The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  Soon dozens and dozens of them had come out into the night, the first few no taller than a thimble. The last few, as tall as streetlamps, were followed by eight more, all of a middling height, who bore a litter upon which their Queen reclined, propped up with coarse black pillows, blackbirds fluttering in her hair and two black cats, entirely uninterested in the birds, asleep on her lap. She yawned as she went through the door, carried after the rest of the procession in a half loop that took her to the flat top of the hill. There her bearers set the litter down on the thick, soft grass and danced around her in a ring. Every step was choreographed for the Queen’s pleasure, though it had been years since she had taken an interest in the design of the dance and many months since she had really paid any attention to them as they performed for her.

  Still paired, the faeries danced five turns around the litter, twisting and dipping, one now leading and then following, one lifting the other partner when the bells rang a particularly discordant note, the lifted dancer now doing a split and now a curtsy toward the Lady, until the bells rang faster and the couples disengaged, everyone dancing alone, increasingly frenzied yet precise, as the bells rang ever louder. It was a sight to nauseate and entrance any human observer, though the dance was not what it once was, and the dancers, for all the ways they leaped high and threw their bodies low, looked as bored, in their frozen, smiling faces, as their Queen.

  In waves the bells reached toward a crescendo until they broke, and then a hundred different unsettling overtones hung a few moments more in the air over the hill. The frenzy of the dancers broke as well, and they stopped, scattered in heaps around the litter but not sweating or out of breath. Smiles vanished, finally no longer required, and they all stood and bowed toward their Queen, who was idly stroking one of the cats and entirely ignoring the other, though it pressed its face into her belly. The birds in her hair had flown away. She flicked one hand absently at her court, and they rose, their unsmiling faces now showing every sort of emotion except happiness. A frog-sized gnome with very curly brown hair was glaring furiously at her, and a feathered, pony-sized woman was staring at her with a combination of sadness and desire, while another lady, tall and pale and barked like a birch, was silently weeping.

  They stood around like that for a time, silent conversations passing from face to face; the host had grown accustomed to such long, boring silences, for the Queen had the privilege of speaking the first words of the night, and this was especially true tonight, the Great Night, the midsummer holiday when all their customs were most formal. Some nights it was halfway to dawn before she called for a game or named the clouds or sang a song (always sad ones, these days). Tonight she seemed to nap a little, clutching now at both cats, who did not squirm like ordinary cats would but suffered her tight embrace, staring into each other’s eyes, panting and gasping a little at the pressure around their necks and chests. The darkness had hardly fully settled under the trees before she started and sat up and spoke.

  “Where’s Puck?”

  A collective sigh escaped from the host, and they dropped their stiff poses, some of them reclining on the grass while others turned away from their enforced partners to seek out their real friends and lovers. Some of them retired in twos and threes to the edge of the summit of the hill, not quite brave enough to leave entirely, but so sure no Great Night festivities were coming that they were already conspiring to make their own party. But three individuals stood by the litter. Formerly Oberon’s closest servants, they had given up or forgotten their names when he disappeared and borrowed others from the human world.

  “Up to no good,” said Fell, who was beaver-sized and somewhat beaver-faced.

  “Out in the city making babies cry,” said Lyon, one of those faeries whose appearance mirrored his disposition but not his name; he looked to be made of tightly spooled string and was seven feet tall at his shoulder.

  “Searching for our Master, and ever faithfully,” said Oak, who might be mistaken for a human boy if you missed his rabbit’s feet and thickly furred face and bottom. He was the nearest thing Puck had in the entire faerie company to a friend since Oberon had disappeared.

  “Summon him,” said the Queen, holding out the cats. Oak and Fell each took one, holding them at an odd angle, and began to squeeze them not quite in succession, so they let out an overlapping series of shrieks and yowls. Despite the abuse, the cats remained docile, not clawing or spitting but only making noise, as dutifully as any instrument. The cats sounded for nearly five minutes, the company around them drawing farther away from the players, not because they didn’t enjoy the music but because of how much they feared Puck. There was a tune in the wailing of the cats, not very obvious at first, but it was actually a very short bit of song they were playing, repeated again and again, something that shared a lot of notes with “Danny Boy,” though to anyone who knew that song it would seem as if notes of violence and threat had been inserted at random into the music. It was those elements, as much as the mandate of obedience laid by Oberon upon the wild spirit who had nearly destroyed them a thousand years before, that drew Puck into the presence of the Queen. Before he appeared, walking quite unremarkably up the hill, a whistling was heard, an echo and exaggeration of the song of the cats. Puck’s whistling grew as loud as and then louder than the cats, until he stopped a few feet before the Queen and bowed.

  People and faeries, animals and spirits—any observing entity—each saw Puck a little differently. What you saw depended on how you were feeling; he was often the image of one’s worst fear or most troubling anxiety. To some of the faeries he looked like a naked boy with a luxurious Afro, and only the height of the boy or the width of the Afro changed from eye to eye. But some saw him as a sliver of flame, or a blackness heavier and darker than the black air, or a fluttering pair of dark wings, and some saw him as an image of their Queen only even more depressed, disheveled, and defeated-looking. In every form he wore a chain, sometimes made of tiny silver acorns or leaves of twisted silver grass. Sometimes the chain was made of thick links of silver manacle, and sometimes it was just silver glints upon the air or the fire. The chain had been placed there by Oberon a very long time ago, so long ago that no one but the Queen remembered the true particulars of the binding, though the battle was a story they all had once sung under the hill and one they celebrated every Midsummer’s Eve.

