Beauty (23 page)

"No idea. Long as they do it out of sight, I don't much care. I get paid to ship 'em, and ship 'em is what I do. Load 'em aboard at the Edge and take 'em wherever they're consigned, if they're consigned. Sell the others. Any we don't sell, we drop off in the Great Swamp, but I get paid anyhow." The captain took a deep breath and sighed. "You took a look down in the forward hold, did you, to see none of them got out of the cages?"

"I always do."

"Wouldn't do to have one of those wandering around the
Queen,
now would it. Ugly things. Scare Mrs. Gallimar out of her pretty shoes."

I, who had seen all that the cages contained, had not found them that ugly. Pitiful. Angry. Hopeless. But not ugly.

The mate answered, "No, no escaped ones. I did find something else down there, though."

The captain turned and fixed him with a stern eye. "You found ... ?"

"This," said the mate, beckoning to one of the boatmen on the lower deck who came up the ladder tugging a struggling young woman along behind him. It was the Viceroy's daughter, Constanzia. I had wondered when she would show up.

"Stowed away," said the mate. "And she's the Viceroy's daughter, to top it all." If he had intended surprise, he had achieved his goal. The captain stared at the young person as though he could not believe it.

"What in the ... ?"

She shook herself, thrust wild hair back from her broad, low forehead, then smoothed her dress and stood erect, glaring at him. "I have brought money to pay for my passage. The only reason I went down into the hold is that I couldn't let anyone see I was aboard."

"Your father will be very annoyed with me," said the captain throatily. I knew he was thinking of .beheading, or of quartering, or perhaps of both. "He was annoyed with me last time, and he will be annoyed with me again."

"Papa will not even know I am gone if you do not do anything foolish, Captain. I have come to see the virgin with a difference, as I seem to remember having done once or twice before, though this time there may really be a difference, which has not happened before now. I thought I might get to know her a little on the return voyage. When we get back to Nacifia, I will disembark quietly, and Papa will think I was merely avoiding him for a time, which I often do."

Captain Karon shook his head, then nodded, then shook it once more, conveying the confusion of his thought. "We're full," he muttered. "There's no cabin space."

"Oh, yes, Captain," I murmured, having taken off my cloak and folded it over one arm. "The young lady is welcome to share my cabin with me."

And so it became possible for me to read even more in the diaries of Abrosius Pomposus.

["She's getting too involved!" I cried to Israfel. "She's thinking too much. How can this be a safe hiding place if she starts analyzing it? She'll pull it to pieces!"

"Hush, " said Israfel. "Imaginary lands are hard to destroy."

"They are not hard to disbelieve in," I told him. "She s
reading, studying ... "

"She learned to do that in the twentieth," he said. "It's not something you can stop her doing."

"We may have to talk to her," I said. "Tell her."

"Wait a while," he said. "See what happens."]

"There are slaves down there in the holds," Constanzia cried to me later that night as we prepared for bed, tears coursing down her olive cheeks. "Slaves."

I nodded understandingly. I had seen them.

"Women and children, too," she sobbed. "And men, young ones and old, old ones. It's dreadful."

"Dreadful," I admitted. But there was nothing she could do, nor I. She had evidently not understood the implications of the book she carried with her.

Kindhearted child. She cried herself to sleep.

I went out onto the deck. The old woman, Senora Carabosse, was standing there. I nodded and smiled good evening. In the saloon, I heard a clock strike. Suddenly, with a rush of memory which was almost a physical blow, I knew where I had heard the name before. Carabosse! It was the name on my clock. She was the fairy who had cursed me!

"Is it you!" I said, raising my hand as though I would ward her off or strike her, one. I don't know whether I would have struck her or not. I felt like it.

"Hush," she said, raising her own hand. Mine fell to my side as she gestured at it. "Whatever you think you know about me is probably false, so don't do that."

"You cursed me," I said.

"If you call that a curse. As it turned out, I cursed your half sister, Mary Blossom," said the old woman. "Which I meant to happen, right from the beginning."

"Why?" I cried.

"To get you away without anyone knowing," she said. "Away from Westfaire. Away from England. Away from the middle centuries. To hide you somewhere safe."

