Part III: IN THE BOWER OF BLISS

So began the happiest days of my life.

We could have stayed there forever, I think, as far as we both were concerned. Enveloped in that bliss that comes with the first physical expressions of love. The old story. So it was a blessing that Nature herself, in one of her many guises, prodded us on, the way Nature always does. For Nature is another name for Fate.

I often bring out the memories of those days with Joe in the Bower of Bliss and sort them, as it were, in small piles on the floor, picking them up, smiling, putting them down, rearranging them—comforting myself with the sight of them. I do this in the room in the Tower that was my mother’s before me, when I wake in the early hours and nothing is awake around me but the stars and the crescent moon, while I ignore the full False Moon that shines so balefully down.

It was the happiest time of my life. I learned about Joe, and what gives more delight than the first forays into the heart of a loved one?

“What if this is all a dream? Maybe I am only dreaming that I rode into the Dead Wood, that I jumped down from the dead tree, and I’ll wake when I hit the Dead Ground,” he would muse, and I would say, “What Dead Wood? What Dead Ground?” But he would fall quiet, remembering something he hugged to himself, so instead I would hug his ribcage tightly, and press my cheek against his bony shoulder in the candlelight.

He was on a Quest, he told me one night as we lay together in the big wide bed next to the embers dying in the woodstove. He was the hope of his family. “And I never wanted to be,” he said earnestly. His eyes shone in the dark. “Until I learned about the Key.”

The Key. What Key? Vaguely, some memory stirred in me. I turned over on my side, my head on his shoulder, and pushed my scaly lizard leg up against his boyish one. His tail stirred, and I smiled.

Then I frowned. A memory flashed past, my mother, in the Room in the Tower, brushing her long black hair as I sat on the rug beside her in the dying firelight, playing with a large rose-gold Key. As I played with it—was this imagination? The fantasy of a child turned into memory?—I could hear the animals outside in the night speak to each other; I could hear the wind and understand what it said; I could see the stars, and they leaned toward me and spoke.

My mother smiled down at me sadly. “It will be yours to hold some day, Snow.”

I pondered. But Joe went on with his own story, intent now on telling me what he hadn’t dared to before.

Our world, he told me—his world and mine, inhabited by the ruined Megalopolis of his birth, and my green and pleasant Arcadia—was in great trouble. This much I knew as well, at least as it concerned Arcadia. Wasn’t Megalopolis, that huge, wretched Empire that surrounded her, our chief worry? How could we be Arcadia when a larger, stronger, more ruthless enemy surrounded it on almost all sides?

“We’re running out of…things,” Joe said earnestly, his eyes shining in the dying firelight. “We grow and we grow and we grow…endless growth—it’s no good, but try telling my folks that. We invent, and we plan, and everywhere we turn it’s like we’re stuck. We know more than any people ever before us, we Megalopolitans, we tell ourselves that over and over. We’ve achieved astonishing stuff, success beyond any in history. But there is nowhere for us to go.”

“You’ve gone, so I’ve heard,” I said cautiously, “to the Moon. And conquered it, and created a False Moon to live on by its side. Yes?”

He fell silent. Megalopolis was proud of its False Moon, but I suspected he felt differently, my Joe. And that he knew that we in Arcadia didn’t think so much of it as all that.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “And the False Moon has every delight a man could want—that’s what they teach us in school, Sophy. But it isn’t true. You can’t breathe on the False Moon. Oh, I don’t mean you can’t take breath; we’ve solved that problem; there’s oxygen there recirculating all the time. But it’s not like here.” He turned his face toward mine, and his eyes glistened. “It’s not like lying here by the fire with you, with Leef on the rug there, with Grete outside breathing the same air.” He sighed. “We can breathe here. And the promise is that when we find the Key that has been lost, we’ll be able to breathe there again, the way we could on our own world, and we’ll be able to jump up into other worlds and breathe there, the way we were meant to.”

I was silent. I knew it was the same Key my mother had given to me to hold, and that disappeared when she was killed. And he was on a Quest to find it, too. I had stopped him on his Quest. This Bower of Bliss, I suddenly understood, was to my own dear Joe an uneasy obstacle to the completion of his own Fate.

A horrid pang went through me. My lizard tail twitched and I buried my head in his shoulder.

