Part VII: ON THE RUINED SURFACE

As we swam across the marsh, the water beneath us and the sky above began to glow with a faint blue-green light. It was only then that I realized the sky and the water in the Dead Wood had been black, then the same gray color as the fine dust of its ground. The gray that was the only color we saw the whole endless time we crossed that foul place. But now, clinging to the back of the creature—salamander? newt? friend—the world around us began slowly to come back to life.

Not as much life as I was used to. Not as much life as I would have liked. But still—life.

I knew when we crossed into fresher water, water that might be safely drunk, for it turned below me into a clear, sweet, silver blue. And I saw pictures in it as we swam, as if they pushed their way to the surface, pictures of trees and flowers and animals of all kinds, as I had seen in the Bower of Bliss. Not so riotous, not so joyful as there, but even here, in the middle of the marsh on the edges of Megalopolis, a multiplicity of life, of story.

We were out of the Dead Wood.

The day lightened as we swam, and the small creature swimming swiftly beside her brother flipped one of her black-clawed forelegs against the water so that it splashed onto us. And Leef, opening his dull eyes, smelled the water as it splashed up, opened his mouth and drank.

It wasn’t the clear, crisp water of an Arcadian stream. But it was fresh, and it revived us. I can still remember its taste.

I didn’t know it then, but there was not much fresh water in that marsh, just this blue green strip that the creatures kept to, which came rushing down from the pure snowmelt of the Donatees. For as we came in sight of the opposite shore, the very edge of Megalopolis, the water again turned, not gray, but the fetid green of a dying sea. The three creatures stopped there, and, swimming in circles, seemed to confer. The Queen looked at me, kindly as I thought. With trepidation I looked down and saw that the water was shallow here, what there was of it pushing its way sluggishly through the algae. I could stand. I realized they could go no farther without danger to themselves, so, grateful, I slid from the back of my guardian, into slimy water that rose up to my waist.

We shook hands, or forelegs, solemnly, and it cost me as much of a pang to leave the three as it had cost me to leave the mermaids. With all my heart I thanked them, and with all their hearts they received my thanks before turning to swim away.

Turning toward Megalopolis, carrying Leef, I trudged through the edges of the Marsh, where it struggled to live. I could feel that struggle, though it looked like it was dying. This was harsh going. As I tore through the masses of water weeds, some dead, some dying, but some, miraculously, fighting their way back to life, I felt my heart tear a little, too. When things are dead, completely dead, the sorrow stays the same. But when there is a hint that life might still be there, the sorrow of that tears at the soul.

On the other side of the Marsh, where we emerged across from the Dead Wood, the land wasn’t much better. It was alive, that’s true—just. But the terror of walking there was worse. The landscape itself seemed to groan as Leef and I went, as if in pain…and a dead thing has no pain. To hear it cry out like that, and to be unable to go to its aid, was almost unbearable, until we became hardened, as are all who manage to live without going mad in Megalopolis, hardened to the sound. It would be unbearable if it wasn’t that all in Megalopolis had to bear it. And now Leef and I were learning to bear it as well.

The land was dying, that was clear. It wasn’t yet the Dead Wood, but if nothing was done, it would be soon. And we were all the same world, Arcadia and this land of the Dead Wood. What happened here would happen there.

What then, could be done?

Years later, I asked this same question of Star as we sat in our Council of Two, discussing matters of High State, “Why, if it is true what you say, and I and countless of my fellows here have been born and reborn in a multiplicity of forms, then why have we not all, by now, combined what we have learned, and solved the problem of the Dead Wood?” But Star only put her forefinger to her mouth in the universal sign of silence, and I knew what she said was that we would never know, for it was our job to toil in the dark. For it is in the dark where new forms are born.

That day, as Leef and I trudged along toward the haze of smoke rising from a human settlement of some kind, I felt the dread pang of the old forms dying. He said quietly, “Look.” I stopped a moment. At my lizard feet were piles of dead bees, husks, thousands of them in small bee cairns all around us.

