Beauty (9 page)

I went out, hearing my lonely footsteps, remembering the sounds of carriages and horsemen, listening in the silence for a sound that did not come. Beyond the last bridge, at the limit of the castle lands, I stopped in amazement to confront a waist-high hedge of briar rose which rustled with savage and implacable life, pulsing in the smell of magic as it grew ever taller. Was this part of the curse or part of the amelioration? To either side of me the hedge stretched in a wide circle, enclosing the outer walls, reaching back on either side to the shores of the lake, hiding what had always been my home.

I pushed my way through, crying out as the thorns tore at my arms, thankful for the thick fabric of the cloak I wore. Once outside the limits of the enchantment, I took off the cloak and changed my clothes. It would not do for a woman to walk about on the roads alone, though it was safer in the country than in the cities, where gangs of youths roamed about seeking unprotected women to abuse and ruin. I had already decided to wear my grubby boy clothes, which would attract no one's interest. Then, tears still running down my face, with my hair twisted up under a grubby cap, and with everything I owned in a sack over my shoulder, I went away from there. At the roadside not far distant stood a pale arm of stone which emerged from the forest in a tumbled wall topped by a rock shaped like a cat's head. Under that rock was a little cave Grumpkin and I had discovered long ago. We called it the cathole. It was a place to secrete treasures, a place for Grumpkin to hide in, a place I had hidden in once or twice myself as a little child, though I had outgrown it long since. Now I stopped and put most of the wealth I carried inside it, stopping the opening with a few head-sized stones well wedged into place with smaller bits of rock. The aunts had often warned against the robbers at large in the world, robbers and ruffians and villains of all sorts. Hiding a part of what I had would save it against later need.

I kept some coin in my sack. Though they might not be real, I kept the emeralds wrapped up in rags: collar, circlet, two brooches, and a bracelet. I kept one warrant on a usurer. The rest of the jewelry and coin and the other warrant, I secreted away. Once this was done, I started on my way again, wishing I had a horse. It had been a weary and frightening day.

As I came from behind the stone, I saw a shattered gleam of sun on the flower-gathering hill, as though a man in armor had moved and reflected the light. I thought of Giles, my heart leaping up. He had known I needed him and had come home! Grumpkin cried, and I held him in my arms as I ran toward that gleam of light, telling myself it was Giles, it couldn't be Giles, perhaps it was only a knight, but perhaps he had a spare horse he might let me ride, or even a horse and saddle I might buy. I had not gone far before Grumpkin snarled, sensing presences I did not. He would not have snarled at Giles.

[We had not foreseen this! We had planned on Mary Blossom taking Beauty
s
place, but we had not foreseen this!]

The men and women I came upon were doing something incomprehensible. They moved among contrivances, among strange apparatus, boxes which hummed and winked and made noises like the midnight peeps of startled birds. There were five persons, some men, some women, though it was hard to tell which were which. They were clad much alike, and my impression of maleness and femaleness came more from stance and stature than from any other regard.

I saw them before they saw me. I should have stopped, turned, gone somewhere else, but it is a measure of my distraction and pain that I simply kept walking, mouth open, eyes fixed on them, wondering vaguely who they were and what they were doing on the May flower hill.

[Nothing in our calculations had included this! These people came from a time the Pool could no longer reach, a time beyond the veil, where I could not see ... ]

"Did you get time lapse shots of the hedge?" the oldest of the men cried, his voice urgent.

"Time lapse, hell," answered the tallest, heaviest man, his eye fixed to the end of the convoluted box he held upon his shoulder. "It's fast enough to show without lapse. Look at the damn thing! It's fairly crawling into the sky!"

I turned. The hedge had grown up behind me and was now higher than my head. Tendrils at the top reached upward like hands, clutching at the clouds. I felt a sob pressing upward and choked it down. Now was no time to give way, however much I needed to do so.

"What are you doing?" I cried, stepping from behind the bush.

[I actually reached out to stop her, but she moved too quickly.]

They turned, mouths open, staring. Almost simultaneously, two who had not spoken before said:

"Oh, shit!"

