When my mother woke from her faint, she was in great pain, and it was pain that never left her for the rest of her physical life. “Like rolling in a barrel of knives,” is how Devindra puts it, and Devindra was Lily’s doctor, so she had good reason to know. No one else knew anything about that constant pain, though I think there were some who suspected. But Lily had already, by this time, begun to be silent, about this as about so many things.
One of those subjects she was silent about was me.
Lily and Conor had conceived me that first night together, the night Lily went with my grandmother up into the tower to see the difference between the False Moon and the Moon Itself. Is it really impossible that I remember it? Well. There are so many things that I remember, that I know, that are impossible, and yet I do remember them, I do know them. I try my best to follow Lily’s example of silence here. I, Sophia, now so much older now than my mother ever was—I know that she understood more in her silence than I ever have in my restless, constant search for what I imagine to be the heart of things. But one thing I do know, that she taught me, even (impossible as it is) when I was sheltered by her own body at the very start of my story, is that you can never tell anyone anything that they have not first discovered for themselves.
There is, for example, so much that I could tell Devindra, who is so wise, and older than me. But, scientist that she is, she would not, could not believe me yet. Her learning hasn’t caught up with what I would say. And her learned disbelief would only postpone, maybe even fatally, her own discovery of all those things she now takes to be impossibility. So, patience, Sophy, I tell myself. The truths that take the greatest hold are the ones that people quarry for themselves. Let them dig! Let them discover! And meanwhile, I’ll pray to the One that their discoveries not come too late.
I listen to Devindra more, much more, than I speak of what I know. And this is good for both of us. It has, in the end, made a confidence between us that I treasure. As a queen, I would be hard pressed to do without it.
But I say here that I remember Lily and Conor gravely facing each other, tracing light patterns on each other’s skin (the one so golden brown, the other so pale pink and white, the two melding and making me what I am), and then coming together, in more than the way that young lovers have, as if something inside of both told them this twining would lead…to what? To some mysterious and powerful end. To me. To Sophia.
Lily was sure of that. She told me later, even before I was old enough to understand.
I couldn’t possibly remember this, Devindra would say. And no one could have told me. My father tried, once, but in the end was defeated by his own embarrassment, as I think was quite right.
I don’t know why I’ve never been embarrassed by these things. Maybe it has to do with my believing that if I can’t face my world, and what made my world this way, then I can’t change it. And that is my job, the one I’m sure I’ll fail at, but nevertheless keep trying to do.
But the question isn’t whether or not I’m embarrassed by thoughts of my parents and their physical love, but really how I know about it at all. And how do I know that the Angel entered Lily, and remained as a companion to me—I don’t dare say as a teacher, because although she had much to teach me, I’m ashamed of what an indifferent student I proved to be (no matter how willing and hardworking!). But we’ve had many talks, Star and I, many, many times since. So it may be that I remember what she herself has conveyed, in that wordless way of light that she has, and that I love.
Of course, I don’t talk much, if at all, about what Star tells me. Instead I let my dear Devindra instruct me in her own way. She was born to instruct, my favorite teacher! And I’ve learned many things, hearing her stories in her Tower by the Pond.
It was there I learned first about Rowena Pomfret, the woman—the girl—my father never loved. The girl he married. “She was very beautiful,” Devindra told me over a cup of her famous ginger tea, as she watched me carefully with those hawk eyes of hers to make sure none of this hurt (she is always so careful, Devindra, and indeed, I can never make her see that she doesn’t have to be, not with me). “She was famous in Megalopolis for how beautiful she was. One of those girls whose likeness is everywhere, and you think, when you’re a young girl the way I was, that it’s because she is so much more beautiful than you or me.”
But of course that wasn’t why. The real reason was that the Pomfrets were ‘fabulously wealthy’ (in the language of the Megalopolitan tabloids), and gave to charity with a widely publicized largesse. They had originally made their money by diverting the rivers that ran off the Donatees and selling the water to the poorer areas of the great city. “That was how the marshes were made,” Devindra told me. “They took the water away and then they sold it back.” And then they gave to charities that were the most likely to add to their luster.
Rowena was always the Belle of the Charity Ball. Small and fragile, with hair like ironed platinum, and pale blue eyes, she was highly admired. And rich. She was very rich. The rich tend to be admired, I’ve noted in my travels. Inevitable, maybe, but not on the whole a very good thing. For anyone. Not, certainly, for Rowena.
When I knew her, years later, she was, as she must have been then, vain, trivial, and fearfully strong-willed. You could still see both the beauty and the money of her youth, though the first had become petulant rather than wise, and the second borderline vulgar. She was not a happy woman.
She was not destined to make others happy, either. Which I think must be one of the most awful fates in this world.
She was, however, destined from childhood to marry my father. Destined from childhood by both families, and it was a destiny heartily endorsed by the mass media of the day. My father would be allowed his dalliances along the way (how vulgar that is, too), even encouraged to have them for the tension they would add to the eventual story of triumphant nuptials for the two Great Fortunes of Megalopolis. But the end of that story was never in doubt. For anyone, that is, but my mother.
“She was always in pain, from that day forward,” Devindra told me flatly. “Because all she wanted was to love your father and have your father love her back. Oh, she wanted to have you, she wanted to have a happy family. That was what your mother wanted, Sophy. She wanted a happy everyday life. And instead she became a queen.”
If it hadn’t been for Rowena, she would never have been a queen. She would have lived, instead, in some corner of Megalopolis, content with Conor, and with me. I never would have been a queen. But as a family, we might have been happy, at least until the disaster that was inevitable for the Great Empire actually touched that happiness. We would have ignored it as long as we could. As I see so many families, so touchingly, try to do even now that Arcadia faces its own great disaster.
But none of this was meant to be. If you had seen my mother in the days of her queenship, you would have found it impossible to imagine her as the concubine, even the wife, of some spoiled but handsome rich boy. Of course, she wasn’t happy in that role. She was, as I’ve said, in constant pain, torn between what she’d hoped for and what was her duty in life. The queenly calm and serenity, I learned much later, were not in spite of that pain. They were because of it. For the cause of the pain (though I’m not sure at all how much of this Devindra actually knows) was that when the Angel entered into Lily, she brought my mother’s destiny with her. And the pain came when Lily tried to master it, or at least find a way to accept it with all her soul.
ROWENA POMFRET WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
IN ALL OF MEGALOPOLIS
But some destinies are too large for even the greatest soul to master. Or, not master, that’s not the word I want. To manage. Some destinies cause permanent suffering in the constant, fruitless attempt to bring them into harmony with an ideal of happiness. And it’s the loving, painful quarrel that results that brings its own treasures, unsuspected by the ignorant onlooker.
That I do know.
For aren’t I my mother’s daughter? I’ve had my own reason to quarrel, many times, with my own fate (and Rowena Pomfret played a role in that quarrel, too, poor woman). Although mine never had the…well, grandeur is one of the only words I can find to describe it… grandeur and melancholy…of Lily’s destiny. She had been fated to be wounded to the heart early on, earlier, even, than the beginnings of the land where she ruled as its first queen. From that wound it proved impossible to recover. But it’s from that impossibility that I owe all the warm gifts she heaped on me in my own life, all the material she gave me, that she wove, for me to get and cut and shape and tailor, into the festal garment that suits a happy country best. She was a good queen. She was a good mother. If I could only say the same about myself, how happy I would be!
But this is Lily’s story, not mine, not yet (though mine has its cautious beginning here). And Lily would have given it all up to be the simple lover of Conor Barr. If it had been allowed without giving up herself.