Our love, mine, was made of such little things. When we traveled to Marvella, he would rise in the morning and find something warm for me to drink. Broth, perhaps. Some herbal concoction. A cup of mulled wine. He would bring it to me, knowing I wake grumpily from the pains of sleep—since I was a child, my legs have bothered me. They pain me especially at night, and many nights I spend half sleepless, turning over and over. So, he would bring me something and sit on the side of the bed while I drank it and call me Beauty, though I was an old, white-haired hag with pouches beneath my eyes and lines around my mouth even then.
And the love would come up from inside me like water rising in a well. Not lust, not romance, but something kindlier than that. The feeling one has watching a sunrise sometimes. The feeling one has watching kittens at play. The feeling one has seeing a rose bloom beside the window. The Baskaronian feeling. A perfection of being.
When we were on the way to Lourdes, each delightful thing that I saw I could not wait to turn to him to see if he saw it, to point it out, to make some jest, to evoke some wonder. Things I read that I wanted to read to him. How we laughed over Christine de Pisan together.
When he grew sick, he did not want me to go back to the twentieth to get the medicine for him. He did not want to go on living if it meant he might outlive me. If one of us died, he wanted to die first. He knew I was mean enough and grumpy enough to get along, someway. He did not think he could live without me. And he knew I would remember him. Perhaps he wanted to be remembered.
I wonder if he knew I would remember him in hell, and for that little time of recollection, hell could not exist for me.
There are men here. Sometimes, between the howls and screams and grunts of pain, I hear marching feet and voices raised in song. Sometimes I hear laughter. Sometimes I hear whispers, too soft to understand the words, but full of sly meaning. Sometimes I hear a shouted name, and know it is a name of someone real, someone I have read about somewhere. Not only one name, but several, in a questioning voice, as though a teacher calls a roll.
Often there is an answer. A voice raised, “I am here!”
And sometimes almost a chorus singing, their voices full of a terrible urgency and a dreadful joy, “Down, down, down to happyland.”
I have been down to see Captain Karon once again, though he tells me simply Charon would suffice.
“Difficult to be captain of a rowboat,” he said, as the newest cargo of ghosts streamed past him into the place.
“Charon,” I said, “if there were another side, would you take us there? Or an ocean, maybe, that the river empties into.”
“Would I go to an end if I could?” He smiled his death’s-head smile at me. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Are they dead?” I gestured behind me. “Are they all dead?”
“If not, they will be someday,” he said. “Who lives forever?”
The Dark Lord, I started to say. Faery. But then I stayed silent, for he had given me the germ, the merest germ of an idea.
“Yes,” said the voices in my ear. “Yes, try that. Those words are good words, as good as any.”
“They are not magic words,” I say, objecting. “They are mortal words.”
“Any words can be magic,” whisper the voices. “If they meet the need.”
“Did you know that I am a fairy?” I asked Barrymore Gryme.
He laughed, spitting pieces of teeth in all directions. I reached out and healed him. He still laughed.
“How else could I heal you?” I asked him. “Fairies can travel through time. Fairies can be taken captive. Still, they are fairies, with powers of their own. I have magic, Barry.”
“Much good it’s doing you,” he muttered through swollen lips, glaring through bruised eyes.
“It’s because I’m alone,” I said. “I am outweighed by all you others.”
“So, you’re stuck,” he said. “Like the rest of us.”
“My point is, I could get some of you unstuck, if you’d help me. There is some magic in each of you, as well. Man has been stealing it from Faery for thousands of years.”
A wily look, perhaps hopeful. “How?” he asked.
“I’ll teach you some words,” I said. “When you see the others, teach them the words. Have them teach still others. When the gong rings the third time from now, everyone say them together and think of the shore of a river. The words are a magic spell. They’ll get us out of here. Think of a river shore and a boat, a big boat come to take us away from here.”
He does not believe me. Still, he has learned the words I have given him.
“I’ve heard this before,” he complained as I recited to him.
“Spells do not have to be original to be efficacious,” I told him. “This one will work. It will draw upon the magic of Faery. If everyone says it at the same time, it will free us. A great skeptic wrote these words. They will work.” Perhaps they will. Though, actually, it is hope that will do the most. Optimism. The undying desire of most men to make things come out right!
Time goes by. Eventually, the gong rings. Over its dying reverberations I hear a whisper, as though a thousand voices have said “One.”
There is time here when nothing happens, when there are no voices, no sounds. My mind circles, like a dog,
