Act II

 

 

POMONA REACHED HER house just after sundown. Friar Lawrence was hanging about the threshold, wringing his hands.

“I’m all right, dear heart,” she said, laughing. “I took a shorter way.”

“Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow,” he mumbled, running his hand through his overgrown tonsure. “I have need of a mandrake. One of the Duke’s men, a certain William, is troubled with memories.”

“Well, I have one growing in a pot of agate stones. It isn’t full-grown yet, but let me see if I can coax it along. They’re stubborn plants, though, and it may take an hour. Come inside, and you can have a cup of wine while you wait. You look as though you could use it.”

Pomona whispered to the little mandrake plant, which groaned but set about growing. While the friar busied himself with cups and bottle, she went to her trunk to put away the old woman’s book.

Old woman, indeed. She had seen a man, and then she had seen a woman. She had seen the man while she was spying, unseen. She had seen the woman only after she, Pomona, had made her presence known.

She would bet a ducat they were one and the same. If the woman had been a fairy or a powerful witch, and had changed her looks when Pomona fell—why? Was the little Mab right? Did the man think Pomona was pursuing him, and scorn her glances so much he hid himself in a disguise? Bah. What did it matter? It did not—and yet she was curious.

“I have heard,” she called to the friar while she opened her trunk padlock, “that there is an ointment that, when touched upon the lids of the eye, shows the wearer the forms of fairies and other sights that would be hidden.”

“Oh, if such an ointment exists it would be too perilous to use,” said the friar, coming to the back of Pomona’s little house with two wooden cups in his hands. “To see the true nature of any of God’s creatures, mortal or fairy, is more than we are made for.”

The dear old coward. She knew a little of his history, of the reasons he had left Verona and taken up residence as a kind of country apothecary in the quietest part of Illyria. What would he say if she asked him to make her a love-potion? To distill the juice of love-in-idleness, so she could drip it on the lids of—no. She was long past such folly. Lovers she had, but never love. It was as she wished it. When she admired beauty of form or of mind, it was at a remove.

Pomona shook her head to banish her thoughts, and lifted the lid of her trunk. There were all her treatises on plant-lore: battered old Theophrastus, and her crumbling Vrksayurveda, and the Kitab al-Nurat. She pulled them out, one by one, until she came to the bottom and her most precious book, her gramarye in its plain goat-skin cover.

The book written not in any language known to man or woman, but in the language of plants as near as it could be written: in diagrams and ciphers, in pictures of curling vines and cavorting ensorcelled figures, in signs and stories of all the magics that she and Sycorax had taught themselves in secret. She would keep her promise to long-dead Sycorax; she would find the boy Caliban, and give him the book, and bequeath his mother’s knowledge to him. Soon, soon. The moment Pomona scraped together the ducats.

She put the borrowed Rumi on top of the gramarye. There let it lie in her trunk, until she had reason to be passing by that strange garden again.

The whole encounter seemed like a dream; and yet, there was the book. Into the trunk with it. On top went the treatises, one by one. She closed the lid of the trunk. Yes, there let it lie. Let it not distract her thoughts. She had promises to keep, and no time for fancies.

“Did Silenus pay you with a book?” said Friar Lawrence behind her, making her jump.

She stood and took one of the cups of wine from him. The friar knew about her gramarye; it was he who had told her about the drunkard of Milan who claimed to be Caliban, the son of the witch Sycorax.

“No, the satyr is not a bookish sort. I borrowed it, on my way. Tell me, good friar, how you found Orsino’s court. Silenus tells me that Orsino is no longer content with sending ships to the war, but would bring it right to our shores by goading Oberon. I cannot believe it.”

“Oh, it is so,” sighed the friar. “Orsino might be more patient, were it not that Viola urges him on. She loves him so violently that she takes offence on behalf of his honour when Oberon suggests that Orsino has done away with the fairy ambassador.”

“Fairy ambassador?”

“Have you not heard? Oberon’s ambassador, a fairy named Vertumnus, has gone missing.”

