Lily the Silent: The History of Arcadia

Arcadia, best of lands, lies between the four mountain ranges that protect it, in the best of times, from the Great Empire: To the east, the Calandals. Mt. Macillhenny, the tallest mountain in Arcadia, is in this range, and it is a dry, windswept place, hard to farm, but peopled by settlers who know the secrets of making and doing. To the west, the Donatees, the most impassable of the mountains, snow capped all year round, the place of Resistance, where game of all kind abounds. To the north, the Samanthans. rising up from the golden Samanthan foothills, mysterious, never crossed until the days of the Lizard Princess, not even by the technicians of Megalopolis, protecting Arcadia to the north from Monsters, Creatures, and the Restless Sea.
To the south rise the Ceres, the sacred mountains. The site and heart of Arcadia, of which no more, to my hearers, needs to be said.
Arcadia provides in unfailing plenty everything that is suited to the use of human beings. It has towns of individual grace and beauty, where women and men can live in comfort and safety, without envy of their fellows. It has rivers that run full and fresh, teeming with fish and other life, the Juliet River, and its tributaries, the Gems and the Deerspring. It has green fields that cradle the towns, growing every kind of food to be traded and sold in its playful markets, no one market more than a morning’s walk one from the other. It has forests made of every kind of tree growing each at its own favored place, trees that spread, mysterious and benign, about Arcadia on all sides, evergreen and elegant silver in winter, pale copper green and chartreuse in spring, emerald in summer, and golden, ruby, and velvet bronze in the fall. In three seasons there grow everywhere flowers of all colors and scents, in such profusion that the bees, ignoring categories, make honey of a hundred indescribable flavors. The vines of the Samanthan foothills, which reap the harvest of the southern sun, make our fine wines, those to the east productive of a deep gold wine and one, popular in summer, of a pale rose, while the vines closer to the west produce what we call Queen’s Wine, from it having been, always, the favorite of our queen, Sophia the Wise. a burgundy red drink that smells of strawberries, tasting of violets, mountain truffles, and fresh hay.
The people of Arcadia have grown up from two strains: those who have inhabited the towns since Before the Time of Records, and those who came over the mountains with Lily the Silent, at the time of the Great Deluge, in the days before she became Arcadia’s first queen. And these are every kind of peoples that the Great Empire of Megalopolis had conquered and enslaved, and so now our people are of every conceivable kind and color, as our forests hold every kind of tree, and our fields every kind of flower.
In the early days, the time between Before the Time of Records and the Great Megalopolitan Invasion, Arcadia was a magistracy. arranged so that each neighborhood in each town elected its own leader, who then joined with the general council of her town in choosing one representative to attend the twice yearly councils of Arcadia. But this system, rational and humane as it appears to us, its inheritors, even now, could not survive the Evil Times that come when the Warlike threaten the Peaceful.
It was in such Evil Times that Lily, she who would become Lily the Silent, first queen of Arcadia, lived, and began the journey that made her queen.
The birth of Lily is unknown, being in the time Before the Records. Of her birth many different stories have been told, each one holding in common only that they speak of a great mystery. Little is known of her origins. No one knows the name of her father. No one knows her past. It was her silence about these that gave her the name Lily the Silent.
Mae the magistrate was her mother. Her stepfather was Alan, son of Maud the Freedom Fighter, whose exploits we all know through the twice told tales of our forebears, always spoken, never written, by tradition and preference, passed down at many a winter hearth, and never before collected into words on a page. Until now. Now by me, Wilder the Bard, tasked with the setting down of the History of Arcadia by our queen, Sophia the Wise. The stories of Maud the Freedom Fighter are those best known by every Arcadian child. I have no need to sing of them here, when they sing, brave and sweet, in every fellow Arcadian’s heart.
Mae, Alan, and Lily lived in an Arcadian garden house on the hill of Harmony Street, in Cockaigne, in the days before the Great Invasion.
Mae was a refined and prudent woman, a magistrate, as I’ve said, and a leader. Alan was a good man, a good husband and father, peaceful in times of peace, never offering to strike a first blow, but fierce in defense.
Mae and Alan raised Lily as an Arcadian child, that is, quiet and content, loving her land and her neighbors and her family, in the way of Arcadia. She was a beautiful girl, the most famously beautiful, not just in Cockaigne, but in the other towns, too. Her hair was as black as water-splashed rock in morning shadow, and her skin was as cream colored as good strong coffee and milk. Her eyes were large, slanted and oddly colored: red brown when she was calm, but striking sparks of green when she was not.
All the boys were in love with her. But she would have none of them. For Lily, from the beginning, there was only one great love, and that love she gave away to lead the Great Migration and become our queen.
