Lily the Silent

by Tod Davies

  It was not, however, the way it was in Megalopolis.

  “I didn’t know,” Lily said carefully, her eyes never leaving the Angel’s (and the Angel’s eyes were and are dark brown and deep as the deepest canyon in the highest mountain in the sacred range of the Donatees). “I had never heard that Megalopolis believed in angels.”

  At this, Alastair gave a crack of laughter. Anthony shuffled his feet, annoyed.

  “Well, we had to, didn’t we?” he said in his peevish way. “When this one forced herself on us.”

  “Seeing is believing,” Auberon said, smiling faintly over Lily’s head at Livia. Lily felt approval of her behavior in his smile, and this approval made her feel cravenly pleased. She didn’t like this feeling of pleasure. It marred her spirit as if a dirty hand had rubbed against it. And this made her uneasy. It gave her pain.

  The Angel breathed another deep, ratchety breath, and Lily knew, somehow, that it had given her pain as well. Lily caught her own breath and tried to control it.

  Her head was spinning. “What does it mean? What does it mean?” an inner voice whispered in her ear.

  The Angel twisted on her hook. Her wings flapped slowly and painfully.

  “What is she here for?” Lily cried out. She couldn’t help herself. “What has she come for?”

  “Why have you come?” she asked the Angel silently, trying to keep the pain she was feeling from her face. “Why didn’t you stay away from here?”

  “What has she come for?” she repeated out loud, looking around at the adults who stood, silent, at the edges of the crystal room. And again, “What has she come for?”

  “My dear child,” Auberon drawled. “Ask her yourself.”

  Lily, tears now spilling unheeded down her face, squatted impetuously by the upturned head of the straining Angel. “Do I dare touch her?” she thought. But without a pause, her hand reached out of its own accord, through a long gap in the crystal wall. Lily touched the Angel’s streaming black hair.

  “What have you come for?” she asked softly.

  And a voice rose up from the heart of that room, a voice that belied the tethered feet, the labored breath, the flailing wings. This voice was the sound of the mountains themselves. Lily, who had often heard the mountains’ voice, recognized it at once.

  “I’ve come for you,” the voice said.

  At this, the wings gave one last helpless heave. And the Angel, under Lily’s hand, gave one last painful breath and died.

  At this, there was an uproar.

  “What? What? Impossible!” barked the fat bald man. “She can’t be dead.”

  “Oh, shut up, Peter,” Alastair said as he swung open the crystal walls, and bent down to feel the Angel’s throat. There was no pulse. He looked at Lily. She could see the Angel’s dead eyes roll up in her head.

  “Angels don’t die, I tell you. They don’t die!” The fat man was agitated now. The flaps of flesh around his chin wiggled and heaved with emotion.

  “Well,” Auberon said dryly from his place by the door, where he leaned with his arms folded, “either she isn’t a real angel, then, or she isn’t dead. Take your pick.”

  “Oh, she’s definitely dead,” Alastair reassured them, getting up now and wiping his hands with a white handkerchief.

  “I always said she wasn’t a real angel,” Anthony said peevishly. “Didn’t I? I said…”

  “Yes, yes, yes, we know what you said. You said whatever you had to say to be sure you were eventually right. You said she was an angel. You said she wasn’t an angel.”

  “In fact, you said both of those twice,” Auberon interrupted Alastair. They exchanged an amused look.

  “How can they be talking like this?” Lily wondered to herself. Her spirit was in great pain, as was to be expected from having been in the presence of the suffering and death of a noble creature. “How can they not feel it?”

  Looking around the room, she saw they did not feel it. None of them showed the slightest trace of pain or sorrow at all. Livia, in fact, quite the opposite, looked like she was holding some kind of delightful secret to herself. Lily found her expression the most repugnant of all.

  Phoebe felt it, though. Phoebe’s face, much as she tried to control herself, was cut across by traces of a sharp grief. Lily saw this, and it lightened her own suffering a little.

