SUMMER: ON THE ROAD FROM LOURDES

I have lost track of what day it is. Not that it matters. It is not so late in the season that I am concerned about the onset of bad weather. The land we are traversing is hospitable and not unlike home. There are fields and hedgerows and gentle rains and much burgeoning growth. We are ascending beside the torrent of the Pau, having not long ago left the town and castle of Lourdes, to turn toward the mountain called "Lost," which, considering what are going through to find Marvella, is not badly named. Pica Perdido, it is called. It is quite high, but we are not going to the top.

In Bayonne, we met with scepticism, not to say outright doubt, when we told guides and equipage purveyors that we wished to go to Ponte Marvella. No one knew how to get there. We spoke of it in English; we spoke of it in French. No one had ever been there. Finally, as we were about to give up in despair during the third or fourth day of quite concentrated effort-at our age it takes concentration to keep doing things over and over-a man presented himself to us and, speaking with a strange accent, told us he could guide us. He is, the French say, a Basque. His name is Echevaria, or Eskavaria, or some such. He speaks a language which no one else in the world speaks unless that person is another Basque. It does not derive from Latin, as does normal speech. It is not related to the languages of the heathen. It has no words in common with other European tongues. Eskavaria says it is the language used by the angels when they helped God make the world, the language of Eden, from which all Basques came directly. He was laughing at me, of course. I thought of teaching him it is unwise to laugh at one who is half fairy, but he is pleasant enough otherwise, so why make a fuss. Besides, he is a very little man, not four feet tall. He reminds me of Bill except that he is less childlike. He is not a dwarf, as my father's fool was. He is simply very small.

As to what he was doing in Bayonne, he did not say. He did say we could take a carriage to the town of Lourdes, not a very great town in this century, on the River Pau. In Lourdes, the river becomes a torrent, plunging down from the heights of the mountains. There, he told us, we would take horses and ride up beside the plunging water toward the highest peak, the "lost one." It is named "lost" in Spanish, that is, Perdido, but not in Basque. In Basque they call it something else. Halfway up the mountain, we will turn aside, so he says, along a valley, and in that valley is the principality of Marvella.

"Not a kingdom?" I asked. I had thought the prince's father was a king.

"It's maybe ten miles long. It's maybe three or four miles wide," Eskavaria replied. "There's two villages and a castle. It has some cows, some sheep, some goats, a few horses. I don't know is it a kingdom, or a duchy, or something else. What I hear them call it is a principality. Whatever it is, it's very small."

"You have never been there," guessed Giles.

"True," said Eskavaria, "but I been close."

"Why haven't you gone there if you've been close?" Giles wanted to know.

Eskavaria shook his head and gave us a half smile. "Perhaps when you get close, you'll decide not to go there." It sounded almost like a recommendation.

Thus far we have done almost everything that Eskavaria has recommended. We took a carriage to Lourdes. Most of the time, Grumpkin rode on top, with the driver. We spent a day sightseeing in the town. The river is very dramatic, as is the new castle set high above it. The next day we bought five horses, three for us and two to carry our supplies, and the day after that we started up the mountain. Grumpkin rides in a basket on one of the packhorses. They are small animals, scarcely larger than ponies, but they are sturdy. Because they are small, they are easier for me to ride than a big horse would be. My legs don't bend as well as they used to. Sidesaddle is actually easier than astride. Except for that, we get along well enough, Giles and I. We are brittle. We ache. But we get along. The early morning is the hardest. That and trying to get comfortable in our blankets at night. Eskavaria is so small he curls up as Grumpkin does.

Days we simply ride, hearing the marmots whistle, hearing the rocks rattle as herds of chamois flee from our horses. The marmots are very curious. They stand on their hind legs and wriggle their noses at us as we pass. Grumpkin stares at them and yawns, thinking them too large for prey and too impudent for acquaintance.

LATER

I asked Eskavaria what day it was. He doesn't know. He neither reads nor writes. He says no one writes in his language. I recall reading of the Basques back in the twentieth, but I don't remember a thing about the language or the people. All I can recall is something about a separatist movement from Spain with some of the terrorism separatists seem to consider requisite. I asked Eskavaria if he had ever blown anyone up, and he seemed quite shocked at the idea.

I have been reading more of the City of Ladies book. Christine would have frowned on my love for Giles. She talks of foolish love affairs and says, "If it happens that some young princess or highborn lady is so lacking in knowledge or constancy that she is unable, does not know how, or does not wish to resist the appeals of the man who is trying to attract her by various signs and gestures (as men well know how to do) ... "

The only sign Giles ever gave me was the love in his eyes. The only sign I ever gave him was to blush when he looked at me, and for that Father Raymond sent him away. Christine would have approved of that. But she would not have approved of me. She has decided views on the conduct of virgins. When I was a virgin, I was argumentative and outspoken, which she deplores. I enjoyed eating entirely too much. And she says I should simply have relied upon Papa to have arranged a marriage for me, and should never have mentioned it to him or even have thought about it on my own. Her idea of a proper virgin is a bloodless one, I think. It's obvious that Christine de Pisan did not have Faery in mind at all when she wrote this book! That, or feminism.

I wonder what she would have done if a clock fairy and a putative angel had sunk some burning seed beneath her breast? Repudiated it, no doubt.

Oh, sometimes I wish I could.

LATER

About midmorning today we saw smoke rising over a ridge to our right. "Marvella," said Eskavaria, pointing.

"Do you speak their language?" I asked him, suddenly aware that we might not be able to communicate. Though that was a silly thought. I had communicated well enough with them when they were in England.

Eskavaria confirmed this. "They speak French," he said. "Or Spanish. Or English. They're not my people."

He left us at the ridge. Or rather, he stayed while we came on. He told us he would watch for us there, to guide us back. One day. Five. Ten. Whatever it took.

Giles thought it was strange he would not come with us.

As we started down into the valley, I smelled magic, and knew why it was Eskavaria hadn't come. He might not know what it was, but he sensed the presence of it. This had a hot, wet smell, like metal doused in the forge. This was not merely magic, but something worse than that.

25

As we rode down into the valley, people looked up at us curiously from the fields. Some came to the road and wandered along beside us, feeling of our shoes, staring at the cat. We told the people we were travelers, going over the mountains to Spain. They spoke a kind of French-Spanish-English mix, which Giles and I could halfway comprehend, though evidently we did not speak it well enough to be clearly understood. Some of our followers ran on to tell others, and soon we had a crowd of them at our heels. Peasant people, ordinary people. Several quite good looking men. No women more than ordinary in appearance. A boy herding geese. A girl with a piglet in her arms. Men who had been cutting hay.

We asked if there were somewhere we could stay for the night. They pointed. We looked up to see the castle perched above us, on a crag. Oh no, we said, we're just ordinary travelers. And they smiled and pointed, pushing us, leading us, dragging the ponies along. Evidently we were to go there, like it or not. I looked at Giles, seeing nothing in his face but pleasant expectation. There was sweat along my forehead, next to my hair, but I kept smiling. Looking back the way we had come, I realized we could have seen the castle all along. If we had been looking for it.

I leaned over and whispered to Giles. "When we are asked for our names, old friend, do not be surprised at what I say."

He gave me a curious look, but nodded. I had originally planned to introduce myself as Lady Catherine of Monfort, the name I had used when negotiating Elly's marriage. Now, something told me it would be better not to claim any former acquaintance with the prince or his daughter. Not until I knew how things stood.

The climb was a hard one. The ponies were sweating heavily when we arrived. Someone rang a bell at the high wooden gates. Someone kissed my hand and gave me a flower. Then they were gone, off down the hillside, chattering with one another, pleased at having delivered us. The gate opened and we were welcomed within. A chamberlain saw to us. He and a couple of serving men. He spoke French, and so did we. He asked if the cat could be taken to the stable, and I said no, it would stay with me. He asked if we were man and wife, and when I said not, he sniffed and escorted us to separate rooms. He told us the servants would bring bathwater. He said the Princess would welcome us at supper.

I laid my hand on his arm as he was ready to depart and said, "A moment. Long ago, I believe I met the ruling family of your realm." It seemed a neutral word, realm, since I did not know what kind of place it was. "The prince had just come of age. It was in England."

He raised his eyebrows at me.

"Is that family still here?"

"Prince Charme?" he asked.

I smiled.

"And his consort," the chamberlain said. "Princess Ilene." He said it Ee-lay-nay.

"His daughter?" I asked.

"He has no daughter," the man said.

"Never? Never had a daughter?"

"No children. Not in twenty years," he said. "I have been here that long."

"I am mistaken then," I smiled, trying not to weep. "It was another family." How many Prince Charmings could there be? More than one, obviously.

The chamberlain was as good as his word about the bathwater, and I soaked in the heat of it, letting it take away some of the soreness of the long ride. He sent a maid to see to our clothes. I had already hidden my cloak and boots away, under the bed. I wanted no foreign maidservants playing about with those. When time came for the meal, he sent a footman to escort us down the stairs and into the hall of the castle. Not the great hall, which we passed through on the way, but a smaller one, paneled in dark wood, with numerous candles, a fire blazing, and many trophies of the hunt hung in the high shadows near the cross-beamed ceiling. A dozen men and women, earls of this and countesses of that, introduced themselves and asked us about our journey. Though some of the men were quite handsome, all of the women were remarkably plain. The chamberlain came to the door and announced His Serene Highness, Prince Charme of Marvella; Her Serene Highness, Princess Ilene. We wouldn't use their names, of course. They would be called, "Your Highness, this," "Your Highness, that." She might be called "ma'am." They made their way slowly across the room toward us, stopping to speak to each of the other guests as they came. Each man bowed deeply, each woman curtsied.

He was much as I remembered him, sweet-faced, rather feminine-looking, though he now had a little gray beard and moustache to cover his gentle mouth and a little tummy to cover his gemmed belt. He was considerably fatter, much softer looking, much, much older. His eyelids made sad little swags of wrinkled flesh, hiding his eyes.

She was taller than he, very regal, very handsome, with a strange, exotic beauty, like a tiger. No. More like a serpent. Sleek. Also deadly. Her hair was dark, rising from a widow's peak to make a double bow of her forehead, a line completed by her pointed chin to make a narrow heart shape. She wore a close fitting gown of blood-colored damask. Her face could have been twenty-five, her body younger yet. Her eyes were several hundred. I thought of Queen Mab and knew that what I saw was not what was really there, then I carefully blanked out that thought and assumed the much excited smile of an elderly woman who was, oh, gracious mercy, right here in the room with royalty and all.

They came up to us. I curtsied. Lord, how long had it been since I had curtsied? My old bones barely made it. Giles bowed. He did it very nicely. He'd had more practice than I, so much was obvious. The chamberlain announced the names we had given. Lady Lavender of Westfaire. Sir Giles of Sawley. It no longer mattered what people called me. Beauty. Dorothy. Catherine. Lavender. I'll be borrowing Aunt Comfrey's name next. Though I had no sure reason why, I urgently did not want this woman to know who I really was. Or what I really was.

"We are pleased to welcome you to Marvella," said the Prince. His wrinkled eyelids rose, exposing his tender soul, like a quivering oyster.

"We are greatly pleased to be so charmingly welcomed," I murmured. "We had not expected such hospitality."

"We have so few visitors," purred the Princess. "So little news of the outside world." She looked me up and down, noting the good though plain fabric of my gown-one of those I'd had made in Bristol before we left-the simplicity of my wimple and veil. I knew how I looked. Inoffensive. Her eyes cleared. I was an acceptable dinner guest and nothing to worry about. She gave Giles a quick look and dismissed him, as well. Too old, her eyes said. Not worth the effort.

I felt his hand tremble on my arm. He had caught her look, and it angered him. Well, it had angered me, as well.

We were seated near the middle of the long table, guests but not honored guests. So much the better. I would not have enjoyed conversing with the Princess. Or with the Prince. We ate a salmi of duckling, fresh fruit, roast venison, bananas (grown, so the Prince said, in the conservatory), salad, river salmon, and finally a soup of almonds and chicken and lemons. I asked my table companion to my left, an aged baron, if dinners in Marvella always ended with soup and was told that they did. "Always with something warm and liquid, to fill any holes previously unfilled, my dear." I remembered a dinner I had eaten when I was young, in Chinanga, with Don Masimiliano. Had that been any less real than this?

We drank wine. I watered mine and kicked Giles, on my right, until he watered his. My left-hand companion was watching me closely, and I murmured something about no longer having the head for wine we had had in our younger years. He was as white headed as I, so we talked about that.

"I've outlived all my generation," he mumbled. "Charme's father, Prince William, was younger than I by a couple of years, but I outlived my half brother."

I had heard his name and title, but had not made the connection. "You're His Highness's uncle," I said. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize ... "

"Nothing to realize. Uncles don't count for much. Especially half uncles. Prince William was my younger half brother. Our mother was a widow when she married Charme's grandfather, Prince Enrico. No, no," he waved the young squire away who was trying to pour more wine into his cup. "Go give it to the Prince, he needs it worse than I."

I decided to risk it. "I met the His Highness's parents. Years ago, in England."

"During the Usurpation," he nodded, putting a capital letter on it. "The usurper was my older brother, Richard. Richard and I were never in the line of succession, but Richard liked to pretend to have royal blood. Mama didn't have that. All she had was wealth she'd inherited when our father died. We were babies when Mama married Prince Enrico. Then she bore William, the heir apparent. Richard and I more or less grew up with William. He was the only proper heir, but after Prince Enrico died, Richard stirred up a bunch of malcontents and overthrew the throne.

"William and his wife and the boy fled to England. After they'd been gone a while, and after Richard started passing tax laws right and left, everyone here in Marvella realized what they'd allowed to happen, so they hanged Richard from a gibbet down in the market square and begged William to come home. He did, him and his wife and Prince Charme and the little girl. I felt very lucky to keep my neck unstretched, though everyone knew I'd told Richard he was a fool."

"Little girl?" I asked, trying to keep my voice only politely interested while my heart thudded away in a fit.

"Charme's daughter. Galantha. Beautiful little girl," he sighed. "She was about ten when William died. Charme ascended the throne, of course, and everyone was after him to get married again and produce an heir. Put it off a couple of years before he finally married Ilene. Not long after that the little girl got lost in the mountains. Eaten by beasts, they say. No one mentions her anymore, as hearing her name upsets His Highness."

"He's been married to Ilene for how long?" I asked. Giles, next to me, was listening to this conversation with great interest.

"Oh, it would be thirty-some-odd years now, wouldn't it? He was twenty or so when he came back. Around thirty-two when he ascended the throne. He must be seventy now. I'm almost ninety, which is a dreadful great age for a man."

"His wife looks very young," I said, casually, as though it didn't matter.

"Holds her looks," he agreed. "I'm told her family always has held its looks."

"A neighboring kingdom?" I suggested.

He snorted. "Marvella has no neighboring kingdoms, Lady Lavender. Except maybe Nadenada, and it's not really neighboring. We're a what-you-call-it, a holdover, a survival. Some crusader did a favor for the King of Aragon, I think it was, or maybe the King of Navarre. Whoever-it-was rewarded him by making him hereditary Prince of cowplop and sheepclip. The main road over the mountains is that way," and he waved toward the west, opposite to the direction we'd arrived from. "People used to have to hire porters to carry them down into the gorge, across the river, then up the other side. Prince William used Mama's money to build a marvelous bridge across the gorge, and now Ponte Marvella makes its living charging tolls. From pilgrims, mostly. Going down from France to Santiago." He sighed heavily. "I told Richard when he started all the fuss that if he wanted to risk his life taking over something, it should at least be something worth taking. Marvella isn't much."

I saw Ilene's eyes fixed on my aged informer, a tiny frown between her brows. He was talking too much, too intently, so I laughed with great vivacity, as though he had told me a funny story. Her glance went on past, like the course of a comet, burning ice.

We drank wine. We ate fruit and nuts. We retired to another room and played at cards for a time. The cards were from Germany and were printed, unlike the painted ones I was accustomed to in that time. The Prince enthusiastically told me how it was done, how the blocks of wood were carved and then painted with ink and pressed onto the paper. I wondered if Gutenberg was at this moment playing at games and being inspired by the unknown carver of playing cards. Printing would be invented very shortly, and one thing always led to another. I put the thought down resolutely and paid attention to my hand.

We learned a Spanish game in which players put together "bodies," that is combinations of six cards making up a head, two arms, two legs, and a torso, and then cried "Hombre" to the others as they put down the man entire. It wasn't unlike rummy, which I had played with Bill in the twentieth, so I learned it rapidly. Giles caught on very quickly, too, and I was glad to see that he had the same sense I did that it would not be wise for either of us to win anything at all from the Princess.

Christine de Pisan hadn't covered the subject of manners around royalty, but Aunt Lavender had. No one could leave until the Prince and Princess left, and they seemed determined to spend the night taking everyone's money. At last the Prince yawned, everyone stood up, and the royal couple departed. One of the earls fluttered about settling accounts. I paid what we had lost, only enough to be polite, no large amount. I said good night to the baron, my dinner companion, who was half asleep in his chair by the fire, then Giles and I went up to our rooms, where yawning servants waited our arrival and tankards of wash water steamed gently before the fires. I told the maidservant she could go on to bed, that I'd take care of myself after I had taken my cat out. She did not like to let me go alone, but I insisted, and when she had gone I put on my cloak, with Grumpkin in the pocket, and let myself out an unlocked side door.

I waited about near the stables while Grumpkin found a place that suited him. When he had finished, he went back in my pocket while we strolled about, seeing what was to be seen.

All the lights in the castle were out except in one squatty tower, which was so close to the precipice it seemed to hang over it, like a vulture perched on a branch. The tower abutted the flat roof of the castle, so I slipped on the boots-when I wasn't wearing them, I habitually kept them in the deep pocket of my cloak-and went there in one step, interested in knowing who was still up, and why.

The room opened upon the roof through a casement window which stood ajar. Inside the Princess sat at a table brushing her hair. Her maid was putting her clothes away in the press. When the maid had finished with the clothing, she poured a cup of wine for her mistress and went away, shutting the heavy door behind her. The Princess got up and bolted the door. Interesting, I thought, wondering what interruption she feared. Certainly none from Prince Charming. I had seen no indication he would be inclined to invade her privacy. He had scarcely looked at her during the evening.

After a time the Princess stood up, walked to the far side of the room, and removed a veil or hanging of some kind. I saw her hand pulling the veil away, but I could not see what it had covered.

I inched closer to the low, crenelated parapet, which was the only thing between me and the valley floor, a quite dangerous distance below. By craning my neck, I got a better view of her. She was standing naked in front of a tall mirror with wiverns carved about the frame. I had never seen a mirror that size in the fourteenth or fifteenth. I didn't know they could make flat glass that size. The Princess put her hands out, beautiful hands, then stroked them down her face, and intoned:

 

"Lord within the glass, declare;
Lord, who holds my beauty thrall:
you have made me passing fair;
am I fairest of them all?"

 

A face formed in the glass. A dark face. Not dark in the sense of color, but dark in the sense of being hidden. It did not really show itself. It merely hinted at being. Despite this, I recognized it. It was Jaybee's face. Not precisely his, but the paradigm of what his face was and meant in its totality. Seeing it, I could say, "This is the pattern from which Jaybee's face was made." When the voice came, it matched the face, full of a mocking, horrid laughter.

 

"One time you were, and then were not,
but now are fairest once again,
while she whose beauty is forgot
sleeps on among her little men.
Snow white of skin, and black of hair,
with gentle lips flushed sweetly red;
full long has she lain sleeping there,
with all believing she is dead."

 

The Princess made a gesture, a stroking of herself, breast to hip, approving herself. She tilted her head, to get a better look at the line of her throat. "Full long she sleeps," she cried in a jubilant voice. "Oh, long time, yes. And will, forever."

In the mirror the dreadful being smiled and glanced my way. I gasped. Beneath my breastbone something flared into life, aware of deadly danger. My foot slipped on the roof, making a sound. The Princess whirled, like a great hunting creature, eyes wide, ears pricked. "Boots," I whispered, "take me to my room."

I was there! I slipped the cloak beneath the bed and myself into it with Grumpkin beside me, pulling my wimple off as I snuggled down, so my white old locks would show. I let the candle burn so she could see me there plainly. I shut my eyes, knowing she would come. Oh, yes, she would come down from her tower to see who had been spying on her. And she would come faster than any ordinary old woman could have come down all those stairs, thinking to find my room empty and me on the way ...

She was quick! The door opened. Someone peered in. I turned, as though sleepily, saying, "Whaa?"

The door closed, and she was gone. She believed someone had been outside her room, but she didn't know who. Down the hall, I heard her open Giles's door. And then close it. He really was asleep. I let time pass, scarcely breathing, pretending sleep. She might be watching. She might be hovering outside my window, like an owl. The candle burned to a smoky stub and guttered out.

Would she let it go at that? Would she ask that thing in the mirror who'd been spying on her?

More important, could it tell her?

"Fenoderee," I whispered, "I need a friend."

He slipped into bed beside me, yawning. "I thought you'd never ask," he said. His sickle rattled upon the floor. "Oh, you do need a friend, Beauty. Nastiness here. And you've got old Carabosse half sick with worry."

"Worse than mere worry," said a voice on the other side. Puck.

"What's going on here?" I said. "Who is Ilene?"

"A witch," said Puck, matter-of-factly. "She signed one of the usual witch contracts with the Dark Lord, her soul and body in return for being young and beautiful for a few hundred years. Of course, he threw a trick into it. He always does."

"A trick?"

Fenoderee nodded; I could feel his head going up and down on the pillow. "Ilene remains beautiful only so long as there is no other female in the kingdom as beautiful as she. She started out in quite a large kingdom, had to dispose of quite a lot of pretty girls, and the word got around. They came after her with hayforks and torches, the Transylvanian kind you use on monsters, you know? So she moved to a smaller kingdom, and then one smaller yet. Here in Marvella, there weren't all that many beauties to start with, and the last one she had to do away with was Galantha."

"Galantha?" I asked.

"Galantha. That little springtime flower, the white one that droops its head."

"Snowdrop?"

"That one, yes."

What a really odd name for a child! Hadn't one fairy tale been enough? Of course, that bit with the mirror had been a dead giveaway. Magic collects magic, Carabosse had said. "My granddaughter?" I asked, trying to disbelieve but not succeeding one whit.

"That's right," said Fenoderee. "Your granddaughter."

"Who isn't really dead!"

"No. Ilene tried, but she couldn't kill Snowdrop. She sent a huntsman to kill her, and he couldn't. She tried a cursed lace, then a poisoned comb, and that didn't work. Snowdrop is one-eighth fairy, after all. Witches can't be allowed to go around killing off fairies, even part ones. No, though Ilene tried several times to get Snow taken care of, everything failed except the apple."

"The apple?" I started to ask. There was a sound outside in the corridor, and my bed was suddenly empty of anyone but me and Grumpkin. The door opened, and I heard Giles whispering to me.

"Beauty? Catherine? Lavender? Are you all right?"

He came in and crouched on the bed beside me. We whispered together as I told him part of what I had seen. It took very little talk between us to decide this place was dangerous and that we wanted to be elsewhere. The Dark Lord had seen me, or sensed me, or at least caught a glimpse of me, so much was clear. What I wasn't sure of was what else he'd seen. In that moment the thing had flared up within me, and I'd felt like a lantern, throwing light in all directions. Had the thing in the mirror seen that?

"How did you get up there?" Giles asked me wonderingly, not waiting for an answer. "I'm not sure we can get out. There's a guard asleep downstairs in the hall, and another one walking up and down outside in the courtyard. And if she has some kind of captive spirit in that mirror ... "

I hadn't told him what was really in the mirror, but I was quite sure it wasn't captive.

"We'll get out," I said grimly. "As far as the stables, anyhow."

I had Giles fetch his clothing from his room. I fetched mine out of the press. I put on the boots, held Giles tightly around the waist, with our baggage tied helter skelter and Grumpkin squashed between us, and said, "Boots, take us to the stables."

