Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Roland sank to his knees before her. I moved to one side so I could see his face. He was looking at her hair, at her feet, at the delicate rose of her cheeks. At her eyes. The swell of her breasts, like petals belling before spring wind! I saw his eyes flicker. The smell of her! I saw his nostrils dilate.

  “You must be the virgin,” smiled Mrs. Gallimar with a slightly sceptical tone.

  For a moment the young woman could not or would not answer. Then she murmured, “Indeed. At the moment I must be. Are you the Viceroy’s representatives?”

  “I am the Viceroy’s representative. This gentleman is Roland Mirabeau, licencee of the Bureau of Public Morals, a registered chaperone, first class.”

  The young woman smiled, unspeaking, nodding once. Oh, but she was beautiful. But then, so was I.

  “Now.” Mrs. Gallimar smiled again, licentiously. “We need to ascertain that you are as represented…”

  “No,” Roland announced, firmly. “It is not necessary to do anything at all. The young woman is as represented. As a registered chaperone, I can tell.”

  Mrs. Gallimar stared at him, unbelieving. He took her firmly by one arm and drew her away. “I can tell, Mrs. Gallimar. By the smell alone. She smells like a six-year-old child after a bath.”

  Mrs. Gallimar sniffed. “She may, in fact, just have bathed.”

  “I assure you, I cannot be misled.”

  “She may have used scent.”

  “There is no such perfume. She is as she is, Mrs. Gallimar. I know it!” And he turned to confront the young woman who sat looking at him with a lively and precocious interest. “My nose cannot be misled!” It was obvious he believed it was so, and yet this young person was looking at him with unmistakeably sexual interest. “She is a virgin, and with a difference,” he murmured abstractedly, turning and looking straight into my face with an expression both of doubt and anxiety. I knew he was wondering whether he was indeed the best person to protect that virginity all the way back to Nacifia.

  • • •

  “Tell me about her,” he demanded from Emilia and Domenico, when we were all sitting in the Sandifor courtyard.

  “She says she was married to a duke. She got tired of being married to him and left him to go home. Something interrupted her journey to or from, at that time or some other, and she ended up in the jungle. She says she has the feeling she was there for a very long time. The natives picked her up and brought her here. That’s as far as we’ve got.”

  Roland stared at Emilia in disbelief. “This is all you know? But you’ve had her for days!”

  “She talks a great deal. I can tell you all about the duke, and his sisters, and where they lived. She puts in a lot of detail.”

  “You haven’t tried to hurry her any?” Mrs. Gallimar asked.

  “Madam. Senor Mirabeau,” Domenico interrupted, “perhaps things are different in Nacifia. Perhaps there are many interesting events in Nacifia. Not here. Things are dull in Novabella. We examine what we can see of Baskarone through our telescopes. We eat. We take a nap. We go down and stare at the river, wondering whether it will rise or fall. We see the little boats from Abaddon, and we fervently hope they will keep their distance, or, at worst, try to sell us fruit or monkeys from the jungle. We eat something else. We wait for Captain Karon to arrive with something new in the cargo. We play cards. We grow frightfully … how shall I say? Pococurante. You understand what I am saying?”

  “Bored,” murmured Roland, who had told me he was very familiar with the feeling.

  “Exactly. Anything new, any new tale, new jest, new trick, new dress—anything new is delightful to us. Why would we hasten it away? We have let her take her time, tell the tale in her own way.”

  I wondered how much my mother remembered. How had she come to be lost in the jungle of Chinanga? How long had she been there?

  “You have not heard the end of her story?” I asked.

  Domenico shook his head. “There may be no end to it. Better if we are left with a little still between our teeth to chew upon after she is gone.”

  While the others went on talking, Constanzia and I went back to visit the virgin. She welcomed us as she might have welcomed any fairly interesting strangers. Seeing her face, even younger looking than my own, I suffered from doubt and fear that she might reject me when I told her who I was.

  “Since my arrival,” she confided to us, “I have been asking what country I have come to, but aside from telling me the name of the place, the people here are remarkably evasive. What is it about Chinanga that occasions such restraint?”

