by Tod Davies
Still, Lily’s deepest love was not among the Dead. He was ahead of her, with the Living. So her heart moved in two different ways, and that, I have reason myself to know, is a very painful kind of movement indeed.
You might put it this way: her future was with Life, but her past was with Death. And this left her present, a riddle that is very hard for anyone to solve, even a woman who is learning, already, what it takes to be a queen.
One of the most important lessons is how Death appears in this life. And how she is like that. And how she isn’t.
Lily then thought she had never seen anyone as beautiful as Death, no one as vibrant and good, no one so filled with purpose and holy rage. Death was angry. Lily who held the Key knew this. She could feel it. And she could feel why.
Death strode ahead, in a fury with those who had misused her powers for their own stupid ends. Death was enraged with Megalopolis. She was outraged that the Empire had presumed it knew when and how to call on her, and for what uses. Star had known it would be this way when she sent Rex on his quest to Arcadia, where Death had been lured by Megalopolis, under the falsest of pretexts. “To do nothing more,” Death thought to herself in her rage (so Lily could feel through the Key), “than further the pygmy projects of a pygmy world, a world that has never given me my due—no, nor my sister her due, either!”
By her sister, Death meant Life.
“She’s angry, isn’t she?” Kim whispered, and Lily nodded in reply. “Oh, she’s beautiful, though.” And Kim, walking two steps behind Lily, still clutching at her hand, wasn’t scared. (She was hesitant, she was unsure, but “I weren’t scared, Soph, that was the weird thing. I weren’t scared at all.”)
“They all dead, then?” she whispered. And then she repeated her first question.
“Who are they all, Lily? Do you know them then?”
Lily nodded. Her heart was too full for her mouth to make a sound. For she did, indeed, know them.
It was the Dead of Arcadia—all of the Dead—who marched on either side of them, parting as Death and Rex led the two living girls to the front of the line. And Lily recognized them. There was Colin, with his shock of white hair, his face cheerful now, like a breeze—not shocked and worn the way it had been when Lily watched Death lead him away. Colin gave her a wave and set himself again to marching.
There was Camilla, who waved and laughed, too, as Lily and Kim passed.
And there was Alan. He walked along, whistling silently, surrounded by a tumbling pack of Dead Boys, who obviously admired him as much in Death as they had in Life. As Lily hurried to keep up with Death, Alan gave her a big, broad wink.
It must have been hard to keep from running back and throwing her arms around him. But Lily knew, from holding the Key, where her duty lay. It was ahead of her, with her love, in Life. Not behind. And she knew from her first mistake when she came out of the sea that to throw your arms around the Dead and hug them to you was a useless act: useless, meaningless, and sad. So instead she gave him a tremulous smile, but when Kim looked at her inquiringly, she didn’t say a word.
And there, marching along beside them, was the Mushroom Man and his dog! He ignored Lily as she passed, “the same,” she thought, “as he would have ignored me if he came upon me while he was hunting in the woods.” Why should it be any different now that he was Dead?
They had almost reached their goal now, which was the front of the silently moving throng of the Dead, and at their head was Maud. Seeing her, Lily did almost cry out, but the old woman smiled and put a finger to her lips.
Death was a discipline, even for the Living, Maud’s look said. And Lily was learning this discipline fast.
Still, when you learn anything new—anything worth learning—you don’t master it all at once. You have surges of new strength, followed by a falling back into weaknesses you often never suspected you had. It was that way with Lily now. When she and Kim came up beside Death and Rex, and fell into step beside a silent Maud (how much more grateful Lily was now for Kim! how she wished Kim would chatter more now! but even Kim was silenced by the Silence of the Dead), she wanted to cry out: “But where are you going? Do we go to defeat Megalopolis? But where will you go when we’re done, oh where? Where will I find you again? Will we ever meet again? Oh where?”
She didn’t cry out. The discipline of the Dead had begun its work, and what was started in the Mermaids’ Deep in Lily was here complete. She was now, in the outer woman, no longer a girl. She became, even more than before in the Mermaids’ Deep, Lily the Silent.
