He rubbed his face with his hands. “It’s getting harder to get here. Harder every time. When are you coming home? Carabosse wants to know, Beauty. This is getting serious.”
“Does she think I’m in danger here?” I asked. I couldn’t get interested in Carabosse, for some reason. “Can I still get back from here?”
“You’re not in danger. Not immediately. And you can still get back, for a little while.”
“Tell her soon.”
April 1993
It is easy to get on a board of directors. All one has to do is give money. Of course, getting the money out of a warrant over six hundred years old is another matter.
The House of Levi still exists, strangely enough, though under quite another name, and it still exists where I found it first, in London. Getting there from here was my first overseas flight in a plane. I chose to do it that way, remembering how thin the magic is in current time. Using the boots to go back, it gets stronger as I go. Going from place to place in the twentieth, the boots might work, but they might drop me off in mid-ocean, as well. I didn’t want to risk it.
When I showed the investment house the warrant, they looked at it in disbelief. They admitted that the money had been with them all those years. One of their young men sat down and figured what it was worth, millions and millions of dollars. I had to prove my right to it, as the direct descendent of the daughter of the Duke of Monfort and Westfaire, which, thanks to the seven-league boots and enough gold to oil palms here and there, I was able to do. Puck and Fenoderee helped, rather reluctantly, and only in past time. They didn’t have to come here to do it. I’m not sure they could have. But in former centuries they were able to forge parish registry entries and put false birth records among ancient files. Marriages which had never occurred were recorded. Baptisms were entered in faded ink in ancient books. Confirmation records were put there as well. And, above all, wills, passing the warrant down from generation to generation, seventeen generations in all, to the present day. To Catherine Monfort. I am an heiress. The people of the House of Levi have been considerably astonished, but they are standing behind their document, six centuries old or not.
I called Janice and offered to hire someone to look after Jaybee. Janice was so angry I could hear her voice shaking, which confirmed my suspicion that she wanted to make me responsible for Jaybee. She had transferred her dislike of Beauty—Dorothy—to this new person, me. In Janice’s world, there must always be a sinner who is paying for her sin while Janice watches and judges. Since she could no longer get at Dorothy, she wanted to get at me. I was Dorothy’s friend and therefore probably guilty of something. In the last analysis, it is probably her own sin she is forever expiating. I don’t know what sin that was. Perhaps neither does she.
It turned out, I didn’t need to hire someone to care for him. Within hours of the time I left the house on Wisdom Street, she had found another place for Jay-bee.
I found an apartment in New York, and I am now on the board of directors of the International Environmental Crisis Committee, a group of very powerful persons dedicated to saving the world. They feel it is going to hell in a handbasket, and I know they’re right, though I can’t tell them how I know. Many of them have given millions of dollars to this effort, and so have I. I am privy to everything they are doing. They are attempting to put together a coalition of all environmental bodies, all the so-called liberal religious bodies who are more concerned with life than money, all people everywhere concerned with life on earth. We spend endless hours in meetings, trying to build coalitions, networks, trying to agree on lobbying strategies. We argue which candidates to support. I go to bed every night weary and yet unable to sleep. Grumpkin lies beside me and purrs, and eventually the sound of him lulls me into unconsciousness. Then I dream of the child named Elaine, and her mother, and the knife, and the sound of a mad voice singing “Down, down, down,” and I wake up again.
January 1994
Almost three hundred species of flora and fauna have gone extinct since I gave my first dollar to IECC. On the front page of the newspaper tonight is the announcement of a Mother of the Year Award, given to a mother of eleven children. I wonder what Father Raymond would say? Her eleven children can eat hamburger made from cows who were fed the ephemeral grass that comes after rainforest is cut and burned. They can breathe the already polluted air. They can look forward to growing up and having spaces of their own in the new prefabricated apartment houses now being built in Japan which give each renter one hundred fifty square feet. The article about the apartments says all the conveniences are built in. Bill’s apartment in the hive in the twenty-first had one hundred square feet. There isn’t far to go.
March 1994
Puck has been back several times, begging me to come home, each time more frantically. I might as well have gone. There is no point in my staying here. There was never any point. Carabosse must have known that. She knew it was too late. I felt I had to try.
We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women’s rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.
We worship the gobble-god. We burn forests in his name. We kill whales and dolphins in his name. We pave prairies in his name. We have retarded babies in his name. We sell drugs in his name. We set bombs in his name. We worship him everywhere. We call him by different titles and commit blasphemies in the name of worship.
We were given magic to use in creating wonder, and the gobble-god has sucked it dry. His followers reject mystery and madness and marvel. They cannot tolerate questions. They can believe any answer, no matter how false, so long as it is a certainty nailed firmly onto the cross of money. They yearn for the rapture to come, without knowing they have killed rapture forever. Fidipur is what is to come, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, will not forgive mankind for that.
LATER
I called Fenoderee or Puck. I sat on the side of my bed and called them. Neither of them came. After a long, long time, I heard a faint, far voice calling my name. “Not enough,” it said. “Not enough magic.”
