“Death,” Lily said reflectively as she walked along the mountain road through the wildflowers and the berry bushes, with Rex close by her side. “Death, where does this road lead?”
Death smiled her beautiful smile, but said nothing. On the Road of the Dead, it was a warm, soft day, with a little breeze coming from the south, and the air smelling like crushed strawberries. Rex, his pelt sleek, and his nose joyfully to the ground, ran here and there, chasing some scent of his own. But he always came back to her afterwards, nudging at her hand with his velvet nose, happy beyond words that they were together again.
There wasn’t much else she could ask for, Lily thought, as the road took a small twist and headed up into a wood of red-barked trees.
There was only one thing to ask for. Only…only one thing.
But this she was frightened to ask. This new road was so strange to her still. She had yet to find her confident footing on it.
Death seemed to understand this, and, serene as ever, walked along a little ahead of Lily and Rex, her long light cloak trailing in the reddish dust.
“Oh!” Death said smiling, looking back the way they came. “Look!”
When Lily looked where Death pointed, she saw a long thread unraveling from the edge of her own violet traveling cloak. “It must have been coming undone for miles!” Lily thought, because she could see a single purple thread winding back and back and back, disappearing down the hill into the glen now well behind them.
She hesitated. I know she hesitated. But the thread was tied to something back there, out of sight. To someone.
She stopped on the road, forehead furrowed. Rex, obedient as ever, stopped too.
“Death,” she finally brought herself to say. “Death. I can’t go on just yet. Wait a moment. Please.”
Death looked at her speculatively, but said no more than “Allow me.” And with a light gesture, Death plucked the thread up between her long, elegant fingers and held it to the light. Then she put it neatly between her even white teeth and, snap! She snapped it loose, just like that.
Lily shuddered. But then…then…
“All right,” Death said vigorously. “Race you to the top of the hill!”
And Lily, feeling somehow lighter now, after Death had cut the violet thread, ran after her, Rex barking and jumping beside. That must have been the moment where she dropped the Key. Dropped it, unnoticed, from her pocket, the Rose-Gold Key, and left it there on the Road of the Dead, as she ran after Death. And as she ran, she forgot. The Key wasn’t meant for her any longer. Now it would wait for someone else.
Death won the race, of course, because Death always does, but only by a hand’s breadth, and then the three of them stopped, companions, at the top of the hill, on the other side of the wood.
The three of them sat there, looking down at the view below of the land and the sea, and a ship that waited for them at the end of the now narrow and dangerous road. It was midsummer. The day was very long, and they were able to sit there a long, long time before Death, with a sigh, stood up, dusted herself off, and, after helping Lily up, led the way down the steep cliffside path to the harbor.
A stiff wind blew as they went. She and Lily wrapped their cloaks around themselves more tightly for warmth.
How do I know this? I know this because I’ve traveled the Road of the Dead myself, and met Death, who told me this part of the tale. “They never end, these tales,” Death told me there, at the top of the path that led down to the harbor where Death’s ship was docked, ready to set sail once again. “Your mother’s story ends and yours begins. How can you tell where?”
She kissed me then, and turned me back on the path. It wasn’t time for me to sail away with her. Not yet. Not then. I still had my own tale to tell.
I was fifteen years old, and it was eight years after Will killed my mother, when my own story started.
“Kim,” I said urgently, in a low tone so that the courtiers around us wouldn’t hear. There were so many of them! And all of them having to be flattered and fed—oh, how I was sick of it that day. They would see me conferring, in my usual grave way, with Kim the Kind, who was known to be the Chief Counselor of State by Regal Decree, and some of them would write records of it, even though they had no idea what was said. Some of them would paint it as an historical scene, and some of them would write epic poetry about it. All of them would make careers from babbling thoughtlessly, without understanding what was, in truth, said. And this was the basis of the prestige of the upper classes, and the shaky foundation on which the economy of Arcadia was laid.
“Kim,” I said again desperately that fatal day, “I really don’t think I can stand this one more hour.”
