“I didn’t know,” Farrell said. “We never talked much about that part of your life, you never wrote how things were. I thought it was what you wanted, committees and all.”

“Oh, wanting’s different.” Ben gripped Farrell’s forearm, not hard, but the urgency in the touch set the bones cringing together. “I did get what I wanted, and I probably even still want it, for all I know these days. But it isn’t what I had in mind.” He peered at Farrell, squinting with the need to make him see, as though he were tutoring him in chemistry once again. “It isn’t what I had in mind.”

A door yawped and sighed, and they both turned to see a tall, naked, white-haired man enter and stand peering at them down the pool. He had a massive, grainy face that reminded Farrell of the bowls of stone grapes and bananas in the gardens of Scotia Street. Ben said abruptly, “Go do a couple of laps, I want to watch you.”

The white-haired man cried out in the thickest Scots accent that Farrell had ever heard, “Now by the rood, ‘tis in sooth the guid laird Egil Eyvindsson of Narroway!” Farrell walked to the near end and went in. He dived too deep and came up off-balance, and it took him nearly a length to find his stroke. Each time he turned his head, he saw the whitehaired man striding toward Ben, one arm out in greeting, skidding alarmingly on the tiles, but never deigning to grab for balance, so that he progressed at an increasingly rapid lurch. For all that, a kind of overripe stateliness steamed about him, and he bawled nobly in a voice like wooden wheels on a wet wooden bridge, “Egil, hail! Och, I was but seeking ye the noo! News o’ Duke Claudio!”

Farrell swam back slowly, gurgling his delight into the water. When he rose beside them, the white-haired man was beaming down at Ben, rumbling and buzzing through a strangle of glottal stops. “I had it frae the laird Morton of Shaws—aye, I ken weel ye’ll say he hath ever been but indifferently o‘ oor party—” Ben was digging at this throat again.

Farrell said, “How’d I do?” The white-haired man neither started nor turned. Ben said heavily, “You’re kicking wrong.” Then he turned to the white-haired man. “Crof, I’d like you to meet my oldest friend, Joe Farrell. Joe, Crawford Grant, Crof.”

Farrell stuck up a hand from the water, feeling a good bit like the Lady of the Lake. Crof Grant said, “Pleased to meet you, Ben’s told me a lot,” in a clear New Hampshire voice, and his handshake was firm enough; but he never saw Farrell. There was no least stir of consent to Farrell in his face, no belief in the slaty hand that it closed on anything of substance. Before that placid, smiling denial, there was a moment when Farrell trembled for his own presence.

Crof Grant turned calmly back to Ben. “Yet for that reason itself do I believe his rede that the Duke Claudio inclineth ever mair toward the Laird Seneschal’s favor—and if Claudio gaes ower, he’ll take the best of King Bohemond’s am folk wi‘ him. Aye, ye’ll scoff, Egil, but gin Claudio’s for Garth, then the war’s ower as we stand here, and ye’ll mind I said so.” There was more, but Farrell lost a lot of it after that.

Elbows hooked over the edge of the pool, Farrell hung in the water, fascinated and amused now that the blandly annihilating stare was turned from him. But Ben spoke severely across the serene babble, demanding, “Where’d you pick up that thing of kicking from the shins on down? Took me two years to make you get your whole leg into it, and now you just lie there and flap your ankles. Try it again, Joe, that’s ridiculous.”

Grant had never stopped talking. Farrell began to swim slowly along the side of the pool, trying to concentrate on nothing but moving his legs from the hip and on feeling the thrust in his shoulders. Crof Grant’s paperback medievalese bumbled on in the tiny waves under his cheek and in the wet tiles.

“Aye, Bohemond’s no longer for the crown than the Whalemas Tourney, but what of that?” And again, chuckling thickly, “Egil, lad, ye’re a bonny hand wi‘ maul or longaxe, but the craft o’ the court still scapes ye.” And twice Farrell heard the white-haired man say clearly, “‘Tis the wee lassie they all fear. I’ll tell ye straight, I fear the girl masel’, each day the mair.” He could not catch what Ben said in reply.

Grant finally thumped into the pool and began to swim—heaving himself along in a chugging, high-prowed breast stroke—and Ben beckoned sharply to Farrell. They dressed almost without speaking, though once Farrell asked, “What’s Grant teach?”

Ben said, “Art history,” never looking at him. In the yellow-green light of the caged bulbs, the fragile scar boiled up maroon.

During the steep, silent ride home, Farrell tilted the bucket seat back, stretched his legs out, closed his eyes and hummed I Belong to Glasgow. Ben finally sighed angrily and said, “It’s like a running gag with Grant. We met at a costume party a couple of years ago. I went as a Viking skald, and Grant was a sort of Jacobite exile, all sporrans and haggis and the Skye Boat Song, the complete homemade Highlander. He’s been doing it forever, since long before I got here. Rack of old swords in the office, and he walks around campus reciting laments for Falkirk and Flodden Field to himself. They say he’s really impressive at committee meetings.”

“All those other people he was talking about,” Farrell said. “Sounded like mail call in Sherwood Forest.”

Ben glanced sideways as the car took one of the Avicenna hills’ Russian-roulette corners. There were few street lights here, and the car was crowded with the prickly, fragrant shadows of jasmine, clematis, and acacia. “I told you, he’s like that most of the time. It used to turn off for his classes, but I hear it’s even getting into the lectures now. He’s got his own names for everybody, and when he’s talking faculty politics, you’re just supposed to know who he means. That’s what all that stuff was about, the king and the war and whatever.” He grinned then. “I will say, it does lend a certain grandeur to fights over who has to teach the freshmen this semester. Makes it all seem like the Crusades, instead of mud-wrestling.”

“He called you Egil something,” Farrell said. Ben nodded, rubbing his mouth. “Egil Eyvindsson. It’s the name I used at the party. Egil was the greatest of the Icelandic skalds, and there was another man around the same time called Eyvind the Plagiarist. Professors at play.”

They had parked in the driveway before either of them spoke again. Ben cut the engine and they sat still, looking up at the wishbone-sharp gables and the pagoda flare of the porch roof. Farrell asked idly, “How many windows on this side of the house?”

“What? I don’t know. Nine, ten.”

“That was yesterday,” Farrell said. “Nine windows yesterday, eleven tonight. They never come out the same way twice.”

Ben stared at him for a moment, then turned away to study the house again. Farrell said, “There are usually more of them at night. I’m not sure why that is.”

“Eleven,” Ben said. “Eleven windows, counting that halfsort of thing in the pantry.” He smiled at Farrell, opening the car door. He said, “At my house, when we were kids. You remember how many times you fell down those last few stairs into the basement? All those years, and you never could keep track, you just kept stepping right off into space. Eleven windows, Joe.”

He was halfway to the house before Farrell had even gotten out of the car. The front door opened for him, though no one was standing there. Farrell called loudly, following him, “They move around a little, too. Just a bit, but it’s unsettling.” Ben went on into the house without turning. The warm yellow light curled around him and lapped him up and swallowed him.