Act III

 

 

VERTUMNUS WOULD HAVE withered these biting vines to nothing, if he had his powers still. If this were a year ago, a month ago, if he were still Oberon’s trusted lieutenant and not a ragged itinerant in need of rescue. Oh, if he were a true fairy, Titania would never have treated him thus.

Titania thought of his fairy powers as in her gift, because it was she who had given them to him; years before, when he was a mere human, a changeling child. She professed to love him for the sake of her beloved friend, the Indian lady who had died giving him life. She had, she said, purged his mortal grossness, made him better than he had been.

He had wanted to believe it, that he was a fairy through and through. He became such a bright and eager student, that Titania’s fairies used to clap with delight to see him learn new tricks. They gave him the gift of language and he read them stories out of books, which they hated to do for themselves.

Oberon grew jealous and asked for Vertumnus to come spend some time at his court. Titania refused, until Oberon tricked her through enchantments into cuckolding him with a human in the shape of an ass, hoping to shame her so that she would hand over anything Oberon desired.

But Titania was not so easily shamed. She was angry instead, and well she might be, to have her affections so manipulated. If Oberon’s anger flickered, Titania’s anger burned like banked coals, most dangerous when they looked white as ash. She pretended to be mollified, to be tractable. She offered up Vertumnus like the Greeks offered their horse, while privily instructing him to act as her spy at Oberon’s court.

“You shall be my eyes and ears,” she told him. “And when I call for you, my child, you will return, and tell me all the names of Oberon’s favourites, and all his mischiefs and follies.”

But Titania did not call him back, not for a year, not for two. And by the time she did, Vertumnus was Oberon’s man.

At Oberon’s court, he was not called upon to perform as if he were some caged wonder in a menagerie. He was given every book he wanted and left to read it in peace. He was left to use his fairy powers as he thought fit, and no one laughed or clapped when he held debates with the squirrels or floated on his carpet high over the forest. He had thought himself a true fairy at last.

All the same, he was never privy to Oberon’s laughing whispers with Puck and his other councillors, and never invited to join the Hunt with the other favourites. He was always more than human but less than spirit.

If he were a true fairy, he would be gone now, off on the air like a sylph, vanished like first love. If he were a true fairy, perhaps—probably—Titania would not have been able to take away the powers she had given him so long ago.

Instead he was bound, and hurt, and limping behind this witch like a pig being led to market.

“We have time, at last,” said the witch, breaking in to his thoughts. “Time for you to tell me the story of how you came to be in that garden.”

He laughed. “We would need a longer journey for the full story, I fear. It is a story centuries long, and that is only my part in it. The short version is: I was born in India, and taken as a changeling child to Titania’s court. She lost me to Oberon when I was still a child. I thought she had forgotten her grudge, but Titania never forgets. When I arrived in Illyria at Orsino’s court this summer, bearing Oberon’s greetings, Titania chose to punish me for my insolence. She shut me in that garden.”

Pomona slowed her gait so that they were walking next to each other now, although the vines still connected them, held in her right hand, wrapped around both of his. The world was so beautiful. How he would have soared over those hills, in his younger days, those domes of yew and minarets of cypress.

“Surely she must have known that an ambassador’s disappearance, at a time of war, would cause great mischief,” Pomona said.

“She has never cared too deeply about the affairs of humans, not in the way Oberon has. Each of them sees humanity as a game; only for Oberon it is Nine Men’s Morris, and for Titania it is something more like bear-baiting. If humans tore themselves to pieces, that would only amuse her.”

“And you? Are you human now, or fairy? I have never met a changeling before. One never thinks of them having lives, afterward.”

All his life had been afterward. He was by nature and long practice the stolen child, even now when he was old enough to have had children of his own, and grandchildren a dozen times over, had he lived his natural life in India.

Every year Oberon had asked him if he wanted his body to stop aging, lest he become an immortal skeleton. Always Vertumnus said no, thinking that if he did not look like a child he would not be treated as one; thinking that if he did not look like a youth he would be respected; thinking that if he had a little white in his hair, Oberon would ask his advice.

But Oberon never did. Vertumnus’ nature was too solid to be trusted. So he sought dissipation. He was more fairy than fairy, wreaking mischief on mortals that would have made Puck blush. He took lovers as easily as gathering flowers.