Kim the Kind looked at me with a worried face—one that had become increasingly worried in the last year, the year that I had reached my fifteenth birthday, and the courtiers had begun to talk of finding me a consort of a grandeur consonant with my high estate and that of Arcadia, whose sign and signal and banner I was, and blah blah blah. There was no one left in the world fit for their queen, these courtiers said to themselves in low, solemn tones around their electric fires—wood fires being for the lower classes, and for the Queen and her immediate Counselors, by royal decree. (In fact, after my mother’s death, when I had inherited her room for my own, I loudly demanded a wood fire there, refusing any other kind—many books, poems, and musical compositions had been written about this strange freak of mine.) Arcadia’s grandeur, since the days of Lily the Silent, who brought destruction to Megalopolis and renewed the springtime promise of her homeland, was unquestioned then.
There was no one left in the Four Corners, in the days after the Great Flood, no prince, to match my supposed eminence. And this was a problem the courtiers gnawed over as they gnawed over the bones of the endless supply of provisions that came from the Royal Pantry for their feasting, as was their right. No one could actually remember when this had become their right, but so many poems, articles, histories, songs, and dramatic presentations had been written about it that there was no one left to question why.
No one, that is, except me, Sophia, daughter of Lily the Silent and Conor Barr, who was to be known, much later, by people who didn’t know any better, as Sophia the Wise.
So now I was Queen Sophia the First, like it or not, and, my somewhat too large nose twitching with suppressed disdain, I leaned over to Kim and cried out.
“They are a bunch of idiots, Aunt Kim, and I don’t think I can bear to look at them one more day. Much less rule over them.”
“Clare will be home soon, yer know, Soph, did you hear? Found a horse faster than the wind, they say, and she’s bringing its foal home for you…”
“Nice try,” I said. Kim sighed.
“No use is it, ever, trying to get you off something once you’re on it,” Kim complained—but there was, as always, a fond light in her eyes.
“No, indeed,” I agreed as I climbed down off my throne. It was miles too big for me, and uncomfortable to boot, but the Court Sculptors would not allow it to be anything less than a perfect symbol of my supposed puissance. It was only later that I had the idea of the Central Court, with the Central Hearth, and a comfortable chair beside it for a throne. And anyway, I hated to contradict them and make them feel like fools.
“Not that they ever would,” I said to Kim. “Feel like fools, I mean. I would like them so much more, if it would occur to them that they might look the tiniest bit stupid.”
About this, Kim was forced to agree. Not the least tedious part of life at the Arcadian court was the great seriousness with which everyone took themselves. This importance was like a membrane, like an impenetrable cloak. We bleakly surveyed the courtiers as they milled about the enormous, marble-paved throne room, muttering importantly to themselves.
“Well,” I said philosophically, wriggling down from the throne and adjusting my skirt with an irritable twitch. “I’ve had enough of this for today.”
“Where you going then, love?”
“The usual,” I said, and I’m sure my eyes brightened with anticipation. “I’m going to have my game of chess.”
“With Will.” Kim said. She gave a little snort, the way she had every day this last year, ever since, on my fifteenth birthday, I had announced my intention of a weekly visit to the Royal Prison in one of the two Royal Towers—the other holding the rooms of the queen herself, and her mother before her.
“With Will the Murderer,” I said thoughtfully as I kissed my dear Kim on the cheek. “Yes.”
“And he never says nothing ’bout that day?” Kim said wistfully. She hadn’t understood my reasons—no one had—but she trusted her charge. Bless her.
“Nothing,” I said cheerfully. “But then he wouldn’t have a reason to, since I say nothing to him.”
And even though no one would have believed it, it was true. For almost a year, I had visited Will the Murderer in his tower room. For all that time we played a weekly game of chess in silence. Sometimes Will won, sometimes it was my turn, and sometimes—and this was obscurely satisfying to both of us—it was a draw. But we never, in those days, exchanged a word.
Never, that is, until this very day of which we speak. Which was the real end of Lily the Silent’s story, and the beginning of the tale of Sophia, called by some ‘the Wise.’
Why am I writing all this, telling it this way? Why don’t I just leave it to Wilder, leave him his expiation, as he so grandly calls it—to sing the foundation myths of Arcadia and make up, on a daily basis, for his one great crime? Why don’t I just get on with what everyone in Arcadia, with a few notable exceptions, thinks of as my real job? Which is, of course, Being Queen.
But what is Being Queen? That’s the question I find I’ve asked myself for as long as I can remember. I’m convinced it’s the question my mother bequeathed to me, the one she never found the answer to, and so passed it down.
