by Tod Davies
Maud looked at her, black button eyes bright. She led the way as they walked on, turning downhill now, toward the top of Harmony Street. “And do you know what they were arguing about?” she said. Lily knew that Maud knew. But she answered just the same.
“They’ve tried to keep it from us at school, but we all know. Megalopolis. And even though we have the mountains between us, they are so strong.” Lily thought about the arguments she had with her own crowd. “The strong,” she said, and asked the painful question that was always on her mind, then and later as queen. “Maud. Do they always win?”
“We have to fight them!” one of the boys at her school had said—it was almost always a boy who said this. “We can’t wait until they run us over and take all of Arcadia. What would happen then?”
“But they aren’t threatening us,” a girl had said—it was almost always a girl who said this kind of thing, then as now. “They’ve sent an ambassador over the Calandals, to Eopolis, asking to buy supplies for their troops. It’s a peaceful mission. Everyone says so.” This last was said shrilly. Everyone didn’t say so. But no one argued just then.
Instead there was a great silence. Eopolis, of course, was the nearest village to Cockaigne, in the northeast. Every girl and boy among them had friends and family in Eopolis.
“It’s only a peaceful mission because they’re waiting till we’ll be easier to pick off. They’re fighting among themselves, over there on the other side, I hear. My dad says…”
“It was always a horrible place to live and now it’s worse. My mother says…”
“They’ve left us alone because we were small and not worth the trouble. But my uncle says now they’ve ruined the entire rest of the planet, they’ve got nowhere else to go…”
“Why can’t they just leave us alone?”
“Why can’t they just leave us alone?” Lily repeated, this time to Maud, as the two began descending the last steep stone staircase that Alan had built down the side of the hill. “We have such a lovely life here, minding our own business. Why can’t they?”
Maud looked at her, and then rested her hand on Lily’s shoulder as if to steady herself as she went down the shaded steps, which were still slippery and moist from a brief overnight rain. But Lily knew Maud didn’t need to do this. Even at a hundred and twenty, she was still strong enough to stand on her own. She did this to steady Lily.
Lily thought about Death coming again for Maud, and her heart skipped a beat.
“Let’s stop for a moment, shall we, Lily? Let’s stop and think of something nice. Let’s think of all the Feasts that have gone before, all the Feasts that all the villages have made in Arcadia.”
So they did. Lily shut her eyes and breathed in deep. Rex pushed up against her hand, and she could smell his warm doggy smell, and the smell of the still damp ground, and of the sun warming the spots of grass through the trees. She could smell Maud’s rose-fresh smell—and she could smell the good smells of all the Feast day dishes being made up and down Harmony Street. Familiar smells. They brought back memories of other Feasts, of playing with her friends in the pale green spring meadows of the Ceres with the late evening sky bowing golden-blue overhead. She could see down to the deep valleys on the other side of the Ceres, and, farther to the south, deep inside Megalopolis, the Klamathas, the mountains that ran parallel to them so far away. She could see her mother and Alan leaning against each other, arms around each other’s waist, laughing, as they talked to some neighbors and waited for those who had brought the desserts to set them up prettily the way they liked to on the long trestle tables settled there just for the day.
But then, as she watched this memory play, another memory began to push through it, a strange memory, of another time and place altogether. And that memory was of Arcadia, but it was not of Arcadia. As if Arcadia had been another place altogether. As if the Feasts had not always been. As if there had been a time when Arcadia was mean and nasty and heartless and cold. As if it had been part of Megalopolis, that huge and horrible city that surrounded them on all sides, that miserable place, upon which it was horrible to look, and which was now, thank the Goddess, held back by the Ceres Mountains.
As if she, Lily, had been someone else altogether. And as if Maud had too.
At this, Lily, startled, opened her eyes. Maud looked at her with a sad sympathy. “You remember, then,” Maud said quietly. “Good. I wanted to make sure. But don’t tell anyone else, Lily. Best to be silent. No one else remembers, nor should they. But for you, you need to know. You need to know that it has happened, many times before, that the strong do not always win.”