  “Where is your Master?” Titania asked him.

  “Still hidden,” he said.

  “But the last report was so … promising,” she said. She had been trying to discover the King by reports of unusual events in the city, because she was sure he had not quit the world but only sunk himself in it, putting on a mortal face and a mortal life because she had wounded him when his heart was already broken, like hers, over the death of their son. She never went out to look for him herself anymore, even though she was sure she would have recognized him no matter how expert his disguise; as lost as he might be to himself right now, he would never be lost to her if she could only stand before him. And she only barely trusted Puck, even under his world-heavy bonds, because all love of his Master was forced on him, and what did he care, really, if her King and husband and lover never returned? But lately she could not abide the sight of mortal boys; everyone looked like their Boy, and so she, Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air and Suzeraine of the Autumn Moon and the bearer of a hundred thousand other lofty titles, some of which could only be expressed in hours of music, ran sweating and shaking from blue-socked babies in their strollers and baseball-capped toddlers and little hoodlums on skateboards, and cried for days under the hill after each time she ventured out. Once, a few dim but well-meaning sprites had scouted out a poor replica of her Boy and called him up to the hill, singing him out of the Mission, warding him as he crossed the street, turning buses and bicycles out of his path as he walked in a daze, not quite awake but compelled toward the park, held fast by the certainty that every good thing he ever had wanted was waiting for him there. When he presented hi
mself in a stupor at the bald top of the hill, mouth agape at the faeries, who were only partially hidden from him, it roused the Queen from her own stupor. In an instant she understood the nature of the spell and knew who had cast it. In another she had punished them, as swift in her vengeance as she ever was in the good old days when every night was great, when the host spent the hours on the hill from dusk to dawn consumed in masques of jealousy and violent, elevating, rejuvenating lust. With a mere gesture, she tore the wings from the do-gooders and forced them to bear the boy upon their wounded backs, crawling under him in the dirt as he dozed and drooled until they deposited him on the Haight Street sidewalk.

  Often, but not always, when her subjects assumed she was lost in sad reverie, she was actually listening to the city where her husband had hidden himself, though it wasn’t any ordinary sense of hearing that she deployed. As she lay on her litter or her bier, startling little flashes of wonder would flare up beyond the hill, sometimes so intensely that she could feel them like a warmth against her face. These showed her where to direct her attention, and it was not much longer before she could discern the particulars of the event: a child floats away with his kite; a dog suddenly grows flowers in its coat; a hideous transvestite stumbling down Eighteenth Street at 2 a.m. actually becomes, for twenty paces, a beautiful woman. This was magic, and it must indicate the presence of her lost love, because for a long time now magic had been absent from the city and the country beyond the hill. In his hidden state, unknown to himself and unaware of his power, the magic would seep from Oberon and temporarily change the world around him, at random or according to the changeable and petty wishes of the mortals with whom he slummed. The latest report had been the most promising: A white bull, cock a-swagger and head held high, had paraded through a coffee shop in Noe Valley and then strolled down Twenty-fourth Street toward Diamond Heights.

  This was a sign like none other. The white bull was one of his aspects; a form to wear in battle or in passion but also one he liked to wear after a bitter quarrel with her, because she could never stay angry at him when he was a creature so warm and breathy, and she could never detect any duplicity in Oberon’s apologies in those giant brown eyes. So it was a sign and a signal. He had become his most distinctive beast because he was ready to put back on his power and become her King again, and because he was so sorry for leaving her, for hurting her more than he’d ever done before in all the years of their marriage.

  “I never saw the bull,” Puck said, “though the wonder of him was written still on the faces of all the mortals who beheld him. I followed his scent for a quarter mile and found a bush wet with his piss. See? I brought you a flower from it.” From somewhere on his naked person he produced a small blue flower with thick hairy petals that glistened as if they were still wet. He took a deep whiff and presented it to her with another bow and flourish. “It is his stink!’ he said with a wide smile. A light came off his teeth too bright for most of them to look at long, though Titania was never cowed by it. She snatched the flower from him and brought it hesitantly to her face. Puck had frozen it in time, but his spell came apart in her hand. The petals softened and felt moist instead of glassy, and when she shook the flower a few drops fell onto her dress as the salt and iron odor rose up and transported her into a rapture of nostalgia. It was pathetic, she knew, to weep over the scent of her lost lover’s piss, but it was the first time in a year she had been able to partake of his odor, since all his clothes had disappeared on the same day he did, and the sheets on his side of their bed, too. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, though she would have cherished it even if it were. It smelled powerful and ancient and sad, and she thought she could apprehend in it some trace, a compacted seed, of the extraordinary love he bore her.

