Lily the Silent

by Tod Davies

  Twenty-Seven

  The Feast at the Villa in Central New York, celebrating the marriage of Conor Barr to Rowena Pomfret, was a far grander affair than the Feast in the Mermaids’ Deep. And so it should have been, given the amount of treasure Julian and Livia lavished on it. “This is the proudest day for a proud family!” Julian announced to representatives of the media, before passing around innumerable bottles of champagne. And Livia dazzled the nobility and the lesser ministers under the Council of Four with the lavishness of her hospitality.

  There were roast peacocks with their plumage, and roasts gilded with real gold on the edges of their marrowbones. There were ice sculptures of swans filled with eggs of fishes now so rare that it took three explorers and their bearers five days of marching into the desert surrounding eastern Megalopolis to find even one in the last deep-water lakes hidden there. There were pyramids of cunning apples, brilliant red, which had been crossed by Megalopolitan scientists with a kind of oyster that was nasty to eat but which formed the most flawless of pearls. And each of these apples, too, hid, in their hearts, a pearl. You had to be careful not to bite on it too hard, or you’d crack your teeth. This had already happened to Conor’s servant, to the great merriment of the rest of the servants’ table that ran down the side of the great room.

  “You’re not laughing, lass!” he said reproachfully to Kim as she sat, shivering in spite of herself, in the place of honor at the head. And he grinned to show off his jagged broken tooth and make her laugh. She smiled and patted him on the cheek, and he wondered at her. “You’re not the girl I remember,” he growled with affectionate puzzlement. “What’s happened then?” But Kim only smiled and shook her head.

  “Shhhh,” she said. “It’s speeches, now.”

  And indeed it was. At the grand table filled with Megalopolitan dignitaries of all descriptions, each resplendent in his sashes and his orders and his official evening dress, side by side with the Megalopolitan wives, each vying with the others in the splendor and richness of her attire, an array of the rarest wines made their appearance, and greatly contributed to the wittiness and exhilaration of these toasts.

  “To my noble friend Conor Barr, whose progress I have watched with pride and pleasure—may he not forget his old friends!”

  “Hear, hear!” cried the other dignitaries wittily, as the wine sloshed out of their platinum goblets onto the tablecloth below—and one or more shirt fronts, as well, much to the annoyance of the dignitaries’ wives. “Stout fellow! Tell it like it is!”

  “May he remember always that the business of Megalopolis is business, and let him make it HIS business to keep that faith alive!”

  “Hear, hear!” the others shouted with even greater enthusiasm. And some among them even wiped away a tear, because a Megalopolitan nobleman is always a little sentimental when it comes to his own religion, which he regards as sacred above all else—even above his own wife and daughters (though not, of course, above his sons). And they are still like that to this day, though you would have thought by now some more modern ideas would have penetrated. I attended a similar feast in my days in Megalopolis, and I can promise that nothing has changed.

  Conor, flushed with unaccustomed amounts of wine and praise—though he was certainly used enough to both, so the amounts that night must have approached the spectacular—rose unsteadily at the head of the table to answer these toasts.

  Lily sat, unnoticed by all, slightly behind Livia. The pain that had come on her when she’d awakened from her faint on the False Moon, and which had faded away in the Mermaids’ Deep, returned with full force. She felt ill, and ugly, and unsteady on her feet. She didn’t even try to catch Conor’s eye.

  “Something was happening to me, Snow,” my mother said, snuggling up against me in her big bed, one cold winter’s morning before she died. “I didn’t know what it was. And I was scared.” She kissed the top of my head, and then she said, “But of course what was happening was you. And that was the best thing of all.”

  I know now this was not the total truth. I know now the best thing that could have happened would have been for my mother and my father to have quietly moved to a farm somewhere up on the Megalopolitan side of the Ceres Mountains, high above the flood plain, to live there a modest, quiet life with their family, far away from the Greater World. The kind of life I would want for my own children and grandchildren. The kind of life we are struggling here in Arcadia—Devindra, I and the others—to remake for our world….

