It was a long way down the Ceres northern slopes to the village edge, and even though Maud and Lily traveled so fast that the sparks flew off the edges of their silver wheels, by the time they arrived at the village hall, the emergency meeting there had been in progress for some time. The representative from Eopolis had the floor. She had obviously been talking heatedly for a while. The magistrates, sitting at their usual long table, had creased faces, as if their very expressions had been thrown out of shape by the news.
“We’ve sent representatives to every village,” the woman said. “We need help. It’s never happened that we have not known what to do. But we…we feel a kind of…confusion….” Here she looked around the hall helplessly, as if she felt this confusion now (and indeed she must have, since this is what happens at pivotal times of change, such as the one we face now). “A confusion,” she went on, “such as we have never felt, never in the living memory of even the eldest of us. And we don’t know what to do.” At this she gave a sigh that was half sob, and sat down, waiting for the village’s answer.
“What confusion?” Maud said now, her voice carrying across the meeting room floor. She moved forward toward the magistrates’ bench. Such behavior would not have been allowed in just anyone, and indeed, with all the procedural court rules now put in place by the Lord High Chancellor, it could hardly happen in our own councils, but in the Arcadia of those days, the wisdom of men and women over the age of eighty was thought to be a resource for all. Anyone over this age was not just allowed, but urged, to speak, in or out of turn. In an emergency, this was a fundamental duty of the elderly.
“Grandmother,” Mae said from the magistrates’ table, for that was how Mae liked to address her mother-in-law. “You didn’t hear.”
“Tell me now, then, please,” Maud said in her patient way. Just the sound of her calm voice quieted the crowd. “It’s a good thing in a crisis to hear a thing said twice. And slowly, slowly…so we can all think it through.”
“Not too slowly, Grandmother,” Alan murmured from where he stood beside Lily in the back. Alan smiled. Even when he was worried (and Lily knew he was worried now), he was very proud of Maud. (My step-grandfather was, my mother told me, “a very nice man.”)
They were all very nice, Lily thought, looking around at the strained but basically pleasant faces of her friends. (“Because they were all my friends, Snow, all of them.”) What would happen when they were confronted by someone who wasn’t so nice?
The woman from Eopolis stood again, and this time she must have made her statement much more simply and clearly—as Maud said, having to say it twice was not a bad thing. And when she spoke this second time, the frozen look of shock began to melt from the faces of the people around her, replaced by different expressions: indignation, anxiety, furious thought. And anger, of course.
“Megalopolis has sent a delegation to Arcadia,” the woman said. “They came over the Calandals at night. I don’t know how. It’s impossible that they could have bribed some of our people, and none of them have ever understood the mountains, and how would they have started now?
“They say they’ve come to ask for help. They say they’ve got plagues and famines and wars…”
“And they say this is new?” Alan murmured to himself. Lily saw him close his eyes as if he was suddenly tired.
“They say,” she went on, “that they can buy what supplies we’re willing to sell them, whatever kind. That they need skilled labor from our villages to replace those who have died—most especially teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers…”
“Poor bastards probably killed themselves,” another man murmured to Alan. This was Colin’s father, with hair as white blond and stubborn as his son’s. Alan nodded grimly.
“They say they ‘come in peace,’” the woman said, and she faltered. Arcadians, even then, were sensitive to language, and therefore to its abuses, and it was a longstanding joke in Arcadia that Megalopolitans so often meant the exact opposite of what their official organizations said.
Maud watched her throughout. Many eyes were on the my step-great-great-grandmother standing straight and tall in the middle of the hall. “And do they?” she said softly.
The Eopolitan woman’s doubts were plain to see. “They say that because there are so few of them in the delegation, and because they don’t know us, they needed to take precautions. They say that though they ‘come in peace,’ they have, ‘for protection,’ taken control of one of the Dawkins families who live on the MacIlhenny ridge, at the topmost edge of the Calandals.” She paused. “They don’t call them ‘hostages.’ They call them ‘guests.’”
An angry murmur went through the crowd. Now Lily understood the baffled rage on the faces around her.
I have to tell you again about how the Arcadians of my mother’s early life felt about their fellow citizens. Each one was as valuable to any villager as herself or her own family. Every death was mourned as sincerely as if it had happened in the household that grieved. “Joy shared,” went the Arcadian proverb, “is Joy increased. But Sorrow shared is Sorrow ceased.” The Arcadians lived by this motto in those early days. We still have the proverb. But I don’t think many would dispute with me that we’ve left the meaning of it somewhere behind us.