Until his fiftieth year, when Vertumnus drank a stoop of wine and then said yes, yes, I will stop here. Oberon pricked fifty marks on his back, each in the shape of a number in Malayalam, the language his mother had spoken. The pain of his mother tongue under his skin sent him to the wine again, for the last time, and then he returned to his books. He sought in contemplation and philosophy the answers that eluded him still.

“I am neither human nor fairy, I suppose,” he answered. “All my life I have known how special, how unique I must be. Oh, you roll your eyes, you think me arrogant, I see. And yet I cannot help feeling I am not more than either, and not enough. I am not what I am. I have sought my true nature high and low, and not yet found it anywhere.”

“Hmpf,” said Pomona, and she pulled an apple out of her satchel. “Would you like one?”

Vertumnus held up his hands, bound together.

“I’ll loose one hand if you’ll be honour bound.”

He shrugged. “Somehow I doubt I could free myself from one of your vines, even if I had a free hand.”

She grinned. “I believe you’re right.”

One vine whipped around and around and shrank into nothing, and then only his right hand was bound. He shook his wrist, and then held out his hand for the apple. She took one for herself out of the satchel and they walked and ate, side by side. The apple tasted perfectly sweet, soft as river water, firm but not too tart. It could very well be the best apple he had ever tasted. Titania wrought well.

They walked in silence for a few moments. He could almost hear the whirr of her thoughts alongside his, her footfalls in time with his own on the dusty road.

“Plants change their natures with the seasons,” Pomona said at last. “Paracelsus says that a plant may be poison or medicine; it is all in the dose. A plant’s nature is in the uses it is put to, and the same may be said of a man, I’ve always thought.”

“Then you subscribe to the view of Ibn Rushd, that existence and essence are the same?”

“Bah, I never had much time for the debates of scholastics. Angels and pins, caves and chairs. What does it matter? A man’s nature may be determined from his actions, so therefore his actions may be said to be his nature.”

“Yes, but what is the truth beneath?”

“Truth is truth,” she said. “Beneath, above, inward, outward.”

“You say that, who saw me as a woman yesterday.”

“And were you any different, when I saw you as something else than what you are? Would you have acted any differently than you had? You cannot seek your nature, you can only make it, moment by moment.”

When had she realized who he was? Was it when she read the book, later, in whatever home she called her own?

“Then tell me,” he said, “what is your nature, Pomona?”

“It is whatever I need it to be—or whatever the person paying me for my services needs it to be.”

“So simple! But Rumi says the king knows not that he is a king when he sleeps, and the prisoner knows not that he is a prisoner. So what are we, then, when we are sleeping? When we are only ourselves, at night, naked and unoccupied?”

“Are you always unoccupied, then,” she said, “when you are naked?”

He was startled into laughter. She kept her pace, looking not at him but off at the Adriatic shining in the sun, just past him. Still the sun shone on her face too, and she was smiling, a little twisted smile like a gnome’s. She made as much mischief as a fairy, in her own ways, this witch who had broken him out of Titania’s prison.

 

 

POMONA FELT A dangerous lightness in her step, a foreboding of joy, as if she were on the verge of some marvel.

The sun was very hot.

She heard the dogs before she saw them, before she realized that she and Vertumnus were approaching a fork where three roads joined. Fie on her wandering mind! All these years Pomona had been wary at such crossroads, preparing herself for Hecate; and today, of all days, the great witch chose to appear.

Hecate’s dogs appeared one by one out of the air. The vine strained against her arm as Vertumnus stepped backward, but Pomona stood her ground. Bootless to avoid Hecate, once she had chosen to speak with you. Pomona had had cause to learn that, many times, long ago.

The dogs—a witch’s dozen, Pomona knew without counting—yipped and snarled until Hecate appeared herself in their midst and they quieted.

The queen of witches had chosen one of the forms she used for strangers. Her body was one long, crooked stick, with another set across it for arms. Her head was completely covered in black cloth, tied at the neck, long enough that the four corners fell down almost to the ground.

Sycorax used to call it the Scarecrow.

Vertumnus was making a very good show of not being afraid, frowning at Hecate.

“What is this folly?” Hecate asked, gesturing at Vertumnus. No one knew the shape of that concealed head, but when Hecate spoke, a mouth seemed to move under the clinging cloth. The dogs grinned and slavered.

