by Tod Davies
Arcadia in those days was very well organized for marketing. (We seem to have lost the ability to act sensibly about this now, I’m ashamed to say.) On a normal day, Lily would have finished the shopping, and then left it at a designated drop-off point to be delivered to her home. Mae and Alan paid to have things delivered daily, rather than randomly in the regular round of drop-offs. But instead, this time, she hailed one of the boys on the three-wheeled bicycles who spent much of each day ferrying people’s purchases from the market to their homes. This was a job boys often had before they turned seventeen and had to think, along with everyone else, about more serious work. And a good job it was, too, because you were out in the fresh air all day, and you knew that what you were doing meant everyone in your village (they were half villages/half towns then, not the full towns they are today) could walk and gossip and be at their ease because of you, instead of having to lug their groceries in some inconvenient, messy, and more dangerous way.
This boy’s name was Colin, and he was a frail boy for Arcadia. (Probably this was because of an illness caught in the days before Hanuman Medical College had got our epidemics under control. We used to have quite a problem with healer-resistant strains brought over the mountains, at least before the more recent discoveries.) He was even smaller than Lily, with blond hair so pale it was almost white, which stood up in a shock on his head. Of course he was in love with Lily. Every boy in Arcadia was.
“Which way are you going, Colin?” Lily said.
I imagine he looked at her just as uneasily as you would expect a teenage boy to look at a beautiful teenage girl. “Dunno,” I imagine he said. I don’t know for sure. Lily used to rush past this part of the story.
“If you’re going up Greensprings, pull me along, would you?” she said briskly. (I know she said it like that. Kim told me later you always knew when Lily didn’t want someone getting any closer. “She’d get all sniffy on ’em,” she said. “She was always like that with the lads. All except your dad, of course.”)
“Don’t mind,” he probably muttered. And I know—I can see— she pulled a pair of light silver roller skates from the bag slung across her chest and attached them to her shoes. Because that was how they did things in Arcadia in my mother’s youth.
Holding on to the back of the wheeled basket towed by his bicycle, Lily rolled along behind him as he toiled up the hill, up past the edge of the last houses huddled on the Greensprings Road, where the big Museum of Arcadian History now stands, that silly, ugly building Michaeli and Aspern Grayling wasted Royal Funds on in the days of my powerless minority. But in those days, the houses ended there at a wood, the fringes of which covered the lower reaches of the Ceres Range. The road got a little rocky here as it still does, though it levels out a bit after awhile, and Lily, Rex loping at her side, gave a little giggle as she bounced along.
The light here was different from down below. It is to this day. There are times (too few) where I pretend I want to do research at the museum, but I really just go out the back door into the woods, leaving those ridiculous bodyguards Devindra insists I have cooling their heels in the ugly lobby underneath the gigantic picture of Lord High Chancellor Michaeli at his most annoyingly grand. The light there, in those woods, is filtered and green, as if you are at the bottom of the sea. In those days there was only one house, all the way at the end of the track. This was the house of Alan’s grandmother, Maud. It was a famous house, The Tiny House in the Wood. (So famous that it was pulled down, of course, since Michaeli intended to build the museum where it stood. Until he found out, too late, that the only suitable site for a huge, impressive building was somewhat downhill.) It was from this house that Maud, Arcadia’s most venerable Fighter on behalf of the Great Freedoms, had organized the Resistance against the Enemy so many years ago. Had organized it and had won. Or so our storytellers said.
It was a ramshackle house, when all was said and done. I have heard detailed, affectionate descriptions of it many times, and wish I could have seen it for myself in the days when Maud still lived there. Even then, I’m told, it tilted this way and that. The wood was so old it had turned silver gray. The windows sagged in their sashes, and the floors creaked. But Maud always said, whenever the magistrates of the All Village Council offered to have it set to rights, that she liked it that way. You can see all that in the records. At least the ones that we have.
