She yawned hugely, and tried to speak at the same time, and laughed. “I said so you’re not going back?”
“No.”
“Even after you find your fortune?”
He didn’t say
“You don’t want me to go back?” he said, doffing the overcoat and climbing on the bed.
“I’d follow you,” she said. “I would.”
“Warm?” he said, drawing down the quilt that covered her.
“Hey,” she said. “
“Warm,” he said, and took the neck and shoulders he had revealed by turns between his lips, sucking and munching like a cannibal. Flesh. But all alive, all alive. “I’m melting,” she said. He entwined her in him as though his long body could swallow hers, a morsel but endless. He bent to her nakedness, a banquet. “In fact I’m cooking,” she said, and she was, her warmth and comfort deep as it was heated further and made more perfect by the incandescent jewel within her; she watched him for a moment, amazed and gratified, watched him swallow her endlessly toward his hollow heart; then she went wandering, and he too, both again in the same realm (later they would speak of it, and compare the places they had been, and find them the same); a realm where they were led, so Auberon thought, by Lilac; coupled, not walking, but still wandering, they were led down concave weed-spined lanes in an endless land, down the twists and turns of a long, long story, a boundless and-then, toward a place something like the place Sophie at Edgewood contemplated in the dark-etched trump called the Banquet: a long table clothed in just-unfolded linen, its claw-feet absurd in the flowers beneath twisted and knotty trees, the tall compote overflowing, the symmetrical candelabra, the many places set, all empty.
Book Four
THE WILD WOOD
I.
They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason.
The years after baby Lilac was rapt from her sleeping mother’s arms were the busiest Mrs. Underhill could remember in a long (in fact as-good-as-eternal) life. Not only was there Lilac’s education to attend to, and a watch kept just as ever on the rest of them, but there were as well all the councils, meetings, consultations and celebrations, multiplying as the events they had all so long nursed into being came more and more rapidly to pass; and all this in addition to her usual tasks, each composed of countless details no one of which could be skimped or scamped.
A Time and a Tour
But look how she had succeeded! On a day in November a year after the boy Auberon followed imaginary Lilac into the dark of the woods, and lost her, Mrs. Underhill quite otherwhere measured the real Lilac’s golden length with a practiced eye. She was, at just past eleven years old, as tall as bent Mrs. Underhill; her chicory-blue eyes, clear as brook water, were level with the old ones which studied her. “Very good,” she said. “Very, very good.” She circled Lilac’s slim wrists with her fingers. She tilted up Lilac’s chin and held a buttercup beneath it. She measured with thumb and forefinger the span from aureole to aureole, and Lilac laughed, tickled. Mrs. Underhill laughed too, pleased with herself and with Lilac. There wasn’t a tinge of green to her biscuity skin, not a trace of absence in her eyes. So often Mrs. Underhill had seen these things go wrong, seen changelings grow dim and marrowless, become at Lilac’s age attenuated pieces of vague longing and good for nothing ever after. Mrs. Underhill was glad she had taken on the handrearing of Lilac. What if it had worn her to a raveling? It had succeeded, and there would be aeons in which to rest soon enough.
Rest! She drew herself up. There must be strength for the end. “Now, child,” she said. “What was it you learned from the bears?”
“Sleep,” Lilac said, looking doubtful.
“Sleep indeed,” said Mrs. Underhill. “Now…”
“I don’t want to sleep,” Lilac said. “Please.”
“Well, how do you know till you’ve tried it? The bears were comfortable enough.”
Lilac, pouting, overturned a darkling beetle which was just then crossing her instep, and righted it again. She thought of the bears in their warm cave, oblivious as snow. Mrs. Underhill (who knew the names of many creatures, as every naturalist should) introduced them to her: Joe, Pat, Martha, John, Kathy, Josie, and Nora. But they made no response, only drew breath all together, and let it out, and drew it again. Lilac, who had never closed her eyes except to blink or play hide-and-seek since the night she woke in Mrs. Underhill’s dark house, stood bored and repelled by the seven sleepers, like seven sofas in their lumpish indifference. But she took her lesson from them; and when Mrs. Underhill came for her in the spring, she had learned it well, and for a reward Mrs. Underhill showed her sea-lions asleep in northern waters bobbing in the waves, and albatrosses in southern skies asleep on the wing; still she hadn’t slept, but at least she knew how.
But now the time had come.
“Please,” Lilac said, “I will if I must, only…”
“No ifs, ands, or buts,” Mrs. Underhill said. “There are times that just go by, and times that come. This time’s come.”
“Well,” Lilac said, desperate, “can I kiss everyone goodnight?”
“That would take years.”
“There are bedtime stories,” Lilac said, her voice rising. “I want one.”
“All the ones I know are in this one, and in this one it’s now the time you fall asleep.” The child before her crossed her arms slowly, still thinking; a dark cast came over her face; she would fight this one out. And like all grannies faced with intransigence, Mrs. Underhill bethought her how she might give in—with dignity, so as not to spoil the child. “Very well,” she said. “I haven’t time to argue. There’s a tour I was to take, and if you’ll promise to be good, and after take your nap, I’ll take you too. It might be educational…”
“Oh yes!”
“And education after all was all the point…”
“It was!”
“Well then.” Seeing her excitement, Mrs. Underhill felt for the first time something like pity for the child, how she would be long bound up in the vines and tendrils of sleep, as quiescent as the dead. She rose. “Listen now! Hold tight to me, great thing though you’ve become, and nor eat nor touch a single thing you see…” Lilac had leapt up, her nakedness pale and alight as a wax candle in Mrs. Underhill’s old house. “Wear this,” she said, taking a tiny green three-clawed leaf from within her clothes, licking it with a pink tongue, and sticking it to Lilac’s forehead, “and you’ll see what I say you’ll see. And I think…” There was a heavy beating of wings outside, and a long broken shadow passed over the windows. “I think we can go. I needn’t tell you,” she said, raising a warning finger, “that no matter what you’re not to speak to anyone you see, not anyone,” and Lilac nodded solemnly.
