Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Shhh,” said Israfel.

  I bowed my head, feeling tears. It wasn’t only the years they’d taken from me. They’d taken my strength to defend them. The seraph would have listened if I could have spoken. They’d given my love for them away. They’d risked God’s displeasure, and for what?

  “She has lived only a few years in the world,” the seraph said. “And yet her life has been used up. If she had spent it here in Faery, the Holy One would have said little. A pity, perhaps, but at least partly through her own choosing. A few years in Faery can be of great joy to mortal men, teaching them dreams. But among you was one who turned to the darkness of pain, not as a spur to knowledge, but as an end in itself. Among you was one who made a god of horror. Among you was one who turned his imaginings inward, an immortal who lusted after death, who set himself up as a god of death, which had only paltry gods until he came. He has let men come to him, those with similar desires. Together they have built a hell. We do not charge you with the deaths of those men, for they went to him of their own will.

  “But you have bowed to him, and given him his teind, and begged him to hold the Holy One at bay. And so long as it was only yourselves you sacrificed, the Holy One, Blessed be He, did not call the Covenant in question, not though you were craven, not though you had fallen far from the glory you were given.”

  The seraph’s voice grew gentle. “What did you think to gain?”

  Oberon stared at the distant hills and said nothing. So proud. He would not beg for mercy. Behind me, Israfel was silent. All that host was silent.

  “Had he told you lies?”

  Still silence.

  “Had he made you promises?”

  No answer.

  The seraph made a sound, or we apprehended a sound, or a feeling, a sound of infinite regret, like a harp string plucked and broken. “Too large a part of this woman’s life has been consumed in your kinsman’s labyrinth, and that was not of her choosing. She is mortal and has been used to her lasting harm, Oberon. Not only for this reason, for there are other reasons, but with this as the cause, the Covenant is broken.”

  Israfel’s hands came up once more. The glamour came back. My strength came back as the seraph turned and went away. Too late to defend them now. The seraph went into the tent and the light went out. The tent stood empty. The trees surrounding it began to blacken. Within moments they had fallen to dust and the dust had blown away on its own little wind. This was the copse Oberon had tried so hard to destroy, and now it was gone. Seemingly he could not take his eyes from the place it had been.

  When I looked back at the assembly, all were weeping and moving away. Only Mama came to me and put her arms around me, saying, “I didn’t know. Oberon sent me away, Beauty. He fogged the palace to drive the Bogles away so they couldn’t warn you. He didn’t tell me. He just took you….”

  I patted her shoulder, hugged her close, crying, “I don’t understand how Faery could make cause with the Dark Lord. I don’t understand how they could.”

  She wept, and shrugged, looking in that moment like any grieved old washerwoman I’d ever seen at Westfaire, crying over a lost child, a lost man, a lost life. “I don’t know,” she cried. “He wooed us. He whispered to us. He told us we had enemies. He told us he would defend us against them. He told us of plots against us, and said he had confounded them. He pointed to the religions of men that were sucking our magic away, religions which pretended to worship the Holy One, and he told us the Holy One allowed the worship and had thus betrayed us. He told us he could lead us to victory against the angels, who would soon declare war upon us. Oberon believed him, perhaps, a little. Enough to give him the teind. A small price, we thought.”

  Simple paranoia, then? A fairy sociopath, crouched in his labyrinth, spewing lies?

  I had been there. I knew there was more to it than that. A monstrous ambition. A death-loving ecstasy. A worship of pain. What dwelt in the Dark One’s halls was not only of faery, but also of man, a dreadful alliance. Could it possibly be that there was some dark angel there as well? A hideous triumvirate, brooding destruction?

  I looked at Israfel over her bent back and asked, “What’s going to happen now?”

  “The Covenant is broken. We had our immortality through the Covenant. I suppose we don’t have it anymore. That’s why Oberon is weeping. When he is through weeping, we will see.”

  “Baskarone,” I faltered.