"Here?" I looked about me at the wallowing riverboat and laughed. "Here?"

"No one knows you are here," she whispered to me. "Jaybee doesn't know. The Dark Lord doesn't know."

"What Dark Lord?"

"Hush. Men like Jaybee do not spring into existence like spring spinach. They are aided into being by the Dark Lord. The evil power. The Devil. He who has taken his portion in horror and pain. That one."

"And you would hide me from him here?"

She repeated patiently what she had said before. "No one knows you are here. No one knows
here
is here."

Staring into her old eyes, I suddenly believed her. I had read Pomposus's books, just as Constanzia had. The difference between Constanzia and I was that I had understood what they meant. I knew that Chinanga was an imaginary world. All the people in it were imaginary people. It had been dreamed up by Ambrosius Pomposus-or by some creature or person calling himself or itself Ambrosius Pomposus. He had packed it full of all manner of strange things and characters. He had borrowed from myth and legend and other worlds for some of them.

How would anyone except Ambrosius himself know anything about this world? And he, I thought, had possibly died long since.

As though reading my mind, Carabosse said, "I used the secrets of time to find this place and explore it. No one else could find it in ten million years. All my effort, all my care has been directed at bringing you here. Believe me, Beauty, here you are safe." She patted my hand.

Safe? Why should Carabosse care? I opened my mouth to ask these questions, and others.

She shook her head at me, much as my aunts had used to do when I asked questions about sex. No, no, no, her expression said. You must do without knowing. She drifted away down the deck, leaving me to wonder at what she had said.

What did I believe?

I believed that I was safe. I believed that she cared greatly about my safety, though I did not know why. I believed there was something more she had not told me. I did not believe, could not believe who it was she said I was safe from. What would the Dark Lord, under any name, want with me?

The
Queen
arrived at Novabella about noon. Among those assembled for the arrival were a squat and swarthy couple, Emilia and Domenico Sandifor, charged with conveying an official welcome to the Viceroy's plenipotentiary and the chaperone, and, of course, to the captain. Constanzia and I became part of the party by virtue of the fact that no one saw fit to deny us that privilege. If anyone had done so, I am confident that Constanzia would have been equal to the occasion.

"I hope you'll consent to stay with us," Emilia bubbled at Mrs. Gallimar. "Don Masimiliano, the perfect of our province, has requested the honor of your company at the castle, yours and the chaperone's, but I thought you'd want to stay here in the town for convenience's sake."

"I will not have time even to dine with Don Masimiliano," said Roland in a severe voice. "I am to be taken to the person at once for a preliminary survey."

"She's been staying with us," admitted Emilia. "With Jorge on a mat outside her door every moment that she's in her room."

"Windows?" snarled Roland. "What about the windows?"

"They have very heavy gratings, Senor Mirabeau. Quite impenetrable, I assure you."

"Senora, if you had seen some of the things I have seen." He shook his head gloomily to let us know that he had seen the worst that life in Chinanga afforded.

"Well, why don't we get along there now?" Domenico offered.

We strolled along the cobbled street to the Sandifor house, the official delegation in the fore, we unofficial hangers-on following close behind. A tall iron gate admitted us to an acre or so of garden with orange trees and orchids. The house bulked beneath its tiled roof; an outside staircase led us to an upper floor where we found the manservant, Jorge, curled in stupified slumber before a metal-bound door. His bulky form stirred as Emilia took out a large black key, and he woke enough to move aside as she started to insert it into the lock. The key was taken from her by the chaperone before she could turn it.

"If you don't mind," Roland smiled. "I believe this is my affair from now on."

"Not quite," smiled Mrs. Gallimar. "It would be fair to say, our affair.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
"

"Really!" The chaperone was outraged. "I am a licencee of the Bureau of Public Morals!"

"And I am the Viceroy's personal representative. Shall we go in together?"

Which, after a lengthy simmering glance, they did.

Left in the corridor, the Sandifors looked at one another in awe. "What was that she said to him?" asked Domenico.

"I have no idea," his wife replied.

