Fool on the Hill (3 page)

“With one ear,” Hobart told her. “No offense, dear, but you’ve been repeating more or less the same thing for the past six months.”

“Do you think it’s wrong of me?” Zephyr asked seriously.

“To love a human being? No. If that were a crime, I’d be more guilty than you. I loved one too, in my time. Why do you think I’ve spent the past century taking care of these bells?” He looked affectionately at the chimes. “Dear sweet jenny McGraw. How I do miss her.”

Zephyr leaned forward, interested. “Was she beautiful?”

“To my eyes, at least. Not, mind you, as beautiful as your Grandmother Zee, but very close.”

“Did she . . . did she ever see you?”

“On her deathbed I think she might have. Consumption took her while she was away traveling the world; she came back to Ithaca to die. I was her most constant companion during her final days, more constant than her own husband. And toward the very end, I think, when she’d really begun to slip away, she seemed to take notice of me.”

Hobart’s eyes grew distant, and a little sad.

“That’s the problem with loving a human being,” he said. “Most of them can’t see you except in extreme circumstances, and even then they don’t always believe what they’re seeing. Dear Jenny . . . I’m almost sure she thought I was nothing more than a hallucination.”

“I think George could see me,” said Zephyr. “I don’t think he’d have to be drunk or dying, either. He’s not crazy, but he . . . he has strong daydreams.”

“Strong daydreams.” Hobart chuckled. “And what if this daydreamer
could
see you, what would you do then? You can’t consummate love with a giant, dear. Several times I tried to imagine what it might have been like between Jenny McGraw and myself, and the picture I got was rather embarrassing, to say the least. Some things really aren’t meant to be.”

“But . . . if only there were something . . .”

“As for that,” Hobart went on, “why do you feel you have to
do
anything for him? You say he’s lonely, but look. He’s laughing down there.”

“But he was just talking to a dog. People never talk to animals unless they’re lonely.”

“Your own father used to hold conversations with ferrets.”

“Yes, but Father
understood
ferrets.”

“Did he really? It always seemed to me that if he’d really understood them, he wouldn’t have wound up being eaten by one. But perhaps I’m just too old and muddleheaded to see the truth of it.”

Zephyr lowered her eyes. “Now you’re making fun of me. You really do think I’m silly, don’t you?”

“No more so than the rest of us,” Hobart assured her. “It’s just that the best you can hope to accomplish is to find George a human woman to fall in love with. But that’s a job best left to Fate. I can tell you from experience that a sprite meddling in the personal affairs of a human almost always brings bad luck.”

“But we always—”

“
Personal
affairs. There’s a difference between helping the University Administration keep its files straight and playing matchmaker. Meddling in that area causes more trouble than it’s worth, Zephyr. Ask Shakespeare if you don’t believe me.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Let him handle his own business. He’s got the wind on his side; he’ll do all right. And once you fall in love again—with a sprite, this time—it won’t hurt nearly as much as it does now.”

Hobart paused for emphasis, then added: “Puck’s been asking about you.”

“Puck’s an idiot,” Zephyr said automatically.

“Puck has his faults. He has his good points, too. You used to know that.”

“Maybe I’m not the same as I used to be.”

Hobart shrugged.

“As you wish,” he said, knowing that there was no point in arguing. “But I can tell you honestly, finding Zee was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“The best thing,” Zephyr repeated. “But you still tend jenny McGraw’s chimes, don’t you?”

“Well . . .”

“When George leaves, I want to follow him in the glider. Is that all right?”

“I suppose,” Hobart said with a sigh. “But he’ll probably go down to The Boneyard. I don’t want you in there, not even flying overhead.”

“Fine. If he does go there I’ll just turn around and come back. I promise. OK?”

“All right,” Hobart agreed, uneasily.

He went back to his inspection of the chimes, while Zephyr stood at the edge of the open-air belfry, unmindful of the seventy-foot drop.

“Grandfather Hobart?”

“Yes?”

“What’s so bad about The Boneyard? What’s in there?”

For a long time he didn’t answer.

“Nightmares,” Hobart said finally. “Old nightmares.”

IV.

