Lily the Silent

by Tod Davies

  When Lily looked around to see if her friends had understood this, too, she saw that the Manatee and Phoebe had gotten up, unseen, from the Feast. They stood a little ways away from the others, their heads together, as if in conference—though even at that distance, Lily could clearly see that they were both silent. Then, to her surprise, they swam away. It wasn’t the swimming that surprised her. It was the way that Phoebe swam. Lily’s friend swam with her legs together, as naturally as if she were a Mermaid herself, and her legs shone, now, with a covering—it looked like—of pale blue-gray scales. And her hair streamed out in tendrils behind her.

  Twenty-Four

  The Mermaids’ Well was in an oasis of stone and sand, surrounded by waving sea palms. As Lily and Kim neared it, led by the emerald-faced Mermaid, they could see the Well was round and squat, and made of the same yellow stone that surrounded it. Kim squeezed Lily’s hand in excitement—“though at what, Soph, I’d swear I couldn’t tell ya.” An ebony-faced Mermaid with chocolate-colored hair and dimly burnished bronze legs swam to the Well, holding a reddish bowl out in front of her. Through its rim, two holes were pierced on opposite sides.

  The purpose of the holes become clear at the Well’s edge, as the Mermaid tied the bowl to the long brown tendrils of her hair.

  Kim’s breath came out in a long hiss of bubbles. “Ooooh. Me eyes were wide at that!”

  The Mermaid let the bowl down bit by bit, her hair lengthening as it went, until Kim and Lily heard a quiet little bump, of the sort you might hear in a little boat on a lake on a summer afternoon while you’re lying on the boat’s bottom in the sun, just as it reaches the shore.

  The ebony-faced Mermaid now pulled gently at her hair, and as she did, Kim put a hand over her face, holding her breath.

  “I couldn’ta said why, but it made me that happy to see her doin’ it, Soph. That happy.”

  Kim leaned forward as if to get as close as possible to what was being pulled up from the Mermaids’ Well. And when the bowl rose to the top, and the Mermaid pulled it up and over onto the sand with a well-practiced yank, Kim gave a silent shriek, and fell back.

  Out of the bowl fell what looked like an enormous ugly insect. Kim ran from it, hiding behind Lily’s back. Lily, laughing soundlessly, pulled her around and made her look again. It was true, the contents of the bowl looked at first sight like some hideous bug: a cockroach, or a cricket, or a giant slug. “As we watched the ’orrible little thing, it started to change, like.” Kim, sheltered under Lily’s arm, watched, fascinated, as the bug waddled out from the bowl, shook itself off, rooted itself and began to grow.

  As it grew, it turned into itself. It turned into a Tree.

  Kim, delighted now, clapped her hands. “Oh, it were a beautiful Tree, Soph, just beautiful!” More beautiful, even, than the sea palms that waved gently around the Well.

  And as the Tree spread its branches, they saw it was not just any, but a particular kind of Tree.

  It was, in fact, a Family Tree.

  And more than a Family Tree. It was Kim’s Family Tree.

  This seemed incredible to Kim, but so it was. Pulling Lily by the hand, she went up to it, mouth open, and looked up. On every branch of the Tree there was a name written in dark green script, and above each name was an ornament of some kind: a stone gargoyle here, a clutch of flowers there. At the bottom of the Tree, on one of the lushest of the lower branches, there it was in script, the words: “KIM THWAITES.” And above her name was a shining gold cradle that hung by a single broken chain.

  Kim looked with amazement at this Tree. For Kim had never known where she came from, having been born after the days of the Great Accident III, when all records, except those of the very richest families, had been lost. Kim went shyly to the Tree and touched the little cradle hanging there. And there were tears in her eyes. “You could see that even in the water of the Mermaids’ Deep,” my mother would always say softly at this point in the story. So Kim cried. As she told me, “it’s a sorrowful thing not to know where you come from, Soph. Planning where you go is always hard, but how much harder if you don’t know where you’ve been!” And Kim had always longed to plan where she would go, but had almost given up hope that she could. “If you’re just a piece of trash floating along,” she would say to me later, many, many times, “you don’t think you have much of a say, then, do you?”