  “Baskarone,” he said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know how long it will last. The seraph didn’t say.” I noticed for the first time that Israfel looked … not older. No. Worn, somehow. As though … as though he had spent himself protecting me. None of us had come out of hell unscathed.

  “Before it … if it … can I see it?” I asked him.

  He turned to look at the others. Michael nodded first, then Gabriel. Then the others. Israfel took me by the hand.

  “Will you come back?” Mama cried, stepping away from me.

  “If there’s time,” I said. “If I have any time left.”

  “Israfel,” she begged, “I was never part of any of this.”

  He looked at her without expression. His face was calm but unforgiving. “When man stood up beside his fire and the Holy One asked us to help him, there were only thirteen voices who assented. Ours, and old Carabosse. Yours was not among them, Elladine. When Oberon laughed and walked away, you were at his side.”

  She bowed her head and wept.

  Israfel said, “I’ll bring her back if there’s time.”

  What shall I write of Baskarone?

  Everything that was lovely of the world when men came into it is here. Everything that men made beautiful while they were in it is here. None of the dross, only the glory. Some gardens. Some monuments. There is even an entire town, designed by a woman of great artistry. I had seen a film on it in the twenty-first. It was built early in the twenty-first and then destroyed by the nationalist terrorists in the Great Reunification War of 2043, the same war that killed all the people in Ireland, North and South, and half those in England and Scotland, as well as sinking the lands of Ireland forever beneath the sea.

  In the long run, it didn’t matter who destroyed the city. Fidipur’s ocean farms now cover the place it once stood. If the terrorists hadn’t bombed it and thereby started the war, Fidipur would have razed it anyhow. Mortal man is mad.

  There are a handful of marvelous mosques in Baskarone, serene and beautiful. An Egyptian temple is here, crowded with painted columns. A mud fortress is here, its walls glistening with bright murals in tiles. There are structures in Baskarone from Ecbatana and Susa. There is a building from Troy. There are two from the States of America, quite small ones, sculptural houses which look as though they grew from the earth.

  Cave paintings are here, fleeing horses and lumbering bison. African carvings are here, and so many things from the Orient I could not see them all, including a city from China, lacquered all in red and gold with dragons upon its roofs.

  And all these things are set in gardens and woods and forests and prairies. The flowers that bloom in those gardens are the loveliest that ever grew. The trees in those woods are tall and straight. The grasses on the prairies have never been cut, and the little peeping birds run about among their roots.

  There are people here as well. The woman who designed the city, the men who built the fortress, the carpenters who carved the dragons. All those who made beauty with their lives, they are here. Those who climbed. Those whose names ring, like a wine glass in a cupboard, hidden but sounding nonetheless.

  The dreams of the men who tried to reach the planets, before Fidipur took everything, they are here. I don’t know how they are there, but they glitter like sequins in the shade of that place.

  “But you can’t have the dreams of space explorers here. That hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “This is still the fifteenth.”

  “As Chinanga existed in the always, so do these things,” Israfel said.

  “Surely the Hol
y One, Blessed be He, won’t let this perish,” I said. “Just because of what Oberon did.”

  Sariel was beside us. She sighed. “Things the Creator Himself made have perished, Beauty, because of what someone else does. The Holy One makes a tree that lives for four thousand years, and someone chops it down to make paper to package chewing gum. The Creator makes whales who sing in the deep, and men kill them to put their oil in lipsticks.”

  “Enough, Sariel,” Israfel said. “She knows. She has seen the end of it.”

  They let me alone to wander where I would. I walked into a great cathedral, down aisles of yearning stone, the great carved branches sweeping upward toward the traceries of the ceiling, so high above that it seemed impossible men built it and stones sustain it in those delicate arches. A bell rang, and the sound of it moved among the pillars, now soft, now loud, repeating and reverberating, plangent as a sigh. Incense burned, and the smoke of it rose in a pure, blue column in the light coming through high, painted windows. All of it, stone and smoke and sound, blending into one thing, one place, one instant in which the beauty of it stops your heart. Men did it purposely, made that space do that purposely. They knew how. They knew what beauty is.