"A quotation," I murmured from behind them. "A question once asked in a similar connection. 'Who will chaperone the chaperones.' "

"Oh," he replied. "Do you suppose we should wait here for them?"

Emilia shook her head. "I want to see what's happening."

She had spoken all our thoughts. We went quietly into the room. Mrs. Gallimar and Roland stood side by side, their backs to us. Before them, sitting on one of the luxuriously padded window seats, a young woman sat reading. She looked up when the two stepped forward.

I was astonished. So astonished I could not move. It was as though I had looked into my own face in a slightly distorting mirror. My hair. My eyes. She looked less like me than Beloved had, but she resembled me in ways Beloved did not. I knew who she was. She was the one I had been seeking. Elladine of Ylles. Who else could she be?

Roland sank to his knees before her. I moved to one side so I could see his face. He was looking at her hair, at her feet, at the delicate rose of her cheeks. At her eyes. The swell of her breasts, like petals belling before spring wind! I saw his eyes flicker. The smell of her! I saw his nostrils dilate.

"You must be the virgin," smiled Mrs. Gallimar with a slightly sceptical tone.

For a moment the young woman could not or would not answer. Then she murmured, "Indeed. At the moment I must be. Are you the Viceroy's representatives?"

"I am the Viceroy's representative. This gentleman is Roland Mirabeau, licencee of the Bureau of Public Morals, a registered chaperone, first class."

The young woman smiled, unspeaking, nodding once. Oh, but she was beautiful. But then, so was I.

"Now." Mrs. Gallimar smiled again, licentiously. "We need to ascertain that you are as represented ... "

"No," Roland announced, firmly. "It is not necessary to do anything at all. The young woman is as represented. As a registered chaperone, I can tell."

Mrs. Gallimar stared at him, unbelieving. He took her firmly by one arm and drew her away. "I can tell, Mrs. Gallimar. By the smell alone. She smells like a six-year-old child after a bath."

Mrs. Gallimar sniffed. "She may, in fact, just have bathed."

"I assure you, I cannot be misled."

"She may have used scent."

"There is no such perfume. She is as she is, Mrs. Gallimar. I know it!" And he turned to confront the young woman who sat looking at him with a lively and precocious interest. "My nose cannot be misled!" It was obvious he believed it was so, and yet this young person was looking at him with unmistakeably sexual interest. "She is a virgin, and with a difference," he murmured abstractedly, turning and looking straight into my face with an expression both of doubt and anxiety. I knew he was wondering whether he was indeed the best person to protect that virginity all the way back to Nacifia.

"Tell me about her," he demanded from Emilia and Domenico, when we were all sitting in the Sandifor courtyard.

"She says she was married to a duke. She got tired of being married to him and left him to go home. Something interrupted her journey to or from, at that time or some other, and she ended up in the jungle. She says she has the feeling she was there for a very long time. The natives picked her up and brought her here. That's as far as we've got."

Roland stared at Emilia in disbelief. "This is all you know? But you've had her for days!"

"She talks a great deal. I can tell you all about the duke, and his sisters, and where they lived. She puts in a lot of detail."

"You haven't tried to hurry her any?" Mrs. Gallimar asked.

"Madam. Senor Mirabeau," Domenico interrupted, "perhaps things are different in Nacifia. Perhaps there are many interesting events in Nacifia. Not here. Things are dull in Novabella. We examine what we can see of Baskarone through our telescopes. We eat. We take a nap. We go down and stare at the river, wondering whether it will rise or fall. We see the little boats from Abaddon, and we fervently hope they will keep their distance, or, at worst, try to sell us fruit or monkeys from the jungle. We eat something else. We wait for Captain Karon to arrive with something new in the cargo. We play cards. We grow frightfully ... how shall I say?
Pococurante.
You understand what I am saying?"

"Bored," murmured Roland, who had told me he was very familiar with the feeling.

"Exactly. Anything new, any new tale, new jest, new trick, new dress-anything new is delightful to us. Why would we hasten it away? We have let her take her time, tell the tale in her own way."

I wondered how much my mother remembered. How had she come to be lost in the jungle of Chinanga? How long had she been there?