That is also how it is. You don’t become something completely new all at once. You get a taste of it, and then you swallow it down, and then, after awhile, it becomes a part of you. I’ve had that experience, too. And this was the way that Lily became the person Arcadia made its queen.
But even Lily the Silent couldn’t quiet her own heart. She never could, not even later, after the journey over the mountains, after she became queen. Her heart went on calling out, “All of you I’ve ever loved. What happens to the Dead? Is there happiness among the Dead? Is there love among the Dead? Is there peace? Is there joy?” Her heart cried out so loudly that Lily thought she could hear it trilling like a bird in distress, one that watches, helpless, while a fox stalks the nestlings in its nest. It was a song, but it was a song of grief.
Like all true songs—if you listen truly—the song of Lily’s heart demanded an answer. And behind her, the answer came. Behind the march of the Dead was the sea, and the Mermaids rose up, now, above the surface of the sea, and sang one of the songs that are the purpose of their being—that is, the Lament for the Dead. Mermaids are silent except in singing one of their three songs: the Praise of the Gods, the Joy of the Born, and the Lament of the Dead. All of these songs are versions of the One Great Song, whose name is secret, but which is called—when it needs a name—the Delight of All.
The Lament of the Dead is, of course, the saddest of these songs, and yet, as it is only a movement of the One Great Song, there is the kind of joy woven all the way through its harmonies that can reconcile those souls that are ready to hear it to their fate.
Lily must have been ready, because she heard the song and was comforted. All around her, and through the Key, she could feel the Dead give a silent murmur of content, at the Mermaids’ singing, and she could feel them march forward faster, determined to win the battle to come and then pass on.
“Pass on to what?” Lily’s heart said. The Mermaids’ Song, though, was confined to the Lament for the Dead, and Lily was forced to go forward now without an answer.
She went forward, on the Sad Road Back, to her destiny and theirs, the Destiny of the Arcadian Dead. Every step was a hard one to take, but every one she took wakened something—or someone—inside her. And that something—or someone—was alive, and it urged Lily on, filling her with new strength as they went.
“That was you, Snow, though you don’t remember,” my mother would say to me drowsily before we both went to sleep, me in her arms in her big, queenly bed. And she would fall asleep with a long lock of her black hair across my forehead. But I would lie awake, remembering.
Twenty-Six
As Lily went forward on the road, she could see a parade up ahead, barring their way.
“Look at that, would you?” Kim said, wide-eyed. She squeezed her friend’s hand. “What’s all that about, then? Who’s all that for?” And then, with a low whistle. “Is it for us?”
Lily looked at Kim and squeezed her hand back. She shook her head. No, the parade was not for Lily and Kim. She knew that. Hand on the Key, there was much she knew.
The parade was for Conor Barr. And his brand new wife Rowena. It was their marriage march. The happy young couple sat in a horse-drawn carriage covered with scentless white peonies, pulled by four snow-white horses waving white plumes. Rowena sat with her small hand firmly clasping Conor’s wrist, her other waving benevolently to the crowd of Megalopolitan living who now mingled unknowingly with the Arcadian Dead.
“Oooh!” Kim gasped. “Isn’t she beautiful!”
And she was beautiful. All brides are, but Rowena had improved on this general rule of nature with a first-rate stylist: hair, makeup, dress, all the best and most gorgeous money could buy. This was the start of the fashion for all things False in Megalopolis, which was to go to such absurd lengths and reach such ridiculous heights in later years, even among the masses left after the Great Disaster. But now, at the fashion’s start, as usually happens, it began with a kind of dazzle that couldn’t help but fascinate the eye. Rowena, as a fashion leader, had experimented with the new artificiality, and her strange, glittering beauty that day was a tribute to her success. Her deep violet eyes lined with green glittered under her long, curling eyelashes. Her perfect nose twitched. Her bow-shaped lips formed a flowerbud moue. Sapphires flashed from her ears.
She dazzled, did Rowena. At that moment, no one had eyes for anyone but her. And it was this dazzle that protected Lily. No one noticed her in the shade left by Rowena’s light.