Lily often visited her stepgrandmother, the great Freedom Fighter Maud, whose story we know from the tale of the Dog Husband and other nursery fare. Maud lived in a tiny, solitary, well built house at the edge of the forests of the Ceres, where she had retired at the end of her legendary exploits, and where she entertained seldom, and then only the closest of her friends.
The closest of all Maud’s friends was Death, and it was
in the Tiny House in the Forest that Lily, as a young girl. met Death and was befriended by her. And this must have happened close before the Great Invasion, when Megalopolis found itself in danger, and in the power of its magnificent panic, overran the Calandals and came into Arcadia with a pretense of Peace. And Lily knew this would happen, because Death had told her so. When Maud went away with Death, it was Lily who saw them walk, arm in arm, away.
Then Lily, and her dog, the famous Rex of our hearthside stories. were taken in slavery to Megalopolis to work in the Children’s Mine. For Megalopolis had discovered a profit in forcing children to pay their own way, and not just their own way, but that of others, too. While she was there, she should have languished and perished with the hardness of it all, for the contented children of Arcadia do not make good slaves, as history has shown. But Lily had lived in the times Before the Records, and what happened there is dark to us, but whatever happened, it tempered her strength and stored it against just such a need as this. So she lived through these times, and many times to come, until she became our queen.
She was silent about this time later, as she was about many things. And I cannot say that I can find it in me to blame her, as there are many things the wise cannot say. Or even those who are on their way to becoming Wise.
Now it happened that, then, in Megalopolis, there lived a young man who was blessed with everything it was in Megalopolis’ gift to give. He was handsome and rich. He was the darling of all the women. Not a one would have resisted a look from his eyes, which, it was said, were the color of the blue sky over a snowy mountain on a sun filled winter’s day. Not a one failed to dream of pulling tenderly at his golden hair. Not a one didn’t long to caress and be caressed by him.
He was the son of a rich man, and, as they call them in Megalopolis, a rich man’s wife. Livia, well known to Arcadian children as a witch, a witch who had long ruled Megalopolis in secret, through the magic spells she worked on men. The name of her son was Conor Barr. He was engaged since childhood to wed the beautiful Rowena, as rich as her long blonde hair, as untouchable and cold and brilliant as a frosty night’s star. But on seeing a portrait of Lily, he would have no one else, and, leaving Rowena behind, rode into the mountains to take Lily and her dog from the Children’s Mine. All marveled at this, that a son of those who were like kings would take, even as a concubine, a lowly slave.
But his mother, Livia, smiled. And no one knew why.
At this time, and in secret, the Glorious Empire of Megalopolis was dying. Few knew it, though all felt it. This was a time that comes to the Great when they have forgotten the Small, and the earth rots under their feet. So it was, then, with Megalopolis, and it was this that was the reason why the raging Empire reached out farther and farther and farther still for slaves and treasure and food and water, in hopes that it could hold off its ordained end. And hold its end off it did, with the goods, and the lands, and the foods, of others.
But the people of Megalopolis, the masses, felt the ground shift under their feet. This made them uneasy, and hard to drive. And so it was that the rulers of Megalopolis built a Phony Moon, a second Moon in the sky, at first as a pleasure ground for even the very lowest of their country to amuse themselves, and then as a haven for those who could afford to flee to the Cold City. They did this not just to save themselves from their own folly, but also to hide the Real Moon. For when the common people could see the Real Moon, they could see the angels there, those beings who made it a way station on their flights across the heavens. When nothing but the Real Moon was in the night sky, the people could watch the angels’ shadows fly across its pale light. Then the people were reverent and silent, and thought again of the old days, when the land did not shiver and quake under their feet. And when there had been the promise of justice for all.
It was to the Phony Moon that Livia took the beautiful Lily and the dog Rex. And Lily, the darling of every festivity given on that Phony Moon (and there were many such, that final season before the Great Disaster), danced and sang, and dallied with Conor Barr, who, for all his charm and riches, was as beneath her as the Earth is beneath the Real Moon.
Lily knew this was so, that Conor Barr was handsome and courteous and fair. But that he was also vain, and boastful, and pleasure loving, and weak. She knew that he was weaker than she. But she loved him, and only him, and knowing his faults did nothing to erode her love, but strengthened it, in the way of love, against a darker day.
That darker day was not slow in coming.
On the seventh night that Lily danced, with the cream of Megalopolis, on the Phony Moon, Livia led her away. The witch led the girl across the Crystal Bridge to the Real Moon. The rulers of Megalopolis met there, in secret, in fear of their promised end, and in defiance of the auguries that told them of it, auguries that appeared thick and fast, as the days turned.