Colin pulled up in front of the old creaky gate, where Lily took off her skates and stowed them neatly in her bag. (She was always very neat, although never oppressively so.) He gave her Maud’s groceries, and took her own basket with a promise to deliver it to Mae. Then Colin, whistling, turned his cycle to sail downhill. In my version of the story, he would be in such a good mood after being allowed to help the beautiful Lily that he would do it with both feet on the handlebars and his hands in the air.
Lily watched him go, Rex at her side, waiting till he had disappeared with a whoop down among the homes below. Then, looking at each other, they pushed open the creaky old gate of the home of Maud Delilah, the greatest Fighter Arcadia had ever known.
Four
Maud was entertaining an old friend, and that friend was Death. Lily recognized her the moment she and Rex walked into the room. She didn’t know how she recognized her. She knew they had never been properly introduced. But nevertheless, she knew for certain that this was Death.
This was how she told me the story.
“Was this who the Wild Mushroom Man met today, on his way through the forest?” she thought. Her eyes met Rex’s. He had recognized the Guest, too, as she sat in Maud’s old red leather-covered wing chair, sipping from a cream-colored china cup. He hesitated for a moment as the two women looked welcomingly at the newcomers.
“Come in, come in. Oh, Lily, how lovely to see you,” Maud said, her pale creased face beaming. She didn’t stand—that was her right, after all, being old, and having sustained so many wounds in the past—but gestured that the two come closer.
At this, Rex moved forward toward Death, and lay at her feet with a sigh. Death, pleased, reached over to scratch the dog behind the ears. Rex gave another great deep breath, and licked her hand. Lily, when she told the story, was clear that Death liked Rex, and that Rex was not afraid of Death.
“What a nice dog!” Death said, and she looked at Lily and smiled.
Lily went to Maud and kissed her on her cheek. “It felt dry like paper, but cool, too. And Maud smelled, as she always did, of roses,” my mother said, not knowing that I breathed in her own scent, which was the same. Lily breathed in deeply then, the way I did while she told the story, and she smiled, too, the same as me. She was very fond of Maud, she said. Maud, in fact, was the most important adult in her life, “more even than my own mother, Snow, and if you should find some other adult more important than me to you, I would always completely understand.” But of course I never did.
Maud held Lily’s hand and patted it. “Sit there, Lily,” she said, pointing to the little hassock at her feet. “Where we can both get a good look at you.”
Lily obeyed. And the two women—one old, and the other appearing to be in the full flower of middle age, for Death is not old or young, but always at the height of her powers—looked at her.
“As if,” Lily thought, “they’ve been talking about me. As if they want to see if what they said was true.” Lily remembered that she put up her chin a little. She was embarrassed to be looked at like this, by Death and Maud. But she was determined not to show it.
Whatever conclusion it was, though, that Death and Maud came to as they looked Lily over, neither of them said anything about it. Instead they returned to their conversation, as if Lily and Rex had never interrupted them at all.
“I’ve always liked this situation,” Death drawled in her elegant way, looking out of Maud’s broad front window onto the woods. “Thank you,” she said as Maud urged Lily to pass around the plate of macaroons. “I will.” Death bit a cookie reflectively. “Of the place but not quite in
it, if you see what I mean.”
Maud laughed. “Oh, I do!” she said and her eyes glinted with amusement. Her eyes were a deep black, like buttons, and when she laughed they sent out purple sparks. “That’s the story of my life all over, isn’t it?” She pulled her plush yellow and black wrap around her arms against the slight spring chill. (“And she always wore black and yellow plush, Snow.”)
“And of Lily’s, too, unless I mistake myself—which I don’t.”
MAUD WAS ENTERTAINING AN OLD FRIEND,
AND THAT FRIEND WAS DEATH
Again both the women turned and looked at Lily, at where she sat balanced on a little green velvet pouf. (Somehow miraculously saved from what came after—I have it in my own small tower now.)
“You heard it this morning, didn’t you, Lily?” Maud asked. Lily looked quickly at Death, and gave just as quick a nod.