My human feet could not have borne walking through those exquisite corpses. Any more than the Sophy I had once been, who had died, I think, in the Dead Wood—any more than she, tenderhearted, deluded girl, could have let Will the Murderer lose a game of chess when it meant so much to him.

These thoughts passed through me as I scanned the landscape and saw more of the velvet black and gold bees. Dead, and worse, much worse, dying. To see them dying in this way was almost more than I could bear, and yet I summoned up the determination to trudge onwards.

Bees have a special meaning in Arcadia, and particularly for me, Arcadia’s queen. For in the Little Meadow, above the Small House, on the outskirts of the pretty town of Ventis, in the Arcadian foothills of the Donatees, are the hives that belong to the domain of Amalia Todhunter and Francis Flight, my godparents and the foster family of Walter Todhunter.

Amalia, as her name indicates, descends from a family who had much to do with foxes, the gray ones that keep our fields free of pesties of all kinds. “Hunter” is a misleading term here; unlike the names of Megalopolis, many Arcadian names prize a symbolic over a practical meaning. “Todhunter,” in our land, refers to people who study the ways of foxes in order to understand more of the ways of our dogs, and, indeed, our fellows. The Todhunters have always been known for their ability to heal domestic animals, and Amalia has inherited this ability to a spectacular degree—which is why, even now in her honored old age, the Small House is a riot of pets: dogs, cats, mice, tortoises, parrots, an owl…and of course, a fox, whose ears flop like a puppy’s, and who follows her wherever she goes.

But it’s the Flights I mean to speak about now. Francis Flight, husband of Amalia, is one of the Donatees Flights: famous beekeepers. The Little Meadow is the most famous Bee Garden in all of Arcadia. And as Arcadia is known for the quality and sweetness of its honey, this is a very real form of fame.

The Bee Garden of the Little Meadow holds about a hundred hives, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the year and the mood of the bees. These bees make what we call the Queen’s Honey, for they feed on the highest mountain flowers of the Donatees, and on the flowers of mountain herbs, as well as the lush clover from the easternmost fields stretching out from the prosperous vine-growing town of Amaurote. It’s this feed, and the warmth of the hollow of the Little Meadow, combined, I am certain, with the character of their guardians (and Devindra has students working hard to prove the physical truth of this), that produces this most prized of honeys.

Like all expert beekeepers, Francis and Amalia have calm, easy-going temperaments. They love their bees, and the Little Meadow has always seemed to me to be filled with sunlight, even on the gloomiest days—the very opposite of the ruin of Megalopolis, always gloomy and in shadows even on the sunniest day. Their Bee Garden is a true garden, so different from what Leef and I were nearing—what the people of Megalopolis call the ‘bee yards’.

We had neared the bee yards over the corpses of discarded bees, huge complexes meant to produce honey on an industrial scale: cold, gray, harsh, and now empty. The bees had all but died out in Megalopolis by the time Leef and I arrived on its shores. And I was later told by the people living nearby that the bees had been of a particularly fierce and angry strain. All the workers in the bee yards, in the heyday of the honey factories, had been forced to wear full protective clothing, morning to night, against the vicious stings of their charges.

The bees tended by Francis and Amalia, though, always seemed to me to be particularly calm and even-tempered, as much so as their guardians. I often played in the Little Meadow under the shadow of the hives, while my mother, the queen, gossiped in the cottage with Amalia. I was never stung, no, not once, not even when I ventured a finger into a honeycomb where the bees flew to and fro.

What I remember is warm breeze, sunlight, happy droning, and flowers. Then after my mother died, I lived there a full year before Devindra had stabilized the Regency and brought me home to Mumford, and the Queen’s House by the side of the Juliet River.

