by John Crowley
Shy, sad for those saddened by whosoever death it was they mourned, she stood a long time watching, her present for Auberon held tight under her arm, listening to the low sounds of their voices. Then one turned at the end of the table, and his black hat tilted up, and his white teeth grinned to see her. He raised a cup to her, and waved her forward. Gladder than she could have imagined to see him, she made her way through the throng to him, many eyes turning toward her, and hugged him, tears in her throat. “Hey,” she said. “Heeeey.”
“Hey,” George said. “Now everybody’s here.”
Holding him, she looked around at the crowded table, dozens present, smiling or weeping or draining cups, some crowned, some furred or feathered (a stork or somebody like one dipped her beak in a tall cup, eying with misgivings a grinning fox beside her) but Somehow room for all. “Who are all these people?” she said.
“Family,” George said.
“Who died?” Sylvie whispered.
“His father,” George said, and pointed out a man who sat, bent-backed, a handkerchief over his face, and a leaf stuck in his hair. The man turned, sighing deeply; the three women with him, looking up and smiling at Sylvie as though they knew her, turned him further to face her.
“Auberon,” Sylvie said.
Everyone watched as they met. Sylvie could say nothing, the tears of Auberon’s grief were still on his face, and he had nothing that he could say to her, so they only took hands. Aaaah, said all the guests. The music altered; Sylvie smiled, and they cheered her smile. Someone crowned her with odorous white blooms, and Auberon likewise, taking chaplets of locust-flower from the locust-tree which overhung the feast-table. Cups were raised, and toasts shouted; there was laughter. The music pealed. With her brown ringed hand, Sylvie brushed the tears from her prince’s face.
The moon sailed toward morning; the banquet turned from wake to wedding, and grew riotous; the people stood up to dance, and sat down to eat and drink.
“I knew you’d be here,” Sylvie said. “I knew it.”
A Real Gift
In his certainty that she was here now, the fact that Auberon had himself not known at all that she would be here dissolved. “I was sure too,” he said. “Sure.
“But,” he said, “why, a while ago—” he had no sense of how long ago it had been, hours, ages “—when I called your name, why didn’t you stop, and turn around?” “Did you?” she said. “Did you call my name?” “Yes. I saw you. You were going away. I called ‘Sylvie!’ “
“Sylvie?” She looked at him in cheerful puzzlement. “Oh!” she said at length. “Oh! Sylvie! Well, see, I forgot. Because it’s been so long. Because they never call me that here. They never did.”
“What do they call you?”
“Another name,” she said. “A nickname I had when I was a kid.”
“What name?” he said. She told him. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
She laughed to see his face. She poured foaming drink into his cup and offered it to him. He drank. “So listen,” she said. “I want to hear all your adventures. All of them. Don’t you want to hear mine?”
All of them, all of them, he thought, the honeyed liquor he drank washing away any sense he might have had of what they could be, it was as though they were all yet to happen, and he would be in them. A prince and a princess: the Wild Wood. Had she then been there, in that kingdom, their kingdom, all along? Had he? What anyway had his adventures been? They vanished, crumpling into broken nothings even as he thought of them, they became as dim and unreal as a gloomy future, even as the future opened before him like a storied past.
“I should have known,” he said laughing. “I should have known.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just beginning. You’ll see.”
Not one story, no, not one story with one ending but a thousand stories, and so far from over as hardly to have begun. She was swept away from him then by laughing dancers, and he watched her go, there were many hands importuning her, many creatures at her quick feet, and her smile was frank for all of them. He drank, inflamed, his feet itching to learn the antic-hay. And could she, he thought watching her, still cause him pain, too? He touched the gift which in their revels she had placed on his brow, two handsome, broad, ridged and exquisitely recurving horns, heavy and brave as a crown, and thought about them. Love wasn’t kind, not always; a corrosive thing, it burned away kindness as it burned away grief. They were infants now in power, he and she, but they would grow; their quarrels would darken the moon and scatter the frightened wild things like autumn gales, would do so, had long done so, it didn’t matter.
Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Her aunt was a witch, but his sisters were queens of air and darkness; their gifts had once aided him, and would again. He was heir to his father’s bafflements, but he could touch his mother for strength…. As though turning the pages of an endless compendium of romances, all read long ago, he saw the thousands of her children, generations of them, most of them his, he would lose track of them, meet them as strangers, love them, lie with them, fight them, forget them. Yes! They would blunt the pens of a dozen chroniclers with their story and the stories their story generated, tedious, hilarious, or sad; their feasts, their balls, their masques and quarrels, the old curse laid on him and her kiss that mitigated it, their long partings, her vanishings and disguises (crone, castle, bird, he foresaw or remembered many but not all), their reunions and couplings tender or lewd: it would be a spectacle for all, an endless and-then. He laughed a huge laugh, seeing that it would be so: for he had a gift for that, after all; a real gift.
