Beauty (26 page)

He had dressed for the occasion in cloth of gold with diamonds. Flatulina was no less marvelously accoutred, and various of the viceregal children stood here and there, observing our approach with scarcely concealed incredulity. I was not surprised to see Constanzia between two of them, standing attentively immobile, as though she had been there all along. We paused at the foot of the stairs.

"Senorita," the Viceroy began, sweeping his hat before him in the first gesture of a very complicated reverence.

"Senora, actually," Mama said.

The Viceroy came erect all at once, like a poker. He glared at Roland Mirabeau, who shrugged elaborately.

"She is a virgin," the chaperone said. "No matter what she calls herself."

"With a difference?" hissed the Viceroy, coming down the stairs sidewise, like a crab, one hand held threatening before him. Flatulina edged down behind him, her head held slightly forward, like a snake about to strike.

"As you will observe," Roland said calmly, indicating Mama with a nod of his head. She sat at ease, awaiting the Viceroy's approach. When he had come near enough, she held out her hand for him to kiss. He bowed over it. I saw his nostrils quiver. Perhaps he scented the odor of ... of whatever Roland had sensed. Over the top of his head she gave me a look of sceptical disdain, but when he raised himself again, her face was all sweetness.

"I have been told you require my assistance," she said. "So happy to be of help."

I scarcely heard her. At the top of the stairs, the ambassador from Baskarone emerged from the great doors. My eyes became fixed upon him. They could not turn aside. What business had kept him here so long? What business had brought him here at all? Why ever he had come, his stay had not changed him. The thought occurred to me that ambassadors from Baskarone were, perhaps, among the eternal things which did not change.

He became aware of my stare and smiled at me as though we were friends but lately separated. I blushed and cast down my eyes, released by that smile to come to myself once more. Resolutely I turned my eyes on Mama and the Viceroy. That was where any business pertinent to me would transpire, and Mama might at any moment need my help. When I glanced up a moment later, the ambassador had gone, perhaps away, perhaps inside the castle, who could say. My heart stopped for a moment, then resumed its steady thudding.

The Viceroy awarded a medal to Colonel Esquivar, to much tantara of trumpets and huzzah from the populace. The gallivant head was turned over to representatives from the firm of Pelasges y Plumas,
rellenadores acclamados
to the hunters of Chinanga. The head would hang in the viceregal dining room, said the Viceroy. Considering both its bedraggled state and the bestial glare remaining in the glassy eyes, the
rellenadores
would have their work cut out for them.

Mrs. Gallimar and the chaperone were rewarded and dismissed. A benefice was awarded Captain Karon. Alms were given to clownery inmates loose along the street. Sweets were tossed to the crowd. There was a general departure, and we were left in relative quiet, scarcely more than a two-family party: the Viceroy's numerous one; plus Mama and me. The Viceroy rubbed his hands together and put on a new expression as he winked and nodded at his wife. "I have everything ready," he chortled. "Have had, simply forever, just waiting, don't you know." His eyes glittered with hectic abandon. He was not the same man I had seen before. He was transformed by excitement.

["I don't like this at all," I said. "This wasn't supposed to happen."

"Carabosse, it will happen, whether we like it or not," sighed Israfel. "It has been inevitable, ever since Elladine arrived. This world does not appear in our futures; we misinterpreted that fact, that's all. We had no way of knowing."

"I should have read all The Diaries,
" I confessed. "I should have been more careful."

"Shhh," said Israfel. "Be ready to salvage what we can ... ]

I looked across at Constanzia, who shrugged. Evidently her father had gone further in
The Diaries
than she had. Following his urgent beckoning, we entered the castle and paraded down a long, stone-floored corridor between files of uniformed guardsmen, climbed several flights of rocky stairs which twisted and coiled about in the walls of the place, and arrived at last in a tower room set up for the study of astrology, alchemy, or some even more esoteric science. I stooped to one great brass telescope as we passed it, finding it focused upon the heights of Baskarone. The mechanism had not the power of Mama's salve, but one could make out the effulgence of the place.

"At last," the Viceroy said, lighting candles and setting alembics to bubbling. "At last," as he thrust a sword through a ring and suspended both above a chair. "At last," as he bustled about opening books to proper pages, laying out indescribable things upon a stone set in a pentacle. He motioned for Mama to seat herself in the chair. She looked at the suspended weapon with a suspicious eye, but complied even as she summoned me nearer, taking me firmly by the hand.