“A fairy,” said Pomona. No point in lying if the truth lay within Hecate’s sight; she had learned that, too.

“A fairy,” sang Hecate, mocking. “The fairy, you mean. The wayward son angering Orsino. And here I find my own wayward beldam, dragging this very fairy off to Orsino, unless I miss my guess or my bearings. There was a wind, over Malfi, but I am no weathercock.”

“I serve Orsino,” Pomona protested. “I could not—”

“You serve me,” Hecate hissed. “Albeit never very well. You have been secretive of late, Pomona. You have not told me all your doings.”

The vines that bound Pomona’s strongbox, where the gramarye lay concealed, would be as nothing to Hecate, and Pomona was often away from home. The cipher was not known to anyone but Pomona and Sycorax. Still, Hecate would doubtless guess the book’s origin and purpose.

If that was Hecate’s game, let her ask straight out. Pomona was too old to bandy words with anyone, least of all the queen of deception.

“My doings have been unworthy to tell,” Pomona said. “A little work, here and there.”

“I did not send you to Illyria to do a little work here and there.”

“No, madam, you sent me here to punish me, to ensure that I would never be anything greater than a purveyor of simples. And so that is all I am and all I do.”

Hecate’s cloth-covered head moved from one side to the other. “Saucy!”

“If I have upset your plans, it was not my intent.”

“Oh, it is never your intent,” Hecate sneered, the cloth puffing and sucking at her mouth. “Lo these many years, you have done as you wished, and damn the consequence. When you whispered with Sycorax, and hid her secrets from me, were you thinking of me? No, I learned long ago that I cannot expect you to serve anyone but yourself. I had hoped, of course, that you would not interfere with my plans, as I do not interfere with yours. And yet here we are.”

Pomona stared.

“I believe the lady refers to me,” Vertumnus said drily.

“Oh, it speaks!” Hecate crowed. “Yes, I do wonder that a fairy places himself in the hands of a wyrtwitch.”

It was Hecate who had made Pomona read Rumi, who had educated her in thirteen known languages and two unknown. Pomona had never liked it much; never liked any poetry, really. Pretty words were as much use to her as cobwebs.

“I place myself in the hands of my rescuer,” Vertumnus said. “Is it Hecate I address?”

“It is she.”

“I am astonished that one as great as you should care about the whereabouts of one fairy,” Vertumnus said.

“One fairy who, when nicely misplaced, had Oberon preparing for war. Oberon interferes with my plans less when he is distracted. But I can see all things, Pomona, and I arrange the world to my purposes, with your help or without it. I am here now as a friend, to give you a friend’s advice, if you will receive it.”

Pomona bowed her head, to hide her flushed cheeks as much as to show respect. Could Hecate truly see all things? For two score years Pomona had hidden her gramarye. Did Hecate know of that, of the existence of Caliban, of Pomona’s plans? But no, if Hecate knew of any of that, she would be more than peevish. If Hecate knew that Pomona sought the child born to Sycorax, to teach him secret knowledge, the earth would have bubbled up and drowned Pomona by now.

“Teach me, then, where my duty lies, for always the path seems to fork beneath my feet,” Pomona said. “Do I follow love, or fear, or honour?”

“All three, and all redound to me,” said Hecate. “But you never would be guided by my wisdom. In your youth I could forgive you being headstrong, but I cannot forgive disloyalty.”

Disloyalty! Pomona had given her life to loyalty. She had tried to be loyal to the memory of Sycorax and to Hecate both, and to Orsino too. There was no disloyalty in anything she did, but rather a surfeit of loyalties that pulled her in all directions, and Hecate’s supposed wisdom was no guidance but merely one more set of demands that Pomona could never fulfill.

“I am here in Illyria on your command!” Pomona said, looking up into Hecate’s terrible face. “I forswore all study of the higher arts, because you wished it. I have no gift for prophecy. I cannot see the consequence of anything I do and yet you damn me for my blindness. I act as I deem best, and I am unacceptable to you, I am the seed you sowed yourself.”

Sooty clouds gathered over the ocean. But Hecate laughed.

“Poor little Pomona,” she said. “Would you hear my prophecy, then, to guide your feet?”

Pomona shook her head. “To me, it is no more use than to any mortal. I cannot read them.”

