Act I

 

Illyria, 1600

 

POMONA KNEW THE satyr was there. The stunted pines blanketing the slope on one side of the road rustled although there was no wind. In the corner of her gaze, a shadow darted.

The tiresome old monster! Still she could not risk offending him. He was, for reasons no mortal could fathom, a friend of Duke Orsino’s. If Silenus were to stop paying for her services, no doubt many others of Orsino’s court would as well. Perhaps even the Duke himself. Passage to Milan would cost her every ducat she could earn in a month’s hard labour up and down the Illyrian coast, comforting espaliered olive trees and whispering to withered grapevines.

Something flew past her ear: a pine cone. It rolled to rest on the dusty road. From an outcrop of juniper came a peal of laughter.

Pomona stopped walking and leaned on her staff.

“You are kind to flatter me, Silenus,” she said. “By paying an old witch the same kind attention you pay, I have no doubt, to the maidens who come to your villa seeking your famous prophecies. But I know full well I am long past such courtesies.”

Silenus emerged, pushing the poor juniper out of his way, his hooves kicking up dust.

“I am only making sure you get home safely,” he said with a horrid grin. “Today you saved my vineyard from blight, and not for the first time. It would be most ungrateful for me to call an old woman to my vineyard and then let her walk home alone along the coast road to be molested by ruffians or sailors.”

Fie. It was neither concern for her safety, nor lechery, that drove him, but sheer delight in her discomfort. He followed her, and threw things, and laughed, because he had nothing better to do, and because he loved to see a witch wince and hold her tongue.

“I have walked this road five hundred times if I have walked it once, and my house is not far. Silenus, I would not detain you.”

His raucous laugh flushed a pair of doves from a lump of rock that broke through the scree and scrubland. She shuffled forward, staring straight ahead. She had endured far worse than a satyr’s company.

“No road is safe for a woman in war,” he said softly. “And the war is coming here, to Illyria’s shore.”

“Coming here?”

“Coming here, coming everywhere. This is no mere skirmish now, with the fairy king taking up arms.”

“The fairy king! But Oberon has kept himself neutral.”

“Until now he has, yes. He and Duke Orsino have had a falling out, and Oberon has declared himself for the Spanish. I have it from the Duke’s own lips. So you see, my dear Pomona, perhaps you should not be so ungrateful for my company. I know more than you about the intrigues of the world.”

Pompous old gossip! If Oberon were to join the war—God’s teeth, it was hard to think with that satyr jumping about—no doubt Venice, his ally and long-time home of his fairy court, would as well. And then it would be all but impossible to travel overland to Italy, and sea travel would be even more costly.

She sighed.

“Oh I am unchivalrous, to give a woman such cause to worry,” said Silenus. “Forget what I have said, and fill your mind with the simples to which it is accustomed.”

How could she rid herself of this bur? Did he intend to stick to her all the way home? It would be another hour’s walk, or close to it.

The Adriatic twinkled blue far to her left, and to her right the hills rose. She could hear the Pelting River’s faint roar on her right, beyond the slope, running through its canyon to the sea. Some of its rapids were fords that she could happily cross, with a little help from the mosses and weeds. But Silenus, if he was anything like other satyrs she had known, would not be over-fond of water, would not want to try his hooves on the slick rocks.

She did not slow her stride but stepped up off the road and up onto the rocky slope, making for the lip of the river canyon.

Silenus scrambled up in front of her.

“You’ve left the road, madam,” he said.

“Yes. This is the shortest way to my house.”

“But you must cross the river somehow. There is a stone bridge ahead on this road, after it curves.”

“It is a shallow river.”

“A nasty river, fleet and full of rocks. And as you yourself have said, Pomona... I hesitate to mention it, but you yourself have said you are... not young.”

He was one to talk, the grizzled goat.

She quickened her pace, as he clambered behind her.

At the low cliff edge, the canyon opened, greener than the dry coastland behind her. The river flowed prettily, far below.

Pomona whispered a quick command to her staff. It obediently shrunk down to a twig, which she stuffed into her pocket.

“I trust this cliffside will give you no trouble,” she said. “As for me, I have no hoofs, and must take another path.”

That vine would do nicely, curling around that spindly bush. A strong, sturdy young plant. She whispered singsong to it. It grew stouter and longer, wrapped itself around her body and lifted her up and over the edge, into the open air freshened by the mist from below. Silenus stared at her, then looked down at the river; stamped his foot, and was gone.

She laughed aloud but could barely hear it over the roar of the water. Flying must be something like this: to see so much of the world at a glance, to be bound by no bounds. But Hecate had never taught Pomona to fly. Pomona’s besoms were for sweeping her hut, and once in a while, for young fools to overleap, hand in hand. No matter. This was better than flying. Safer. The vine held her tight and tethered her to the earth.

