“What’s your family bringing to the Feast?” Lily’s friend Camilla asked when they collided, baskets on their arms, at that morning’s market in Cockaigne. I mention Camilla here because much later I came to take a special interest in her grandchildren. I like to think of the generations of Arcadia stitched together like that. I like to think that my mother knew their grandmother as a girl.
Lily showed Camilla her basket, which was filled with wild mushrooms that the Wild Mushroom Man collected in the mountains. It was for her mother and Alan’s specialty, the dish they brought every year to the Spring Festival. In those days at the festivals of Arcadia, the tradition was for the households of the village magistrates to compete in a good-humored way, to see who made the most popular dishes. Camilla’s father was a magistrate. So was Mae, one of the best, it was said, that Arcadia had ever had. I am proud to say of my own grandmother that she is still remembered. Mae had been elected chair three times already in the last few years, an unheard-of distinction, and it had also been admitted that her wild mushroom casserole was the finest dish a magistrate had ever made. This did quite a lot to enhance her prestige. Skills of that sort were highly thought of in those days. Lily was proud to be doing the marketing for her. The wild mushrooms had to be absolutely fresh for perfection’s sake, and the Wild Mushroom Seller knew that, and always saved the best for Mae.
“Look, Lily, he’s waving at you! You must have forgotten something.” Lily turned and looked through the crowd. Camilla was right. The Mushroom Man, with his dark walnut face and his queer little black hat, was waving her back. She excused herself from her friend, and made her way toward him.
As she neared his table, she saw the mushrooms laid out in front of him. The golden chanterelles, the red and blue boletes, the little chestnut nuggets, and, best of all, the honeycombed morels, all of them so scarce in the mountains now, after our last disastrous experiment with crop starts from the False Moon. In those days, though, wild mushrooms grew in abundance, though in hidden places that only the patient could find. The Mushroom Man was famous for his patience, and usually there was a crowd clamoring at his stand. But at that moment, strangely, the crowd was gone. The shoppers were elsewhere, buying up the mountain fish with the rainbow scales, and the squash flowers, and the long shoots of garlic greens for the Feast—all her neighbors and friends, all laughing, all looking forward to it. (Gone! Gone! Gone are the days of those innocent Feasts. And what have we gained by losing them?) Not one of them had heard anything wrong, Lily thought sadly. She was, as she had always dreaded she would be, all alone.
Not completely alone, though. Rex pressed against her leg to comfort her in the way that only an intelligent animal can.
The Wild Mushroom Man stared hard at her as she and Rex approached his stand. My mother always said, “He looked like a black cloud on a clear day.”
“Forgot,” he said to her, as he squinted his little black seed eyes. Lily’s nose twitched. Rex sat and waited.
“You go see your grandmother,” he said. “Quick as you can, and right away.”
“My grandmother?” Lily said. “My grandmother’s dead.” This was true. Mae’s mother had died long ago.
“Not her,” the Wild Mushroom Man said. “The grand one.” And Lily knew by the admiring look on his wrinkled walnut face that he meant Alan’s mother Maud, her step-great-grandmother by rights, not her grandmother at all. “Though I loved her more than if she had been my own,” my mother would say, and I would take comfort from it, not knowing till much later that the comfort came from knowing you could choose your family at need. “I always felt I had known her somewhere, some time before,” she would say.
“We’ll be taking her to the Feast,” Lily said cautiously, not sure she understood him right. “We always bring Maud.” Or she brings us, she thought. My guess is she smiled to herself at the idea of anyone bringing Maud the Freedom Fighter (for that was how she was known even then, in our schoolchildren’s history books) anywhere she didn’t want to go.
“No,” he said. “Go now. Someone with her wants to see you. I met Her in the woods on Her way, and She told me so.”
Lily looked at him then. For a moment, it was as if the clamor of the market fell away, and all there was standing there were her and Rex and the Wild Mushroom Man.
Rex whined.
The Wild Mushroom Man thrust out a wrinkled dark-brown hand.
“Take her these,” he said. In his palm were a bunch of shriveled black mushrooms. These were Trumpets of Death, and she repeated their other name to herself—trompettes des morts—as she tucked them away in her basket.
“Thank you,” she said. The sound from the market came back up, as if it were a normal day after all.
