by Tod Davies
“He did understand me, though,” she said, her eyes lighting maliciously at the memory. “A clever boy. Too malleable. But quick to know what you meant.”
He understood what she meant now. Even though the marriage with Rowena Pomfret was desirable, even though she had negotiated the contract herself—Conor’s father being hopeless at any business matters (he was, as Livia remarked to me much later, “mainly for the Look”)—even though so much seemed to pivot on this alliance, and even though Conor had felt a surge of independence and rebellion at his decision to ride into the mountains in search of my mother—despite all these things, Livia wanted Conor to follow his new course of action.
Without waiting for her son’s answer, Livia now turned to go out. But before he had a chance to heave a sigh of relief, she turned back once more.
“Oh, and Conor,” she said.
“Yes, Mother?” he answered, and he turned, looking nervously in her turquoise-blue eyes.
“Make sure you bring the dog. That will be good for the newspapers. Everybody loves a dog. I can’t think why.”
And then she went out.
Conor’s knees buckled. But he didn’t allow himself to falter, not then, anyway. He had made his plan and now he would carry it through.
Twelve
“I’ve come to take you home,” he said. He didn’t know why he said it. He didn’t know why his voice refused to stay steady. (“Oh, she was beautiful, Soph. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that. It was that she was home to me, and I knew from that moment that there would be no home for me without her.”)
“Yes,” Lily said, but her voice was sad. She knew that what he meant by ‘home’ would be utterly foreign to her. This person—this boy—this handsome man—would not be taking her back to Arcadia. She looked down at Rex, who looked up at her and gave a heavy sigh. “No,” the dog seemed to say. “It will be a long time until we see our true home again.”
And yet, as Lily stood there, a strange happiness grew in her, so strong that she almost (not quite, but almost) didn’t care. This happiness was white-hot and strong, and “it almost burned my love of home away,” she told me later, thinking I wouldn’t understand, thinking I was too young, not knowing that I did understand very well, and that even at seven years old, I knew I was fated, too, to love someone as well as my home. And to have to choose, as she did. To choose to follow my own life. As she did before me, showing me the way.
For Lily, even though this was the only great love she would ever know, there was a still small voice inside of her that insisted on being heard. For Lily, while a great love might, for a time, overwhelm who she was, it would never be permanent. In the end, she would always follow the road laid out for her by Death herself, because anyone who has really met Death sees their own road that much more clearly. Lily’s road led back to Arcadia. Lily was Arcadia. There was no getting away from that. Though she would try.
Maybe that was another reason why Conor Barr was, then and ever after, so in love. Maybe he was in love with Arcadia itself. Or with what Arcadia could become.
(I like that idea. But of course I would.)
Conor and Lily rode side by side out of the Children’s Mine, down the west side of the Donatee Mountains. Rex trotted along behind. And farther back came Conor’s man, with Kim sitting excitedly behind him, arms around his waist. At the last moment, Conor had decided Lily should have her own servant, and his choice was Kim.
(Blessings on my father, for that alone. What would I have done, all these years, without my dear nurse, Kim the Kind?)
The light broke on them as they trotted out onto the steep mountain road, all gray and yellow, as the light over Megalopolis always was. At this, Lily blinked. She pulled up her mare, and in silent obedience to her whim, Conor pulled up his horse, too. The servant behind—who was very well pleased to offer such a pretty girl as Kim a ride back to Central New York—stopped too.
“Why’re we stopping, then?” Kim said in his ear, even more cheerful than usual. As she told me: “Oh, it were Adventure, weren’t it, Soph? And me not even knowing what Adventures were going to come!”
Conor’s servant shrugged. “Who cares?” he said. “Too much trouble to worry yourself about what THEY do.” At this his head jerked toward the silent Lily and Conor. “Best advice I can give you, my girl, is look out for yourself now, and let others do what they’re going to do.”