But I always thought of the Small House as my other home. I was not the only child of Arcadia who did. There were so many fostered there over the years, and I made many valuable friends my own age when I stopped there after my mother’s death—valuable because they were not the friends I would have made had Michaeli, the Lord High Chancellor, and Aspern Grayling had their way. They would have kept me trapped in a ghetto of princehood, as a precious artifact is trapped by its guardians. But Devindra was stronger than they were then, and it was easy, for a while at least, to let her have her own way.

So I grew strong as a child, tended along with the bees.

It was not so easy by the time I completed my quest. The days of the Lizard Princess had come to an end and those of Queen Sophia had begun. I returned to be queen. It was not so easy then. I had learned, during the days of my quest, and particularly in the hard days I speak of now on the Ruined Surface of Megalopolis, to take good care. It was to the Small House I journeyed in secret on my return, and at the Small House where I left the future of Arcadia in the beekeepers’ care. It was instinct that took me to the home of Amalia Todhunter and Francis Flight. My own best instinct. I remembered their compact, comfortable cottage in its well-tended garden; I remembered their happiness as a couple. It was a pleasant place for a child, a stable place—a place of healing.

I never heard an angry word between Francis and Amalia—never. When I commented on this, in the days when they gave me refuge before I moved from the time of the Lizard Princess to the reign of Sophia, Francis laughed and said laconically: “Anger doesn’t go with bees.” This trait was of immense value to me. When I was a child, almost a young woman, on one spring visit to the Small House, I watched them sit for a moment, hands entwined, under the enormous oak tree, and the thought passed through my mind that if I ever had a child, this was what I would want for him.

It was and is a great good place, the Small House by the Bee Garden in the Little Meadow. A place to grow a great good future. Or at least the hope of one.

All of this, protected and proved by the bees.

A living Bee Garden. Utterly unlike the bee yards that Leef and I made our way through now, through the rustle of the dead and dying bees of Megalopolis.

In Arcadia, we know that the night holds two kinds of sleep. The first is the lightest, and one wakes from it, in the still of the night, refreshed and thinking about the days before and the days to come, before falling into the second sleep, which is the sleep of dreams. Those two parts of sleep are like a smooth stone skimming across the surface of a clear lake, skipping across for the first part, then sinking to the bottom surrounded by dreams.

But in Megalopolis, sleep, when it comes—and there it comes only in fits and starts—is like a rock rolling down a cracked and dried-out riverbed, rolling down to a sea that receded long ago.

I could never sleep properly in Megalopolis, neither on the Ruined Surface nor on the False Moon. I would fall asleep as normal, as if I were back in my Tower Room in Arcadia, or in the Bower of Bliss with Joe, but within an hour, I would wake, clawing at the air, grief-stricken with nameless loss, calling out ‘No!’ while Leef shifted uneasily at my side.

More: I was aware of my lizard half there, as I had never been before. It hurt. My right thigh would throb at night with the pressure of my blood turning from warm to cold. My back cried out with the hardship of dragging a tail behind it. My leather feet pulled at my legs, my scales chafed, I could never truly settle. Night after night in Megalopolis it was always the same.

Then there was the breathing. The air was different there from anywhere else I had ever been. Thinner, with an undercurrent of a subtle poison I could sense faintly, just below the threshold of consciousness. A poison that made me fearful and uneasy as I breathed it in and out—and not just me, but Leef, too. Every night felt like a battle, a losing battle with a powerful enemy, a battle to keep myself and Leef safe.

Here was another oddity. In Megalopolis, on the Ruined Surface, I had such dreams as make me shudder now to remember them. Black dreams. Dreams of explosions killing innocents, of earthquakes, of enormous waves of water like the one that destroyed the Great City in the year of my own birth. I would wake gasping for breath, and a black thing, like some dark hand clutching my heart, would squeeze me inside, and I would feel it trying to drag my heart down, down, down. I grappled with it, confused, baffled—what was it? What did it mean?

