Beauty
Page 18
Had this been a new sensation, Roland went on, he would have been disturbed by it, but in fact it was his usual feeling with regard to women. Flowers could move him. Sunsets could bring tears to his eyes. The sight of the wind bending the trees at dawn could make him cry out in luxurious sensitivity, but women moved him not at all. There was something about them, some inherent fleshiness, some excess of corporeality which turned him cold. And then there was their smell, whether masked in perfumes or alive upon the air as itself, that fecund stench, that earthy aroma, that mephitic scent, which seemed to come upon them with womanhood.
(I leaned toward him, wondering if he would catch my aroma. Evidently he did not. It was then, I think, that I began to understand the world in which I found myself. I was beginning to find a certain lack of consistency. As though natural laws only partially applied.)
Little girls smelled otherwise, Roland said. He quite liked little girls. He loved their breastless little bodies and their wee buttocks, like two eggs laid side by side. He loved their elven haunches, their dimpled knees, and pink soled feet, but all this adoration was in his eyes only. He did not lust after them. He merely worshipped them, as he worshipped the egg icons in the sanctuary of St. Frog, for what they symbolized, not for what they were. Purity. Oh, Roland adored purity. Purity and beauty. It was why he had become a chaperone, after all, in order that he might adore it. Serve it. Preserve it. And though there was much beauty, there was little enough of purity in Chinanga, so he said.
“I sometimes wonder,” he remarked to me over his second cup of cou, “what we would have been like had we Hot been condemned to live here in Chinanga. What would we have been like had we been allowed to settle in holy Baskarone?”
His remark was overheard by Captain Karon, who snorted and said, “Better ask what Baskarone would have been like if we’d lived there. Can you imagine the Viceroy ruling Baskarone?” Then the captain flushed and looked around himself quickly to see who might have overheard. “Meaning no disrespect,” he mumbled, catching Roland’s eye. “No disrespect, Chaperone.”
“None taken,” mused Roland. “In fact, I apprehend your question, Captain. Are we what our environment makes us? Or do we make our environment what we are? If the latter, then one might ask who really lives in Baskarone. Do we not say ‘Blessed Baskarone’? Do we not speak of Joyafleur as a heavenly city?”
It was the first time I had heard those words. They set up a reverberation within me, a humming, as though some great tuning fork had been thrust down my spine. A holy city. A blessed country. And the ambassadors from that region, ah, what were they, then? I inferred what they were and flushed as I felt myself longing for angels. Had the ambassador from Baskarone been an angel?
The captain made a face as though to spit, then thought better of it. “Well, sir, since we’re speaking frankly, how by all the serpents would I know? Not having been there. We look up toward Baskarone from these sweaty lowlands and see it all stretched out there like some great, feathery wing, full of color and design, but who’s been there? None of us, that’s sure. The border posts, they don’t let tourists from Chinanga go up to take a look, now do they?”
I caught Senora Carabosse’s eye. She was listening unabashedly, her mouth slightly open, as though ready to bite at some intimation she desperately desired.
Roland murmured, “There have been visitors from there.”
“Ambassadors. Oh, yes. Once in a while. Close-mouthed as turtles, too. I met one once, at Mrs. Gallimar’s.”
“Did you indeed? An ambassador from Baskarone?”
“A great tall, tan fellow with a sunny smile and a ready laugh, not a feather in his wings out of place, and no more information in him than there is good intentions in a woodtick.”
Was it the same ambassador from Baskarone? Had he had wings? I could not remember.
“Then what was he doing here?” asked Roland.
“Flew down to find out how many cases of wine we wanted lowered from Joyafleur. Come to find out what we had to trade. Come to find out whether any contraband was getting through, had I been bothered by pirates. Asked if Chinanga was stable, if it was safe if someone wanted to leave something here for a while. Complained a little about a few hunters climbing the wall and falling off. It messes up the trails through there, so they say, and since the wall is known to be impassable, creates a foolishness. That kind of thing. Full of questions, he was. If you ask me, he was here spying, finding out about us, about Chinanga.”
“Did you ask him about Baskarone, directly?”
“Well, you know how people will, at a dinner party. ‘How’re things in Baskarone, Your Excellency?’ ‘Had any interestin’ happenins in Baskarone?’ ‘How’s the weather been in Baskarone?’ That kind of question.”
‘To which he replied?”
“Not at all,” said the captain. “Far’s I could tell, nothing ever happens at all in Baskarone. He said about six words.”
“I wish I’d been there,” Roland mused. “I would have asked him directly, Tell me about Baskarone.’”
“No you wouldn’t,” said the captain. “You think you would, but you wouldn’t.”
“I suppose that’s true,” sighed Roland, with a sidelong glance at me. He sipped the cooling cou as he stared across the undulant waters, letting the silence settle between them.
I thought of the captain’s words often in the succeeding days. Did we suit our environments or did we change them to suit ourselves? And in that case, what were we who had lived in the twentieth? And in that case, who were they who lived in Baskarone?