Now Kim tells me she did not agree with this. “Definitely not! But a’course, I didn’t bother to argue.” She never did. And this was a very valuable lesson that she later taught me.
THEY RODE OUT OF THE DONATEE MOUNTAINS TO MEGALOPOLIS
As for Lily, she had stopped so that she might look back at the Donatees, the sacred mountains that loomed up so high that their peaks were hidden in clouds. Spring was coming, and she could feel a warm rush of air up from the city below. But the mountains behind were still deep in a winter that lasted nine months of the year. She thought about her friends, hiding there. There would be no way to get to them now, even knowing the secret paths the way every Arcadian child of that day did. And it was so far away.
Better to look forward then. Lily did. She shivered, even though she was wrapped in a white fur-lined velvet cloak, with matching boots on her feet, which had been her first gifts from Conor Barr.
“There it is,” Conor said, and his voice shook a little. “Your new home.”
There was Megalopolis below. It spread in all directions, its black wires and white towers quivering, as if they were marching forward, up the mountains. From it rose a loud, whining hum and the lights that shone dully everywhere pulsated. The distinctive smell of the Great City rose up even this far into the mountains, battling back the mountain scents of those heights, reaching out backwards onto a marshland and a dead-looking sea.
Many years later, when I came down to Megalopolis along that same winding road, it was a different landscape. The Great Flood had made sure of that. But in spirit, it was all too drearily the same. Megalopolitans had learned nothing from the disaster. They had gone on, stubbornly, the same as before.
Megalopolis was and is a place of considerable grandeur. But to anyone used to a more human scale of life, it was and is a horrible place. A harsh one.
To Lily, who was used to the green and tempered land of Arcadia, it was barbaric, a mistake. It was unimaginable to her how anyone could live here with comfort, let alone pleasure.
This was to be her new home, then. She and Rex exchanged a look. “A bad place,” Rex’s look said.
Conor, sensing some of this, grabbed Lily’s bridle and kicked at his horse, pulling hers along behind him. Lily wrapped her cloak more tightly about her against the wind with one hand, but she kept the other firmly on the reins. She did not know yet what it meant—a bad place. Could a bad place make good people? She looked at Conor, and a surge of tenderness moved through her so strong, she swayed in the saddle. She would always, from now on, be pulled in two directions at once, and there would never be any way to rest. To have one of her heart’s desires would mean she couldn’t have the other.
All along that tedious gray way, through the endless, crowded boulevards of Megalopolis, where the street noise fought against the howl of the winds that swept through the funneling thoroughfares (Kim described it to me later, long after it had become a great muddy lake), people turned to stare at the woman Conor Barr brought back to the Villa in Central New York.
Lily missed her home very much. She never stopped missing her home. Even after she found her way back to it, after many adventures, it was never the same home she had left. So she was missing something now that was being destroyed even as she rode farther and farther away. That hurt alone made her sag in her saddle.
“Sit up, Lady,” Conor’s servant said in a friendly way to my mother from where he and Kim jogged beside her on their piebald gelding. “Don’t let them say you lack heart.”
Sitting straight, Lily gave him a grateful look. That was a kindness. “Maybe t
hese people are not as hard as they look,” Lily thought, and she felt some comfort. She wasn’t to know yet that both Kim and Conor’s servant came from the same small group in the Great City, one that had been beaten and ignored and enslaved for years, and that it was the only one that still retained its old songs and old ways and old heart. How was she to know?
She learned of this later, from her friend Devindra, who was born of the same marsh people. She learned much about the history of that marsh, and the tales that were told there, and how they shaped Devindra, the wisest woman in all of Arcadia.