“My family was told we’d be the ones to find it—the Key.” He was drowsy now, falling asleep even as he told me the most important words, the closest to his heart. “That’s the legend. At my parents’ wedding, a Fortune Teller said that my father’s son would find the Key.” He gave the sigh that meant he was about to drop from wakefulness into sleep. “He said: ‘Conor Barr’s child will restore the Key. Conor Barr’s child will rule over all.’ What a lot of pressure, eh? But I mean to do it…I mean to…not rule over all, that’s stupid. But find the Key. Find it and find out the better way…there has to be a better way, don’t you think, Sophy?” He dropped off to sleep.

An electric surge, uncomfortable, startling, was going through me, as I forced myself to lie still, so as not to disturb my sleeping love. Conor Barr’s child? I was Conor Barr’s child. And suddenly, it was as if I remembered a task given me in a dream. I was to find the Key I had played with as a child. That was the secret of Will’s curse, of my own quest. I was to find the Key.

And I knew it, too.

Strangely, it bothered me not at all that I lay now in the arms of my own brother. There was no horror attached to that realization; it seemed, to tell the truth, the most natural thing in the world. Though I was careful not to mention this truth to Joe, just in case he wouldn’t see things in quite the same light.

Firelight, I thought drowsily to myself, even though I had meant to stay awake and plan. Firelight…bed…warm…tea…heart…hearth…heat…beat…feat…we…key…

I slept.

And I dreamed. The night was still, except for the hooting of a lone owl, and I dreamed. I still remember that dream, so vivid was it, and so strange.

I was in a great gray city, half-ruined, with torn streets and crumbling buildings. A baby cried forlornly from a cellar below the street, the entrance blocked by fallen bricks. Panic possessed me, and I hurried to the pile, throwing the bricks aside in a frenzy to get to the crying child. “Don’t worry, baby,” I crooned. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” My hands bled, and I wiped them impatiently on my legs—which were my own, in this dream, lizard no longer, but wholly Sophy’s—and dug and dug. The baby’s cries changed from forlorn to terrified, and I threw myself at the bricks, until I saw a chink of light, and diving there, dug and dug and dug, and threw away the last brick.

Breaking through, I saw the scene change. Instead of the dank cellar I had expected, I stepped onto a gentle green meadow, not unlike the one surrounding the Bower Joe and I had found—but longer, thinner, and more cultivated, as if it had been in place and tended by humans a very long time.

At the end of the meadow was an enormous tree, and under the tree was a naked baby lying on its back, not crying any longer, but crooning, looking up into the sun shining through the tree’s full leaves, so full it must have been high summer there. I went to the child and scooped him up, and he was warm from the sun, and as I looked up, I saw the tree was actually two trees growing side by side, their leaves twining together.

Still holding the child, I turned and looked back the way I had come. No cellar was there, no pile of bricks, no gray ruined city, but a small house, neatly built in the style of an Arcadian farm cottage, airy and snug. Before it was a long table with benches on either side. A middle-aged couple sat there, side by side, holding hands and talking seriously to each other.

To my surprise, I recognized them: Francis Flight and Amalia Todhunter, a cultivated man and woman who live in a small community at the foot of the Donatees, near Ventis, where the Agricultural College was established in my mother’s day. They had been favorites of my mother’s (she had, Devindra tells me, the most hope for the well-read, healthy inhabitants of the villages of Arcadia), and I remembered them coming to court when I was a child, bringing me honey and almonds from their farm. Though I hadn’t seen them now in many years, I knew where they lived, and where they lived looked nothing like this house in my dream.

As I puzzled over this, a traveler approached, and Amalia and Francis stood, still holding hands. As he came nearer and stopped, his back to me, wrapped in a long topaz and gray traveling cloak, they bowed deeply.

The baby sat up in my arms and stared. And in my dream, I knew the stranger was a god. What god? I wondered fretfully to myself. I wanted to call out to him, but something restrained me, and I clung to the baby more tightly.

He turned and looked at me, and I saw his face. It filled me with a sadness I couldn’t name. I clutched at the baby, but to my grief, I now clutched nothing but air…the baby was gone. I held only a sheet and blanket…

I woke. It was morning, and I could hear Joe making tea by the woodstove. Leef sat on the pillow next to my head cleaning his paws. Grete snorted happily outside, which meant Joe had already piled some grass for her to eat. It was morning in the Bower of Bliss, next to the Wall of Fire, the normal waking world, the world I was used to.