“Missing?”

“Dead, or so Oberon assumes. The ambassador arrived here safely enough from Venice, and sent his first dispatch, and then that was the last anyone has seen or heard of him. Oberon blames Duke Orsino, calls him murderer.”

“What cause could the Duke have for killing the fairy king’s ambassador?”

“All Oberon knows is he sent Vertumnus to Illyria and now Vertumnus is gone. And Viola suspects the hand of Don Pedro, goading Oberon into the fray. Orsino, bless him, is not yet sure. He has the look of a man being torn asunder by his advisers, as a piece of meat is torn apart by dogs. When I was there, I heard him cry out that any citizen of Illyria in possession of knowledge of the whereabouts of Vertumnus, who kept that knowledge from Orsino for even so much as a day, would hang.”

Pomona shook her head. Orsino was a good man, but too easily swayed.

“Fortunate I am to have no business at his court for the time being.”

“A storm is brewing and it must break before it passes. Orsino and Oberon, once so noble in their respect for one another, once so gentle in their courtesies, have each become so enraged they spit when they speak of each other. And yet I think neither of them knows what truly happened to Vertumnus. Perhaps he is playing some fairy trick of his own. It seems to me that if a fairy wished to hide himself, he would have no trouble in finding some out of the way spot, or some disguise.”

Hiding! Some out of the way spot! A coldness washed over her skin. She set her cup of wine down. Her hand shook.

“What is it, my child? What makes you go so pale?”

“Oh, father, have you an ointment to show my eyes the plain truth before them? I have seen a strange sight today, friar. I fear it must be connected to this business.”

“This business of the missing ambassador? Tell me!”

“The book I brought. I had it from a stranger, who insisted that I borrow it. A woman who lives in a garden on a rocky outcrop in a river canyon, away from all the world. I happened upon it on my way home.”

“In the Pelting River? ’Twas strange, ’twas passing strange.”

“As I said.”

“Here,” said the friar, putting his wine down on the one bare spot on Pomona’s deal table all bestrewn with wax tablets, tally sticks and cuttings in little clay pots. “May I see this book?”

“Oh, it is mere poetry,” Pomona said, and opened the trunk again, pulling out the treatises again until she reached the heavy Rumi, its cover all whorled in gold and brindled in silver. Friar Lawrence wiped his hands on his habit and flipped it open.

“Here’s the title, but I can’t read it. What language is this? Ah, but here’s an inscription in Venetian, in a rounded hand. ‘Given to Vertumnus to delight those hours when Oberon needs him not.’ Holy Saint Francis!”

“Let me see, friar,” said Pomona, and looked over his shoulder. “Does it truly say ‘Vertumnus’?”

“It does. Perhaps the woman who gave you this book got it in turn from him.”

“Perhaps,” said Pomona, taking the book back and running her fingertips over the page where the inscription lay in faint violet ink. “But I think the tale is more tangled yet. I could see no easy way into the garden, so I went up in a tree over the garden wall, and there all concealed I looked in and saw a man.”

“A man? What sort of man?”

The image of him was still bright in her mind’s eye.

“A gentleman, reading a book. But when I fell into the garden, the man had gone. In his place there was a woman, and a small fairy, like a pixie. The woman, I thought, bore some resemblance to the man. Her skin was the same colour, her hair the same curling brown streaked with white—here, at the temple. Some fairies, I have heard, can change their shapes, or make others appear to have changed theirs. But the question is, if this woman was in fact the ambassador Vertumnus, was he hiding, or being hid?”

“Whatever the truth of it, you must tell Orsino, and tonight. You can end this feud between the two courts. You can sow peace! Take my donkey and ride at dawn and take the message to his court. I will join you there as soon as I have mixed my potion for this William.”

“And what of Vertumnus, in the meantime?”

“What of him? He gave you this book; he must have intended for you to learn his name. Therefore, reason suggests, he is captive. And if he is captive there, let him remain so, until Orsino can get at the truth of the affair.”