But for now it was all a great mystery. And the greatest mystery of all was the young man who rode in front of her, his back straight as a lodge pole pine, his golden wire hair kissing the back of his slender neck. “The enemy,” her mind said forcefully. But her heart said otherwise. Lily was annoyed at how he never looked back at her, not once, as they rode through the streets filled with rudely staring people. But she found she couldn’t listen to her mind. And it was not just her heart who spoke up for him, either. Her body argued for him. And even though her mind screamed out at this in silent protest, Lily knew that what her body and her heart told her was true. She didn’t know how or why she knew it, but along with the many feelings snaking through her that bound themselves together and formed a silken, tough rope, she felt a yearning for Another that she had never, in her young life, felt before.
This yearning filled her with sweetness. And it filled her with fear. She exchanged a look with Rex, and she saw that he feared for her, too.
Meanwhile, my grandmother Livia waited for my mother. She stood ceremoniously with Julian, Conor’s father and her husband, along with all their household, waiting, calculating how much and what kind of press they were likely to get on this occasion. She made her plans. And she stage-managed her scene with her customary vigor.
“Stand up straight, Julian, for god’s sake,” Livia hissed.
Julian started, then threw his shoulders back as well as he could. He looked at his wife. On her face was an expression of the utmost conjugal piety and devotion. Every line on it proclaimed that he, Julian, her husband, was lord and master of all he surveyed. How excellent she was at playing her expected role! He marveled at it anew, as if he had not marveled at it yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that—and this morning, even, and an hour before now. All their life together he had marveled at her ability to hide her true nature when she needed to, and to always, always get her own way. “I feel sorry for the little girl, indeed I do,” Julian mused to himself. He knew that for Conor’s woman Livia had the firmest plans. He himself had been the object of some of Livia’s plans, and he was inclined to pity anyone else who became their helpless object.
Of course it was hard for Julian (I saw that later, watching him sneak sips from a forbidden bottle in his expensive nursing home every time his nurse’s back was turned) to imagine anything but helplessness in any relation with his wife. But he didn’t know Lily.
Julian and Livia waited for Conor and Lily now in front of the house, as was the custom when the eldest son brought home his first woman, and all the servants and hangers-on of the house waited behind them. The small children of the house ran shouting down the street toward it, as they traditionally did. And after them came Conor, “followed by a sad-looking skinny little dark thing on the horse behind him!” Julian said later, astonishment at his son’s taste still sounding in his voice after all those years. “And next to her, this common, low, mixed breed dog!”
“Good heavens,” Julian murmured. “I expected rather more of a beauty queen.” Then he gave a start. Livia, in the midst of her broad, respectful, matronly looks, flashed him a glance of pure irritated contempt.
“You would, certainly,” she murmured, though anyone overhearing would have thought she was submissively agreeing with his every word. “But Conor is my son as well as yours, and that is as fortunate for us as it will be for Megalopolis at large.”
“Yes, darling, I’m sure that you’re right,” Julian said apologetically—though he didn’t at all understand the stupidity of his remark, which apparently was quite clear to her. Julian was used to a different standard of beauty, there in Megalopolis, one more like that of Rowena Pomfret: pale, blonde, sculpted and colored by the finest surgeries money could buy. Lily’s beauty was not something he could naturally appreciate. But now it was time to play his part, and Julian was very good at that. He stepped forward majestically, in his role as pater familias and aristocrat, to receive Conor and his first concubine as they dismounted before the Villa.
“You curtsey now,” Conor hissed, and Lily looked up at him, startled. His face looked resolutely forward—not at her—and if she hadn’t heard him so plainly, she would have sworn he hadn’t spoken at all.
“What?” she said.
At this there was a murmuring around her from the crowd, and she knew immediately she had done something wrong. What this could be, she had no idea, but instinct told her to follow Conor’s lead. So she turned her face forward and made her expression as lofty and blank as she could manage.
“Don’t you know how?” came another hiss from beside her.
“No!” she hissed back. “I don’t even know what it is.”
“Oh, never mind then,” he muttered. “But for god’s sake, don’t smile.”
“Don’t worry,” she retorted. She learned quickly though, and this time her face (Livia noted with approval) was a perfect and lovely blank. “I’ve never felt less like smiling in my life,” Lily said now through tightly gritted teeth.