The vine set her down on a flat rock at the river’s edge and unfurled itself. She thanked it and released it, and it slithered up the side of the cliff and was gone.

Rocks broke through the surface of the river. She carpeted three in moss and stepped lightly across. Here in the green world the headache she had from the glare of the coast road was softening.

The canyon wall on the far side was a little way back from the water’s edge, as if the river in ancient times had been mightier here and carved a hollow it had since abandoned. A long, dry floor of rock led to a verdant cliffside, broken here and there by rocky ledges.

On the top of one such outcropping was a very curious sight: a neat, high stone wall, all carved along its top, with boughs of fruit trees peeking over.

What capricious god or nobleman would build a walled garden or orchard halfway up a cliffside in a river canyon? There were no pathways down the steep slope that she could see. The water met the cliffside on either side of the little hollow.

Pomona left damp footprints on the gray rock floor. No stairs were carved into the rock, no ladders or ropes. A few scraggly pines reached out of cracks. She coaxed one down to take her hand. It was a crotchety, stiff thing, unwilling. She had to sing three verses of an old, old song before it would stretch out and up, carrying her with it, until she could just see over the garden wall.

For it was indeed a garden, its white paths shining and lined with orange and lemon trees trimmed into globes. And there the pear tree she had seen. There beside it, a doughty gnarled apple.

A man sat reading at the far side of the garden, on a stone bench beneath an arbour of woodbine. The line of his shoulder and his bent head echoed the lines of the pale musk roses and pink eglantine on either side of his bower. Silver sparkled in his hair and beard. A man of her own age, perhaps, although it was hard to say at this distance. She coaxed the grumpy old pine a little taller and leaned out over the garden wall.

 

 

VERTUMNUS WAS MID-SENTENCE when Mab ran her chariot across the page. She stood there in her hazelnut shell, partially obscuring the word flood, folded her arms and stared.

His tiny warden was more powerful than she looked. Vertumnus had no wish to wake up blistered cap-a-pie as he had the morning after he’d trod on her hat, although he still said that the tip of a peasecod was not in any universal sense a hat but only obtained that quiddity post res, as Ibn Sina would have it—that is, its hatness was only a product of its being seen as a hat, and therefore to Vertumnus, ignorant of Mab’s finery and seeing it only as a bit of peasecod, it was not a hat at all.

The argument had ended painfully for him.

He had better take the safer course and swallow his dignity. Who knew how long proud Titania would leave them locked up here together? Mab’s tenure as his warden was no doubt some punishment for her, but Titania was, in her own mind, the only being allowed to hurt her servants. If Vertumnus hurt the tiny fairy, Titania would be so furious, she might leave him here for years, or in some less pleasant prison, while the world thought him dead.

He contented himself with grumbling: “If your atomies leave tracks on my beautiful Rumi, I warn you I’ll sing loud and off-key for a week.”

As if in response, the six skeletal horses, each no longer than a fingernail, stamped and snorted. He felt his eyes cross just trying to look at them.

“You ought to take more care, Vertumnus,” said Mab in her tinny voice. “There is a human watching you right now, and if the human spreads word of you, Titania will be wroth.”

A human, here? Vertumnus nearly slammed the book shut, out of shock rather than anger; he caught his hand in time. This could be his chance to get word to Oberon, to get himself free. What would Oberon do, given this chance? Or Thistle, or Puck? What would a true fairy do? He glanced around the garden but there was no human visible, and the thin fruit trees and shrubs were not large enough to hide anyone.

“I see no one,” he said. “And even if a human were to get into the garden, they’d see me in the form of an old woman. Titania laid that enchantment on me herself. Do you doubt her magic?”

“I do not, you fool, how could I? Am I not the size I am because of her enchantments? I was once nearly as tall as you, Vertumnus, when I was Queen of Connacht. I had a horse that no one else could mount—”

“Yes, yes, but the point is, Mab, you are small now, and I am in the form of a woman, or should be to human eyes, if Titania’s magic is still upon me.”

“I do not doubt that if a human were in the garden, Titania’s enchantment would cloud her knowledge,” Mab said, preening. “But the human I mean is over the garden, and that circumstance I do not think Titania foresaw.”

He brushed a branch of gold and ivory blossoms away from his face and looked higher. There! Over the wall nearest the river, a woman clung to a pine branch. He caught her gaze for a moment.

The branch snapped.

The woman lay face down on the garden path as Vertumnus pushed his book, still open, aside onto the bench and dashed toward her.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, kneeling at her side.

She groaned. She lifted a shock of bright henna’d hair, and looked at him. Bits of white gravel clung to her cheek. She rolled back, leaned on one elbow, and frowned deeper.

