CHAPTER 27

 

Though Giorgio had been the worst of his tribe, he was by no means the only rotten apple in the barrel, and his henchmen kept Faron and Ellie captive while they looted Janet Carr's estate in their search for the banjo. Giorgio's wife and uncle remained aloof, indifferent to the search, the uncle playing on his violin, lost in the world of the music, and the wife, as if in a trance, held the phone, through which the banjo kept playing.

This was the stage in the movies or in books, Ellie thought, where the good guys tried to talk the bad guys out of their evil deeds or at least get a long drawn-out explanation from them of why they were perpetrating their crimes. Meanwhile, of course, the good guys were either taping the explanation as a confession or there was a handy police official in the wings, who was listening and taking it all down in shorthand.

Ellie didn't expect rescue. She did ask Giorgio's wife what had become of Gussie, but the woman just shrugged and flipped a cigar butt at her.

"Don't you know those things are bad for you?" Faron asked, but the woman was again engrossed in the music coming from the telephone and from her uncle's hands. Ellie thought that she looked like a woman who was using the music to have a long, hard talk with herself. She was still young and she looked plenty tough, but her nose had been broken and her eyebrows and upper lip were split in more than one place. Two of her teeth were patched with gold.

The banjo began a song Ellie didn't remember and Faron only knew slightly. "'The Flowers of the Forest,'" he said. "Sort of an elegy for the men lost at Flodden, especially those from the Ettrick Forest. I didn't recognize it at first because it's being played in march time."

Uncle Theo manfully filled in with all sorts of violin ornamentation, though it was plain that he was a fine violinist of the concert type and not much for doing Scottish folk music in the normal course of things. But he had been deprived of playing since his nephew forbade it, and now he played as if anyone who tried to take his fiddle from him again would have to pry it, as the NRA slogan went, from his cold, dead fingers.

"Someone should teach him 'MacPherson's Lament,'" Faron remarked.

"Do I know that one?"

"About the famous fiddler who was going to be hanged, and when people came from all around to see the execution, hoping to buy his fiddle after he was dead, he broke the fiddle instead of parting with it."

"Good for MacPherson and good for you, honey," Ellie said. "I think the old fiddler just helped you recover another song. But I also don't think he would have given you his violin if he didn't have more respect for musical instruments than that."

But as they listened to the music, the swish of tires through mud and the rumbling of an engine announced the arrival of another car, which parked in front of the cottage.

A tall, gray-haired man unfolded himself from the driver's seat and an elfish dark-haired woman popped out of the passenger seat, followed by a very black man in a Polar Circalen sweatshirt and a Laplander hat in blue and red with white rickrack trim. From the backseat, another black man, a black woman, and three smallish blond people clad alike in jeans and ice-blue and purple anoraks stepped out onto the gravel driveway.

"Wow, great!" said Dan, who was, of course, the tall, gray-haired man. "They're having a party and it looks like they've already made friends with some Gypsies. This is going to be super!"

He rushed into the cottage while Terry and the newcomers began unloading instruments from the boot of the car.

"Hey, gang!" Dan yelled from the doorway, then saw Uncle Theo in the middle of the room playing. "Oops," he said in a whisper, and grinned at Giorgio's wife and whispered to Faron and Ellie, "You're going to love these guys we've brought back from Norway and Iceland. Gachero and his friends know more of the Icelandic songs than Torun, Solveg, and Søren do."

One of the Gypsy men emerged from the bedroom with an armload of clothing. Giorgio's wife, who snapped out of her trance when the newcomers arrived, set the banjo-broadcasting phone thoughtfully down on the windowsill and withdrew her dagger from her sash, fingering the blade and flashing a wide golden smile at Dan. "Hello," she said.

"Hi, there. I haven't met you before but I'm Dan. What do you play? Wait till you see what these guys who came with us do. You're going to love it."

"Call me Rosa," Giorgio's widow said, arching her neck coquettishly.

"Hi, I'm Terry," the dark woman said, linking her arm with Dan's as she dropped an African drum on his foot.

But Dan picked the instrument up and walked over to Theo, where he could better hear the interplay between the telephone-amplified banjo and the violin. "Cool," he said, and began pounding out a march rhythm on the African drum.

One of the Gypsies who had been searching the house saw the instruments the Africans were piling in the center of the room and swooped down to scoop up a fine concertina, which he began playing along with Dan's drumming, Uncle Theo's fiddling, and the telephone-transmitted banjo.

The same song played over and over until every Gypsy and each of the newcomers who didn't have an instrument joined in stamping their feet, swaying from side to side, clapping their hands, or snapping their fingers to the music as if compelled by the cellular pied piper. After the song had repeated enough times, Faron began singing the lyrics and Ellie and Terry joined in with harmonies. But when they got to the first refrain, "The flowers of the forest are a' wede awa'" which Terry hastily whispered to Ellie meant "weeded out" in Scots, a new instrument joined the others. Dan looked up from his drumming, eyes slitted in ecstasy to say, 'Way cool. I was wondering how we could get some bagpipes in with this!"