  “I never said she was an angel,” Anthony fumed. “I said all along what everyone in Megalopolis knows. Angels don’t exist. They’re a fairy tale, a fable. A story for children.”

  “Then what was that?” Auberon said, pointing at the Angel, who twisted in a breeze that seemed to come from nowhere.

  They were all silent. The only sound was the breeze that blew from nowhere and to nowhere, around and around the crystal chamber walls.

  “The Book, then?” Alastair said to the others, one eyebrow raised.

  The fat man, Peter, didn’t answer. He gazed at the Angel’s corpse with a kind of fascinated horror. Something had upset him deeply about her death, Lily could see. “And yet,” she thought, creasing her forehead with the intensity of her attempt to understand, “he isn’t sad, and he isn’t sorry.”

  “Oh yes,” Auberon said clinically, as he reached up and untied the silken rope that had bound the Angel to the silver hook. Her body slumped lightly to the floor without a sound.

  Peter’s face took on another look. Lily recognized this: it was a look of fear.

  For a moment, she almost grasped what he felt. For a moment, she held it, horrified, in her hand. But then, frightened herself, she let it go. And she couldn’t have gotten it back again even if she had wanted.

  But it was so horrible, she didn’t want to feel it ever again.

  “I wish she’d lived,” Anthony complained. “Then we could have forced her to tell us who she really was.”

  Peter shook himself, and his wattles moved ponderously from side to side. Returning to himself, he gave Tony a bleary-eyed look of contempt. “You wouldn’t have wanted to know who she was.”

  “What?” Anthony bleated angrily. “I…”

  “You couldn’t have stood it. Not for a single moment,” Peter said, and, waddling back toward the small door, waited for Livia and Phoebe to help him through.

  Behind him, the Angel’s body slowly dissolved. It shimmered, shrank, and then completely disappeared. But no one except Lily and Rex saw.

  Sixteen

  “The Book of the Key,” Alastair said with a touch of the irony that Lily had already noted was characteristic of the Council of Four, “is a most impressive technological achievement. All the more impressive since we have no idea, really, how it works.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Alastair,” Anthony said in his whiny voice. “Of course we know how it works. It belongs to us.” But his fellow just looked at him mockingly as he led Lily up to a carved wooden stand on which a large, illuminated book lay open.

  The Book of the Key was indeed the most impressive technological achievement that Lily had ever seen. Which was not surprising, seeing as how it was the most impressive technological achievement the Megalopolitan world had ever known…as Megalopolis never tired of telling itself. It was amazing. Death-defying. Unprecedented and godlike.

  But it made the skin on the back of her neck creep unpleasantly. And it made her stomach feel a little sick.

  This, also, was not surprising. For two reasons.

  One reason was that Lily had depths of experience that went past the technological achievements of her race. But of these she had only the faintest of memories. Every child has this wisdom, from the moment she or he is born. But as we are human, we have a genius, too, for forgetting what is most important in our past. And Lily was no exception to this. Still, some of the memory remained, and was enough to make her very uneasy indeed, when confronted by the Book of the Key.

  There was another reason, too. And this second reason was probably the more important.

  For Peter had been right. The Angel had not died. Angels cannot die
. It had waited, with angelic patience, for Lily to arrive. When she did, when she reached out to touch the Angel, the Angel passed into her. For the Angel had a task: a way to show and wisdom to impart. It is the way of angels to enter into us when these things are so. When their job is finished, they go out again. If we think about it, in silence and solitude, we will see that this is the way things are. We will see that we have felt angels coming and going before…perhaps many times before.

  And if we do not see this, it should be cause for grief. For a person—and a country—who has never felt an angel is lost. And to be lost in this world is a dark and dreary thing indeed.

  But the Book of the Key was remarkable, for all it made Lily feel queasy—and in its own way, it was beautiful, too. The Council of Four stood there, each of them trying to conceal his pride and pleasure in being able to show off the thing to someone who had never seen it before.