(And I. Sophia. Her daughter who was to come after her. I needed to know that, too. But I had to find out for myself, which is the only way anyone ever truly knows anything, alas.)
At that, Maud held out her hand and Lily took it, and the two continued down the steep stone steps. Rex followed behind.
Six
The Feast that night was a strange one, my mother said. “Everyone felt it.” It was not lighthearted, the way the Feasts before had been, even though the foods were as delicious, the drinks as cool and sweet, the lovers as happy, the children as healthy, the neighbors wishing each other as well as much as ever. But there was something that weighed on them all. Bright colored cloths covered the mountain meadows, but no one sat on them. Everyone moved, milling back and forth, restless. The exclamations over the food were quieter than usual, and even the group of teenagers who drank too much of Amaurote’s elderflower wine dropped into sullen silence.
The sky’s blue deepened. All of Cockaigne was there, in those days almost seven thousand people, a much smaller population than in our towns now. It must have been strange to see that many of us suddenly go still, all at once, on a mountaintop at twilight.
All turned to look south, down over the rugged valleys below, on to the edges of Megalopolis and to the Klamathas beyond, the imperial mountains that rose up out of the sea and the marshes that formed its far boundary. No one could have said what it was they thought to see. And except for the whistling little mountain breeze, there was no sound.
“Look!” somebody shouted. Lily saw it was Colin, his shock of white hair standing straight, jumping and pointing, his small frame shaking with surprise.
A light exploded over the Klamathas, and, a moment later, a BOOM shook the Ceres, so that the village folk covered their ears with their hands. The light soared upward, straight up, throwing sparks back down behind. Straight up it went and kept going, leaving a thin silver line like a tear in the sky.
Then there was another sound, behind them. This was the sound of a car, coming on very fast, and this sound was so unfamiliar that at first most of the crowd couldn’t tell what it was. Cars were only used, in the Arcadia of that time, for the direst emergencies. Otherwise people used silver collapsible skates, like the ones Lily had in her bag, or skateboards, or rode horses, or bicycles, or, as tonight for the Feast, open carriages powered by the sun. But this was a car, and it arrived honking, and when it stopped, everyone could see, from the crest on its side, that it came from their neighbor Eopolis to the northeast. A woman jumped out of the driver’s seat, and many recognized her immediately as a sister of one of the magistrates of Cockaigne.
Mae, Lily’s mother, as the lead magistrate of the town, hurried to greet her, and listened intently to her rapid talk as several of the other magistrates gathered there as well. The husbands and wives of the magistrates stood in their own group and conferred, for in an emergency, they had their own duties.
As did the daughter of a magistrate. Lily, well trained in these, began immediately to round up the smaller children, putting them into one of the open carriages, and making sure it was safely on its way before turning to the older ones. The magistrates themselves had already left, in the swiftest way each could.
Alan, lingering only long enough to make sure Lily was all right, said, “Stay with Maud,” and then was gone. But when Lily went to help Maud into the final c
arriage, her step-great-grandmother pulled her back into the trees and put one finger to her lips. “Wait,” Maud mouthed. And Lily did. Rex, waiting for her in the last carriage, sniffed the air. As the carriage rolled away down the meadow lane, he gave a graceful leap, so silent that he was unnoticed, and loped after them into the wood.
Soon the three were all alone. Dusk was there now, and the sky would soon turn from dark blue to black.
Stars wheeled in the sky.
Maud slowly led Lily and Rex back to the center of the meadow. She stood there and looked into the southern sky. Lily followed her look. There was just the faintest trail now of the blasting light that had shot straight up toward the helpless stars.
“What was it?” Lily whispered, as if she was afraid that it could overhear.