And there we were, standing beside the horses, an arrival which startled the horses almost as much as it startled Giles. I told him there was no time to explain, and he subsided unwillingly, full of questions we had no time for. Still, he had his wits about him sufficiently to suggest that we tie some sacks around the horses' feet, so their hooves wouldn't make a noise on the cobbles. We waited until the guard moved around the corner, then made a dash for it. Once we were past the courtyard (the gate wasn't even shut and there was no drawbridge), the road was mostly soft dust. We went down through the dark village, silent as mice, then up the other side. When we got to the top of a long rise, we saw a little campfire, and there was Eskavaria sitting beside it, waiting for us.

"Have you been here all along?" I asked.

"Thought you might not stay very long," he said. "Thought I'd take you along to spend the night with my brothers and me."

He wouldn't have thought of that on his own. Who had told him to stay? Puck? Still running errands for Carabosse? I didn't ask.

He brought our packhorses out of the shadows, mounted his own, and we went along through the starlight, with him humming a little song and the water making an accompaniment to it. We wove through rocks and trees. Once he got down and moved a log behind us, hiding the way. We came to the top of a long slope and could see below us the bulk of a house with windows faintly outlined in firelight.

Eskavaria looked up at the stars. "Midnight," he said. "Time we get under cover."

"What happens at midnight?" Giles asked.

"If she knows you're gone, she may come looking for you then," the little man answered, and we trotted down the long slope toward the house beneath the trees. A stable stood next to it, with a door connecting the two. We were beneath the stable roof when we heard the scream from above, a long, shrill cry that was not an owl.

Giles started to go out and look. Eskavaria grabbed his arm and held him. "No," he said. "Never look up when you hear that cry, or she may see you. Faces show up in the dark more than hair or hats do." Then he led us through the door.

It was a simple house, though larger than it had looked from outside, with one big room downstairs and a large open loft. The brothers, all six of them, were asleep up there. None of them were any bigger than Eskavaria. I could tell from the size of the beds. If not dwarves, they were not far from it. I thought of the "little men" the Dark One had mentioned, and knew these were they.

"You know where my granddaughter is," I challenged him.

"I know where someone is. How can I be sure she is your granddaughter?" he challenged me in return.

I couldn't think of an answer. I was very tired. I hurt all over, and I started to cry. Once started, I couldn't stop.

Giles shouted angrily, "Now see what you've done. Damn it, Esky, she's tired! She's come all this way to find her granddaughter, and you say a thing like that!"

This woke up the family, and they all came down, rubbing their eyes and asking what was going on. Among themselves they spoke the other language, Euskara. Evidently other people call them Basques, but they call themselves the Euskaldunak, which gives you a hint as to what the language sounds like. Except for an occasional word that sounded rather Latinish, I couldn't understand any of it, though the tone of the conversation was decidedly argumentative. There was a great deal of pointing up and making the horn sign and staring at us with a mixture of intense curiosity and obvious distrust.

I don't think there was ten year's difference in age from Esky, the youngest, to the oldest. The older ones had beards, the older the longer. Evidently they never trimmed them. The younger three or four were clean shaven. Esky told us all their names, and I promptly forgot them. Couldn't pronounce them, in any case. Not Sneezy. Not Grumpy. My eyes were falling shut. Next thing I knew, they were spreading some quilts on the floor and I was being invited to lie down and sleep.

I didn't wait for a second invitation.

When I woke, hours and hours later, it was full daylight and the house was empty. The door was open. I could hear horses champing away in the stables and the buzz of flies. Otherwise, silence.

I sat up and fumbled with my hair. Giles must have heard me, for he came in from outside, bringing me a cup of something warm. Broth, I finally decided. With some kind of very fine grain cooked in it. Almost like grass seed. I leaned back against a nearby bench and drank it. Or chewed it. It needed salt.

Giles suggested, very sweetly, that since we had a few moments to ourselves, I explain to him what was going on. I did so, mostly. I told him my mother was a fairy, without dwelling on what that made me, and I said she'd given me certain fairy gifts. I said an inimical force was sort of following me around. I didn't mention Jaybee. I couldn't bear to tell him about Jaybee. In Giles's mind, I was Beauty and I was Catherine, both at once, and they were not necessarily the same person. He could accept that Elly had been Edward's child, and Galantha was somehow my granddaughter, without giving up his belief that his first love, Beauty, still virgin and pure, was asleep at Westfaire. I was her, and I wasn't her, so to speak. He had no trouble believing Galantha had been wickedly enchanted by a witch. He believed in witches. In those times, everyone believed in witches.

"I've been to see her," Giles said, looking at his feet.

"Her?"

"Your grandchild. Galantha."

I started to get up. He pushed me back, very gently. "She looks almost like she's asleep, Beauty. Very pale, but not ... you know, not rotted or anything. They've put her in a kind of case, so nothing will chew on her. I don't think she's dead."

Giles had never seen Disney. This time I did get up.

"I want to see for myself," I said, pulling the pins out of my hair and trying to find my comb. Giles found it for me and helped me braid up my white locks. When I had the wimple pinned tightly, my veil on and my kirtle smoothed out, he led the way outside.

We went up a gentle hill, not the one we had come down the night before, and through a bit of forest, down a much used path, and into the gaping entrance of a mine. She was lying well back inside, in an area lit by torches. The case looked more like a reliquary than anything else, bits of rock crystal and faceted gems pieced together with gold to make a domed lid in a design of flowers and leaves. The leaves were emeralds, I thought. Or maybe jade. Through the flatter, clearer bits I could see her, only a child, twelve or thirteen, perhaps. She was very beautiful, rather like the child Elizabeth Taylor, in that horse movie they always showed late at night on TV in the 1990s. She was incorruptible, as saints' bodies are supposed to be. I thought of Giles and my conversation about mice and shrouds and laughed at myself.

Then I sat down beside the case and let some tears run, not many. After a while, Esky and one of his brothers came in and asked if I'd like the case opened. I said yes, and they unbuckled it at one side and laid the top back. She lay on a satin mattress, with a satin coverlet over her, her hands folded on her breast. She was dressed very simply, in a full white shift with puffy sleeves and a kind of laced bodice over it. Disney had got that part right.

The other brothers came from deeper in the mine, setting their tools down to one side and seating themselves on chair sized stones, one for each of them. From the wear on those stones, I could tell they had sat there like this time and again for years.

Giles took a deep breath. "She looks just like you," he said to me. "When I first saw you."

I looked at the child, considering. She looked something like Elly and something like her father, but a good deal like me. As though I'd passed on my own looks, skipping a generation. Her hair was black, of course, and mine had been gold, but otherwise, we looked much the same.

I nodded. Esky reached out to touch the bones of my cheeks and jaw and nodded. "I see it," he said.

He could see more than I, then, but his brothers all nodded, telling each other how much the child resembled me. The resemblance, whether fancied or real, seemed to allay their suspicions.

"How?" I asked, motioning at them, her, everything, meaning "How did it happen?"

Esky sighed. "One day we heard this screaming noise, so we went to see what it was. This big huntsman was down on his knees, crying. He said Princess Ilene had told him she'd kill him unless he took this little girl into the woods and murdered her. He couldn't do it. He said he was going to kill a deer and take its heart back instead. Then he went off and left the child behind. It was getting dark. Wolves was howling. We couldn't leave her there. We took her along home. She was a sweet, pretty girl. Not much sense, but sweet." He wiped his face with his hand, sighing.

"Well, some time went by. We got used to having her around. At first she couldn't do nothing useful. We taught her. Cookery a little. Gardening a little. If I tell the truth, Lady Catherine, all of us lusted after her even though she was just a child. With all of us living here, we agreed we'd behave decent. We may be hermits, so to speak. We may not be very civilized, but our ma raised us to be decent folk. Right then, we should have took her over the mountains into Spain. Or took her back to Lourdes, we could have did that. Truth is, none of us travels much, except me, and I didn't want her to go. She was so pretty ... "

He rose and went out of the cave. The brothers muttered among themselves, in their own language. No one said anything I could understand. After a time, Esky came back, his face wet.

"So one day we came home and seen her lying there on the floor. We picked her up and seen her bodice was laced up tight. It was a new lace."

One of the brothers interrupted, and Eskavaria nodded to him.

"That's right, a silk lace, one we hadn't seen before. So we unlaced her, and she caught her breath, all of a sudden. We asked her what happened. She told us a peddler woman come by. Well, we knew then what happened. The witch knew she was here."

The little men nodded, agreeing this is the way it had been.

"Gaily wasn't real quick," Esky went on. "All of us knew that. Even so, we thought since it happened once, she'd know next time. We told her no more peddler women ... "

Another interruption, discussion, nodding of heads.

Eskavaria nodded. "That's right. No more visitors, no one. We said stay in the house until we come home. We said then we'd walk with her if she wanted to pick flowers or something.

"Well, wasn't a whole week passed before we come home and there she is again. All limp on the floor. We thought she was dead. We picked her up, and then a comb fell out of her hair, and she woke up. It was another peddler woman. Talked her way around the child, like the first time.

"So we knew we couldn't trust her alone. Right then we should have took her over the mountains, fast. We didn't do that. We decided that one of us would stay with her, to protect her. Then that didn't seem decent, so we said two would stay, to keep an eye on each other along with her. And that went along for quite a long while ... "

He turned to his brothers and asked them a question in their own language. They argued for a moment, then responded. "Almost a year," he went on. "It was almost a year. Then one day Euskaby found a big gem deposit back in the mine with a rock in front of it. Big rock. All of us had to move it. Maybe an hour we left her, but when we got back she was on the floor again. This time was no lace, no comb. We undressed her, took everything off, looked at everything, put everything back. We combed her hair. We cleaned her fingernails and toenails. We looked in her mouth, in her nose and ears. Nothing."

"The witch said it was an apple," I said. "I overheard her." It hadn't been the witch who had said it, but I wasn't about to explain about Fenoderee and Puck.

"If it was an apple, it's inside her belly," said Esky. "There's no way to get it out of her with her living."

And he was perfectly right, of course, in the fifteenth. In the twentieth, it would be minor surgery. But if I took her to the twentieth, I might not be able to get back. Or, if I got back, too much time might have passed, and I might never see Giles again. I sighed and bit my lip and decided not to decide, not just yet.

"We're still within the borders of Ponte Marvella, right?" I asked.

They talked it over and decided that we probably were right on the border, not really in, not really out.

"Then we need to get her out," I said. "Once we're outside Marvella, maybe the witch won't bother us, and we can decide what to do. I don't think my granddaughter's dead. Not really. Perhaps there's a way to remove the enchantment." In the story it was a prince's kiss, wasn't it? Or was that only my own story? Or was it Disney? I simply couldn't remember!

More argument. They weren't sure they believed me. I wasn't sure it was true. Esky waved his hands and shouted. Eventually they agreed. Two or three of them were crying. One thing they did agree upon. Daytime was the time to move. Nights were dangerous.

So we started out. Galantha's coffin was bound about with ropes and slung between the two packhorses. Our supplies went on Esky's horse. All seven of the little men came along, to be sure we got out safely, Esky said, but I think they simply were unwilling to let her go. She had become something more to them than a sleeping little girl. They decided the safest thing to do was to go down the south side of the mountains into Spain, since we were nearest the southern border of Marvella. Also, we had to avoid the toll bridge the baron had told me about. If the Princess wanted to stop our leaving, that bridge would be watched.

The idea was good, but the trails were simply not wide enough for the two horses with the coffin between. This became obvious very quickly, and a shouting match broke out among the little men. Two of them kept pointing to the ropes and screaming at two others. I could read their faces if not their words. "You didn't tie it right. It's all your fault." And the others: "You don't know a damned thing about knots. What do you mean it wasn't tied right?" It went on far too long, and Giles stopped it by bellowing at them, dismounting, untying the coffin, opening it, wrapping the girl in the satin coverlet, and taking her up in his arms. She was as stiff as an image carved from wood. In a way that was a relief. I had worried myself over what the little men might have been doing with her in that mine, all those years. They had done nothing, obviously, that they could not have done as well with an image carved from stone.

The little men muttered at Giles's picking her up, but decided to allow it. Still, they insisted on bringing the coffin along, the bottom and top tied separately onto the backs of two of the horses. It had been made with love, care, and endless hours of labor. The gems and gold alone were worth a fortune, not to speak of the workmanship. It was their gift to their Snowdrop, and they weren't going to abandon it. I shook my head at Giles, and he subsided with a growl.

After a time, we worked out a processional order that worked fairly well. Esky went first with one of his brothers, leading one packhorse, then Giles, then me, then the horses with the coffin led by two brothers, then the other little men coming along single file. We went up for a time, then abruptly down. Giles asked Esky where we were going.

The little man was breathing hard. "There's a place we can get across the gorge and onto the road to Santiago," he said.

Giles looked at me and shrugged. It looked like we were going to St. James's shrine whether we wanted to or not. I wondered if we would run into Margery Kempe. After that, I tried not to wonder anything or think anything except about hanging on. Riding a horse uphill is difficult. Riding a horse downhill is exhausting.

Night came. The little men went off in all directions, looking for a camp site, finding one at last under an overhanging ledge of stone where we could not be seen from the sky. I thought perhaps they were being overcareful. We must have come far from Marvella by this time. Then, late in the darkness, I was awakened by the same cry we had heard the night before. Around me I could hear indrawn breaths, silence. The horses stopped munching outside among the trees. After a time the cry came again, far away to the north, echoed by the howling of wolves. The little men began to breathe once more.

"What was it?" I asked Eskavaria.

"Night lammergeier," he said, not meeting my eyes. The lammergeier are huge vultures of the Pyranees, sometimes called "bone-breakers" because of their habit of dropping large bones from great heights to shatter them and get at the marrow. Ordinarily, I believe, they do not fly at night. I thought it wisest not to pursue the matter.

Midmorning, this morning, we came to the road to Santiago. The road is wide enough that the coffin can be slung between two horses once more. My granddaughter is in it. Eskavaria is leading the packhorse. His brothers have faded back amongst the trees, tears running down their faces. A traveler we met coming up from Spain tells us today is the fifteenth of August. We have time yet to get to Compostela before fall.

ST. HELENA'S DAY, AUGUST, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417

We have traveled for several days on the downward road, very slowly because of the coffin, seeing no living things except an occasional herd of ibex, a few skulking foxes, or the ubiquitous marmots. Then, this morning, shortly after we began our journey for the day, we came upon a large party of noble men and women together with their servants, all camped among their wagons beside the road. It appeared they might have spare mounts, and Giles went to see if he could purchase a packhorse to carry the supplies carried by Esky's mount. Esky had been walking, and it had slowed our progress somewhat.

Several of the young men came over to us where we waited, looking us over in an insolent manner, until they saw the coffin itself. Then they became quiet. One of them, a boy scarcely fourteen or fifteen years old, pressed his face to one of the transparent bits of crystal and peered within. I thought it best, since he was surrounded by his fellows, not to antagonize him or cause any notice by using enchantment. I had seen similar gangs of young men, though not noble young men, in Bayonne, where they were said to roam the streets at night, seeking unprotected young women they might rape and ruin. It was a kind of game with them, and the insolence of these young nobles seemed also a game: cockiness pushed to its limits.

The coffin-peering youngster stood up, very arrogantly, and asked me who she was.

"My granddaughter, child," I said, unthinking.

One of the other young men started toward me, angrily, but another courtier, a very handsome, slightly older young man, put out his hand and said softly, "The young man who addressed you is Prince Edward. Fourth son of King Zot of Nadenada."

I bowed, as best I could from atop my little horse. "Your Highness," I said to the arrogant lad. The soft-spoken courtier regarded the prince with a worried expression.

"And you are, sir?" I asked the pleasant-voiced courtier.

"Vincent," he told me with a smile, taking his eyes from his master for only a moment. "Vincent d'Escriban."

Giles returned from the encampment shaking his head. No horse for sale. Well, it had been worth the trial.

I bowed again. "We must depart," I said. "It is a long journey to Compostela."

"Is she dead?" the prince asked, taking hold of my horse's bridle to prevent my moving.

"We think not," I said. "She may be under an enchantment."

The young man looked at Vincent and said, "I want her."

Vincent and I exchanged uncertain glances.

"I want her," the boy repeated. "Buy her for me."

"She is a person," I explained softly. "Not a toy. Not a mannequin. She is not something one can buy."

"Buy her for me," screamed the prince, growing very red in the face.

Vincent shrugged an apology toward me and moved to take the young prince in hand by distracting him from his madness. Esky took the right-hand coffin horse by the reins and led him purposefully onto the road. Giles and I followed, on our horses. The prince broke away from his keeper, dashed into the road and threw himself in front of the coffin horses. One horse stumbled. The rope came loose. The other horse bolted. The coffin fell into the road. The lid bounced off. My granddaughter's body rolled out of it into the road and lay there, coughing.

Beside her in the dust lay a piece of apple.

The mad young prince sat up, looked at my granddaughter with great satisfaction, then smiled. "Buy her for me," he said again. "I want to marry her."

I had slipped off my horse and then had been knocked down in all the confusion. Giles was busy picking me up and seeing that nothing was broken. Eskavaria was cuddling Snowdrop and crying. Vincent was remonstrating with the mad young prince. Persons of great self-importance arrived from across the road to see what all the fuss was about and succeeded in making an even larger one. Questions were shouted at me, which I was too confused to answer.

We are now camped at the edge of the forest, being waited upon by the servants of King Zot of Nadenada while the mad young prince and my granddaughter play at shuttlecocks in the road.

"Who is she?" King Zot himself asked me, having been introduced through Giles and Vincent.

His tone was peremptory. I didn't like it.

"She is the daughter of the hereditary Prince of Marvella and his former wife, Elladine, who was the daughter of Lord Edward of Wellingford and granddaughter of the Duke of Monfort and Westfaire," I said with chill hauteur.

"Oh well, that's all right then," he said, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. "Related to you?"

"My granddaughter."

"Ah," he said, scratching his nose. His manner changed to one of respect. "How old would you say she is?"

"I would say she is ... " And I paused, wondering for a moment how old she really is. She had been born quite some time ago. "I would say she is twelve or thirteen," I said. "She spent some time under an enchantment, but she did not age during that time."

"Virgin, is she?"

I snorted. "Of course." Though I wouldn't have put it past Esky or one of his brothers to have tried.

"Ah," he said again, and then sat down, leaned forward, and began to tell me about his kingdom.

Nadenada, it seems, is a pocket realm just over the mountains toward France. It is larger than Marvella, but not by much.

The mad young prince is a pocket prince, not the heir, but still a prince, and at fourteen it is time he was married. So said King Zot.

"Undoubtedly you will think of alliances when you consider a wife for him," I said stiffly.

He stared gloomily at the dust between his feet, drawing circles in it with an ornamental dagger. "Not much of that kind of thing in Nadenada," he said, summoning Vincent with one hand. He sent the young man for wine and settled himself more comfortably on the chair he had brought over from his camp. Then he drew more circles. "France wouldn't care, far too big and far away. England wouldn't care, they've enough to worry about warring with France. Navarre wouldn't care, nor Aragon; everything is religion with them, and we're not that observant in Nadenada. And the same applies to Castile, come to that."

"Then you're not concerned with alliances."

"Not really, no."

"Some affair of state, perhaps, which could be helped along by a judicious match?"

"Haven't any affairs of state, either. There was the matter of the wool tax, but that's been decided." He gloomed into his linked fingers. "Shepherds said they'd go over the mountains into Spain, so we relieved them of it. Can't have all one's shepherds absconding to Spain."

"It wouldn't look well," I agreed. "No other affairs of state?"

"None I can think of," he said.

"The prince ... " (I'd almost said "the mad prince," catching myself just in time). "The prince will want a large dowry, undoubtedly."

"Not ... not really large, " the King murmured, giving me a straight look. "It's not as though he were in the succession, you understand."

"An elder brother?"

"Three elder brothers."

"Things can happen," I murmured.

"Yes," he said in a plaintive voice. "They can. Put it, then, that he's not likely to be in line for the throne."

"So he wouldn't need a very large dowry."

"Not very large."

I considered this. "Did you happen to notice the ... ah ... case that my granddaughter was traveling in? Before your son dumped her out into the road."

"I had noticed that, yes. Brass, is it? And crystal?"

"Gold," I said. "And gems."

"Ah," he said again. "One wouldn't have known."

I nodded in agreement. One really wouldn't have known. If one hadn't met Esky's brothers, one wouldn't even have thought it likely. I said, "Of course, your ... fourth son is very young. Perhaps too young to think of marriage."

The King scratched his head again and sweated gently into his beard. "Let me be frank," he said. "Since the boy became a man, which happened just a year ago, he has been quite ... quite ... "

"Urgent?" I suggested.

"Urgent," he agreed. "We are having some trouble keeping maidservants at the castle. His mother and I are agreed it is time he was married."

We parted, each to think about that. Vincent came to summon the mad young prince to lunch. Snowdrop, thus deserted, came to sit by me in the shade.

"Have you been having fun?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," she said. "It's so nice."

"What about the young man?"

"He's so nice," she replied with a happy expression. I offered her some cakes which the King had brought with him, and she took one, eating it greedily. I was reminded of her mother.

"Tell me, Snow," I asked. "Why did you let the witch poison you with that apple when the little men had told you not to let her in?"

She gazed at me wonderingly, her little brow furrowing with the attempt at thought.

"Because I was hungry and it looked so nice."

Her father, Prince Charming, was never long in the brains department, either.

ST. FRANCIS'S DAY, OCTOBER, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417

Giles and I are here in Nadenada for the wedding. We are honored guests. Since the Death ravaged all of Europe, no one wonders if fathers and mothers aren't present at weddings. A grandmother does quite well enough, even one so obviously old as I. The Queen even offered her dressmaker in order that I might be suitably clad for the occasion. Prince Charme and Princess Ilene have been invited to the nuptials. I mentioned to the Prime Minister of this place that Ilene was probably responsible for the spell which had been laid on Snowdrop. He talked with the archbishop, and formal charges of witchcraft are being considered. As a princess, she is not subject to the laws of a neighboring kingdom, but the archbishop believes the Church has authority to examine her even if civil authority cannot. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't like Ilene, but then I don't much like heresy trials, either, and I certainly don't like anything which might involve Ilene's patron in the mirror. The archbishop has sent someone posthaste both to Avignon and Rome to attempt to get a ruling from one or more of the popes on the matter. I can't remember whether there are three popes at the moment or only two.

If I were wise, and if I had the conviction wisdom should lend me, I would seize Snow up and take her somewhere away from this pathological child she is going to marry. And yet, one asks, where? Where does one take a gloriously beautiful twelve-year-old girl who has not two tiny brains to rub together to make even one wee warm idea in her head? And when one gets her there, what does one do with her? No monastery would take her. No, that's not true, given a sufficient dowry some monastery would, but she'd be miserable there. Marriage is her only hope. And yet ...

Well. Beauty does not breed true. I said that before, when Elly died. Beauty exists in all ages, but it does not necessarily breed true. Mixed with dross, it becomes dross. I am only her grandmother, after all. I am not God, who presumably made her as she is for some reason!

ALL HALLOW'S EVE

Tomorrow is the wedding. Tonight I was sitting alone in my warm, tapestry-hung room, with my cat on the bed and Giles next door, remembering Mama. I saw her last on Samhain Eve, so long ago, when Thomas the Rhymer got loose from Faery. I wondered if she would care that her great-granddaughter was being married.

"Fenoderee," I whispered.

And he was there, sitting on the window sill, looking out at the night. Puck lounged against the bed, chewing at a fingernail. Call one, get both.

"I was thinking about Mama," I said.

"Ah," said Puck. "Well, she's in Faery, looking well."

I tried to think of something to ask about her, but I couldn't. Instead, I wondered, "Was it the Dark Lord I saw in the witch's glass?"

"It was," said Fenoderee.

"Did he see me?"

"Carabosse thinks he may have. Israfel thinks he did, also. They're both frightened for you, though they say it was probably going to happen, sooner or later. Once you went back to the twentieth, it showed up in the Pool that he would."

Puck added, "They think the Dark Lord will come looking for you, manipulating things. Be careful, Beauty."

