“What a story,” Auberon said, when he could find his voice again.
“See, if,” George said. “If it was Lilac, but just transformed in some weird way…”
“But she knew,” Auberon said. “She knew it wasn’t really Lilac.”
“Did she?” George said. “Who knows what the hell she knew.” A dark silence rose. “Women. How do you figure ’em.”
“But,” Auberon said, “what I don’t understand is, why they would have brought her that thing in the first place. I mean if it was such a fake.”
George eyed him suspiciously. “What ‘they’ is this?” he asked.
Auberon looked away from his cousin’s inquiry. “Well, they,” he said, surprised and oddly embarrassed that this explanation was coming out of his mouth. “The ones who stole the real one.”
“Hm,” George said.
Auberon said nothing further, having nothing further to say on that head, and seeing quite plainly and for the first time in his life just why silence had been kept so well among those whom he had used to spy on. Having them for explanation felt in fact like having none at all, and he found himself now, willy-nilly, sworn to the same silence; and yet he thought he would not ever again be able to explain a single thing in the world without recourse to that collective pronoun: they. Them.
“Well, anyway,” he said at last. “That accounts for two.”
George raised his eyebrow in question.
“Two Lilacs,” Auberon said. He counted them off: “Of the three I thought there were, one was imaginary, mine, and I know where she is.” In fact he felt her, deep within, take notice of his mention of her. “One was false. That’s the one you blew up.”
“But if,” George said, “if that was the real one, only Somehow changed… Naaah.”
“No,” said Auberon. “That’s the one that’s left, the one that’s unaccounted for: the true one.” He looked out the casement at the gloaming which was stealing now over Old Law Farm as well as over the high towers of the City. “I wonder,” he said.
“I wonder…” George said. “I’d give a lot to know.”
“Where,” Auberon said. “Where, where.”
Thinking of Waking
Far, far, and dreaming: turning in her sleep, restless, and thinking of waking, though she would not wake yet for many a year; an itch in her nose, and a yawn in her throat. She even blinked, but saw nothing through sleeping eyes but dream: a dream, amid the spring she slept in, of autumn: of the gray vale where, on the day of her tour, the stork that bore her and Mrs. Underhill had at last put its feet on terra firma or something like it, and how Mrs. Underhill had sighed and dismounted, and how she, Lilac, had reached out to put her arms around Mrs. Underhill’s neck and be helped down… She yawned; having learned how to do it, she was now apparently unable to stop, and couldn’t decide whether she liked the sensation or not.
“Sleepy,” Mrs. Underhill said.
“Where is this?” Lilac said when she had been set on her feet.
“Oh, a place,” Mrs. Underhill said softly. “Come along.”
A broken arch, roughly carved, or finely carved and roughly weathered, stood before them; no walls extended from it, it stood alone astride the leaf-littered path showing the only way into the sere November wood beyond. Lilac, apprehensive yet resigned now, put her young small hand in Mrs. Underhill’s old huge one, and like any granny and child in a chill park from which summer and fun have fled, they went on to the gate; the stork stood alone on one red leg, preening her rumpled and disordered leathers.
They passed under the arch. Old birds’ nests and moss filled its coffers and reliefs. The carving was obscure, creatures inchoate or returning to chaos. Lilac passed her hand over it as they passed: the stuff it was made of was not stone. Glass? Lilac wondered. Bone?
“Horn,” said Mrs. Underhill. She took off one of her many cloaks, and dressed Lilac’s nakedness in it. Lilac kicked the brown leaves of the vale, thinking it might be nice to lie down in them, for a long time.
“Well, a long day,” said Mrs. Underhill, as though sensing this thought.
“It went too fast,” Lilac said.
Mrs. Underhill put her arm around Lilac’s shoulder. Lilac stumbled against her, her feet seeming to have lost contact with her will. She yawned again. “Aw,” said Mrs. Underhill tenderly, and she picked up Lilac with a single swift motion of her strong arms. She drew the cloak more tightly around her as Lilac nestled against her. “And was it fun?” she asked.
“It was fun,” Lilac said.
They had stopped before a great oak at whose foot a whole summer’s worth of leaves was piled. From a hollow in it an owl, just awakened, boomed softly to itself. Mrs. Underhill bent to lay her burden in the rustling leaves.
“Dream of it,” she said.
Lilac said something that made no sense, about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pass. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.
Mrs. Underhill tucked the cloak once more carefully around her, and then straightened up. With both hands she pressed the small of her back and bent backwards, as weary as she had ever been. She pointed to the owl, whose soft-blooming eyes were looking out from its house, and said, “You. Take care, watch well,” which those eyes could do as well as anypair she knew. She looked upward. Twilight, even the endless twilight of this November day, had nearly ended, and she with all her tasks left undone: the last of the year still unburied, and the rains that were to bury it (and a million insect larvae, a million bulbs and seeds) yet unpoured; the floor of heaven unswept of dirty cloud and its winter lamps still to be lit. Brother North-wind, she was sure, champed at his bit to be unleashed. It was a wonder, she thought, that day followed night, that the very earth turned at all, she had given it so little thought of late. She sighed, turned away, and (growing huger and older and more puissant than Lilac had ever supposed, or could imagine or even dream her to be) she expanded upward and outward toward these tasks without a backward look at her adopted grand-daughter asleep among the leaves.
Book Six
THE FAIRIES’ PARLIAMENT
I.
The first years after what Russell Eigenblick thought of as his accession were the hardest anyone then alive would live to see—so it would seem to them, looking back. Sudden snowstorms raged on the November day when against token opposition he was elected President, and seemed scarcely to abate thereafter. It could not have been always winter in those years, summer must have come around duly as ever, yet universally people remembered winters: the longest, coldest, deepest winters ever known; one continuous winter. Every hardship the Tyrant regretfully imposed or his opponents wilfully inflicted in their uprisings against him was made worse by winter, by months of frozen mud and sleety rain that continually mired every enterprise. Winter made ghastly and hopeless the movements of trucks, traffic, brown-clad troops; everywhere, deeply marking the memory, were the huddled clots and queues of refugees, rag-bound against the cold; the stalled trains, grounded planes; the new frontiers at which lines of slush-bound cars, tailpipes breathing cold clouds, waited to be examined by muffled guards; the shortages of everything, the awful struggle, the difficulties and uncertainties made more awful by the isolating endless cold. And the blood of martyrs and reactionaries frozen on the dirty snow of city squares.