As Maud and Lily and Rex walked up the path behind Maud’s house, they could see all of Arcadia laid out in front of them.
It was a clear spring day. A slight breeze pushed everything a little this way and that, and reminded you that this was spring, and everything was still unsettled—that a storm could sweep through in a flutter of an eyelid, black and mean.
But now the air was mild and questioning, as if it were saying, “This is how we all like it, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t it stay this way forever?” Maud laughed, my mother told me, “as if she could understand the words of the breeze itself.” And the great old woman shook her head.
Maud and Lily stood there, looking at the villages blooming like flowers below them on the valley floor. We were a prosperous, hospitable, and fair people, we Arcadians. We still are. But our ancestors were small, as we are small, though we try, I often think with more than a little exasperation, to be bigger than we should. In those days, Arcadians were few in number, and determinedly peaceful; there was no argument about that last, the way there is in our day. At that time, Arcadia had laid it down as law that it would never be anything else but peaceful. This was excellent in theory, but it had this one defect (as Aspern Grayling has so truly pointed out): this made our ancestors proud, too proud, in their moral certainty. They were vulnerable. Their pride was their greatest weakness. But this pride also had this one great value: an Arcadian would never risk her own, and certainly not another’s, life without very good cause.
Alan was going to risk his life. That was what the quarrel had been about with Mae.
“Mother and Alan were arguing this morning,” Lily said, as Maud stopped to stroke an early-blooming cat’s ear blossom, cream and purple against the reddish ground. “And that is something they never do.”
Maud looked at her, black button eyes bright. She led the way as they walked on, turning downhill now, toward the top of Harmony Street. “And do you know what they were arguing about?” she said. Lily knew that Maud knew. But she answered just the same.
“They’ve tried to keep it from us at school, but we all know. Megalopolis. And even though we have the mountains between us, they are so strong.” Lily thought about the arguments she had with her own crowd. “The strong,” she said, and asked the painful question that was always on her mind, then and later as queen. “Maud. Do they always win?”
“We have to fight them!” one of the boys at her school had said—it was almost always a boy who said this. “We can’t wait until they run us over and take all of Arcadia. What would happen then?”
“But they aren’t threatening us,” a girl had said—it was almost always a girl who said this kind of thing, then as now. “They’ve sent an ambassador over the Calandals, to Eopolis, asking to buy supplies for their troops. It’s a peaceful mission. Everyone says so.” This last was said shrilly. Everyone didn’t say so. But no one argued just then.
Instead there was a great silence. Eopolis, of course, was the nearest village to Cockaigne, in the northeast. Every girl and boy among them had friends and family in Eopolis.
“It’s only a peaceful mission because they’re waiting till we’ll be easier to pick off. They’re fighting among themselves, over there on the other side, I hear. My dad says…”
“It was always a horrible place to live and now it’s worse. My mother says…”
“They’ve left us alone because we were small and not worth the trouble. But my uncle says now they’ve ruined the entire rest of the planet, they’ve got nowhere else to go…”
“Why can’t they just leave us alone?”
“Why can’t they just leave us alone?” Lily repeated, this time to Maud, as the two began descending the last steep stone staircase that Alan had built down the side of the hill. “We have such a lovely life here, minding our own business. Why can’t they?”
Maud looked at her, and then rested her hand on Lily’s shoulder as if to steady herself as she went down the shaded steps, which were still slippery and moist from a brief overnight rain. But Lily knew Maud didn’t need to do this. Even at a hundred and twenty, she was still strong enough to stand on her own. She did this to steady Lily.
Lily thought about Death coming again for Maud, and her heart skipped a beat.
“Let’s stop for a moment, shall we, Lily? Let’s stop and think of something nice. Let’s think of all the Feasts that have gone before, all the Feasts that all the villages have made in Arcadia.”
So they did. Lily shut her eyes and breathed in deep. Rex pushed up against her hand, and she could smell his warm doggy smell, and the smell of the still damp ground, and of the sun warming the spots of grass through the trees. She could smell Maud’s rose-fresh smell—and she could smell the good smells of all the Feast day dishes being made up and down Harmony Street. Familiar smells. They brought back memories of other Feasts, of playing with her friends in the pale green spring meadows of the Ceres with the late evening sky bowing golden-blue overhead. She could see down to the deep valleys on the other side of the Ceres, and, farther to the south, deep inside Megalopolis, the Klamathas, the mountains that ran parallel to them so far away. She could see her mother and Alan leaning against each other, arms around each other’s waist, laughing, as they talked to some neighbors and waited for those who had brought the desserts to set them up prettily the way they liked to on the long trestle tables settled there just for the day.
But then, as she watched this memory play, another memory began to push through it, a strange memory, of another time and place altogether. And that memory was of Arcadia, but it was not of Arcadia. As if Arcadia had been another place altogether. As if the Feasts had not always been. As if there had been a time when Arcadia was mean and nasty and heartless and cold. As if it had been part of Megalopolis, that huge and horrible city that surrounded them on all sides, that miserable place, upon which it was horrible to look, and which was now, thank the Goddess, held back by the Ceres Mountains.
As if she, Lily, had been someone else altogether. And as if Maud had too.
At this, Lily, startled, opened her eyes. Maud looked at her with a sad sympathy. “You remember, then,” Maud said quietly. “Good. I wanted to make sure. But don’t tell anyone else, Lily. Best to be silent. No one else remembers, nor should they. But for you, you need to know. You need to know that it has happened, many times before, that the strong do not always win.”
(And I. Sophia. Her daughter who was to come after her. I needed to know that, too. But I had to find out for myself, which is the only way anyone ever truly knows anything, alas.)
At that, Maud held out her hand and Lily took it, and the two continued down the steep stone steps. Rex followed behind.