"How much do you know about ... "I started to ask, then shut my mouth, remembering they didn't know.

"About your burden?" Puck asked. "We've known since almost the beginning. It's not her fault, but old Clockwork Carabosse is one of the Sidhe, after all. She can't get out of the habit of thinking of us Bogles as slightly subnormal. She thinks we don't notice what's going on under our noses."

Fenoderee said, "I don't know what made her think we wouldn't see what she was up to. She and Israfel did it right there in front of us."

I sighed. "I'm getting old, you know. I won't last too much longer. They'd better start thinking of somewhere else to hide it."

Puck nodded deliberately. "They're cogitating, looking in the Pool, thinking deep thoughts, the way they do."

"And I'm still just supposed to go along, is that it?" I was surprised to find myself still capable of a little anger!

"For now," said Fenoderee. "Is that why you called?"

I shook my head. "No, it was just I was thinking about Mama. I was thinking of going to Faery to say hello, but when I returned here, wouldn't a lot of time have passed."

Puck nodded. "Oh, yes. No way around that. Your mortal part ages whenever you travel back and forth by magic."

I wanted to see her, but I couldn't risk that. If I died before Carabosse took away my burden, it might be lost forever. Besides, Giles and I couldn't look forward to that much time together. Nor Grumpkin, either. "Could you take a message for me?"

He smiled.

"Tell her ... I love her," I said.

I think I do. Despite what she is and how she feels, I think I do. In my long life there have been few enough people, mortal or Faery, for me to love.

ALL HALLOWS NIGHT

Well, we have had a wedding. There was the mad young prince, all dressed up in taffeta and furs with a plumed cap, looking very handsome, and there was Galantha, Snowdrop, in silk and velvet, both of them standing outside the church door, exchanging their pledges. I had hired a local goldsmith to break up the coffin and melt down the gold into nice little ingots. That gave me a goodly sum for her dowry, and the King settled a house and land on his son. They have enough to live on; neither of them is bright enough to get into serious trouble; and I laid a happiness spell on them as a gift. It was the least I could do. The King is quite a jolly fellow, several decades younger than I, but gallant and well-spoken. He says to call him Zot, and that he'll send word to me in England how the children get along. He flirts with me and tells me I don't look a day over eighty.

After the pledging was done and the rings exchanged and the papers signed, we went into the church and had the nuptial mass. And after that was done, we went to the feast, and there was Princess Ilene of Marvella. I'm not sure whether she knew who the bride was. I'm not sure the invitation mentioned the bride's name. If it did, she may have assumed it was someone else by the same name, or that Snow would have aged during the thirty years she'd been asleep, or something. At any rate, when Princess Ilene saw Snow, her eyes bulged. I've never seen that actually happen before, but it happened this time. Ilene was standing beside me at the time, her eyes bulged, and then something quite dreadful happened to her face. It sagged, melted, and began to fall off the skull. She raised her hands, just as she had when invoking the presence in the mirror, and they were all bones. Well, she'd said the Dark Lord held her beauty in thrall, and she'd been safe so long as no one around was prettier than she. However, Snow certainly was prettier and it seemed the Dark One was ending his contract and taking Princess Ilene for his own.

I was the only one who saw what was happening. Ilene crumpled to the floor, very slowly. I'd brought my cloak to the banquet with me, folded over my arm, thinking I might want to escape if things got dull. I spread it like a fishing net, to hide what was left of the Princess. "Fenoderee," I whispered, and there he was. "Take it away," I said. "And put the cloak back under my bed upstairs."

He was gone only for an instant. Then he was back. "Where did you put her?" I whispered.

"Under the church with the other old bones," he whispered back, then made a face at me and departed. Faery folk aren't very respectful, sometimes. That was consecrated ground!

Then I caught myself and realized that was merely another way of saying "magical ground." She could lie there as well as anywhere.

A few moments later, Prince Charming, the hereditary Prince of Marvella came wandering toward me with Snow on his arm and a silly smile on his sweet old face. He was looking for his wife to tell her he'd found his long-lost daughter, but Princess Ilene was nowhere to be found. I helped them look for a while, until I got tired. Then I came up here to bed.

Giles brought me a cup of wine and asked where we would go now.

"Home," I told him. Meaning Westfaire. Or, at least, somewhere near there. I long for home.

NOVEMBER

King Zot of Nadenada gave us an escort to Bayonne. There we found it simple to join a group of travelers who were seeking passage to England. Good weather held. A merchantman presented itself in due course. Five days north, we landed once more at Bristol and found a carriage we could hire to take us to Sawley, where, after inquiries, I found the man who claimed to own Wellingford (though I much doubt his claim would stand a legal test). I paid him a few years' rent on the Dower House.

And in that house we have come to rest, Giles and I, keeping our old bones busy hiring people to refurbish the place and manage the farm land around it, and finding half a dozen women to keep it clean. It is not a wreck, not like some places in the countryside, but it is certainly dilapidated. I converted gems back to cash, and cash into investments with a certain House of Levi in England. This time, just in case I decide to go away and come back in five hundred years, the money is to be paid to whoever knows a few code words. I've had enough of darting about planting forged documents.

SPRING 1418

Winter came and went. Despite the cold, it has been the happiest time of my life. Strange to say that with youth gone and all the pains of age very much with me, but it is true. Giles is a loving, dear companion, a sweet and kindly friend.

A few days ago I decided I wanted to see Westfaire. I told Giles just enough for him to help me, and we went through the water gate together, floating on pigs' bladders, for neither of us is strong enough to push through that deep water. Inside it is just as I left it. We climbed slowly up to the tower, me holding the cloak, Giles clutching the boots to keep us from falling asleep. As we climbed, he paused often to catch his breath. He was not this weak when we were searching for Snowdrop. It must be a very recent thing.

Beloved is still there in the tower, still lovely, still sleeping.

"How long?" Giles wanted to know, reaching out to touch her face. "How long will you sleep?"

"You." Not "she." Oh, Giles. Giles.

Well, according to Joyeause, she will sleep thirty more years, until kissed by a handsome prince, though, according to Carabosse, that wasn't the real curse at all. Supposing that both of them are right (and I do not take Aunt Joyeause so lightly as old Carabosse does), at the end of a hundred years, someone may be able to take Beloved out of Westfaire and kiss her awake. If I am to see that event, I must live to be one hundred and sixteen years old. Looking at myself in the glass, I don't think I'll make it. Still, if and when that day comes, Beloved will know it was all worth it, being my friend. She'll have the best of it then. ;

I wrote her a note. "Beloved, you are Beauty. And Beauty is gone, long ago. Live her life as well as she would have lived it, or even better." ?

As I turned toward the stair, I saw my mysterious thing, still sitting upon the chest. It's a clock, of course. One of Carabosse's clocks. The hand has moved to half past fifteen. It does not measure hours but centuries. It ends, as the world will end, with the twenty-second. I leaned close and listened to the sound. The faint ticking. The tiny crepitation of time moving past. On the face of the clock is the word "Carabosse," entwined with the numbered centuries. She cursed me. But she left me this gift. Sometimes I wish it was all she had left me.

It was easier climbing down. When we got back to the lake shore, we were thoroughly chilled through. Such a stupid thing to do at our age!

LATER

Giles is very ill. I know what he has. He has pneumonia. I could get to the twentieth in an instant, I could steal penicillin, I could be back before he knows I am gone. Maybe. I don't know if I could. I could try!

I told him that. His being sick is all my fault. He would be all right if I hadn't dragged him through the water and up that tower. He must let me help him.

But he won't. He shook his head at me, smiling. "I saw you sleeping in that tower, just the way you were. If I die, let me die remembering that, sweet girl. I want you here, not off somewhere with your boots."

"Giles, we could have years, yet."

"Don't want years that badly," he whispered to me. "I've had years. More years alone than I ever wanted. Don't leave me alone now. I'm tired. It's enough."

He went off to sleep.

Oh, God in Heaven, I could not let him go. I wept and screamed and threw myself about, while he went on sleeping, more deeply, more deeply.

It was that gave me the idea. I called Puck and Fenoderee and put on the boots, and we held him while all of us went, holding onto him we went, through the thorns, through the roses, into Westfaire. Oh, I could have used the boots anytime. So foolish. So stupid. I let my love go through that cold water when we could have used the boots. If they would go through time, what were a few thorns!

I put him in Aunt Lav's bed. I took the boots away. He fell even more deeply asleep. He slept, as all in Westfaire sleep. He will not die. Nothing in Westfaire can die. I know it! That was the curse Carabosse put upon Westfaire. Sleep! Not for a hundred years, but forever! It has to be. It's the only thing that makes sense of everything that's happened!

I asked Puck if I was right, and he nodded, shuffling his toes in the dust as though embarrassed. I asked him why, and he said he didn't know.

26

JUNE 1418, SOME SAINT'S DAY OR OTHER

With Giles gone from me, nothing seems worth it, somehow. Not that we were recent lovers, in a physical sense. All that sort of thing leaves you. You remember it, but your body doesn't urge you toward it. Your body wants comfort and affection and the sweetness of companionship. We weren't lonely, not so long as we were together, but now I am. I go to Westfaire often and sit there, talking to him as he sleeps. Sometimes I pretend he answers me.

It seems to me his breathing is easier. Is he healing? While he sleeps? It would be so easy to summon him up, not really him, you understand, but an enchantment of him. But I don't. I won't. It wouldn't be fair to him. It would be like Chinanga, all a dream, my creation, not really him at all. An enchantment Giles would be incapable of surprising me. He who always surprised me.

It was unfair of him to go before me. I believe I will probably live quite some time yet. Despite all the aches and pains, my heart sounds steady and strong and I breathe easily. I may have years yet to get through.

 

When I was a child, my legs used to hurt often. Aunt Terror, I think it was she, used to say it was growing pains. I have the same pain now. Perhaps now they are ungrowing pains. Whenever the pain wakes me in the night, I think of going back to Faery where I don't feel pain.

I called Fenoderee a day or so ago, and he didn't come. He always came before when I called. What's going on in Faery?

I need to talk to Carabosse. What's she going to do with this thing inside me? I would like to see Mama, too, to tell her how sorry I am for what happened to her. Besides, in Faery, I would at least look and feel young.

Remembering the condition I was in when I returned last time, I'll need to make some provision for staying healthy and clean. Going to Faery will do no good if my human flesh is starved while I'm there. I'll have to figure something out.

 

The solution to staying healthy and clean in Faery is to come out of it every now and then, into the mortal world, and eat, bathe, and reclothe myself. I have hired a woman from the nearby village to go each evening to the kitchen of the ruined manor of Wellingford, to set out food and drink, to build a fire, and to heat water over it. Though the rest of the manor is dilapidated, the kitchen is whole and the roof over it is in good repair. The woman's name is Odile Kent.

Of course, she wants to know why. I have told her it was a promise I had made my husband before he died. A kind of memorial. Service for a ghost. Though the explanation makes no sense, she accepts it. People in this age believe in ghosts, and people in all ages do odd things in memory of loved ones. I told her, also, that the matter was secret, not something to be rumored about the countryside to bring beggars to eat the food she puts out. I called God to witness our contract and bring down fire upon her if she fails me. She looked suitably impressed. My agent in East Sawley will pay her, year on year. My agent in London will check to be sure that he does. Ever since Chinanga, I have put watchers to watch the watchers.

I have also instructed Odile to put a mark on the chimney face at each full of the moon, thirteen marks in a row, starting the next row beneath. In that way I will know how much time has passed. She's a sensible woman, strong and stout and still quite young. She should last longer than I do. I have already carried a pile of clothing over to the kitchen and stored it in a locked chest together with Mama's box. Looking through the box, I came upon that last hank of thread. When I see Mama, I must ask her what it is for.

The key to the chest is around my neck on a ribbon. As soon as I have taken care of a few things here, I am ready to go. I have told Odile to stay in readiness, that I will let her know when she is to start.

LATE JUNE

Surprise! Just as I was about to leave for Faery this very morning, I received a messenger with a letter from King Zot. He says Snow is very pregnant. He says he's much afraid the father may not be the mad young prince, but he's making nothing of that, because it may be for the best. The messenger who brought the letter is the putative father of Snow's baby: that nice young courtier, Vincent, the one who tried so hard to keep his young master in check.

"Well, this is a fine thing," I said, waving the letter at him so the seals and ribbons flapped. "Why on earth?"

He shrugged, blushing. "I didn't mean to," he said weakly. "She's so lovely. And she has no sense of the fitness of things. And her husband was away, hunting, and I was rather drunk. And she gets prettier and prettier."

I should have brought her back and locked her up in a monastery. I know I should. "She's not intelligent, you know."

"Oh, I know." He sounded guilty about that, too, as he well might. "One is constantly aware of that. It is like making love to a beautiful talking doll. She keeps saying, 'Oooh, that's so nice.' "

"What's the King doing about her?"

"He's sent me away," he said, shamefaced. "And he's appointed all women to look after them from now on. Old women. You know. Past the age when ... "

"I know," I snarled at him. "What will the King do when the baby arrives?"

"The King plans to send it here to be fostered and educated. The King doesn't want the baby around the prince, just on the chance that ... I mean ... "

"I know what you mean," I said. "The child, if it's a boy, might by some chance get into the succession, and the King doesn't want him to be infected with madness. If madness is infectious." It was no time to give Vincent a lesson in genetics. "What are you going to do now?"

"The King heard that your friend died." (I had given it about that Giles had died.) "So I'm to stay here and look after you," he said. "For my sins."

Well! This postpones my return to Faery for a time. I can't wait to see the baby. Also, it will be nice to have a man around again.

FALL 1418

The baby arrived today. King Zot said I was to see to the naming of him and the rearing of him. The King is getting even with me for Snow, I'm sure of it. The baby's name will be Giles Edward Vincent Charming, honoring everyone who deserves to be honored and at least one who doesn't.

Since I knew the baby was coming, I've a wet nurse already hired. The one who came with him wants to go back to Nadenada. I also have a nursery maid and a pleasant young boy who will play with him when he gets a bit older. It isn't good for boys to have only women around them.

Since it is also not good for a young man to be alone, exposed to the temptations of the world, I have arranged a marriage for Vincent. She is the daughter of a local baron, fallen upon hard times, but of impeccable lineage. Her name is Elizabeth. She is quite pretty, extremely intelligent, and, thanks to her father, well-educated. We took her without a dowry, since the poor man had none to offer, and both she and Vincent feel grateful and relieved to be so well arranged for.

Since the Dower House is large enough for all of us, young Giles will grow up in a house with two parents and one old aunt!

CHRISTMASTIDE 1418

I am having such fun with the baby! Elizabeth is a treasure, such a sweet, helpful girl. I hope Vincent loves her as much as I already do. Both of them are quite sweet with baby Giles, almost as though he were their own. I feel fortunate that they are here.

WINTER 1419

Today, while I was telling cook at some length what I wanted prepared for dinner, I surprised upon Elizabeth's face an expression which was so familiar and yet so elusive that I spent a good part of the morning figuring it out. It came to me at last. With considerable shock I realized it is the same expression that I used to feel upon my own face when one of the aunts did something so outrageous that I could not believe it, yet had no recourse but to accept it. It is an expression of bemused fury.

Well, during my converse with the cook, I had changed my mind several times about the menu. I really had. There was a time when that would have annoyed me. The implication is inevitable. I am merely tolerated in my own house! The idea makes me waver between amusement and fury and grief. I have done everything for Elizabeth that a loving mother might have done. I thought she liked me. Well, she does. She simply wishes I were not so much about. If I were at a distance, she could probably like me quite well, or she could hate me without hindrance, whichever she was minded to do at the moment. When I realized this, I cried, then I thought vindictively of sending her and Vincent away-they are living here at my invitation, after all-then I cried again. Oh, I wish Giles had not died! It is only with our own loves that we are more than mere burdens. Neither of a mated pair should ever die first! Or even, as he has done, go to sleep!

Finally, after much weeping and self-examination, I decided that it is time for me to do what I had planned before Vincent arrived: return to Faery. The baby is not mine. He'll be happier if there is no dissention in his home. Tonight I will tell Vincent I am going on a journey. A pilgrimage. I will give him title to the Dower House and surrounding lands, which I purchased some time ago. I will advise him of the income he may expect to receive per annum. My investments, however, remain my own against my return. Unless I do not return.

LATER

"When will you be back?" Vincent asked. "Who are you going with?"

"A party of pilgrims," I told him. "At my age, I may not be back, my boy, but that is no concern of yours. If I do not return in-oh, thirty years, let us say-my great-grandson Giles Edward Vincent Charming will fall heir to what I have. Thirty is a good age to inherit property. One is still young enough to enjoy it, but old enough to have acquired elementary prudence."

"I don't want you to go," he said. "I don't want you to go." Vincent's face was troubled, part duty, part affection. The larger part affection, I think, though one is never sure, is one? Elizabeth had merely said farewell, without protestation.

"But I want to go," I told him with a smile.

I think I really do want to go. Before, when I was in Faery, I knew too little. Now, I may know too much, but I want to see it again. I keep worrying about what Carabosse may be doing. I keep thinking of Mama. "I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end." My favorite poet said that. He was right. Before my end, I need to make it right with her.

I will take my cloak, boots, and book with me. The only thing left to do is to send word to Odile Kent that she is to begin her daily journey to the Wellingford kitchen.

"When are you going?" Vincent asks. "Soon?"

I will be gone before he knows it. One need not pack for Faery.

FAERY, NO TIME, NO DATE

Most things done in Faery have no meaning in the world. However, as I know from when I was last here, words written here are really written. When I go out of this place, they will come with me into the other world. Promises made here are transferable. Songs sung here can be sung out there. Meaning is meaning, whether in the world or in Faery. Only our outward seeming does not go from one place to the other. Here I am young again, and very beautiful. Here I am Beauty once again.

It would be easy to forget to go back. Suppose my mortal half died here, in Faery. Wouldn't my fairy half go on? Perhaps I would be dwindled, as Puck says, but still immortal. Free to dance here, and dine here, and while the endless time away with hunts and feasts. Dwindle. Ride mice. Sleep in flowers. Become one with the origin of my creation.

It is tempting. Enticing. Seductive. I try to summon what Father Raymond would have called my conscience and determine that, whatever happens, I will go back, at intervals, to wash and eat and dress myself and see what time has passed. Perhaps I can remember to do it. Perhaps not.

As I was leaving, I stood by the ruined hulk of Wellingford and peered back through the trees to see the Dower House well-peopled behind me. Its windows were alight and its chimneys sent up fine coils of smoke toward heaven. Let the smoke carry my prayer: pray God that Vincent and Elizabeth stay well, and so baby Giles.

27

WELLINGFORD: ONE STROKE ON THE CHIMNEYPIBCE

A month already? I would have said a day or two. I am famished. I ate all the bread and cheese and drank most of the beer. After I have a bath, I will have the rest of the beer and the meat. My dress is a bit ragged, but it will do a while longer. I must have a clean underbodice. This one is covered with something dreadful along the sleeves.

Mama had returned to Faery, as Puck had told me. My boots took me to the flowery meadow at the center of that world. I put on my shoes and began walking toward the distant castles, and there she was, standing all alone. "Hello, daughter," she said, not at all surprised as she turned to walk beside me. "You've come back." She said not another word, nor did I, until we reached the castle. She kissed me on the cheek, an unmeaning kiss, like the kiss of an aunt, then pointed to a door and said, "Your room is there." How could one describe her manner? Neither warm nor chill. Neither welcoming nor forbidding. Merely neutral. As though it made no difference. As though I had been noticed, but only that. I did not know how to break through to her. All the words I had been saving were useless. I felt despair, but then something stubborn in me said to stay and keep trying. So.

Oberon noticed me, too-but only that. He bowed and swept his hat widely, almost a satire upon himself, but did not invite my company on his couch, nor did any of the others. Not that I'd have consented, but it would have been nice to be asked. After a few days of this treatment by all of them, I decided to find out why, not caring greatly except that I like to know what is going on. I thought Puck would tell me, so I wandered off into a copse of lacy trees and called him up. He did not want to tell me, but did, finally. He says I smell differently now. Mortality, he says. Before, I was in the juice and fat of life, but now I know what age is, I have a scent of sootiness, like a candle burned down to its end.

"They can't see it," he said, kissing me on the cheek to take the pain of his words away. "But they can sense it."

"I'm half mortal," I cried angrily. "I've wondered what that means, really. Can't the mortal half die and the other half remain?"

Puck shook his head. "I've known several begot by mortals, half fairy like yourself. If they were born here, or if they came here as wee children to stay, then they seem to partake fully of Faery. If they live in human lands, they seem to grow up mortal. It's as though the heritage is the smaller part, and the rearing is the most of it. You were reared to a good age in the real world, so your fairy half maybe didn't have a chance to develop. Don't ask me, Beauty. I grow less and less sure about things." He looked older to me than he had in the past, if those in Faery can be said to age. Perhaps Bogles do, if they choose.

"You don't blame me, do you?" I asked, needing him as a friend and not wanting him to disapprove of me. "You don't blame me for coming back?"

"Ach, no," he said. "I don't. The Fenoderee doesn't. None of us do. Carabosse wants to see you, when you've time."

"Everything looks much the same," I commented.

"Thus far," he agreed. "Though Oberon is coming close to changing his world. He's bored, I think."

The words set up a dreadful resonance in my mind. I had seen another ruler change his world out of boredom.

"He's gotten sneakier," said Puck, going on with his comments. "He's fallen into this pattern of evasion."

"Evasion?"

"Of the terms of the covenant. You remember his enchanting people into deer, and then killing them? Cleaving to the letter, but not to the spirit? He's doing more things of that kind. No matter what Oberon says, it's at least a small infraction of the covenant. It's like the agreement they made with the Dark Lord, a kind of slyness. It's unworthy of what he once was, is what it is, but you wouldn't dare say that to Oberon now."

"What would a big infraction of the covenant be, then?"

"Well, they almost found out, didn't they, seven years ago, when they set out from here intending to give Thomas the Rhymer to the Dark Lord?" He made a disgusted face. "They came close then!"

I went back to the castle feeling dismayed but trying not to show it. I needn't have bothered. The people of the hills simply weren't paying any attention to me. Partly because of my mortality, I suppose, but partly something else. Some great event due to occur, something that was known of and planned for even before I came back, something mysterious that even Oberon doesn't speak of. There is whispering, something I don't remember from my former visit. In a land in which everything is known, nothing really hidden, in which all veils are merely seeming, what is there to whisper about?

Finding out will be more exciting than sitting in the Dower House growing lame(r) and blind(er) while Elizabeth simmers. So, when I've had my bath and something more to eat, I'll return to Faery.

 

The Sidhe are as nervous as sparrows, twitching at every sound. Some great doings are abroad in the land, but they will not tell me what they are. There are tents set up in the meadow, as though the Sidhe were expecting guests. Everyone pretends not to notice them.

I have been left much alone since my return, full of doubts and vagrant memories which sometimes overwhelm me. I spend much time thinking of Giles and of my life in the twentieth, wondering what I might have done differently with both. Sometimes I simply sit about, doing nothing purposeful, trying to make meaning of my life. It comes back to Mama, always. Why had I been born? For what? How had I failed her?

At last I begged her to walk with me in the flowery meadow, and among the copses I asked her to tell me what was going on.

"Going on?" She drew herself up and made her eyes glitter at me arrogantly. "Going on?"

"Come on, Mama," I said desperately. "You know what I mean. There's a definite mood of apprehension about."

"I don't know what you mean, Beauty," she said, striking a very dignified attitude. "I have no idea what you can be speaking of." She spoke as though to a stranger.

"Who is it that's coming?" I wanted to know.

She looked suddenly very haggard. "We're not sure who they are now," she admitted. "They were our kindred once."

"Then how do you know they're coming?" I asked.

"We just know," she said, the glitter in her eyes looking more like tears than arrogance. I tried to put my arm around her, and she pushed me away. "You should have come when you were young," she cried. "I told you to come to me when you were young! And when you came at last, you should have stayed. You went away, and now you stink of age and corruption. If you'd stayed when you were young, you'd have stayed young for a long, long time. So long, you'd have forgotten anything but Faery! I smell death on you, and it hurts me! I cannot bear it!"