I may have trapped myself. If I am to try and get back, it must be now. There is nothing I can do to stop things. I’ve spent the last few days turning money into gold and gems—gems mostly, they’re lighter—and what antique coins of the period the dealers have on hand. I made up a story about a costume party and had a couple of outfits made, plain, wool, fourteenth-century style, wimple, veils, shoes. It took me an hour to find this book and Mama’s box and my cloak and boots where I’d hidden them when I moved into this apartment. I’ve sewn the gems into the seams of the cloak. I keep thinking I’m hearing things, someone here with me. Grumpkin is in my pocket with the coins. We’re going to try.
24
EARLIER: LATER
I didn’t think the first jump moved me at all. I was looking at my watch, thinking the date would have moved significantly. After a moment, I realized the first jump had only taken me back two minutes. I didn’t look around. I was standing next to the desk where a previous me was sitting, writing, and I knew the other me was there, at the desk. I didn’t dare look. I fixed my eyes on the floor and walked into the next room before I tried again. The second jump moved me four minutes, the third a little over eight. I hadn’t been in the kitchen all evening, so I went in there in order not to run into myself. The fourth jump took me back half an hour. The fifth a little over two hours. I lost count of how many it took to get me to the sixteen hundreds where the magic was strong enough to bring me back a
ll the way. The huge mound of Westfaire looms against the stars. The smell of magic is strong. The smell of trees is like wine. I’m going to lie down wrapped in my cloak and sleep. I’m very tired, very sore. I feel very old.
LATER: SHORTLY AFTER DAWN
I look very old, at least my hands and arms do. Luckily, I had a good haircut shortly before I left, and that seems to have stayed with me. So did my manicure, nail sealer, no polish. My new clothes fit. I haven’t lost any more weight, at least. I’m just a nicely groomed, quite-old woman, miles from anywhere. I have no idea what year it is. Grumpkin was hungry so he caught a mouse or mole, something small and gray, and ate it. He didn’t offer to share it. It’s all right. I have protein crackers in my pocket, enough to last several days. Someone is bound to come along, sooner or later.
[“She’s back,” I said inadequately.
“So I see,” said Israfel He was as weary as I. “Do you think she’ll go back there again?”
“No. She’s done everything she can do. You were right. It’s grown into her. The two of them have become one thing, and she when she fought for it, she was fighting for her own life. I can’t blame her. I’d have done the same.”
“What do we do now?”
“Let her alone for a while. While we try to see what’s going to happen next.”
“She looks very frail. I could send a cart, at least.”
“Do that. Send a cart.”]
ST. CYRIL’S DAY,
MAY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417
A cart came by midmorning, driven by a tinkerish sort of man, with a blowsy woman and several snot-nosed children along. I begged a ride, offering him a halfpenny, which he respected. I was glad of that, not wanting to use magic unless it was absolutely necessary. It was he, the tinker, who told me the year. Fifty years have passed since I was last here. Seventy since the curse fell on Westfaire. By the count of elapsed years, I am eighty-six. There must be some kind of rule in travel of this sort. It doesn’t seem to be the lived time that counts, but some other chronological measure. I don’t feel eighty-six. Or as I imagine eighty-six should feel!
Elly’s daughter, my granddaughter, will be a middle-aged woman, possibly with children of her own. I will introduce myself as an elderly aunt. A wealthy, elderly aunt. Wealthy relatives are always easier to take. That is, if I can find her. If the little kingdom is still there. The tinker says there has been no plague for a considerable time. Still, there may have been a war. Indeed, there is a war. The war that was going on when I was a girl is still going on. The English against the French. Our King trying to take lands there, or reclaim lands there, or hold onto lands there. Their King trying to drive us out, or keep us out. One would think someone could put an end to it, though as I recall from references I picked up in the twentieth, it is to go on for decades yet.
Henry V is King. He will not be king long, poor boy. Edward III was King when I left in 650. He was succeeded by his grandson, Richard II, and he by his cousin, Henry IV, and he by his son. This current King Henry will die of a flux of the bowels in France, and his son will die in the Tower, having spent a good deal of time, on and off, as a madman. However, Henry Five’s widow will have a grandson who will be Henry VII, and it is all very interesting and complicated. I must be careful not to mention any of this lest I seem to prognosticate. According to the tinker, they are still burning poor old women whenever some busybody gets a gnat up her ass and thinks she’s been bewitched. I must also be careful not to seem a Lollard. They are also burning Lollards. I’m not sure I remember what Lollards are. I mean, I know what they are but not the things one must not say if one doesn’t want to appear to be one, and I am afraid to appear heretically ignorant if I ask.
The other interesting thing the tinker had to say is that the peasants have left the land and gone searching for better pay. I had read about that, but it all seemed frightfully unlikely. Now, here, seeing the vacant fields, I can tell it has really happened. The nobles have tried to put a stop to it, of course, but it’s done no good. It used to be that a man could not leave the land, for there would be no place for him elsewhere. Every lord had his own serfs and little need for more. Now, however, the Black Death has killed so many that there are places begging for any good man. Well, I remember that from Wellingford, from the Dower House. It was hard, even then, to get anything done, and the Death has been back several times since then. Strange, isn’t it. Men are more valued when there are fewer of us. Which is what I tried to tell them back in the twentieth. Which is what Puck said, too.