Everything was so fragile there, in Megalopolis. It was as if in some kind of mass hysteria, the people there built and built and built, throwing a building up higher and higher, raising it continually closer to the sky, rather than putting any thought into securing its foundations. Until it was as high as the heavens, flashing lights and emitting loud, imperious noises far above the place from which it had sprung.

And yet—there had been joy, I would tell myself sternly in my days there. There could be joy again. Though that seemed impossible to me, that time I spent in the Great City and on the False Moon.

The terrible sadness I felt as we crossed the boundaries and made our way to the miserable settlements left at the outskirts of the Ruined Surface was not just a sadness, but also a sickness. I’d heard about this sickness. Its official name in the clinics of the Great City is Generalized Atmospheric Grief. But it was popularly known, among the straggling, struggling populace where I made my first home those days, as the Daily Despair. The symptoms of the Daily Despair are plain: on waking, one feels oneself pressed down upon by a curious weight, like a heavy load of wet feathers. These push against the torso of the sufferer, with special weight on the chest right above the heart. This feeling of pressure is accompanied by varying feelings of grief…varying according to the personality and history of the sufferer, making this a very difficult illness to treat.

Although the weight typically lifts throughout the waking day, the sense of loss, of grief, of mourning, commonly remains, interfering with the ability to feel commonplace pleasures. A meal, a drink with friends, the touch of a loved one, all become muted, dragged down by this dreaded and all-too-common virus.

A sufferer from Daily Despair doesn’t say, “I caught it.” More commonly they say, “It caught me.”

Leef and I entered Megalopolis. And the Daily Despair caught me, right away.

I felt it as we walked toward the smoky horizon where the settlements of the Ruined Surface began. We were walking through a scraggly copse of the kind that passes for a forest there. I felt a lack, and the creeping of an unfamiliar despair.

“The trees,” I said to Leef. “The trees here don’t talk.”

We both stopped and listened. Leef looked at me, concerned, and leapt lightly off my shoulder onto the stony ground. He ran from tree to tree, stopping for a moment beneath each one, gazing up into its branches.

These were all the same kind of tree, a type of evergreen, though straggly, sparse and sullen-looking. At one particularly misshapen specimen, Leef chattered in a low, hopeful tone. I heard nothing. But it was clearly different with him, for he paused as if listening, nodded, chattered again, listened again. Then he reached out gently and touched the tree’s bark, patting it once as if in farewell. And he came back sadly to me.

“What is it?” I said, alarmed.

“They’re all gone,” Leef said as he tugged at my leg to be picked up again. “The Nature Spirits. They’ve all gone away.”

Now, I have never seen nor heard a Nature Spirit, but I have heard the grasses, and the flowers, and the trees speak—beautiful dialects, of which one can only understand the kernel, rather than the words. The meaning. The content, rather than the form, as it were. Leef had always assured me that it was the Nature Spirits who spoke through them, and that he could hear them more clearly than I could, even seeing them in certain lights.

“Who was that you spoke with, then?”

We walked on. Leef sat mournfully curled on my shoulder.

“She wouldn’t say. All she told me was that when the others left, she was too sad to move on. So she stayed.”

“Will she die?” I asked, afraid.

He hesitated, and then gave a tiny shrug. “I don’t think a Nature Spirit can die. I think she’ll just fade away.” He brooded over this, and I asked no more. That was when I saw the smoke in the distance and knew we must be at the edge of a settlement—even though the city of Megalopolis had been cut to pieces by the Great Flood, on its outskirts inhabitants who survived and who had lacked the resources to flee to the False Moon gathered together into these casual slums on higher ground. It was one of those I searched for now. We were tired and lonely and hungry and wanted the companionship of our own kind.

Later, when we found our way to the False Moon, it was harder to find our own kind. On the False Moon, there weren’t many of what are called the ‘Lower People’, that is, the descendants of the Megalopolitans who were left behind on the world after the Great Flood, those who hadn’t had the money or the connections—for a lucky few were servants to the Upper People, and so survived the deluge along with their masters—to fly to the settlements on the False Moon.