  “Only initiates are allowed to see the Book,” Peter said in a sonorous voice. Then his beady little eyes gave Lily a sharp look, as if to make sure that she understood the magnitude of the honor being done her.

  She dropped her eyes demurely. Livia, obviously pleased by the impression her protégée had made, came over and took her hand.

  “Look,” Livia said. “This book—this precious manuscript—holds the secret of all that was, all that is, and all that is meant to be. You have been brought here because you have been called by the Book itself.” Then with a theatrical flair, Livia put her fingers under Lily’s chin and pulled it up to look the girl in the eye. “Do you understand what that means?”

  “She doesn’t mean any of it,” Lily thought to herself. “It’s just a role she’s playing. And she wants me to play one too.”

  Lily certainly understood what role she was meant to play. And the Angel that was inside her prompted her, so that her actions were everything that they ought to be.

  “Indeed I do, Lady Livia,” she said in a clear, bell-like tone. “I, the humble girl chosen by Conor Barr, have been called to play a part in the forming of the Great Empire.” (If she had been able to see Phoebe’s face, she would have seen the girl suppress a laugh at this nonsense.)

  Peter let out a heavy, sonorous breath of sheer admiration. “That is well said, well said indeed.”

  “The Great Empire,” Auberon said seriously. “The End Which We All of Us Serve.”

  “We are the same as our fathers before us,” Anthony said in his nasal, unpleasant voice. “We keep the same sacred vows.”

  Only Alastair looked at Lily skeptically. Maybe he had noticed a slightly false tone in her voice. Or maybe he had noticed she didn’t look so surprised when she saw the Book. Whatever it was, something about Lily’s performance made him uneasy.

  “Look at the book,” the Angel’s voice whispered inside Lily. “Turn the pages. Look admiring, humble, and afraid. Look all of these things. And I will tell you what to do next.”

  Lily obeyed.

  She stepped up to the glowing pages of the Book. And she turned the first page.

  “It’s…it’s so beautiful,” she said. And she meant it, even though, as I’ve said, something about its beauty made her feel a little bit sick.

  This was the truth. The Book was indeed beautiful. Encrusted with gold and gems, each page glowed with pictures so lifelike that one could imagine oneself inside of them. More than that: each picture moved, changed, told its own story.

  I know this for I’ve seen the Book myself. It is indeed beautiful.

  And then there were the stories, so many of them. The Book lay open now to the story of how Megalopolis became an Empire.

  “Turn to page one thousand, two hundred, and forty-one,” Alastair ordered her, still watching her expression closely, as if to reassure himself of something.

  Lily, obedient, did so. On that page, there she saw herself.

  Herself.

  And there was the picture, changing. Everything that had happened to her up until now. Arcadia. The Children’s Mine. Conor’s and her love (here Lily couldn’t help but blush and feel a brief, sharp longing for the lover she had left behind on the False Moon). Livia leading her and Rex across the Silver Bridge.

  But there was more. The pictures changed.

  “I…I’ve never seen these things before,” Lily said. And the Angel didn’t need to warn her to speak shyly. She did this on her own out of her natural awe.

  “The future,” Peter said softly. And Lily, astonished, knew it was so. She was looking at pictures of the Future. As she did, she saw herself walk to the shore of a great ocean. She was alone. Rex was nowhere to be seen. Without hesitating, the girl in the picture walked into the sea. The green-gray waves closed over her head. She could smell the salt and the wrack and the tar. She could feel the water….

  “Somebody catch her before she falls,” she heard Alastair say, as if from a great distance.

  And then she fainted dead away.

  Seventeen

  When my mother woke from her faint, she was in great pain, and it was pain that never left her for the rest of her physical life. “Like rolling in a barrel of knives,” is how Devindra puts it, and Devindra was Lily’s doctor, so she had good reason to know. No one else knew anything about that constant pain, though I think there were some who suspected. But Lily had already, by this time, begun to be silent, about this as about so many things.

  One of those subjects she was silent about was me.