“Those Dawkinses have two small children still at home,” another woman said.
“They’ve said they’re caring for them well,” the woman from Eopolis said. Her mouth twisted. “And that ‘no harm will come to them’ as long as the delegation gets back to Megalopolis safe, over the Pass.”
There was a moment’s silence. Everyone looked at Maud.
“And do you believe them?” she asked in her clear way.
“No,” the woman said. “No, none of us believe them.” She hung her head. “But what choice do we have but to pretend that we do?”
Lily knew what she meant, and why the Eopolitans had asked for help. The Arcadians of that generation were, we all know, among the most rational of people. They were used to solving their problems by rational means: by discussion, by consensus, by agreement, then by action.
But you can only rationally solve a problem that has a solution. This was a problem without one—at least, without one for which Arcadia was prepared. Arcadia had always counted on its very insignificance, and the protection of its mountains, for its security. Megalopolis was stronger, bigger, more ruthless in every way. Once the Empire turned its eye Arcadia’s way, what then?
And that the Megalopolitans had taken hostages was the first sign that they meant to terrorize to get what they wanted. Megalopolis had long since given up any pretense to get it any other way. Colin’s father had been right about how the Empire treated its own people. How then, when it had tormented and killed all its own, would it behave to outsiders?
But where could the Arcadians go? Nowhere. And now what could they do? How would the rational method work if there were no known rational answer?
(“What choice did they have, Snow?” my mother said when she told me this story. I was too young to understand. I was too young to understand what choice Maud gave them. But I begin to understand it now.)
“What choice do we have?” the woman from Eopolis cried again. And everyone looked at Maud.
She shook her head. I imagine she was in despair at how her words would be taken. As queen, I’ve felt that despair myself. I know it well.
“There’s only one real road,” Maud said then. “But I doubt you’ll take it. We’ve all put off what we should have done a long time ago, and now what we have to do to make it up is too hard.”
Everyone looked at her, shifting uncomfortably. How many times have I stood in front of a group of Arcadians, all looking at me the very same way!
“Tell us, Grandmother,” Alan said. Lily saw him move to hold Mae’s hand. She always remembered this, she told me. It was one of the last times she saw them together, she said.
At Alan’s words, a murmur of agreement went around the room.
Maud looked at them all, and sighed. Resting on Alan’s arm, she walked to the center of the room.
Lily looked apprehensively at Rex. His tail gave a single thump.
“What you have to do,” Maud said, “is go on exactly the way you are. Don’t stop for anybody or anything. That’s all.”
At this, everybody looked at their neighbor. They wondered if Maud’s mind was finally wandering. Or was she making some kind of sophisticated joke?
“If that’s meant to be funny, it’s not the right time for it, Maud,” one of the men said flatly.
Maud sighed again. “No,” she said. “I’m quite serious. Let me say it again: no matter what happens, don’t change the way you are. Keep going the way you have.”
“And Megalopolis?” someone said in that sarcastic way you talk when you don’t understand what’s going on around you. The speaker must have been very distressed to be so rude, and in public, too, Lily thought.
“Ignore it,” Maud suggested.
“Oh yeah,” hooted one of the boys. “Ignore it when they burn our houses.”
“Ignore it,” Maud said.
“Ignore it when they steal our lands?” a woman laughed shrilly.
“Ignore it,” Maud agreed.
“Ignore it when they kill our children,” another woman said. She didn’t laugh.
Maud looked at her sadly. “Ignore it,” she said again, nodding her head. “Ignore it and have more children.”
Now there was real silence in the hall.
After a moment, Alan said, in his reasonable voice, “Mother, we can’t do that.”
Maud looked at him. She looked around again at all her neighbors. “No,” she said finally, and she gave the tiniest sigh this time, like an empty teakettle set back on the stove. “No,” she agreed. “I didn’t think you could.” And shaking her head, she took her hand off his arm and hobbled (“Hobbled!” my mother said. “Maud who had never walked anywhere but straight and tall!”) toward the double doors at the end of the room. The crowd parted as she went, still silent.
“But what if what they say is true?” a woman cried. “What if Megalopolis comes in peace? What if we can live together, side by side? What if they can just let us be?”
