by Tod Davies
But you can only rationally solve a problem that has a solution. This was a problem without one—at least, without one for which Arcadia was prepared. Arcadia had always counted on its very insignificance, and the protection of its mountains, for its security. Megalopolis was stronger, bigger, more ruthless in every way. Once the Empire turned its eye Arcadia’s way, what then?
And that the Megalopolitans had taken hostages was the first sign that they meant to terrorize to get what they wanted. Megalopolis had long since given up any pretense to get it any other way. Colin’s father had been right about how the Empire treated its own people. How then, when it had tormented and killed all its own, would it behave to outsiders?
But where could the Arcadians go? Nowhere. And now what could they do? How would the rational method work if there were no known rational answer?
(“What choice did they have, Snow?” my mother said when she told me this story. I was too young to understand. I was too young to understand what choice Maud gave them. But I begin to understand it now.)
“What choice do we have?” the woman from Eopolis cried again. And everyone looked at Maud.
She shook her head. I imagine she was in despair at how her words would be taken. As queen, I’ve felt that despair myself. I know it well.
“There’s only one real road,” Maud said then. “But I doubt you’ll take it. We’ve all put off what we should have done a long time ago, and now what we have to do to make it up is too hard.”
Everyone looked at her, shifting uncomfortably. How many times have I stood in front of a group of Arcadians, all looking at me the very same way!
“Tell us, Grandmother,” Alan said. Lily saw him move to hold Mae’s hand. She always remembered this, she told me. It was one of the last times she saw them together, she said.
At Alan’s words, a murmur of agreement went around the room.
Maud looked at them all, and sighed. Resting on Alan’s arm, she walked to the center of the room.
Lily looked apprehensively at Rex. His tail gave a single thump.
“What you have to do,” Maud said, “is go on exactly the way you are. Don’t stop for anybody or anything. That’s all.”
At this, everybody looked at their neighbor. They wondered if Maud’s mind was finally wandering. Or was she making some kind of sophisticated joke?
“If that’s meant to be funny, it’s not the right time for it, Maud,” one of the men said flatly.
Maud sighed again. “No,” she said. “I’m quite serious. Let me say it again: no matter what happens, don’t change the way you are. Keep going the way you have.”
“And Megalopolis?” someone said in that sarcastic way you talk when you don’t understand what’s going on around you. The speaker must have been very distressed to be so rude, and in public, too, Lily thought.
“Ignore it,” Maud suggested.
“Oh yeah,” hooted one of the boys. “Ignore it when they burn our houses.”
“Ignore it,” Maud said.
“Ignore it when they steal our lands?” a woman laughed shrilly.
“Ignore it,” Maud agreed.
“Ignore it when they kill our children,” another woman said. She didn’t laugh.
Maud looked at her sadly. “Ignore it,” she said again, nodding her head. “Ignore it and have more children.”
Now there was real silence in the hall.
After a moment, Alan said, in his reasonable voice, “Mother, we can’t do that.”
Maud looked at him. She looked around again at all her neighbors. “No,” she said finally, and she gave the tiniest sigh this time, like an empty teakettle set back on the stove. “No,” she agreed. “I didn’t think you could.” And shaking her head, she took her hand off his arm and hobbled (“Hobbled!” my mother said. “Maud who had never walked anywhere but straight and tall!”) toward the double doors at the end of the room. The crowd parted as she went, still silent.
“But what if what they say is true?” a woman cried. “What if Megalopolis comes in peace? What if we can live together, side by side? What if they can just let us be?”
Maud looked at her as if she thought the woman a fool, but politeness kept her from saying so. “They don’t,” she said briefly. “They don’t and we can’t and they won’t.” She looked around her wearily. And then she said, with all the patience in the world, what she knew to be true. “They can’t let us be, for we have proved them wrong. We have proved that the purpose of life can be happiness. We have proved that happiness comes from kindness, from moderation, from compassion…and, most of all, from leaving well enough alone! They can’t let us be because we have proved that might doesn’t make right. They’re afraid to let themselves know these things. So, in their logic, we have to fail. To disappear. To die.” She sighed again, looking around the room, and she tried one last time. “What I said already is the only way.”
