by Tod Davies
And she? She had that great capacity for Love, Love of all kinds, as I should know. He was her first great Love, and the last she would ever have of that kind. But she knew Reality, because she was a girl who knew she was a woman, not a boy thinking he was a man. Reality told her she could not stay.
“Come with me, Conor,” she’d pleaded before he had fallen, in her arms, asleep. But he, just as Livia had known he would, only laughed. “Go with her?” my father said to me later. “Leave all that advantage? Go to some provincial place where I’d be unknown and poor, when all we had to do was stay put to have everything our hearts desired? I didn’t think she was serious. I told her, ‘You’re the one I love. What does it matter what everyone else thinks? We can arrange it to suit ourselves.’ But she wouldn’t listen, of course. Well, of course she wouldn’t. Wasn’t she a person in her own right? Not that I knew that then.”
That was something she realized, I think. That she wasn’t a person to Conor, no matter how much he loved her. She was an object, a thing. And this was not how she loved him. She saw that to him her child would be an object, a thing. And she had the Key. She knew this had to change. She knew that because she had walked on the Road of the Dead.
As she lay there staring at the dying fire, it was as if a pearl dropped from her heart down and down and down. She listened carefully. But though it dropped for a very long time, it never reached the bottom. That night, she failed to hear it land.
Then there was another sound she missed tonight: the sound of Rex breathing evenly, on the rug beside the hearth. Lily listened and listened, and scrunched her eyes up with the effort of listening, but you can’t hear what’s not there, no matter how hard you try.
Shuddering, she buried her head in Conor’s chest. He murmured in his sleep, and pulled her to him. There was warmth in his arms, but even as she held them to her, and clasped her own around his chest, she could feel the warmth dying. There was soon to be no more warmth for her there, no matter how much she desired it. Because Lily knew that her desires were not the most important thing in the world. She had drawn this knowledge up with the Key from the Mermaids’ Well. This is an important knowledge, maybe the most important knowledge for a queen. My father had not achieved it yet. It would be a long time before he did.
Pulling gently on Conor’s arms, she prized them apart. She sat up in the bed, paler, even, than before, watching silently as Conor Barr slept. He had one hand lying palm up on his forehead, and that forehead wrinkled as if, even in his sleep, he planned the grandest of plans. (“And I did,” my father said, smiling. “It’s true. Especially in my sleep, I was a Conqueror of Worlds.”) He muttered something, as if momentarily distressed, and she moved without thought to comfort him. But a sound behind startled her and checked her hand.
Lily saw it was Death, standing inside the huge carved door, wrapped in a heavy cloak against the cold, though Death can’t feel cold, no, or warmth either.
Quicker than her thoughts, Lily covered Conor with one arm, guarding him against Death. She was quick, my mother, when it came to protecting those she loved. I have reason to remember that.
This time, though, Death just laughed at her, indulgently. “No,” she said, throwing back the hood of her cloak, and heading toward the fire. “I haven’t come for Conor Barr, Lily. I have bigger fish to fry.”
But Lily warily kept her arm across my father’s sleeping chest. She watched Death as she sat at a loom that appeared there, where Rex had once slept. Death worked the loom, watching it critically as she did, its shuttle clattering with a comfortable familiarity.
It was a strange thing. But with Death’s arrival, warmth returned to Lily’s arms. She puzzled over this, and I’m not sure she ever understood it. I’m not sure I understand it, even now.
LILY COVERED CONOR WITH ONE ARM,
GUARDING HIM AGAINST DEATH
“If you go now, Lily,” Death said quietly, over her work. “I’ll leave him be for many, many years. As you know, I always keep my promises.”