These Lower People were mainly from the same stock as the Megalopolitan women and children who had fled over the Ceres Mountains ahead of the Flood, right before the disaster, driven by an instinct and a fear that had warned them aright.

It was during that flight that I was born. So many of the Lower People left in the slums clinging to what hillocks remained after the waters receded resembled the advisors and protectors of my childhood, those who had made their way to Arcadia with my mother, Lily. There were the dark-skinned, black-haired hawknoses of the Marsh People, from which my dear Devindra had come. And then there were the enormous slanted eyes and golden-brown skin of the ancestors of my nurse, Kim the Kind, and of my friend, Clare the Rider.

The people there had changed, though, since the days my friends had fled their part of the world. These people were not as those I had known, and knew. They were a people like the weather on the Ruined Surface—extreme, rough, even violent. In one day there you can have a scorching sun, hailstones as big as a child’s fist, wind that blows old people down hills with its relentless force. The people matched this atmosphere, being changeable, unpredictable, violent…and shy.

Surprisingly, they were shy. Or perhaps not surprisingly at all. The circumstances of their environment probably had forced a response that most, in their hearts, despised. Most then hid their true natures in their hearts, protecting them until a better, warmer, calmer day.

Of course, there were the other methods of protection against a harsh, cruel, and violent fate that the weaker of the Lower People chose. To spend even a small amount of time in Megalopolis is to understand the use, and the overuse, of drugs and stimulants of every kind. The daily reality there is too sharp, too shiny, too harsh to take easily without aid of some kind. Without the aid of a strong heart and hope—any amount of hope no matter how small—it is impossible. With the Daily Despair rampant, drug treatment presented itself as an absolute necessity, whether prescribed by a doctor or by the sufferers themselves. This was not only true of the Lower People, for the Upper People were forced, from time to time, to return to the Ruined Surface when struck by disease of any kind. The False Moon did not allow for healing. Only the earth could aid with that, as I found when I sought my Joe’s mother, Rowena, in one of the clinics for the rich that are established on the Ruined Surface below. Drug treatment was, and is, a necessary evil in Megalopolis.

This treatment has the unintended side effect of making all of the difficulties involved with living on the Ruined Surface far worse than if the medication had never taken place at all. As our Arcadian scientists have long held, there is a use for pain, even a need for it, both in the microcosm, to let the body know that something is wrong, that something needs to be changed, and in the macrocosm as well. For every individual has their place in the body of the community, and when individuals are in pain, they are signaling to that body that something is wrong. They are calling for restorative action of some kind. The more bodies signaling this, the more acute the pain, the more pressing the need for change, the louder the call for a creative response.

But the more the parts of the community are drugged…anaesthetized…against the pain that would rightly be theirs if they stood—if they could stand, if they were allowed to stand—healthy and firm in their own interaction with their world, if they are invalided out, as it were, of the battle to make life better, more human for all, then the Body Politic will stagger on, drowsy, unthinking, unfeeling, unconscious, from useless activity to hopeless end. Like a lumbering, brainless golem, not knowing itself, its world, or what it does in and to that world.

So Megalopolis. So the people I now found myself among.

I learned much from my time on the Ruined Surface. Mostly I learned that a people barely surviving have no time for Love. I learned that Love is not enough in dealing with people who think that if they are to survive, it is either them or you.

I learned that they, these people so corrupted and worn by the harshness of their life, were more to be pitied than to be blamed. But I learned—oh, important lesson!—that compassion should never mean weakness, lest it fail in its true mission, which is a human mission, and so never fruitful outside of the many contradictions of the human race. And, feeling the edges of this compassion, as it were, with the tips of my fingers, at first I, from habit and ignorance both, sought to pull the whole fabric nearer to me, to drape myself in it, to protect myself, and those others, from my own hot anger and my own cold fear.