“I don’t think anyone else did,” she offered, and then, embarrassed, was quiet again.
“No,” Death drawled. “No, I don’t imagine they did.” She looked out the window at the woods, but this time her long, elegant fingers tapped impatiently on her chair’s wooden arm. “Arcadia,” she murmured. “Beautiful…and blind.”
“It’s a very good place,” Maud said in a voice of faint protest. But Lily could see she was sad. “We fought to make it a good place. And to a certain extent we won, didn’t we? We won.”
At this she smiled at Lily again, and stretched out her hand, which Lily clasped and then let go. “She’s smiling at me as if I’d helped her fight!” Lily thought wistfully. “And I wish I had.” Because the stories about Maud were legendary in Arcadia. Village teachers taught them in the schools, their voices still tinged with awe at the idea that one of their own could have been so wise and brave. There were no written records of it, strangely enough, but everyone in Arcadia knew that fifty years before, the Enemy had poured through a mountain pass, opened unexpectedly by a landslide. And it was Maud who led the guerrilla force that had pushed them back, Maud who had been one of the leaders of the great Arcadian Resistance.
So it was said.
But as for Maud herself, she always laughed whenever the subject came up—which was rarely in front of her, so much was the awe in which she was held. But she had hugged Lily to herself once, when Alan was boasting in his good natured way about his mother to one of the magistrates visiting from Mumford, a historian who was interested especially in these old tales, because even then, Mumford was known for its curiosity about fairy stories, legends, and myths.
Then Maud had whispered in Lily’s ear, “Never, ever believe everything you hear.”
(It was a lesson my mother learned, and that she passed on, almost urgently, to me. “Think for yourself, Snow,” she would say, murmuring the words into my hair. “Look for yourself. See for yourself, and don’t let anyone tell you what you see isn’t there.”)
Death stretched in her chair now, in the sun. She yawned. “Too smug,” she said finally. “Too self-satisfied. That kind of thing always comes to a bad end.”
Maud looked reflective at this. And still sad.
“But the end is never the end,” Death said, and now she sat straight up and her black eyes flashed. “Not quite.”
“Not even when it’s you, then?” Maud said. Lily, straining hard to follow the conversation of the adults, pondered over this.
Death laughed. “Not even when it’s me, my dear, dear friend. I am so misunderstood…if I were given to self-pity, good heavens, how you’d hear me moan.” She gave Lily a friendly look. “But you see me, don’t you, Lily? Do I look so big and bad and terrible and frightening? Do I?”
Lily knew that Death wanted an answer to this question, and so she thought hard about the matter. She thought so hard that she pulled her knees up to her chin and squinted her eyes. Rex watched her, encouraging. She looked at Death, and Death looked young and beautiful and kind.
“No,” she said finally, though a little timid, too. “But you do look very strong, and maybe that’s what frightens people.”
“I am strong,” Death agreed. “I am stronger than many, many things. But I am not stronger than Life. And those who say that we are enemies, Life and I, those people are idiots.” She sighed again. “But the world is so filled with idiots, I don’t know why I bother, honestly I don’t, Maud.”
Now Death stood up. She was tall, very tall—“even taller than you’re going to be, Snow,” and I am almost six feet. (I get my height from my father’s side of the family; all the women there are that way.) Maud stood up also, and motioned Lily that she was to do so too. They all three stood there for a moment, and Death laughed again.
She bent down toward Lily and looked in her eyes. And Lily saw deep into Death’s eyes and saw that she was great and strong and that she was someone you wouldn’t want to meet when she was in a rage. But Lily saw more. She saw that Death felt deeply and acted from levels Lily was too young and weak to know anything about. She wondered if Maud knew. “Maybe she doesn’t know all of it,” she thought. “But she knows more than me.”
“That was wise of you,” Death said, absently tapping Lily’s cheek with one thin finger. It was a beautiful finger, rosy and long, tipped with an oval nail—not a claw, as Lily had imagined belonged to Death. “Always remember how little you know. There are so few of you who can keep that in their heads! I’m a great friend to those who can.” At this, Death paused again, lost in her own thoughts. Lily had the feeling that those thoughts were of people that Death had loved.
