For the Tyrant, Russell Eigenblick, would not be forgotten. A long bad time lay ahead for his people, a bitter time when those who had contended against him would turn, in his absence, to contend with each other; and the fragile Republic would be broken and reshaped in several different ways. In that long contention, a new generation would forget the trials and hardships their parents had suffered under the Beast; they would look back with growing nostalgia, with deep pain of loss, to those years just beyond the horizon of living memory, to those years when, it would seem to them, the sun always shone. His work, they would say, had gone unfinished, his Revelation unmade; he had gone away, and left his people unransomed.
But not died. No; gone off, disappeared, one night between dawn and day slipped away: but not died. Whether in the Smokies or the Rockies, deep in a crater lake or far beneath the ruined Capital itself, he lay only asleep, with his executive assistants around him, his red beard growing longer; waiting for the day (foretold by a hundred signs) when his people’s great need should at last awake him again.
V.
Are you, or are you not? Have you the taste of your existence, or do you not? Are you within the country or on the border? Are you mortal or immortal?
‘I want a clean cup,’ the Hatter interrupted. ‘Everyone move one place.’
That the Dog predicted by Sophie which greeted Daily Alice at the door should turn out to be Spark didn’t surprise Alice much, but that the old man whom she found to guide her on the far side of the river should be her cousin George Mouse was unexpected.
“I don’t think of you as old, George,” she said. “Not old.”
“Hey,” George said, “older than you, and you’re no spring chicken, you know, kid.”
“How did you get here?” she asked.
“How did I get where?” he replied.
Her Blessing
They walked together through dark woods, talking of many things. They walked a long way; spring came on more fully; the woods deepened. Alice was glad of his company, although she had not been sure she needed a guide; the woods were unknown to her, and scary; George carried a thick stick, and knew the path. “Dense,” she said; and as she said it she remembered her wedding journey: she remembered Smoky asking, about a stand of trees over by Rudy Flood’s, whether those were the woods Edgewood was on the edge of. She remembered the night they had spent in the cave of moss. She remembered walking through the woods on the way to Amy and Chris’s house. “Dense,” he had said; “Protected,” she’d answered. As each of these memories and many others awoke in her, unfolding as vivid as life, Alice seemed to remember them for the last time, asthough they faded and dropped as soon as they blossomed; or rather that each memory she called up ceased, as soon as she called it up, to be a memory, and became instead, Somehow, a prediction: something that had not been but which Alice, with a deep sense of happy possibility, could imagine one day being.
“Well,” George said. “This is about as far as I go.”
They had approached the edge of the wood. Beyond, sunny glades went on like pools, sunlight falling in square shafts upon them through tall trees; and beyond that, a white, sunlit world, obscure to their eyes accustomed to the dimness.
“Goodbye, then,” Alice said. “You’ll come to the banquet?”
“Oh, sure,” George said. “How could I help it?”
They stood a moment in silence, and then George, a little embarrassed for he’d never done this before, asked her blessing; and she gave it gladly, on his flocks and on his produce, and on his old head; she bent and kissed him where he knelt, and went on.
So Big
The glades like pools, one after another, continued a long way. This part, Alice thought, was the best so far: these violets and these new moist ferns, those graylichened stones, these bars of benevolent sun. “So big,” she said. “So big.” A thousand creatures paused in their spring occupations to watch her pass; the hum of newborn insects was like a constant breath. “Dad would have liked this place,” she thought, and even as she thought it she knew how it was that he had come (or would come) to understand the voices of creatures, for she understood them herself, she needed only to listen.
Mute rabbits and noisy jays, gross belching frogs and chipmunks who made smart remarks—but what was that in the further glade, standing on one leg, lifting alternately one wing and then the other? A stork, wasn’t it?
“Don’t I know you?” Alice asked when she had entered there. The stork leapt away, startled and looking guilty and confused.
“Well, I’m not sure,” the stork said. It looked at Alice first with one eye, and then with both eyes down its long red beak, which gave it a look at once worried and censorious, as though it peered over the tops of pince-nez spectacles. “I’m not sure at all. I’m not sure of much at all, to tell you the truth.”
“I think I do,” Alice said. “Didn’t you once raise a family at Edgewood, on the roof?”
“I may have,” the stork said. It made to preen its feathers with its beak, and did it very clumsily, as though surprised to find it had feathers at all. “This,” Alice heard it say to itself, “is going to be just an enormous trial, I can see that.”
Alice helped her loose a primary that had got folded the wrong way, and the stork, after some uncomfortable fluffing, said, “I wonder—I wonder if you would mind my walking a ways with you?”
“Of course you may,” Alice said. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t rather fly.”
“Fly?” said the stork, alarmed. “Fly?”
“Well,” Alice said, “I’m not really sure where I’m going at all. I sort of just got here.”
“No matter,” the stork said. “I just got here myself, in a manner of speaking.”
They walked on together, the stork as storks do taking long, careful steps as though afraid to find something unpleasant underfoot.
“How,” Alice asked, since the stork said nothing more, “did you just get here?”
“Well,” the stork said.
“I’ll tell you my story,” Alice said, “if you’ll tell me yours.” For the stork seemed to want to speak, but to be unable to bring itself to do it.
“It depends,” the stork said at last, “on whose story it is you want to hear. Oh, very well. No more equivocation.
“Once,” it said, after a further pause, “I was a real stork. Or rather, a real stork was all I was, or she was. I’m telling this very badly, but at all events I was also, or we were also, a young woman: a very proud and very ambitious young woman, who had just learned, in another country, some very difficult tricks from masters far older and wiser than herself. There was no need, no need at all, for her to practice one of these tricks on an unwitting bird, but she was young and somewhat thoughtless, and the opportunity presented itself.