I haven’t found the answer. Sometimes I think I never will. For how many years do I have left? My adventures have been hard on me, and I know this old, familiar body took the brunt of my wanderings, of my curious inquiries into the nature of our world. I can’t expect miracles from it. It’s served me well enough as it is.
And what if I don’t find the answer to the question: How is it best for us to live? If I can’t discover the answer, I have to leave the question for someone else, the way my mother did, handing it down like an unlit torch from one to another, waiting for the day the light will come to it.
I think I’ve been waiting, all this winter while I pondered and wrote this small history down, for my goddaughter, for Shanti to be born. I think that’s what started this, after all the years I spent locked in my study, refusing to do my royal duties, while I spent the afternoon poring over old manuscripts, gathering old stories, arguing and laughing over meanings with Wilder. It was when Devindra came to me, so happy to give me the news about her great-granddaughter Shiva Vale—that she and her husband, Walter Todhunter, were finally, after many barren years, going to have a child.
Devindra’s great-great-grandchild. My…my goddaughter.
Of course this was more than usual cause for rejoicing. We all know Shiva and Walter have tried to have a child for many years, and there were so many reasons why they might never have succeeded. Those reasons go right to the heart of our present conundrum. Which is, I repeat, how is it best for us to live?
All through the months of waiting for Shanti, I have been writing this, the bits and pieces and scraps of what I know of my mother’s history, which means the bits and pieces and scraps of who I am. And all of it, all of it, meant for Shanti.
For you, Shanti. If I can, if I may, I’ll spend the next years telling you tale after tale, telling you bits I’ve forgotten to put in here, bits I haven’t understood enough to put in here, bits I’ve begun to understand differently since I put them down here. I’ll tell you what stories I can, in what time we have together.
But for now, there is this story, this tale of Lily the Silent, who was my mother and Arcadia’s first queen. And of course, because tales never begin or end, not really, her story leads into mine.
“Oh, Death!” Lily exclaimed from her comfortable seat on the deck of the white ship, Rex’s head resting on her knee. “You give me so many gifts!”
Death, steering the ship so that it caught the breeze in its sails, just smiled her deep smile. She looked ahead. Very far away ahead.
On Lily’s lap was a book wrapped in velvet and lace, and this had been Death’s gift to her friend as they boarded the ship. “It’s meant to pass the Time,” Death explained, and Lily, half trembling, gave her cheek another timid kiss. “You can pick it up whenever you like, and then”—at this Death sighed and smiled another type of smile, this one more subtle than the ones that had gone before—“you can put it down again.”
The day was warm, with a cool current running through it like a ribbon, and the sun was high over the sea. Death was so adept at sailing the tall, white ship that it was a pleasure to watch her, and this is what Lily and Rex did now.
After awhile, the sun dipped below the horizon; the stars came out, and a moon rose up so brightly that the sea shone under it, and you could even count the fish as they cavorted under the waves. “Look!” Lily said from where she leaned against the ship’s rails, pointing the sights out to Rex (she had gotten up to get her cloak against the chill of the evening, and now, holding it closed at her chest, she was as warm as she had been under the bright gold of the sun). “Look, the Mermaids! Oh, I’m so glad!” For under the surface the Mermaids swam serenely alongside the ship, and among them Lily could see Phoebe riding the Manatee. Phoebe saluted her and the Manatee blew her a clumsy kiss. And Lily knew they would join her at the journey’s end.
Now Lily after awhile remembered Death’s gift, which lay on the deck beside her chair, and she went back to open it and read a little before she slept. Rex went with her and watched with interest as the pages began to turn.
Lily went through the book until she found the page she was looking for. There was a picture there of a wandering hermit, solitary and old, but determined to find the love that he had lost. “Will he be so much older than I am now when he finds me, Death?” she said sadly. “Will we even know each other then?”
Death didn’t answer. But Lily was a queen, even in death, and she knew that to worry your heart over things that can’t be fixed is foolish, in life, in death. It was enough to know that Conor would set out to find her some day.
She went back to the book, and turned another page.
“Look, Rex, there. There’s Sophia, and her story. And it’s part of ours, isn’t it?” The Dog, nodding, agreed, and the two of them went on reading Sophia’s story, absorbed. Death, who never slept, kept a stern eye on the goal far ahead.
“The queen! The queen! My God, what has happened? Look at the queen!”