“Here is my prophecy, will ye or nill ye,” Hecate screamed, the four corners of the black cloth billowing.

 

A cell awaits at Orsino’s court:

Wrath and war be your rewards.

Shackled be he that you would free,

And bound you both will ever be.

 

A wind blew up from the sea and even the dogs were quiet.

“A pretty verse,” said Vertumnus. “But it cannot hold a candle to Rumi.”

His voice banished the clouds. Pomona smiled, for Vertumnus, but also for Hecate, who could not be other than she was after all her years.

“I give you my thanks, teacher,” she said. “But if I free him here and now, I will be breaking Orsino’s law, and that I cannot do.”

Hecate sighed, and the sticks came apart and clattered to the ground. A scrap of dark cloud floated on the air for a moment, and then all that was left was the distant baying of dogs.

How convenient such a mode of travel must be!

Pomona stepped carefully around the sticks on her sore feet, feeling the vine go taut, knowing Vertumnus must follow. And follow he did, saying nothing. Perhaps he was used to apparitions.

“Do all witches answer to Hecate?” he asked after a time.

She took a moment before answering. She owed him nothing. Yet he had answered Hecate too, and stood beside her bravely and without complaint. He could have asked to be freed. He could have complained of Pomona’s treatment of him, made promises to Hecate to keep Oberon out of her way. He did none of that.

“All prudent witches show her respect,” Pomona said. “But not all are her students. I was, once.”

“When you were young?”

She laughed. “When the world was young, or so it seems sometimes. I was her student from a baby. I could do witchcraft before I could walk. She is in the habit of taking in orphan children. I was the unwanted child of a Barbary pirate and her lover. Hecate raised me at her school in Algiers, and taught me well.”

“Until she found cause to punish you.”

“Yes.”

She said nothing further but listened to the uneven sound of his footsteps. She had forgotten his hurt foot. She slowed her pace, but only a little. They were not safe upon the road. Hecate had found them; Titania might be next, and who could say what she would do.

“We were both raised away from the human lives we should have had, you and I,” he said.

She did not want to talk any more about the past, so she laughed.

“Like Romulus and Remus,” she said. “Where shall we build our city?”

 

 

IT WAS STILL hot when they arrived at Orsino’s palace, but the sun was melting into the crucible of the Adriatic. Vertumnus, from his burned foot to his parched mouth, wanted nothing but cold wine, a soft couch, and a book.

At the gatehouse, a man in Orsino’s livery came out to greet them.

“Madam, you are well met and welcome here, most well met, and I will quarter your dog with the Duke’s own,” he said, glancing at Vertumnus.

“God’s teeth, Joseph, your insults do your master no honour,” Pomona retorted.

“I meant no insult, madam. It is a fine kennel, and the best meat. I would eat that meat myself, I swear upon my mother’s grave, and I loved my mother dearly. It is very good meat.”

“Let us in, for we have urgent business with the Duke,” Vertumnus said.

“Your dog barks most viciously,” said the man, mincing backwards.

Damn Pomona for binding his hands, and giving fools cause to joke at his expense.

“I’ll show you my bite in a moment,” said Vertumnus.

Pomona put her hand up.

“Hold, hold. Joseph, tell me truly, who do you see here beside me?”

“Why, no one, madam. Should I see someone?” He leaned forward on his pike and whispered to her as if Vertumnus were not there. “Are we being observed?”

“Not at the end of this vine?” she asked.

“Why, I see your dog at the end of its leash, of course. A most clean and well-mannered dog, I meant no insult to it. A handsome devil. A shame about the paw. Such an injury would make the sweetest dog growl, I know. I had a dog once, the sweetest orphan spaniel, a gift from the Duke himself, but one day she stepped upon a thorn and you would have thought her a dog to bait bears with, until we pulled it out.”

Pomona took Vertumnus by the arm and stepped backward. She whispered to him, her breath on his cheek.

“Hecate. She must have enchanted you,” she said. “Given you the appearance of a dog.”

Vertumnus pulled back, looked up and down his body. It looked as it always did, but then it had under Titania’s spell too.

“Do you see it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “To my eye, you’re a man. But I know this Joseph. He lets his tongue run away with him, but he is kind, and not given to foolery. If the man says he sees a dog, he sees a dog.”