“Perhaps my coming will have startled his watchers, and when Orsino arrives at the garden there will be no fairy within—or no garden at all, if fairy edifices are as insubstantial as stories say. No, let me go back to the garden and make this fairy, be he man or woman, come with me to Orsino.”

“You mean to capture a fairy, all on your own?”

“You could come with me.”

“Oh, but I cannot delay my commission from Orsino to bring a potion for his servant. I promised to return in no more than two days’ time, and it will take me a day to make the potion.”

The old man had not a drop of courage in him.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Go, then, take the mandrake and mix your medicines. I ask only that if you arrive at the duke’s palace before I do, that you say nothing of this matter to Orsino.”

He shook his head.

“And risk my neck, if he finds I have kept this knowledge from him?”

“We’ll risk both our necks if we are wrong in our guess, or if the garden has vanished, and we make Orsino look a fool through false hope. Wait and watch for me. If this fairy is Vertumnus, I’ll bring him to Orsino, and by Heaven I’ll see his true face again. I knew I had not lost my wits!”

 

 

POMONA BEGAN WALKING before Lauds and arrived at the garden wall just as the sun was peeking over the canyon wall. The garden was still there. She had almost talked herself into believing it a dream.

The main trouble was Mab. If Vertumnus, a fairy himself, was an unwilling captive, the pixie must be powerful indeed.

Pomona had long ago made her peace with being a mere wyrtwitch, but a little battle magic would serve her well now, if only Hecate had seen fit to teach it to her. Plants had their uses, and there was always poison. But it surpassed her skill to guess the strength that would incapacitate Mab without killing her. And how to induce the fairy to take the poison in the first place? In the ear, sleeping? In her food, awake?

Pomona would prefer not to damn her soul if she could help it.

There was one spell Pomona could cast that might hold Mab long enough to get Vertumnus away and safe. It was never intended to be a weapon, never intended to do any violence at all. She and Sycorax had invented the dryad-spell together. They had dreamed of transforming themselves into lithe willows or strong oaks and bestriding their narrow corner of Algiers like Colossi, of so impressing their teacher Hecate that she would be bound to teach them the higher magics of flight, illusion and prophecy.

But Sycorax and Pomona had been young, brash and unready. They had tried to transform a cat and only succeeded in trapping the poor thing in a kind of half-existence, part cat and part tree. Its yowling face emerged from the trunk, and one paw scratched from behind the bark. Faced with the prospect of killing the thing or admitting their foolishness to Hecate, they chose the latter, and the great witch freed the poor creature and gave the girls the edge of her tongue.

It was then, perhaps, that the young Sycorax’s attention to her magical studies began to wane. She was a few years older than Pomona, and began to speak of a lover, swearing Pomona to secrecy. They never had the chance to try the dryad-spell again before Sycorax fell pregnant. She insisted she would bear the child, and Hecate banished her to the island where she died.

In all the years since, Pomona had never dared try the spell. She would not succeed in making a dryad if she tried it today. She was only a wyrtwitch, good for soothing a diseased vine or growing simples. She had settled into unremarkable haghood with some relief and years of long practice.

But she did not need the spell to succeed. She needed it to fail in the way it had before, to trap Mab for long enough to let Vertumnus go free, if he were truly captive. If Vertumnus were truly a fairy, and if his powers were only temporarily diminished, surely he could free Mab later if he chose, or send Oberon to do it. If it came to the worst, Pomona would ask Hecate for help just as she and Sycorax once had, although the very thought made her shudder.

If she was going to do it, best to do it quickly. She would lose the advantage of surprise with every moment she spent, revealed at the garden wall, searching for the tiny Mab.

Willows drooped at the edge of the canyon floor. There: a leaf, with a pale green canker-worm clinging to its shadow. Canker-worms were the only animals she could speak with, and only then with difficulty. They thought they were plants. She plucked the leaf and whispered to the worm, then blew the leaf up onto the air, blowing through her cupped hands until the leaf went up and over the garden wall.

