Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Because everyone remembers it,” I repeated.

  “Because the Holy One remembers it,” he said.

  I could imagine how annoyed Oberon would be at that, how it would nag at him, reminding him. Puck forestalled further question by reaching out a hand to stroke mine, then he vanished as he usually does, not in a puff of nothingness, but with a sidle which seems to carry him behind something, even when there is nothing to go behind. It is so all the Bogles come and go, there one minute, gone the next, slipping into ways we mortals—or even half mortals—cannot see. I think they are ways that even full fairies do not often see, for, considering Oberon’s hatred of them, if Bogles were easily followed and caught, there would be many fewer of them.

  I walked back to the castle, wondering a number of things. Wondering if I could master the Bogle sidle. Wondering why one has to walk or ride in Faery, rather than simply “being” where one wants to be. Wondering, considering the empty feeling at my center, if it might not be time to come back to Wellingford and get something to eat. It seems too much effort. A needless effort.

  I summoned all my strength of will and did it.

  WELLINGFORD: ONE ROW

  ON THE CHIMNEYPIECE

  AND SIX STROKES BELOW

  The boots brought me here and I stumbled, weak with hunger. Eighteen months since I was last here, though it seemed merely days, a few days. It was hard to summon strength to stagger to the broken-legged table where the bread was set out, covered with a linen napkin. I will stay here a day or two and eat. I may even raid the kitchen at the Dower House. My clothes are rags. I have already discarded them for others. The warm bathwater was welcome. I soaked off dirt and scabs and washed my hair. Thank God I thought to leave a comb with my clothing.

  I came so close not to coming back at all.

  LATER

  I eat like a starved dog, gulping the food down. I did raid the kitchen at the Dower House, sneaking around the dairy like a ghost before wraithing it upstairs in my cloak to have a look at baby Giles. Such a big boy, now. Vincent has made him a rocking horse, so he must be walking. Well, of course he’s walking; he’s almost two. Grumpkin III was curled beside the baby’s cot. When I came into the room, Grumpkin woke and came to me, rubbing around my ankles, purring loudly enough to wake the house. I sat there and held him, softness beneath my chin, and he reached out a paw to touch my face. I hated to leave him there. I wanted to bring him with me. I cannot. He needs to be here, where there are mice to catch and queen cats to pursue. If I do not return again soon, I will find his child in his stead, and yet leaving him is like leaving part of me.

  Now I have eaten, and bathed, and dressed myself. Now that I am fortified, I’m going back once again. Mostly because of curiosity. I want to know what’s going to happen.

  LATER

  I had mentioned earlier that Oberon has largely ignored me since my return. This morning, or what passes for morning in the eternal evening of this place, he sought me out among the ladies of his court.

  “Beauty,” he smiled. “Well met.”

  “Well met, Your Majesty,” I curtsied in a flourish of samite and lace.

  “We have come to invite you to join the royal hunting party this evening,” he said.

  I curtsied again, wondering if this would be another expedition after enchanted deer, wondering how I could say no.

  “We go to hunt the moonrise,” he said smoothly, silkily, as though he had read my mind. “In the lands of mortal men. Such a ride may not come again for a lifetime. We beg you to join us.”

  I acquiesced, smiling, dropping yet another curtsy. Hunting the moonrise seems innocent enough. I went to find Mama to tell her about the invitation, thinking it would please her. I could not find her, not in the castle, not in the gardens, not near the groves and pools where the ladies of the court like to wander. In the stables I found news of her, however. One of the lads told me the Lady Elladine had ridden out on some business of His Majesty’s, some message to be carried somewhere.

  I went back into the castle. Everywhere I went there were Sidhe walking about with torches from which a heavy, reddish smoke trailed, filling the air. “What’s going on,” I asked one of them, a tail, white-haired fay named Auspir.

  “Smoking out the spies,” he said crisply. “The King believes the castle is riddled with them.”

  “Spies?”

  “Bogles,” he said.

  I started to tell him if the Bogles wanted to get into the castle, they’d do it, despite all the Sidhe could do against them. I thought better of it.