  “They are ashamed of their origins,” said Constanzia with a blush.

  My mother regarded her with the liveliest interest. Without thinking, I said I felt no origin, however lowly, should shame a population for more than a generation or two. Constanzia shook her head at me.

  “There has been only one generation, Lady Wellingford. I believe that Ambrosius Pomposus, father of Chinanga, must have been a warlock who traveled in far and wondrous places, only to fall under the spell of his own memories, his recollections of tropical lands full of languor and splendor and luxuriant vegetation, full of incestuous entanglements and erotic desires, a place in which time seemed damped in its passage. He determined to create such a land of his own, so laid claim to this milieu along the eternal rivers and created in it, Chinanga!” She gestured widely, signifying all and everything, a great, inclusive gesture which stopped only at the farthest reaches of her fingertips.

  “How do you know this?” asked Elladine.

  “She read about it in Pomposus’s book,” I replied, to Constanzia’s amazement. She had indeed read it there, though she still did not understand what she had read. “Though Pomposus may have been only a writer, not a warlock. Writers, too, can create such places.”

  “I see,” breathed Mama.

  I went on, “I believe Constanzia has also read that Chinanga is to remain changeless until the Viceroy, while in the company of a virgin with a difference and after the celebration of a certain rite which Constanzia has not yet been able to translate, decides differently.”

  “I see,” said Elladine, who did indeed see, turning to the girl. “Your father wishes to change the country? A revolution, perhaps?”

  “A devolution, I believe,” whispered Constanzia, coming away from the windows as though suddenly aware of ears which might be pricked at those windows. “He wishes to attain mastery over Baskarone. He speaks of it metaphorically, as the ascent of the lover onto his mistress’s balcony, claiming he will do it with love.”

  “There is ravishment of that kind,” said Elladine, dispassionately. “And then there is rape.”

  Constanzia nodded. “I know. Daddy has grown insensitive and mulish with the centuries. He wishes some great apotheosis.”

  “I, on the other hand,” said Elladine, “merely wish to get home to Ylles.”

  “Ylles,” mused Constanzia. “Ylles. I have heard of Ylles. It is mentioned in The Diaries. It is here, in the continuum, part of a larger creation, not far away.”

  “Roland told me it was an unachievable distance away. Surely he would not he?”

  “Nonsense. A chaperone wouldn’t know the truth if it waved its wings at him.” Constanzia patted my mother’s shoulder. “Never mind. I’ll find Ylles for you. When we get home, I’ll look it up in the great encyclopedia, if you will only tell me how to spell it.”

  “Wy,” I said to her. “Double el, ee, ess.”

  “How did you know?” Mama asked me.

  “I have seen reference to the place in certain family papers,” I replied cunningly. “In Westfaire. My home.”

  “Westfaire,” brooded Elladine. “I remember Westfaire. Then you … you must be…”

  “Your daughter,” I answered softly, watching her face.

  She gave me a long look, a troubling look. As though she could not believe who I was. At last her lips trembled open, and her eyes lit with … was it love? Was it something else?

&nbs
p; “Beauty,” she cried. “You got my letter!”

  Constanzia watched in amazement as we embraced. The embrace itself was not what I expected. It was awkward, a little embarrassing. Mother did not cling. She gave me a brief, almost perfunctory hug, and then stood away from me, looking intently at me, as though trying to find in me some resemblance she had expected. Perhaps our meeting would have seemed more natural if Mama had appeared to be only a little older. Almost at once Constanzia increased my embarrassment by commenting upon Mama’s youthful appearance.

  “She’s a fairy,” I told Constanzia. “I imagine she’ll always look that way. On the other hand, I am only half fairy. I’m already older than she is.” I smiled fondly at Mama. At least, it began as a fond smile. Mama’s reaction to it was to turn abruptly away from me with a sigh. Something was not as I had planned or hoped, but I didn’t wish to consider what it might be at that moment.

  “You’re very lovely,” said Constanzia, patting me upon my cheek. “You couldn’t be prettier even if you were only twenty-three.”