“It was the sign that they have ruined their World, ruined it utterly and completely,” Maud said in a weary voice that Lily had never heard her use. “And with their World, they have ruined ours.” She took Lily’s hand and squeezed it hard. “It was a rocket, Lily,” Maud said. “A rocket to the moon.”
“To the moon?” Lily said. “But why? Why would anyone want to go to the moon?” To an Arcadian like Lily, that was crazy. (At least, it was then. Alas, that is not true in our Arcadia now.) To go to the moon? That was her thought. A dead gray rock? With the beauties of the Earth everywhere around? Who would do such a thing? What poor defeated people could even conceive of such an incredible waste of time, men and women, and strength?
“They wouldn’t go unless they had nowhere left,” Maud said softly.
“Nowhere left,” Lily repeated.
“Nowhere left unspoiled, nowhere left with water to drink and air to breathe and wholesome food to eat, nowhere…”
“But…but we have these things,” Lily interrupted her. “And we….” Lily stopped. So she understood. Maud meant that Megalopolis would come now, to take the Good Life from Arcadia. Once the Empire had the Good Life themselves, and look what they had done to it! They would do that, again, here, in Arcadia. They would strip Arcadia until there was nothing left.
And then they would go to the moon—those of them who could.
Maud didn’t answer. She spun about as if she waited for something, something that she expected to come on all sides.
First there was an upward burst of light to the east, over the Calandals, and the same loud BOOM. And a BOOM, more distant now, but still distinct to the west. And then, like a huge gold flower, a light bloomed and the BOOM sounded almost as the same time—and this was over the Donatees.
“As Death told me,” Maud said. “She’s been there with them. They’re using the Donatees as a base. At least, where they can reach.”
“The Donatees!” Lily caught her breath in horror. To understand this, you have to understand that the Donatees were sacred to the Arcadians then—holy, almost, untouchable. We have lost that feeling of awe in Arcadia, much to our diminishment. But we had it then.
Something tugged at Lily. A memory. A bad one. She frowned.
“I wanted you to see that,” Maud said. “Now we will go back down.” And she went over to where her bag and Lily’s sat under a tree, and pulled her own skates from her bag. Lily did the same.
In spite of herself, Lily let a surge of joy pass through her. “Are we going to skate all the way down, Maud? All the way down the mountains into Cockaigne?”
And Maud tossed her head. In the light of a saucer-sized rising full moon, she looked young, as young as she had been when she had saved Arcadia once before.
“Why not?” she said. And the two, woman and girl, and the dog running along with them, turned down the mountains, skating fast and free all the way down. Even if it were only for that, Lily never would have forgotten that night. Even if it hadn’t been the night when everything changed.
Seven
It was a long way down the Ceres northern slopes to the village edge, and even though Maud and Lily traveled so fast that the sparks flew off the edges of their silver wheels, by the time they arrived at the village hall, the emergency meeting there had been in progress for some time. The representative from Eopolis had the floor. She had obviously been talking heatedly for a while. The magistrates, sitting at their usual long table, had creased faces, as if their very expressions had been thrown out of shape by the news.
“We’ve sent representatives to every village,” the woman said. “We need help. It’s never happened that we have not known what to do. But we…we feel a kind of…confusion….” Here she looked around the hall helplessly, as if she felt this confusion now (and indeed she must have, since this is what happens at pivotal times of change, such as the one we face now). “A confusion,” she went on, “such as we have never felt, never in the living memory of even the eldest of us. And we don’t know what to do.” At this she gave a sigh that was half sob, and sat down, waiting for the village’s answer.
“What confusion?” Maud said now, her voice carrying across the meeting room floor. She moved forward toward the magistrates’ bench. Such behavior would not have been allowed in just anyone, and indeed, with all the procedural court rules now put in place by the Lord High Chancellor, it could hardly happen in our own councils, but in the Arcadia of those days, the wisdom of men and women over the age of eighty was thought to be a resource for all. Anyone over this age was not just allowed, but urged, to speak, in or out of turn. In an emergency, this was a fundamental duty of the elderly.
