…which made her the most beautiful girl in all of Arcadia. She was well-made—perfectly made, in fact; of compact height and slender build. Her hands and feet were particularly graceful: even the hand that was missing its smallest finger was so perfectly shaped, you almost thought four fingers was the proper number when you held it. Her nose was elegantly small—not like this beak of mine.
Her hair was glossy black. Not blue black, but a dark color that hinted of chestnut and teak and mahogany and ebony, like a deep forest at night. Her eyes, too, echoed those forest colors, being a dark reddish brown, but with emerald flashes emerging unexpectedly whenever she was deeply interested or involved. I’ve mentioned her nose, but her features in general were regular—so regular, in fact, that they gave the impression of being a reworking by an unknown artist of an earlier, less perfect draft. Her skin was the color of coffee and cream, half and half, blended by a skilled hand.
All the boys in Arcadia were mad for her, of course. But she would have none of them, as Wilder says. Lily knew that she was meant for Love, and that the Love she was meant for was a particular kind, for a particular person, not yet met, but somehow known. “I’ll know it when I see it…when I feel it…when I see him,” she said to herself, confident that she was right. And so she waited for it. For him.
While she waited, though, like all the other young Arcadians of her day, Lily spent her time learning her responsibilities as a citizen. She learned how to hold house, how to work with her fellows, how to add to the gracefulness and reputation of her town, how to respect the towns surrounding her. Most importantly, she learned how to keep balanced in body and mind. This balance was always the aim of Arcadian education, even in the days before Devindra Vale reorganized the university system. It has always been an ideal of Arcadian life, then as now.
All these tasks, and learning them properly, absorbed much of Lily’s young time. But in her free hours-—which were abundant, back then, in Arcadia—Lily dreamed about Love.
It was Love she dreamed of the day everything changed, for her and for Arcadia. That day brought her to Love. But Love, it seemed, was not always like her dreams.
It started the morning she could hear her parents quarrel. They had never, in her memory, quarreled before.
“Your first duty’s your family,” she could hear her mother Mae say, even though her voice was muffled, coming up from the floor of her room, through the thick dark blue carpet. “That’s always been our way.”
“Times are changing, and not for the good,” her stepfather Alan said, in a new, worried-sounding voice. Alan was usually as unruffled as he was large. Lily had never once heard anything approaching the sound of fear in his voice, in the three years he and her mother had been so happily married.
She heard it now.
Lily must have told me all this, the start of the events that made her queen. I remember it as a favorite story, clamored for at bedtime. She must have told me, and, later, after she was gone, my nurse Kim must have repeated it. I have it in my head, fresh, as if I’d been there in her attic room up the hill of Harmony Street, in Cockaigne, the house that doesn’t exist anymore, not since the Empire overran the town, making that street the scene of an ugly fight that Arcadia lost.
But I can still see it. The house must have been of the early Arcadian type, snug, comfortable, easy to maintain. Flowers growing in the gardens all around, from which came the familiar sounds of the different birds, as well as the sound of one neighbor who whistled every morning. Every morning until the Invasion.
There must have been a change in the air outside. Lily, alerted by a strange new sound, threw off the cool white linen sheets of her bed, and slid her feet into the sheepskin slippers lying there, the same type of sheets and slippers she insisted on all through her life. It was spring, always her favorite season, and the mornings were still cold—though they were clear, too, in a way that my dear nurse Kim always said “would break your heart if you didn’t know that the next spring they would be that way, too, and the next and the next.”
Only this time there wouldn’t be a next.
“They’ll leave us alone,” Lily heard her mother say dully. “They always have.”
“But they won’t leave others weaker than us alone,” Alan said, and he must have sounded tired, for Mae and Alan had been arguing about this all night, there in their big, wide bed next to the window that opened out onto a flowering cherry tree that was long gone by the time I was born. “And after them, it’s us. If we let them have this battle, it’s our turn.”
There was silence now.