  Grandaunt Joyeause came by, and I asked her what was going on.

  “My dear,” she trilled, “don’t ask me! I’m always the last to be told, the last at any event. As you should well know!”

  “Is it true that Oberon thinks there are Bogle spies in the castle?”

  “Oh, very likely,” she said with a high flutter of laughter. “He’s always thought that, hasn’t he?”

  The smoke smelled harsh and resinous and made it impossible to stay in the castle. I went out into the paddock and spent the afternoon watching the horses and writing in this book. Soon it will be time to bathe and dress for the moonhunt. I’ll take the book with me on the ride, just in case there is a pause during which I can record what a moonhunt amounts to. I wish Mama were here to go with us. It might make an opportunity for us to work ourselves back into sympathy with one another. Mothers care for their children even when the children are dying of loathsome disease, don’t they? Though perhaps there is no disease so loathsome as mortality, and that is why the old die first in the world: so they need not see their children succumb to it.

  LATER: AT A HALT

  This ride is a strange affair. We began by trotting over the flowery meadows of Faery. Hoof-fall and bridle-ring jingle, a quiet murmur of voices, the stars chiming like glass bells, the wind coming up to blow in our faces and make us feel we are riding faster and faster, fast as the wind itself.

  Which we cannot be. Surely not. Surely not as fast as the wind! And yet the meadow goes under the hooves like a great carpet, smoothly pulled from beneath us, and we are suddenly on the heath, where contorted stones come up through the bracken and gorse to stand as enigmatic monuments upon this high plain. I smell the glamour around us, thick as smoke. Afar on one hand is the level line of the sea, glowing with dimly reflected light from the gathered stars, while far ahead on the other hand are barren hills and behind them a jagged bulk of mountains.

  Our ride has brought us out into the world. The air is moist and chill. The horses’ breath steams, making clouds around their heads and ours. The rutted road winds along the flanks of the downs, its pale track vanishing into a dark fold of hills. Dry leaves skitter across the ruts. Hunched clumps of heather crouch like toads in the lee of the twisted stones. I find myself counting the months. I came to Faery in March. I returned to Wellingford in April. I returned last the following April, plus six. Likely it is October or November of that year here in the world.

  The road winds, along this hill and another hill and another hill. One twisted stone and another twisted stone. One glimpse of the star-silvered sea as we come around a corner, then almost darkness for a time until we wind that way again. Silence among the riders. The horses champ and stamp, gusting their breath in great sighs, and the silent hounds run red-eyed among their legs.

  At long last we come to a crossroad, with a crude cross set up on a stepped pedestal, roughly squared stones laid by an inexpert hand. Have I seen it before? It seems familiar to me, and yet not, as though I might have seen it years ago, or in some other place. Oberon has dismounted and stands next the cross, staring at the sky, at the stars to see how they move, as though what he does next depends upon their movement. Perhaps the stars make the only clock Faery can depend upon to know when the moon will rise. I sit on the pedestal beside the cross and write, while the Sidhe murmur together like voiced shadows.

  Oberon calls, relish in his voice, anticipation. We will ride
again. He and Mab and a whole following of fairy folk. But not Elladine.

  LATER

  At the road’s end is a great cavern, tall and dark as a tomb. Inside it is a fire the Sidhe have built, and behind the fire, a door. Oberon and his people are unusually quiet as they wait for the moonrise. There are so many of the Sidhe about that I do not feel I can call for Puck or the Fenoderee without endangering them. Instead I sit and write, an inveterate chronicler, recording each action. The Sidhe seem to me to be in no very contemplative mood.

  Ah, now I see the first light on the eastern horizon. The edge of the moon pressing upward, a half-moon. Everyone murmurs at the rising light. As the moon comes higher, it illuminates the cavern where they are all standing, and they come out, into the pale light, leaving the fire behind them.

  They murmur, I write. Now they turn toward the fire for some ritual or other. Oberon gestures. They fall silent.

  The door is opening!