  But now, as Kim looked at the cradle hanging so precariously above her name, there rose in her the beginnings of an Idea. It wasn’t the first Idea that had ever come to Kim—if you looked inside her, in fact, you would have seen, I’m positive, the merriest jumble of multi-colored intentions and resolves—but it was the strongest by far. And for a moment, she stood there patiently and let it form itself and grow.

  Lily saw all this happen to her friend, doubtless again because of the clarity of the water in the Mermaids’ Deep. And she silently asked the Well, “And me? What do you have for me in the Well?”

  At this, the ebony-faced Mermaid swam toward her and, taking her by the hand, led her to the Well. Lily moved easily over the gold sand, and the water washed away her footprints as soon as they had formed at her feet. She stood there at the edge of the golden circle, and then, holding her breath, looked in.

  She could see a lot of things, she told me, way down deep in the Mermaids’ Well. She saw music and dancing and the carving of stone statues. She saw heraldry and viniculture and the breeding of horses. She told me about those things, explaining carefully what they were when I asked. She saw vases carved with pictures from the stories told down below among the sea’s inhabitants. And she saw fields of flowers and white sheets drying on them in the sun.

  But that wasn’t what was important. What was important was that Lily saw, lying on a muddy ledge halfway up the deep immensity of the Mermaids’ Well, a Rose-Gold Key.

  The Rose-Gold Key.

  There was no mistaking it. Half covered in green-black murk that it was, it shone up through the clear water. And Lily knew it had been waiting for her. It shone now with its recognition of her, and she knew she was meant to fetch it and take it back to land. She knew that was what she was there for.

  But it was so far down the Well. How was she to get at it?

  She looked around for help. “Always remember to do that, Snow, when you need it.” She saw Phoebe smile at her, with that sharp silver crescent smile, from across the Well. Kim, too, had joined them, and the long yellow-brown tendrils of her hair waved in the water.

  As Lily looked at her friends standing with her at the Well, she said, silently: “Who will help me get the Key?” At this, Phoebe reached up to her silver smile and plucked it—ping!—away from her face. “Like it were ripe or sumpthin’, Soph,” Kim said, laughing at the memory. Phoebe’s own mouth appeared behind it, pink and raw, but the silver smile shone in her fingers like a fisherman’s hook.

  Lily took the smile with a nod of thanks, and tied it to the waving ends of Kim’s long hair. And then Kim bent over the Well. With Lily guiding the strands of her tendrils, the waving hair plunged lower and lower, pulled down by the silver crescent hook. Until it reached the ledge. And Lily, closing her eyes, fished for it and felt it catch, and felt it lift, almost as if it was lifting itself, reaching up itself toward its true fate. It whooshed up the water of the Well, and danced out with a tiny ‘plop,’ bouncing once against the sandstone sides, and up to where Lily caught the Rose-Gold Key with both hands.

  As she caught it, the Mermaids’ Deep fell away. And she was in Arcadia again. All around her was her home. But her home, now, was burnt and mangled and gray and reddish brown.

  Shuddering, Lily tried to cry out, but there was a wind that blew ash and bits of burnt paper and cloth so hard that nothing could be heard above its wail. She knew where she was. She could see the mountains: the Calandals, the Donatees, the Samanthans, and her beloved Ceres. She reckoned, given the distances, that she was somewhere between the towns of Amaurote and Paloma. She had been there once with Alan, her ste
pfather, for reasons he had never told her. She had never asked.

  “But this can’t be the same place!” Lily thought. “Where is my lovely Amaurote, with its flowering trees? And over there, that heap of ash—that should be green Paloma.”

  Then she heard, over the screeching of the wind, the voices wailing with pain: the pain of loss, the pain of torture, the pain of wrongful death.

  “Rex!” she called out, because suddenly Lily knew that this was where Rex had gone. And she knew that, holding the Key, she could feel everything and everyone everywhere. “Rex! Where are you?”

