Beauty (58 page)

Fenoderee and the others who are staying are out with the animals. Puck carried my Giles up to the tower and laid him on my bed. Giles looks much better, much stronger. This long sleep has done him good. Then Puck helped me to climb all these stairs to be with my love. Since I've been back this time, my legs have hurt such a lot, and of course I am very, very old. One hundred and sixteen! Think of it! I could not have climbed here without him.

From the balcony I can see the light of dawn and bright wings circling straight above. A dove, I think. Very high. On my bed, Giles snores and Grumpkin snores, little breathy sounds in the silence. When I stroke either of them, they move as though to tell me they know I am here. I sit on the edge of the bed to write, remembering Giles Edward's question.

What will happen?

Beloved will awaken once she is out of Westfaire. He will kiss her, of course, but that has nothing to do with anything. No matter what Joyeause said about a hundred years, this spell was laid forever. Westfaire will go on sleeping. Papa will sleep, and Doll, and Martin. The aunts will sleep, and the young maids, and the young footmen and stable hands, all will sleep until the conditions of this enchantment are fulfilled and someone or something wondrous arrives to kiss beauty awake once more. Not a prince. Or not merely a prince. More than a prince. A rebirth of some kind. And not soon. Not until long after Carabosse's clock has run down. Long after the twenty-third, I should imagine. Long after Baskarone is gone and all of Faery vanished. Long after the Dark Lord and all his minions have perished from the weight of time. The inanition of age will get him, finally, where nothing else can, and having no victims except each other will kill the rest. Perhaps in the twenty-fourth or the twenty-fifth, or perhaps long after that, life will come again. I have done everything a half fairy can to preserve it. Carabosse and I make a good pair.

And if it happens-why, then everything is here. The whales and the elephants and the radishes and the trees. Magic is here. And man, too. All those randy stable boys and giggling maids. And the Bogles. Ready to begin again. Ready to recreate what God created. And Giles, to greet me again in the morning; and I, to greet him.

And if it does not happen?

Then everything is here. Sleeping. Dreaming, perhaps, of what might have been. Perhaps others, on some other world will catch the dream, will wake from it astonished at its marvel, at its complicated wonder. Perhaps someone or something will dream who can create once more.

There is a bedtime prayer Aunt Terror taught me when I was a child. "Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep." Such an arrogant idea to go to sleep on, I have always thought. Why should God do any such thing, except that I've always loved His beauty passionately. All God's beauty passionately.

That time, so long ago, I would not allow the Curse to touch me. I did not want to spend a hundred years sleeping. I thought it unworthy of me. I thought it monstrously unfair that Papa had let me in for such a fate. I evaded it. I escaped it, so I thought. Escaping destiny is not so easy as that. Funny, the way things work out. Even Carabosse and Israfel couldn't quite keep it from happening the way it did. As though someone else had done the planning.

Puck is holding out his hand for my pen. And my cap. He says he will sit by me, and rub the pains out of my poor old legs. Until I sleep.

"I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

Perhaps, instead, He will keep the fire that burns here; the fire that Israfel and Carabosse set here.

Perhaps that has always been my soul.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

During the last few years we've all been made increasingly aware of the destruction of habitat that's been going on all over the world—in rainforests, wetlands, deserts, the high tundra. We see it on television and read about it in the nature magazines. When I drive from Denver down to Santa Fe, I see the river valley where I grew up now packed with houses cheek by jowl. There used to be cattail swamps along there, and I remember lying for hours on my belly in the tall grass looking for whatever it was that sounded exactly like a plumber's plunger being squooshed. The bird was a least bittern, but there aren't any swamp birds there anymore because the swamps have all been drained and the trees cut down to build a golf course. The sloping wildflower-filled meadows where I used to hunt Indian arrowheads were first rutted and destroyed by off-road vehicles and then turned into a trailer park. And on TV I see trees falling in Brazil, and wetlands turned into marinas in Florida, and deserts creeping into places grasslands used to be in Africa.

It seems to me sometimes that all beauty is dying. Which makes me hope that perhaps it isn't dead but only sleeping. And that makes me think of Sleeping Beauty and wonder if she—Beauty, that is—might not be a metaphor for what is happening to the world at large; perfect Beauty born, Beauty cursed with death, Beauty dying—but with the magical hope of being reawakened, maybe by love.

The result of all this is
Beauty
, a novel of the human spirit, a book-length faery tale, a meditation on various questions of religion—or perhaps just a prayer ...

Table of Contents

Beauty

FOREWORD

THE JOURNAL OF BEAUTY the daughter of THE DUKE OF WESTFAIRE

1 MY LIFE IN WESTFAIRE

ST. RICHARD OF CHICHESTER'S DAY, APRIL, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

2

DAY OF ST. PATERNUS, BISHOP, CONVERTER OF DRUIDS, APRIL, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

3

DAY OF STS. PETER AND JAMES, MAY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

4

ST. MONICA'S DAY, MAY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

5

ST. ETHELREDA'S DAY, MAY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

6

ST. LADISLAS DAY, JUNE, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

7

DAY OF THE VISITATION, JULY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

8

ST. BERTHA'S DAY, JULY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

9

LATER, MIDNIGHT

10

ST. PALLADIUS DAY, JULY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347

11

ANOTHER TIME. ANOTHER DAY. I DON'T KNOW WHEN, YET.

12 MY LIFE IN THE LATER CENTURIES

13

14

JULY 1991

AUGUST 1, 1991

AUGUST 12, 1991

AUGUST 15, 1991

AUGUST 17, 1991

AUGUST 20, 1991

AUGUST 21, 1991

SEPTEMBER 6, 1991

OCTOBER 4, 1991

OCTOBER 7, 1991

NOVEMBER 15, 1991

NOVEMBER 17, 1991

NOVEMBER 20, 1991

CHRISTMAS MORNING 1991

JUNE 1992

JULY 1992

CHRISTMAS 1992

NEW YEAR'S, JANUARY 1, 1993

LATER:

15

SAINT SERAPHIA'S DAY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1350

16

17

CHINANGA: TIME UNKNOWN, PERHAPS TIME IRRELEVANT

18

19

20

21

22

LATER

ST. MARY MAGDELEN'S DAY, JULY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367

ST. MARTHA'S DAY, JULY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367