Lily the Silent

by Tod Davies

  My mother had been right, though. Innocence was no excuse. You can’t tell people what they don’t want to hear, no matter how true it is. How much is that a fact about countries, as well as people!

  Of course, that was one of the problems at the heart of my mother’s short reign, people not wanting to hear what they all agreed was best forgotten. But she stood up to it as well as she could, because she was (she had learned to be) a brave woman.

  She really was. I’m proud to say that about my own mother. She was brave to try to better a world that seemed so determined not to be better. And her goal was always love. Always, always, Love.

  But Love was not enough. Is that only true of Arcadia? No. I don’t believe that now. What was, and is, true for Arcadia, I know now, is true for all of the other worlds.

  The Arcadia of my mother’s childhood was a gentler one than it is now, a more hopeful community, untroubled by any thoughts of a guilty past, smugly confident that its modern version of traditional village ways would continue, if not forever, than at least long into a prosperous future.

  Then, as now, Arcadia was what we call a ‘necklace’ of towns, each with its own governance and special features, divided by a fertile countryside of allotments and larger, mutually worked fields. The whole of the queendom was surrounded on four sides by mountains: to the east, the Calandals, with their dry, high desert climate; to the north, the mysterious Samanthans; to the west, the impassable Donatees; and to the south, the Ceres Mountains, most beloved of all. The Juliet River runs in a rough diagonal across our valley, striking off into two smaller tributaries, the Gems and the Deerspring. All three of these fall, finally, into the marshlands at the foot of the eastern part of the Ceres. We have no port. We have no rivers, even, that run to the ‘outside’ world, which has historically meant Megalopolis on the eastern, southern, and western sides, and even now, in the days after the Great Flood, still means the Megalopolitan territories, its vast administrative region. This, of course, has always been both a blessing and a bane, a source of protection, but also of much hardship and loss.

  Of the Arcadian towns, I won’t have much to say in this story, so I’ll just briefly list them here, both for the record, and for the great pleasure it gives me. ‘New’ Eopolis, known for its practical know-how. Wrykyn, home of St. Vitus’s College, teasingly called ‘abstemious Wrykyn’ for the great care its inhabitants take to have a comfortable life! Flower-covered Amaurote. Market-mad Walton. Ventis, gathering place of thoughtful farmers. Amana, known as the center of Arcadian healing, both human and animal. Paloma, famous for its artistic, and frequently snobbish, leanings.

  Mumford, called ‘Learned Mumford,’ the seat of Juliet College, the first college of the entire Otterbridge University system. The royal town. My own home.

  And Cockaigne. Famous as the most beautiful of the many beautiful gems in the necklace of Arcadia. The pearl that is the pride of all the rest. And Lily, at fifteen, was the most beautiful girl in Cockaigne…

  LILY WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN ALL OF ARCADIA

  Two

  …which made her the most beautiful girl in all of Arcadia. She was well-made—perfectly made, in fact; of compact height and slender build. Her hands and feet were particularly graceful: even the hand that was missing its smallest finger was so perfectly shaped, you almost thought four fingers was the proper number when you held it. Her nose was elegantly small—not like this beak of mine.

  Her hair was glossy black. Not blue black, but a dark color that hinted of chestnut and teak and mahogany and ebony, like a deep forest at night. Her eyes, too, echoed those forest colors, being a dark reddish brown, but with emerald flashes emerging unexpectedly whenever she was deeply interested or involved. I’ve mentioned her nose, but her features in general were regular—so regular, in fact, that they gave the impression of being a reworking by an unknown artist of an earlier, less perfect draft. Her skin was the color of coffee and cream, half and half, blended by a skilled hand.

  All the boys in Arcadia were mad for her, of course. But she would have none of them, as Wilder says. Lily knew that she was meant for Love, and that the Love she was meant for was a particular kind, for a particular person, not yet met, but somehow known. “I’ll know it when I see it…when I feel it…when I see him,” she said to herself, confident that she was right. And so she waited for it. For him.

  While she waited, though, like all the other young Arcadians of her day, Lily spent her time learning her responsibilities as a citizen. She learned how to hold house, how to work with her fellows, how to add to the gracefulness and reputation of her town, how to respect the towns surrounding her. Most importantly, she learned how to keep balanced in body and mind. This balance was always the aim of Arcadian education, even in the days before Devindra Vale reorganized the university system. It has always been an ideal of Arcadian life, then as now.

  All these tasks, and learning them properly, absorbed much of Lily’s young time. But in her free hours-—which were abundant, back then, in Arcadia—Lily dreamed about Love.

  It was Love she dreamed of the day everything changed, for her and for Arcadia. That day brought her to Love. But Love, it seemed, was not always like her dreams.

  It started the morning she could hear her parents quarrel. They had never, in her memory, quarreled before.

  “Your first duty’s your family,” she could hear her mother Mae say, even though her voice was muffled, coming up from the floor of her room, through the thick dark blue carpet. “That’s always been our way.”

  “Times are changing, and not for the good,” her stepfather Alan said, in a new, worried-sounding voice. Alan was usually as unruffled as he was large. Lily had never once heard anything approaching the sound of fear in his voice, in the three years he and her mother had been so happily married.