  Then she was suddenly elsewhere. In the mountains. She was there in time to see two stone-faced troopers from Megalopolis herd two small children into a shed, the kind the people in the Calandals used to store their winter wood. “So it’s the Calandals, then,” she thought. “Over Eopolis.” She looked more closely at the hut, and at the remains of a farmhouse, burned, behind it. “It’s the Dawkins place. I’ve been there with Alan.” He had taken her there before, she had never asked why.

  The troopers were young, and both very handsome, pale and blue-veined, with cornsilk hair. They were serious about their work, and you could see in their expression that they didn’t particularly relish it, but they knew their duty. Efficiently and quickly, they pushed the children inside, and then set fire to a pile of wood left haphazardly against the shed. They did this, Lily saw, to teach a lesson to any Resistance fighters hiding in the woods.

  “This is what happens to traitors and those friendly to the rebels,” one of the troopers said loudly, apparently addressing the trees around her. And Lily saw what the troopers couldn’t. She saw Alan and Colin’s father, and a young boy, maybe fifteen years old, hiding in the trees, the boy in a lightning-struck hollowed-out oak, a hank of pale brown hair across his forehead. He was clutching Rex.

  As Lily watched, helpless, Rex looked up at the boy, and licked his face. When Alan and the other man burst from the trees, the dog pulled itself from the boy’s grip, even though the poor child clutched after him soundlessly, and hurled himself after the men as they ran through the gathering smoke toward the burning hut. None of them made it that far.

  That was how Rex found Death, and gave her Star’s message.

  And Lily turned back to the boy, knowing there was nothing to be done for the others, the pain not yet having found its mark. Her first instinct was to comfort the Living, before she could miss the Dead.

  But she couldn’t reach him. As she watched, she saw his face go wild, and all she could do was pray silently that he would keep still and only come out when everything was clear.

  Someone must have heard her prayer, because that is what he did. Young Andy Dawkins, who had come home from school at the first sign of trouble, to find his parents murdered and his home destroyed, and then watched his brother and sister burn. That was the fire where Andy became Aspern Grayling.

  How do I know? I know because he told me. And when he told me, it was without expression, except for his habitual one of urbane sophistication. And it was not in a conversation about his family. It was in a conversation we had once, late at night, about how he hated dogs.

  Lily screamed, then, not in terror, or in anguish, but like the release of steam from a pot that boils over on the fire. It was a sheer need to let out the pressure of the feeling building up in her, to let it out so that she could go on and do what she needed to do. The scream was silent, but it was powerful, and it shook her frame so that she dropped the Key.

  At this, the vision shimmered and disappeared, and Lily stood once more beside the Mermaids’ Well. The Mermaids and the Manatee and her friends all stared at her in silence.

  “I have to go back,” she said. And these were the only words that Lily the Silent ever spoke in the Mermaids’ Deep.

  Yes. The Manatee nodded his velvet-gray brown head. He swam toward her. And waited for her to stoop, hesitant but firm, to retrieve the Key, after which he offered his back. Lily pocketed the Key, and, grasping the sea creature by the soft scruff of his neck, clung to him as he shot through the water back the way they came.

  “Wait!” Kim cried out behind them, and these were the only words Kim spoke under the sea. “Wait, oh wait for me!” She jumped up and down crying. “No, I got to go with you!” She turned to the Mermaids around her. “She needs me! I know she does! I saw it in the Tree!”

  Then, as if that was what she had waited for, Phoebe, legs forming a tail like a fish, swam quickly to Kim’s side. The other girl thankfully hugged her around the neck. And they shot off, following the Manatee and Lily, back the way they had come, to the surface and to what was now the Road of the Dead.

  For there had been other dead, back in Arcadia, that Lily had not yet seen.

  Twenty-Five

  When they came out of the sea, the Dead were there waiting. There were thousands of them, stretched out along the road—a sea of the Dead.