But what god had I seen?

“Morning, Soph,” Joe said, grinning, holding two mugs of steaming tea as he climbed awkwardly back into bed, hauling his tail in behind him. Leef leapt neatly away from Joe’s pillow and curled up onto mine. I took my tea and thanked Joe, sipping it, smelling the good morning air, as he nuzzled at my neck, holding his tea aloft to keep it from spilling. It was another beautiful morning; the mornings, here in the Bower of Bliss, seemed to have no end.

That was wrong, of course. Everything ends.

But what god?

It was a good thing we had come to an Enchanted Valley, a Bower of Bliss, a Horn of Plenty. For Joe had very little practical knowledge, which came from having been raised an aristocrat in Megalopolis, where to be practical is to be a servant. He didn’t know how to cook (except for tea), or clean, or hammer, or even forage. So it was lucky that in that Enchanted Bower, food and drink were magically plentiful, at least to a certain extent. And past that extent, I was quite competent myself to deal. Devindra and my nurse, Kim the Kind, had seen to that. They’d made sure I was able to keep house, to tend to myself and others. Because that is one of the things that, in Arcadia, it means to be a queen.

Those skills came in handy now, what with Joe and me setting up household. And any signs of the housewifely on my part enchanted him. Well, maybe not at first. At first, to my chagrin, he took for granted that it was I who swept the floor, and I who smoothed out the bed when we woke in the morning. But like all true lovers—I remark wryly—we had our share of sharply spoken words, maybe even a pot or two thrown against a wall, followed by bashful apologies, kisses, lessons learned and acted on the next time. He learned to appreciate what I had to give. And I learned the same about him.

In fact, I learned more from those months with Joe in the Garden than in all my years of being princess, or later on when I was queen. This kind of education, of what you might say is two people joined together, rubbing the rough edges off each other in delight and in anger, is undervalued, or even scorned. Yet two people together can find a third wisdom greater than either of them alone could have known. What they make together, every day, in each action and interaction, is as real as any child they might make together in moments of passion. And has as much effect on the world in the years to come. More, maybe.

Be careful then, oh be careful! in how you live with each other, and love each other, and quarrel and learn from the quarrel and move on. Don’t yearn for endings in your ignorance, the way I sometimes did in the early days, when I thought Joe too full of himself, too regardless of me; little did I know then how short and sweet those days, even the moments of quarreling, would seem now.

For it was short, that time. It was only a year. Only one dear year. Or, at least, it was only a year to us, there in the Bower of Bliss.

Yes, it was a year, and in all its seasons, too. I know from experience that it’s wrong to think that Paradise is only spring, or high summer, or harvest season. It is all these times, and it’s winter, too, when everything seems dead and frozen as if it will never come back to life. All of these are Paradise, for without one of them none of the others would live. Paradise lives in the changes around us, in the exuberant changes in our bodies and our minds and our souls, which make one deep and steady pulse in the world.

We both were that pulse together, which is the kind of joy that True Love brings, through all kinds of weather, in every season. Making a home in the Enchanted Hut, setting up our own place, with spots by the fire for him and for me, a pillow for Leef beside mine, where he curled up in the evening while we made the last meal of the day. Putting up stores against the winter, stores of the food that appeared like magic around us, both wild, growing in the forest at the edges of our meadow and around our lake, and in the cupboards of the little house. Winter with the snow banked up against the windows, and the woodpile appearing in a little shed beside the door, to be gathered in armloads and brought inside. That winter was the sixteenth since my birth.

Then spring, when the snow disappeared, leaving a marshland in the meadow outside, and streams running here and there, digging furrows through it, some mornings rime-covered, then fewer and fewer of those, until the sun warmed and came up earlier and earlier, as we rose earlier and earlier, and the meadow dried, and was covered with a soft green sheen, and flowers sprang up, first the white, then the purple, then the yellow and blue. Joe had his birthday then.

Then summer, and the sun stood high in the sky till late at night, and we spent long hours outside warming ourselves. Then fall, when the wild things were the most awake getting ready for winter, and we, wild things too, got ourselves ready, thinking the years would go on and on like this, but knowing that they wouldn’t, not really.

So as the autumn came in that year, we were sad and silent, though happy, too, which I think is a secret that only people truly in love who have lived together know. For we had come to know each other over that year, as true joy and true sorrow (two sides of the same coin) teach knowledge of the loved one, and wisdom too. We had come to know that we were both alike and different, and that this was the way it needed to be.