  She heard it now.

  Lily must have told me all this, the start of the events that made her queen. I remember it as a favorite story, clamored for at bedtime. She must have told me, and, later, after she was gone, my nurse Kim must have repeated it. I have it in my head, fresh, as if I’d been there in her attic room up the hill of Harmony Street, in Cockaigne, the house that doesn’t exist anymore, not since the Empire overran the town, making that street the scene of an ugly fight that Arcadia lost.

  But I can still see it. The house must have been of the early Arcadian type, snug, comfortable, easy to maintain. Flowers growing in the gardens all around, from which came the familiar sounds of the different birds, as well as the sound of one neighbor who whistled every morning. Every morning until the Invasion.

  There must have been a change in the air outside. Lily, alerted by a strange new sound, threw off the cool white linen sheets of her bed, and slid her feet into the sheepskin slippers lying there, the same type of sheets and slippers she insisted on all through her life. It was spring, always her favorite season, and the mornings were still cold—though they were clear, too, in a way that my dear nurse Kim always said “would break your heart if you didn’t know that the next spring they would be that way, too, and the next and the next.”

  Only this time there wouldn’t be a next.

  “They’ll leave us alone,” Lily heard her mother say dully. “They always have.”

  “But they won’t leave others weaker than us alone,” Alan said, and he must have sounded tired, for Mae and Alan had been arguing about this all night, there in their big, wide bed next to the window that opened out onto a flowering cherry tree that was long gone by the time I was born. “And after them, it’s us. If we let them have this battle, it’s our turn.”

  There was silence now.

  Lily went to her window and threw it wide open. She hadn’t yet put another piece of oak on the fire that had smoldered all night in her room’s white porcelain stove (you see the details? She must have loved her life there on Harmony Street, to have remembered and told me so much, so many small bits of it, and we had an oak fire in a porcelain stove in our room, on
cold days—I have it still). But the cold spring air was welcome. She took a deep breath in and could smell many things: the flowering trees all the way down Harmony Street where she lived, the grass on the playing field at the foot of the street, the clear water in the reservoir at the top of the hill by her house. She could feel a warm current in the midst of all the cold—the coming of spring and then summer.

  But she could smell something else, as well. Her small nose twitched.

  She stood there, considering. She was worried, too. She had been worried a long time. Her nose sniffed cautiously again at the beautiful mild Arcadian spring air. Yes. She was right. She had smelled it right the first time. From the east—from over the Calandals. She could smell the smells of the Calandals, the high, free, desert smell of creosote and pine. But she could smell something else, on an air current which swept through deep ravines on the Megalopolitan side, and up over the top of Mount MacIlhenny, down into Arcadia. She could smell burning. As she smelled it, she closed her eyes, running her hands down her sides, clenching the soft white flannel of her nightdress. She strained, now, not her ears, but, as it were, her inner ear. With that inner ear she could hear it. A deep, distant, unmistakable BOOM. Another boom. She could hear faint screaming, from far away, from far away over the Calandals.

  She knew no one else could hear what she could. It was a moment, she told me much later, where she knew everything had been changed. She knew her old life, which she valued so much, her pleasant life with Alan and Mae and her dog, Rex, where she dreamed in her little attic bedroom of a Love she was sure would come…well. She knew that was over now.

  So Lily swayed, standing there, as if she had been hit by an invisible force and was struggling to stand against it. She would have fallen, except for Rex, her dog—a black and gray beast with enormous paws and brown, shrewd eyes. (She loved to tell me, when I was a child, about Rex, and this is something, along with so much else, that I loved about her.) Rex got up now from where he had watched her, on his rug by the side of the stove, and pressed against her legs, trying his best to give her back her balance. Or at least to let her know he was there.

  At this, Lily opened her eyes and looked down at him. “You can smell it, too?” she asked. The dog looked gravely back. He could smell it too. “It’s here, then,” she said nervously, kneading at her nightgown with her hands. The dog wouldn’t have answered, she told me he didn’t. After a moment, though, he went to the window and raised himself up by his big paws onto the sill. While he looked out in this way, Lily went to the stove and stoked it for a little heat, listening to hear Alan and Mae downstairs. But there was only the sound of bacon sizzling, and the faint smell of the pancakes Alan always made for special occasions. They were going to pretend, then, that everything was fine. Lily knew that if they did this, it would be out of concern for her. She knew this and she appreciated it, but in a way, it made her feel more forlorn and alone. Lily knew a lot of things that a fifteen-year-old in the beautiful, peaceful valley of Arcadia should not have had to know. And there was no help for it. Knowing those things meant she would have to act.

  But she would be all alone.

  Lily didn’t want to be alone. But Fate, as she told me as soon as she thought I might be able to understand, is Fate, and if you don’t walk to meet it, it catches you from behind, and who knows what will happen then?

  “Maybe it won’t come to that,” she said to herself reassuringly, as bravely as she could. Lily was brave, no one knows that more than I do. And really, it’s only the truly brave who know when they are scared. So she was scared. But she was a little defiant, too. “Anyway, today I’ve got things to do. There’s the Feast. And the marketing to do.” (Everyday things, my mother always told me, is what we need to hold on to. Everyday things are what make up everything. And in my life, I have learned the wisdom of that many times.)