Rowena told me about that day much later, in that thin, querulous, overbred voice of hers, in the expensive Retirement Villa she lived in on the False Moon at the end of her life. That was the day she returned to, over and over, as if it had been the most important of her life. I think maybe it was. She was never meant to be a Mother (“so painful, Sophia! Children ruin your life!”), or really even a Wife (“I hated hated hated growing old, Sophia. You’ll see. You’ll hate it just as much as I did”). She disliked being a Lover (“So…so messy”).
What Rowena was meant for was to be a Bride.
“My hair was gold, Sophia, not just any gold, but a gold a dozen artists had worked three weeks without sleep to perfect, the kind of gold you dream about, or read about in stories, but never see in life. Except that day! Look, here, I kept a lock of it…” But the bit of hair she eagerly pulled out from a fraying velvet-covered box was faded, and the old Rowena looked at it sadly for a moment before her desire to see differently triumphed over what was in front of her, and she looked at me, complacent again. “My make-up was done by the foremost painter of the day. How we laughed as he dabbed at my face, and—I remember!—said the tint was more beautiful than the rosiest summer dawn. And the dress, Sophia! The creation! A thousand silkworms couldn’t have spun a more translucent silk than our Megalopolitan scientists made, a white never seen before except on the finest, pink-tinged pearl, a dress made of dozens of yards of the fabric, but a dress so fine you could pull it through a gold ring without strain. That was the most beautiful dress that had ever been seen in Megalopolis…in all the world! And my shoes…studded with tiny diamond chips that flashed every which way when I walked….” At her description of the shoes, the old Rowena’s monologue slowed and almost stopped. Then, a final dreamy word, “I always loved shoes the best. Always.” And then she was gone from me, in a dream, I hoped, of her marriage day, when she was the center of all eyes, and still happy. I left her, without having got the answer that I looked for that day, but still, with that bit of memory passed on to me by the poor, faded, rich, and unloved creature shrinking visibly by the moment in the expensively covered bed before me, in the expensive retirement villa over which she petulantly ruled. As I went out, the nurses went in. “Her husband and her son never come to see her. Never,” one of them muttered to me as she let me out the front door. I didn’t tell her that I already knew that; instead, I promised to come again. And I did, one more time, but by then she was lost in her dream of triumphant girlhood, and I don’t think she remembered who I was. If she had ever known. “I was the most beautiful bride,” was all she would say, that final visit. “The most beautiful beautiful bride.”
My grandmother told me a bit, also, about that day. “Megalopolis needed a beautiful bride,” she said with that grim humor that I appreciated—maybe I was the only one in the family who had ever appreciated it. In any case, Grandmother always responded to the smile I could never hold back from her, no matter how horrifying the details of her conversation, no matter how clear she made it that she had never had the good of any of my dear loved ones in mind. But how she burned to have power, my grandmother! How much energy was there! “We needed a big party, the biggest the world had ever seen, something to distract the population from noticing the Great Disaster looming, the one we still hoped against hope to avert.” She smiled sourly, I remember, as if she looked back at Rowena’s glowing, demanding beauty, and found it as thin and silly as she and I both knew it really was. “That backfired. No one had eyes for anyone but Rowena.”
What she meant was, “I was too busy stage-managing Conor’s wedding to notice Lily had returned with the Key.” And knowing my grandmother, I can well believe this irked her till her dying day. Which was not a happy one. I know. I was there. I have been there at the deaths of many loved ones and family, and of all of them, Livia most hated Death. And when you hate Death, she does not treat you kindly.
Lily and Kim stood there, watching the cheering crowds of bored Megalopolitans shouting with pleasure as Conor gave Rowena the obligatory kiss.
Death nudged my mother in the ribs with her elbow.
I can see this. Star and Kim have both described it to me, and, having met Death myself, I can well believe this was done in a certain mordant spirit.