Then Lily knew what she had to do—the way an animal does, without thinking. Lily gave Conor’s lips one quick kiss (“I felt it in my sleep, Sophy, I’m sure of it,” he said), then slid down to the floor, and began to dress. This was still her room, and all the clothes he had given her were there. She dressed in the warm clothes he had meant for her to wear when they went into the mountains for the winter sports—sheepskin-lined wide wool pants, a linen shirt that buttoned up high on the neck over a winter vest, and a pair of stout green leather boots. She looked at her velvet and fur cloak fit for a queen, and hesitated. Instead, driven by an instinct she did not yet wholly understand, she shrugged herself into a fur-lined leather hunting jacket of his, left carelessly over a chair. She felt carefully in the pockets for the scarf and gloves and hat that she knew he would keep there. And then, to her surprise, she felt the Key.
She hadn’t put it there. But the Key would not be left behind.
Death nodded her head and the shuttle flew across the warp. Lily came closer and saw the cloth stretched out on the loom. It was covered with pictures, top to bottom. People running up a dark street, an enormous wave following them. Two roads, the one to the left with a knight valiantly fighting a helmeted foe, the other solitary, weaving past streams and ponds, heading down to a green world.
As Death wove, Lily saw a picture emerge: a knight battling with his foe—only now the foe’s helmet was off, and you could see…the knight was battling himself.
“They’ve invited me here,” Death said, smiling wryly. “By the grandeur of their conceptions.” She stopped her work and sighed. “Oh, if they only knew how tired I am of man’s grand conceptions!”
And Lily’s hand tightened over the Key.
All at once, she could hear shouting, and the sound of thousands of feet tramping, and the loud roar of the sea. She could feel terror all around her, and the deep desire to get to higher ground.
“That’s right,” Death murmured approvingly. “That’s a good girl.” And this was the last time Lily was called a girl, when she was called one by Death. And there was no going back.
Now there was a little scratch at the door, as if from an animal, and when Lily opened it, Kim, wrapped in a blanket coat that was way too big for her, looked back at her with an expression of timid resolve.
“Ohhh,” Kim breathed, taking in Lily’s dress, as Lily quickly and silently shut the door behind them, so the two women were alone in the hall. “I knew it. I knew you were going.” Lily turned to go down the hall, putting her finger to her lips. “Well,” Kim whispered fiercely, “you’re not going without me, then, you know that, don’t you.” Lily, grinning, gave her a quick hug, and the two disappeared down the back staircase, and let themselves silently out onto the street. Neither of them looked back.
Twenty-Nine
On winter nights in Arcadia now, we hold Storytelling Around the Great Hearth, in the Central Round Hall of the Palace. It’s meant to knit us together, to strengthen those bonds between us that are shown by the Key to so clearly exist. It’s our new tradition, invented by myself and Wilder the Bard. Traditions have to start some place, after all.
That first night, I remember, I knew we had chosen right. Wilder held forth in the way that only Wilder can, when he is both the teller and the tale. It wasn’t just his talent that kept the audience enthralled, I told him when we were alone again in his room in the Tower: it was his experience, his wisdom, all that he’d learned on his own long hard road. When he wove the tale that first night, I could see him weave the tapestry of Arcadia anew. This part of Lily’s story made our fellows hold their breath. No one made a sound. No one went out of the room, to the bathroom, or to get a snack. They had wandered in and out at other parts, all of which they knew well, but when he came to this part in the story, and the kindly wind sang outside, and the puffy snowflakes swirled in little tornados you could see through the long windows of the Round Hall, and it was warm inside, and dark but for the fires and th
e candles in the sconces set onto the slim wood walls—all that came together, I remember. We could smell the hot cider in the mugs we held. And Wilder held us, too.
He was modest about this later, and sad. “For Goddess’ sake, Snow, it wasn’t me, it was the story.” Then, troubled, “All the story I could bear to tell.” But in this, I understand more than Wilder himself. My understanding was dearly won, as no one knows better than he. I know that the magic that held us was that he was in the story, too. And yet, because of his own part, he can never speak the end. That is always left to me. It was that night. Wilder could sing up to a certain point, and then, like a bird when you throw a cloth over its cage, he was, like my mother, silent.