“It knocked the breath out of me, that’s all. And God save me, my wits, too? I did not see you in the garden. Where is the man?”

So the enchantment was intact. How it galled to be mistaken for someone else! In his earliest days as a changeling, when Titania was teaching him fairy powers, Vertumnus used to take the guise of an owl or peacock and then forget how to shuffle it off again, and he’d be forced to strut around Titania’s bower until she recognized him and, laughing, waved her long white hand.

“There is no man,” said Mab, hovering in the air beside his shoulder.

“You are a fairy!” the woman said, her eyes wide.

“Yes,” said both Vertumnus and Mab at once.

He could tell her all, blurt that he was a fairy ambassador, disappeared from his post, held in this prison-garden of Titania’s invention for the crime of insufficient devotion. But even if the woman could get free of the garden before Mab did something unspeakable to her, she could not reach Oberon with word of Vertumnus before Mab reached Titania with word of her.

Better to play his part before Mab, and watch for his chance.

“She is indeed a fairy,” Vertumnus said, pointing at Mab, wondering how his voice sounded in this enchanted woman’s ears. “I am merely an old woman, as you see; and this garden my home.”

The woman was watching Mab flit in her chariot from blossom to blossom.

“This fairy is my companion, Mab,” he added.

“Queen Mab,” said the tiny termagant.

“Queen!” said the woman. “If Titania is queen of the fairy court, then what is your domain?”

“Surely you have heard—” Mab started.

“Oh, she is bounded in a nutshell, and counts herself the queen of infinite space!” said Vertumnus. Once Mab got started, there was no stopping her. “The question is, who are you and how did you come to be here?”

The woman took up her battered straw hat where it had fallen on the ground, punched it into shape and fit it onto her head. He gave his hand to the woman and she pulled herself to her feet.

She was small, and of an age to be calling her grandchildren down from trees, not climbing them herself.

“My name is Pomona, and I plead curiosity. I was on my way home by a... shortcut, when I saw this place and wondered at it. It is a strange spot for a garden. I saw—I could swear I saw a man, sitting on that bench, reading. Reading that book that lies there now.”

She strode down the path toward the bench.

She’d seen him! Happy accident. Now for her to take that suspicion, and her description of him, out into the world, where it might find Oberon’s ear. But Mab must be convinced to let her go, convinced she posed no threat, and so Vertumnus needed to stoke Pomona’s suspicions while seeming to allay them. An easy matter, no doubt, for a born diplomat.

If only Vertumnus were one.

Pomona was circling the bench, looking behind the rose bushes as if she’d find a man there. How did Vertumnus appear to her? What gown or kirtle did the ‘old woman’ wear? Titania’s enchantment did not change his form, but only his appearance to a mortal; he could not even seek a mirror to tell whether his face bore its lines well as a woman, or how he dressed his hair.

Pomona picked up the book. His book.

“Such a beautiful cover. I have never seen its like.”

She opened it.

“‘But love unexplained is clearer,’” she read aloud in the Persian, as if to herself. “My ghost reads Rumi.”

She read Persian! Who was this curiosity? Could she be some new trap of Titania’s making? She seemed, all in all, very unlikely.

Mab flitted through the air, her team of atomies like a swarm of midges. She circled Pomona’s head, and teased, “Did Cupid’s arrow knock you from that tree? I regret to say you have fallen into a phantasmagorical sort of love, madam. There is no husband for you here.”

Pomona coloured. “I know you fairies like to trick us, to show us things that are not and to hide the things that are. I saw a man. Whether he was real or counterfeit I cannot say, but I did see him here.”

“And so if you had seen this man, what of it?” squeaked Mab. “Why seek him with such ferocity? Whenever you think you glimpse a man, you charge toward the place he was last sighted and seek him behind any bush or tree? I advise you as a woman of some years myself: your fond chase will only make your quarry despise you more. Chase cattle, not men. You are, by your looks, not wealthy enough to atone for your wrinkles in the eyes of any man worth the hunting.”

The woman set her lips together but said nothing. If she were a trap, sent here by Titania, she must have no awareness of it—or else she could play a part better than any mummer. She had wandered into this garden only to be taunted, to be called ugly and foolish by a bitter old gad-fly.

By Jove, he would prove the little harridan wrong if he were wearing his own appearance.

“You rere-mouse,” he scoffed to Mab. “You speak of love as you would speak of farthest India, knowing nothing of either.”

In response, she flew at him, her ghastly team stamping toward his nose. Without thinking, he caught her between his cupped palms for just a moment, but it was long enough for Mab to work her magic on him. He screamed as pain spread from his feet upwards, all over his skin, and in his mind flashed a strange vision, so that for a moment he thought his prison was not a beautiful garden but a dank stone cell, smelling not of blossoms but of mould.