  Our world. And all the worlds that move with her.

  But back then I did appreciate that my mother didn’t give that version of the truth to me. The story a seven-year-old wants to receive is that she is the center of her mother’s world, and that truth my dear mother, Lily the Silent, First Queen of Arcadia, never hesitated to give.

  She knew, she told me, that she would never again be as beautiful as she had been in her younger days in Arcadia, and in her first days with Conor in the Great City. “It isn’t true, none of it!” Kim contradicted indignantly. But Devindra, who had seen the early pictures of Lily when they screamed out of every tabloid in Megalopolis, told me later that it was a fact: Lily looked different after she came back from the Mermaids’ Deep. “Although to my mind, Sophy, my dear, she was more beautiful than before.” Lily looked now at the glittering Rowena, dressed in the finest bridal clothes ever seen in any of the worlds, and she was ashamed. Or so she said.

  But I think it was something different. I think what she felt was the humbling knowledge of who she really was, which is something entirely different from ashamed. I think it was that she knew what had to be done, and didn’t want it, felt she wasn’t capable of it. But still, it was pulling her forward. Her desires moved her toward Conor, who stood flushed and overly excited, responding to the toasts of his admirers, moved her toward him, toward battling Rowena for him, and toward what she thought of as fulfillment. Happiness. But her…I hesitate to call it her soul, I can hear Aspern Grayling’s contemptuous laugh as I do, and certainly we have had some fine battles over Arcadia’s soul, and none to compare with the battles to come. But as I say that, I gain confidence, I know Arcadia’s soul, and I know my own. And even, this many years later, I know the soul of my mother. She knew it too. She looked inside herself after the Mermaids’ Deep, and she knew her soul, knew that inside her that night it was protecting mine that was just being born.

  How do I know all this? I know this because I have held the Key.

  Lily pondered this fact, hugging it to herself, as she hugged the new life inside her. And these facts she quietly pondered joined with that new life, and made it grow in unexpected ways. Which was lucky for me, her daughter.

  For now, she tilted her head up gravely, and prepared to listen, with the admiration expected of her for his brilliance, leadership qualities, and wit, to the speech of Conor Barr.

  “Friends…” Conor began. But then, outside, there came an uproar. A loud wave of shouting from the mob.

  A faint expression of annoyance passed over Livia’s face. “Ah,” she said urbanely, making the quick recovery that was usual with her. “A Fortune Teller. How auspicious! Hurry!” she said to the servants who leapt up to open the huge bronze doors. “Food and drink for the Fortune Teller, and let us all hear what the Fortune Teller has to say!”

  The massive doors swung open, and in a moment, as if appearing from nowhere, the Fortune Teller stood there.

  “It’s very lucky,” Conor whispered to Rowena as she sat, upright and glittering, beside him, her white and pink hand holding a crystal goblet of pale gold wine. He had, of course, sat immediately back down when the Fortune Teller appeared, as was the tradition in Megalopolis at times of triumph, transition, or crisis. All this Conor explained to his new wife. “Auspicious. He’s come to the Feast to pass judgment on the design for which we gather.”

  “And what is that design?” Rowena asked coldly. She had no interest in any design other than the celebration of her Glorious Achievement
in marrying the man—the boy—that every other woman in Megalopolis longed for. (“Politics,” she spat later, when I visited her in that cold villa of hers, hoping for an answer to a question I never dared ask. “Conor was, like all men, only interested in politics.” She looked at me tragically, and said in that whiny overbred voice of hers, “Never Love.” Poor Rowena. Love was her religion, but she knew it not.)

  “That we rebuild our whole society on the basis of new technologies that will save us all!” Conor said proudly. “My family has always been at the forefront of such initiatives. You know that, Rowena! The False Moon is only one of our projects. Now there will be dozens of others!” His eyes gleamed as he watched the Fortune Teller eat and drink the small amounts of ritual food necessary on these occasions.