The tinker is a youngish man, but he has traveled these roads since he was a child. All Wellingford is empty now, he says. He does not know where the people went who used to live there. He remembers hearing of the King and Queen who were driven from their home over the seas, but he doesn’t remember where that home might have been. He will take me within a very short distance of East Sawley Mill, which still stands, and there I will ask about to see if anyone remembers.
ST. JUSTIN, MARTYR,
FIRST DAY OF JUNE,
YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417
I got down from the cart in front of an inn. What passes for an inn in these times. Outside it, sitting on a bench, was a straight, slender old man chatting with a friend. When he saw me standing there in the road alone, he came forward to offer his assistance.
He looked at me for a long time. I felt dizzy from that look.
“Catherine?” he asked. “It is Catherine, isn’t it?”
For a moment I didn’t know him. When I did, I felt everything whirling, like a tornado of feeling, swirling me around with it. “Giles? Oh, Giles. Is it Giles? But, you’re dead. They told me you were dead!”
He held me, and for that moment I was thirty again. My heart was as strong as it had ever been and that instant became an eternity for me. He wasn’t dead. Giles wasn’t dead. He knew me when he saw me, though I cannot imagine how. He called me by the name he knew me by, Catherine. He put his hand out to touch my face, and he smiled, as though he had expected me. He told me he had expected me every day for the past fifty years. He said he has thought about me every day during all that time, and he knew I was somehow his own lost Beauty come back to him.
I cried when he said this. I cry every time I think about it. We are of an age. He is still straight as a lance, though his stride is shorter than I remember and he does not see as well as once he did. His hair is as white as mine, but it is still full and soft and falls over his forehead as once it did. I wept and begged to know what had happened to him, and he told me a tale of being waylaid by an impress gang, one of whom he had killed, defending himself, before he was overpowered and dragged away. It was that man who had been buried beside the road.
I told him I had gone there and laid flowers on the place, and he laughed, saying I was the only one to grieve over that ruffian. Because the horse was there, with the king’s arms upon it, the witness had not considered it might be one of the gang who had died rather than the man they had assaulted.
The impress gang was working for a merchantman who had a royal contract to carry supplies to France and not enough men to man the ships. They kept Giles for months, sailing back and forth across the channel, and when he escaped at last, I was gone. He had dwelt here about East Sawley since, he said, waiting for me to return, knowing that I would.
“If I’d known you were here, I’d have come long ago,” I told him. And I would have. I’d have come long, long ago.
“After what had passed between us, no little wait seemed at all worrisome,” he said. “I have lived all my life in the memory of those three nights.”
What can any woman say to that? I went into the privy behind the inn and wiped my face, telling myself I’d been a fool to go to the twentieth for vengeance sake when I could have stayed for love’s sake, a fool to stay there for pride’s sake, thinking there was anything I could do. But then, I never said I was not a fool.
When I spoke of them, Giles remembered the little royals, and he also remembere
d the name of their kingdom: Ponte Marvella, somewhere in the high mountains where Aragon and Navarre and France come together in a tangle. I told him about Elly marrying the prince and their having a daughter, my granddaughter. He says he will come with me to find her. Here we are, two old pots, though seemingly fairly hale for all that, going off over the seas. The boots would have taken us there in a moment, but now that he is with me we will travel as other persons do, to see the sights. Giles might not like the idea of the boots. Explanations would be complicated, and perhaps too risky. He loves me for what he thinks I am. So I will try to be what he thinks I am.
Giles has taken some of my smaller gems to turn into coin. He will hire a conveyance to take us to Bristol, a three day’s journey. Once there, I can have a few more gowns made. The styles have changed somewhat. More people are speaking English, though it sounds very strange to me, because of all the accents clashing up against one another. Before the Death, no one traveled that much. Now everyone moves about, going and coming, here and there. The vowels slide about with the speakers, some say ae and some ai and some ao. It is almost easier to read lips. Giles says some years ago the Parliament attempted to make English the official language, but the lawyers all refused, saying they couldn’t argue in it. Pish. Even in the twentieth they say that! They spend their careers making up words so no one will know what they’re talking about! If lawyers had to write in plain English, nine-tenths of them would be out of work!
ST. BONIFACE’S DAY,
JUNE 5, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417
Bristol. The only rooms we could find here are in the pilgrim hostel. There are no ships. King Henry has commandeered them all to carry his army to Normandy. There are pilgrims waiting who have been waiting for weeks, running about each time they hear a rumor that some new ship may have come into port. Remembering Papa, I said something to Giles about such travel being of little use, and he hushed me. Lollards disapprove of pilgrimage, and speaking so may make people think I am a Lollard. I asked Giles, in a whisper, what Lollards are, meaning what are they like, and he told me they are followers first of John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English, much to the annoyance of the priests, and later of Sir John Oldcastle, who was condemned for heresy but escaped the Tower and plotted against the King’s life. Though his followers were caught and executed, the man himself remains at large.
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