Puck had told me about my smell, but hearing it from her was like being slapped. I felt totally mortal, unbelievably old. If I could have shrunk into wrinkles and ashes, I would have done. She stood apart from me, her back to me, and it was a time before I could answer her.

"Mama, I had to go away. Thomas the Rhymer was gone. I know you wouldn't have meant for it to happen, but it's likely Mab and Oberon would have used me for the teind if I'd stayed."

"Better me than you, is that it?" She drew herself up, proudly.

"They didn't break the covenant with you, Mama. They would have broken it with me. And you survived. Puck told me when you came back."

"Puck!" she sneered. "I have a daughter who not only betrays me but also associates with Bogles."

"Mama!"

"I should never have given you the gifts I gave you. You're merely mortal! You aren't worthy of them!"

"Mama!"

She turned away, obdurate, angry.

"Take them back," I said. "If that's the way you feel."

She was sobbing. The Sidhe never cry. "No, the gift once made remains. You are what you are because of me. I try, but I can't hate you enough to take the gifts away." And she ran away, back to the courts, leaving me in the meadow staring after her, longing for a mother's strong love and seeing a child's weakness. Perhaps she could have loved a fairy child. She had nothing to give me. She had never had anything to give me. It was the other way around, and I understood for the first time what Puck meant. The Sidhe did not have children in order to give but in order to get. Mortals have a strength that they need.

Ridiculously, what came into my head then was the third hank of thread. I had wanted for a long time to ask her about the third hank of thread. Now I could not ask. She was hurt with me, but hurt with something else as well, something she had been worried about when I returned. Something great and mysterious had them all in an uproar. I had needed her, and she needed ... what?

"Fenoderee," I whispered. "Take me to Carabosse."

He was there, holding the bridle of a horse. We went together, the same way I had gone before. Puck was waiting for us at the cottage door, and as I knocked I heard the susuration of clocks suspended into sudden silence.

"Come in," she cried. She sat huddled in a chair before the fire. Behind her, all around her, the walls were still covered with clocks. More hung down a hallway I could see through a half-open door, while others stood on the window ledges and in the corners, hung from the rafters, or lay on the table before her with their gears and hands spread out before them.

The only thing I could think of to say was, "There are few, if any, clocks in the fifteenth!"

"Fifteenth what?" she demanded.

"Fifteenth century," I said.

"Fifteenth, twelfth, first, makes no difference to me," she said.

Puck squatted on the carpet and picked at a toenail.

"I don't keep human time," Carabosse said.

It looked to me as though she kept a great deal of human time, but it seemed inappropriate to say so. "What are they for," I asked.

"Amusement," she said. "Entertainment. A hobby." She got up from her chair, leaning heavily upon a gnarled stick. I sensed little glamour about her. She evidently didn't care what she looked like. Her hair was sparse; her eyes were bloodshot; her forehead was high and corrugated with deep lines. She had a hump on her back and walked bent in half. She pointed her cane to one of the clocks on the wall and said, "That's Oberon's. The one next to it is Mab's."

I looked at them more closely. They were fine clocks, very beautifully made. Italian, I thought, eighteenth-century, perhaps. Enameled bronze and gilt, a matched pair.

"They've about run down," she cackled at me.

"Would you like me to wind them?" I asked politely.

"Would I like you to wind them? Ha, ha. So, you're a jester, are you? Beauty. Come sit by the fire. Have some tea."

She stumped her way back to her chair, and I took the one across from her, a comfortable rush-bottomed chair which fit me exactly. I had a feeling it would suit any guest exactly. For all its small size and sparsity of furnishings, the cottage was warm and comfortable.

She poured and handed me a cup, cream and sugar, the way I like it. There was no tea of this kind in the fourteenth, either, at least not in my part of the world. It seemed unnecessary to comment on that. It was real human tea. So were the biscuits, real. She and Puck seemed determined to feed me real food.

"You're getting older," she said.

I nodded. "That's my inescapable conclusion, Carabosse. Are you doing something about it?"

"About your getting older?"

"About this package I've been carrying about."

"Shhh," she said, glancing sidewise at Puck.

"He's known about it since I was a child," I said. "Puck knows more about me than either my mother or father ever did."

She glared at Puck, and he made a face at her, like an impudent boy.

"More than your father, certainly," she agreed. "Stupid man. Couldn't think of anything but his ridiculous pilgrimages. Wandering about, gazing at pieces of rotted bodies, thinking that conferred some kind of grace, all the time letting Westfaire go to ruin."

"It really wasn't," I contradicted, a little angered by what she had said. "It wasn't going to ruin, I mean. The roof was whole. All the walls were sound."

"Oh, child, I don't mean the beams and the stones. I mean the people who could have kept it and preserved it. You were his only child, and he almost ignored you. He didn't find you a good husband to help preserve Westfaire. Westfaire deserves preserving. That and a good deal else."

"He didn't find me a husband because you had cursed me," I argued, growing a little pink in the face. I could feel it.

"No, no, no," she said, waving her cane. "Before I cursed you. I looked at what he would do if I hadn't cursed you, don't you see? I don't go around doing indiscriminate curses. Besides, it wasn't you I cursed, remember?"

"Wasn't it Aunt Joyeause who changed your curse from death to sleep," I argued, wanting to get this business of the curse straightened out at last. "That's what the letter said."

Carabosse shook her head, to and fro, sipping at her tea, smiling a knowing, half-toothless smile. "Joyeause doesn't have the wits of a bat. She couldn't summon up a fairy gift if her life depended on it. And besides that, she tells lies. She was the only one near when I cursed Duke Phillip's lovely daughter with sleep."

"Duke Phillip's lovely daughter, and Westfaire," I pointed out.

"Well, yes. And Westfaire."

"Forever?"

"Let us say without a stated time of wakening," she said stiffly, warning me with her expression to press the matter no further. "I left immediately thereafter. Joyeause must have gone to your Mama with some fay and follet story about what she thought I'd said or what she invented to say I'd said or what she would have said in my place. It's like her. Such a silly-shee."

"I used to think all fairies were wise," I said sadly. The thought that Carabosse might be lying never entered my head. She was telling the truth, and I knew it.

"Some are and some aren't."

"So, what's happening, Carabosse."

"The Dark Lord saw you, is what's happening. First, in Faery, picking that vengeful herb to get back at that man. Then, later, in that mirror in Marvella. The first time, it meant little to him. The second time, it meant more. Your showing up in both places has a certain resonance to it. He didn't really see what you're carrying, but he scents it perhaps. He wants to put his nose on you and sniff you up, find out what you are."

Hearing it like that, even though I'd known it, in my heart, made me shudder. "Well, Carabosse, you must find somewhere else to put it, that's all."

"True." She sipped and nodded.

I sighed. "I didn't mean what's going on about the Dark Lord, anyhow. I meant, what's going on in Faery."

"The Bogles did a thing," she said, cocking her eyebrows at Puck where he sat on the carpet. "Oh yes, they did a thing."

"What have you done, Puck?" I asked him.

"The Sidhe wouldn't listen to us, so we've tried the only thing left to try. We've sent a message out of Faery."

"How have you done that?"

"How haven't they?" snorted Carabosse.

Puck settled himself for oration. "We've cried out by every hob and boggart, by the gruagach and the selkies, by the killmoulis and every lob-lie-by-the-fire capable of speech. Every pixie and nixie, phouka and glashan have carried our summons. We've sent the aughisky and the banshee out to howl, the bogan and the spriggans out to screech. The gabriel ratchets have honked the call into the sky, and the fuath have bubbled it down into the watery places beneath the sea.

"In the towers of the north, the durtters are grinding our words in their quern until the message rattles the stones beneath the mountains. Even the duergar have been constrained against wickedness and made to write our summons in the smoke of their fires. The cait sith prowls the edges of the world yowling our yowl, and after her come the black dogs, barking our bark. In all the times of earth until now, no such call has gone out from the Bogle-folk, and if there are any left to answer it, surely they will." He finished up with a fine, broad gesture.

"If they'd asked me," said Carabosse, "I'd have told them it wasn't necessary. I'd have told Israfel, and he'd have told his kinfolk. A few quiet words. All this hullabaloo wasn't needed."

"We wanted a hullabaloo," said Puck in a dignified voice.

"And what answer have you had, Puck?" I knew the answer already. What else could it be?

"The Long Lost are coming home," he said. "They're coming back to Faery. The Sidhe don't much like it. Oberon's wrathful and that makes his people edgy. Elladine's people are in no good mood. They're snarly, and snarly folk do stupid things."

"They're snarly, right enough," I said, remembering how Mama had flown at me, over nothing.

Puck replied, "If things get very bad for you there, with them, call me. It might be well for you to come visit my places. I've visited yours often enough."

"Maybe you should come stay with me," suggested Carabosse.

I shook my head, feeling confused and alone. "What am I supposed to do?" I asked. "What will be best?"

"Just go on," she advised me, pursing her old, wrinkled lips, leaning forward to place her hand on my breast, feeling the little fire in there. "Just go on. Being ordinary."

"With the Dark Lord hovering in the wings, sniffing and waiting to pounce?"

"We've talked about that, Israfel and I. If he pounces, we'll be there. Don't worry, Beauty. We're watching. We're good at that."

I tried to get more out of her and got nothing. She was closemouthed as a turtle, glaring at Puck out of the corner of her eyes, as though he had betrayed the secret instead of merely finding out about it.

He and I went out into the world and rode back to the castle. When we came within sight of it, we stopped and merely sat, seeing what was there. Things change about in Faery. What is there one day is often not there the next.

"Why is Oberon's castle always there," I murmured.

"Because Oberon believes it is," said Puck. "As do his courtiers, of course."

"They all believe the mountains are there," I agreed, for the mountains never changed.

"And the sea, and the stretching moors, and the meadow. Yes. This is the land into which they were born. Originally, of course, it was in the world. Then, as men began to encroach, the Sidhe moved it, but this is the evening land of woods and sea that they were made for, and they believe in it."

"Do you?"

He shrugged. "It is the land into which I was born as well. Many of my people dwell in those mountains, beside that sea, at the far edge of that moor. Others of my people remained in the world when Faery was removed, and many of us chose to continue there, but this most resembles our ancestral home."

"But the trees move about. The copses in the meadow are one time here and one time there."

"The copses shift, perhaps, with those who think of them."

"I've noticed one sizeable copse that always stays," I said, pointing to one that shone silver against the dark bulk of the hills.

Puck paled, though I am not sure how I saw any change in his color in that long gloaming. "The Copse of the Covenant," he said. "It was there Oberon stood when he made the pledge to the Holy One, Blessed be He, that no man should come to lasting harm through the Sidhe."

"And everyone remembers it, so it stays there, in that place," I said.

Puck shook his head. "If they remember, it is not willingly. I have seen Oberon try to move that copse away. I have seen him send axemen to cut it down. He cannot touch it. It stands."

"Because everyone remembers it," I repeated.

"Because the Holy One remembers it," he said.

I could imagine how annoyed Oberon would be at that, how it would nag at him, reminding him. Puck forestalled further question by reaching out a hand to stroke mine, then he vanished as he usually does, not in a puff of nothingness, but with a sidle which seems to carry him behind something, even when there is nothing to go behind. It is so all the Bogles come and go, there one minute, gone the next, slipping into ways we mortals-or even half mortals-cannot see. I think they are ways that even full fairies do not often see, for, considering Oberon's hatred of them, if Bogles were easily followed and caught, there would be many fewer of them.

I walked back to the castle, wondering a number of things. Wondering if I could master the Bogle sidle. Wondering why one has to walk or ride in Faery, rather than simply "being" where one wants to be. Wondering, considering the empty feeling at my center, if it might not be time to come back to Wellingford and get something to eat. It seems too much effort. A needless effort.

I summoned all my strength of will and did it.

WELLINGFORD: ONE ROW ON THE CHIMNEYPIECE AND SIX STROKES BELOW

The boots brought me here and I stumbled, weak with hunger. Eighteen months since I was last here, though it seemed merely days, a few days. It was hard to summon strength to stagger to the broken-legged table where the bread was set out, covered with a linen napkin. I will stay here a day or two and eat. I may even raid the kitchen at the Dower House. My clothes are rags. I have already discarded them for others. The warm bathwater was welcome. I soaked off dirt and scabs and washed my hair. Thank God I thought to leave a comb with my clothing. I came so close not to coming back at all.

LATER

I eat like a starved dog, gulping the food down. I did raid the kitchen at the Dower House, sneaking around the dairy like a ghost before wraithing it upstairs in my cloak to have a look at baby Giles. Such a big boy, now. Vincent has made him a rocking horse, so he must be walking. Well, of course he's walking; he's almost two. Grumpkin III was curled beside the baby's cot. When I came into the room, Grumpkin woke and came to me, rubbing around my ankles, purring loudly enough to wake the house. I sat there and held him, softness beneath my chin, and he reached out a paw to touch my face. I hated to leave him there. I wanted to bring him with me. I cannot. He needs to be here, where there are mice to catch and queen cats to pursue. If I do not return again soon, I will find his child in his stead, and yet leaving him is like leaving part of me.

Now I have eaten, and bathed, and dressed myself. Now that I am fortified, I'm going back once again. Mostly because of curiosity. I want to know what's going to happen.

LATER

I had mentioned earlier that Oberon has largely ignored me since my return. This morning, or what passes for morning in the eternal evening of this place, he sought me out among the ladies of his court.

"Beauty," he smiled. "Well met."

"Well met, Your Majesty," I curtsied in a flourish of samite and lace.

"We have come to invite you to join the royal hunting party this evening," he said.

I curtsied again, wondering if this would be another expedition after enchanted deer, wondering how I could say no.

"We go to hunt the moonrise," he said smoothly, silkily, as though he had read my mind. "In the lands of mortal men. Such a ride may not come again for a lifetime. We beg you to join us."

I acquiesced, smiling, dropping yet another curtsy. Hunting the moonrise seems innocent enough. I went to find Mama to tell her about the invitation, thinking it would please her. I could not find her, not in the castle, not in the gardens, not near the groves and pools where the ladies of the court like to wander. In the stables I found news of her, however. One of the lads told me the Lady Elladine had ridden out on some business of His Majesty's, some message to be carried somewhere.

I went back into the castle. Everywhere I went there were Sidhe walking about with torches from which a heavy, reddish smoke trailed, filling the air. "What's going on," I asked one of them, a tall, white-haired fay named Auspir.

"Smoking out the spies," he said crisply. "The King believes the castle is riddled with them."

"Spies?"

"Bogles," he said.

I started to tell him if the Bogles wanted to get into the castle, they'd do it, despite all the Sidhe could do against them. I thought better of it.

Grandaunt Joyeause came by, and I asked her what was going on.

"My dear," she trilled, "don't ask me! I'm always the last to be told, the last at any event. As you should well know!"

"Is it true that Oberon thinks there are Bogle spies in the castle?"

"Oh, very likely," she said with a high flutter of laughter. "He's always thought that, hasn't he?"

The smoke smelled harsh and resinous and made it impossible to stay in the castle. I went out into the paddock and spent the afternoon watching the horses and writing in this book. Soon it will be time to bathe and dress for the moonhunt. I'll take the book with me on the ride, just in case there is a pause during which I can record what a moonhunt amounts to. I wish Mama were here to go with us. It might make an opportunity for us to work ourselves back into sympathy with one another. Mothers care for their children even when the children are dying of loathsome disease, don't they? Though perhaps there is no disease so loathsome as mortality, and that is why the old die first in the world: so they need not see their children succumb to it.

LATER: AT A HALT

This ride is a strange affair. We began by trotting over the flowery meadows of Faery. Hoof-fall and bridle-ring jingle, a quiet murmur of voices, the stars chiming like glass bells, the wind coming up to blow in our faces and make us feel we are riding faster and faster, fast as the wind itself.

Which we cannot be. Surely not. Surely not as fast as the wind! And yet the meadow goes under the hooves like a great carpet, smoothly pulled from beneath us, and we are suddenly on the heath, where contorted stones come up through the bracken and gorse to stand as enigmatic monuments upon this high plain. I smell the glamour around us, thick as smoke. Afar on one hand is the level line of the sea, glowing with dimly reflected light from the gathered stars, while far ahead on the other hand are barren hills and behind them a jagged bulk of mountains.

Our ride has brought us out into the world. The air is moist and chill. The horses' breath steams, making clouds around their heads and ours. The rutted road winds along the flanks of the downs, its pale track vanishing into a dark fold of hills. Dry leaves skitter across the ruts. Hunched clumps of heather crouch like toads in the lee of the twisted stones. I find myself counting the months. I came to Faery in March. I returned to Wellingford in April. I returned last the following April, plus six. Likely it is October or November of that year here in the world.

The road winds, along this hill and another hill and another hill. One twisted stone and another twisted stone. One glimpse of the star-silvered sea as we come around a corner, then almost darkness for a time until we wind that way again. Silence among the riders. The horses champ and stamp, gusting their breath in great sighs, and the silent hounds run red-eyed among their legs.

At long last we come to a crossroad, with a crude cross set up on a stepped pedestal, roughly squared stones laid by an inexpert hand. Have I seen it before? It seems familiar to me, and yet not, as though I might have seen it years ago, or in some other place. Oberon has dismounted and stands next the cross, staring at the sky, at the stars to see how they move, as though what he does next depends upon their movement. Perhaps the stars make the only clock Faery can depend upon to know when the moon will rise. I sit on the pedestal beside the cross and write, while the Sidhe murmur together like voiced shadows.

Oberon calls, relish in his voice, anticipation. We will ride again. He and Mab and a whole following of fairy folk. But not Elladine.

LATER

At the road's end is a great cavern, tall and dark as a tomb. Inside it is a fire the Sidhe have built, and behind the fire, a door. Oberon and his people are unusually quiet as they wait for the moonrise. There are so many of the Sidhe about that I do not feel I can call for Puck or the Fenoderee without endangering them. Instead I sit and write, an inveterate chronicler, recording each action. The Sidhe seem to me to be in no very contemplative mood.

Ah, now I see the first light on the eastern horizon. The edge of the moon pressing upward, a half-moon. Everyone murmurs at the rising light. As the moon comes higher, it illuminates the cavern where they are all standing, and they come out, into the pale light, leaving the fire behind them.

They murmur, I write. Now they turn toward the fire for some ritual or other. Oberon gestures. They fall silent.

The door is opening!

I see light within. A face in the light. A face I have seen before, in a tower room in Marvella, looking out at me from a mirror.

Oh, my God. My God. I've been a fool, a fool. Puck said it. He said, "Seven years ago, when Thomas the Rhymer got free!" It is still Halloween. Seven years have passed since Thomas was claimed by his fair Janet. The Sidhe owe another teind to hell, and this time no one has come between themselves and their intended victim. They have brought here the only teind they could lay hands on who is not wholly fairy. One stinking of mortality. An old woman.

"What have you brought me?" the voice in the doorway cries like a whinney, like a howl.

"Beauty," Oberon says, turning his glittering eyes on me where I sit, petrified, writing. "Beauty, daughter of Elladine."

I am glad she was not with them. I can tell myself she would not have let this happen.

And now they are all departing, taking my horse with them, and I have not cloak nor boots nor Mama's box; not Puck, nor the Fenoderee, nor Giles nor any friend but myself, here, all alone. And in the light the face smiles as only that face can smile, and a finger beckons.

A voice by my ear says, "We are here."

I look. Nothing.

"We are here," says the voice. "Do not fear."

Carabosse? Israfel?

The finger beckons again, and my body moves against my will. I cannot go on writing.

 

Barrymore Gryme is here. Jaybee Veolante is here. Others of their ilk are here. The things they created in their books and pictures are here as well, made real, embodied in flesh, or more than flesh, or less than flesh. It is not proper that they should be here, either the authors or their creations. It is not timely. I am half a millennium away from their time. There are no movies here, no television, no paperback books, no best-seller list in the New York Times. There are no publishing houses, no editors, no word processors, none of what it takes to create monstrousness and evoke horror, none of what it takes to record frantic lust as it edges its way toward death. And yet they are here. The ones whose names blazoned the bookstalls and the ones whose names were whispered over the counters; those who sold openly and those who sold covertly.

As I am moved through this place, I see some of them at desks, writing. Some are directing dramas. These are the willing ones who have always belonged to the Dark Lord. Others, the unwilling, who thought they could trifle with the Dark Lord's works for amusement only, they are held in cages until time comes to act out their stories, and then they are let out. They are costumed, false faces glued to their own, breasts nailed to their chests if that is needed, their own genitals cut away or modified as the plot requires, this one to play that one's wife or son or mother, another one to play the part of the character who will be slowly eviscerated in the third chapter, another one to be the child who returns from the dead with sharpened teeth or the child who is raped and then murdered, and then, then, they are set upon the stage, their memories wiped clean, and set to the play. Chapter after chapter, horror after horror, while the Dark Lord applauds and cries bravo, bravo, bravo.

Others are here, many of them from the twentieth. Those who forbade birth control and abortion, worshipping the fetus over all other of God's creations. They are here in their vestments, their religious garb, their Sunday robes or their everyday dress, carrying their picket signs and swollen in endless parturition, for so the Dark Lord commands that they shall be, endlessly pregnant, endlessly giving birth, endlessly suckling the demonic life that burgeons out of them, with no choice in the matter. Having allowed none, they are now given none, and the Dark Lord roars with amusement.

The nature destroyers are here, the tree-cutters and whale-killers, they are here, some of them willingly. They sit on bare stone and contemplate bare stone and eat bare stone for their sustenance. Surrounded by ten thousand of their like pressed in on every side, they gasp for air and beg for water. What they did, or wrote, or filmed, or believed in life has brought them here. Here there can be no undoing or rewriting. Here one is judged by the words already on paper, the picture already on film, the speech already recorded. Nothing new is written here. Only old things, redone. Old horrors, relived.

Still, I am able to think new words and distill new paragraphs out of the awful silences between the more horrible sounds. Between the screaming, the panting, the uhng uhng uhng sounds flesh makes when the pain and terror grow too much for comprehension. To shut out that sound, I think sentences, I spell them into happening, into my book, wherever my book may be, writing them there in shadow letters, willing them to exist, enchanting them into existing, somewhere, to keep myself sane.

Mama stayed here for a time. Mama came away herself still, or almost herself, still. Can I?

 

He has put Barry and Jaybee in cells next to mine. Cells. One could call them that. Obdurate cloud, frozen pain, structured agony, something not metal nor stone, something not permeable, not tangible, not anything one knows about substance. It isn't substance, but it's there, on all sides, below, above, opening nowhere except when He reaches through with his hand, his finger, his long, sinuous, lascivious, dignity-destroying tongue.

I hear Barry's voice. He says, "Help me, help me, please, oh help me."

I scream at him in fury and pain. "Nothing is happening to you you didn't describe, think of, imagine. Nothing is happening to you you didn't conceive of and write down. Why do you ask for my help?"

I cannot even help myself.

"We are here," say the voices. They come close, like a cloak, like a bandage, like a barrier between me and what other things are here. There is healing in them. There is quiet in them. Invisibly, they are here. Even when I am being hurt, they are there, between the core of me and Him. The torturer can see my flesh, but not the thing I carry. He can feel my flesh, but not what it conceals.

"We are here," they say. "Hold on."

 

Jaybee is next door to me, separated only by a veil. If he sees me, he will break through. If I move, or breathe, or blink, he will see me. So I sit, like a statue, immobile, while he prowls there. Clever of the Dark One to think of this. So much worse than merely being raped, or killed. To think one may escape, if one merely doesn't cough. Doesn't breathe. Doesn't move. Doesn't move. Doesn't move.

He is singing, beneath his breath, a happy little hum as he wanders, brushing against the veil. "Down, down, down to happyland ... "

It would be easier to die.

Except for the voices that gather around me to protect me, to make all quiet. "Hold on," they say. "We are here." How do they stay invisible? Undetectable?

