Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “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 rulership 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.

  We had gone only a little way when we saw the Sidhe coming toward us, a host on horseback, the first among them leading two riderless horses by their bridles. Oh, the horses were fine! All the horses I had seen as a child were nothing to these, and all the tack I had cared for was nothing to what they wore. Milk-white steeds, they were, shod with silver and bridled in gold, with gemmed frontispieces over their foreheads and jeweled taches across their chests. The skirts of the saddles were dagged, with gilded edges, and were gemmed in patterns of flowers and leaves. Broad in the chest, those horses were, and their nostrils flared and their eyes gleamed as though made of fire.

  The riders wore green mantles fringed with gold and bright helmets feathered with green plumes. Each one had in his hand a golden spear from which a long, narrow banner flew, the banners coiling across the sky like the writing I had seen on leatherwork brought back to Westfaire by Papa’s father, the liquid writing of the heathen in the Holy Land.

  “Read the banners,” Mama instructed me, laying her hand on my eyes, and in that instant I could understand them, for they spelled words and paragraphs that slipped into my mind as a hand into a well-worn glove. They expressed the language of the djinni, the banner language of the slow-winds which all in Faery know. The words told me it was the King of that place coming to welcome Mama, and with him a whole host of other elvish peoples, all curling their banners to make her name: Elladine.

  Behind these male fairies the females rode, clad in bright silks of colors and designs I had never seen, their hair bound in circlets of oak leaves tied with ivy, the ivy leaves dangling beside their pure white brows. Most among them had golden hair, and this was obviously the color preferred. Others, male and female, were smaller, swarthier folk who rode at the sides of the procession, and at the rear, mostly unheeded by the golden-haired. The King wore a high crown tipped with diamonds like drops of dew glittering with inner lights.

  Mama bowed when he approached, tugging me into a similar obeisance. He got down from his horse and bowed in return. There was much talk as I was led forward and introduced. Beauty. Daughter of Elladine. Only half fairy, but true to her mother’s line. Much murmuring among the ladies. “Elladine’s child? But so old!” I tried not to let the shock show on my face as I tucked that away to think on later. There were many glittering eyes among the men. “Elladine’s daughter. Still young enough!” No one explained, but it was not long before I learned why this difference in their perceptions.

  We mounted the white horses brought out for us. I had never ridden a horse like that. His feet fell like feathers upon the grass. His mane tossed like silver floss, floating upon the air. His gait was smooth, firm, and steady as a stone, and his eyes were full of intelligence. I had no need to ride. He carried me. Mama touched me, and I found myself clad as they all were, silken gown, green mantle, and wreath of leaves. We rode toward the djinni castle nearest us, one with towers impossibly narrow and high, with conical roofs so tall I did not know how they could have been built, topped with banners which reached to the stars.

  A fairy woman rode up beside me, and another on the other side. “Well met, Beauty,” they called to me. “We are your grandaunts. We were at your christening.” They waved and rode on, looking at me curiously over their shoulders with something of the same expression Mama had first shown me. That slight narrowing of eyes, that barely noticeable discomfiture.

  Another took their place. “I am your Grandaunt Joyeause,” she introduced herself. “When your mother and I carried your sleeping body up to the tower, I had no idea the curse would seem to take such little time.”

  “The curse …” I faltered. So far as I knew, the curse was continuing. Mama and Joyeause had gone back to Westfaire to move my body into the tower, and it was then, returning to Ylles, that Mama had been caught by Carabosse’s spell. But it hadn’t been my body they had carried up to the tower of Westfaire. With sudden pain I admitted to myself that they hadn’t known the difference!

  I turned away, trying not to think of that. “Is it morning or evening,” I asked Mama, gesturing at the sky.

  “It is as it is,” she said. “As it always is in Faery. The sky a dark and glorious blue. The stars just showing. The flowers still visible, and their perfume lying soft on the air. The grasses cool with evening. The air warm from day just past and the warmed leaves of the trees exuding fragrance. As it always is, in Faery.”

  What was the emotion in her voice? I could not place it. Not sadness, not quite. What? I was lost among these people. I could not tell what they were feeling, or why!

  “Look there!” cried Aunt Joyeause.

  There were whisperings among the host. “Mab. Queen Mab. Come to greet Elladine.”

  A single rider came toward us, clad all in silver with a crown of pearls. Far behind her white horse was another steed ridden by a dark-haired young man. He was dressed in silver, also, but he was not her son or her brother or her lover. They appeared to be of an age, but this was only seeming. She was old as the hills and lovely as the dawn, and he was something other than that.

  “Young Tom-lin of Ercildoune,” they whispered. “See, she’s brought young Tom-lin.”

  “He fell from his horse, hunting,” Mama whispered to me. “In time to see Mab riding by. He greeted her, and she snatched him up. She brought him here to Faery, and here he’s dwelt since, almost seven Faery years. She longs for him, but though he gives her every reverence, he’ll have none of her.” Mama’s nostrils flared, as though in disgust at such ingratitude and impertinence.

  “Maybe he longs for home,” I suggested.

  “What has home to compare with this,” Mama said.

  “Why do they call him Tom-lin?” I asked.

  “Because he has ceased to be Tom,” she said. “Though when he speaks of himself, he calls himself Thomas the Rhymer, still, and writes verses down on bits of paper.”

  Mama greeted Queen Mab, evidently a higher ranking queen than herself, though Mab was kindness itself when she spoke to me, welcoming me to Faery.

  “You’ve been long away,” she said to Mama.

  “A hundred mortal years, evidently,” Mama said gaily. “Else my daughter would not be with me.”

  So Mama hadn’t known the difference between me and Beloved. So what. I’d been asleep. Or rather Beloved had. And Mama hadn’t seen me since I was a baby. How would she have known? Inside me, something said, “Somehow, she should have known.”

  Queen Mab turned to ride with us to the palace and Tom-lin turned to follow. I caught the full strength of his stare, hungry and demanding. I was careful not to stare back, having the feeling Queen Mab would not much like it, but
something in me responded to that stare. Something human and sympathetic.

  There was a feast prepared at the castle. We ate and drank. The wine was wonderfully flavored and scented, but it did not make one drunk. The food was wonderfully prepared, but it did not make one full. One could eat and drink forever if one wished, pandering, as Aunt Basil had used to say, to one’s palate with no thought for tomorrow’s indigestion.

  When everyone was weary of eating, we trooped outside. I thought, perhaps, we would walk in the gardens or have music or even dance, but no. In the glades behind the castle streams ran into silver pools, steaming beneath the stars. The water was warm, and my astonishment at this had not faded when I looked up to see the inhabitants of Faery slipping into the pools, naked as eggs, Mama among them.

  She called to me in a bell-like voice. I sat on a stone and fumbled with one shoe, trying not to stare. I could see them, males and females both, slender, the woman almost breastless, their vulvas naked of hair, their bodies like little manikins carved from ivory. The males had a kind of sheath, like a dog, or goat, coming from between their legs and a little way up their bellies, and these sheaths seemed covered with golden fur. Nothing dangled. Nothing protruded. Nothing seemed awkward or erotic. Their smooth buttocks folded gently together on either side of a simple, unperforated crease. Mama had told me the truth. They did not piss or shit in Faery.

  But I was not built as they were. I had breasts. I had hair on me. If I bent over, as some of them were doing, my parts would show. I was overcome with shame. I blushed.

  And every eye was on me, fierce and prurient. Out of the doggy sheathes, little penises protruded, like darting red tongues. On every female face a luxurious interest gleamed, and I saw their hands reach out to stroke one another familiarly.