Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Westfaire,” he mused. “I thought Westfaire was mythical, like Faery, like Olympus, like…”

  “Mythical things frequently aren’t,” I said tartly. “Focus your mind, boy. Grandmama has need of you.”

  With Giles Edward Vincent Charming’s assistance along the way—let us be clear, mostly he carried me—I got back into my boots and, holding him firmly around the neck, told them to take us through the roses into Westfaire. Once inside, he let loose my hand and promptly fell asleep, as I should have known he would. I was carrying the cloak and the boots and had the magic cap upon my head. He had nothing to protect him from the spell upon the place. Retaining the cap, I thrust the boots inside his shirt and belted it around him with the belt of my cloak. Thus closely associated with magical influences, he woke once more to stare around him unbelievingly. If anything, the hedge had grown taller since I had last been there. Everything within seemed to glow with a light of its own. The glamour was so thick it seemed buttery.

  He carried me upstairs for his first look at Beloved.

  Once he had seen her, he could not tear his eyes away. He wanted to kiss her, but I would not let him. “No, Giles,” I said. “Not yet. We have some thinking to do.”

  He became almost uncontrollable, so I pulled the cap off my own head and put it on his. He subsided, his mouth falling open as his mental faculties underwent instantaneous enlargement. When he looked completely dazed, I removed the cap and replaced it on my own head. I felt it might take a day or two to explore the full ramifications of the headgear, and I had no time to lose. In passing, I examined Carabosse’s clock and verified that it was almost half-past the fifteenth century. The numbers still ended with twenty-two. Though all of Faery had gone to war, nothing had changed. Or perhaps something had. After I had seen light in the bottom of the pool, she had seen fit to leave Faery and enchant my great-grandson. There had to have been purpose in that.

  We went first to the barracks, to get Giles Edward some clothing, and then to the kitchens. He prepared food while I sat and thought and thought and sat. We ate together, ignoring the cooks sprawled across the floor. While we ate, I began to tell him the story of my life, referring from time to time to this book, my book, the book Father Raymond gave me so long ago, to remind me of the sequence of occurrences. So it was I found Carabosse’s addition to my text and marveled over them. As I read, I realized who it was the frog had reminded me of when he talked. It was myself. I had been a loquacious youngster.

  When I grew weary, I gave him the book and let him read for himself while I dozed beneath the cap, aroused occasionally by his exclamations as he encountered something strange or unbelievable or patently impossible.

  “I know, I know,” I murmured. “But it all happened just as I have said.”

  I was not really surprised to find that my account of my time in hell was in the book, as I had imagined setting it down. That kind of thing is, had been, usual in Faery.

  When we had eaten, we were weary, so I directed him to Aunt Lavvy’s room where I had slept before. I had forgotten my Giles was there, but it did not matter. I told young Giles who he was, then lay down beside my love. My great-grandson tucked me into a blanket and rolled himself into a quilt upon the floor, asking if there was any danger we would sleep forever. The question was too close to my thoughts for comfort. I assured him we would not, and in a moment his youthful snores echoed in the room.

  I dozed. After a time I woke. The very old do not need as much sleep as younger folk, though they need it more frequently. Like cats, we nap and wake, nap and wake. The thought of cats reminded me of Grumpkin, and I missed him. One of the first things I wanted to do was explore the Dower House stables to see if he had left a son.

  I felt somewhat stronger, and wanted to look about me a little. I took the boots from my great-grandson’s shirt, replacing them with the cap, and bade them take me to the lakeshore beyond the roses. Instantaneously, I stood there, the cool night wind blowing in my face.

  Across the lake were the villages of East and West Moerdyn, where, evidently, they were having carnival time. There were fires on the lakeshore and torches among the trees. All along the lakeshore, from far on my left to far on my right, the little fires flickered and burned and I could hear, as though from another world, voices raised in jollity.

  On the surface of the lake, windlessly calm, the reflections of the fires and torches stretched to my feet like a hundred golden roads leading to the edges of the world. I was at the center of a fan of fire, a wheel of golden beams.