"If I am not mistaken," she murmured. "The Viceroy is about to turn his universe inside out."

["This world has lasted for centuries," I sighed. "Oh, Israfel, why. Why? Just when we had need of it."

Israfel didn't answer me. He had no time to answer.]

Various members of the Viceroy's family were assigned parts in the rite. They were already well-rehearsed. The telescope was evidently part of the ritual, for it was sprinkled with liquids from the alembics, censered with fragrant and bitter smoke, and Mama was asked to put her eye to it as the final words of the spell or invocation were spoken. The words were in no language I knew. I could not even have begun to spell the sounds which issued in gutteral imperatives from the Viceroy's throat.

Silence.

A wind came up from somewhere. Mama gripped my hand. A voice from behind us said, "May I drop you ladies somewhere?" I turned to see the ambassador from Baskarone, smiling at us both. Senora Carabosse stood at his side, looking like a rider whose horse had just died unexpectedly, her face a puzzle of chagrin and impromptu resolution. I looked back at the Viceroy, only to find him vanished, his place taken by an amount of empty and chilly air. So with Flatulina and the children. Constanzia whirled past, her hair a wheel of dark and light as she spun and was gone. She held out her hand toward me, her face pleading.

I cried out to her. "Constanzia ... "

The ambassador shook his head. "Ambrosius Pomposus did not intend his imaginary world to exist forever. He included in his creation a procedure whereby the inhabitants, when they grew sufficiently bored, could accomplish the rite of dissolution. Some such rite is part of all creations, Beauty. Of Faery. Of the world. It is our misfortune that our own actions have helped un-create this one just now."

He took Mama on one arm and me on the other and began to stride across the clouds that suddenly stretched before us, Senora Carabosse walking effortlessly beside. I thought, irrelevantly, that if she walked so easily, she could not be so old as I had previously thought. My fingers tingled where they touched the ambassador's arm. I heard Mrs. Gallimar's voice saying faintly to someone, "Such a lovely wine. Such a lovely, lovely wine," and then came the retreating wail of the
Stugos Queen.
The clouds opened below us to let us see a great, edgeless river where a lonely boatman looked up from his oars and waved. Chinanga had departed, but the river was still there.

"The Styx was imagined before Chinanga," said the ambassador. "It will be there through many creations yet."

"Ylles, Israfel, if you would be so kind," Mama said in a strained, polite voice.

"Glad to be of service, Elladine," he replied. There was something weary and ironic in his voice.

We were very high up. For a moment I saw the beautiful heights of Baskarone, clear as day. Then they were gone, and so was he.

21

I write the truth when I say that Ylles is an almost-Baskarone. When one eats fairy fruit, one sees it as glorious, lovely, utterly beyond compare. Since I had eaten no fairy fruit prior to arrival, however, my first glimpse of it was disappointing. It looked rather like a waste of moorland with some pigpens and hovels scattered here and there. The moment we arrived, Mama darted away into the bushes, and Carabosse, who was standing quietly beside me with an expression of deep pain upon her old face, leaned forward and said, "Come see me as soon as you can, Beauty. Ask Puck to bring you." Before I could ask her who Puck was, she took a step or two down the path toward some pigpens, sidled a little to the right and was gone. It was a method of coming and going I was to see much of in Faery.

Mama emerged from the shrubbery with a handful of berries which she thrust upon me, urging me to eat them all as quickly as possible. While I did so, she gathered others for herself. She chewed them as though famished, eyes rolled up, jaws working furiously. It was an astonishing sight which kept my eyes fixed on her for several minutes. When I looked at my surroundings again, I found myself in true Ylles. Parkland had replaced moorland; castles stood where the hovels had been, and over all stretched a sky of late-evening blue spangled with early stars. The grasses were also starred with tiny five-pointed flowers of silver, umbels of golden bloom, and tinkling sprays of bluebells. Though I saw it all quite clearly, Mama was not content until she had uprooted a small, hairy stemmed plant and rubbed the juice of its root into my eyes. It stung horribly for a time, but when the pain vanished, my eyesight was like that of a falcon.