Until I learned a lesson past this: which is that sometimes the only way to show Love is to drop the fabric and let anger and fear show, in all their naked Power. I learned that on the Ruined Surface of Megalopolis.

I had little doubt of being able to defend myself against aggression in this foul-looking, foul-smelling place. Though I was a young woman raised in the safety of Arcadia, I was also the Lizard Princess, who had crossed the Dead Wood…and who, long before that, had watched her mother murdered before her own eyes. My mother’s murderer had been my teacher these long years, his very curse giving me a reptile’s strength and a reptile’s cunning. Was it not those gifts that enabled me to survive this far?

It was Will’s teachings, also, that began to teach me a queen’s cunning. When you learn a game like chess, and play it every week with a tutor bent on teaching you the meaning of every move, not through words (for words can confuse, and words can lie), but through action, which, if rightly observed can never tell anything but hard truths about the actor…then you learn.

So I learned the truth about Will, who had murdered my mother. I learned he led me on to make mistakes in my own moves so that I would recognize, in burning shame, my own faults—those faults that lead to errors of judgment, and from there, to fatal errors of action.

I learned that vanity could be turned easily to account by a canny opponent. I learned that pride always goes before fall. I learned that there are extremities where planning ahead is of no avail, where you have to grit your teeth and make painful, careful decision after painful, careful decision with no promise of salvation, hoping against hope to crawl your way, inch by inch, out of a likely fatal hole. I learned how there are times where only planning would save you, far-seeing and cunningly hidden by an endless patience, where you would have to swallow defeat after defeat, keeping always that goal of a final victory in sight.

I learned all this. It took years, but I learned it. And I learned, slowly enough, that it was by this teaching that Will the Murderer hoped to make atonement for his mistakes, his ignorance, and his fatal actions.

There was one last lesson I had not yet learned, when, out of Love, he laid his curse upon me. I had not yet learned the lesson that turned me into the Lizard Princess and sent me on my way. I had not yet learned that misplaced mercy can destroy everything that’s been painfully won by cunning and strength…and Love. Yes. I had yet to learn the difference between the prizes won by Love, and the prizes won by Power, and the necessity of striving past these for the ends won by a marriage of both. And it was this lesson Will had sought to teach me.

It was that last lesson I was learning now, there on the outskirts of the Ruined Surface of the Great Empire that is Megalopolis. But before I learned it, I needed to learn that in a quest for power, there will be no mercy shown us from the other side. As long as I had scorn, and no pity, for that side, I had great confidence in my own strength. But my weakness, as Will knew, was that I loved easily and well, and that I thought I could spend that Love on those who didn’t feel the same.

But I was learning those lesson. Living in that filthy, degraded slum in the far reaches of the Ruined Surface, beside the foulness of the Marsh, I needed those lessons now.

It was strange to me then that the Megalopolitans I met never seemed to notice my lizard legs and feet and tail. One foul night by the Marsh, I was attacked by a man who, judging from his eccentric gait and jerky movements, must have been on one of the many drugs available in that part of the world. He grabbed me as I made my way back from an errand done in exchange for a small pallet for me and Leef. He tried to put his forearm around my neck and pull me down, as several of the dull denizens of that street looked on, uncaring.

By this time, though, I had learned the use of my reptile’s tail and, without a thought, neatly looped it around his throat, pulling him backward until he hit the pavement and was knocked unconscious—all in a flash, without even disturbing Leef, who had lain curled up in the pouch slung across my chest. But who now crawled out and stared.

“What will you do now?” he whispered. For he didn’t know, he couldn’t predict, the last few weeks living hand to mouth had changed me so.

I considered this. I considered the body of my attacker and how to deal with him now. There was no hope of help from any kind of police force. The police of Megalopolis had long ago become nothing more than a private security system for the rich.

But I questioned the wisdom of just leaving him there. If he attacked me, there would have been others he had preyed on as well.