  I heard, as though in a dream, the voice of Captain Karon saying, “We are at the center of the world.”

  I saw myself, once again young and beautiful, at the center of a wheel of light.

  All light, all beauty, ends at my feet, I told myself. It comes from everywhere, and ends at my feet. For a time a vision possessed me, a great wheel of light which could not be extinguished, which would roll and burn and roll forever.

  At length, I came to myself. It was chilly with the moist wind blowing, and the fires had been put out. I bid the boots return me to my bed. There I lay quiet and warm and quite awake, my hand on my Giles’s chest, wondering if Carabosse had foreseen what I would attempt to do.

  When my great-grandson woke, I told him to put the cap on his head while I explained what was in my mind. When I told him the world, or at least all life was to end in the twenty-second century, at first he protested. However, the thinking cap exerted its influence, and he admitted it was inevitable, given the nature of men. When I told him that Faery might end very soon, he wept. Despite having been turned into a frog by the fairy Carabosse, he had gentle feelings for most of fairykind. After that, he simply nodded, concentrating on my plan.

  “It might be done, Grandmother,” he said. “If one really wished to do it.” He looked very wistful, however.

  “You’re thinking of the girl upstairs,” I said.

  He admitted that he was.

  “I am sure we can work something out,” I told him. “But everything else must be done first.”

  “It may take years,” he sighed.

  “I think not,” I told him. “I’m sure help is available. But, even if it should take years, remind yourself that you are one-sixteenth fairy, a sufficient share of fairy blood to guarantee you an extremely long life.”

  “How old are you, Grandmother?”

  “One hundred sixteen,” I said, thinking what a brief time it all seemed.

  He sighed, but he was a good, sensible boy. Thank God he was Vincent’s son, and not the child of the mad young prince. Thank God he took after his father rather than his mother. Thank God he took after his great-grandma, at least a little. Perhaps beauty does, in time, breed true. I knew he would do as I asked.

  I lent him the seven-league boots and the cloak of invisibility, taught him a few enchantments, and thereafter he came and went many times each day. I, meantime, kept the fire burning and food hot in the kettle, and stood ready to admire each acquisition as he brought it in.

  Giraffes and lions and rhinoceri. Auks and dodos and passenger pigeons. Elephants, okapis, and pandas. Snow leopards, tigers, and ocelots.

  Seeds of great trees and small. Shrubs and flowers and mere herbage, shoot and root, leaf and branch. Robin and sparrow, goldfinch and wren, eagle and falcon and kestrel, and all the birds of the sea.

  Those creatures too large to be transported in statu quo, as Father Raymond would have said, were diminished. I taught my great-grandson the spell and he had no trouble with it whatsoever. Evidently even one-sixteenth fairy blood is sufficient for such elementary magic. Once the creatures were in Westfaire, I removed the spell while they lay sleeping two by two, or one by six, or however they properly divided themselves. Herd beasts came by severals, others by pairs, at least two pairs of each, for Giles Edward Vincent Charming had learned his husbandry well. “You have to allow extra so you don’t get too much inbreeding,” he told me. And “I only picked the ones with young, for t
hey have proven fertility.”

  Such a good, sensible, intelligent boy.

  One day as I sat by the kitchen fire, waiting for his return, I heard a voice calling my name. I tottered out into the garden and found Sariel there among the cabbages. She looked worn and tired. I was afraid to ask her how the battle had gone, but she took me by the hand and told me without my asking.

  “We weakened him, but we have not yet killed him,” she said. “All those creatures of horror that men invented have gained strength and a terrible life of their own. We are not fighting only our own darkness. We are fighting men’s darkness as well. Oh, Beauty, the things we found down there! The engines of annihilation! The machines of destruction! The human engineers of hate, laboring in their dens to make greater horrors yet. The human writers, hovering over their pens, creating baser terrors of bigotry and persecution. Oh, we could not have made these things, Beauty. Only God and man can create. All that God makes is beautiful. Why did He give man the choice? In the labyrinth of the Dark Lord, man is his ally. Only time can kill him, and them.”