Late that night the Stugos Queen tied up at what had once been and would be again, when the floods had passed, the riverbank. There, under the motionless branches of great jungle trees, Captain Karon conducted some hours of quiet business. All the passengers except myself had long been asleep before the captain and the mate opened the hatches to the forward hold and lifted out a number of cages. During the earlier hours of the evening small boats rowed by persons claiming to be from Tartarus and Tophet and Eblis and Gehenna had drawn near to the Queen, and now they surrounded the ship. Natives came aboard a few at a time to pick up consignments or to offer Captain Karon bids for his unconsigned merchandise. Cages were lowered into the waiting boats. To unsuccessful bidders, the captain offered his hand and the suggestion that they might have better luck next time. As the first fingers of dawn stroked the sky, the last native boat departed, skimming the water like a swallow, away and into the drowned forest and up one of the tributary rivers, Rio Lamentarse, Rio Abrasador. The cage tied to its hull shaking from the agitation of those enclosed.
“Is that the lot?” the captain asked the mate.
“That’s it. Thirty-seven big cages and thirteen small ones. Only ones left are in the after hold, a dozen of ‘em, consigned farther upriver. Erebus, if I remember right. Oh, and there’s one little box for Abaddon, up the Rio Desmemoriarse. What do the natives do with them, anyhow?”
“No idea. Long as they do it out of sight, I don’t much care. I get paid to ship ‘em, and ship ‘em is what I do. Load ‘em aboard at the Edge and take ‘em wherever they’re consigned, if they’re consigned. Sell the others. Any we don’t sell, we drop off in the Great Swamp, but I get paid anyhow.” The captain took a deep breath and sighed. “You took a look down in the forward hold, did you, to see none of them got out of the cages?”
“I always do.”
“Wouldn’t do to have one of those wandering around the Queen, now would it. Ugly things. Scare Mrs. Gallimar out of her pretty shoes.”
I, who had seen all that the cages contained, had not found them that ugly. Pitiful. Angry. Hopeless. But not ugly.
The mate answered, “No, no escaped ones. I did find something else down there, though.”
The captain turned and fixed him with a stern eye. “You found …?”
“This,” said the mate, beckoning to one of the boatmen on the lower deck who came up the ladder tugging a struggling young woman alo
ng behind him. It was the Viceroy’s daughter, Constanzia. I had wondered when she would show up.
“Stowed away,” said the mate. “And she’s the Viceroy’s daughter, to top it all.” If he had intended surprise, he had achieved his goal. The captain stared at the young person as though he could not believe it.
“What in the …?”
She shook herself, thrust wild hair back from her broad, low forehead, then smoothed her dress and stood erect, glaring at him. “I have brought money to pay for my passage. The only reason I went down into the hold is that I couldn’t let anyone see I was aboard.”
“Your father will be very annoyed with me,” said the captain throatily. I knew he was thinking of beheading, or of quartering, or perhaps of both. “He was annoyed with me last time, and he will be annoyed with me again.”
“Papa will not even know I am gone if you do not do anything foolish, Captain. I have come to see the virgin with a difference, as I seem to remember having done once or twice before, though this time there may really be a difference, which has not happened before now. I thought I might get to know her a little on the return voyage. When we get back to Nacifia, I will disembark quietly, and Papa will think I was merely avoiding him for a time, which I often do.”
Captain Karon shook his head, then nodded, then shook it once more, conveying the confusion of his thought. “We’re full,” he muttered. “There’s no cabin space.”
“Oh, yes, Captain,” I murmured, having taken off my cloak and folded it over one arm. “The young lady is welcome to share my cabin with me.”
And so it became possible for me to read even more in the diaries of Abrosius Pomposus.
[“She’s getting too involved!” I cried to Israfel “She’s thinking too much. How can this be a safe hiding place if she starts analyzing it? She’ll pull it to pieces!”
“Hush,” said Israfel “Imaginary lands are hard to destroy.”
“They are not hard to disbelieve in,” I told him. “She’s reading, studying …”
“She learned to do that in the twentieth,” he said. “It’s not something you can stop her doing.”
“We may have to talk to her,” I said. “Tell her.”
“Wait a while,” he said. “See what happens.”]
“There are slaves down there in the holds,” Constanzia cried to me later that night as we prepared for bed, tears coursing down her olive cheeks. “Slaves.”
I nodded understanding. I had seen them.
“Women and children, too,” she sobbed. “And men, young ones and old, old ones. It’s dreadful.”
“Dreadful,” I admitted. But there was nothing she could do, nor I. She had evidently not understood the implications of the book she carried with her.
Kindhearted child. She cried herself to sleep.
I went out onto the deck. The old woman, Senora Carabosse, was standing there. I nodded and smiled good evening. In the saloon, I heard a clock strike. Suddenly, with a rush of memory which was almost a physical blow, I knew where I had heard the name before. Carabosse! It was the name on my clock. She was the fairy who had cursed me!
“Is it you!” I said, raising my hand as though I would ward her off or strike her, one. I don’t know whether I would have struck her or not. I felt like it.
“Hush,” she said, raising her own hand. Mine fell to my side as she gestured at it. “Whatever you think you know about me is probably false, so don’t do that.”
“You cursed me,” I said.