"That's torn it. Hell!"

Not a polite greeting, considering everything, though not necessarily hostile.

"What in the bloody hell are you doing here?" asked one of the women in an offended voice. "There's not supposed to be anyone here!" Her accent was strange. It took me a moment to figure out what she had said.

I shook my head, almost unable to respond. "Coming home," I mumbled. "From market."

I saw them mouthing the words, having the same difficulty I had had in understanding what they heard. Evidently my tongue was not their native speech.

The oldest man turned to one of others, throwing up his hands. "What do we do about this, Alice?"

"How the hell am I supposed to know, Martin," the one called Alice replied. "If this shows up on the monitors, they'll have our guts for dinner."

"What's your name, boy?" Martin asked. His gray hair was combed back from his face, almost as short as the woman's.

"I am Havoc, the miller's son," I mumbled. It was the name I had used with Martin since I was tiny. There was no time or need to invent another.

"Damn," he said again, thrusting parts of his apparatus into cases. "Jaybee, you got enough footage? Bill, ready? There are only minutes left."

The man addressed as Bill turned his face toward me, grimacing. He was shorter than I, the height of a child, with hair the color of ripe apricots, and he wore the same kind of singlet and trousers as the others. "Ready," he said, staring at me with something like pity in his eyes.

I did not understand the word "footage."

"Janice?"

The other woman looked into the eyes of her contrivance and nodded. "Plenty," she said in a cold voice. Her hair was white as snow, but she was not an old woman. Her eyes when she looked up at me were hard and black, like fowls' eyes.

"What are you doing here?" I wanted to know.

The white-haired woman laughed, a quick bark of laughter. "A documentary, boy. We are recording the vanishment of magic from England-and from the world. Now, do you know any more than you did before?"

"That isn't true," I said, shaking my head. "No."

"Not yet," she smiled. "But soon."

The one called Jaybee stared at me as he had been since I came from behind the bush. His jaw moved restlessly, like that of a boar pig, and I resolved to stay away from him, for tushes or no, he had that look to him which says all pigs are sows to him. "We need to get rid of this kid," he said, glaring at me. "I'll do it."

"No!" shouted the Alice one. "Killing him would show up on the monitors. Don't! We've only got a minute left."

Jaybee sneered at her and grabbed me by the shoulder. When he jerked me, my hat fell off and my hair tumbled down. He shouted, then laughed and grabbed me up from behind, one great hand clamped on each arm near the shoulder, holding my arms tight as he turned me toward a thing standing behind us, like a great barrel with a door in it. On my shoulder, Grumpkin snarled and scratched at him, but he paid no heed. Both of us were thrust through the door and the others tumbled in after us, all of them shrieking at Jaybee, telling him to put me out, and him fending them off while holding onto me.

Alice staggered to a certain part of the barrel where there were buttons and a flickering of light. She bent over them, muttering. Then we were all twisted inside out. I was. I presume the others were, for Janice cried out and then cursed. Grumpkin screamed. So did I. It felt as though I were being slowly torn apart from inside by rats.

[As was I, for I took hold of the thing she was in and went with her. Or tried. A barrier stretched from the bottom of the world to the top, from side to side. Impenetrable. My powers were absorbed by it, like a sponge. I could not move it. I could not get through. I was being sucked dry, sucked out, killed. I felt Beauty leaving me and could do nothing about it at all. And then she was gone. What she carried was gone with her. All our hopes gone. I was still there, sitting on the hill and weeping when Israfel found me, I who had not wept since the fountains of the deep were sealed.]

Then everything stopped. Quiet came. The pain went away. The others began to stir and bend and mutter. And the little man, Bill, opened the door into the twenty-first century.

12
MY LIFE IN THE LATER CENTURIES

"I want her," said Jaybee. "She's mine." His fingers were making holes in my arms.

"No," Alice snarled at him, her voice like a whip. "You've gotten us all into enough trouble. You were a stupid fool to drag her along. They're already watching you! Risk your own life all you like, but you're not going to get me killed. Get out of here! Do something to distract the guards at the door, and maybe they won't see there's an extra person!"