  The Fortune Teller, unsmiling but calm, looked back, and then looked aside at Lily. But Conor, still feverish with excitement, did not follow that look. Not yet.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE FORTUNE TELLER WAS MOST AUSPICIOUS

  “And I will be the one leading the projects, Rowena!” Conor boasted, lolling in his seat, blinded by a momentary vision of his own greatness. “I—with you by my side!” Then he hushed her, kissing her on the top of her head, though it had been he, and not she, who had spoken.

  (“I am so ashamed when I think of that night, Sophia,” my father said to me much later. I forgave him, of course. What else could I do?)

  Now the Fortune Teller stood and walked to the head of the room.

  “Thank you for the food and drink, Lady,” he said in his calm, almost placid, voice, which nevertheless carried into every nook and cranny of that enormous hall. Everyone buzzed. How they love, in Megalopolis, a Fortune Teller! It’s still as true today on the False Moon as it was then on the mainland.

  He nodded at Livia, who stood reluctantly and curtsied in return—a stiff, formal bob, as if she would do what was required of her by custom and not a bit more.

  I laugh when I think about it. I can see my dear grandmother in this scene so clearly.

  The Fortune Teller noted this, and his eyes laughed. He held up his hand, and the room was so silent that Lily could hear the skittering of a rat as it disappeared into a hole in the wainscoting, holding a bit of smoked eel in its teeth.

  “In return, Lady,” he continued. “I will give you two pieces of news you would like to have—though one more than the other, maybe.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” Livia answered him formally, in what was the ritual exchange. She hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “I choose to hear first the one that will bring me the most joy.”

  “The most joy now or the most joy hereafter?” the Fortune Teller asked, and Conor, whispering, told Rowena that this question was what he must always ask, by the laws of their people.

  (“As if I didn’t know,” she said scornfully to me later. “I was as well born as he was. Better. But the Pomfrets never pushed themselves forward the way you saw the Barrs do. Of course, we were a much older family, by twenty years or more.”)

  “But it means nothing, really,” Conor explained further to his annoyed bride. And Livia said, with only a hint of impatience, “The most joy now, Fortune Teller, for now is the only time we have.”

  The Fortune Teller nodded. And when he spoke again, his voice was entirely different: no longer placid and gentle. And that voice boomed: “Conor Barr’s child will rule over all. Of that there is no doubt.”

  Livia stood there, blazing in her triumph. She had a moment of doubt—a moment that my mother alone noticed. She had been unsure of what the Fortune Teller would say. The Fortune Teller had not been bought. Ever a risk-taker, Livia had left that one small matter unfixed. And see, here was her reward!

  “Conor’s son!” she called out, triumphant. “Conor’s son will rule over all!” Dramatically, she held out her arms. “Come to me, my child!” she called out, her eyes, I am sure, only darting for a moment right and left to be sure that the representatives of the media were given the best possible of photo opportunities. “Let your mother be the first to embrace you upon hearing this news!”

  Another uproar. Conor hurried to his mother, who clasped him to her bosom (somewhat stiffly), while everyone else in the hall fought to be the first to congratulate them. Corks popped by the dozens, champagne poured into tumbler after tumbler. The noise was incredible. Lily shrank from it, pulling herself away through the crowd, trying not to double over from the pain she felt all over her skin.

  That was when Conor saw her.

  Over his mother’s shoulder. He saw Lily move slowly away, cradling her stomach with one forearm, and then, in that moment, she looked back at him.

  He stopped. Everything stopped. He told me that.

  “It was as if Time had slowed and then stopped, and as if only she and I were allowed to move in that space. As if we could go to each other and no one else would see.”

  I didn’t tell my father, but that is probably what did happen. That was one of the theories that the scholars of Otterbridge University proved, in the first decade of the research led by Devindra Vale in the Tower by the Lily Pond. The theory that feeling, not thought, produces the flow of Time. That stronger feeling can stop it.

  My father told me he hurried to Lily’s side. He was sure no one else could see. While the rest of the room froze, he reached out and touched her timidly. “I was afraid that she hated me for what I’d done. The way I’d betrayed her. I couldn’t put it into words myself, not then. Too young, too stupid, too concerned with my own vision of myself as a Great Man, Sophy. But that was it.”