  I see light within. A face in the light. A face I have seen before, in a tower room in Marvella, looking out at me from a mirror.

  Oh, my God. My God. I’ve been a fool, a fool. Puck said it. He said, “Seven years ago, when Thomas the Rhymer got free!” It is still Halloween. Seven years have passed since Thomas was claimed by his fair Janet. The Sidhe owe another teind to hell, and this time no one has come between themselves and their intended victim. They have brought here the only teind they could lay hands on who is not wholly fairy. One stinking of mortality. An old woman.

  “What have you brought me?” the voice in the doorway cries like a whinney, like a howl.

  “Beauty,” Oberon says, turning his glittering eyes on me where I sit, petrified, writing. “Beauty, daughter of Elladine.”

  I am glad she was not with them. I can tell myself she would not have let this happen.

  And now they are all departing, taking my horse with them, and I have not cloak nor boots nor Mama’s box; not Puck, nor the Fenoderee, nor Giles nor any friend but myself, here, all alone. And in the light the face smiles as only that face can smile, and a finger beckons.

  A voice by my ear says, “We are here.”

  I look. Nothing.

  “We are here,” says the voice. “Do not fear.”

  Carabosse? Israfel?

  The finger beckons again, and my body moves against my will. I cannot go on writing.

  Barrymore Gryme is here. Jaybee Veolante is here. Others of their ilk are here. The things they created in their books and pictures are here as well, made real, embodied in flesh, or more than flesh, or less than flesh. It is not proper that they should be here, either the authors or their creations. It is not timely. I am half a millennium away from their time. There are no movies here, no television, no paperback books, no best-seller list in the New York Times. There are no publishing houses, no editors, no word processors, none of what it takes to create monstrousness and evoke horror, none of what it takes to record frantic lust as it edges its way toward death. And yet they are here. The ones whose names blazoned the bookstalls and the ones whose names were whispered over the counters; those who sold openly and those who sold covertly.

  As I am moved through this place, I see some of them at desks, writing. Some are directing dramas. These are the willing ones who have always belonged to the Dark Lord. Others, the unwilling, who thought they could trifle with the Dark Lord’s works for amusement only, they are held in cages until time comes to act out their stories, and then they are let out. They are costumed, false faces glued to their own, breasts nailed to their chests if that is needed, their own genitals cut away or modified as the plot requires, this one to play that one’s wife or son or mother, another one to play the part of the character who will be slowly eviscerated in the third chapter, another one to be the child who returns from the dead with sharpened teeth or the child who is raped and then murdered, and then, then, they are set upon the stage, their memories wiped clean, and set to the play. Chapter after chapter, horror after horror, while the Dark Lord applauds and cries bravo, bravo, bravo.

  Others are here, many of them from the twentieth. Those who forbade birth control and abortion, worshipping the fetus over all other of God’s creations. They are here in their vestments, their religious garb, their Sunday robes or their everyday dress, carrying their picket signs and swollen in endless parturition, for so the Dark Lord commands that they shall be, endlessly pregnant, endlessly giving birth, endlessly suckling the demonic life that burgeons out of them, with no choice in the matter. Having allowed none, they are now given none, and the Dark Lord roars with amusement.

  The nature destroyers are here, the tree-cutters and whale-killers, they are here, some of them willingly. They sit on bare stone and contemplate bare stone and eat bare stone for their sustenance. Surrounded by ten thousand of their like pressed in on every side, they gasp for air and beg for water. What they did, or wrote, or filmed, or believed in life has brought them here. Here there can be no undoing or rewriting. Here one is judged by the words already on paper, the picture already on film, the speech already recorded. Nothing new is written here. Only old things, redone. Old horrors, relived.

  Still, I am able to think new words and distill new paragraphs out of the awful silences between the more horrible sounds. Between the screaming, the panting, the uhng uhng uhng sounds flesh makes when the pain and terror grow too much for comprehension. To shut out that sound, I think sentences, I spell them into happening, into my book, wherever my book may be, writing them there in shadow letters, willing them to exist, enchanting them into existing, somewhere, to keep myself sane.