In the name of Oberon, he was tired. Tired of being everyone but himself. Tired of the world seeing a face that was not his own.

“Can’t you remove the spell?”

“If you were a leaf, I could change you. If you were a seed, I could coax you. As it is, you are beyond my influence. God’s teeth, this is the last thing we need. But now we are here, it is our duty to tell the Duke.”

“Always thinking of your duty,” he said with a smile.

“Thinking of my life,” she retorted. “If we delay, and he hears of it, I will answer for it.”

“And if you stride into his hall with a barking, limping dog and say you have found a fairy ambassador? If I were to get a message to Oberon—”

“If, if. Fie on your hypotheticals. Do your best not to bark, then, and leave the rest to me. Orsino knows me. He has no cause to doubt my word.”

She strode toward the doorkeeper, pulling Vertumnus after her. By Jove, he had had enough of being a prisoner.

“You believe that you see a dog, Joseph, but you are ensorcelled,” she said to the gatekeeper. “What you see is Vertumnus, the fairy ambassador.”

“Oh, no,” said Joseph. “With the utmost respect, madam, and begging your pardon, I see a dog.”

“If you tell the Duke that Pomona the witch is here, and that she says she has brought Vertumnus with her, I believe he will ask to see us both, directly.”

Joseph frowned, but he went into the door of the gatehouse and then they saw him running across the courtyard on the other side.

Perhaps Pomona was right and Oberon would give him sea passage to Venice. Perhaps, even better, there would be a representative here from Oberon’s court, who would send word to the fairy king—perhaps, if it were one of the more powerful fairies like Thistle or even Puck himself, they would make short work of removing Hecate’s enchantment. Soon he would be himself again, whoever that might be, and if he was of little use to Oberon or anyone else, at least he would do no harm.

The man Joseph came hurrying back, puffing and waving at them as if he thought they would leave.

“Well?” Pomona asked.

“My master is in audience now with Esperanza Malchi,” the man panted.

“Why is Esperanza Malchi here?” Vertumnus asked. Joseph ignored him. Of course, he had heard nothing but barking.

“Arf arf,” Vertumnus said pointedly.

Pomona said, “My companion would like to know who Esperanza Malchi is. Isn’t she an Ottoman?”

“I know who she is,” Vertumnus growled. “I asked why.”

“You may know, but I don’t,” Pomona whispered.

“Yes, she is the secretary of the Safiye Sultan, the chief consort of the Ottoman ruler,” said Joseph. “It is the Safiye Sultan who truly rules the Empire, people say, but she does not leave her home. Malchi, being Jewish, is her public face, and speaks and acts for her at foreign courts, and tells her what she learns, and arranges presents and those sorts of things.”

“An ambassador, to save words,” said Vertumnus.

“I do not know what Madam Malchi thinks about dogs,” said Joseph nervously, looking at Vertumnus. “Or any animal, to tell the truth of it. I have not asked her opinions on dogs or any animal. There was not time.”

“Not time?”

“No, my master bade me rush back to you as fast as my feet could carry me.”

“Rush back to tell us to wait?”

“Oh, no! The Duke bids you come, and present yourselves before him, and the Ottoman woman too, so she can see that the ambassador lives, that Orsino is not at fault for Oberon’s bellicosity. He bids you come, and not to wait. I tried to tell him about the dog, but—”

“There wasn’t time,” Vertumnus said.

“Shush, Vertumnus,” Pomona said. “Lead on, Joseph.”

He limped along, his hands bound, trying and failing not to feel as if he were being led as a prisoner or a prize—although he had done nothing wrong. He must have done something, surely, or he would be in some other life, in some other skin. At some point there must have been a choice, and he had chosen awry.

“The Ottomans will be worried about the fragile peace with Venice,” said Pomona as they walked.

“A fragile peace, you may call it, or a lazy war,” Vertumnus said. “In diplomacy it matters very little which. The trick is to make sure no one gets any stronger—not Venice, and certainly not the Spanish, who are threatening England now. Malchi wishes to make sure that Oberon does not throw in his lot with Venice, as he is sure to do if he is angry with Orsino. She will be pleased to see me, then.”

“Everyone will be pleased to see you,” said Pomona. “Now stop barking, for the love of God, or we’ll be asked to leave.”