Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I fled back through the dining room, seeking help, and was sent sprawling when I tripped over the body of one of the footmen lying beside a trayload of scattered flagons. In my daze, I assumed he had seen what happened to Beloved and had fainted. Even when I reached the hallway and began to find other bodies, I did not immediately realize what had happened. Only when I found Aunt Lavender fallen prone across her lute did I realize that the malediction had been modified by Aunt Joyeause not only to send Duke Phillip’s daughter to sleep, but to include everyone at Westfaire. I had worried about what people would do with a princess who slept for a hundred years! It seemed they would do nothing at all, for she was not to sleep alone. When she regained consciousness, a hundred years in the future, all her court would still be around her, though it was not Beloved’s court, but mine.

  I found Doll and Martin asleep in the stables and Dame Blossom asleep at her loom. In the village, everyone slept. The shoemaker and the tailor and the potter and the tanner and all. I howled for some little time, as frightened as I have ever been, while I ran about through the barns and stables, the armory, the dormitories of the men-at-arms, the kitchens, the granary, the orchards, through every house in the village by the walls. Everyone was asleep, guests and all. Every living thing. The cattle in the byre were asleep, and the chickens in their pens, and the swine, the piglets laid out like rows of barely breathing bottles at their mother’s swollen teats. Wasps slept on the fruit on the sunlit walls. Spiders slept in their webs. The weevil slept at the heart of the rose. Papa’s dogs lay indolently in the sun, as unmoving as the painted wooden saints in the chapel.

  And in that chapel Father Raymond slept beside Papa—who had arrived home only that morning—both of them on a bench, propped upright by each others bodies. Papa’s mouth was open and the faint, infrequent breaths hissed across my ear when I leaned down to shake him. I inadvertently dislodged him so that he fell sidewise, onto the bench, but his sleep did not break, nor did that of Father Raymond when I clung to him, wetting his surplice with my tears. He held a piece of paper in his hand. Evidently something he and Papa had been looking at. It caught my eye because I saw my name on it.

  It was addressed to Father Raymond. “Tell Beauty that I love her forever,” it said, “Tell her I honor her always. Tell her I would never have done anything to hurt her. Tell her no matter what distance separates us, I will love her still.” It was signed by Giles. Father Raymond had not shown it to me. He had shown it to Papa! I hated them both for that, but I could not stand there doing it. I put the letter in my pocket and ran on.

  The sleepers included even Sibylla and her mother. I found them in the scribe’s office, lying atop Mama’s marriage contract in an uncomfortable looking heap. I left them that way, hoping when they woke they would have cramps. Of all living things in all the lands of Westfaire, only Grumpkin and I were free to move about because we were cloaked in magic and invisible to the enchantment. Grumpkin wanted to leave my pocket, but I did not dare let him go.

  I cannot remember what I did then for a while. Though a few other guests had been expected, none arrived. It was as though the castle had been set aside from mortal lands. The sun sank slowly, and I with it. For a time I huddled on the stairs, crying, Grumpkin patting my face with his paws and making the small, trilling noise he makes when he seeks catly companionship, his love call. I clung to him and wept. I reread Giles’s letter and wept.

  Tears changed nothing. Eventually, my eyes dried and I realized I had no choice but to go. There was no way I could stay in this place. No way I could maintain myself. I made myself think carefully about going away, made myself consider calmly the things I would need to take with me, gritting my teeth so hard that later my jaws hurt. I needed money. The keys to Papa’s chest were around his neck, and the coin he had available, poor though Sibylla had said he was, was locked in the chest in his room. Also in the chest were two warrants making claims upon usurers in London, and I took them both. Papa or his man-of-business had evidently tried to delay the final reckoning by deferring payment of current expenses and putting current income into the hands of the Jews to collect interest. Usury was a sin for Christians, but then so was lust, and Papa had not balked at that. I think anything done to excess must be sinful, including pilgrimages, but if so the poor man was paying for his sins. If he had not neglected Mama, I kept telling myself, none of this would have happened.

  The aunts had some jewels, which I did not hesitate to purloin. They would not need them for one hundred years, and I needed them now. There was the Monfort parure of emeralds and diamonds that Papa intended to give Sibylla for a wedding gift. I took that, too, though I suspected the gems might not be the real ones. Surely Papa had sold them, poor as he was. I wondered how much Papa had received for the jewels when he had sold them and what he had spent it on. If, indeed, Grandfather had not sold the emeralds in his own time and put the money into rebuilding Westfaire.

  The last thing I did before I left was to drag Beloved in from the garden. I could not carry her up the stairs into my tower room, which seemed most fitting, but then, what is fitting at such a time? Where are Sleeping Beauties supposed to lie? Towers come inevitably to mind. Towers or perhaps bowers or enchanted tombs of glass. I could manage none of them. Half fairy or no, I had no powers that I was aware of. Perhaps my mama would have managed better. Besides, the tower was burned and there was nothing there except my mysterious thing, sitting untouched upon the window ledge, with charcoal all about it.

  As it was, I got Beloved onto the table in the small dining room and covered her with a brocade hanging, bringing it neatly up under her chin, placing a cushion under her head, doing what I could to make her long sleep a comfortable one. I wondered if she would turn over in that sleep and found myself giggling hysterically at the thought. “I’m sorry Beloved,” I cried. “Sorry!”

  It was pure hypocrisy. Suppose I had known what was going to happen, wouldn’t I have done the same thing again? I may even have known what would happen without admitting it to myself. Even then I caught myself thinking, better Beloved than I. She would be thrilled to be awakened by a prince, and why not? It was a far finer fate than a weaver’s daughter could ordinarily expect.

  As I stood looking at her, I was aware of two things: first, that Westfaire was redolent of that odor I had always associated with the chapel; and second, that there was an aura of glamour which flowed from Beloved’s form in a swelling tide. When I went out into the hall, the aura came after me, a shining mist of silent mystery, an emanation of the marvelous. Every stone of the hallway throbbed with it, giving my footsteps back to me like the slow beat of a wondrous drum or some great heart that pulsed below the castle, making the very stones reverberate with its movement. Above me the lacelike fan vault sparkled like gems; through the windows the sunbeams shimmered with a golden, sunset glow. Once outside, I looked up at the towers and caught my breath, for they had never seemed so graceful. Over the garden walls the laburnum dangled golden chains, reflowered on this summer evening as though it were yet spring. In fact, springtime had miraculously returned. In the corners the lilacs hung in royal purple trusses, and roses filled the air with a fragrance deep as smoke.

  All around me beauty wove itself, beauty and the strange, somehow familiar smell of the place. Westfaire became an eternal evening in an eternal May, the sun slanting in from the west as though under a cloud, making the orchards and gardens gleam in a green as marvelous as the light in the gems I carried. Slowly the sun moved down, and I feared it would not rise again on Westfaire for a hundred long years.

  I took myself away from the castle, across the wide gardens and lawns to the tall inner walls built when the castle was renewed. Outside these walls the moat reached around from the lake on one side to the lake on the other, filled by its waters. The heavy bridge was down. My footfalls thudded on the timbers as I crossed, then fell silent in the dust of the village street. Little shops and houses huddled in quiet, thatch glowing like gold, walls flushe
d by sun. Beyond the village lay the paddocks and the commons, and past them the outer walls, all that was left of the first Westfaire, built so long ago that men had forgotten when—low, massive ramparts with squat watchtowers and a fanged portcullis—and beyond that the final bridge and the road leading to the outside world.

  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,” ftp 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 km 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 th
em 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 Jay-bee, talking loudly, gesturing, making people look at him.