Fenoderee and the others who are staying are out with the animals. Puck carried my Giles up to the tower and laid him on my bed. Giles looks much better, much stronger. This long sleep has done him good. Then Puck helped me to climb all these stairs to be with my love. Since I’ve been back this time, my legs have hurt such a lot, and of course I am very, very old. One hundred and sixteen! Think of it! I could not have climbed here without him.
From the balcony I can see the light of dawn and bright wings circling straight above. A dove, I think. Very high. On my bed, Giles snores and Grumpkin snores, little breathy sounds in the silence. When I stroke either of them, they move as though to tell me they know I am here. I sit on the edge of the bed to write, remembering Giles Edward’s question.
What will happen?
Beloved will awaken once she is out of Westfaire. He will kiss her, of course, but that has nothing to do with anything. No matter what Joyeause said about a hundred years, this spell was laid forever. Westfaire will go on sleeping. Papa will sleep, and Doll, and Martin. The aunts will sleep, and the young maids, and the young footmen and stable hands, all will sleep until the conditions of this enchantment are fulfilled and someone or something wondrous arrives to kiss beauty awake once more. Not a prince. Or not merely a prince. More than a prince. A rebirth of some kind. And not soon. Not until long after Carabosse’s clock has run down. Long after the twenty-third, I should imagine. Long after Baskarone is gone and all of Faery vanished. Long after the Dark Lord and all his minions have perished from the weight of time. The inanition of age will get him, finally, where nothing else can, and having no victims except each other will kill the rest. Perhaps in the twenty-fourth or the twenty-fifth, or perhaps long after that, life will come again. I have done everything a half fairy can to preserve it. Carabosse and I make a good pair.
And if it happens—why, then everything is here. The whales and the elephants and the radishes and the trees. Magic is here. And man, too. All those randy stable boys and giggling maids. And the Bogles. Ready to begin again. Ready to recreate what God created. And Giles, to greet me again in the morning; and I, to greet him.
And if it does not happen?
Then everything is here. Sleeping. Dreaming, perhaps, of what might have been. Perhaps others, on some other world will catch the dream, will wake from it astonished at its marvel, at its complicated wonder. Perhaps someone or something will dream who can create once more.
There is a bedtime prayer Aunt Terror taught me when I was a child. “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Such an arrogant idea to go to sleep on, I have always thought. Why should God do any such thing, except that I’ve always loved His beauty passionately. All God’s beauty passionately.
That time, so long ago, I would not allow the Curse to touch me. I did not want to spend a hundred years sleeping. I thought it unworthy of me. I thought it monstrously unfair that Papa had let me in for such a fate. I evaded it. I escaped it, so I thought. Escaping destiny is not so easy as that. Funny, the way things work out. Even Carabosse and Israfel couldn’t quite keep it from happening the way it did. As though someone else had done the planning.
Puck is holding out his hand for my pen. And my cap. He says he will sit by me, and rub the pains out of my poor old legs. Until I sleep.
“I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
Perhaps, instead, He will keep the fire that burns here; the fire that Israfel and Carabosse set here.
Perhaps that has always been my soul.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sheri S. Tepper was born in 1929 in Denver, Colorado, and has lived in Colorado all her life. She worked in the administration of a multi-state non-profit organization until her retirement in 1986. Currently, she divides her time between writing and—in association with the American Minor Breeds Conservancy—raising various minor and rare breeds of domestic livestock and poultry on a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. She is married, has two adult children and one grandchild.
In the few short years Ms. Tepper has been publishing, she has written over a dozen novels which have garnered the respect and admiration of both readers and critics. In addition to After Long Silence, her works include The Gate to Women’s Country, Grass, The Awakeners (published in two volumes as Northshore and Southshore), Beauty, (winner of the Locus award for best fantasy novel), Sideshow, A Plague of Angels, and Shadow’s End. Her most recent novel is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall
Beauty Page 46