The courtiers of Arcadia ran to and fro like mice, squeaking in dismay.
Clare the Rider, who had only just arrived, stood with Kim the Kind, both of them arrested by what they saw. Kim clutched at Clare’s arm.
Queen Sophia the First, daughter of Lily the Silent and Conor Barr, stood at the top of the stairs to the tower where Will the Murderer was kept. She looked down at them all with an expression hard to read, a mixture of sadness and anger and relief all at once.
“She’s young, but, ah, Clare, she’s a deep one. She’ll find a way out of this new mess, you wait and see!” That was what Kim the Kind said to Clare the Rider—or so the Arcadian historians later claimed.
For Sophia the First stood there, pretending to be as regal as ever, in spite of—or was it because of?—the new pair of scaly, horny, clawtoed, green and gray legs that replaced her formerly girlish ones. And in spite of—or was it because of?—the thick diamond-patterned tail that swirled out from under her dress and coiled around the floor in front of her.
“Well, you don’t have to look at me like someone died or something,” Sophia said in her severest voice as all the court looked up at her in horror. “It’s only a murderer’s curse. I mean, honestly. Garden variety, people! I felt sorry for him, okay? So I let him win. He seemed to take that badly.”
At this her tail twitched and thumped, a proceeding she looked at with some interest, appearing to test how much control she had over this. Thumping it once, then twice, she was satisfied. “Hmm,” she murmured. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
Another gasp of horror from the courtroom’s floor recalled her to her audience and she said, “Well, who would have thought he had it in him, Will the Murderer? And me always thinking he didn’t have much imagination to speak of. But to curse me into being half a lizard—well, it’s not bad. It kind of gives me hope….” She gave another half smile, not saying what kind of hope she had. At this, Kim the Kind gave a cry and jumped forward—and not a moment too soon, because Sophia crumpled, fainting, to the floor. Kim was just in time to catch her before she hit the ground.
But then, in a flash, the fainting fit was gone, and Sophia, brushing Kim off her with the fondest of strokes to the cheek, jumped up onto her lizard feet and—at first clumsily, then with growing confidence—made her way down to the floor beneath, among the grieving, shrieking, whining court.
“All right,” she said. “Enough moaning. Now I’ve got to start figuring out how to fix this thing. Clare! Call out the three best horses you have! The Lizard Princess might be a little heavy on her feet, but her brain’s as good as it ever was.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Clare said, and she was out of the throne room as swiftly as one of her own mares, and came back, as quick as you could say “happy/sad/happy/sad” three times without taking a breath, with a red mare, a black mare, and a gray. And before the stunned court could collect itself, Clare, Kim the Kind, and Sophia the Lizard Princess mounted (it was amazing in retrospect how Sophia so quickly learned how to manage that unwieldy tail and feet!), and went riding hard out the door.
“W-w-w-wait!” cried Michaeli, the Lord High Chancellor in a weak voice. “W-wait! St-st-stop! N-n-n-no!”
But Sophia the First, now the Lizard Princess, was gone with the wind and never once turned to look back until she became, so say the historians (but them you can’t always believe), Sophia the Wise.
“Ah,” Lily said dreamily, as Sophia, Kim, and Clare rode away. “I wonder what will happen next?” Rex looked at her thoughtfully and, lying on the deck beside her, gave a contented grunt. Lily closed the book for now, and lay it down on its face. “For now,” she said, “I think we’ll just look at the sea.”
“A good plan,” Death said. “For we’re almost there.”
“Are we?” Lily said eagerly, jumping up. It was dawn now, and pink light was shining to the east, shimmering over the water. “Ah!” Lily said. “I can see it! I can see it! We’re almost there!”
“Home,” Death said.
“Home,” Lily agreed, going to her side. “We’re going home.”
Death steered the tall white ship into a port in a clear blue bay. At the end of a wooden dock Maud stood, shading her eyes against the morning sun. And smiling.
“Is this the End, then, Death?” Lily asked, as she smiled back.
“No,” Death said, smiling her own smile. “It’s never the end.”
“Oh,” Lily said. “Good.”
The ship docked, and Lily and Rex walked home, with Maud and Death herself, into a new day.
And in another world altogether, the Lizard Princess rode on her way to become (or, as she would always have it—and who knew better?—to try to become) Sophia the Wise.
But that is another story, for another place, and another Time.
THE END