But until that point…this is the way he told his portion of the tale that winter night when we first gathered around the Great Hearth:
“In Arcadia, there is much history, and legend too, about the hard and dangerous travels of Lily the Silent and her companion, Kim the Kind. Many strange and terrible things are told of the days before the birth of Sophia, later known as Sophia the Wise. But the most terrible is of the final night they fled, out of the Villa in Central New York, back to the mountains. Back to higher ground. For this was the time of the Great Earthquake, and after the Great Earthquake—as every schoolchild knows—there came a Great Silence more ominous than any sound. After the Whole World held its breath in fear, the World once more let out that breath…and with its breath came the Great Wave. All who had stayed on lower ground were destroyed, utterly destroyed. There was nothing left.”
At this, the audience held its breath. And Wilder, sad but determined, carried on, taking courage as he wove the tale.
“Kim and Lily hurried toward the main road that night. Kim turned toward the stables, where they would find horses, but, ‘No,’ Lily said firmly. ‘It’s better we stay on solid ground.’ Why she said this, Lily didn’t know, but about this she was sure. Kim didn’t argue. She followed.
“When they came to the road, they were no longer alone. There were hundreds of people—Devindra Vale, who was there that night, walking out of the Marsh, says it may have been thousands, though only a small part of that survived the final winter’s journey over the mountains into Arcadia. The endless, restless crowd moved slowly and silently up toward the mountains. Without wondering at this, Lily and Kim joined them. They blended in right away. Most of these refugees were women and children. Here and there was a man, although not many, and of these, maybe only one or two finished the trip.
“On every face was a look of dread. ‘We saw Death,’ the wanderers murmured among themselves as they fled. ‘Death with the Dead.’
“A woman holding the hand of a little blonde girl who had her brown skin and black eyes said to Lily, ‘Only some of us could see her. The others just laughed.’
“And Lily and Kim saw what she meant by ‘the others’—heard them, too. As the silent procession continued toward the mountains, pressed behind by its own fear, jeering folk lined the road on either side. They held glasses and bottles, for the celebrations of the wedding of Conor Barr and Rowena Pomfret were meant to go on for two more days, and the bystanders had been at the freely distributed wedding cheer for most of that night. This group was mostly men, though there was a scattering of women among them. ‘What do you think you’re running away from then?’ they laughed. ‘Bunch of ninnies. Scared of the dark. Seeing things that aren’t even there. Fools!’ But the folk heading for the mountains ignored them in silence and pressed on.
“This was when Kim realized the wisdom of making their way on foot. The drunken, angry men yelling out insults as they passed by were in a dangerous mood, the way men, and crowds, fueled by aimless celebrations become. To ride above a crowd like that would have invited…unwelcome attentions. ‘You were right then, Lily,’ Kim whispered. Lily nodded grimly—she held the hand of the little blonde girl while her mother stopped to redo the straps of her knapsack—and they continued on.
“‘She’s quite taken to you,’ the mother whispered to Lily, with a fond, sad look at the daughter who clung to Lily’s hand. Lily smiled faintly and nodded again. This girl was Clare, afterwards Clare the Rider, who was never seen in Arcadia far from one of the marvelous horses she trained, the horses for which she was famous far and wide. Everyone in Arcadia wanted a horse from Clare the Rider, but she sold them only to a certain few, and how she chose those few will be told later, in the tale about her dearest friend, Sophia the Wise.
“It was Clare who helped Kim the Kind the night that Sophia was born. It was Clare who kept the fire lit at the mouth of the cave and who kept watch there against any enemies until dawn. Her own mother was dead by then—fallen, in the dark rush up the mountain, down a sheer and rocky drop.
“After this, Clare clung to Lily all the more.”