George stayed on the Quad for the better part of an hour. When he finally reeled in the kite and disassembled it, the wind did not stop. It blew steadily, summoning cloud after cloud until the sky was steely grey. The rain was much closer now.

“Give me an hour,” George petitioned the clouds. “I want time for a walk.” He cocked his head as if listening for a reply, then put the pieces of the kite back into the Swiss Army bag and started heading back the way he had come. “So long, buddy,” George said to the St. Bernard, which had wandered back under the tree. “Thanks for your company.”

As he passed Ezra Cornell he snapped another salute, smiling at the thought of the legend: it was said that if a true virgin passed between the Quad statues at precisely midnight, Ezra and Andrew would come to life and shake hands with each other. Oversized footprints painted on the path between the two statues paid tribute to the notion.
But you’d have a hard time deciding what to do if
I
came by, wouldn’t you?
George thought.
Once as a teenager and then seven years of abstinence, a man’s virginity might spontaneously regenerate after all that time. Hell, some people develop a third set of teeth.

Pondering this, George left the Arts Quad behind him and hurried
down Libe Slope toward The Boneyard, while in the sky the clouds took a vote and decided to hold their water a little longer.

V.

The glider, an ancient contraption of pinewood and gossamer, was stored in a secret hangar in the Tower peak above the belfry. Zephyr reached it by means of a hidden ladder and staircase. At the top of the stairs she pulled a lever in the wall, setting in motion a group of counter-weights that opened the outer hangar doors.

Sitting in the farthest recesses of the hangar, the glider looked about as aerodynamically sound as a wingéd sneaker. Designed to be as invisible as the sprites, the glider’s pinewood frame was anorexically thin, and the gossamer wings—woven from Midsummer’s Eve lake fog—shimmered only slightly even in the brightest daylight. The single passenger rode in a narrow sling suspended beneath the main body of the craft, controlling direction by pulling on two threads . . . but it was the wind that did most of the steering.

Zephyr climbed into the sling without hesitation or fear. She loved to fly; it was certainly a more convenient method of transportation than walking or squirrelback. Why the great majority of sprites remained earthbound was a mystery to her.

Puck did a lot of flying, she knew—though his was a more mechanical and less magical bent—but she purposely tried not to think about that now. She had refused to see or speak to Puck for months since she’d caught him fooling around with Saffron Dey inside one of the display cases in Uris Library. Coincidentally or not, her feelings for George had first surfaced at about that time.

Zephyr launched the glider with a thought. Like George, she too was on intimate terms with the wind, and didn’t even have to bother spinning around to summon it. She merely called to it in her mind and a river of air flowed into the hangar, floating the glider gently out, like a cork leaving a bottle in slow motion. The hangar faced north, giving her a splendid view of the Quad as she entered the open air; then she banked to the right, descending in a series of wide spirals around the Tower.

“Be careful of the weather!” Hobart shouted to her as she passed the level of the belfry. “And remember—stay away from The Boneyard!”

Zephyr raised one hand to wave, not bothering to yell back that she’d understood, and then she was lower, circling the clock faces of the Tower.
I love you, Grandfather,
she thought, at the same time wishing that he wouldn’t worry about her so much. But old sprites seemed prone to worry, and at 172 years of age, Hobart was the oldest surviving sprite on The Hill (Zephyr, only 40, was just finishing adolescence), old enough to have seen action in the
Great War of 1850 against Rasferret the Grub, the most terrible conflict in remembered history. Zephyr wished he would learn to relax.

She leveled out at an altitude of about thirty feet and flew after George, who had reached the bottom of Libe Slope and was crossing West Avenue into the temporary ghost town that was West Campus. She had closed more than half the distance to him when a low droning reached her ears. Recognizing the sound, Zephyr looked for cover to hide behind, but there was none close enough. A moment later a propeller-driven biplane pulled even with the glider.

“Hello, Zeph,” Puck called to her. His plane was a single-engine scale model, the type hobbyists build and fly by remote control. In this case, however, the miniaturized controls were located in the cockpit. “Long time no see. I’ve been hoping we’d bump into each other up here.”