“Y’see?” said the black locust-tree that overhung the feast-table, the locust from which the flowers that decked Auberon’s horned head had been taken. “Y’see? Jes’ oney the brave deserve the fair.”
She’s Here, She’s Near
The dance whirled around the prince and princess, marking a wide circle in the dewy grass; the fireflies, toward dawn, turned in a great circle in obedience to the turning of Lilac’s finger, wheeling in the opulent darkness. Aaaah, said all the guests.
“Just the beginning,” Lilac said to her mother. “You see? Just like I told you.”
“Yes, but Lilac,” Sophie said. “You lied to me, you know. About the peace treaty. About meeting them face to face.”
Lilac, elbow on the littered table, rested her cheek in the cup of her hand, and smiled at her mother. “Did I?” she said, as though she couldn’t remember that.
“Face to face,” Sophie said, looking along the broad table. How many were the guests? She’d count them, but they moved around so, and diminished uncountably into the sparkling darkness; some were crashers, she thought, that fox, maybe that gloomy stork, certainly this clumsy stag-beetle that staggered amid the spilled cups flourishing its black antlers; anyway she didn’t need to count in order to know how many were here. Only—”Where’s Alice, though?” she said. “Alice should be here.”
She’s here, she’s near, said her Little Breezes, moving among the guests. Sophie trembled for Alice’s grief; the music altered once again, and a sadness and a stillness came over the company.
“Call for the robin-redbreast an’ the wren,” said the locust-tree, dropping white petals like tears on the feast-table. “Keep m’man Duke far hence that’s foe to man.”
The breezes rose to dawn winds, blowing away the music. “Our revels now are ended,” sighed the locust-tree. Alice’s white hand blotted out the grieving moon like clouds, and the sky grew blue. The stag-beetle fell off the edge of the table, the ladybug flew away home, the fireflies turned down their torches; the cups and dishes scattered like leaves before the coming day.
Come from his burial, none knew where but she, Daily Alice came among them like daybreak, her tears like day-odorous dew. They swallowed tears and wonder before her presence, and made to leave; but no one would say later that she hadn’t smiled for them, and made them glad with her blessing, as they parted. They sighed, some yawned, they took hands; they took themselves by
twos and threes away to where she sent them, to rocks, fields, streams and woods, to the four corners of the earth, their kingdom new-made.
Then Alice walked alone there, by where the moist ground was marked with the dark circle of their dance, her skirts trailing damp in the sparkling grasses. She thought that if she could she might take away this summer day, this one day, for him; but he wouldn’t have liked her to do that and she could not do it anyway. So instead she would make it, which she could do, this her anniversary day, a day of such perfect brilliance, a morning so new, an afternoon so endless, that the whole world would remember it ever after.
Once Upon a Time
The lights of Edgewood which Smoky had left burning paled to nothing on that day; in the night that followed they shone again, and on every night thereafter. Rain and wind came in through the open windows, though, which they had forgotten to close; summer storms stained the drapes and the rugs, scattering papers, blowing shut the closet doors. Moths and bugs found holes in the screens, and died happily in union with the burning bulbs, or did not die but generated young in the rugs and tapestries. Autumn came, though it seemed impossible, a myth, a rumor not to be believed; fallen leaves piled up on the porches, blew in through the screen-door left unlatched, which beat helplessly against the wind and at last died on its hinges, no barrier any more. Mice discovered the kitchen; the cats had all left for more seemly circumstances, and the pantry was theirs, and the squirrels’ who came after and nested in the musty beds. Still the orrery turned, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling, and still the house was lit up like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. In winter it shone its lights on snow, an ice palace; snow drifted in its rooms, snow capped its cold chimneys. The light over the porch went out.
That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixty-five stairs, fifty-two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and populous with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as of their own, the two stories seemed one. The house could be found. In spring the basement lights went out, and one in the music-room.
People in motion; stories starting in a dream, and spoken by unwise actors into wanting ears, then ceasing; the story turning back to dream, and then haunting the day, told and retold. People knew there was a house made of time, and many set out to find it.