Who are they? Is it really Carabosse, old Carabosse? Is it really Israfel, come to this hideous place? Strangely, I hear more voices than theirs. I do not take time to wonder. When they offer sleep, I sleep.

 

Once in a while there is the sound of a great gong, the reverberations slowly dying away into nothingness. I tell myself the gong marks the passage of days, or weeks. It has rung twelve or fifteen times since I have been here. It must be to mark the passage of time. What time? Is it like Carabosse's clock, marking the time until the end!

Time. There was a time, I remember a time, when certain things were said to be unthinkable. Persons did not dwell on these thoughts, they cast them aside, exorcising them by crossing themselves, by prayer, by recital of some formula which would wipe out the unthinkable thing. It did not do to dwell on such things. The darkness was too close. The reality of death was too near.

Later came science and electric lights, a time when people sitting in well-illuminated rooms said, "nonsense, we can conceive of anything at all." Any horror. Any disgusting, vomit-making thing. Any garbage. Any offal. Any violence, blood, evisceration, ripping open, heads flying with blood spurting, things emerging from inside the heart with the tissue ripping like paper and the tender inner places laid bare, no defense, no place to hide. "We can think of those things," they said, with a chuckle. "We can think of them."

There were times, I remember, when we said certain things were unspeakable. Fantasies too horrible for words. Imaginings too gross for description. Violence too inhuman to be put in human language. And then came those who said, "We can speak it, we can say it, make stories of it, until there is nothing that is not there on the page for the eye to see, for the mind to comprehend, for the child in each of us to be corrupted and eternally tainted by."

Innocence. Gone, forever, with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. And innocent laughter gone as well. Now only the dirty giggle, the wicked snigger, the game of out-grossing, the playtime of the beasts.

So that when the real death stalks.

When the real horror begins.

It will all be familiar and we will be able to enjoy it.

 

Barrymore Gryme has been put in the cell with me.

"Do I know you?" he screamed at me.

One eye hung on his cheek, that cheek gnawed open so that the teeth showed through. I shuddered, sickened, put my hands out and healed him. I am half fairy. I can do that. He was naked. His white, pouchy flesh was covered with scabs and bruises. Parts of him are mangled. Touching him is like touching something long dead.

"When did you die?" I asked.

"Die. Die," he screamed at me. "I'm not dead. I wish I were dead."

"You're in hell," I told him. "The hell you made. Did you believe in it, when you made it?"

He turned his face into the corner of wherever we are and wept. I tried to find a way out, but I cannot get away from him. My pain and disgust are part of the teind. They amuse the Dark Lord who is disgusted at nothing, who feels no pain, but who relishes it in others.

"Hold on," the voices say, breathing cool, fresh air upon me. Offering me cool, fresh water.

Later I saw Barry watching me. "You're beautiful," he said in wonder.

"I am not beautiful," I told him, stripping the glamour away so that he could see what I really am. He did not see. The Dark Lord will not let him see. Or perhaps he sees too well.

"You glow. You shine. Don't be afraid," he whispered. "I won't hurt you. I am a decent man." I laughed. I laughed until I cried.

 

The Dark Lord cannot create. Faery cannot create. The angels cannot create. Only God, and man. I told Barry this, carefully, making him pay attention to what I was saying. It was hard. The face glued to his own would not let him breathe, the false breasts fastened to his flesh pained him, the shoes he wore had somehow been made part of his feet so he could not take them off. One of the spike heels was broken, and a fractured end of bone protruded from it. He kept reaching down to feel the bone, trying to convince himself it was not there. It was there. I saw it.

He had been playing a character from one of his own books, a woman who moves into a house occupied by a terrible thing from some other dimension of reality. It kills her children, one by one, in horrible ways, then her boyfriend, then comes after her. Barry had played the role well, so I assumed, for I had heard the Dark Lord's bravos ringing through the substance of the cell. One of the added horrors of this place is that one hears everything.

"The Dark Lord cannot create," I told him again. "You have created everything here. You and the others. He has only borrowed it from you."

"It was only a story," he cried. "Only a story!"

I thought of Chinanga once more. That, too, had been only a story, and yet I remembered Constanzia's face as she twirled slowly into nothingness. What are stories, after all, but reflections of a reality we make? Before Jaybee did anything, first he told himself a story about it. First I will go to her house, then I will break in her door, then I will knock her down and lie on top of her, watching her scream, then I will let my weapon out of my trousers and hurt her with it.

"To those who read it, it was real," I told him. "They lived it, while they read it. Perhaps afterward, they lived it. Some believed it. Perhaps one of those who believe it picked up a weapon and did to someone else what you did to a character. Or tried. There was enough belief to give it reality. Otherwise you would not be here."

He won't believe that. He has stopped talking to me.

 

The cell is open. I go out. Barry comes behind me.

He is playing with us, of course.

We walk, and I think words. Somewhere they are distilled onto a page. We ... walk. My feet shuffle along. Barry tiptoes, screaming when he does not get high enough on his toes to avoid the broken bone at his heel. This is part of it, of course. Tempting him to walk, to escape, so that he will try this ungainly, ridiculous gait which hurts him so. I shuffle, he tiptoes. Time goes by. We are still surrounded by others. We can feel them on all sides.

An opening. We separate. He goes one way, I another.

 

I found a river. I came upon a place where space breaks through into something almost real. Like the door in the cavern, like the mirror, this connects to the world. Or to some other world. It is hard to tell. Mists hang heavily over the flow, which is turgid and silent. Nothing moves in the water. There is no shore I can walk along, but only this one space where hell waits on one side and the water on the other.

Still, it is a change. I sit beside the flow, listening, hoping for a sound other than those I have heard for so long. At last it comes. A slow plopping. From somewhere to my right and behind me. Eons pass and the slow sounds are no closer. And then, at last, they are here, in front of me. A rowboat, a rower, a few other figures who are drawn up past me as though made of smoke, fleeing past me into the enormity of this place.

The rower turns to face me, his dark hood shadowing his face.

"Captain Karon," I whisper.

"Lady Wellingford," he smiles. "Fancy seeing you here." His smile is a death's-head grin, and yet there is something of the old captain there. "Back at my old trade, you see. Sometimes I miss the Stugos Queen."

"I thought," I say, wondering what I thought. "I thought that you ... "

"Would vanish, with the rest? With my lovely Mrs. Gallimar? With Constanzia and the Viceroy? No. No, I was not part of that story only. I am part of many things."

"You've thought about who you are, then."

"I've had an eternity of time to think about little else," he smiled. "Plying across the Acheron, the Styx, the Cocytus, the Lethe, the Dark Waters at the end of all things."

"Who made them, Captain?"

"Men made them, Lady. Made them with magic their religions stole from Faery. Made them and named them and peopled them, too."

"Along with Acheron and Abaddon and all the rest."

"Surely."

"And this hell behind me, Captain? Did men make this one, too?"

"Men and the Dark Lord, Lady. Each helping the other." He sighed. "Is there anything else I can tell you, or do for you, Lady Wellingford?"

"Would you row me away from here? For old time's sake?"

He laughed. "Where to, Lady Catherine?"

"To the other side."

"What other side?" he smiled again, and pushed his boat away. I heard the quiet plops of the oars recede and was then drawn back into the place.

"Never mind," said the voices. "It may be a way out."

 

Giles. I have found I can almost escape this place by thinking of Giles. The voices give me silence, and I think of him.

When one is young, one thinks of love in romantic or erotic terms. I did. When I was sixteen, I thought of Giles in romantic and erotic terms. Romance when we were in the dining hall. Eros when I was in bed alone in the night hours. There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one's own youthful awareness. I wanted Giles, very specifically, to do to me what the stallions did to the mares, what the stable boys talked of doing to their sweethearts. I had no experience of it, but my flesh knew. And then, twenty years later, when we did at last what I had longed for, my flesh knew once again. It was the single thing needed, the one thing wanted, the savor and marvel of life.

I could not imagine doing without it. Being without it.

And yet, all those years in the twentieth, I had done without it, been without it. Seventeen, eighteen years old. At the peak of urgency and desire, and yet I had done without it. Because there had been no Giles. I had remembered him, lusted after him, pleasured myself in my bed pretending he was there. He had been necessary to my joy. It would have been nothing without him. So I had thought.

And when we two had come together at last, we had been splendid, but it had been more than the splendor of the flesh. It was we who loved one another. We two. Old Giles laid his hand upon mine and looked sweetly into my eyes, and I loved him no less than I had loved him on the terrace outside the ballroom where Elly and her young prince moved in a dance of another kind.

Our love, mine, was made of such little things. When we traveled to Marvella, he would rise in the morning and find something warm for me to drink. Broth, perhaps. Some herbal concoction. A cup of mulled wine. He would bring it to me, knowing I wake grumpily from the pains of sleep-since I was a child, my legs have bothered me. They pain me especially at night, and many nights I spend half sleepless, turning over and over. So, he would bring me something and sit on the side of the bed while I drank it and call me Beauty, though I was an old, white-haired hag with pouches beneath my eyes and lines around my mouth even then.

And the love would come up from inside me like water rising in a well. Not lust, not romance, but something kindlier than that. The feeling one has watching a sunrise sometimes. The feeling one has watching kittens at play. The feeling one has seeing a rose bloom beside the window. The Baskaronian feeling. A perfection of being.

When we were on the way to Lourdes, each delightful thing that I saw I could not wait to turn to him to see if he saw it, to point it out, to make some jest, to evoke some wonder. Things I read that I wanted to read to him. How we laughed over Christine de Pisan together.

When he grew sick, he did not want me to go back to the twentieth to get the medicine for him. He did not want to go on living if it meant he might outlive me. If one of us died, he wanted to die first. He knew I was mean enough and grumpy enough to get along, someway. He did not think he could live without me. And he knew I would remember him. Perhaps he wanted to be remembered.

I wonder if he knew I would remember him in hell, and for that little time of recollection, hell could not exist for me.

 

There are men here. Sometimes, between the howls and screams and grunts of pain, I hear marching feet and voices raised in song. Sometimes I hear laughter. Sometimes I hear whispers, too soft to understand the words, but full of sly meaning. Sometimes I hear a shouted name, and know it is a name of someone real, someone I have read about somewhere. Not only one name, but several, in a questioning voice, as though a teacher calls a roll.

Often there is an answer. A voice raised, "I am here!" And sometimes almost a chorus singing, their voices full of a terrible urgency and a dreadful joy, "Down, down, down to happyland."

 

I have been down to see Captain Karon once again, though he tells me simply Charon would suffice.

"Difficult to be captain of a rowboat," he said, as the newest cargo of ghosts streamed past him into the place.

"Charon," I said, "if there were another side, would you take us there? Or an ocean, maybe, that the river empties into."

"Would I go to an end if I could?" He smiled his death's-head smile at me. "Wouldn't you?"

"Are they dead?" I gestured behind me. "Are they all dead?"

"If not, they will be someday," he said. "Who lives forever?"

The Dark Lord, I started to say. Faery. But then I stayed silent, for he had given me the germ, the merest germ of an idea.

"Yes," said the voices in my ear. "Yes, try that. Those words are good words, as good as any."

"They are not magic words," I say, objecting. "They are mortal words."

"Any words can be magic," whisper the voices. "If they meet the need."

 

"Did you know that I am a fairy?" I asked Barrymore Gryme.

He laughed, spitting pieces of teeth in all directions. I reached out and healed him. He still laughed.

"How else could I heal you?" I asked him. "Fairies can travel through time. Fairies can be taken captive. Still, they are fairies, with powers of their own. I have magic, Barry."

"Much good it's doing you," he muttered through swollen lips, glaring through bruised eyes.

"It's because I'm alone," I said. "I am outweighed by all you others."

"So, you're stuck," he said. "Like the rest of us."

"My point is, I could get some of you unstuck, if you'd help me. There is some magic in each of you, as well. Man has been stealing it from Faery for thousands of years."

A wily look, perhaps hopeful. "How?" he asked.

"I'll teach you some words," I said. "When you see the others, teach them the words. Have them teach still others. When the gong rings the third time from now, everyone say them together and think of the shore of a river. The words are a magic spell. They'll get us out of here. Think of a river shore and a boat, a big boat come to take us away from here."

He does not believe me. Still, he has learned the words I have given him.

"I've heard this before," he complained as I recited to him.

"Spells do not have to be original to be efficacious," I told him. "This one will work. It will draw upon the magic of Faery. If everyone says it at the same time, it will free us. A great skeptic wrote these words. They will work." Perhaps they will. Though, actually, it is hope that will do the most. Optimism. The undying desire of most men to make things come out right!

 

Time goes by. Eventually, the gong rings. Over its dying reverberations I hear a whisper, as though a thousand voices have said "One."

 

There is time here when nothing happens, when there are no voices, no sounds. My mind circles, like a dog, trying to find a place to lie down. It runs off in all directions, thoughts flying in and out like bats while I chase after them. I keep losing them, thinking, "What was the thing I was just thinking of," trying to trace it, trying to remember. I become exhausted, unable to think at all. I start to panic!

"Shhh," say the voices. "Lie down. You are soft, in bed. You are comfortable. Your hands are folded on your chest. You do not hurt. What would you like to hear, or read, or watch?"

One of Bill's documentaries, I think. And suddenly, it is there before me. Bill's documentary on the Last Radish.

Fidipur's farms.

Glass houses as far as I can see. The camera plunges down through the glass, and shows shallow tanks, full of green slime, constantly agitated by mechanical fingers and bubbles from perforated hoses. The camera dwells upon these things, tenderly, sensuously. Between the tanks walk robed acolytes, examining the soup, bending to a thermometer with a motion like a genuflection, adjusting a valve with the tips of sanctified, gloved fingers. There is soft, holy music in the background, a choir singing.

Bill's voice: not his regular voice, but his awed voice. "This is one of Fidipur's farms. Here, isolated from any organism which might conceivably interfere with a maximized harvest, the soup is grown from which our food is made. It is here, in this particular section, that green one and two are manufactured."

The voice guides the camera as it follows the green soup. It spills down transparent pipes to the great cookers and emerges as a flaccid mush onto a conveyor belt. Knives divide and texture it. The belt moves into drying ovens, emerges once more, goes through a machine which injects other substances.

"Here essential vitamins and minerals are added," Bill says. "Before the mixture goes on into the molding section and the ovens." He does not mention flavor.

The camera follows the belt as it dumps its half-dried goo into a hopper, from which plops of green-gray gum are extruded into depressions in a great steel band. Heated plates come down at the end of stems. There is a sizzle of steam, then the tops rise and the band curves over to dump its cargo of baked biscuits onto another conveyor beneath.

"Food for the billions," Bill says in a proud tone. "But in the past there have still been those who believe they are too special to eat what the billions eat. Until now there have been the elite, who ate old-style, natural growth foods, because of the status it conferred." Montage shots of fat people at tables, toasting each other, eating with knives and forks. Close-up shot of a jaw, chewing. "In the past," Bill says, "some people have robbed Fidipur, but the robbery is at an end. The new managers, elected by you, Fidipur's billions, are harvesting the last of the old-style foods. Tomorrow, one of Fidipur's farms will rise where they have grown."

Camera flies over the glass houses, flits across the multiple towers of a hive, darts downward into an open space where narrow rows of greenery show against brown earth. The camera turns to the side of the field where Martin, the director, stands beside a stout, wrinkle-faced man dressed as everyone dresses in the twenty-first.

Martin says, "It did not seem right that the managerial class be allowed to consume this last vegetable, and there are not enough such vegetables for all of Fidipur's billions to share. So a worldwide lottery was held to find one of Fidipur's billions to have this privilege." Martin turns, beams at the man next to him. "This is Mr. Walford Tupp. What words do you have for us on this occasion, Mr. Tupp?"

The man gapes, smiles, giggles. "Well, gee, I don't know. I mean, it's such a privlige to be here on this momous casion, isn't it?"

"Yes, it certainly is a privilege on such a momentous occasion, Mr. Tupp. Are you ready to harvest the last radish?"

"Well, I don't know. I mean, sure. I mean, that's what I come for, isn't it? Right?"

"Remember, Mr. Tupp. Slowly. We want to be able to catch every nuance of this historic event." Martin smiles his professional smile and pats Mr. Tupp on the shoulder.

Camera on the Tupp feet, walking over brown earth. He is pigeon-toed. The soles of his shoes are worn more on one side than the other. The earth gives under each footfall, little cracks run away around the edges of his soles, leaving prints behind. There is an ant on the ground. He steps on it. Behind him, the ant struggles out of the compressed soil. Now the camera runs ahead of him, finds the radish, brings it up until it fills the screen ...

Green leaves, as large as sails. Slightly crinkled, textured, glossy hillocks separated by darker-veined valleys, the veins running like brooks to join larger veins, these wandering toward the center to join the strong central rib of the leaf. It is like a rib in the vault of a cathedral, curving gently, its size diminishing toward the leaf-tip, growing larger as it plunges down toward the stem, the whole rounded on one side, cupped on the other, the proportions perfectly designed. Light fractures off the leaf. Light falls through the leaf. The rib is darker, becoming wine colored at its base.

And this is only one leaf. The camera pulls back to let me see two, then three, then four. Each a triumph of architecture. Each a wonder, a marvel. The camera pulls back, back, and suddenly the fingers come down. Grasp the leaves. Crunch them together. The microphone picks up that crunch as cells explode, as their tender juices run out onto those fingers. The fingers pull.

Soil shatters. Crumbs of moist soil rain down the sides of a growing cone. There is a volcano of disturbed soil. Out of its top emerges a flame-red, spherical shape, slowly rising, like a great balloon, like the sun, a gleaming ruby, a vast carbuncle brighter than blood, up, slowly, the long, white root trailing behind, tiny hairs on it broken from their home within the earth. It quivers. It almost screams.

The camera follows the fingers, up, and up, and up.

The camera sees a mouth. Opening. The radish is inserted, halfway. Yellowed teeth champ down. Saliva perks at the corners of the lips. The mouth opens again.

"Shit," says Mr. Tupp, spitting. "That's awful." The camera follows the radish as it falls, a bite out of one side, the other still glowing like martyr's blood, wet and miraculous.

The camera sees Martin walking away with Mr. Tupp, his arm around Mr. Tupp's shoulders in comradely fashion. For a moment the camera follows them. Then it turns downward, down to the last radish.

Jaybee always knew what made a good picture. As the camera draws away, and turns, and draws away, the radish becomes a sun on the horizon, an arc eaten out of it by a low brown hill; the leaves around it are a forest, and behind that forest the glowing ruby sun is setting. Forever setting.

 

The gong rings. Stronger this time, I hear a murmur, as maybe many voices whispering, "Two."

 

I am alone in my place. Barry is being tortured somewhere else. I am thinking of my mama. And of myself.

I was Elly's mother. Unwillingly. Without intention. Mama was my mother. If not unwillingly, at least without intention. She left me, left me to Westfaire and the Curse, a short span in her life, telling me to come to her when it was over. I left Elly, only for a few years, I thought, intending to return when they were over. So, perhaps, mothers leave children every day, intending to return, only to find they are too late, returning. The thing has happened. The hour has struck. The time has passed when it would have mattered.

So, are they to blame? Am I to blame, for Elly? Is Mama to blame for me?

And if the mother hovers, settles like a hen upon the nest, clucks to her chick beneath her wings and does not let it go; if the mother says, "No, the hour may strike, the thing may happen, and I will not leave you alone"; if the mother does that? What?

The chick struggles, and runs, and hides, wanting to feel the sun on its feathers, the air beneath its wings. And if it runs away and the hawk gets it, whose fault is that?

Is Mama to blame I am in hell? Was I to blame that Elly was in hell from the day of her birth?

 

The third gong. I wasn't expecting it. The sound came in a great wave. It left in slow vibration, and after it the almost hysterical gabble of thousands of voices moving from a whisper to a grunt to a shout: "Three, three, three."

Then the voices, saying the words I had taught them, words my favorite poet had made long ago, in some other place:

 

"From too much love of living.
From hope and fear set free,"

 

The words were ragged. I joined them, shouting, hearing Barry's voice rise up next to mine.

 

"We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be"

 

The words came more strongly, more surely.

 

"That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;"

 

A shriek from the Dark Lord. He had heard us. Was he too late to stop us? Did all the victims believe it enough?

 

"That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."

 

We were on the river shore! I heard the shriek, the cry, the bellow of the whistle of the Stugos Queen. We were standing on the riverbank in Chinanga, watching it come around the bend. From the high deck, Captain Karon waved at me. Around me lay the bodies of some dead, including Barry, who would rise up never, and some living, who now knew they would surely die. And before them was their transportation on their journey toward that final sea, the one the captain had long wished to find.

I heard a cooing voice and looked up to see Mrs. Gallimar clinging to Captain Karon's arm. She looked like Bill. She was Bill.

So, and so. The captain had done some dreaming of his own. Or he had taken my dreams for himself.

There was a swirling darkness behind us. Out of this aching cloud a figure lunged toward me, a scrambling monster, a hurtling shadow: Jaybee, alive. Well. He had not suffered here. He belonged here, and he was coming to get me. It had been too late, and useless. His breath touched my face, his fingers touched me ...

"May I drop you somewhere," said a voice from behind me. It was Israfel. The ambassador from Baskarone. Jaybee's hand slid away, an empty skin, a sack, something hollow and unliving.

"Ylles, Israfel, if you please," I said in a fair imitation of Mama's tone.

"Faery, Israfel," said another voice. Carabosse.

He took our hands and we went up.

I looked down to see the river winding toward a far horizon, an endless starlit sea. Behind us was a seething darkness which no light penetrated. "He's still there," I said, disappointed that he had not vanished, as Chinanga once had done.

"A great deal of creativity has gone into that hell," said Israfel. "You and Carabosse and I, we made a spell that freed a few of us, but it will take more than a few verses of Swinburne to free him."

He meant the Dark Lord, of course. I meant Jaybee and all who are like him. Perhaps we both meant the same thing.

"Did you plan for him to catch me?" I asked, wondering now that it was over what it had all been about. "Did you plan it?"

"No," said Carabosse. "Oberon planned it, and Mab. But we knew of it and let it happen. If we'd stopped it, he'd have tried something else. He had the scent and wouldn't give up until he knew-or thought he knew. So we let it happen, but we came along to make sure he would not find in you what he was looking for."

"Will he try again?" I asked, wondering if I could last, again.

"No," said Israfel. "He thinks there's nothing there. He thinks he was misled, and he finds you troublesome. Besides, if things go as we believe they will, he'll be too busy." His voice was furry and throat-stopped with grief. He said nothing more.

28

Israfel and Carabosse suggested that I stop in the world. I did so. They waited while I ate, bathed myself, dressed myself. It took forever. I was so slow. I kept dropping things. Finally, I looked at my hands and cried out, hearing the sound of the cry, a tiny shrilling, like a lost bird. My hands were like claws!

"How long?" I cried.

"The bell rang once each year," Israfel told me.

How many times had it rung. Fifteen? Twenty? "How old am I?" I cried.

"About a hundred and three," said Carabosse, adding kindly, "Don't worry about it, Beauty. It won't matter in Faery."

I laughed, a quavery little laugh. "Odile may not live long enough for me to return again. I think I'll take my things with me this time."

"Things?" Israfel asked, smiling his radiant smile.

"There's still one hank of thread left," I said. "And the needles. I'll put them in my pocket."

When I had dressed myself, I got out Mama's box. It still had the letters in it, her letter, and Giles. I left them there. The time was past for letters. I put on the ring with its little winged figure. I put the needles and thread in my pocket. Then Israfel and Carabosse took me by the hands and led me back into Faery, back onto the flowery meadow where the tents had been set up. A dozen of so of the tents were clustered not far distant from us. Their occupants were standing outside, very quietly, as though they had been waiting for us to arrive.

Carabosse sidled sideways and was gone, but Israfel did not leave me as he had done when he brought me from Chinanga. He walked with me toward the clustered tents, holding my hand upon his arm. On either side, the Sidhe bowed, as though reluctantly, as though forced to do so. None of them looked me or Israfel in the eye, I noticed. I stared them down just to make them more uncomfortable, for among them were the riders who had used me for the teind.