Lily went to her window and threw it wide open. She hadn’t yet put another piece of oak on the fire that had smoldered all night in her room’s white porcelain stove (you see the details? She must have loved her life there on Harmony Street, to have remembered and told me so much, so many small bits of it, and we had an oak fire in a porcelain stove in our room, on cold days—I have it still). But the cold spring air was welcome. She took a deep breath in and could smell many things: the flowering trees all the way down Harmony Street where she lived, the grass on the playing field at the foot of the street, the clear water in the reservoir at the top of the hill by her house. She could feel a warm current in the midst of all the cold—the coming of spring and then summer.
But she could smell something else, as well. Her small nose twitched.
She stood there, considering. She was worried, too. She had been worried a long time. Her nose sniffed cautiously again at the beautiful mild Arcadian spring air. Yes. She was right. She had smelled it right the first time. From the east—from over the Calandals. She could smell the smells of the Calandals, the high, free, desert smell of creosote and pine. But she could smell something else, on an air current which swept through deep ravines on the Megalopolitan side, and up over the top of Mount MacIlhenny, down into Arcadia. She could smell burning. As she smelled it, she closed her eyes, running her hands down her sides, clenching the soft white flannel of her nightdress. She strained, now, not her ears, but, as it were, her inner ear. With that inner ear she could hear it. A deep, distant, unmistakable BOOM. Another boom. She could hear faint screaming, from far away, from far away over the Calandals.
She knew no one else could hear what she could. It was a moment, she told me much later, where she knew everything had been changed. She knew her old life, which she valued so much, her pleasant life with Alan and Mae and her dog, Rex, where she dreamed in her little attic bedroom of a Love she was sure would come…well. She knew that was over now.
So Lily swayed, standing there, as if she had been hit by an invisible force and was struggling to stand against it. She would have fallen, except for Rex, her dog—a black and gray beast with enormous paws and brown, shrewd eyes. (She loved to tell me, when I was a child, about Rex, and this is something, along with so much else, that I loved about her.) Rex got up now from where he had watched her, on his rug by the side of the stove, and pressed against her legs, trying his best to give her back her balance. Or at least to let her know he was there.
At this, Lily opened her eyes and looked down at him. “You can smell it, too?” she asked. The dog looked gravely back. He could smell it too. “It’s here, then,” she said nervously, kneading at her nightgown with her hands. The dog wouldn’t have answered, she told me he didn’t. After a moment, though, he went to the window and raised himself up by his big paws onto the sill. While he looked out in this way, Lily went to the stove and stoked it for a little heat, listening to hear Alan and Mae downstairs. But there was only the sound of bacon sizzling, and the faint smell of the pancakes Alan always made for special occasions. They were going to pretend, then, that everything was fine. Lily knew that if they did this, it would be out of concern for her. She knew this and she appreciated it, but in a way, it made her feel more forlorn and alone. Lily knew a lot of things that a fifteen-year-old in the beautiful, peaceful valley of Arcadia should not have had to know. And there was no help for it. Knowing those things meant she would have to act.
But she would be all alone.
Lily didn’t want to be alone. But Fate, as she told me as soon as she thought I might be able to understand, is Fate, and if you don’t walk to meet it, it catches you from behind, and who knows what will happen then?
“Maybe it won’t come to that,” she said to herself reassuringly, as bravely as she could. Lily was brave, no one knows that more than I do. And really, it’s only the truly brave who know when they are scared. So she was scared. But she was a little defiant, too. “Anyway, today I’ve got things to do. There’s the Feast. And the marketing to do.” (Everyday things, my mother always told me, is what we need to hold on to. Everyday things are what make up everything. And in my life, I have learned the wisdom of that many times.)
Heartened, she began to dress. Thinking about the marketing made her almost sure any worry was no more than a dream. The marketing for the Feast-—that was real. The Feasts of Arcadia Before the First Reign are still famous in our history; children learn about them in school. This was the Spring Festival, where all of Arcadia went into the Ceres Mountains, up to the alpine meadows, and made merry, as we used to say, before it became so much harder to do. Lily, like all Arcadians then and now, loved a good Feast. That morning, she thought she’d better hurry if she was to get her breakfast and then get out to the market, which, she could see from her window, was already drawing shoppers from all over Cockaigne.
MAUD HAD ORGANIZED THE RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ENEMY
SO MANY YEARS AGO