Lily heard the shouting turn then. It sounded ugly and mean, and she wasn’t used to this. (She told me she had never before that night heard the sound of ugliness or meanness in Arcadia. Alas, if only we could say that today!)
Rex cowered against her legs. “We should have fought them!” Colin’s father called out with an angry growl. “We’ve talked about it for years, some of us, trying to get the rest of you to see reason. We should have gone over the hills and killed them before they killed us!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” another woman called back hotly. “Kill them? Kill the millions of starving rabble on the other side of the mountains? And us only a few, and most of those old and children? Talk sense, why don’t you? Where would Arcadia be then?”
“Where will we be if they kill us first?” said another voice. “Which they will once they get the scent of it, the bastards. He’s right. We should have gone after them a long time ago.”
“Gone after them? With what? Your weeding fork and a couple of pairs of skates? Be serious!”
“Be serious yourself! Where do you think you’ll be, not defending yourselves and your home, eh? The best defense is a good offense!”
“And where WILL we be?” another voice called out, without waiting, any more than the others had done, for her turn. “Mourning all of our dead, is where. Funerals instead of Feasts!”
“And what Feasts will there be when Megalopolis turns us into its own garbage heap, I ask you?” another voice cried, out of its turn.
One voice shouted out after another. The magistrates called for quiet, but it was no use. They didn’t know it, our unhappy ancestors, but that was the last time Arcadia was peaceful and quiet. We’ve lost the knack of it now, over these last bitter years, and it started that night. The hall erupted with neighbor shouting at neighbor. It’s still that way.
That night, the woman from Eopolis looked helplessly on. “It was like this at home, too,” she said, though no one seemed to hear. “It’s why I came for help.” But the hall raged on.
Lily hugged Rex. Even Alan shouted now, at one of his neighbors, the one Lily had seen that morning carrying a net bag of fruit to a sick friend. And the neighbor shouted back. Feeling more than a little sick herself, Lily went to Maud and tugged unhappily at her plush scarf.
“Make them stop!” Lily said. “Maud, can’t you make them stop?”
“What?” Maud said, as if Lily had roused her from some dream. “No, Lily, I can’t make them stop. No one can. This was Arcadia’s fate, you know. To fall down at the last fence.”
“What do you mean?” Lily said. The tumult around them increased. Maud, as if still far away, as if she were not in the hall at all, turned and began to walk quickly away. Lily and Rex tried to follow, but there was a confusion of noise outside, a shout from the dark, an explosion, and a whirring noise, and they were caught up in the suddenly alarmed crowd, plunging and hysterical. “Maud!” Lily shouted. But it was no use.
There was screaming from inside the hall and out now, and voices booming outside, with more explosions suddenly everyw
here around. The double doors were flung open, and there was a series of sickening cracks. Lily searched and searched the crowd as it stampeded toward the doors, then, uncannily, the crowd parted, and she saw Maud, standing at the doors—it was she who had thrown them aside. And then she saw Death holding Maud by the arm, whispering in her ear. Maud turned, and, before the crowd surged again, mouthed a good-bye to Lily, who strained to catch one last sight of her. As Lily and Rex struggled forward, they saw Death take Maud by the arm and lead her away.
“Take a few hostages,” a good-humored voice said over the screams of the crowd, and Lily saw a group of strangers enter the room, all looking around it with interest and no sign of fear. They were taller than any Arcadians Lily knew, and the three men and one woman were so handsome that it took her breath away.
Especially the youngest among them: a boy? a man? Not much older than Lily, certainly, but already a lord of the universe. Tall, golden, blue-eyed, loose limbed…she had a confused impression of some animal in the forest, and of lying on a bed of grass in the mountains in the spring. It was like seeing her other half, even though until then she had thought she was whole.