  Heartened, she began to dress. Thinking about the marketing made her almost sure any worry was no more than a dream. The marketing for the Feast-—that was real. The Feasts of Arcadia Before the First Reign are still famous in our history; children learn about them in school. This was the Spring Festival, where all of Arcadia went into the Ceres Mountains, up to the alpine meadows, and made merry, as we used to say, before it became so much harder to do. Lily, like all Arcadians then and now, loved a good Feast. That morning, she thought she’d better hurry if she was to get her breakfast and then get out to the market, which, she could see from her window, was already drawing shoppers from all over Cockaigne.

  MAUD HAD ORGANIZED THE RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ENEMY

  SO MANY YEARS AGO

  Three

  “What’s your family bringing to the Feast?” Lily’s friend Camilla asked when they collided, baskets on their arms, at that morning’s market in Cockaigne. I mention Camilla here because much later I came to take a special interest in her grandchildren. I like to think of the generations of Arcadia stitched together like that. I like to think that my mother knew their grandmother as a girl.

  Lily showed Camilla her basket, which was filled with wild mushrooms that the Wild Mushroom Man collected in the mountains. It was for her mother and Alan’s specialty, the dish they brought every year to the Spring Festival. In those days at the festivals of Arcadia, the tradition was for the households of the village magistrates to compete in a good-humored way, to see who made the most popular dishes. Camilla’s father was a magistrate. So was Mae, one of the best, it was said, that Arcadia had ever had. I am proud to say of my own grandmother that she is still remembered. Mae had been elected chair three times already in the last few years, an unheard-of distinction, and it had also been admitted that her wild mushroom casserole was the finest dish a magistrate had ever made. This did quite a lot to enhance her prestige. Skills of that sort were highly thought of in those days. Lily was proud to be doing the marketing for her. The wild mushrooms had to be absolutely fresh for perfection’s sake, and the Wild Mushroom Seller knew that, and always saved the best for Mae.

  “Look, Lily, he’s waving at you! You must have forgotten something.” Lily turned and looked through the crowd. Camilla was right. The Mushroom Man, with his dark walnut face and his queer little black hat, was waving her back. She excused herself from her friend, and made her way toward him.

  As she neared his table, she saw the mushrooms laid out in front of him. The golden chanterelles, the red and blue boletes, the little chestnut nuggets, and, best of all, the honeycombed morels, all of them so scarce in the mountains now, after our last disastrous experiment with crop starts from the False Moon. In those days, though, wild mushrooms grew in abundance, though in hidden places that only the patient could find. The Mushroom Man was famous for his patience, and usually there was a crowd clamoring at his stand. But at that moment, strangely, the crowd was gone. The shoppers were elsewhere, buying up the mountain fish with the rainbow scales, and the squash flowers, and the long shoots of garlic greens for the Feast—all her neighbors and friends, all laughing, all looking forward to it. (Gone! Gone! Gone are the days of those innocent Feasts. And what have we gained by losing them?) Not one of them had heard anything wrong, Lily thought sadly. She was, as she had always dreaded she would be, all alone.

  Not completely alone, though. Rex pressed against her leg to comfort her in the way that only an intelligent animal can.

  The Wild Mushroom Man stared hard at her as she and Rex approached his stand. My mother always said, “He looked like a black cloud on a clear day.”

  “Forgot,” he said to her, as he squinted his little black seed eyes. Lily’s nose twitched. Rex sat and waited.

  “You go see your grandmother,” he said. “Quick as you can, and right away.”

  “My grandmother?” Lily said. “My grandmother’s dead.” This was true. Mae’s mother had died long ago.

  “Not her,” the Wild Mushroom Man said. “The grand one.” And Lily knew by the admiring look on his wrinkled walnut face that he meant Alan’s mother Maud, her step-great-grand
mother by rights, not her grandmother at all. “Though I loved her more than if she had been my own,” my mother would say, and I would take comfort from it, not knowing till much later that the comfort came from knowing you could choose your family at need. “I always felt I had known her somewhere, some time before,” she would say.

  “We’ll be taking her to the Feast,” Lily said cautiously, not sure she understood him right. “We always bring Maud.” Or she brings us, she thought. My guess is she smiled to herself at the idea of anyone bringing Maud the Freedom Fighter (for that was how she was known even then, in our schoolchildren’s history books) anywhere she didn’t want to go.

  “No,” he said. “Go now. Someone with her wants to see you. I met Her in the woods on Her way, and She told me so.”

  Lily looked at him then. For a moment, it was as if the clamor of the market fell away, and all there was standing there were her and Rex and the Wild Mushroom Man.

  Rex whined.

  The Wild Mushroom Man thrust out a wrinkled dark-brown hand.

  “Take her these,” he said. In his palm were a bunch of shriveled black mushrooms. These were Trumpets of Death, and she repeated their other name to herself—trompettes des morts—as she tucked them away in her basket.

  “Thank you,” she said. The sound from the market came back up, as if it were a normal day after all.