The pipe music skirled closer accompanied by the sound of hoofbeats. Suddenly the banjo sounded much louder, much closer. Outside the cottage the setting sun gleamed saffron and scarlet in the mud puddles along the road, cloaking the clouds with bold gory glory. Ellie, standing nearest the open door, felt the wind rise and saw the trees bow down as if more traffic were coming up the road, the weeds flattening as if pressed by tires—or hooves or feet.

The music outdoors grew louder and louder until suddenly the pipes whined to a halt and the door burst open, admitting a biting cold wind.

Giorgio's wife, Terry and Dan, Uncle Theo and the Gypsy man with the concertina, Gachero, the other Africans, and the three Norwegians all crowded into the doorway, their hair whipped across their faces as the wind forced them back inside.

Ellie hung on to the doorframe longer than the others, restraining her hair with her hands and peering down the road. Though she saw no pipers or horses, she did seem to make out, very dimly, the shadowy outline of a small curly-haired woman carrying a somewhat more distinct form that looked like—

"Faron, it's Gussie and the banjo. But there's something wrong with them."

A long derisive laugh erupted in Ellie's face and a slatternly woman with messy red hair and bloodshot eyes sauntered into the room carrying a bottle of scotch.

"Hail, hail, the gang's all here," she said and added, allowing her tacky faded pink chenille bathrobe to fall open across her thighs as she sat cross-legged on one of the kitchen chairs, "What the hell do we care? What the hell do we care?" To the wind that had just blown in with her, she said, "Well, I'll be blessed if it ain't the Bold Buccleuch. H'lo there, Buck. What are you doing above the dirt at this hour? Did you bring back that banjo just for little old me? Buck, I'm touched that you remembered, after all these years!"

She laughed again. "You know, little dears, I'm almost sorry I got you into this. The boss says I'm washed up, that debauchery is going out of fashion. Oh, don't worry, Rosa, there'll always be a market for the product I've been supplying to your people for distribution."

Rosa glared at her and spat, the glob landing on the bright red lacquer on the nail of Torchy's right big toe. Torchy, unmindful, rubbed it away with the ball of her other foot.

"They say people are going to stop all the freewheeling fucking around I worked so hard to promote and that blessed Pestilence Devil ruined with his nasty little STD plagues. They say all the important people are going to stop doing drugs and drinking so they can concentrate on really serious power mongering. What's going to be left for a poor girl to do? They don't care if I'm left here playing nursemaid to you suckers for the next seven years until time for me to deliver you up to them."

"That wasn't the deal!" Faron said. "Gussie said that if they played by your rules and got back all the songs and the seven songs for every song they lived through, like you said, they could come back and we could try to take the songs home again."

Torchy shrugged. "So I lied. I do that, didn't you notice? It's part of my stock in trade, along with wine, women (or men, depending on your preference—both for that matter), and song. Crap, I don't know why I let the boss talk me into it. I'm not nearly as good a negotiator as those guys, you know? I just want to have a good time and they're always scheming, always playing games. I must have been stoned to let them talk me into helping them get rid of music. It was the best part of Fairie and the only thing they let me bring with me. It was"—she sniffed and sniveled and began to sob—"it was kind of like my dowry, you know? All I had left of my glamor besides, of course, my incredibly sexy appearance, and now they're taking it away!"

"Oh, don't cry," Dan said, patting her on the shoulder. "There's always rock and roll."

"Not for long," she sobbed. "That's next. Ummm, that feels good," she writhed like a cat as he massaged her shoulders.

"So why don't you just bring everybody back if you don't want to stick around here?" Dan asked.

"Yeah," Faron said. "If you've got nothing against the music after all, let us go. All we want is to sing a few songs and make a few bucks."

Torchy laughed bitterly. "You know there's more to it than that. Maybe, if you were all mine and only mine, I could bring them back. But you're not. The music keeps these poor saps here in this age connected with all that went before—with Buck here and Sir Walter," she nodded at the shadows, which were assuming ghostly form now that the sunset was rapidly fading. "It keeps people human. Hell's bells, it almost keeps me human and I'm not."

"Could we ask the Wizard Michael to bring them back?" Ellie asked.

Torchy shook her head. "Nope. They're stuck there the whole seven years and then you can bet my boss will be here to collect them. And if I don't deliver them, my ass is in hot lava. Mick the Wiz can't do much of anything without my help. I thought you knew that. His power was mostly earthly except for a little inspiration from me. I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I'm all the magic you've got and I just can't get involved anymore." She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. "I just wanted you to know how rotten I feel about it all."

"What you mean is that you just got snockered and were feeling maudlin," said Gussie's voice within her now ghosty-looking form.

"That too," Torchy said. "But at least with you and the banjo in never-never land with the ghosties and such, I'm off the hook about bringing you back. And Rosa and her gang can take care of the others, so I guess it's ta for now, luvvies. Pip pip, cheerio, and all that."

"Wait," Dan said. "What if we did have our own magic? Would you let us try to use it without getting in our way?"

"Honey, you got nothin' as powerful as me," she said.

"Maybe we do. You said yourself that music was not only some of your strongest stuff, but it was also a force for the other side. Maybe we could use that."