  Her courtiers yawned, and here and there they muttered “There she goes again” and “I thought tonight would be different” and “Some Great Night this is going to be!” A few of them wandered off in small companies down the hill, more faithful to their holiday than to the Queen who didn’t have the heart to celebrate it. Most were too timid to spurn her presence, but bold enough to sit without leave and complain to one another loudly and at length. But the three who had been nearest to her husband, and who now were nearest to her, closed on her, taking liberties with her person, stroking her hair and kissing her hands and her feet, uselessly attempting to comfort her. Puck, still smiling, remained where he was.

  “Wicked thing,” the Queen said to him. “You are failing on purpose to find him.”

  “You know I cannot willingly fail at anything you set me to. Your word is his word, and I am bound to obey.” He shook his silver chain, and the tinkle and rattle and chime stilled a few complaining conversations. It made the host nervous when Puck rattled his chain, and none of them were really comfortable having him around now that the King was gone. “He outmatches me. But perhaps if I were unbound?” He fell to his knees and slid closer to the Queen, offering her the back of his neck, where a thumb-sized block of rough silver bound the ends of the chain. They had this conversation every night, after every report of failure, Puck always bolder in his requests for freedom.

  “I would sooner put out the sun,” she said, her usual response, and it sounded to all but the most discerning ears the same as it did on any other night, but Puck and her three closest courtiers heard overtones of resignation in her voice. The three courtiers reacted by stroking and kissing her more frantically, whispering to her that she shouldn’t listen, and calling on Puck to be silent.

  Puck said, “Maybe someone should put it out.” The thought had actually occurred to her, when she was in her deepest troughs, that there would be a certain satisfaction in putting out the sun or banishing the moon or pulling down the sky, taking away from the world something commensurate with what had been taken from her. But these indulgent fantasies always passed in a moment; she cried them out along with all the resurgent bitter anger she felt toward her husband, and when her nightly tears were done she only ever felt a deep sadness that had a small quality of peace to it. She tried to weep herself down there now, because she was more bitter and angry and hopeless than ever, all because of the bull, prancing outrageously down Twenty-fourth Street, and now through her mind’s eye, wagging its ass, teasing and mocking her for having been stupid enough to drive him away in the first place and for being too weak now to call him back. She took her hands away from her courtiers—two of them were rubbing her palms—and covered her face and wept harder, so the circle of the host widened even more, because it was bad enough for the Queen to be languid and depressive on the festival night, but to indulge in histrionics was frankly poor taste. Even the cats, who had formerly been licking at her arms and breasts and face, slunk off the litter and disappeared over the edge of the hill with another dozen faeries. Titania took no notice of them. She was on her way down to the saddest place in her memory, Oberon’s leave-taking, when she had made her awful mistake. It had seemed like the only thing to say at the time, the only sensible response to the horrible new world she had woken into after the long dreamlike demise of their Boy. Grieving furiously, she had set about destroying everything left to her.

  “You do not love me anymore?” her husband had asked her.

  “I do not,” she had said.

  “You do not love me?”

  “I do not love you. All my feelings have been false.”

  “Then I am undone. Behold, I never was Oberon, nor you Titania, and never was the boy our Boy. I undo it all with a word, no, and pass away.” And then he walked away, from this very spot where she lay every night on her bier, down the hill and out of the park and into the mortal world. In memory she watched him, and instead of turning her face away from his receding back (as she actually had done), she propelled herself after him. Even in her imagination she could not capture him, but this exercise usually sent her into the deeper and more peaceful sadness that she sought. Tonight it eluded her, and seeking it she had a thought, terrible and surprising. Puck was star
ing at her when she looked up, wearing Oberon’s face, sad but disdainful, looking at her just the way she most feared he might look at her.

  “Milady,” said Lyon, “best not to look into his eyes!” He tried to cover her eyes with a fan, but she batted it away.

  “Maybe someone should put it out,” she said to Puck. “What does it illuminate for me, except everywhere my love is not? And does it see him and not tell me where he is? Shouldn’t it be punished?”

  “I have always hated the sun,“said Puck.

  “The sun is our friend, “said Fell nervously, sensing the direction in which the conversation was turning and not liking it at all. “It makes the green things grow.”

  “What worth is the world with him not in it?” It wasn’t the first time she had considered destruction as a remedy for her ills. Before she had become confined to the hill, she had made a study of mortal suicides. No faerie had ever done such a thing, or even died at all, though in remote legend some great grief had turned one to stone, or caused a sleep of ages. Mortals’ deaths always only reminded her of how different she was from them. She was ageless and immortal, and the only creature ever to threaten her life or those of her subjects had been overcome a whole age before, his wild magic contained by a bond that was as frail as it was strong, so that anyone might break it with a single word, though only Titania and Oberon knew the word, which changed from year to year. The magic in the chain prevented any accidental utterance, so that lately Puck, in the city in the service of his Queen or his own constrained appetites, might hear someone forget the breed of their beloved dog when asked, or might hear someone say, “What a lovely dog. What is it? Of course I know … it’s on the tip of my tongue! The lovely fur like hair, the distinctive hairdo. Hypoallergenic!” A person might work themselves into a fit trying to speak the word, but Oberon’s magic would strike them dead before they ever uttered the first syllable.