While I pondered this, a small crowd of women gathered around us. They must have been attracted by the groans of the man as he struggled back to consciousness. There were five or six of them, and one whose name I even knew, who had exchanged greetings and small favors with me before. She lived in the cellar of my boarding house (although that is too grand a name for the wreck of a house which we all shared). I met her regularly at the never-emptied trashcans in the back. She, like me, made attempts at keeping our mutual home clean and ensuring no useable object escaped detection and salvage.

Her name was Deb and she was a little thing, but strong, as she showed now in the ferocity with which she kicked the groaning man in the ribs.

“Gently now, Deb,” I said without thinking as I reached out and pulled her back.

“Why?” she asked as a sudden look of fear darkened her face. “Will he hurt me?”

I looked at her as she shrank back against my shoulder, clearly less afraid of me than of the broken man on the ground.

“Has he hurt you before?” I asked as more people, mostly women, but children, also, and one toothless, limping old man, emerged from a gathering mist, gazing openmouthed at me as if waiting for some miracle to occur. They looked down at the groaning man, and their expressions were unmistakable: simple hatred. The loathing of the preyed-upon for their tormentor. And when they looked up at me: simple hope.

A small child, a girl not more than ten years old, with hair even more carroty red than my own, appeared at my knees, grabbing hold of my shirt, as if for protection.

“He hurt me,” she said softly. No one said another word.

It was settled in my mind, then, in that instant.

“Go get a pillow,” I said to her. When she looked back at me, eyes wide, without answering, I said, “Do you know what that is?” She nodded. “Don’t be scared, then. I won’t let him hurt anyone. But get me a pillow, as quick as you can.”

At that, she smiled, a dim smile like a half-moon shining behind a fog, and was gone as quickly as she’d come.

A moment later, there she was by my side, holding a vile looking piece of fabric and flattened fluff that must have once been a pillow someone would have wanted on their bed, but which now—well, it would serve the purpose I had for it.

The man groaned again. I knew I had to act quickly. Taking the square from the child, I laid it on his face and, putting one lizard clawed foot atop, pressed down with all my weight.

As I did, I looked swiftly around the gathered crowd to see if there was any protest, any objection showing on any face. But there was nothing. There was sternness in one face, grim satisfaction in two or three, intent attention in another. But no regret. No protest. No plea for mercy. No horror.

The body under my foot shuddered. I pressed harder until it struggled briefly and was finally still. Then I peeled the pillow off the man’s face and looked at him; for all that he had meant violence toward me and toward these others, still, he was a man. But there had been no help for it. No good paths, all the choices were bad.

The women, behind me, still silent, began dragging the body away to some unknown dark burial, rifling his pockets for what money he had on him that would do them some good now that it could do him no good any longer. I walked away, heavyhearted at doing wrong, yet still accepting the wrong as the best choice available to me.

This was a moment I remembered often later, on dark days, the kind of dark days that inevitably come to every queen. The decision I made that night was one that laid the foundation for my future life, and the future of those I had in my care.

But I was heavyhearted as any real queen should be at decisions so taken. And my steps were slow. So slow that at first I didn’t notice an odd fact: the claws of my lizard feet had shortened and tightened, and my tail curled and slashed now, less like that of a lizard, and more like that of a cat.

It was indeed days before I completely took in this strange change in my build. But right away I did see a change in my status in the neighborhood. The women and children now acted as if I had been their friend for years. The men, at least all those past boyhood, avoided me, without malice it must be said, but still with an unmistakable, though elaborately masked, fear. Unmistakable, too, was how the women rejoiced to see this fear, as if they now had a champion they could finally claim as their own.

At first I found this a burden almost too much to bear, but as time went on it became more and more endurable, even cause for a quiet satisfaction, until, inevitably, it turned into a part of myself, and I was able to go on.