My eyes were drawn to the Copse of the Covenant, where it sat afar upon the grass. There, too, a tent had been raised, and there was no question but that it, too, was occupied. The fabric glowed with a blinding effulgence. I looked away, my eyes watering.

"The messenger of the Holy One, Blessed be He," whispered Israfel, as he prepared to introduce me to those who had been standing by the tents. His fellows. His companions. Male and female.

Michael. Gabriel. Raphael. Uriel. They are the eldest, says Israfel.

Aniel, Raguel, Sariel, and Jerahmeel.

Kafziel, Zadkiel, Asrael, and Israfel himself. There are twelve of them all together. The Long Lost. The separated kindred. Twelve who assented when the Holy One asked Faery to help man; those who went away when Oberon said no; those who built Baskarone; those now returned to Faery. Twelve visitors. Plus Carabosse. Plus the Holy One's envoy.

The envoy is a seraph, says Israfel. Not a star-angel but simply a messenger. Come to deliver the word of the Holy One.

"When I was in Chinanga, I thought you were angels," I told them, my eyes on my shoes.

Gabriel shook his head. "Nothing so fiery. From time to time men have seen us and have assumed we were angels, but we are merely ambassadors of Baskarone." His voice sank to a whisper. "To the worlds. Whatever and wherever they may be."

That whisper was familiar! It was like the whispers I had heard in hell, encouraging me, helping me find a way out. I realized suddenly that they might all have been there! All twelve of them! Their faces told me I was right. They had been there. Invisibly, they had followed me into hell, to keep me safe.

Israfel squeezed my hand, giving me a significant look, and I understood. They did not want me to speak of it, not even to thank them. They did not want anyone-anything-to know what they had done. They did not want anyone-anything-to ask why.

I tried to think of something inconsequential to say. "Are you ambassadors even to dreamworlds?" I asked. "Even to places like Chinanga?"

Gabriel laughed. "If one stretches time long enough, they may all be dreamworlds. The only differences may be in the length of the dream and the strength of the dreamer. Perhaps we call reality that which is dreamed the longest, that's all."

I had learned something of cosmology in the twentieth-what anyone who read a popular science magazine might pick up. "You mean the Big Bang?" I said.

"God breathes in, God breathes out," said Gabriel. "Blessed be the name of the Holy One."

"What is Baskarone?" I asked, them. "I thought it was heaven."

"We have tried to make it so," said Sariel. "By copying what was here when man came, and the best of what has been created since. Much of earthly creation had already manifested itself and departed before men came, of course, but we wished to preserve the work of the creators, somewhere."

She sounded almost as sad as Israfel did, and I did not ask any further questions. Besides, there would not have been time. Somewhere a fanfare of trumpets blew, a silvery shiver of sound I had not heard before in Faery. More of the Sidhe came out of their castles and walked slowly down the hills to the meadow where we stood. These were all the kindred of Oberon, those who occupied this world. Behind them came the horses of Faery, tossing their lovely heads, their silver manes flying. The dogs came, too, the white dogs with their red ears and red eyes.

From the other directions, Bogles emerged, as they do, making that sideways sidle which brings them into one world or another.

During what followed, I stood with my hand on Israfel's arm, his kindred arrayed behind us, watching them come. Puck came up to us, quite unselfconsciously, nodding to Israfel as though he knew him well. While he watched his fellow Bogles assemble, he whispered to us both, taking an inventory, as it were, jigging from foot to foot with the rhythm of his voice.

 

"When the silver trumpets sound to every puck and peri,
From the clustered hills around, come the folk of Faery.
Brownies, brags, bugbears, hags,
big black dogs and banshees,
Boggy-boes, hobby-thrusts,
imps and lianhanshees,
Kitty-witches, hinky-punks,
clabber-naps and swaithes,
Fachans, follets, fays, fiends,
gallytrots and wraithes,
Selkies, scrats, spunks, spurns,
ciuthaches and cowies,
Nickies, nacks, gholes, grants,
tutgots and tod-lowries,
Melch-dicks and come-fuicks,
cars and mares and pixies,
Pad-fooits and leprechauns,
chittifaces, nixies,
Sprets, trows, gnomes, kowes,
goblins and Peg-powlers,
Ouphs, brags, nickers, nags,
nisses and night-prowlers.
Lubbers, lobs, tantarrabobs,
cluricans and correds,
Tangies, trolls, tatterfoals,
hobbits and hob-horrids,
Mawkins, tints, gringes, squints,
shellycoats and sprites,
Roanes and ratchets, pinkets, patches,
grindylows and wights.
When they hear the summons sound, every puck and peri
from the clustered hills around gathers into Faery."

 

He grinned at me, cocking his eyebrows, and I knew he'd been trying to amuse me. I suppose I must have been amused, or at least interested, for I'd paid enough attention to note that he had not mentioned the Fenoderee in this inventory, which was not inclusive in any case. Puck had ignored thurses, knockers, kobolds, and a dozen other beings that Fenoderee had spoken of.

When all the Bogles had ranged themselves on the seaside in a vast half circle, the Sidhe began to arrive, gathering on the upland side and leaving a lane clear to the Copse of the Covenant, which stood toward the mountains.

I did not see Mama anywhere.

Israfel put his hand on my shoulder and said, "She'll be here."

And at last she came, from her own castle, which stood to the south of the upland. She came walking with one or two of her people, Joyeause and another aunt, I think it was. There were tears in my eyes. I was grieving and didn't know why. When she came close enough, I saw how very beautiful she is. She looked at me, shaking her head a little from side to side, tears running down her cheeks. Oberon looked at her, then away, flushing angrily. He had sent her away when they gave me as the teind to hell! She hadn't known he was going to do it.

And it was all right. No matter that I was a hundred and three and all my remaining years had been used up in hell. It was all right. She hadn't known. She hadn't wished me ill. Oh, didn't I know it's the best we can do, sometimes, simply not to wish our children ill.

"Get on with it," said Oberon, impatiently.

Gabriel answered him. "There's nothing to get on with, brother. We are not here to make judgements."

"A little late to call me 'brother,'" said Oberon.

"Not at all," Gabriel said. "We were made at one birth, you and I. We were both children of the Covenant. You and your people chose your way and I and my people chose ours. You have done as you have done, and we have done as we have done. Now we will be judged, both, but neither you nor I will do the judging."

As though that had been an introduction, the seraph came out of the tent and moved down the lane between the Bogles and Oberon's kindred. I couldn't tell what the seraph looked like. All I could see was light, not too bright to look at but much too bright to see whatever was inside. Maybe it was all light and nothing else. It was not made for earth, as man and Faery were. "Earth is all we were given," Puck had told me. "Both Faery and mortal man. Earth is all we were given."

"Oberon," said the seraph. The word was really a word, but there was no sound. We all apprehended the word, but we didn't hear it. It seemed to hang within us, somehow, like a sensation. Like a pain.

Oberon didn't speak. He stood, head up, staring at the light, refusing to blink.

"You have broken the Covenant between Faery and the Holy One, Blessed be He."

"Not true," said Oberon in a harsh whisper. "No human has come to harm through me."

"She stands before you. Beauty, daughter of Elladine. Half human in birth. Wholly human in life."

"She's here! She isn't hurt! She isn't dead!"

I felt the glamour around me thick as salve. I could tell from the expressions on all their faces that I was beautiful, lovely as the dawn, lovelier than Mama, even. They were all set on making me so. Their eyes were on me, strengthening me, making me glow. I wish I could have seen me at that moment. Just to remember. I felt myself shining like a star.

Israfel's hands touched the top of my head, came down my head to the shoulders, down my arms, on down my body. I felt the glamour stripped away. Oberon refused to look. The others could not take their eyes away. I saw Mama weeping as though she could not stop. I was so weak, I wanted to lie down. So old. So fragile. So very tired.

And still, I wanted to defend them. I wanted to cry out, "No! They've given more than the pain cost! There's beauty here. There's enchantment here. They've let me have that. I've had a life that's worth more than the lost years. Don't hurt them. Don't hurt my mama ... "

I tried to say that. Israfel's hands rested on my thighs, my old, quivering thighs, barely able to hold me up. I gasped for air. I tried to shout and couldn't, tried to intervene and couldn't. I raised one hand, and it trembled.

"Shhh," said Israfel.

I bowed my head, feeling tears. It wasn't only the years they'd taken from me. They'd taken my strength to defend them. The seraph would have listened if I could have spoken. They'd given my love for them away. They'd risked God's displeasure, and for what?

"She has lived only a few years in the world," the seraph said. "And yet her life has been used up. If she had spent it here in Faery, the Holy One would have said little. A pity, perhaps, but at least partly through her own choosing. A few years in Faery can be of great joy to mortal men, teaching them dreams. But among you was one who turned to the darkness of pain, not as a spur to knowledge, but as an end in itself. Among you was one who made a god of horror. Among you was one who turned his imaginings inward, an immortal who lusted after death, who set himself up as a god of death, which had only paltry gods until he came. He has let men come to him, those with similar desires. Together they have built a hell. We do not charge you with the deaths of those men, for they went to him of their own will.

"But you have bowed to him, and given him his teind, and begged him to hold the Holy One at bay. And so long as it was only yourselves you sacrificed, the Holy One, Blessed be He, did not call the Covenant in question, not though you were craven, not though you had fallen far from the glory you were given."

The seraph's voice grew gentle. "What did you think to gain?"

Oberon stared at the distant hills and said nothing. So proud. He would not beg for mercy. Behind me, Israfel was silent. All that host was silent.

"Had he told you lies?"

Still silence.

"Had he made you promises?"

No answer.

The seraph made a sound, or we apprehended a sound, or a feeling, a sound of infinite regret, like a harp string plucked and broken. "Too large a part of this woman's life has been consumed in your kinsman's labyrinth, and that was not of her choosing. She is mortal and has been used to her lasting harm, Oberon. Not only for this reason, for there are other reasons, but with this as the cause, the Covenant is broken."

Israfel's hands came up once more. The glamour came back. My strength came back as the seraph turned and went away. Too late to defend them now. The seraph went into the tent and the light went out. The tent stood empty. The trees surrounding it began to blacken. Within moments they had fallen to dust and the dust had blown away on its own little wind. This was the copse Oberon had tried so hard to destroy, and now it was gone. Seemingly he could not take his eyes from the place it had been.

When I looked back at the assembly, all were weeping and moving away. Only Mama came to me and put her arms around me, saying, "I didn't know. Oberon sent me away, Beauty. He fogged the palace to drive the Bogles away so they couldn't warn you. He didn't tell me. He just took you ... "

I patted her shoulder, hugged her close, crying, "I don't understand how Faery could make cause with the Dark Lord. I don't understand how they could."

She wept, and shrugged, looking in that moment like any grieved old washerwoman I'd ever seen at Westfaire, crying over a lost child, a lost man, a lost life. "I don't know," she cried. "He wooed us. He whispered to us. He told us we had enemies. He told us he would defend us against them. He told us of plots against us, and said he had confounded them. He pointed to the religions of men that were sucking our magic away, religions which pretended to worship the Holy One, and he told us the Holy One allowed the worship and had thus betrayed us. He told us he could lead us to victory against the angels, who would soon declare war upon us. Oberon believed him, perhaps, a little. Enough to give him the teind. A small price, we thought."

Simple paranoia, then? A fairy sociopath, crouched in his labyrinth, spewing lies?

I had been there. I knew there was more to it than that. A monstrous ambition. A death-loving ecstasy. A worship of pain. What dwelt in the Dark One's halls was not only of faery, but also of man, a dreadful alliance. Could it possibly be that there was some dark angel there as well? A hideous triumvirate, brooding destruction?

I looked at Israfel over her bent back and asked, "What's going to happen now?"

"The Covenant is broken. We had our immortality through the Covenant. I suppose we don't have it anymore. That's why Oberon is weeping. When he is through weeping, we will see."

"Baskarone," I faltered.

"Baskarone," he said, his voice breaking. "I don't know how long it will last. The seraph didn't say." I noticed for the first time that Israfel looked ... not older. No. Worn, somehow. As though ... as though he had spent himself protecting me. None of us had come out of hell unscathed.

"Before it ... if it ... can I see it?" I asked him.

He turned to look at the others. Michael nodded first, then Gabriel. Then the others. Israfel took me by the hand.

"Will you come back?" Mama cried, stepping away from me.

"If there's time," I said. "If I have any time left."

"Israfel," she begged, "I was never part of any of this."

He looked at her without expression. His face was calm but unforgiving. "When man stood up beside his fire and the Holy One asked us to help him, there were only thirteen voices who assented. Ours, and old Carabosse. Yours was not among them, Elladine. When Oberon laughed and walked away, you were at his side."

She bowed her head and wept.

Israfel said, "I'll bring her back if there's time."

 

What shall I write of Baskarone?

Everything that was lovely of the world when men came into it is here. Everything that men made beautiful while they were in it is here. None of the dross, only the glory. Some gardens. Some monuments. There is even an entire town, designed by a woman of great artistry. I had seen a film on it in the twenty-first. It was built early in the twenty-first and then destroyed by the nationalist terrorists in the Great Reunification War of 2043, the same war that killed all the people in Ireland, North and South, and half those in England and Scotland, as well as sinking the lands of Ireland forever beneath the sea.

In the long run, it didn't matter who destroyed the city. Fidipur's ocean farms now cover the place it once stood. If the terrorists hadn't bombed it and thereby started the war, Fidipur would have razed it anyhow. Mortal man is mad.

There are a handful of marvelous mosques in Baskarone, serene and beautiful. An Egyptian temple is here, crowded with painted columns. A mud fortress is here, its walls glistening with bright murals in tiles. There are structures in Baskarone from Ecbatana and Susa. There is a building from Troy. There are two from the States of America, quite small ones, sculptural houses which look as though they grew from the earth.

Cave paintings are here, fleeing horses and lumbering bison. African carvings are here, and so many things from the Orient I could not see them all, including a city from China, lacquered all in red and gold with dragons upon its roofs.

And all these things are set in gardens and woods and forests and prairies. The flowers that bloom in those gardens are the loveliest that ever grew. The trees in those woods are tall and straight. The grasses on the prairies have never been cut, and the little peeping birds run about among their roots.

There are people here as well. The woman who designed the city, the men who built the fortress, the carpenters who carved the dragons. All those who made beauty with their lives, they are here. Those who climbed. Those whose names ring, like a wine glass in a cupboard, hidden but sounding nonetheless.

The dreams of the men who tried to reach the planets, before Fidipur took everything, they are here. I don't know how they are there, but they glitter like sequins in the shade of that place.

"But you can't have the dreams of space explorers here. That hasn't happened yet," I said. "This is still the fifteenth."

"As Chinanga existed in the always, so do these things," Israfel said.

"Surely the Holy One, Blessed be He, won't let this perish," I said. "Just because of what Oberon did."

Sariel was beside us. She sighed. "Things the Creator Himself made have perished, Beauty, because of what someone else does. The Holy One makes a tree that lives for four thousand years, and someone chops it down to make paper to package chewing gum. The Creator makes whales who sing in the deep, and men kill them to put their oil in lipsticks."

"Enough, Sariel," Israfel said. "She knows. She has seen the end of it."

They let me alone to wander where I would. I walked into a great cathedral, down aisles of yearning stone, the great carved branches sweeping upward toward the traceries of the ceiling, so high above that it seemed impossible men built it and stones sustain it in those delicate arches. A bell rang, and the sound of it moved among the pillars, now soft, now loud, repeating and reverberating, plangent as a sigh. Incense burned, and the smoke of it rose in a pure, blue column in the light coming through high, painted windows. All of it, stone and smoke and sound, blending into one thing, one place, one instant in which the beauty of it stops your heart. Men did it purposely, made that space do that purposely. They knew how. They knew what beauty is.

I walked down aisles of trees that spoke of even greater loveliness. Green glades where light slanted down in golden spears, touching blossoms in the grass. There were oaks as red as stained glass, sifting the sun onto ancient groves. When I walked there, I walked quietly, seeing glory all around me. God did that. He knew how. He knew what beauty is. The cathedral was only a copy of this.

Even the Temple of Helpful Amphibians was there. Ambrosius Pomposus, also, had known what beauty is.

I remembered what I had left in the twentieth: gray concrete and miles of scabby houses, featureless towers of glass and miles of parking lots. The glades had been cut down to make pulp for horro-porn. There had been no holy silence but only the rant and howl of the machines the youths carried on their shoulders, a constant rape of the ears.

Here in Baskarone was a silence in which one could hear birds singing and the low of cattle from distant fields. Once on earth there was silence in which a child's laughter could be heard, or the cry of a kingfisher ratcheting overhead or the high shriek of a falcon. Once fish could be heard, plopping in their pools, and the splash of frogs and the hum of bees.

When I had left the twentieth there had been only the whom a whom a whom a whom, each sound hitting the ear like a blow, bruising the hearing so that when the sound was gone the ear throbbed with it still, like a wound. There is no birdsong left in that time, and if, by chance, the ear finds silence somewhere it can hear nothing, for it has been mutilated by what it listened to.

And the eye also. If it has never seen beauty, how can it know? It has been mutilated by ugliness, destroyed by horror. And so the mind.

I wanted to stay there, of course, but I had not earned the right. I did not ask. They did not offer. When I had seen all my heart could hold, they took me back to Faery, where I found Puck waiting amid preparations for war.

 

Puck was sitting on the ground near where Israfel left me. He got up to take me by the hand and help me seat myself on a convenient stone. I noticed for the first time that he rather resembled Giles. Not the face so much as around the eyes. But then he looked a little like Bill there, too. Strange how much there is of people we love in other people we love. He offered me a cup of something warm which he happened to have by him. It tasted suspiciously like worldly chicken soup with barley in it, and he confessed he had stolen it from a mortal kitchen.

"The cook will not miss it," he said. "She had a whole pot of the stuff. Rest, Beauty, and tell me about Baskarone."

I told him what I could, waxing as poetic as it is in me to be. I could see him noting it all down in his head, ready to make a song of it. While we sat there, several Bogles gathered around, including the Fenoderee. When I had told him all I could, I asked him what had transpired in Faery since I had been there last. I did not ask him how long I had been gone. I was afraid to know that.

It was thus I learned of the war.

"Oberon's people are not happy with him," Puck said. The Bogles all nodded at this intelligence, agreeing that indeed the Daoine Sidhe were extremely unhappy with Oberon.

"He has decided, therefore, that it is all someone else's fault."

"Not mine?" I said, horrified. "Not Mama's?"

Puck shook his head and laughed, shortly. "The Dark Lord's fault, Beauty. If the Dark One had not tempted Oberon, then Oberon would not have broken the Covenant on his behalf. Therefore, everything is the Dark Lord's fault, and Oberon is going to fight him. Him and his close kindred, at least." He sounded disapproving.

"But that's what you wanted them to do!" I cried.

"True, though not for that reason," brooded Puck. "The problem is that Oberon and his kindred are not strong enough by themselves to do more than irritate the Dark Lord, but the rest of Faery is too annoyed with Oberon to follow him."

I asked, "What about you, Puck? And Fenoderee? And all the Bogles?"

The Fenoderee answered. "He hasn't asked our help, and fighting isn't our kind of thing. Bogles have never gone to war. Even though there are a few tribes of us capable of violence, by and large we are too individual and eccentric. I think most Bogles will return to the world and live out our lives, such as they are. We may not be immortal any longer, but something tells us we're a long-lived people. Likely even in the twentieth or twenty-first, there'll be folk thinking they've seen a Bogle, or heard one."

"Where will Oberon attack the Dark Lord?" I asked.

"The Dark Lord won't come out," one of the little folleti piped from the circle around. "So Oberon will have to go in after him."

"Will my mama go with him?"

They nodded, slowly.

"He has many demons there," I cried. Actually, the thought of the demons bothered me less than those other things in hell. Those horrors created by men in the future.

I told the Bogles about some of them, and they shivered where they stood. "I don't know if those things can be killed," I told them. "Men invented them, but the Dark Lord has given them a dreadful kind of life. They may be proof against anything Oberon can do. Can the Dark Lord himself be killed?"

Puck nodded. "He was of the Sidhe, Beauty. His pride led him to break the Covenant. He was so proud he did not realize he would lose his immortality when the Sidhe lost theirs. Both he and Oberon are like the sons of a generous father who are spendthrift with their father's fortune, treating it as though it were their own and limitless, as though they had earned it rather than receiving it as a gift. Then the time comes at last when the father says enough. Then, when the sons are left without the riches, they curse fate and their father, not willing to lay the blame at their own feet. Yes, the Dark Lord can die, just as Oberon now can die."

I stood up and brushed myself off. It was time I saw Mama. I had promised her I would come back. The Bogles took me part way, then left me as I started up the hill toward the castle of Ylles. As I approached, I saw her coming toward me. We met halfway, and she kissed me. This time she didn't mention my smell. I was careful not to mention hers, which was the smell of old flowers, drying and fading.

I told her what I could about the things they would find in the Dark One's lair and begged her not to go with Oberon. She shook her head at me, but she listened carefully to what I had to say, asking me one question and another. She said the things I described had not been there when she had been used as the teind. Barrymore Gryme and his ilk hadn't been there, either. There had been only fairy horrors, things Mama could handle fairly easily. When I had finished telling her, Mama was very pale and seemed rather frightened. I wondered if she would be able to convince Oberon that he should be careful. Oberon had always struck me as being both arrogant and precipitant in his actions.

Mama said she must go talk with him, but even as she turned to go, she clung to my hand. Finally, she pushed me away from her, pointing toward the place where Puck and the Bogles waited. "Your Grandaunt Carabosse wants you to come to tea. She says she will have no time, later on."

I knew she would not. "When does she want me to come?" I asked.

"Now. As soon as you can." Again she made the pushing gesture, telling me to go with Puck.

I didn't want to leave her. "Should I be leaving just now? With this business of Oberon going to battle and your going with him?"

For a third time, she gestured at me to go. "That's why you must go! Oberon is irritated at you. Oh, Beauty, he's irritated at himself for ... well, you know what for. He looks at you, and it reminds him of how irritated he is. It's not a good time for you to be in Faery."

I stared at her. "It's probably the last time I will be in Faery, Mama. I'm really one hundred and three. Human people seldom live that long. When I go back, I'm gone. This is the last time you and I will be together."

She started to cry again, and I felt dreadful. I patted her on the shoulder. "Never mind. I'll go see old Carabosse. I won't stay long. We'll have some time to ourselves when I come back." As I turned to join the Bogles, she was trudging up the hill toward Oberon's castle.

Nothing had changed at Carabosse's cottage. The clocks still ticked and could still be silenced by her gesture. The only surprise was that Israfel was with her. They were both very quiet. When we had had tea, Carabosse suggested that I look into her Forever Pool and took me out with her and Israfel to the garden. The pool lay beyond it, among a grove of silver trees. The bridge which arched over it reminded me of the one arching the Pool of Delights, and its purpose was the same. We leaned on the railing, Israfel, Carabosse, and I, looking into its depths, seeing our faces dimly reflected on the black water.

Carabosse moved her hand over the water. Darkness. There was only darkness. Israfel moved his. Still only darkness.

Carabosse said, "Now you," and I did, moving my hands as she had moved hers, in a wide double arc above the surface.

Israfel sighed. "There," he said, pointing. I looked where he pointed and saw a glimmer of light, so faint, so dim, as though in the very bottom of the pool some treasure gleamed, softly and infinitely far.

"Well, so," breathed Carabosse. She and Israfel looked at one another, no expression on their faces at all, but I could feel something flowing between them.

We went back into the cottage. "What's going to happen?" I asked them.

"Something other than what we planned," Carabosse whispered. "It is almost as though someone else had done the planning."

"Whatever happens," Israfel said, "we have seen light at the end of time. I will carry word of that to the others. I think it will be enough."

And that is absolutely all he would say, though his hand lingered caressingly upon my shoulder as he bid me farewell. I stayed only a little while longer. When I went out, Puck was standing there with the horse to take me back. We rode through the forest while Puck sang ballads at me and the Fenoderee accompanied him on a lute.