The sky grew lighter while Pomona paced. At last, the leaf returned, the canker clinging this time to the top, terrified.

“Well?” Pomona whispered, catching the leaf in her hands. “Did you see the fairy? Not much bigger than you?”

Worms were poor spies. The thing could not speak but nodded, or shook its head, as Pomona asked question after question. It was a relief to both of them when at last Pomona determined that Mab was dozing in a lady’s-slipper near the close edge of the garden. Pomona did not have the strength to ask about Vertumnus.

She pulled a little box-wood cutting out of her satchel and warmed it between her hands, a sturdy little twist of brown and green. It would bear her weight. Pomona thrust one end into a little wash of silt on the rocky shore, and sang to the plant under her breath, an old song.

Up and out the box-hedge grew, under Pomona’s hands and words, until it formed a green stair rising to the edge of the garden wall. Pomona stopped her song and stilled her hands, and caught up her courage.

Seventeen soft steps up the boxwood stair, and she was crouching, peering through the gaps between the stone skulls that bounded Vertumnus’ garden. There he was! Her disappearing man. Lying on the same bench where he had been reading. One wonderful arm flung over his face. And no sign of the woman.

And there was the lady-slipper. Pomona squinted and could just see Mab sleeping within, the flower like a blanket. A violet monkshood sleeping cap fluttered on her head with every snore.

Sycorax had composed the tune of their transformation spell. Pomona had spent many years trying to forget it, and finding all the same that it would circle in her mind when she was washing clothing or planting seeds. Sometimes she woke with it bellowing in her mind, as if she had been creating armies of dryads in her nightmares.

But today she had to think, for a long moment, before it came to her. And even then, the melody was a little her own, not quite the one written on the shores of Algiers by the long-dead witch. There was not so much menace in it, and a little more richness. But then she was older than Sycorax had been, and less angry.

From within the lady-slipper, a narrow shoot of barren pine grew, and then three pale green branches shrugged out of it, and held within the bark was the shape of a small, pinched face, screaming.

Pomona scrambled over the stone skulls and ran to the bench. She was right, she was right! There on the bench lay the woman. They were one and the same, the woman and the man, depending only on whether Pomona was inside the garden or outside it. And soon they would both be outside.

The shoulder beneath her touch felt as it looked: a woman’s.

“Come, wake up,” she hissed. “I have Mab trapped for now, but I can’t say how long it will hold.”

The woman blinked awake.

“You read the inscription,” she said.

“We can discuss it,” Pomona said. “Or we can get out of the garden.”

“Are you alone?” the woman murmured, rising to her feet and throwing one end of her long, golden robe over one shoulder. “I had hoped you would send Oberon. How did you—”

“No time for questions. And no Oberon. You will have to make do with me. Come now, over the wall, before we are caught.”

It would have been faster, safer, to take the woman’s hand and run as if they were children, but Pomona contented herself with keeping the prisoner at the edge of her vision and the hideous Mab-tree in sight. She dared not turn her back on it.

As they passed an apple tree, Pomona could not resist whispering to two lovely gold-and-red apples hanging from a low branch and holding out her straw hat to catch them as they dropped.

They reached the wall and Pomona sang to the boxwood stair so it stretched over the wall and down into the garden. The woman stumbled just as she was stepping over—there was a trick to walking on hedges that came with practice—and the woman’s shoe brushed the wall. She screamed in pain. Then she was on the boxwood stair, her foot smoking and bloody.

And she was a man.

There he was, just as she had seen him. Only now he was next to her. There was no time to wonder at his injury, or anything else.

“We must not stop,” Pomona gasped, taking his elbow. This solid arm, knotted and warm, that had been a woman’s a moment before! It was pure enchantment, and yet she could hardly fail to believe her own eyes.

“Do you see me?” he asked, still breathless from his injury.

She nodded, not knowing what to say, and helped him step down to the scree by the river. They walked side by side without speaking until they passed a bend in the river. Here they could cross without Mab seeing them even if she broke free from her tree.