Torchy's eyebrow lifted. "Maybe."

"Would you stand in our way?"

"Depends on what you're going to do."

"Wouldn't it be better for you," Ellie said gently, "if you didn't know and we just sort of snuck one past you?"

"Good point," said Torchy, standing up with her robe's hem daintily held in two fingers and her bottle of scotch clutched in the other. "I'm going to go powder my nose—and throw up. Plot quickly, darlings."

Terry Pruitt's eyes were shining as she looked up at Dan. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Yeah, but a lot depends on Brose and Anna Mae and them. How many songs have they gotten back already, Ellie?" he asked.

Faron flipped open a notebook and said, "Counting today? With the primary ballads, variants, seven freebies per each retrieved ballad, and all of the associated songs, five hundred forty-five. Plus three instrumentals I couldn't find any words for."

Rosa asked suspiciously, "What is this? What you doing? You going to call the cops?"

"Of course not, Rosa," Dan said. "Cops don't usually know any magic—or music. But Gachero and his buddies and Torun and her friends taught us this cool custom, something they do in Iceland and in some parts of Scotland. I think it might help. Give me your hand."

"Why? I don't understand."

Gachero said, in an Oxford-educated voice, "You see, Rosa, it is simply a matter of synchronicity. The Icelandic peoples believe that they contact their ancestors by forming a line of life, a sort of a snake dance, and chanting and singing all of their sagas and songs from the beginning of memory. Thus they keep their history, their national personality, their spirits, alive. I see no reason why such a tactic might not be useful here."

"Makes sense to me. You only keep the songs alive by singing them and maybe we can bring Gussie and Willie and the others back by singing the songs they're bringing back to life."

Rosa grabbed Theo's hand and said, "This is sensible. My family, we are great musicians, great menders of musical instruments. Then I marry that Giorgio. I think, poor boy, to be so hurt and I find I am married to a dead man who poisons what he claims to protect. Music doesn't pay so good, but is part of the Gypsy soul."

The Africans, the Gypsies, the Norwegians, Dan, Terry, Faron, and Ellie all formed a line. Ellie was on the end and she felt large, sausage-sized fingers grasp her own, though no one was on that side of her. The fingers let go of hers long enough to slap her on the behind, then rejoined hers innocently, as if it had been one of the Gypsies who had done it. But then, she had not yet been formally introduced to the Bold Buccleuch's ghost.

Theo removed Rosa's hand so that it linked with his belt, and did the same with Torun on the other side, freeing his hands for his violin. On the center of the table, the banjo suddenly appeared, as solid as it ever had been though slightly glowing around the edges.

A bagpipe wheezed into its first groan as Dan, Terry, and Gachero picked up hand drums while the concertina playing Gypsy also attached himself to the people on either side of him in a way that wouldn't interfere with his playing.

A long sigh of silence throbbed through the cottage, then the banjo chimed the first notes of "The Gypsy Rover" and everyone began to sing, even the Africans and the Norwegians, who watched everybody else's lips. And when all of the words were exhausted to the version that Faron and Ellie knew, Gachero sang a similar song in a Kenyan dialect, and an Icelandic one, and Torun and the others sang variants they knew, until the banjo changed tunes again.

For seven nights and seven days they sang and danced, until their limbs were so weary and their throats so raw, their hands so sore, they could barely move, but still they sang the songs and danced, always linked, always following the banjo. The first two nights, the Bold Buccleuch and his men, Gussie and Sir Walter, and Jeannie Gordon, Glenlogie, the Widow Hetherton, and Neighbor Cuddy solidified gradually to be seen dancing among their living partners, though by morning the ghosts faded once more.

But by the third morning, the forms that belonged to Gussie, to Glenlogie, the Widow, and Jock who had spurned the Flower of Northumberland remained visible, though see-throughish and shadowy, in the dim light filtering through the curtains.

Every once in a while someone would detach from the line and get water or drinks or food for the others, to be chewed and swallowed during pauses between songs or phrases. Now and then one dancer would bow out for a brief rest or to massage the limbs of the others, but never more than one at a time broke the line for all the seven days and seven nights.

During some of the wilder murder ballads or drinking songs, a whirling, high-kicking mote of light cavorted in front of them and around them, and a raucous laugh rose over the singing, a familiar voice shouting, "I can't stand still for this, luvvies, but I can sure as hell dance to it!"

And on the seventh night, just as they were about to drop, the banjo played "The Flower of Northumberland," and Jock waved, and twisted his ring three times widdershins on his left finger, and Anna Mae stepped from his shadow and into the room and joined hands with the living. And the banjo played "Glenlogie" and Jeannie Gordon and her love dropped hands, twisted their rings three times widdershins around their fingers and who but Willie MacKai and Julianne Martin should step from their shadows and into the room to join hands with the others?

And finally the banjo played the "Borders Gathering Song" or "The Fray of Suport," and the Widow Hetherton gave her ring three fierce yanks around her finger and her shadow swelled and bulked until it solidified into Brose Fairchild, who also joined hands with those beside him, linking the two ends of the snake dance as the banjo played its final tune, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"