  I walked down aisles of trees that spoke of even greater loveliness. Green glades where light slanted down in golden spears, touching blossoms in the grass. There were oaks as red as stained glass, sifting the sun onto ancient groves. When I walked there, I walked quietly, seeing glory all around me. God did that. He knew how. He knew what beauty is. The cathedral was only a copy of this.

  Even the Temple of Helpful Amphibians was there. Ambrosius Pomposus, also, had known what beauty is.

  I remembered what I had left in the twentieth: gray concrete and miles of scabby houses, featureless towers of glass and miles of parking lots. The glades had been cut down to make pulp for horro-porn. There had been no holy silence but only the rant and howl of the machines the youths carried on their shoulders, a constant rape of the ears.

  Here in Baskarone was a silence in which one could hear birds singing and the low of cattle from distant fields. Once on earth there was silence in which a child’s laughter could be heard, or the cry of a kingfisher ratcheting overhead or the high shriek of a falcon. Once fish could be heard, plopping in their pools, and the splash of frogs and the hum of bees.

  When I had left the twentieth there had been only the whom a whom a whom a whom, each sound hitting the ear like a blow, bruising the hearing so that when the sound was gone the ear throbbed with it still, like a wound. There is no birdsong left in that time, and if, by chance, the ear finds silence somewhere it can hear nothing, for it has been mutilated by what it listened to.

  And the eye also. If it has never seen beauty, how can it know? It has been mutilated by ugliness, destroyed by horror. And so the mind.

  I wanted to stay there, of course, but I had not earned the right. I did not ask. They did not offer. When I had seen all my heart could hold, they took me back to Faery, where I found Puck waiting amid preparations for war.

  Puck was sitting on the ground near where Israfel left me. He got up to take me by the hand and help me seat myself on a convenient stone. I noticed for the first time that he rather resembled Giles. Not the face so much as around the eyes. But then he looked a little like Bill there, too. Strange how much there is of people we love in other people we love. He offered me a cup of something warm which he happened to have by him. It tasted suspiciously like worldly chicken soup with barley in it, and he confessed he had stolen it from a mortal kitchen.

  “The cook will not miss it,” he said. “She had a whole pot of the stuff. Rest, Beauty, and tell me about Baskarone.”

  I told him what I could, waxing as poetic as it is in me to be. I could see him noting it all down in his head, ready to make a song of it. While we sat there, several Bogles gathered around, including the Fenoderee.

  When I had told him all I could, I asked him what had transpired in Faery since I had been there last. I did not ask him how long I had been gone. I was afraid to know that.

  It was thus I learned of the war.

  “Oberon’s people are not happy with him,” Puck said. The Bogles all nodded at this intelligence, agreeing that indeed the Daoine Sidhe were extremely unhappy with Oberon.

  “He has decided, therefore, that it is all someone else’s fault.”

  “Not mine?” I said, horrified. “Not Mama’s?”

  Puck shook his head and laughed, shortly. “The Dark Lord’s fault, Beauty. If the Dark One had not tempted Oberon, then Oberon would not have broken the Covenant on his behalf. Therefore, everything is the Dark Lord’s fault, and Oberon is going to fight him. Him and his close kindred, at least.” He sounded disapproving.

  “But that’s what you wanted them to do!” I cried.

  “True, though not for that reason,” brooded Puck. “The problem is that Oberon and his kindred are not strong enough by themselves to do more than irritate the Dark Lord, but the rest of Faery is too annoyed with Oberon to follow him.”

  I asked, “What about you, Puck? And Fenoderee? And all the Bogles?”

  The Fenoderee answered. “He hasn’t asked our help, and fighting isn’t our kind of thing. Bogles have never gone to war. Even though there are a few tribes of us capable of violence, by and large we are too individual and eccentric. I think most Bogles will return to the world and live out our lives, such as they are. We may not be immortal any longer, but something tells us we’re a long-lived people. Likely even in the twentieth or twenty-first, there’ll be folk thinking they’ve seen a Bogle, or heard one.”