Pomona called three vines down from the canyon wall and bid them stretch across the canyon. A bridge, of the simplest kind. One vine to walk on, and two to hold.

“Can you manage it, Vertumnus?” she asked, using the name as if it were nothing.

“I can,” he said through gritted teeth.

So she had guessed right. Oberon’s ambassador! Dangerous company indeed. But worth some reward, surely, when she delivered him to Orsino.

Vertumnus used the two rail-vines to lift himself and vault with each step, to put no weight on his hurt foot. Pomona followed behind him, coaxing the vines into strength, holding them as steady as she could over the rushing water below. How long did they have before Mab broke free? She must be powerful indeed to have kept Vertumnus captive.

They reached the far side, near where Pomona had left Silenus the day before.

Vertumnus bowed low, sweeping one arm before him, the other raised to the sky.

“I am forever in your debt,” he said. “And I regret that I cannot stay even for an hour of a conversation I devoutly wish to have. But Oberon has need of me, and for desperate reasons of state I cannot tarry.”

Ha! She had desperate reasons of her own. She shook her head.

“You are coming with me to Orsino.”

He frowned. “I am Oberon’s ambassador. I have been captive for weeks, with no word to him.”

“I know. Oberon claims Orsino has killed you. But why should the Duke kill you? And come to that, how did you come to be imprisoned in that garden? It all seems very like a ruse, to justify Oberon joining the war against the Duke and his allies.”

Vertumnus threw up his hands.

“It was no such thing.”

“What was it, then?” Pomona put her hands on her hips. “How did a fairy of Oberon’s court—an ambassador, no less, and a man of some strength if I judge aright—come to be at the mercy of a pixie behind a garden wall?”

He sighed, and ran a hand through his iron-coloured curls.

“Queen Titania bears an old grudge against me. She took my fairy powers and shut me up with Mab as my warden, and set the enchantment on me that changed my form in your eyes. And so I must return to Oberon, not only to put his mind at ease and prevent this strife from going any further, but also to regain my powers. If I encounter Titania abroad, in my current state, I can only imagine what she will do to me for escaping.”

“A likely story,” Pomona scoffed. “Are not Oberon and Titania married?”

“Theirs is an unusual marriage. I will tell you many tales about them one day. In the meantime, if you wish to halt the war between Oberon and Orsino, you can do no better than to bid me adieu so I can return to Oberon and soothe his rage.”

“The enchantment must have addled your brain,” Pomona retorted. “Oberon’s court is in Venice, a long journey over land or water on your injured foot, while Orsino’s palace is only a half-day’s walk hence down the coast. By the time you find Oberon, you and I will be on either side of a vicious war.”

“Oh, you must have more faith, Pomona. Oberon’s anger flickers like a tallow lamp. I will send word ahead to him as soon as I can. Keep the book I gave you, as a reminder that we have conversations to finish. Come to Oberon’s court in Venice, if you like. You may find me there, for the time being, as I doubt he will send me back to Orsino until this business is clear. Adieu!”

He turned and limped down the scree slope toward the dusty coast road. Orsino would have her head if he learned she had let him get away. She could not very likely hold a fairy against his will, but he said his fairy powers were gone. And if that were true, if he were no more than a man, she could hold him.

Pomona took up the end of a vine that had been part of the rope-bridge, pressed it into service again with a whisper. It shot out and snapped around Vertumnus’ wrist. He cried out, but she yanked him closer and he had no choice but to stumble up the slope toward her.

“What satisfaction can I give you, witch?” he cried out. “I have told you the truth and done you no harm.”

Another branch shot out of the vine and bound his other wrist to the first.

“It is Orsino’s satisfaction, not mine, that matters,” she replied. “You can tell him your tale, and if he is satisfied, he may put you on a ship to Oberon at his expense—or send Oberon a message. He is a fair man, and my patron. I have no choice but to bring you to him, will ye or nill ye.”

“You freed me only to make me your captive?”

“I freed you so you could go to Orsino with me. How was I to know you would be so mulish?”