  Rex was there. It was his mission to bring Death back to Megalopolis from Arcadia, and, like good dogs everywhere, he had done his job. Death was with him, grand and free, her black hair blowing in the dank wind, her green-brown eyes crackling with fire. She stood there at the front of the Dead. Rex sat patiently beside her.

  When he saw Lily come out of the sea, he leapt up. Death put her hand on his head and said, “Not yet.”

  Rex sat down again and waited for Lily to make her way out of the sea. This was hard for him. He didn’t mind Death—as we know, it hadn’t been difficult to find her, and while it had been hard to go to her and bring her back, it was hard for one moment only. But after that moment, when Rex woke up, he remembered many things he had forgotten, and he knew they had been many. That was how it was when you passed from Death to Life and back again. But the one thing he could never forget, no matter which land he roamed, was Lily, and what it had been like to be alive and be with her as her dog. That would stay with him now through Eternity. It had happened and could never be changed.

  So even though Rex now had the infinite patience of the Dead, when he saw Lily, the memory of his heart leapt up.

  Lily saw Rex before she saw Death, and so of course she ran toward him out of the sea, up the sloping sand beneath. She was so eager to reach the shore that she forgot the Manatee, who couldn’t follow as her feet touched bottom in the shallows. He watched her go and he thought, “These partings—they are the same in every life. Always painful, always sad.” He lifted a flipper to one eye and gave a quick blink twice. But he, like Lily, had duties that couldn’t be put off or ignored, and with one last pang, he silently saluted her as she ran up the strand toward the Dead, and then turned, with Phoebe who had set a bewildered Kim on her feet on shore before turning back. Both of them, with a wave of flipper and feet, disappeared back toward the Mermaids’ Deep.

  WHEN THEY CAME OUT OF THE SEA, THE DEAD

  WERE THERE WAITING

  You wonder how I know this? The Key changes everything. You see a lot of things that you would have missed before. Sometimes you would rather have missed them. But once you’ve held the Key, you really have no choice but to see these things. And then to act.

  That was Lily’s situation now, as she came out of the sea from the Mermaids’ Deep. And even now, when I’m so much older than my mother ever was, my heart aches for her.

  “Rex! Rex! Oh, Rex! I had the most awful dream!” Lily, laughing and crying at once, ran up to where the dog sat patiently and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face into his fur.

  Only when her arms clasped together they clasped nothing. There was no doggy smell. There was no warm fur under her cheek. And no wet nose nuzzled at her throat.

  There was nothing there.

  At this, Lily fell back, silent. She looked at Rex, and he looked back at her sadly, his tail thumping soundlessly on the ground. Lily looked from Rex to Death, who stood beside him. She looked one question, and Death gave her one nod. At this Lily’s silence deepened and increased. And she said nothing again all that da
y, as she and Kim walked through the Marshlands into Megalopolis at the front of the Dead.

  “Who are they all?” Kim whispered to her as they walked to the front of the silent crowd. Death and Rex led them, and their feet made no sound on the gray mud. The only sound was a thin wind, the wind, so Devindra has told me, that always sounded above the Marsh.

  It was a comfort to Lily that Kim held her hand. It felt good to have that warm, living skin next to hers. So instead of answering, Lily stopped for a moment, ducked her head onto Kim’s shoulder, hugged her, and continued on, still holding her by the hand.

  And this, I have found in my life as well, is generally the best answer to questions of this kind.

  By then, the Great Silence of the Dead had silenced even Kim. This was different from the silence of the Mermaids’ Deep. Though both mean wisdom, they are wisdom of different kinds. For human beings, no cold wind blows through the silence of the Mermaids’ Deep. That silence means every good: protection, kindness, and the civilizing possibilities of life.

  But the Silence of the Dead: what human being still alive can say what that means? It may well mean every good beyond what the living can understand. But there is no way of knowing this without becoming one of the Dead yourself. And for this, no human is ever really ready. No matter how much we might long to be, even in longing to follow our deepest loves.

  Lily, her hand in her pocket clutching the Key, knew she was not ready. Although at that moment, in the midst of the Dead, her heart yearned toward Death, who walked so fearless and strong ahead of them all.