“It must be a great thing to be loved by Death,” Lily thought. Then she saw the great lady turn and kiss Maud on the cheek, and, awestruck, she realized that Alan’s mother was one of Death’s loved ones.
“I’ll come for you soon,” Death murmured, and the two women clasped hands. Maud nodded and smiled and a tear slid down her face. She unclasped one hand and wiped it away. Lily shivered at this. “I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it, Snow.” But she knew somehow that she had had the honor of seeing a little, just a little, into a great mystery.
“And as for YOU,” Death said turning lightly toward Lily in a whirl, “you I will meet again and again. You’re going to need my help. That was why I asked you to come today, to tell you that, and to meet you and be properly introduced, so that when the time comes you will know what’s being offered you.”
“I heard the BOOM,” Lily said, troubled. “What does that mean?”
Death knelt down in front of Lily and tilted her chin up with her long fingers. “It means, dear child,” she said gently, “that you must find the Key that has been lost. And when you find it, Lily, you must claim it as your own, to be passed down to your own daughter. You must not give it to anyone else, no matter how they beg, no matter how much you think their claim worth more than yours. Those are your tasks: to find the Key and to keep the Key. Of the two, it is the second that is by far the harder. And the first task is impossible! That is how difficult these tasks will be!”
At this, Death bounded lightly again onto her feet, and her black and gold eyes swept the room. She opened her arms as if to embrace them all, and then, with another laugh full of the enjoyment of life, she was gone.
“Oh!” Lily said. “I forgot to give her these!” And she looked down at the mushrooms that she had carried all this time.
“Never mind,” Maud said, soothing her. “We won’t worry about that now. We have a lot to talk about, you and I.” Maud stood now, and pulled her yellow and black fleece wrap more tightly around her. “Let’s go for a walk in the woods,” she said. “And then we’ll go to meet your mother and father and be in time for the Feast. I think,” she said, and her eyes were grave, graver than Lily had ever seen them before, “it will be the last Feast for Arcadia for some time. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visit from Death, and she’s told me many things. And even in Arcadia, Lily,” Maud said as she led Lily and Rex out of the weathered front door and closed it behind them, “not as many as should would
find such things easy to understand.”
With that, Maud sighed and led the way, not through the gate, but up a winding path, along which mushrooms and early spring flowers pushed up through the dirt.
Five
As Maud and Lily and Rex walked up the path behind Maud’s house, they could see all of Arcadia laid out in front of them.
It was a clear spring day. A slight breeze pushed everything a little this way and that, and reminded you that this was spring, and everything was still unsettled—that a storm could sweep through in a flutter of an eyelid, black and mean.
But now the air was mild and questioning, as if it were saying, “This is how we all like it, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t it stay this way forever?” Maud laughed, my mother told me, “as if she could understand the words of the breeze itself.” And the great old woman shook her head.
Maud and Lily stood there, looking at the villages blooming like flowers below them on the valley floor. We were a prosperous, hospitable, and fair people, we Arcadians. We still are. But our ancestors were small, as we are small, though we try, I often think with more than a little exasperation, to be bigger than we should. In those days, Arcadians were few in number, and determinedly peaceful; there was no argument about that last, the way there is in our day. At that time, Arcadia had laid it down as law that it would never be anything else but peaceful. This was excellent in theory, but it had this one defect (as Aspern Grayling has so truly pointed out): this made our ancestors proud, too proud, in their moral certainty. They were vulnerable. Their pride was their greatest weakness. But this pride also had this one great value: an Arcadian would never risk her own, and certainly not another’s, life without very good cause.
Alan was going to risk his life. That was what the quarrel had been about with Mae.
“Mother and Alan were arguing this morning,” Lily said, as Maud stopped to stroke an early-blooming cat’s ear blossom, cream and purple against the reddish ground. “And that is something they never do.”