  “Our side?” I asked, barely able to get the words out. “What about our side?”

  She smiled, a remote, bitter smile. “Horror is stronger than joy, Beauty. Particularly when it is encouraged to flourish. Still, we have beat him back. He has fled from us, out of Faery and into some other dimension of terror. We are pursuing him with what strength is left. Many of our people are gone.”

  “Mama?”

  “Your mama. Yes. She perished bravely fighting a thing none of us could have imagined. And Oberon and Mab. And Israfel. And many more.”

  Israfel! Oh, such a pain by my heart.

  “But not the Bogles?”

  “No. Not the Bogles. Sensibly, they stayed out of it. Sturdy. Independent. A little cynical. They do not let pride lead them into folly. They have come behind us, blocking the earths as it were, to keep the horror from returning. They will live a long, long time yet.”

  “And Carabosse.”

  “When Carabosse saw there could be no victory in time, she left us. She said she had a greater task before her.”

  “But some survive.”

  “Some survive, yes. But it is the end of Faery. We must leave the world. We must pursue the Dark Lord into whatever place he goes, however long it takes. In the end, we pray the victory will be ours….”

  “Then Bill and Janice were right. It was the last ride.”

  “They were right.”

  “Will you ever go back to Baskarone? Those of you who are left?”

  That remote smile again. “Who knows if we will ever come there again. Or, if we do, who knows whether it will be there to receive us.”

  “May I have it?” I asked her.

  She was astonished when I told her why, but she smiled and told me I might have it if I liked.

  Then she was gone. I wept a time for Mama and for Israfel, but weeping does no good, does it? Sitting down and weeping is what women have done for centuries, and it has done no good at all. Nor praying. God has given us the earth. He is not waiting in the next room, ready to fix it for us if we ruin it. If we do not care for it, no one will. On other worlds, other races of men perhaps do better than we have done. He cares for us, but he does not control what we do.

  So. So. I called Fenoderee, and he was there, with Puck, and a dozen other Bogles as well. I told them what Sariel had said.

  “We know,” said Puck. “We heard.”

  “Baskarone won’t last. Faery is gone. Mortal men will trash all life by the end of the twenty-first. That means …”

  “It means this is the only hope,” said Puck. “We know. We’ve come to help.”

  And so they have. They have brought beetles and butterflies and moths. Orchids and hibiscus and frangipani. Tropical fruits and desert plants. Things that fly and crawl. They bring them all to sleep in my gardens, my orchards, my stables, my hallways. Every sconce is hung with spiders. The moat is filled with fish, there are mice in Papa’s pockets and moles under Father Raymond’s skirts.

  The library is littered with great buildings made small, with bridges and monuments, all those from Baskarone, made small. We could not bring the gardens or the forests, so we have settled for seeds.

  On two of their return trips, I asked Giles and Puck to take Weasel-Rabbit and her mama out into the world once more. They are doing no good here;they would not be good breeding stock; and we desperately need the space.

  Days go by, and they shuttle back and forth. My grandson with them, they alone, they in pairs or triplets, coming and going. The grounds of Westfaire are capacious, but they are beginning to fill up. Sleeping bodies are everywhere, perched, sprawled, flopped. Bats and sloths are hanging upside down in the buttery. I put the koalas in my tower bedroom, clinging to the bedpost, and four kinds of foxes are curled at the foot of my bed, next to the Taj Mahal.

  Giles Edward has emptied the fountain and filled it with saltwater from the sea. It took all of them to bring the whales, though when they arrived they were no larger than goldfish. Sperm whales and right whales and blue whales and white whales. Killer whales and dolphins. Gray whales and pilot fish. Sharks. I thought perhaps we could leave sharks out, them and mosquitoes, but Puck said no, the Holy One made it beautiful in its entirety, and it had to be all or nothing. I sit on the edge of the fountain and watch the whales sleeping on the water, blowing spray from their blowholes and dreaming of the songs they will sing. Perhaps. Someday.