  Mama stayed here for a time. Mama came away herself still, or almost herself, still. Can I?

  He has put Barry and Jaybee in cells next to mine. Cells. One could call them that. Obdurate cloud, frozen pain, structured agony, something not metal nor stone, something not permeable, not tangible, not anything one knows about substance. It isn’t substance, but it’s there, on all sides, below, above, opening nowhere except when He reaches through with his hand, his finger, his long, sinuous, lascivious, dignity-destroying tongue.

  I hear Barry’s voice. He says, “Help me, help me, please, oh help me.”

  I scream at him in fury and pain. “Nothing is happening to you you didn’t describe, think of, imagine. Nothing is happening to you you didn’t conceive of and write down. Why do you ask for my help?”

  I cannot even help myself.

  “We are here,” say the voices. They come close, like a cloak, like a bandage, like a barrier between me and what other things are here. There is healing in them. There is quiet in them. Invisibly, they are here. Even when I am being hurt, they are there, between the core of me and Him. The torturer can see my flesh, but not the thing I carry. He can feel my flesh, but not what it conceals.

  “We are here,” they say. “Hold on.”

  Jaybee is next door to me, separated only by a veil. If he sees me, he will break through. If I move, or breathe, or blink, he will see me. So I sit, like a statue, immobile, while he prowls there. Clever of the Dark One to think of this. So much worse than merely being raped, or killed. To think one may escape, if one merely doesn’t cough. Doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t move.

  He is singing, beneath his breath, a happy little hum as he wanders, brushing against the veil. “Down, down, down to happyland…”

  It would be easier to die.

  Except for the voices that gather around me to protect me, to make all quiet. “Hold on,” they say. “We are here.” How do they stay invisible? Undetectable?

  Who are they? Is it really Carabosse, old Carabosse? Is it really Israfel, come to this hideous place? Strangely, I hear more voices than theirs. I do not take time to wonder. When they offer sleep, I sleep.

  Once in a while there is the sound of a great gong, the reverberations slowly dying away into nothingness. I tell myself the gong marks the passage of days, or weeks. It has rung twelve or fifteen times since I have been her
e. It must be to mark the passage of time. What time? Is it like Carabosse’s clock, marking the time until the end!

  Time. There was a time, I remember a time, when certain things were said to be unthinkable. Persons did not dwell on these thoughts, they cast them aside, exorcising them by crossing themselves, by prayer, by recital of some formula which would wipe out the unthinkable thing. It did not do to dwell on such things. The darkness was too close. The reality of death was too near.

  Later came science and electric lights, a time when people sitting in well-illuminated rooms said, “nonsense, we can conceive of anything at all.” Any horror. Any disgusting, vomit-making thing. Any garbage. Any offal. Any violence, blood, evisceration, ripping open, heads flying with blood spurting, things emerging from inside the heart with the tissue ripping like paper and the tender inner places laid bare, no defense, no place to hide. “We can think of those things,” they said, with a chuckle. “We can think of them.”

  There were times, I remember, when we said certain things were unspeakable. Fantasies too horrible for words. Imaginings too gross for description. Violence too inhuman to be put in human language. And then came those who said, “We can speak it, we can say it, make stories of it, until there is nothing that is not there on the page for the eye to see, for the mind to comprehend, for the child in each of us to be corrupted and eternally tainted by.”

  Innocence. Gone, forever, with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. And innocent laughter gone as well. Now only the dirty giggle, the wicked snigger, the game of out-grossing, the playtime of the beasts.

  So that when the real death stalks

  When the real horror begins

  It will all be familiar and we will be able to enjoy it.

  • • •

  Barrymore Gryme has been put in the cell with me.

  “Do I know you?” he screamed at me.

  One eye hung on his cheek, that cheek gnawed open so that the teeth showed through. I shuddered, sickened, put my hands out and healed him. I am half fairy. I can do that. He was naked. His white, pouchy flesh was covered with scabs and bruises. Parts of him are mangled. Touching him is like touching something long dead.