He opened his hands and Mab flew away, and the sunlight returned.

Pomona put the book down on the bench and a hand on her hip. “Do not trouble the fairy, madam. She speaks the truth. I know full well I am no beauty. I do not seek a husband, here or anywhere. Show me the way out, then, I will trouble you no more. Where is the gate? I see none.”

Vertumnus’ gaze fell on his beloved Rumi. The book was his—his name was written on its first leaf, in the inscription from Oberon who’d given him the book. In the early days, when Oberon was still not sure of his loyalty.

Surely, all Illyria must be buzzing with speculation about his disappearance. Surely, if this Pomona saw the words Given to Vertumnus to delight those hours when Oberon needs him not, she would put the puzzle together? But she must come to that knowledge privily, outside the garden. Would she have the wit to get a message to Oberon? She must; a woman who read Rumi—in Persian!—would need little coaxing or coaching, once the facts were before her.

He stepped closer to her. This would be a delicate affair; he must seem to have some reason to give her the book. Let Mab think him enamoured of the woman, or at least pretending to it out of chivalry after Mab’s cruel gibing.

“The book is mine,” he said, picking it up and then turning to face Pomona. He took her arm and led her down the white path, knowing Mab hovered behind his shoulder. “I think perhaps you saw me, reading it, and some trick of the light or the gods fooled your vision. I am sorry to have disappointed you, and sorry to have subjected you to the little fairy’s scorn. I will not keep you from your road any longer, for the day is growing old. But from one old woman to another, let me lend you this copy of Rumi, since it delights you so.”

Pomona shook her head. “When it comes to books, I am neither a borrower nor a lender, by long practice.”

“And a wise practice it is, but this would be a great favour to me, for if you take it, I know you will return it, and therefore I know I will see you again. Therefore you are not borrowing anything but agreeing to take my book as a kind of surety for friendship yet to come.”

“You argue by the book,” she said with a laugh. She took it from him, opened it idly.

“No, no, do not read it now,” he urged, putting his hands over hers to close it gently. “The day is waning.”

They stood, his hands over hers, over the closed book. Her hands were warm and rough, with dirt bordering each fingernail.

“The day is waning indeed, and you must also be going to your home,” she whispered, glancing about.

“I am a kind of lazy anchorite,” he said, loudly, merrily. “I do not leave my garden. I have forsworn the affairs of men but not all company, not the best sort of company. I would like you to read the book and bring it back, but make it soon. Oh, I know you have read Rumi before—but this book has much front matter of interest, and illustrations like nothing you have seen. Read it quickly but read it thoroughly, and return to me.”

She took the book from his hands and looked up into his face. What did she see there? Could she read the truth in his eyes?

Pomona turned from him to face the unbroken garden wall. Titania’s wall, carved out of what looked to be a single expanse of feldspar, fine-grained, twinkling a little in direct light. Comfortable, warm, friendly stone, save where a thick vein sparkled like milky ice.

Along the top, Titania’s wand had carved skulls, so close together they almost touched. Human-sized. Waxy, dark-green vines wound through every orifice, thrusting out the eye sockets, curling into nose cavities, bursting through broken-tooth grins.

A reminder to Vertumnus that this wall would burn him if he touched it.

“I cannot help you over the wall,” he said. “But perhaps, I might help you find a stronger branch in that tree by which you entered.”

Pomona shook her head.

“No need,” she said.

She walked to a mallow plant that climbed the wall, and plucked the biggest flower. She looked back at him over her shoulder, and smiled, and put the purple flower to her lips. It began to spin, and at first he thought she spun it in her fingers, but then he saw it was some kind of magic—and yet she was a mortal, not a fairy. Witchcraft, then. The petals stretched as they spun, until the flower was as big as a parasol, and Pomona turned from him again and lifted it over her head.

She stepped up on the broad dark leaves of the mallow that strained like a living thing to hold her weight, until she reached the level of the top of the wall with its grinning skulls. Without stinting or looking back, she leaped.

Vertumnus ran to the wall and leaned against it without thinking, then pulled back with a yelp as smoke rose from his burning hands. On the strand below, Pomona was landing gently on her feet, her flower-parasol shrinking and folding.

Who was this woman, and what her history?

Oh, look back, look back, to see him as he was!

Mab gibbered in his ear. “What a lovely pair of old women you’ll make in your dreams tonight!”

He shook his head like a dog with fleas, and watched Pomona cross the river. She never once looked back to see him at the wall, watching her.

He would wait—how long?—he had no choice but to wait, and to hope that tonight as he dreamed whatever dreams Mab chose to plague him with, Pomona would read the book, and start from the very first page.