The Feast that night was a strange one, my mother said. “Everyone felt it.” It was not lighthearted, the way the Feasts before had been, even though the foods were as delicious, the drinks as cool and sweet, the lovers as happy, the children as healthy, the neighbors wishing each other as well as much as ever. But there was something that weighed on them all. Bright colored cloths covered the mountain meadows, but no one sat on them. Everyone moved, milling back and forth, restless. The exclamations over the food were quieter than usual, and even the group of teenagers who drank too much of Amaurote’s elderflower wine dropped into sullen silence.
The sky’s blue deepened. All of Cockaigne was there, in those days almost seven thousand people, a much smaller population than in our towns now. It must have been strange to see that many of us suddenly go still, all at once, on a mountaintop at twilight.
All turned to look south, down over the rugged valleys below, on to the edges of Megalopolis and to the Klamathas beyond, the imperial mountains that rose up out of the sea and the marshes that formed its far boundary. No one could have said what it was they thought to see. And except for the whistling little mountain breeze, there was no sound.
“Look!” somebody shouted. Lily saw it was Colin, his shock of white hair standing straight, jumping and pointing, his small frame shaking with surprise.
A light exploded over the Klamathas, and, a moment later, a BOOM shook the Ceres, so that the village folk covered their ears with their hands. The light soared upward, straight up, throwing sparks back down behind. Straight up it went and kept going, leaving a thin silver line like a tear in the sky.
Then there was another sound, behind them. This was the sound of a car, coming on very fast, and this sound was so unfamiliar that at first most of the crowd couldn’t tell what it was. Cars were only used, in the Arcadia of that time, for the direst emergencies. Otherwise people used silver collapsible skates, like the ones Lily had in her bag, or skateboards, or rode horses, or bicycles, or, as tonight for the Feast, open carriages powered by the sun. But this was a car, and it arrived honking, and when it stopped, everyone could see, from the crest on its side, that it came from their neighbor Eopolis to the northeast. A woman jumped out of the driver’s seat, and many recognized her immediately as a sister of one of the magistrates of Cockaigne.
Mae, Lily’s mother, as the lead magistrate of the town, hurried to greet her, and listened intently to her rapid talk as several of the other magistrates gathered there as well. The husbands and wives of the magistrates stood in their own group and conferred, for in an emergency, they had their own duties.
As did the daughter of a magistrate. Lily, well trained in these, began immediately to round up the smaller children, putting them into one of the open carriages, and making sure it was safely on its way before turning to the older ones. The magistrates themselves had already left, in the swiftest way each could.
Alan, lingering only long enough to make sure Lily was all right, said, “Stay with Maud,” and then was gone. But when Lily went to help Maud into the final carriage, her step-great-grandmother pulled her back into the trees and put one finger to her lips. “Wait,” Maud mouthed. And Lily did. Rex, waiting for her in the last carriage, sniffed the air. As the carriage rolled away down the meadow lane, he gave a graceful leap, so silent that he was unnoticed, and loped after them into the wood.
Soon the three were all alone. Dusk was there now, and the sky would soon turn from dark blue to black.
Stars wheeled in the sky.
Maud slowly led Lily and Rex back to the center of the meadow. She stood there and looked into the southern sky. Lily followed her look. There was just the faintest trail now of the blasting light that had shot straight up toward the helpless stars.
“What was it?” Lily whispered, as if she was afraid that it could overhear.
“It was the sign that they have ruined their World, ruined it utterly and completely,” Maud said in a weary voice that Lily had never heard her use. “And with their World, they have ruined ours.” She took Lily’s hand and squeezed it hard. “It was a rocket, Lily,” Maud said. “A rocket to the moon.”
“To the moon?” Lily said. “But why? Why would anyone want to go to the moon?” To an Arcadian like Lily, that was crazy. (At least, it was then. Alas, that is not true in our Arcadia now.) To go to the moon? That was her thought. A dead gray rock? With the beauties of the Earth everywhere around? Who would do such a thing? What poor defeated people could even conceive of such an incredible waste of time, men and women, and strength?
“They wouldn’t go unless they had nowhere left,” Maud said softly.
“Nowhere left,” Lily repeated.
“Nowhere left unspoiled, nowhere left with water to drink and air to breathe and wholesome food to eat, nowhere…”
“But…but we have these things,” Lily interrupted her. “And we….” Lily stopped. So she understood. Maud meant that Megalopolis would come now, to take the Good Life from Arcadia. Once the Empire had the Good Life themselves, and look what they had done to it! They would do that, again, here, in Arcadia. They would strip Arcadia until there was nothing left.
And then they would go to the moon—those of them who could.
Maud didn’t answer. She spun about as if she waited for something, something that she expected to come on all sides.
First there was an upward burst of light to the east, over the Calandals, and the same loud BOOM. And a BOOM, more distant now, but still distinct to the west. And then, like a huge gold flower, a light bloomed and the BOOM sounded almost as the same time—and this was over the Donatees.
“As Death told me,” Maud said. “She’s been there with them. They’re using the Donatees as a base. At least, where they can reach.”
“The Donatees!” Lily caught her breath in horror. To understand this, you have to understand that the Donatees were sacred to the Arcadians then—holy, almost, untouchable. We have lost that feeling of awe in Arcadia, much to our diminishment. But we had it then.
Something tugged at Lily. A memory. A bad one. She frowned.
“I wanted you to see that,” Maud said. “Now we will go back down.” And she went over to where her bag and Lily’s sat under a tree, and pulled her own skates from her bag. Lily did the same.
In spite of herself, Lily let a surge of joy pass through her. “Are we going to skate all the way down, Maud? All the way down the mountains into Cockaigne?”
And Maud tossed her head. In the light of a saucer-sized rising full moon, she looked young, as young as she had been when she had saved Arcadia once before.
“Why not?” she said. And the two, woman and girl, and the dog running along with them, turned down the mountains, skating fast and free all the way down. Even if it were only for that, Lily never would have forgotten that night. Even if it hadn’t been the night when everything changed.