"Let Bill take her," said Martin. "Nobody'll bother Bill. I'll see to the guards." He pushed me at the little man and then walked away behind the scowling Jaybee, talking loudly, gesturing, making people look at him.

Bill held me by one wrist. He gave me no time to see anything. I had an impression of grayness, of round things like lance shafts hung across a wall. All sounds echoed, dwindling away in reverberations, as though we were in a great stone hall. I remember a mighty clamor of voices. Some were ours and echoes, but there were others. One of the women said, "Get that animal out of sight. Hide her hair."

Choking down a curse, I put Grumpkin under my shirt and held him there, feeling his ragged breathing against my belly and his claws in my skin. Bill bundled up my hair and pushed my cap down on my head. He must have picked it up when it fell off.

"Now! The guards are looking the other way! Get her out of here, hurry."

The little man pulled me along with amazing strength. He was not much larger than Papa's fool, but he was very powerful. He dragged me up a flight of stairs that clanged under our feet like swords upon armor.

The women were behind us. One of them said, "God, there's a pop-patrol." I heard it as one word, "popatrol." I looked for it, thinking it must be some kind of dangerous animal, but saw nothing except heads and legs, people moving in all directions, up and down and across, all dressed alike, all looking alike. The surface we walked upon was full of tiny holes. Another such surface was above. There were feet above us, tramping down on us, thousands of feet. Below us were the heads of people, moving fast or slow, thousands of heads, arms swinging below them, feet at the bottom, and below them, more heads and arms and feet. There were people on all sides. I wanted to scream. I think there were beggars, for some of the people rattled canisters beneath our noses as they cried, "Fidipur, fidipur."

"Get off here," the woman said from close behind.

Bill jerked me to one side. We ran down a corridor that moved beneath our feet, weaving through clots of people moving more slowly. I stumbled when the corridor ended, only to be hauled up and dragged onto another one. There were several more corridors that moved slow or fast. People stared at me curiously. I lost my footing and fell down and was jerked upright by my panting escort. Suddenly we were standing on an unmoving surface in front of a door. Bill put his hand flat on a place at the side of it. The door opened, and we were inside somewhere with the door shut behind us and the noise mostly gone, though I could still feel it rumbling in my feet. I felt the scream bubbling in me.

"Home-sweet-home," said Bill. Much of what he said was unintelligible, and I've doubtless got a lot of it wrong, but I know he said "home-sweet-home," because he always said it, whenever he came in.

"And what's your name again?" he asked me.

I swallowed the scream and started to say, "Havoc." No point in that. He knew I was a girl. "Beauty," I said, in a kind of mumble, trying to see on all sides of me at once. I would not have called it home-sweet-home. It was tiny, half the size of my tower room, full of complicated surfaces, with more of those ropes on the walls, very straight, like lances. When we brushed them with our bodies, they clanged.

"Mind the pipes," said Bill. "You'll knock off a steam valve, and then where'll we be?"

I shook my head at him, signifying I did not know either where we were or would be or what a pipe or a steam valve was. I must have looked frightened, for he became less cheerful and tried to soothe me. "It's all right," he murmured. "Just sit down and relax. Sit down. It's all right."

Grumpkin heard him if I did not, for the cat came out from under my shirt all in one movement and crouched at my feet yowling.

"He's hungry," I said. I knew he was, because I was. We had not eaten during all that grieving time at Westfaire. And now-I had the feeling much time had passed.

"What do they eat?" he asked me, pointing to the cat.

I could not imagine anyone not knowing what cats eat. "Milk," I told him. "Meat. Eggs. What any animal eats."

"Milk," he said, laughing. "Meat. Eggs. Ha, ha. Ha."

It was not amused laughter. It was bitter laughter, the kind Papa's fool sometimes got up to when he remembered his wife who had run away with his children.

"You don't have any?" I asked.

"Have none. Have never seen any. Would not know any if I saw them."

"What do you feed your animals? What do you eat?" I asked him in amazement.