We shared the same religion, if I can call it that, even though Joe, like all Megalopolitans, scorned the idea of religion, or even the sacred. But nevertheless, I knew that we both believed the world outside our Bower could be a better place than it was. And that was why our sojourn in the Bower of Bliss could only be temporary, a way station. We had both set out on our adventures to try and find a better way. To find it just for us two was a blessing and a treasure. But it wasn’t what either of us was meant for. To find what we were meant for, we would have to be apart.

I began to understand this, as that second autumn drew on. When the days shortened, I would ride Grete farther and farther afield in search of wild berries and mushrooms, for one more ramble in the warm fall air, that air that changes so quickly into a rush of cold current from the north. I often rode alone, around the edges of our world. Joe was not a good rider, or a very interested one; he had, like all the princes of Megalopolis, preferred to drive a machine that had been given him on his thirteenth birthday, which he had left behind on his quest into the mountains.

So my offer to let him ride Grete was always declined. And I would ride out every afternoon, or sometimes in the early morning, me and Leef and Grete. We would explore the edges of the Wall of Fire, which burned brightly without consuming anything that could be seen within. I know this, because Joe only saw, to the north, an impenetrable forest that stretched as far as his eye could see. He described it to me when I asked, with feigned casualness, why he never went that direction in his rambles. “Too thick,” he explained. “All underbrush.” No way through, and nothing, apparently, of interest there.

What did I see? That wall of flame that warmed, but never burned, as I held a hand out near it. A wall twice as tall as I was, a wall guarded by an angel. Star. All that year, she stood there, a flaming sword in one hand, and her other held up, forefinger at her mouth, in the universal sign of silence. She was silent, that year. I knew enough not to try to get her to break her silence; I knew…I was afraid…it would happen soon enough.

I knew…I was afraid…it would happen that autumn. I knew when I saw the cobwebs at the end of the meadow.

“Do you see that?” I asked one afternoon as Joe applied himself happily to his newfound skill of splitting wood for the winter. I began to suspect this was wood we would never need. But I stayed silent.

“What?” he said, wiping his forehead, his hair sticking up even more than usual. He followed my look, and my finger that pointed to the western end of our meadow, where the sun was already beginning to sink below the trees. “No, I don’t see anything. What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. But it was something. It was cobwebs, appearing first fragilely, then thick and strong, in the trees there hedging the meadow. They multiplied as I watched. Leef watched, too. He looked at me, and I knew he saw as well as I did.

“No,” Joe said, “but…!” The excitement in his voice made me whip round to see what he meant. He looked in a different direction than I did, to the south, to the crest of the steep mountain there. “Look there, Sophy. Look!”

I followed his finger. I could see nothing.

“Look! There’s a man there, standing at the top of the path we came down. Can’t you see him, Sophy?”

It was no good. All I saw was a ridge and some trees.

“He’s coming down the mountain,” Joe said, dropping his maul. “Slowly. He’s leaning on a staff, so he must be old…go on, Soph, you must be able to see him!”

No. I couldn’t see him. I looked anxiously back to the west. The cobwebs had grown stronger, and they now stretched from the trees out to the edges of the meadow.

“He’s dressed like no one I’ve ever seen, in a long orange coat. He’s…you must see him now!”

Still nothing. The cobwebs stretched out toward us. Star burned ever more brightly, and her expression settled into one even sterner than before. Stern and beautiful.

“I think…no, it…Sophy! It is…!” Joe threw down the wood splitter and raced across the meadow to the foot of the mountain, shouting as he ran.

It was then that my vision cleared just enough for me to see Joe leap across a boulder and run to a tall man, hunched with age or pain or both. The man stood perfectly still as Joe came toward him, and in that moment, the sun broke through the tops of some trees to the west and lit his face. It was then I recognized him. It was the god of my dreams, the god who was the guest of Amalia Todhunter and Francis Flight.

It was Joe’s father. It was my father, too.

“Father!” Joe yelled out in a voice of sheer joy. “Father, father, father!”

It was the god. It was Joe’s father. It was my father, too.

And it was the end, I knew, for us together, me and Joe, for in our time here in the Bower of Bliss. I had thought it was the happy ending. But it really was only the beginning.