“If you call that a curse. As it turned out, I cursed your half sister, Mary Blossom,” said the old woman. “Which I meant to happen, right from the beginning.”
“Why?” I cried.
“To get you away without anyone knowing,” she said. “Away from Westfaire. Away from England. Away from the middle centuries. To hide you somewhere safe.”
“Here?” I looked about me at the wallowing river-boat and laughed. “Here?”
“No one knows you are here,” she whispered to me. “Jaybee doesn’t know. The Dark Lord doesn’t know.”
“What Dark Lord?”
“Hush. Men like Jaybee do not spring into existence like spring spinach. They are aided into being by the Dark Lord. The evil power. The Devil. He who has taken his portion in horror and pain. That one.”
“And you would hide me from him here?”
She repeated patiently what she had said before. “No one knows you are here. No one knows here is here.”
Staring into her old eyes, I suddenly believed her. I had read Pomposus’s books, just as Constanzia had. The difference between Constanzia and I was that I had understood what they meant. I knew that Chinanga was an imaginary world. All the people in it were imaginary people. It had been dreamed up by Ambrosius Pomposus—or by some creature or person calling himself or itself Ambrosius Pomposus. He had packed it full of all manner of strange things and characters. He had borrowed from myth and legend and other worlds for some of them.
How would anyone except Ambrosius himself know anything about this world? And he, I thought, had possibly died long since.
As though reading my mind, Carabosse said, “I used the secrets of time to find this place and explore it. No one else could find it in ten million years. All my effort, all my care has been directed at bringing you here. Believe me, Beauty, here you are safe.” She patted my hand.
Safe? Why should Carabosse care? I opened my mouth to ask these questions, and others.
She shook her head at me, much as my aunts had used to do when I asked questions about sex. No, no, no, her expression said. You must do without knowing. She drifted away down the deck, leaving me to wonder at what she had said.
What did I believe?
I believed that I was safe. I believed that she cared greatly about my safety, though I did not know why. I believed there was something more she had not told me. I did not believe, could not believe who it was she said I was safe from. What would the Dark Lord, under any name, want with me?
• • •
The Queen arrived at Novabella about noon. Among those assembled for the arrival were a squat and swarthy couple, Emilia and Domenico Sandifor, charged with conveying an official welcome to the Viceroy’s plenipotentiary and the chaperone, and, of course, to the captain. Constanzia and I became part of the party by virtue of the fact that no one saw fit to deny us that privilege. If anyone had done so, I am confident that Constanzia would have been equal to the occasion.
“I hope you’ll consent to stay with us,” Emilia bubbled at Mrs. Gallimar. “Don Masimiliano, the perfect of our province, has requested the honor of your company at the castle, yours and the chaperone’s, but I thought you’d want to stay here in the town for convenience’s sake.”
“I will not have time even to dine with Don Masimiliano,” said Roland in a severe voice. “I am to be taken to the person at once for a preliminary survey.”
“She’s been staying with us,” admitted Emilia. “With Jorge on a mat outside her door every moment that she’s in her room.”
“Windows?” snarled Roland. “What about the windows?”
“They have very heavy gratings, Senor Mirabeau. Quite impenetrable, I assure you.”
“Senora, if you had seen some of the things I have seen.” He shook his head gloomily to let us know that he had seen the worst that life in Chinanga afforded.
“Well, why don’t we get along there now?” Domenico offered.
We strolled along the cobbled street to the Sandifor house, the official delegation in the fore, we unofficial hangers-on following close behind. A tall iron gate admitted us to an acre or so of garden with orange trees and orchids. The house bulked beneath its tiled roof; an outside staircase led us to an upper floor where we found the manservant, Jorge, curled in stupified slumber before a metal-bound door. His bulky form stirred as Emilia took out a large black key, and he woke enough to move aside as she started to insert it into the lock. The key was taken from her by the chaperone before she cou
ld turn it.
“If you don’t mind,” Roland smiled. “I believe this is my affair from now on.”
“Not quite,” smiled Mrs. Gallimar. “It would be fair to say, our affair. Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?”
“Really!” The chaperone was outraged. “I am a licencee of the Bureau of Public Morals!”
“And I am the Viceroy’s personal representative. Shall we go in together?”
Which, after a lengthy simmering glance, they did.
Left in the corridor, the Sandifors looked at one another in awe. “What was that she said to him?” asked Domenico.
“I have no idea,” his wife replied.
“A quotation,” I murmured from behind them. “A question once asked in a similar connection. ‘Who will chaperone the chaperones.’”
“Oh,” he replied. “Do you suppose we should wait here for them?”
Emilia shook her head. “I want to see what’s happening.”
She had spoken all our thoughts. We went quietly into the room. Mrs. Gallimar and Roland stood side by side, their backs to us. Before them, sitting on one of the luxuriously padded window seats, a young woman sat reading. She looked up when the two stepped forward.
I was astonished. So astonished I could not move. It was as though I had looked into my own face in a slightly distorting mirror. My hair. My eyes. She looked less like me than Beloved had, but she resembled me in ways Beloved did not. I knew who she was. She was the one I had been seeking. Elladine of Ylles. Who else could she be?