  Since I thought I was only nineteen or twenty, at least as I counted elapsed time, her words did not greatly cheer me. And, though I considered myself only nineteen or twenty, there were unmistakeable signs about the eyes that I might actually be somewhat older, which reminded me suddenly of what Mama had said in her letter to me. The bit about coming in haste, before I got any older.

  My mother reached out a hand to touch me, felt of my breast with her fingertips, drew her hand away as though burned. Perhaps she had felt the mysterious fire within me. Perhaps she could tell me what it was!

  Before I could ask her, she spoke, almost abruptly, to Constanzia. “I simply cannot figure out what I am doing here! I had returned to Ylles, I remember quite distinctly. Then something came up, some necessary journey back to Westfaire. I think I was with Aunt Joyeause. Then we were returning to Ylles once more, and suddenly I was caught up, as in some whirling vortex of wind, and deposited on a small, uncomfortable outcropping in the middle of a jungle.”

  I started to tell her why she had gone back to Westfaire, then realized that would require lengthy explanation. I was saved from saying anything by Constanzia.

  “It might have been Daddy who trapped you there,” she said. “He’s been making black magic to summon a virgin with a difference for years. He may have hit upon something that worked.”

  I thought this exceedingly unlikely. The Viceroy had not struck me as a competent sorcerer. The spell had been cast by Carabosse, to catch and hold my mother here, to bring me here to join her, to keep me safe. Why was my safety so important?

  “But why? Why this obsession …?” my mother asked.

  This was a safer subject than the other, and I had been thinking about the matter ever since we left Nacifia. I had come to certain conclusions, and in order not to think about other things, I shared them with Constanzia and my mother.

  “Ambrosius Pomposus had only the compass of his own mind to invest in his creation. Each of the beings he placed here in Chinanga partook of his sensitivity and his feeling, and each is, therefore, similar to every other, or if not similar to, at least totally comprehensible by. There are no foreign thoughts, no strangenesses entering from outside. The mystery of the exotic is lacking. The lure of the peculiar, the alien, the inexplicable, all are missing.

  “Even in the clownery, which I visited during a stop in Nacifia, the patients are not truly insane within the totality which is Chinanga. The actions of one are offset by the actions of another; what one creates, another destroys, precisely as errant thoughts in one’s own mind are corrected by other thoughts until they result in a personality which, though undoubtedly unique, is entirely familiar to itself. It occurs to me that after long time, all of Chinanga must feel that it knows itself far too well, that it exists as one entity, bound about with invisible and inexorable ties of familiarity, alone, without contrast, in solitary confinement for endless time.”

  “Years of solitude,” Constanzia murmured, nodding in agreement. “Mother has often commented upon it. Endless solitude.”

  “I first thought of this,” I continued, “when I saw how delighted Mrs. Gallimar was to meet me and how little surprised she was about virtually anything else. Everything that can happen in Chinanga must have happened before.” I paused for a moment, reflecting that Mama and I—and Carabosse and the ambassador—might be the only real, non-Ambrosius creatures currently in Chinanga. I did not want to say this to Constanzia. She had obviously not considered her own reality or lack of it, and I did not wish to upset her.

  I finished my peroration lamely, “Chinanga, though very lovely, remains a singularly inhibited creation.”

  My mother regarded me with wonder. “The way you talk!”

  I chose to take this as fondness and smiled modestly. “I was a college student, majoring in literature.”

  “What is literature?” she asked.

  It was not the time to discuss such things, so I replied only briefly.

  “Still,” she yawned when I had finished, “if I take your meaning correctly—which is, darling, somewhat difficult to do when you use all those strange words—it might explain why Constanzia’s father has summoned me up. The poor Viceroy is simply bored out of his senses.”