Maud looked at her as if she thought the woman a fool, but politeness kept her from saying so. “They don’t,” she said briefly. “They don’t and we can’t and they won’t.” She looked around her wearily. And then she said, with all the patience in the world, what she knew to be true. “They can’t let us be, for we have proved them wrong. We have proved that the purpose of life can be happiness. We have proved that happiness comes from kindness, from moderation, from compassion…and, most of all, from leaving well enough alone! They can’t let us be because we have proved that might doesn’t make right. They’re afraid to let themselves know these things. So, in their logic, we have to fail. To disappear. To die.” She sighed again, looking around the room, and she tried one last time. “What I said already is the only way.”
Lily heard the shouting turn then. It sounded ugly and mean, and she wasn’t used to this. (She told me she had never before that night heard the sound of ugliness or meanness in Arcadia. Alas, if only we could say that today!)
Rex cowered against her legs. “We should have fought them!” Colin’s father called out with an angry growl. “We’ve talked about it for years, some of us, trying to get the rest of you to see reason. We should have gone over the hills and killed them before they killed us!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” another woman called back hotly. “Kill them? Kill the millions of starving rabble on the other side of the mountains? And us only a few, and most of those old and children? Talk sense, why don’t you? Where would Arcadia be then?”
“Where will we be if they kill us first?” said another voice. “Which they will once they get the scent of it, the bastards. He’s right. We should have gone after them a long time ago.”
“Gone after them? With what? Your weeding fork and a couple of pairs of skates? Be serious!”
“Be serious yourself! Where do you think you’ll be, not defending yourselves and your home, eh? The best defense is a good offense!”
“And where WILL we be?” another voice called out, without waiting, any more than the others had done, for her turn. “Mourning all of our dead, is where. Funerals instead of Feasts!”
“And what Feasts will there be when Megalopolis turns us into its own garbage heap, I ask you?” another voice cried, out of its turn.
One voice shouted out after another. The magistrates called for quiet, but it was no use. They didn’t know it, our unhappy ancestors, but that was the last time Arcadia was peaceful and quiet. We’ve lost the knack of it now, over these last bitter years, and it started that night. The hall erupted with neighbor shouting at neighbor. It’s still that way.
That night, the woman from Eopolis looked helplessly on. “It was like this at home, too,” she said, though no one seemed to hear. “It’s why I came for help.” But the hall raged on.
Lily hugged Rex. Even Alan shouted now, at one of his neighbors, the one Lily had seen that morning carrying a net bag of fruit to a sick friend. And the neighbor shouted back. Feeling more than a little sick herself, Lily went to Maud and tugged unhappily at her plush scarf.
“Make them stop!” Lily said. “Maud, can’t you make them stop?”
“What?” Maud said, as if Lily had roused her from some dream. “No, Lily, I can’t make them stop. No one can. This was Arcadia’s fate, you know. To fall down at the last fence.”
“What do you mean?” Lily said. The tumult around them increased. Maud, as if still far away, as if she were not in the hall at all, turned and began to walk quickly away. Lily and Rex tried to follow, but there was a confusion of noise outside, a shout from the dark, an explosion, and a whirring noise, and they were caught up in the suddenly alarmed crowd, plunging and hysterical. “Maud!” Lily shouted. But it was no use.
There was screaming from inside the hall and out now, and voices booming outside, with more explosions suddenly everywhere around. The double doors were flung open, and there was a series of sickening cracks. Lily searched and searched the crowd as it stampeded toward the doors, then, uncannily, the crowd parted, and she saw Maud, standing at the doors—it was she who had thrown them aside. And then she saw Death holding Maud by the arm, whispering in her ear. Maud turned, and, before the crowd surged again, mouthed a good-bye to Lily, who strained to catch one last sight of her. As Lily and Rex struggled forward, they saw Death take Maud by the arm and lead her away.
“Take a few hostages,” a good-humored voice said over the screams of the crowd, and Lily saw a group of strangers enter the room, all looking around it with interest and no sign of fear. They were taller than any Arcadians Lily knew, and the three men and one woman were so handsome that it took her breath away.
Especially the youngest among them: a boy? a man? Not much older than Lily, certainly, but already a lord of the universe. Tall, golden, blue-eyed, loose limbed…she had a confused impression of some animal in the forest, and of lying on a bed of grass in the mountains in the spring. It was like seeing her other half, even though until then she had thought she was whole.
At that moment, though, Lily knew she wasn’t. Or if she had been once, she never would be again.
And as the boy looked back at her, startled, she saw it was the same with him. She didn’t know how, but she knew it was so.