We stopped on the way to have a picnic. More human food: sliced ham and fresh baked bread and fruit. Several of the more interesting Bogles joined us and vied with one another in telling strange tales of humans they had known. I think I slept. I seem to remember sleeping. We stopped in a wonderful glade to pick orchidlike flowers that grew in the trees. Several Bogles came along and lectured me on the flora and fauna of Faery. It was interesting that some of the creatures I had taken as Bogles, they took as animals, and that some of the creatures I had thought were animals definitely were Bogles. There seemed to be no clear way to tell. Black dogs, for example, are Bogles. The Hedly Kowe, however, is an animal. At least, most of the time it is. And so are the Gwartheg y Llyn. I may have fallen asleep again, during one of the lectures.

We stopped again, to look at a waterfall which Puck thought extremely beautiful. There he introduced me to a nixie, and she insisted that we try some of her water-moss wine, which was exceedingly delicious. Could I have fallen asleep again? It seems to me I did.

When Puck suggested we stop for the fourth time, I said, "Puck, you're preventing my getting back, aren't you? I think you should tell me why."

He shook his head at me. "Well, to begin with, there was some talk among Oberon and his close kin about your knowing your way about in the Dark One's halls. Oberon was talking about taking you along, as a guide."

"I don't know my way about," I said, astonished. "The Dark Lord is one of the Sidhe. They would know more about him than I. Every time I moved about in that place, it was different."

"We know that," said Puck. "And so does Oberon by now. We were just giving him time to become sensible, that's all."

"A very long time," I complained, suddenly worried that we had been away too long.

"We could have returned sooner," he replied. "But Israfel suggested we should allow some time for other developments to occur."

With all the picnics and wine tastings and zoological lectures, I felt we had been gone long enough for most anything to occur. When we came out of the trees, however, it was apparent that what Israfel had meant by "developments" was much more than I could possibly have foreseen. I had rather expected to see Oberon and his kindred making ready for battle, a few hundreds of the folk of Faery making a brave but futile array upon the meadow. What I saw instead was a sea of lances, the assembling of a mighty host, all in bright armor with banners coiling slowly overhead.

And there at the center of the host were the twelve from Baskarone, the Separated Ones. Israfel. Michael. Gabriel. All. The great swans' wings they wore made them stand out, glowing like stars.

"Why?" I whispered.

"Hush," said Puck. "Watch now!"

We stood at the edge of the trees as other of the Sidhe came over the hills and kept coming, more and more of them, more than I had ever seen or had known existed. Puck whispered into my ear as they came, identifying them, telling me about them. These were Faery folk, though not of Oberon's lineage, and they came from afar: an army marching from Tirfo Thuinn, the lands beneath the sea; a mounted troop of the Plant Annwn, led by their King, Gwyn ap Nud, and another troop from the Plant Rhys Dwfen; people of the Gwyllion; Ethal Anbual, the Sidhe king of Connaught, galloping down the hill at the head of a great host of his people, mounted all on golden horses.

The warrior Queen Tyton came. She was armed with an ebon bow and silver arrows, and she wore the crescent moon upon her helm. Around her gathered a host of warrior maidens, all serious-faced and fell, with knots of red upon their breastplates to show they intended that their blood be shed to the last if need be. Their banners bore the image of the hoodie crow and they cried names of Neman, Macha, and Morrigu in shrill voices. These are the three names of Badb, the goddess of war.

Came also the seven winter sisters, Cailleach Bheur of the Highlands, Black Annis of the Dane Hills, the Loathely Hag of the Midlands, the Gyre-Carline of the Lowlands, Cally Berry of Ulster, Caillagh ny Groamagh of the Isle of Man, and Gentle Annie of Cromarty Firth (where winter is softer yet more treacherous than most), all in gray robes, their heads wreathed with gorse, and their faces the color of blue-gray stone. They bore triangular banners of gray with a tiny sun in one corner, and their voices were the voice of winter wind calling death upon the world.

"Why do they come?" I cried to Puck again. "I thought it was only Oberon and his folk! Are they all following Oberon?" Puck shook his head and held my hand tightly. "They are following Israfel and his kindred," he said. "The Long Lost have gone among them, speaking of the end of time. They know why they are fighting, Beauty. See how they look at you out of the sides of their eyes, without seeming to. See how they glance. It is why we came late to this meadow, why we are posed here against the trees. It is so they can see you, Beauty. They will carry your image and your name into battle, like a flag. It is for you, all this array."

I had not noticed the glamour until then. It was around me as it had been when we confronted the seraph, as much, and yet a different thing. A truer thing. I was as beautiful, but they were not seeing me, but what I carried.

"Tss," whispered Puck as he saw the tears in my eyes. "Hold your head high and do not dare to weep. They are going for you, and they must not see you weeping when they go."

It was a very great host. Many faces in that array showed the determination to die quickly for some great cause rather than to die slowly for none.

I, who was dying slowly, could not find it in my heart to abuse them for that.

And still they came, from afar, from the new world as well as the old, from the islands of the sea, from the forests of Africa, from great chasms and mighty rivers, from all the places of the world where Faery had made a home. I did not know the names of a tenth of them. Even Puck did not know them all.

And when the last of them had come, Mama came riding out from the edge of the host, up the long slope toward us. She looked very wan and worn.

"I told Oberon you could not guide us," she said. "So he's left you out of it. Besides, with all this ... " She turned to gesture at the host and sighed. "It was funny to watch him when they started coming. He suddenly remembered who he was! He suddenly measured himself against Israfel and did not want to appear unworthy." She said it with a tiny smile, a tiny, mocking smile. "He is Oberon once more, as I remember him from the distant past. Here at the end of things, he is Oberon once more, perilous and puissant."

I threw my arms around her. "Where are you going?" I asked.

"The route we know best," she said. "To the cavern on the heath. The same place the ride took you."

"I'll go with you that far," I said. She nodded and turned back to join the host.

Puck pulled at my leg. I looked down and he whispered to me. "If you ride with them, Beauty, wear your boots, bear your cloak, carry everything that matters to you."

"I don't even know where my things are," I said. "I haven't seen some of them since I was taken to hell."

"They're here," said the Fenoderee. "I gathered them up for you and kept them safe."

And there they were: boots, cloak, and book. He stowed the book in the cloak pocket and slipped the boots on my feet. The cloak I tied behind me, where I could get it in an instant.

"The Dark One hasn't forgotten what you did," Puck whispered again. "You'd be wiser not to go at all."

"It may be the last time," I told him. "The last time I see Mama. I can't just let her ride away without going with her as far as I can. You have to understand about mothers, Puck. I'm one, and I know. You can't always do for your children what you'd like to do. Your children aren't always people you can do for. But she never meant me ill, Puck. Never once. She must see that the same is true. I've never wished her ill."

The sound of a great horn came thrilling over the meadow, that horn which is said to be Huon's horn, given to Oberon as a token of friendship. And the ride began.

It was so vast, that host, that the Long Lost had reached the world of men before the last of the Sidhe left the meadow. We rode at the tail, Mama and I, with Puck holding to my stirrups and loping beside us. Not far behind I saw Carabosse on a donkey, picking her way along as though going to a fair. Quick though we rode, she kept close behind, though the donkey never went faster than a walk. She waved her stick at me, and I waved in return.

Mama said, "Did you make it up with Aunt Carabosse, then?" And I suddenly recalled that Mama knew nothing of my long association with Carabosse. Nor could I tell her, now.

"She says she never cursed me to death, but only to a sleep. It was Aunt Joyeause who made that up."

Mama nodded thoughtfully. "Joyeause has never cared for truth much. She says whatever comes into her head. I never doubted her at the time, though."

"Once I thought all fairies were wise," I confessed to her as I had to Carabosse.

"Oh, no," Mama said. "Wisdom is not a great thing among the Sidhe. I have heard a legend about that." She settled herself in the saddle and told me the story.

"It is said that the Holy One, Blessed be He, first created mankind as he created the Sidhe, marvelously fair, and he set the first of them in a garden much like Faery except that day and night came there, spring and fall, warm and cool, dry and wet, and every animal which has ever been, and every bird and every fish."

"I think I've heard this tale," I said, remembering Father Raymond.

"Very likely. The story is very old. And it continues that He set in the middle of the garden the tree of the hunger for wisdom, and He told them what it was. 'Eat of it or not,' He said, 'as you choose. Except, you eat of it, you must leave the garden of ever-life, for wisdom brings a terrible price, the price of pain and death and loneliness. But if you will be immortal, do not eat of it, and you may live here forever in peace."

And she went on to tell me the whole story of Eden, as though she were reading it out of the Bible, as Father Raymond had used to read it to me.

"Until the first woman could bear it no more," said Mama, "and she went to the tree of the hunger for wisdom and picked a fruit from it and ate it. Then she sat down beneath the tree and cried, for all the questions of the world percolated about in her head, like fish she could not catch, and she knew herself and all her children forever would be adrift in mystery, that as soon as one thing was found out another would present itself to be discovered.

"And the man found her there. When she told him what she had done, he took the core of the fruit she had eaten and tasted it and put the seeds in his pocket. 'For,' he said, 'if you must leave the garden, so will I. And if you must die, so will I. I will go with you wherever you go, leaving all the garden behind. And of the tree of knowledge you have given up paradise for, we will take the seeds to plant in every land we come to, and we will find the fruit bitter and we will find the fruit sweet."

Mama sighed. "And that is why man was cast out to be no better than a beast, dirty and itchy and covered by smuts from the fire. And it is why he creates, and why he may grow wise, and why he is numerous. Though it is said among the Sidhe that both wisdom and children are the burden of men, we have desired only children. We have not much valued wisdom, for we considered it less valuable than the immortality man gave up for it. Which is why I gave you the hank of thread, child. To sew a cap of wisdom if you liked, for you are half mortal and might care about such things."

A thinking cap! Oh, I should have known. Of course. What else could it have been?

We had come to the road which wound among the dun hills. I could see the moonlight on the lances far ahead, for the host was strung out for miles. Here and there I noticed huddled human forms, their faces in their hands, trying hard not to see us. We must have seemed very terrible indeed, awesome and fell. I wondered what stories those people would tell their children about the night they had seen the Fairy Ride, going out in their thousands from the lands below.

Something itched at me. Something I had seen, or thought I had seen. A flicker, perhaps, along the route we were taking. Something or someone upon the hills. I searched, seeing nothing. Mama's eyes were better than mine, and so were Puck's. "Look," I told them. "Along the hills. Is there something there that shouldn't be?"

Both of them scanned the horizon. At first they saw nothing, but then Mama stiffened and pointed. Then Puck saw it, too, and then I did. The gleam of moonlight on metal, high upon a hilltop overlooking the road we were taking. I knew what it was.

"The television crew," I told them both, barking unamused laughter. "Here to film the end of Faery."

"They may be here to film it," said Puck, angrily, "but it will not be filmed." He jumped up behind me and turned my horse aside, and we went behind the hill. I heard a snort behind us and saw Carabosse's donkey following. So there were four of us, Mama, me, Puck, and Carabosse. We circled around the hills, the horses picking their way through the gorse and the tumbled stones as we worked our way higher, toward the ridge. Evidently no one else among the host had seen them. When we came out behind them, they had no idea they had been observed.

"Let me," I suggested in a bleak voice. "I know their language."

Mama nodded. Carabosse snorted, sitting still upon her donkey. Puck sat down cross-legged and waited to see what I would do.

"This sequence," I said loudly, "is expected to complete the documentary on the last fairies."

Bill spun toward me, then Janice and Alice. The machine sat a short distance away, like a great stone tub. Martin stood up from the place he'd been kneeling behind a stone, watching the host pass below. Jaybee turned slowly, letting the camera rest on me. Carabosse did something with one hand, and he cursed, taking the camera off his shoulder.

"Damned lens fogged," he snarled.

"You are filming the departure of magic from the world. However, your premise is false." I was determined to say it, no matter whether it was true or not. Mama was there, and she needed to hear it. "This host, it is true, will leave the world, but magic will return."

"The hell it will," said Janice. "This is the beginning of the end." She laughed, shortly. "From here on out, it's all downhill. Magic is gone. From here on out, it's religion, then romance, then horror, then the end!"

"Whatever comes when," I said, fixing Jaybee with a loathing glare, "you film nothing here today. Nothing at all."

He had the lens wiped off and raised it to his eye once more, only to curse once more, taking it down to stare at it. Carabosse had evidently fixed it so that he could not get a picture.

"Give it up," I told them. "Go home. We're not going to let you do it."

Jaybee got up and stalked toward Carabosse, violence obviously in his mind. When he got there, she wasn't there. She was a hundred feet away, sitting on her donkey. "No," she said firmly, "you'll not show anyone what happened here tonight. No one at all."

"You have no right," blustered Martin. "People have a right to ... "

"Know only what others choose to let them know about private matters," finished Mama. "These are private matters."

" ... a right to know," he concluded.

"No, they do not," Puck said. "People have no right to crash private parties, pornographer. And this party is private."

Jaybee sputtered.

"You won't get a picture," I said. "Even if we go away, which we're about to do. You just won't get a picture, that's all. We have decided the world will never see this."

And we rode down the hill to the road, leaving them fuming behind us. Bill hadn't argued. He had just looked at me, stared at me, listening to every word that was said, as though he recognized me. This trip had happened the day after I got to the twenty-first. I remembered his returning from it, angry that we hadn't let them finish. His superiors must have been annoyed with him, laying the fault at his door. Well, the fault was not his, but there would never be a documentary on the last of the fairies. The last whales, the last dog, the last tree, the last radish, yes. No last fairy. Not yet.

We came back into the ride farther forward in the column. We passed the cross I remembered from last time. It was not long after that we came to the great cavern, the one with the door. Some of the Sidhe had already built a fire. Others were watching the eastern horizon. Evidently the door opened at moonrise, whether the Dark Lord would or no. When it opened, they planned to go through.

Mama shivered, and I got down from the horse and went to her. "You're cold," I said, idiotically. We were all cold. The night was crisp and chill. A winter's night. "Take my coat."

She shook her head. "You have nothing heavy enough to warm this chill. I know what's down there."

I stepped away, staring at the fire and at the door behind it. I was the only one who did know what was behind that door, though I had told Mama and she had tried to describe it to anyone who would listen.

"Father Raymond used to say, 'Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem,' " I told her. "It means that victory can come out of hopelessness." She smiled, only a little.

Israfel came riding back through the quiet host, looking for me. When he saw me, he turned his horse and came straight toward me, bowing to Mama, to Carabosse, even to Puck as he came. When he reached me, he held out a hand and pulled me up onto his horse, then rode a short distance away. We both got down and stood together, looking at the assembled multitude. He was very quiet.

"I want you to have this," he said, taking a scarf from around his neck and putting it about mine. It was crimson silk, with bands of silver and gold at the edges. "It is real, not enchanted. I wove it, with my own hands. When we go in, put on your boots and your cloak and go home, back to Westfaire."

"To Westfaire? But Carabosse said he would look there."

Israfel kissed me gently. "He would have. Oh, yes, my love, he would have looked there. But now, we believe he won't have time."

"I can't let you go in there alone," I said. In that instant he was Giles, he was Bill, he was anyone who had ever cared for me. I could not let him go.

"We aren't alone," he said. "Nor are you. And you have something to do yet, Beauty. Something more important than going into that hellhole again. Carabosse knows. I know."

A sound caught his attention, and he turned to watch. The moon was rising. The door was opening. He leapt into the saddle and drew me up beside him. He kissed me again. It felt like Giles's kiss, that night when we danced on the terrace. He laid his head against my breast, where the thing burned, whatever it was. At Mama's side he left me, then rode forward into the host.

"Someone will come to tell you about it, daughter," she said. "Puck, if no one else. Do not grieve over us. We've played the proud fools for a very long time." She leaned down and kissed me, too, on the cheek. My lips and my face and my chest all burned from fairy kisses. Then she rode off, down the hill, and I was left standing beside Puck, holding the reins of my horse in one hand. Carabosse jogged past, waving to me. Below, the horses were pouring through the doors like water down a drain. In no time at all they were gone. The door closed. The cold moon looked down at me, unsmiling.

I tied Israfel's scarf around my neck. If there was something left for me to do, I could not imagine what. I had very little time left in which to do anything.

Puck was kneeling at my feet, holding the boots. I slipped my feet in, one, then the other.

"I'll see you there," he said.

Perhaps I nodded. Perhaps not. Far off on the top of a hill was a shimmer, a shifting, as of a time machine going back to its own time. I, too, needed to go to my own time.

"Boots," I said, "take me home."

29

I tottered on my feet beside the rose-hedge of Westfaire. Beside me was the shepherds' well. I could barely see the cat's-head stone. I put out my hands to catch myself, and they were only bones with a little flesh bagged about them, blue veins running like rootlets across their backs and between fingers with nails all ridged and twisted. I sat down on the coping of the well and leaned against the post. Israfel had told me to go to Westfaire. What could I do in Westfaire? Besides, I had no strength to go anywhere.

I sat there for a long time, accumulating strength, or perhaps losing it. The boots were heavy upon my feet, and I slipped them off. The cloak was heavy upon my limbs, and I took it off as well, letting it lie behind me over the well coping. I sat there in a ragged kirtle, feeling the sun strike my skin through the rents. Ah, well. If I got a bit stronger, I could put the boots back on and go to the Dower House. There might be someone there who remembered me. Or who would take me in, out of charity.

As I sat up, almost determined to go, something dropped from the pocket of my cloak. I picked it up and looked at it, the hank of thread. I reached into the clock pocket for the packet of needles and found it with one unlucky fingertip.

Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn't. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom, we had lost our heritage. I didn't believe that. We hadn't sought wisdom diligently enough, that's how we'd lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it. I sighed. I couldn't make a cap. There was nothing to make it of.

One hand went to my face to wipe frustrated tears away, encountering a corner of the scarf Israfel had given me. Such luxurious silk. Silk for a princess. Real world silk.

I could make a cap of that.

That is, I could make a cap if I could thread the needle. My eyes were weak, half-blind. The needle was small. I fumbled with the hank of thread, moving the almost invisible end of thread back and forth. The needle slipped in my hand; I grabbed at it, pricking myself; and the thread fell into the well.

I sobbed. Weakly. Without conviction. What had made me think I could do it in the first place? My back pressed against the post, I waited to die, believing I could cry myself to death if I just kept at it. There wasn't much to me anymore. I probably weighed no more than eighty pounds. I thought I would leak my life out through my eyes and then dry up and blow away. That would be the end to it, and I could quit trying.

"What's the matter, Grandmother," said a voice. It was a male voice, a young voice. I couldn't see who spoke.

"I've dropped my thread," I said hopelessly. "It dropped into the well."

"I'll get it for you, Grandmother," the voice said. I hadn't time to wonder how before I heard the plop of something sizeable dropping into the water. Not a big enough splash to be a person. Or had it been? A quite small person, perhaps?

I heard assorted liquid sounds, plashings and gulpings, then a scratching and grunting, and finally something wet and cool pressed the soaking hank of thread into my hand.

"I thank you," I said. "But I'm afraid my reach is beyond my grasp. I needed it to sew with and cannot see to thread the needle."

"It's a pity we do not have a fairy about," fretted the voice. "One who would give you keen eyesight as a fairy gift."

I started to agree with the young man, coming to myself with rather a start. I was a fairy, one who had been taught such spells, a long time ago. I had learned diminishing spells. The Spell of Bran. Spells for far-sight, sure-foot, keen-ear. Perhaps if I blended the former and the latter. Keen-sight was what was wanted.

I tottered to my feet, made a few graceless passes, and chanted the proper words. My vision cleared at once, and I stared at the well coping where a large green frog sat regarding me with bulging eyes. "How marvelous, Grandmother," he said. "We had a fairy after all."

"I am not your grandmother," I snapped. At my age it was not easy to snap. The few teeth I still had seemed loose.

"I know you are probably not really my grandmother," said the frog. "I was only being polite."

Indeed, he was a particularly polite frog. I could not recall, through the fog of my aged memory, that I had ever encountered a frog of such poise before. I cast about for recollections of other frogs, finding such memories sparse and unprofitable, mixed inexplicably with memories of dinners in Bayonne and Lourdes and garlicky servings of something I had preferred to think of at the time as chicken.

"Of course," said the frog. "I am not really a frog, either."

I had already guessed that. "You're a prince disguised as a frog," I hazarded. "To prevent your being killed by your enemies."

He shook his head. Since a frog has little neck, this involved shaking the entire body. The coping was slippery, and he fell into the well once more, emerging moments later very wet and out of breath.

"Actually," he said, "I am a prince enchanted into a frog for some reason which I am utterly incapable of understanding."

I was busy threading the needle and spared only a moment to look inquiringly at him.

"Since you are going to be occupied with your sewing, perhaps you would like me to entertain you with my life's history," the frog suggested.

I nodded. Certainly there was no reason why not. Until I got the thinking cap done, there was nothing else I could do but sit and sew. I was already planning how to make the cap, by folding the scarf into fourths, diagonally, as one does to make a cocked hat out of paper, and then sewing the folded side closed and turning it up to make a brim. Since the frog seemingly had not interpreted my nod as permission to go ahead, I repeated it more firmly as I tied a knot in the thread.

"Ahem," he began, clearing his throat.

"My earliest memories are of a childhood surrounded by loving people. My foster father and mother, my nursemaid, the servants, the young man who was hired to play with me, later my tutor. When I was old enough to be told anything at all, I was told that my true father and mother, a prince and princess, lived far away, in another kingdom from which it was thought advisable I be excluded, inasmuch as I was not an heir to the throne and my presence might serve as an excuse for usurpers to cause dissention and unrest. I was told that this step had been taken in order to assure me a happy and extended life, since claimants to thrones, even legitimate ones, often live shorter lives than other, less exalted persons."

"I have known of such cases," I told the frog. "History is rife with them."

"So I was informed," the frog went on. "Since I am not ambitious, this explanation was satisfactory to me. The allowance my foster parents received for my care was sufficient to guarantee a pleasant life, and the maintenance of the estate on which I was reared was a sufficient career to interest me. I learned agriculture, beekeeping, cattle raising, dairying, egg production, fodder storage, gardening, horsemanship, independence, jar molding, kennel keeping, lamb raising, manpower management, nut growing, orchard keeping, poultry breeding, quarrel quashing (among the serfs), rabbit hunting, sheep grazing, timber cutting, usury, viniculture, wool clipping, xyloglyphy, yoke making, and zealotry."

"What is xyloglyphy?" I asked, amazed.

"Wood carving," he replied. "It was the only x I could think of."

"And zealotry?"

"One must be zealous, mustn't one. About something."

"And you learned usury?"

"To avoid it, Grandmother."

I started to remind him I was not his grandmother, but halted. Dim thought swam through my turgid mind. A fish I could barely see. Something he had said. "Go on with your story," I said.

"My foster father, a good man, and my foster mother, a good woman, though at times impatient, gave every attention to my education. I had the finest tutors from the time I was a child and learned Latin, Greek, French, and the common tongue as well as the trivium and quadrivium, including grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, composition, and history. I learned to play four musical instruments and sing in a pleasing voice a great number of popular ballads and instructive songs."

"How many times have you told this story?" I asked, taken with the well-rehearsed tone of the verbiage he was spewing.

"Many times, Grandmother," he sighed. "More times than I can count. Has it begun to sound overly familiar?"

"A bit more spontaneity might be welcome," I said, turning the seam in the cap I was making. "However, whatever comes most naturally to you will do." I sighed, fretfully, suddenly overcome with hunger.

"What's the matter, Grandmother?" the frog asked.

"I'm starved," I said. "Literally starved. I have been too long in Faery, and my mortal body has not been fed."

"I can find you an apple," the frog said, leaping off the coping and hopping into the woods which surrounded the rose-hedge. I remembered then that there had been an old orchard there, one that had not been used for generations, except by lovers, lying on the sweet grasses. Within a little time, the frog hopped back again, removed a ripe apple from his mouth, and wiped it upon my ragged skirt, apologizing for the only way he had to carry it. I felt a sudden spasm of affection for the frog.