  Lily and Conor had conceived me that first night together, the night Lily went with my grandmother up into the tower to see the difference between the False Moon and the Moon Itself. Is it really impossible that I remember it? Well. There are so many things that I remember, that I know, that are impossible, and yet I do remember them, I do know them. I try my best to follow Lily’s example of silence here. I, Sophia, now so much older now than my mother ever was—I know that she understood more in her silence than I ever have in my restless, constant search for what I imagine to be the heart of things. But one thing I do know, that she taught me, even (impossible as it is) when I was sheltered by her own body at the very start of my story, is that you can never tell anyone anything that they have not first discovered for themselves.

  There is, for example, so much that I could tell Devindra, who is so wise, and older than me. But, scientist that she is, she would not, could not believe me yet. Her learning hasn’t caught up with what I would say. And her learned disbelief would only postpone, maybe even fatally, her own discovery of all those things she now takes to be impossibility. So, patience, Sophy, I tell myself. The truths that take the greatest hold are the ones that people quarry for themselves. Let them dig! Let them discover! And meanwhile, I’ll pray to the One that their discoveries not come too late.

  I listen to Devindra more, much more, than I speak of what I know. And this is good for both of us. It has, in the end, made a confidence between us that I treasure. As a queen, I would be hard pressed to do without it.

  But I say here that I remember Lily and Conor gravely facing each other, tracing light patterns on each other’s skin (the one so golden brown, the other so pale pink and white, the two melding and making me what I am), and then coming together, in more than the way that young lovers have, as if something inside of both told them this twining would lead…to what? To some mysterious and powerful end. To me. To Sophia.

  Lily was sure of that. She told me later, even before I was old enough to understand.

  I couldn’t possibly remember this, Devindra would say. And no one could have told me. My father tried, once, but in the end was defeated by his own embarrassment, as I think was quite right.

  I don’t know why I’ve never been embarrassed by these things. Maybe it has to do with my believing that if I can’t face my world, and what made my world this way, then I can’t change it. And that is my job, the one I’m sure I’ll fail at, but nevertheless keep trying to do.

  But the question isn’t whether or not I’m embarrassed by thoughts of my pare
nts and their physical love, but really how I know about it at all. And how do I know that the Angel entered Lily, and remained as a companion to me—I don’t dare say as a teacher, because although she had much to teach me, I’m ashamed of what an indifferent student I proved to be (no matter how willing and hardworking!). But we’ve had many talks, Star and I, many, many times since. So it may be that I remember what she herself has conveyed, in that wordless way of light that she has, and that I love.

  Of course, I don’t talk much, if at all, about what Star tells me. Instead I let my dear Devindra instruct me in her own way. She was born to instruct, my favorite teacher! And I’ve learned many things, hearing her stories in her Tower by the Pond.

  It was there I learned first about Rowena Pomfret, the woman—the girl—my father never loved. The girl he married. “She was very beautiful,” Devindra told me over a cup of her famous ginger tea, as she watched me carefully with those hawk eyes of hers to make sure none of this hurt (she is always so careful, Devindra, and indeed, I can never make her see that she doesn’t have to be, not with me). “She was famous in Megalopolis for how beautiful she was. One of those girls whose likeness is everywhere, and you think, when you’re a young girl the way I was, that it’s because she is so much more beautiful than you or me.”

  But of course that wasn’t why. The real reason was that the Pomfrets were ‘fabulously wealthy’ (in the language of the Megalopolitan tabloids), and gave to charity with a widely publicized largesse. They had originally made their money by diverting the rivers that ran off the Donatees and selling the water to the poorer areas of the great city. “That was how the marshes were made,” Devindra told me. “They took the water away and then they sold it back.” And then they gave to charities that were the most likely to add to their luster.

  Rowena was always the Belle of the Charity Ball. Small and fragile, with hair like ironed platinum, and pale blue eyes, she was highly admired. And rich. She was very rich. The rich tend to be admired, I’ve noted in my travels. Inevitable, maybe, but not on the whole a very good thing. For anyone. Not, certainly, for Rowena.