“Grandmother,” Mae said from the magistrates’ table, for that was how Mae liked to address her mother-in-law. “You didn’t hear.”
“Tell me now, then, please,” Maud said in her patient way. Just the sound of her calm voice quieted the crowd. “It’s a good thing in a crisis to hear a thing said twice. And slowly, slowly…so we can all think it through.”
“Not too slowly, Grandmother,” Alan murmured from where he stood beside Lily in the back. Alan smiled. Even when he was worried (and Lily knew he was worried now), he was very proud of Maud. (My step-grandfather was, my mother told me, “a very nice man.”)
They were all very nice, Lily thought, looking around at the strained but basically pleasant faces of her friends. (“Because they were all my friends, Snow, all of them.”) What would happen when they were confronted by someone who wasn’t so nice?
The woman from Eopolis stood again, and this time she must have made her statement much more simply and clearly—as Maud said, having to say it twice was not a bad thing. And when she spoke this second time, the frozen look of shock began to melt from the faces of the people around her, replaced by different expressions: indignation, anxiety, furious thought. And anger, of course.
“Megalopolis has sent a delegation to Arcadia,” the woman said. “They came over the Calandals at night. I don’t know how. It’s impossible that they could have bribed some of our people, and none of them have ever understood the mountains, and how would they have started now?
“They say they’ve come to ask for help. They say they’ve got plagues and famines and wars…”
“And they say this is new?” Alan murmured to himself. Lily saw him close his eyes as if he was suddenly tired.
“They say,” she went on, “that they can buy what supplies we’re willing to sell them, whatever kind. That they need skilled labor from our villages to replace those who have died—most especially teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers…”
“Poor bastards probably killed themselves,” another man murmured to Alan. This was Colin’s father, with hair as white blond and stubborn as his son’s. Alan nodded grimly.
“They say they ‘come in peace,’” the woman said, and she faltered. Arcadians, even then, were sensitive to language, and therefore to its abuses, and it was a longstanding joke in Arcadia that Megalopolitans so often meant the exact opposite of what their official organizations said.
Maud watched her throughout. Many eyes were on the my step-great-great-grandmother standing straight and tall in the middle of the hall. �
�And do they?” she said softly.
The Eopolitan woman’s doubts were plain to see. “They say that because there are so few of them in the delegation, and because they don’t know us, they needed to take precautions. They say that though they ‘come in peace,’ they have, ‘for protection,’ taken control of one of the Dawkins families who live on the MacIlhenny ridge, at the topmost edge of the Calandals.” She paused. “They don’t call them ‘hostages.’ They call them ‘guests.’”
An angry murmur went through the crowd. Now Lily understood the baffled rage on the faces around her.
I have to tell you again about how the Arcadians of my mother’s early life felt about their fellow citizens. Each one was as valuable to any villager as herself or her own family. Every death was mourned as sincerely as if it had happened in the household that grieved. “Joy shared,” went the Arcadian proverb, “is Joy increased. But Sorrow shared is Sorrow ceased.” The Arcadians lived by this motto in those early days. We still have the proverb. But I don’t think many would dispute with me that we’ve left the meaning of it somewhere behind us.
“Those Dawkinses have two small children still at home,” another woman said.
“They’ve said they’re caring for them well,” the woman from Eopolis said. Her mouth twisted. “And that ‘no harm will come to them’ as long as the delegation gets back to Megalopolis safe, over the Pass.”
There was a moment’s silence. Everyone looked at Maud.
“And do you believe them?” she asked in her clear way.
“No,” the woman said. “No, none of us believe them.” She hung her head. “But what choice do we have but to pretend that we do?”
Lily knew what she meant, and why the Eopolitans had asked for help. The Arcadians of that generation were, we all know, among the most rational of people. They were used to solving their problems by rational means: by discussion, by consensus, by agreement, then by action.