“Goodbye,” Zephyr replied curtly, yanking the glider’s nose up. This slowed the craft’s speed considerably, and Puck, unable to copy the maneuver without stalling his engine, shot past her. The biplane began a wide U-turn while Zephyr lowered the nose again and headed for the bottom of the Slope, calling on the wind for extra speed.

“Come on, Zeph!” Puck pleaded. “I just want to talk to you!”

“
I
don’t want to talk to
you!
"

She sailed over West Avenue and under the arch between Lyon and McFaddin Halls, then hung a sharp right, hoping to lose Puck among the West Campus dormitories. George, who had also gone through the arch but continued on straight, paused in mid-step as the glider passed near, though of course he could neither see it nor hear it. He did hear the drone of Puck’s biplane a few seconds later, but dismissed it as a mosquito and kept walking.

“Come on, Zeph!” Puck shouted again. But instead of answering, Zephyr began weaving between buildings, pulling tight turns and other acrobatics in an attempt to shake him off. Puck brought the biplane up to full throttle and hung on. He was a good pilot, as good as she, and knew that eventually she’d have to give up.

But he’d forgotten about her tenacity, and her friendship with the wind. The wind kept Zephyr’s glider moving at an incredible speed, while giving no similar aid to the biplane; it was all Puck could do to keep pace with her. Then, after making a particularly tight turn, he saw Zephyr pass between two close-growing trees. Barely a hairsbreadth of space existed between them, but a convenient breeze spread the branches to make room for the glider. Zephyr passed through the opening, and Puck attempted to follow.

The branches closed up in front of him.

“Terrific,” said Puck. He tried to pull up and succeeded only in stalling his engine; the biplane plunged belly first into the branches. For a few seconds all was tumbling and chaos, and then, by some miracle, the plane reemerged on the far side of the trees with its wings and propeller intact. It was still stalled, however, and immediately went into a dive.

“Terrific,” Puck said again, as the biplane stubbornly refused to level out. It was too heavy to glide effectively, and with the ground rushing up to meet him like a relative at a family reunion, there was no time to restart the engine. He was going to crash into the sidewalk.

“Terrific,” Puck said, for what should have been the third and final time.

The wind saved him. It billowed up underneath the biplane like a cushion, forcing it to straighten out, holding it steady. Puck wasted no time asking questions; he pounded the starter button until the propeller kicked over and began to turn. As soon as it did, the wind cushion faded, leaving him to fly on his own power again.

“Are you all right?” Zephyr asked. The glider was alongside him now, close enough so that they didn’t have to shout over the drone of the biplane’s engine.

“I’m still breathing,” Puck told her, not ready to concede anything more than that. “You are a
nasty
one when you get upset, you know that, Zeph?”

“It’s your own fault.” Now that it was clear that he was all right, some of Zephyr’s anger came creeping back in a muted form. “That thing’s a death trap, anyway. You should know better than to trust physics. If I hadn’t talked the wind into saving you—”

“
Saving
me!? You’re the one who got me into trouble in the first place.”

“Yes, well,” Zephyr protested in a lame voice, “you could have gotten into trouble yourself just as easily. And then where would you have been?”

“I have a parachute,” Puck informed her, although this, too, sounded a bit lame. They fell silent for a moment, banking left to avoid another cluster of trees. A sparrow looked up at the sound of the biplane and chirped.

“That’s another thing,” Zephyr said. “You’re too noisy and too easy to see.”

“Maybe. But human beings have a way of not noticing obvious things. Even that George character—”

“Don’t you say a word about George!” Zephyr warned.

“Fine. But people don’t scare me, Zephyr. They really don’t.”

“What about animals? They notice you. Most of them would probably be too scared to do anything, but a pack of crows, or an owl . . .”

“God, Zephyr, are you really that worried about me?” Puck grinned at her, and she gave him a black look. “Well listen, I was thinking about crows and owls myself, so I got Cobweb to help me rig something up.”

He brought the biplane up a few feet so that she could see two black cylinders that were mounted under the lower wings.

“What are they?” Zephyr asked. Like all sprites, she was fascinated with weapons.