At that moment, though, Lily knew she wasn’t. Or if she had been once, she never would be again.
And as the boy looked back at her, startled, she saw it was the same with him. She didn’t know how, but she knew it was so.
Eight
“Wouldn’t you agree,” the smiling young man with the hard eyes said, “that it is a good thing for us all to work together?”
“No,” thought Lily. But she, like all the other Arcadian children sitting cross-legged around her, was silent.
“And wouldn’t you agree,” he persisted, holding his hands cupped on his knees from where he sat cross-legged in their midst (“we’re all friends here, after all,” he had said), “that the Good of All is better than the Good of One?”
“No,” thought Lily again. “No, I don’t think that at all. And if I don’t think it, I certainly can’t agree.” She tried not to look as sullen as she felt. They had all of them—her friends and her—learned very quickly the bullying that lay behind the pressingly friendly manner of the Empire’s occupying force. Not ‘troops.’ She wasn’t supposed to call them ‘troops.’ They were insistent about that, as about everything else. And none of them wore uniforms, only the most sharply pressed of casual clothes. And they weren’t “occupying” Arcadia. They were insistent about that, too. “We are exploring opportunities for mutual assistance. Nothing sinister about that, is there?” A Megalopolitan general had explained this to them all, after they had been herded—all the villagers of Arcadia—onto a communal field outside of Walton. The field was all stubble now, covered in bits of corn and wheat and rye. The Arcadians had harvested it and watched as the Megalopolitans heaved it onto enormous trucks that drove, day and night, through the harsh cut they had made at the lowest point of the Calandals. It was going “to feed needy people,” the Megalopolitan social workers informed them loftily. And the assumption was that the Arcadians, being such a warmhearted bunch, would find this some solace. For the fact was that the grains’ disappearance meant there were going to be some hungry mouths at home.
Alan, before he disappeared into the mountains with Colin’s dad and a half dozen others, had said to her, “Their own people are on the verge of revolt—at least the ones without the money, and that’s most of them. If they can make us the enemy, and loot our land, they can buy a little time. But what in the Goddess’s name they think they’ll do after that, I don’t know.” But he was going to find out, he said. “Take care of Mae,” he said, and then he laughed—they both laughed—at the idea of anyone taking care of Mae. She had already begun a secret line of communication between the magistrates of all of the villages, and she was helped in this by the fact that most of them were, to the Empire, “mere” housewives or small business owners. The Megalopolitans did not understand that in Arcadia the talents needed for these roles were considered supreme, and that such people were for this reason thought to be the only ones worthy of high office.
So through Mae’s secret channels traveled much information concerning the less and less full net bags of market day, information traded over the pots and pans that were less and less filled with the food needed for the patient mouths of Arcadia. The Megalopolitans looked on the activities of the women of Arcadia with a derisive eye. More worrying to them was the disappearance of many of the village menfolk into the mountains. But winter was coming. They could deal with them then. They could freeze them out.
Then there were the children of Arcadia. To the Megalopolitan invaders, these were the key to the future. “We have to educate them to Megalopolitan ways, and quickly as we can,” urged Field Commander Susan B. Riggs, a rangy ex-commando who stood about seven feet tall. “We have to—as our earlier strategists used to say—win their hearts and minds.” There had been something a little scornful in how her colleagues heard her out, especially Conor Barr, the young and handsome military attaché, sent by his phenomenally well connected parents to get some safe (and easily publicizable) real-life battlefield experience. In Megalopolis, it was unusual to find a woman in a position of such authority in the military. But her superiors, recognizing that she would be of unusual value in an environment like Arcadia, had more or less forced her on her commanding officer. Conor looked at the General now to see how he took the suggestions of a woman. Conor’s own mother, Livia Barr, was well known for her own ‘suggestions,’ but she, he thought, was the exception that proved the rule. It was men who knew best. Always, though they kept quiet about it, out of superior wisdom. Conor felt a glow of pride as he reconsidered this truism from his expensive upper class Megalopolitan education. Then he thought again about that girl, the one he saw the night they came into Arcadia. He hadn’t dared ask what had happened to her. He hardly dared admit to himself that what happened to her was the only thing that really interested him in this godforsaken land.