"Elvenroot," she explained. "It grows only in Faery, nowhere else. It enables one to see all our marvels."

"Ylles is in Faery?" I asked stupidly, sniffing at an odor which had caught my nostrils, a familiar scent.

"A province," she said, nodding. "One of many. It goes from those hills over there," and she pointed, "to the ocean over there," pointing once more. "I am the ruler of it, when I'm here. When I'm not here, another of the Theena Shee takes it over."

I had not understood the word she used. She said it again, then smoothed a patch of ground and spelled it out with her finger, in Irish, evidently the only human language in which the word was written. "Daoine Sidhe," she said.
"Theena Shee.
My people. The people of True Faery. One of whom takes over rul-ership of my province when I am away. Here, I'll show you the boundaries."

She turned me to face a direction I thought of as north, where loomed a range of shadowy mountains, their ridges making a jagged line against the stars. At the foot of the mountains lay dark folds of forest. Mama turned me widdershins from the forest to see the land sloping down to a starlit sea, the white combers rolling endlessly toward us. Widdershins from the sea was moorland, covered with low growth and extending as far as I could see. Widdershins from the moorland brought me facing uplands, where many fantastic and marvelous palaces stood, though none, to my surprise, as lovely as Westfaire. Whichever direction I turned, the familiar odor came past me on the wind, as though blown from every quarter.

"Oberon's and Mab's," she said, pointing to the two closest palaces. "And mine, and a dozen more. It doesn't really matter which part belongs to who. Oberon's realm is next to mine, and he would look after it if I left."

We stood beside a copse which was more or less at the center of all this: tall trees, lacy, silvery, softly susurant.

"Why would you ever leave it?" I asked, staring in wonder around myself. Truthfully, it was very lovely.

"Oh," she said vaguely. "Sometimes one wants a change."

Every view was one a painter would sell his brushes for. Every aspect thrilled. Every structure was perfect from every angle. The scent of the flowers alone was enough to make one drunk, though it did not mask that other scent ...

"Mama, what is that smell?" I asked.

"Smell?" She sniffed delicately. "The flowers?"

"No, the smell on the wind."

She sniffed again, her ivory nostrils dilating to take in the breeze. "Not the sea? Not the pines of the forest?"

"No. The smell ... the smell that's everywhere."

She laughed, liltingly. "The smell of Faery, silly child. The smell of magic!"

As I was about to pursue that matter, we were interrupted by the sound of horns, tiny horns pitched high as a wasp's buzz. Mama gestured to one side, and I turned to see a troupe passing by, little men mounted on mice, butterfly-winged maidens riding hedgehogs saddled with roses. Elladine called and they answered, their voices like infant bells, waving tiny hands, calling a greeting but not turning aside from their processionary way.

"Trouping fairies," she told me with an indulgent smile.

"Where are they going?"

"Nowhere. Everywhere. They simply go. They camp on the mosses and dance. Then they move on. They are not serious creatures. They have only small enchantments, small as themselves. Sometimes they are seen in the human world, sometimes they are heard. Sometimes their dance floors are seen."

"Fairy rings?"

She nodded. "They are the only fairies with butterfly wings, the only fairies to inhabit human gardens. Once they were as large as we; once they were worshipped as gods and goddesses, long, oh long, long ago. They had mighty names then: Pomona. Naiad. Dryad. Aurora. Over time they have shrunk. They get smaller with every passing century. Eventually I believe they will vanish into the atmosphere, and we will hear them for a time, like midges, then they will be entirely gone." There was something careless and remote in her voice, a tone I had noted before, a tone I had shuddered to hear.

"Won't you miss them?" I asked, wanting her to say yes, yes, she would miss them because they were fanciful and marvelous.

She didn't answer the question I had asked. "We Sidhe do not need wings, nor mice to serve as steeds. We have our own hunt, our own ways." She sounded eager, almost voracious. There was something uncomfortable in her voice, something like an edge of grass, seeming so soft, cutting so deep, the life's blood following it almost invisibly so that one does not know one is cut until one sees the red. I drew in my breath, waiting for the wound to gape, but she walked away over the verdant meadow, and I followed her, drawn like the tail of a kite, wondering what had happened to her. Even in Chinanga she had seemed more ... more human. But then, I told myself, Chinanga had been a human imagining, while Faery was not.