The apple was crisp and sweet. I bit into it, gently, in order that my teeth not come out in the sweet flesh of it, and the juice ran down my throat as the frog continued.

"It's interesting that you're not all fairy. I am not all prince, either. Though, as a child, I was told I had royal blood; the kingdom from which I had come was small and had insufficient fortune to keep me well all my life. Therefore, I was educated with a view to becoming industrious and independent. My foster father told me that, when I was twenty-one, he and my foster mother would return to the tiny kingdom from which he had come, and which he missed agonizingly from time to time, though I cannot say why. The stories he told of it were uniformly boring. It had no natural splendors that he could remember, and its architectural heritage he described as rural revival, though a revival of what, he could not say. Still, I looked forward to the day when I should be master of my own destiny, little knowing that such matters are subject to many reversals totally outside one's own competence.

"When I was about ten, I learned that my mother and father, whom I had never met, had died in an avalanche. I grieved, though not greatly, since I had never known them.

"As do all boys, I came to the age of physical maturity somewhat ahead of any mental or emotional stability with which the physical surges and urges might be controlled. I had a bittersweet and blessedly brief affair with a dairy maid, an unsuitable partner, one might say, though she had a lovely complexion, very pretty hair, and a vocabulary not exeeding one hundred words, most of them to do with cows."

The frog reminded me of someone. I couldn't tell who, but he did. His manner of speaking reminded me of someone.

"I then wooed and won the hand of the fair Elaine," the frog went on. "A very suitable match. We were to be betrothed on my eighteenth birthday. She was some years younger, and it was thought we would be wed when she was fifteen or sixteen and I about twenty-one. In the interim, my foster father was of the opinion I should seek sophistication through travel. While he did not recommend any attempt to go to the Holy Land, then, as you know, held by the infidels, he did recommend a journey to Santiago de Compostela, to which he had journeyed in his youth with great cheer and good company."

Through the murk of memory, the fish swam nearer.

"However," said the frog, "before I could depart on the journey set out for me by my foster father, with due regard for continuing my education and experience in ways that would benefit me, I happened to go riding into the forest and became lost. On attempting to find my way out, I came upon a tower in which a maiden sat singing. Her name was Rapunzel, as I learned when an old and opinionated fairy came out of the underbrush, carrying a clock, and insisted that the maiden let down her hair."

"Carabosse!" I said. "It could only have been Carabosse."

"However did you know, Grandmother? It was indeed the fairy Carabosse. Well, to make a long story short (for I see you have almost completed your sewing), the fairy tricked me in a very unpleasant way, and when I climbed what I thought was a rope of hair securely attached to the head of Rapunzel-a very lovely maiden, indeed-I found the old fairy instead. She harangued me at length upon the subjects of time and beauty, ending her discourse by putting an enchantment upon me that I should become a frog and remain so until kissed willingly by a princess!

"Since that time, it has been my hope that I would first be kissed, then returned to my natural state, though I fear that neither Rapunzel nor the fair Elaine will have waited. Some thirteen years have passed since then. Both of them will be old maids of twenty-five, or buxom matrons, mothers of many." The frog wept briefly. "Though I have spoken to my foster father about the matter, and he assures me the estate will be still be mine when I achieve manhood once again."

I finished the cap and put it upon my head. The elusive fish swam up and looked me in the eyes.

"You are my great-grandson Giles Edward Vincent Charming," I said.

"Well of course, Grandmother," said the frog. "I would not have addressed you so familiarly otherwise."

This was specious, but I did not argue with him. I had been one hundred and three when I had visited Carabosse. If, while I dallied returning to Ylles, she had come immediately to the world of men to enchant my great grandson, as she no doubt had, and if thirteen years had passed since that time, I was now one hundred sixteen years old. The century had passed during which Beauty was condemned to sleep. Or was that in the curse? And which curse? Joyeause's curse, or Carabosse's? Or Disney's? I started to blurt all this out, then stopped. Beneath the thinking cap, faculties long unused-nay, faculties never used before-began to stir.

"At one time," I said, "I think it was in 1417 or the year after, while in Bayonne, I bought a book by Christine de Pisan. It was called, I recollect, The Treasure of the City of Ladies. Do you know of it, by chance?"

"I'm sorry, no, Grandmother. I am unacquainted with feminist literature."

"She directs her discourse toward princesses, including in that number the daughters of dukes. Would you agree with her inclusive idea of royalty?"

"The daughters of dukes are certainly very noble, Grandmother. Certainly they might be included among princesses."

"Then let me kiss you, child. I have not seen you since you were two years old."

I leaned forward and kissed the frog. The air shimmered. I felt dizzy. A small earthquake made the stones beneath us shift, ever so slightly. When I looked up, he stood there before me, stark naked, as fine-looking a young man as has ever been my fortune to see, except for his very slightly bulging eyes. No doubt he would outgrow them in time. I enchanted a few leaves into a long shirt for him and told him that would have to do until we got into Westfaire.

"Westfaire," he mused. "I thought Westfaire was mythical, like Faery, like Olympus, like ... "

"Mythical things frequently aren't," I said tartly. "Focus your mind, boy. Grandmama has need of you."

With Giles Edward Vincent Charming's assistance along the way-let us be clear, mostly he carried me-I got back into my boots and, holding him firmly around the neck, told them to take us through the roses into Westfaire. Once inside, he let loose my hand and promptly fell asleep, as I should have known he would. I was carrying the cloak and the boots and had the magic cap upon my head. He had nothing to protect him from the spell upon the place. Retaining the cap, I thrust the boots inside his shirt and belted it around him with the belt of my cloak. Thus closely associated with magical influences, he woke once more to stare around him unbelievingly. If anything, the hedge had grown taller since I had last been there. Everything within seemed to glow with a light of its own. The glamour was so thick it seemed buttery.

He carried me upstairs for his first look at Beloved. Once he had seen her, he could not tear his eyes away. He wanted to kiss her, but I would not let him. "No, Giles," I said. "Not yet. We have some thinking to do."

He became almost uncontrollable, so I pulled the cap off my own head and put it on his. He subsided, his mouth falling open as his mental faculties underwent instantaneous enlargement. When he looked completely dazed, I removed the cap and replaced it on my own head. I felt it might take a day or two to explore the full ramifications of the headgear, and I had no time to lose. In passing, I examined Carabosse's clock and verified that it was almost half-past the fifteenth century. The numbers still ended with twenty-two. Though all of Faery had gone to war, nothing had changed. Or perhaps something had. After I had seen light in the bottom of the pool, she had seen fit to leave Faery and enchant my great-grandson. There had to have been purpose in that.

We went first to the barracks, to get Giles Edward some clothing, and then to the kitchens. He prepared food while I sat and thought and thought and sat. We ate together, ignoring the cooks sprawled across the floor. While we ate, I began to tell him the story of my life, referring from time to time to this book, my book, the book Father Raymond gave me so long ago, to remind me of the sequence of occurrences. So it was I found Carabosse's addition to my text and marveled over them. As I read, I realized who it was the frog had reminded me of when he talked. It was myself. I had been a loquacious youngster.

When I grew weary, I gave him the book and let him read for himself while I dozed beneath the cap, aroused occasionally by his exclamations as he encountered something strange or unbelievable or patently impossible.

"I know, I know," I murmured. "But it all happened just as I have said."

I was not really surprised to find that my account of my time in hell was in the book, as I had imagined setting it down. That kind of thing is, had been, usual in Faery.

When we had eaten, we were weary, so I directed him to Aunt Lavvy's room where I had slept before. I had forgotten my Giles was there, but it did not matter. I told young Giles who he was, then lay down beside my love. My great-grandson tucked me into a blanket and rolled himself into a quilt upon the floor, asking if there was any danger we would sleep forever. The question was too close to my thoughts for comfort. I assured him we would not, and in a moment his youthful snores echoed in the room.

I dozed. After a time I woke. The very old do not need as much sleep as younger folk, though they need it more frequently. Like cats, we nap and wake, nap and wake. The thought of cats reminded me of Grumpkin, and I missed him. One of the first things I wanted to do was explore the Dower House stables to see if he had left a son.

I felt somewhat stronger, and wanted to look about me a little. I took the boots from my great-grandson's shirt, replacing them with the cap, and bade them take me to the lakeshore beyond the roses. Instantaneously, I stood there, the cool night wind blowing in my face.

Across the lake were the villages of East and West Moerdyn, where, evidently, they were having carnival time. There were fires on the lakeshore and torches among the trees. All along the lakeshore, from far on my left to far on my right, the little fires flickered and burned and I could hear, as though from another world, voices raised in jollity.

On the surface of the lake, windlessly calm, the reflections of the fires and torches stretched to my feet like a hundred golden roads leading to the edges of the world. I was at the center of a fan of fire, a wheel of golden beams.

I heard, as though in a dream, the voice of Captain Karon saying, "We are at the center of the world."

I saw myself, once again young and beautiful, at the center of a wheel of light.

All light, all beauty, ends at my feet, I told myself. It comes from everywhere, and ends at my feet. For a time a vision possessed me, a great wheel of light which could not be extinguished, which would roll and burn and roll forever.

At length, I came to myself. It was chilly with the moist wind blowing, and the fires had been put out. I bid the boots return me to my bed. There I lay quiet and warm and quite awake, my hand on my Giles's chest, wondering if Carabosse had foreseen what I would attempt to do.

When my great-grandson woke, I told him to put the cap on his head while I explained what was in my mind. When I told him the world, or at least all life was to end in the twenty-second century, at first he protested. However, the thinking cap exerted its influence, and he admitted it was inevitable, given the nature of men. When I told him that Faery might end very soon, he wept. Despite having been turned into a frog by the fairy Carabosse, he had gentle feelings for most of fairykind. After that, he simply nodded, concentrating on my plan.

"It might be done, Grandmother," he said. "If one really wished to do it." He looked very wistful, however.

"You're thinking of the girl upstairs," I said.

He admitted that he was.

"I am sure we can work something out," I told him. "But everything else must be done first."

"It may take years," he sighed.

"I think not," I told him. "I'm sure help is available. But, even if it should take years, remind yourself that you are one-sixteenth fairy, a sufficient share of fairy blood to guarantee you an extremely long life."

"How old are you, Grandmother?"

"One hundred sixteen," I said, thinking what a brief time it all seemed.

He sighed, but he was a good, sensible boy. Thank God he was Vincent's son, and not the child of the mad young prince. Thank God he took after his father rather than his mother. Thank God he took after his great-grandma, at least a little. Perhaps beauty does, in time, breed true. I knew he would do as I asked.

I lent him the seven-league boots and the cloak of invisibility, taught him a few enchantments, and thereafter he came and went many times each day. I, meantime, kept the fire burning and food hot in the kettle, and stood ready to admire each acquisition as he brought it in.

Giraffes and lions and rhinoceri. Auks and dodos and passenger pigeons. Elephants, okapis, and pandas. Snow leopards, tigers, and ocelots.

Seeds of great trees and small. Shrubs and flowers and mere herbage, shoot and root, leaf and branch. Robin and sparrow, goldfinch and wren, eagle and falcon and kestrel, and all the birds of the sea.

Those creatures too large to be transported in statu quo, as Father Raymond would have said, were diminished. I taught my great-grandson the spell and he had no trouble with it whatsoever. Evidently even one-sixteenth fairy blood is sufficient for such elementary magic. Once the creatures were in Westfaire, I removed the spell while they lay sleeping two by two, or one by six, or however they properly divided themselves. Herd beasts came by severals, others by pairs, at least two pairs of each, for Giles Edward Vincent Charming had learned his husbandry well. "You have to allow extra so you don't get too much inbreeding," he told me. And "I only picked the ones with young, for they have proven fertility."

Such a good, sensible, intelligent boy.

One day as I sat by the kitchen fire, waiting for his return, I heard a voice calling my name. I tottered out into the garden and found Sariel there among the cabbages. She looked worn and tired. I was afraid to ask her how the battle had gone, but she took me by the hand and told me without my asking.

"We weakened him, but we have not yet killed him," she said. "All those creatures of horror that men invented have gained strength and a terrible life of their own. We are not fighting only our own darkness. We are fighting men's darkness as well. Oh, Beauty, the things we found down there! The engines of annihilation! The machines of destruction! The human engineers of hate, laboring in their dens to make greater horrors yet. The human writers, hovering over their pens, creating baser terrors of bigotry and persecution. Oh, we could not have made these things, Beauty. Only God and man can create. All that God makes is beautiful. Why did He give man the choice? In the labyrinth of the Dark Lord, man is his ally. Only time can kill him, and them."

"Our side?" I asked, barely able to get the words out. "What about our side?"

She smiled, a remote, bitter smile. "Horror is stronger than joy, Beauty. Particularly when it is encouraged to flourish. Still, we have beat him back. He has fled from us, out of Faery and into some other dimension of terror. We are pursuing him with what strength is left. Many of our people are gone."

"Mama?"

"Your mama. Yes. She perished bravely fighting a thing none of us could have imagined. And Oberon and Mab. And Israfel. And many more."

Israfel! Oh, such a pain by my heart.

"But not the Bogles?"

"No. Not the Bogles. Sensibly, they stayed out of it. Sturdy. Independent. A little cynical. They do not let pride lead them into folly. They have come behind us, blocking the earths as it were, to keep the horror from returning. They will live a long, long time yet."

"And Carabosse."

"When Carabosse saw there could be no victory in time, she left us. She said she had a greater task before her."

"But some survive."

"Some survive, yes. But it is the end of Faery. We must leave the world. We must pursue the Dark Lord into whatever place he goes, however long it takes. In the end, we pray the victory will be ours ... "

"Then Bill and Janice were right. It was the last ride."

"They were right."

"Will you ever go back to Baskarone? Those of you who are left?"

That remote smile again. "Who knows if we will ever come there again. Or, if we do, who knows whether it will be there to receive us."

"May I have it?" I asked her.

She was astonished when I told her why, but she smiled and told me I might have it if I liked.

Then she was gone. I wept a time for Mama and for Israfel, but weeping does no good, does it? Sitting down and weeping is what women have done for centuries, and it has done no good at all. Nor praying. God has given us the earth. He is not waiting in the next room, ready to fix it for us if we ruin it. If we do not care for it, no one will. On other worlds, other races of men perhaps do better than we have done. He cares for us, but he does not control what we do.

So. So. I called Fenoderee, and he was there, with Puck, and a dozen other Bogles as well. I told them what Sariel had said.

"We know," said Puck. "We heard."

"Baskarone won't last. Faery is gone. Mortal men will trash all life by the end of the twenty-first. That means ... "

"It means this is the only hope," said Puck. "We know. We've come to help."

And so they have. They have brought beetles and butterflies and moths. Orchids and hibiscus and frangipani. Tropical fruits and desert plants. Things that fly and crawl. They bring them all to sleep in my gardens, my orchards, my stables, my hallways. Every sconce is hung with spiders. The moat is filled with fish, there are mice in Papa's pockets and moles under Father Raymond's skirts.

The library is littered with great buildings made small, with bridges and monuments, all those from Baskarone, made small. We could not bring the gardens or the forests, so we have settled for seeds.

On two of their return trips, I asked Giles and Puck to take Weasel-Rabbit and her mama out into the world once more. They are doing no good here; they would not be good breeding stock; and we desperately need the space.

Days go by, and they shuttle back and forth. My grandson with them, they alone, they in pairs or triplets, coming and going. The grounds of Westfaire are capacious, but they are beginning to fill up. Sleeping bodies are everywhere, perched, sprawled, flopped. Bats and sloths are hanging upside down in the buttery. I put the koalas in my tower bedroom, clinging to the bedpost, and four kinds of foxes are curled at the foot of my bed, next to the Taj Mahal.

Giles Edward has emptied the fountain and filled it with saltwater from the sea. It took all of them to bring the whales, though when they arrived they were no larger than goldfish. Sperm whales and right whales and blue whales and white whales. Killer whales and dolphins. Gray whales and pilot fish. Sharks. I thought perhaps we could leave sharks out, them and mosquitoes, but Puck said no, the Holy One made it beautiful in its entirety, and it had to be all or nothing. I sit on the edge of the fountain and watch the whales sleeping on the water, blowing spray from their blowholes and dreaming of the songs they will sing. Perhaps. Someday.

Grumpkin IV is on my bed. Or perhaps he is Grumpkin V or VI. He sleeps on his back with his paws curled over his belly. His wife is curled on my pillow, with the kittens. Such pretty kittens.

And at last it is all done. There is not a species alive between year one of mankind and the twentieth that they have not found and brought here, alive or in seed. Mammoths and mastodons and all. There is not a creation Israfel and his kinfolk included in Baskarone which is not here. And beneath my breastbone the seed of beauty burns and burns and burns, stronger with each thing that comes. It will not burn out. It will never burn out.

Now is only the last bit.

"Where will you go?" I asked Puck.

"Here," he said. "A few of us are going to stay here. If the time ever comes, you'll need help with this lot."

"Grandmother," said Giles Edward, a youth worn and tired from his long effort, "I can stay, too."

I shook my head at him. "Oh, child, of course not. There's Beloved up there in the tower all this long time, waiting for her prince. We can't let her go on sleeping forever. That wasn't the idea at all."

"But ... "

"But me no buts, child. No. Tonight we will all have a celebratory dinner. Ham and cheese and ale and wine, and fresh baked bread-Fenoderee has someone to do that-and we will sing songs and laugh. And then you will take Beloved out with you, well away from here, and kiss her awake." Once out of Westfaire, she would wake on her own, but why shouldn't he have the pleasure.

"And then?"

"And then you will apply all your alphabet of industry and intelligence to living a long, prolific, and pleasant life." God grant that it is so.

"And then? What will happen here?"

I shook my head at him again. Who knows for sure?

 

I was getting ready for our celebration when Carabosse showed up, suddenly, sidling out of nothing.

"So here you are," she said.

I mumbled something at her, something about how hard I'd been working and everything we'd done, and offered to take her about the place and show her.

She looked at the animals in the corners and the bats hanging from the wardrobe door and laughed. She toured the stables and the gardens. Then she sat down in a corner and laughed, the tears running out of her eyes.

"I thought you knew," she said. "I thought you had guessed."

"Knew what?" I asked her. "Guessed what?"

"All this. This," she said, pointing at all of it, animals, fish, birds, Baskarone shrunken to tiny size. "You didn't need to do this. We already did it."

"You ... ?" I couldn't figure out what she was saying.

"Israfel. And his kindred. They already did it. Long ago. Before you were born." She leaned forward to tap me on my chest. "What did you think was in there, silly girl?" And she went off laughing again.

After a time, I laughed with her.

"Beauty's in there," she said. "In Beauty, beauty. All of it. Here in Westfaire. In the beautiful is Beauty, and in Beauty, beauty. Silly girl." And her head sagged, just for a moment, as though she was too tired to go on. "Everything you have collected is beautiful, girl. But it was already inside you. All inside you, made tiny, like a seed. For you to keep safe, forever."

Well, I had known that, of course. But it wasn't enough merely to take their word for it. They might have missed something! It felt better to have done it myself.

A little redundancy never hurts. Someone told me that once. I can't remember who.

 

Carabosse joined us for our celebration.

Candles. Every candle in the place alight. Music. The Bogles came from everywhere for that. Wild things. Benevolent monsters. They are a very musical people. Food, and wine, and dancing, and games. I sat quietly in the-corner, writing in my book, watching them all.

It went on until dawn. Somewhere out in the world a cock crowed. Silence came, and most of the Bogles went.

Giles Edward Vincent Charming brought the sleeping Beloved downstairs and out into the courtyard. He put on my boots. He was crying as he told me goodbye, but he was sneaking glances at her, too. He will not grieve for long. He kissed me and then he went.

Carabosse kissed me. It felt like a mother's kiss. She didn't tell me where she was going, but I have a feeling it will not be far. She sidled into somewhere else and was gone.

Fenoderee and the others who are staying are out with the animals. Puck carried my Giles up to the tower and laid him on my bed. Giles looks much better, much stronger. This long sleep has done him good. Then Puck helped me to climb all these stairs to be with my love. Since I've been back this time, my legs have hurt such a lot, and of course I am very, very old. One hundred and sixteen! Think of it! I could not have climbed here without him.

From the balcony I can see the light of dawn and bright wings circling straight above. A dove, I think. Very high. On my bed, Giles snores and Grumpkin snores, little breathy sounds in the silence. When I stroke either of them, they move as though to tell me they know I am here. I sit on the edge of the bed to write, remembering Giles Edward's question.

What will happen?

Beloved will awaken once she is out of Westfaire. He will kiss her, of course, but that has nothing to do with anything. No matter what Joyeause said about a hundred years, this spell was laid forever. Westfaire will go on sleeping. Papa will sleep, and Doll, and Martin. The aunts will sleep, and the young maids, and the young footmen and stable hands, all will sleep until the conditions of this enchantment are fulfilled and someone or something wondrous arrives to kiss beauty awake once more. Not a prince. Or not merely a prince. More than a prince. A rebirth of some kind. And not soon. Not until long after Carabosse's clock has run down. Long after the twenty-third, I should imagine. Long after Baskarone is gone and all of Faery vanished. Long after the Dark Lord and all his minions have perished from the weight of time. The inanition of age will get him, finally, where nothing else can, and having no victims except each other will kill the rest. Perhaps in the twenty-fourth or the twenty-fifth, or perhaps long after that, life will come again. I have done everything a half fairy can to preserve it. Carabosse and I make a good pair.

And if it happens-why, then everything is here. The whales and the elephants and the radishes and the trees. Magic is here. And man, too. All those randy stable boys and giggling maids. And the Bogles. Ready to begin again. Ready to recreate what God created. And Giles, to greet me again in the morning; and I, to greet him.

And if it does not happen?

Then everything is here. Sleeping. Dreaming, perhaps, of what might have been. Perhaps others, on some other world will catch the dream, will wake from it astonished at its marvel, at its complicated wonder. Perhaps someone or something will dream who can create once more.

There is a bedtime prayer Aunt Terror taught me when I was a child. "Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep." Such an arrogant idea to go to sleep on, I have always thought. Why should God do any such thing, except that I've always loved His beauty passionately. All God's beauty passionately.

That time, so long ago, I would not allow the Curse to touch me. I did not want to spend a hundred years sleeping. I thought it unworthy of me. I thought it monstrously unfair that Papa had let me in for such a fate. I evaded it. I escaped it, so I thought. Escaping destiny is not so easy as that. Funny, the way things work out. Even Carabosse and Israfel couldn't quite keep it from happening the way it did. As though someone else had done the planning.

Puck is holding out his hand for my pen. And my cap. He says he will sit by me, and rub the pains out of my poor old legs. Until I sleep.

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

Perhaps, instead, He will keep the fire that burns here; the fire that Israfel and Carabosse set here.

Perhaps that has always been my soul.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

During the last few years we've all been made increasingly aware of the destruction of habitat that's been going on all over the world—in rainforests, wetlands, deserts, the high tundra. We see it on television and read about it in the nature magazines. When I drive from Denver down to Santa Fe, I see the river valley where I grew up now packed with houses cheek by jowl. There used to be cattail swamps along there, and I remember lying for hours on my belly in the tall grass looking for whatever it was that sounded exactly like a plumber's plunger being squooshed. The bird was a least bittern, but there aren't any swamp birds there anymore because the swamps have all been drained and the trees cut down to build a golf course. The sloping wildflower-filled meadows where I used to hunt Indian arrowheads were first rutted and destroyed by off-road vehicles and then turned into a trailer park. And on TV I see trees falling in Brazil, and wetlands turned into marinas in Florida, and deserts creeping into places grasslands used to be in Africa.

It seems to me sometimes that all beauty is dying. Which makes me hope that perhaps it isn't dead but only sleeping. And that makes me think of Sleeping Beauty and wonder if she—Beauty, that is—might not be a metaphor for what is happening to the world at large; perfect Beauty born, Beauty cursed with death, Beauty dying—but with the magical hope of being reawakened, maybe by love.

The result of all this is Beauty, a novel of the human spirit, a book-length faery tale, a meditation on various questions of religion—or perhaps just a prayer ...