There was applause from the crowd as the Lord and Lady of the Household greeted the young couple. There was much ribald commentary as they disappeared into the house. This too was traditional. About the traditions of Megalopolis, Lily obviously had much to learn.
“And this is your dog, then?” Livia murmured as she took Lily by the hand. “Very good. It should come in handy; everybody loves a dog story.” Lily looked up quickly in surprise at the sound of her voice. There was something very familiar about it, though Lily was sure that she and Livia had never—could never have—met.
Livia looked back at her. And Lily saw Livia’s sapphire-blue eyes. “I do know you!” she thought. “I do!” But Livia’s eyes gave her a warning glance, and Lily held her peace. She felt Rex nudge her hand, and she knew that he had recognized Livia, too.
But recognized her as who?
“Your rooms,” Livia said in a loud and formal way, and she held open a tall ebony door. Lily and Rex entered. Conor followed. The door shut behind him, and then they were alone.
The huge four-poster bed hung with green velvet stood in the middle of the room, its white linen sheets turned back on a green satin coverlet. An enormous log burned in an open hearth, and beside it was a table on which was placed a bottle of ruby-colored wine and two crystal glasses.
Lily’s eyes flew to Conor’s in alarm. To her surprise, he was no longer the haughty stranger who rode ahead of her through the streets of Central New York. Now he sat on the edge of the bed and his look was shy.
“I’ll do anything you want, you know,” he said.
Lily looked at him more closely. “Why?” she said.
“Because I love you,” he said. At this he stood, though he didn’t come any nearer. And Lily, still looking at him hard, saw that he told the truth. His look of boyish anxiety went straight to her heart, and without thinking, she walked straight toward him and straight toward her fate. This was the way she had always taken life, and the way she always would. And there was much in it, I think, after all—that way of meeting your life. It would never, in any case, lead Lily astray.
Rex sighed, and laid himself down on the rug beside the hearth. Curling up, he slept.
The hours passed. The log burned to a pile of red embers. Rex, sleeping, breathed steadily in and out. Lily, lying on the bed, propped herself up silently by her elbow and stared at the boy beside her.
He slept, too, deeply
and fully, his mouth half open and his brow clear. Lily looked at his face in the dying firelight. It was a half-good face, she thought. “Faces in Arcadia are all good,” she thought, “even if no one there is as handsome as this.” And she wondered why she had never felt, in looking at any of the boys of Wrykyn, Mumford, Ventis, Amaurote or Cockaigne, the way she felt now, looking down at her lover, a spoiled rich boy of Megalopolis. For this she had no answer. But she tenderly smoothed a hand against his cheek.
It surprised Lily, how very unsurprised she was at all that had happened. For example, she felt no surprise now when the big black teak door opened on silent hinges, and she watched Livia glide in. She felt no surprise when Livia looked over at her, as if to make sure of the depth of Conor’s unconsciousness, and no surprise when Livia beckoned.
It was as if it had happened before. Or as if it was meant to happen. Whichever it was, Lily was not surprised. She slid silently out of the bed to the floor, pulled a shift over her head, and wrapped herself in the white velvet and fur cloak that lay where she had let it fall. And she followed Livia.
Rex woke the moment the door opened. And he silently followed the women out, though neither Livia nor Lily heard him behind.
Thirteen
Up and up and up and up a spiral staircase, Lily followed Livia, both women treading noiselessly on the dark red-carpeted stair. Rex, unnoticed, padded behind. Through the slits of the windows they passed, Lily could see the house below. Lights blazed there in every window except one. That one showed only a flicker of candlelight through glass, and Lily knew that was the room she had come from. She thought gravely about what had happened in that room, and pulled her cloak more tightly around her body as she did.
“Why is the house awake?” she said softly. “What is happening?” But Livia only looked back at her and continued up the stairs.