The General rubbed his surgery-enhanced jaw and grudgingly admitted the truth of what Field Commander Riggs had to say. If Megalopolis was to hold Arcadia, and mine its resources for the people back home, it needed workers. And those workers had to be willing, too—Megalopolis had found out, to its cost, and almost when it was too late for its own economy to recover from the damage, that it was no good working slaves to death. It was an economic waste the Empire couldn’t afford. Happy workers, under the impression that they were working for their own good: that was by far the best. And the Great City couldn’t risk importing Megalopolitans into Arcadia to do the work that needed being done there. What if they picked up the subversive values that federation had always held? That was too big a risk. Better, as Susan said, to bring up a generation of villagers who understood that the Megalopolitan way was the best. Better to teach them scorn of their own parents. “God knows, that should be easy enough!” the General exclaimed, thinking of the contempt his own three sons showed for him on every kind of occasion. This had long been a problem for Megalopolitan upper-class parents. There wasn’t a one among them who wasn’t thoroughly hated by his own children.
Why should it be any different here in Arcadia?
“Don’t you agree,” the young lieutenant insisted, there in the midst of the Arcadian children who stared at him expressionlessly, “that it is better for a government to decide what is best for the Good of All?”
“No, no, NO!” Lily shrieked inside her own head. No “government” decided what was best for the citizens of Arcadia. The Arcadians decided what was best for Arcadia. Anything else was tyranny. Lily had not just learned this at her mother’s knee, and then in school. Lily knew this—she knew it all the way down and all the way through her very self. She knew it, and she knew she had been born knowing it. And she knew it could not be any other way.
“Maud,” Lily thought hopelessly, remembering the night last spring—it seemed so long ago now, even though only a few months had passed!—when she had seen Death le
ad her away for the last time. “Maud, help me now.” There had been no time to grieve for Maud. That had been the hardest. All of Arcadia in an uproar, the discovery that settlers on the ridge were killed by the invaders—a ‘mistake,’ the Megalopolitans said, a miscommunication, and then their feigned anger at the fact that the Arcadians refused to forgive. The accusations that the villagers were using this, “a regrettable error but an honest mistake,” as an excuse for aggression. Then the inevitable invasion. It was very simple. Megalopolis was stronger. Arcadia, bewildered, had never even tried to fight. Arcadia had always believed that negotiation and common sense were the way. But it is not the way, as all the worlds know, when one power is so much stronger than the other. There was no negotiation. There was no common sense. There was exploitation and manipulation and planned confusion. Now there was this.
“How can it not be like this?” Lily thought furiously as she tried to keep her expression bland. “What can we DO?” For an Arcadian child was taught from birth to waste as little time as possible in wishing things might be other than the way they are. “If you don’t like what’s happening, change it.” This was what Arcadian teachers taught, time and time again.
And every child in that drab, under-heated room, under the watchful shifting eyes of the falsely pleasant man in their midst, and of Field Commander Susan B. Riggs standing by the door assessing them for her report, every child was thinking the same thing, thinking furiously: “What can be done? What can we DO?”
But as they had no answer yet, they were silent.
“Don’t you agree that might is right?” the man went on smoothly and relentlessly, his little eyes glittering with more and more anger as the hour went on. “That all men are ants, but some are meant to rule over the other ants? That Father knows best? That there’s no place like home?”
Understand, also, that Arcadian children in those days had been taught, always, the joys of ‘Yes.’ That ‘No’ might someday be necessary had not been considered by the educationists of those lovely, lighthearted villages.