  My mother didn’t hate him. She flew to him. Imagine. Everyone and everything frozen around them, like all the trees around my mother’s room that cold winter’s night when she told me this story. And two living breathing warm young human beings finding each other.

  Clinging to each other for dear life. And then parting. “Later,” Conor mouthed. “I’ll come to you later.” It was then Lily remembered Livia’s expression at the side of the sea. And her heart sank.

  He was back in his chair next to Rowena, nodding and smiling to the crowd, all in a flash. As if the moment had never happened. And the room unfroze. Time started up again.

  Livia continued the ritual exchange with the Fortune Teller.

  “Well?” she said. “I liked your first prophecy well enough. What’s the one that doesn’t bring me joy?”

  The Fortune Teller looked back at her, startled, as if he had been looking at something far away. “More of a warning than a prophecy, Lady,” he said now slowly. “A silly saying, a cliché practically, I’m ashamed of it, to tell you the truth.” At this, he gave an embarrassed cough. “It’s only this,” he said apologetically. “Beware of the Sea.”

  “And what’s the meaning of that?” Livia asked, attempting without much success to suppress her irritation.

  “Maybe nothing,” the Fortune Teller said, shrugging his shoulders, picking up a champagne bottle for himself off the endless heap, and making ready to go. “It’s not me as makes ’em up, you know—I just tells ’em as I hears ’em.” He gave a grin, went up suddenly to Livia, murmured something under his breath, and then he was gone.

  Kim told me that. But I was never able to get Livia to tell me what it was he said to her before he disappeared. “I’ve forgotten completely,” she said to me tartly. But Kim always said, “Whatever ’e told ’er, it made ’er gather ’erself up right then and there.”

  Now Livia’s color had returned, and her steadiness. “I knew,” she said, “or I thought I did, that we had the Key. And that was the only thing that mattered,” she said to me, remembering that night.

  I remember her looking at me when she said this, and her eyes had that twisted look that scared so many of her underlings, but which I always, for some reason, found oddly attractive…and this may have been why she confided all this to me. Although my grandmother had so many undiscovered depths, I never did know for sure.

  “Of course, I was wrong,” my grandmothe
r said dryly. And even all those years later, her capable hands closed involuntarily into two dead fists. “We didn’t have the Key at all. That little girl had carried it off….”

  For the feast was over. Lily, knowing Conor would come, went back to what she thought of now as her old room. And in her pocket, Lily’s hand closed around the Key.

  Twenty-Eight

  As she lay on the broad tall bed in the arms of the sleeping Conor Barr, her face was pale, despite her golden brown skin and the reflection from the dying fire. And she was cold all over, even under the gold satin coverlet. She didn’t bother pulling the covers up around her chin. She knew it was no use. The cold came from inside, not out.

  “Anything can happen, Lily!” she had heard Conor exult, whispering in her ear before he slept. “Anything!” He was too excited. Pushed and pulled to and fro by forces he didn’t understand, inside of him and out, he no longer could see what was real.

  “In my mind,” my father told me later, in that faintly wry tone he took when talking about his younger self, “it was all triumph. It was all ‘Conor, Conor, Conor.’ Whatever Conor wanted, Conor was going to get.” My father laughed again, that sad laugh of his. “Young men are such idiots,” he said, smiling. “We think it’s us against the world, and we never think the world is likely to win.”

  I know he loved her truly, though. Even though he had waited till his new bride slept before slipping through the corridors to her room. Even though he slept soundly now, as if she were a trophy, or a prize, anything but a human being, and never worried now about what would happen to her or me, the child she still hadn’t told him was going to be born, even though he smiled in his sleep at dreams of having everything he wanted and his own way, and having everyone admire him while he did, supporting him in his triumph, and never doubting for a moment that he deserved it. Still, I know he loved her truly. Didn’t he prove it, much, much later, when he was a much, much older man?