The Marsh hadn’t always been this way, dying, poisonous, home to a degraded tribe. My own dear Devindra had told me many stories of the place when I was a child, for the Marsh was from where she and her folk had originally sprung. “From the days, Sophy, when it was a vale—hence my name, you see.” It had been a vale, a valley—“the biggest, widest meadow you can imagine, Sophy, so my mother told me, though she had never seen it in her day either, no, not her mother or her grandmother either.” Those were the early days of Megalopolis’s exploration underground. The mild earthquakes this caused widened the rift already made by the winter runoff from the Donatees, which now filled the valley with a marsh.

“And so my ancestresses,” Devindra continued, spinning a bedtime story I loved to hear, “who were resourceful by nature and by necessity, turned to fishing for their livelihood. With that, and kitchen gardens, my people supported themselves—not grandly, of course, but in a sturdy, independent, careful sort of way.”

That is, until the inevitable happened, and Megalopolis, bloated, outgrew its boundaries, spreading in all directions over whatever peaceful communities would put up the least fight.

“Gradually, Sophy, the industries they built fouled the Marsh, and their new methods of fishing left nothing behind, and the air sickened, and the water was poisoned, and the men of my grandfather’s generation left to find work, leaving the women behind. And how were the women to survive, except by servicing, in whatever way was required, the Megalopolitan laboratories and schools? For those sprang up on the ruined land, both because it was cheap to build there, and because it offered a unique opportunity to study what should not, in the future, be done to a living community.”

Devindra’s much-loved mother, Tilly, was a washerwoman. And to be a ‘washerwoman’ in the Marsh, as Devindra explained when she judged me old enough to understand, meant to take care of the needs of the technicians and the scientists in the nearby facilities, in whatever way they demanded…and could pay for.

I didn’t at first understand. I didn’t understand the concept of prostitution. How could I, without careful thought and study? I had no experience of such a thing. There was no such thing…there is no such thing…in Arcadia. Why would there be? There is enough in Arcadia for everyone to have a decent, if not luxurious, quality of life, and those who want luxuries can usually find them in a less degrading and painful way. Arcadians hate, above all else, to be treated as objects, and so it would be unheard of for anyone to choose being an object as a way to make a living. The closest I could come to the idea was the example of a handful of women and men who had married much richer people than they were, apparently without much affection. But these unfortunates, and their spouses, were greatly pitied by the rest of us as being incapable (some people are) of one of life’s greatest joys: a marriage of lovers. We aspired to the Ideal, but of course it wasn’t always possible for one reason or another, and so there were many variants on the attempt. But not prostitution, as Devindra tried to explain it to me. No, there was nothing like that.

It was the women of the Marsh, Devindra among them, and their children who made up the bulk of the refugees from Megalopolis the night that Lily fled with them over the Ceres Mountains.

“We had been uneasy for days, myself and my neighbors, we could feel some kind of shift in the atmosphere,” Devindra said. “What was it? At first, each of us thought the dread and the deep desire to get away were strictly personal, a physical manifestation of some psychic unease. But then, as the unease among us grew, we talked about it, shared our experience, and found our neighbors felt the same, as ourselves.

“Our animals were restless, too. And then, mind, we had the reputation, the women of the Marsh, of being mildly psychic. In fact, I once wrote a research paper on the subject, tying psychic powers to early trauma, the suffering working to develop a faculty that all humans possess, but in normal circumstances seldom need.

“In each one of us there was a growing panic, a panic that paralleled a tightening and groaning of the earth under the tortures she had received—tortures that demanded catastrophic release. Like animals fleeing some disaster, a fire or an earthquake or a flood, we fled what turned out to be all three. That was how we came to our new home in Arcadia.”

Their old home became a flooded, poisoned, fetid lake that receded into a poisoned fetid bog. It took years for the sea to help the Marsh reassert itself, even if feebly. It was in this version of the Marsh where I now lived. Where I now found one of my greatest loves. For it was in the Marsh that Susan lived, experimenting with new strains of rice that she had bred herself, with the hope that they would be easily grown, harvested, and shared. Susan, who lived and coaxed the Marsh itself back into life.