Arcadia in those days was very well organized for marketing. (We seem to have lost the ability to act sensibly about this now, I’m ashamed to say.) On a normal day, Lily would have finished the shopping, and then left it at a designated drop-off point to be delivered to her home. Mae and Alan paid to have things delivered daily, rather than randomly in the regular round of drop-offs. But instead, this time, she hailed one of the boys on the three-wheeled bicycles who spent much of each day ferrying people’s purchases from the market to their homes. This was a job boys often had before they turned seventeen and had to think, along with everyone else, about more serious work. And a good job it was, too, because you were out in the fresh air all day, and you knew that what you were doing meant everyone in your village (they were half villages/half towns then, not the full towns they are today) could walk and gossip and be at their ease because of you, instead of having to lug their groceries in some inconvenient, messy, and more dangerous way.
This boy’s name was Colin, and he was a frail boy for Arcadia. (Probably this was because of an illness caught in the days before Hanuman Medical College had got our epidemics under control. We used to have quite a problem with healer-resistant strains brought over the mountains, at least before the more recent discoveries.) He was even smaller than Lily, with blond hair so pale it was almost white, which stood up in a shock on his head. Of course he was in love with Lily. Every boy in Arcadia was.
“Which way are you going, Colin?” Lily said.
I imagine he looked at her just as uneasily as you would expect a teenage boy to look at a beautiful teenage girl. “Dunno,” I imagine he said. I don’t know for sure. Lily used to rush past this part of the story.
“If you’re going up Greensprings, pull me along, would you?” she said briskly. (I know she said it like that. Kim told me later you always knew when Lily didn’t want someone getting any closer. “She’d get all sniffy on ’em,” she said. “She was always like that with the lads. All except your dad, of course.”)
“Don’t mind,” he probably muttered. And I know—I can see— she pulled a pair of light silver roller skates from the bag slung across her chest and attached them to her shoes. Because that was how they did things in Arcadia in my mother’s youth.
Holding on to the back of the wheeled basket towed by his bicycle, Lily rolled along behind him as he toiled up the hill, up past the edge of the last houses huddled on the Greensprings Road, where the big Museum of Arcadian History now stands, that silly, ugly building Michaeli and Aspern Grayling wasted Royal Funds on in the days of my powerless minority. But in those days, the houses ended there at a wood, the fringes of which covered the lower reaches of the Ceres Range. The road got a little rocky here as it still does, though it levels out a bit after awhile, and Lily, Rex loping at her side, gave a little giggle as she bounced along.
The light here was different from down below. It is to this day. There are times (too few) where I pretend I want to do research at the museum, but I really just go out the back door into the woods, leaving those ridiculous bodyguards Devindra insists I have cooling their heels in the ugly lobby underneath the gigantic picture of Lord High Chancellor Michaeli at his most annoyingly grand. The light there, in those woods, is filtered and green, as if you are at the bottom of the sea. In those days there was only one house, all the way at the end of the track. This was the house of Alan’s grandmother, Maud. It was a famous house, The Tiny House in the Wood. (So famous that it was pulled down, of course, since Michaeli intended to build the museum where it stood. Until he found out, too late, that the only suitable site for a huge, impressive building was somewhat downhill.) It was from this house that Maud, Arcadia’s most venerable Fighter on behalf of the Great Freedoms, had organized the Resistance against the Enemy so many years ago. Had organized it and had won. Or so our storytellers said.
It was a ramshackle house, when all was said and done. I have heard detailed, affectionate descriptions of it many times, and wish I could have seen it for myself in the days when Maud still lived there. Even then, I’m told, it tilted this way and that. The wood was so old it had turned silver gray. The windows sagged in their sashes, and the floors creaked. But Maud always said, whenever the magistrates of the All Village Council offered to have it set to rights, that she liked it that way. You can see all that in the records. At least the ones that we have.
Colin pulled up in front of the old creaky gate, where Lily took off her skates and stowed them neatly in her bag. (She was always very neat, although never oppressively so.) He gave her Maud’s groceries, and took her own basket with a promise to deliver it to Mae. Then Colin, whistling, turned his cycle to sail downhill. In my version of the story, he would be in such a good mood after being allowed to help the beautiful Lily that he would do it with both feet on the handlebars and his hands in the air.
Lily watched him go, Rex at her side, waiting till he had disappeared with a whoop down among the homes below. Then, looking at each other, they pushed open the creaky old gate of the home of Maud Delilah, the greatest Fighter Arcadia had ever known.