“But all of this happened later,” Wilder continued, after taking a draught of mulled wine. “For now, the refugees surged forward, silent and with one will. Our scientists say it was because of this unity of purpose that the time they made was remarkable. Seven days and seven nights they moved, as if making up a single animal, resting all at once, eating quickly and sharing what provisions they had among them, and then continuing on. How they knew to do this would be a mystery to the scientists of Megalopolis, who say it is impossible for so many individuals to act together, without a leader, without force. But in Arcadia the facts are known. The answer is the Key. The Key was among them, and the Key knit them together, and it was because of the Key they knew when to stop. It was because of the Key that they knew when to start. And Lily, pale with the effort of carrying the Key, knew this even that very first night, but as she had now become Lily the Silent, how it worked was something she would never tell.”
“It was the Key that opened the door to the new world,” Wilder continued in his most solemn voice, and even the children who knew this story by heart stared at him open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “You all know how our Arcadian scientists discovered this later, after much debate about the meaning of the facts. It was the Key that opened the door to the Great Wave, that catastrophe that killed everyone left on the plains of Megalopolis, everyone who had not climbed the Ceres Mountains, and everyone who had not been rich enough, or well enough connected, to catch the last rocket to the False Moon. Our scientists, you know, have labored long and hard to understand the physics of what occurred. There’s been debate; there have been factions. Professor Devindra Vale, the leader of the scholars who eventually uncovered the truth, was the first to hold out her hand to the other side, saying: ‘We wanted to know this as little as you. But now that we do know it, let us hold it together, and see what it means for us in the future—to what direction it points, to what duties it calls us.’ It was hard, you all know, for us to accept these truths. For some of us, impossible. But in the end, we hope Truth prevails. Even if we also know that prevailing might take, as it has in Megalopolis, a very long time.”
When Wilder came to that part of the story, I remember, Devindra put her knitting down on her lap for a moment, wiped her eyes, and hid a sad smile behind her hand.
“It took another three days,” Wilder continued, “once they had reached the foothills, for them to get up into the mountains, and many, despite the efforts of their fellows, fell along the way. There was never an abundance of food, but there was enough. Barely enough. The Ceres, on their south side, keep green in a normal year for ten months out of twelve. And though this was no normal year, still there was food to be found, much of it left from the oldest days, the days no one can remember, when both women and men had settled there, leaving behind patches of now wild greens, trees with bright orange fruit, edible roots and berries. And of course there were the mushrooms Arcadian mountains are famous for providing.
“There were wise women in the group, women from the marshlands of Megalopolis who had lived, secretive and unheard, afraid of the periodic purges of the Different and the Odd that happened in that great city. These women knew much about wild fo
ods: which mushrooms healed, which ones hurt, which were good to eat, which gave an agonizing death. These women quickly passed their knowledge to others—to the young girls traveling with them, in particular. These showed themselves deeply interested in the lore of the older women, and our queen has told us that this gave her the idea for the foundation of the colleges of Otterbridge University. She began by watching the younger women quizzing the old, comparing what she heard to the truths the Key had taught her. All this by the fires made at night from the brush of the Ceres, where, Queen Lily told us, the new Arcadia was born in these meetings between young and old.
“One of these young women was our own Devindra Vale, the great physicist of Arcadia you all know, and the founder of the University herself. You have heard her say that the Flight from Megalopolis was the Foundation Stone of the New Arcadian Science. And she never, ever lost her taste for woodland mushrooms.”
At this, I remember, Devindra smiled again. This time at Wilder, who wouldn’t look at her that night. She had long forgiven him for his part in the story, but he—he found it impossible to forgive himself.
Bravely, though, he went on.
“On the tenth night, they camped in silence on a sheltered ridge, a fierce wind blowing around them down the mountains to the plains below. They gathered there, huddled around brushfires, all silent. The view of Megalopolis stretched out beneath them. The city glittered on its plain like a string of jewels.
“Lily, silent, looked down at the city and remembered a string of colored gems—flashing white and orange and pink and sea-blue and red—that Conor Barr had given her as a gift. She had worn that strand the night of her triumph at the ball on the False Moon. She had left it and everything else behind. And it was that necklace that our own queen, Sophia, brought home from her adventures in foreign lands. You’ve seen her wear it at occasions of State.