It could be found. There it was: at the end of a neglected drive, in a soft rain, not what had been expected at all and however long-sought always come upon unexpectedly, for all its lights; sagging porch steps to go up, and a door to go in by. Small animals who thought the place theirs, long in possession, sharing only with the wind and the weather. On the floor of the library, by a certain chair, face down at a certain page, a heavy book spine-broken and warped by dampness. And many other rooms, their windows filled with the rainy gardens, the Park, the aged trees indifferent and only growing older. And then many doors to choose from, a juncture of corridors, each one leading away, each ending in a door that could be gone out by; evening falling early, and a forgetfulness with it, which way was the way in, which now the way out?
Choose a door, take a step. Mushrooms have come out in the wetness, the walled garden is full of them. There are further lights, there in the twilit bottom of the garden; the door in the wall is open, and the silvery rain sifts over the Park that can just be seen through it. Whose dog is that?
One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lines from Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson; published 1954. By permission of Oxford University Press. Lines from “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” from The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber; copyright © 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation, also published by Oxford University Press. By permission of W. W. Norton, Inc., and Laurence Pollinger, Ltd.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
Meet John Crowley
About the book
Wit and Terror:
A Little, Big Review by Roz Kaveney
Read on
Have You Read? More by John Crowley
About the Author: Meet John Crowley
“Crowley received the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.”
JOHN CROWLEY is the author of nine novels and two collections of short fiction. His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer, nominated for the American Book Award in 1977, appears in David Pringle’s authoritative Science Fiction: 100 Best Novels. Crowley’s next book, Little, Big, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1980; Ursula K. Le Guin called it a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” Also that year, Crowley embarked on an ambitious multivolume novel called Ægypt, of which three volumes have been published: Ægypt, Love & Sleep, and Dœmonomania. (The final volume is in preparation.) Both this series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. Crowley is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. The Translator, published in 2002, received the Premio Flaianno (Italy).
Crowley’s short fiction is collected in three volumes: Novelty (containing the World Fantasy Award–winning novella Great Work of Time), Antiquities, and Novelties & Souvenirs, an omnibus volume containing almost all his short fiction (a new novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, appeared in 2005). A volume of essays and criticism will appear in 2006.
For much of his working life, Crowley has written scripts for short films and documentaries, along with many historical documentaries for public television. His work in this medium has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and several other festivals. His scripts include The World of Tomorrow (about the 1939 World’s Fair), No Place to Hide (about the bomb shelter obsession of the fifties), The Hindenburg, and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (about American fitness practices and beliefs over the decades; co written with Laurie Block).
ALSO BY JOHN CROWLEY
The Translator
Dæmonomania
Love & Sleep
Ægypt
OTHERWISE: THREE NOVELS BY JOHN CROWLEY
The Deep
Engine Summer
Beasts
About the Book
“One way of judging the basic seriousness of a piece of genre fiction has to do not so much with the originality of its solutions as with the strenuousness of the efforts it takes to come to the standard ones.”
Wit and Terror
A Little, Big Review by Roz Kaveney
Roz Kaveney is the author/editor of Reading the Vampire Slayer and the author of From Alien to the Matrix and Teen Dreams. In 1982 Ms. Kaveney reviewed Little, Big for the m
agazine Books and Bookmen. The following is a reprint of her article, back in print for the first time in twenty-four years.
FICTION CONSOLES, but it also disturbs, awakes unease. There are questions that have continually to be asked and fiction is one of the best ways to pose them; not least because, truthfully, its answers have to be provisional and conditional. The genres and subdivisions of the novel have their obsessional questions and their usual answers; one way of judging the basic seriousness of a piece of genre fiction has to do not so much with the originality of its solutions as with the strenuousness of the efforts it takes to come to the standard ones. The thriller for example has its traditional great Matters—for example, the questions “Can the just man be nurtured by a fundamentally unjust society? Nurtured thus, can he build justice within it?” The regular answer of the thriller is yes; the best thrillers show the price the avenger has to pay as being more than a sap across the back of the ear or a bullet through the windscreen. The campus novel has its conflict of abstract knowledge and institutional power; the novel of life among the urban intelligentsia has its search for balance between sexual equality and sexual justice; so-called hard science fiction has its demonstration that by natural grace and scientific ingenuity you can escape the deaths the universe has in store.
And the fantasy novel? Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world’s pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages its landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people: it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking if you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist—the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power, and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life. That is an important part of the work of Angela Carter, the subject of Hope Mirrlee’s neglected Lud-in-the-Mist and, in particular, of John Crowley’s extraordinary and excellent Little, Big.