  “Where will Oberon attack the Dark Lord?” I asked.

  “The Dark Lord won’t come out,” one of the little folleti piped from the circle around. “So Oberon will have to go in after him.”

  “Will my mama go with him?”

  They nodded, slowly.

  “He has many demons there,” I cried. Actually, the thought, of the demons bothered me less than those other things in hell. Those horrors created by men in the future.

  I told the Bogles about some of them, and they shivered where they stood. “I don’t know if those things can be killed,” I told them. “Men invented them, but the Dark Lord has given them a dreadful kind of life. They may be proof against anything Oberon can do. Can the Dark Lord himself be killed?”

  Puck nodded. “He was of the Sidhe, Beauty. His pride led him to break the Covenant. He was so proud he did not realize he would lose his immortality when the Sidhe lost theirs. Both he and Oberon are like the sons of a generous father who are spendthrift with their father’s fortune, treating it as though it were their own and limitless, as though they had earned it rather than receiving it as a gift. Then the time comes at last when the father says enough. Then, when the sons are left without the riches, they curse fate and their father, not willing to lay the blame at their own feet. Yes, the Dark Lord can die, just as Oberon now can die.”

  I stood up and brushed myself off. It was time I saw Mama. I had promised her I would come back. The Bogles took me part way, then left me as I started up the hill toward the castle of Ylles. As I approached, I saw her coming toward me. We met halfway, and she kissed me. This time she didn’t mention my smell. I was careful not to mention hers, which was the smell of old flowers, drying and fading.

  I told her what I could about the things they would find in the Dark One’s lair and begged her not to go with Oberon. She shook her head at me, but she listened carefully to what I had to say, asking me one question and another. She said the things I described had not been there when she had been used as the teind. Barrymore Gryme and his ilk hadn’t been there, either. There had been only fairy horrors, things Mama could handle fairly easily. When I had finished telling her, Mama was very pale and seemed rather frightened. I wondered if she would be able to convince Oberon that he should be careful. Oberon had always struck me as being both arrogant and precipitant in his actions.

  Mama said she must g
o talk with him, but even as she turned to go, she clung to my hand. Finally, she pushed me away from her, pointing toward the place where Puck and the Bogles waited. “Your Grandaunt Carabosse wants you to come to tea. She says she will have no time, later on.”

  I knew she would not. “When does she want me to come?” I asked.

  “Now. As soon as you can.” Again she made the pushing gesture, telling me to go with Puck.

  I didn’t want to leave her. “Should I be leaving just now? With this business of Oberon going to battle and your going with him?”

  For a third time, she gestured at me to go. “That’s why you must go! Oberon is irritated at you. Oh, Beauty, he’s irritated at himself for … well, you know what for. He looks at you, and it reminds him of how irritated he is. It’s not a good time for you to be in Faery.”

  I stared at her. “It’s probably the last time I will be in Faery, Mama. I’m really one hundred and three. Human people seldom live that long. When I go back, I’m gone. This is the last time you and I will be together.”

  She started to cry again, and I felt dreadful. I patted her on the shoulder. “Never mind. I’ll go see old Carabosse. I won’t stay long. We’ll have some time to ourselves when I come back.” As I turned to join the Bogles, she was trudging up the hill toward Oberon’s castle.

  Nothing had changed at Carabosse’s cottage. The clocks still ticked and could still be silenced by her gesture. The only surprise was that Israfel was with her. They were both very quiet. When we had had tea, Carabosse suggested that I look into her Forever Pool and took me out with her and Israfel to the garden. The pool lay beyond it, among a grove of silver trees. The bridge which arched over it reminded me of the one arching the Pool of Delights, and its purpose was the same. We leaned on the railing, Israfel, Carabosse, and I, looking into its depths, seeing our faces dimly reflected on the black water.

  Carabosse moved her hand over the water. Darkness. There was only darkness. Israfel moved his. Still only darkness.

  Carabosse said, “Now you,” and I did, moving my hands as she had moved hers, in a wide double arc above the surface.