“Look down,” the Great Lady whispered. And Lily, looking at the mud on the road in front of her, saw a large Brass Key lying there. It glinted in the light reflecting off the passing cavalcade of cars. It was bigger, bolder, more noticeable in every way than the Rose-Gold Key, which Lily had safe in the pocket of her coat.
“Pick it up,” Death suggested, and Kim swears there was the hint of a laugh in her voice. Lily did what she was told, and just as she straightened up, holding the Brass Key wonderingly in her hand, there was the sound of screeching brakes, the headlights from a car swept over her and she froze.
“Ah,” a voice said dryly. “I see you’re back.”
It was Livia, following the wedding couple’s carriage, in an open car with Peter and Alastair, both looking bored. Conor’s servant was driving. He hopped out and opened the back door for Lily to get in beside Conor’s mother, and then he helped Kim into the front seat beside him.
When Alastair saw who it was who’d gotten in beside him, his face lost that look of ennui. He leaned forward. “You’ve found it?” he asked eagerly. “The Key?” And when she nodded, he held out his hand. His expression was greedy. Peter’s eyes gleamed over his head.
Lily gave him, as she knew she was meant to do, the Great Brass Key. His hand closed over it with a sigh. Peter exhaled a long breath. Both men turned their heads forward and resumed the look of boredom that protected them from the crowd.
In her pocket, Lily’s hand clutched the Rose-Gold Key, which seemed to grow heavier as she held it there.
“Hurrah!” the crowd shouted, throwing flowers—provided, for the occasion, by the State—into the air. “Hurrah for Conor Barr and his bride!”
The driver started up the car again, and leaned over to give Kim’s knee an exuberant pat. “See that? Hear that roar? It’s a great honor to be the maid of Conor Barr’s woman, lass, even if she’s never the legal wife!” he shouted up over the general noise. But Kim, when she looked back at him, gave an uncertain smile. “Is that what I am, then?” she murmured. For she knew she had become something else. Something much more. She was not the same Kim who had gone into the Sea (“and I never was again, Soph”). She looked over at the Dead, stopped now, standing blocked by the parade, watching it silently go past. And the car drove away from Death.
“Listen!” Kim shouted over the fireworks and the singing and the chanting and the laughs, “don’t you see them, then?”
“See who, lass?” the driver shouted back, cheerful as ever.
“Them! Them over there! The Dead, you silly fool! The DEAD!” Kim waved her arm toward Death, where she stood at the head of the thousands of shadows, with Rex at her side.
“Ge
t over your joking!” the driver laughed.
They couldn’t see them, then. Kim’s eyes looked for Lily’s in the back of the car. Lily, her hand being absently patted by a glitter-eyed Livia, shook her head.
“No,” Lily thought. “None of them can see the Dead.” Except possibly, she thought, for Livia, who had turned, craning her neck, chewing on her thumbnail, and looking reflectively in Death’s direction. But Lily couldn’t be sure.
The parade marched on. Conor led it, Rowena sitting straight up and gleaming at his side. The crowd roared its endless approval. No one noticed how frightened Kim’s face was, or the tear that fell down Lily’s cheek.
Lily craned her neck until the last minute she could, to catch a last glimpse of Rex, as he sat patiently by Death, his tail thumping without a sound. But no one in the crowd saw her look. Not even Conor knew that she was there, and this filled her with sadness. Lily’s heart thumped sluggishly in her chest as the parade—noisy, glittering, alive—ignored the Dead, and, ignoring Lily’s yearning for Conor, ignored the Living, too. The parade ignored both these facts and marched on by. Only Kim could see them that night. But my dear nurse was always so modest, I doubt it occurred to her that she alone, aside from Lily, was able to see plain facts that were invisible to the rest of the world.
And Lily, of course, could see and hear all the things she couldn’t see and hear before. She could see many things that were there, that no one else could see. It wasn’t until much later, when I found and held the Key myself, that I knew what this must have meant to her. Tremendous isolation and responsibility—what should be told? And what should be left unspoken? At that moment, though, she didn’t need to worry about that. No one in the rest of the world wanted to know what she could see. Not just then. The rest of the world was distracted. It could not, just then, see past the promised Grand Party.