  Grumpkin IV is on my bed. Or perhaps he is Grumpkin V or VI. He sleeps on his back with his paws curled over his belly. His wife is curled on my pillow, with the kittens. Such pretty kittens.

  And at last it is all done. There is not a species alive between year one of mankind and the twentieth that they have not found and brought here, alive or in seed. Mammoths and mastodons and all. There is not a creation Israfel and his kinfolk included in Baskarone which is not here. And beneath my breastbone the seed of beauty burns and burns and burns, stronger with each thing that comes. It will not burn out. It will never burn out.

  Now is only the last bit.

  “Where will you go?” I asked Puck.

  “Here,” he said. “A few of us are going to stay here. If the time ever comes, you’ll need help with this lot.”

  “Grandmother,” said Giles Edward, a youth worn and tired from his long effort, “I can stay, too.”

  I shook my head at him. “Oh, child, of course not. There’s Beloved up there in the tower all this long time, waiting for her prince. We can’t let her go on sleeping forever. That wasn’t the idea at all.”

  “But…”

  “But me no buts, child. No. Tonight we will all have a celebratory dinner. Ham and cheese and ale and wine, and fresh baked bread—Fenoderee has someone to do that—and we will sing songs and laugh. And then you will take Beloved out with you, well away from here, and kiss her awake.” Once out of Westfaire, she would wake on her own, but why shouldn’t he have the pleasure.

  “And then?”

  “And then you will apply all your alphabet of industry and intelligence to living a long, prolific, and pleasant life.” God grant that it is so.

  “And then? What will happen here?”

  I shook my head at him again. Who knows for sure?

  I was getting ready for Our celebration when Carabosse showed up, suddenly, sidling out of nothing.

  “So here you are,” she said.

  I mumbled something at her, something about how hard I’d been working and everything we’d done, and offered to take her about the place and show her.

  She looked at the animals in the corners and the bats hanging from the wardrobe door and laughed. She toured the stables and the gardens. Then she sat down in a corner and laughed, the tears running out of her eyes.

  “I thought you knew,” she said. “I thought you had guessed.”

  “Knew what?” I asked her. “Guessed what?”

  “All this. This,” she said, pointing at all of it,
animals, fish, birds, Baskarone shrunken to tiny size. “You didn’t need to do this. We already did it.”

  “You …?” I couldn’t figure out what she was saying.

  “Israfel. And his kindred. They already did it. Long ago. Before you were born.” She leaned forward to tap me on my chest. “What did you think was in there, silly girl?” And she went off laughing again.

  After a time, I laughed with her.

  “Beauty’s in there,” she said. “In Beauty, beauty. All of it. Here in Westfaire. In the beautiful is Beauty, and in Beauty, beauty. Silly girl.” And her head sagged, just for a moment, as though she was too tired to go on. “Everything you have collected is beautiful, girl. But it was already inside you. All inside you, made tiny, like a seed. For you to keep safe, forever.”

  Well, I had known that, of course. But it wasn’t enough merely to take their word for it. They might have missed something! It felt better to have done it myself.

  A little redundancy never hurts. Someone told me that once. I can’t remember who.

  Carabosse joined us for our celebration.

  Candles. Every candle in the place alight. Music. The Bogles came from everywhere for that. Wild things. Benevolent monsters. They are a very musical people. Food, and wine, and dancing, and games. I sat quietly in the corner, writing in my book, watching them all.

  It went on until dawn. Somewhere out in the world a cock crowed. Silence came, and most of the Bogles went.

  Giles Edward Vincent Charming brought the sleeping Beloved downstairs and out into the courtyard. He put on my boots. He was crying as he told me goodbye, but he was sneaking glances at her, too. He will not grieve for long. He kissed me and then he went.

  Carabosse kissed me. It felt like a mother’s kiss.

  She didn’t tell me where she was going, but I have a feeling it will not be far. She sidled into somewhere else and was gone.