  “I have not yet been able to translate the rites mentioned in The Diaries,” Constanzia murmured. “But I think Daddy has done so. He is not alone in being bored. Mother is bored. Colonel Esquivar is bored. Even Roland Mirabeau is bored. I have tried to deny it to myself, but I am bored also. What have we to look forward to except things we know are going to happen but which happen less frequently than others? The Stugos Queen arrives less often than do the seasonal festivals, and her arrival is therefore cause for more excitement. The river rises less often than the Queen arrives, and the rising is considered cause for celebration. A gallivant causes depredations only once in a very great while and brings, therefore, almost a quality of surprise. I’m amazed the people here at Novabella want the gallivant hunted and killed, for even the woman whose buttock it ate admits it has made an interesting change.”

  [We did not foresee this. I had never thought the place would be boring. So much life and color and exotic splendor should not be boring. And yet, I suppose, given sufficient time, everything becomes boring.

  “We should have known,” said Israfel. “We, of all creatures, should have known.”]

  Constanzia’s voice trailed away into silence. She shook her head somewhat petulantly and excused herself, the tiny frown on her face betraying troubled thought. Perhaps she was beginning to realize that Chinanga was an imaginary land, and what the implications of that might be. I reproached myself silently for having said anything about Chinanga within her hearing. I had wanted to impress Mama with my intelligence, and all I had done was make Constanzia apprehensive. It would be better if Mama and I could leave Novabella at once, before I was the cause of any further disruption. I suggested to Mama that since I had the seven-league boots in my pocket, we might depart together, dispensing with any ceremony. She said it was worth a try, so I put them on. “Boots,” I said, holding Mama tightly about the waist and refusing to acknowledge that she shrank slightly from my embrace, “take us to Ylles.”

  [Israfel and I held our breaths. She was not supposed to do this. She was not supposed to try to leave Chinanga! We muttered enchantments and held fast!]

  At once the boots attempted to depart with my feet inside them. Mama, however, remained rooted in place. It was as though I had taken hold of one of the great forest trees, a mighty monarch rooted deep through the swampy soil of Chinanga into the eternal substance of whatever lay beneath. Mama could no more move than such a tree could move, but I was being whipped to and fro like a flag attached to an immovable mast, feeling my grip slowly loosened by the force of the fairy shoes.

  “Boots,” I cried in a strangled voice, “desist!” I fell to the floor, for a moment unable to stand, feeling as though my legs were made of water
.

  “It will do no good,” Mama murmured in my ear. “Whatever spell has caught me here in Chinanga will not let me go. We must find out what the enchantment is before it can be broken.”

  I did not think it was the Viceroy who had done it. I thought it was more likely Carabosse. I determined to talk to her the next time I saw her, to learn what she was doing to me and why.

  In any case, it seemed we must defer our departure until later, and we could not return to Nacifia at once. We had the choice of joining the Stugos Queen as it completed its voyage upstream to the wall below Baskarone, or of remaining in Novabella. Since we were assured by everyone that nothing in Novabella was worthy of our attention—except the hunt for the predacious gallivant in which Colonel Esquivar was even now engaged, but which we, as non-hunters, could hardly share—Mama, Constanzia and I decided to go on upriver with the Captain and his remaining passengers.

  We shared a large cabin. Roland and Mrs. Gallimar accompanied us upon the trip. Whenever Mama emerged from the cabin, one or both of them were in attendance. Though I was certain Senora Carabosse had been on the ship when we came to Novabella, she was not there when we left.

  [I had gone home, to attempt to find out what we were doing wrong!]

  Upriver from Novabella, the aspect of the country began to change. The river became swifter and less spread out; the land on either side sloped away more steeply. There were fewer drowned trees and more great rock pillars, accumulating as we traveled into ramparts, escarpments, and pinnacles of stone set well back from the flow but still visible whenever the mists lifted. During the entire voyage, Constanzia scarcely left the rail or the window. Each turn in the river made her exclaim.

  “Then there is something new in Chinanga,” I teased her, wondering if I had been mistaken about the country’s reality. “You have not seen this stretch of country before.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she replied. “There have been virgins with a difference reported before, though none were ever genuine. I have stowed away before. Before I knew it was all there was, I traveled all of Chinanga. But those journeys were so long ago I have almost forgotten them.”