This Last Island of Beauty
Fiction - by Simon Kewin
The garden had shrunk again overnight.
Syzygy Perland paced it out. She knew what she would find, but she did it anyway. Her stiff hips complained as she forced herself into yard-long strides. The low stone walls surrounding her little square garden were as immovable as ever. Lichen encrusted the rocks that someone, long ago, had slotted together to form the square wall. She couldn’t have budged any of them if she’d tried yet, unmistakably, they’d moved. Overnight, as she writhed in the grip of her nightmares, her garden had shrunk by another foot.
She checked again, past the bed of forget-me-nots, the herb bed with its cloud of marjoram and thyme, the lavender with its heady, purple smells. There was no doubt. She shuffled to the low wooden gate that was the only way in and the only way out, the gate she had never stepped through. Once they had been high, ornate gates wrought from steel. Once the wall had been vast, surrounding her palace and its grounds, and now it was this tiny patch of beauty and her in her ramshackle hut. That was how it was. Outside, the grey winds howled, searing the blackened wastelands. She understood why her world was shrinking, of course. The protective magic was hers, woven by her, and it was fading just as she was fading. It would not be long now. She felt the hard knot of malignity within her when she moved. The canker that was slowly eating her, the fleck of evil in the garden of her body. It was a bottomless well into which she was falling.
The entity she thought of as the Fury was there, outside the gate, lashing forwards and backwards as it sought a way in. Its features were a blur; it was a bundle of lines held together by fog and cobwebs, but she could feel the malice burning off it, like smoke coiling off smouldering autumn leaves. It wanted to devour her. It hated her little patch of defiant beauty. It had devoured so much that had once been glorious.
She ignored it and peered through the brass telescope on its rickety wooden tripod set up by the gate, seeking some sign of others out there, another island of life in the horror. As always, she saw nothing. No colour, no life, no hope.
“Come to me. Let me in.”
Always it spoke like this, luring her, cajoling her. The Fury’s words were the wind moaning through the branches of a dead tree in the depths of winter. It was what lurked at the bottom of the well, and it would have her in the end. But not yet.
“Come, come. Let me in.”
She turned and walked away, paying it no heed, stopping instead at the poppies to harvest a few more seeds. Fresh ones worked best. The plants were brown and desiccated, dead but still standing. She knelt, ignoring the knife-sharp pains in her knees and picked off one of the pods, tapping it to let a cascade of the tiny black specks fill her cupped hand, like the severed heads of so many ants. Climbing back to one leg and then the other, she returned to her hut.
The wooden cabinet stood beside the cot she slept upon. Each of its ninety-six drawers could be pulled open by a brass handle, but it held much more than that. Seeds, berries, cuttings, rootstocks—all were contained within it, magically preserved. An entire garden, in potentia. Once, she’d planned for the day when she could return her world to its glory using the contents of this cabinet. Now, she collected simply because that was all that remained.
She rotated the stiff metal dial on the side, the enchantments woven into the wood moving the compartment she needed into place. The etched brass label on each drawer also changed as the drawers behind appeared and disappeared. Had she worked the enchantments to create this fantastical cabinet, or had some unremembered court magician laboured over it? It didn’t matter. She tipped most of the poppy seeds into the relevant drawer and carried the remaining few to her little table.
She sat. Lines of sunlight streamed in through the cracks in her walls. The broken triangle of mirror showed her the lined face of an old, tired woman. She had become her own grandmother. The spell she intended to work was a simple one. She hated herself for weaving it once again; it was an admission of failure, a flight, but it was something she did more and more. The escape from the pain of her old bones was welcome, too. She tipped the seeds into the pestle, adding a drop of her own blood pricked from her thumb as well as the other herbs the spell needed. She plucked out one of the ink black beetles that she kept in a jar and, holding its hard body between thumb and finger, bit off each of its wiggling legs, letting the ichor drip from the dying creature to complete the concoction.
She pounded the ingredients, murmuring the syllables of the spell, then took the bitter paste into her mouth. In moments, the lines of her broken hovel faded and she was back as she’d once been, Queen Syzygy of Greater Perland.
She stands in the intricate knot garden while a servant holds a taffeta canopy overhead to keep the sun off. Scents of roses and jasmine fill her nose. The palace’s air is always rich with flowers and herbs. Another servant hands her a sorbet in a silver chalice. She ignores the offering. She narrows her eyes, peering into the distance, over the rose garden, beyond the trees. At the far end of the greensward the wall is just visible, a black line. It is high enough to keep what lies beyond from her gaze. In these days—she is aware on some level that this is a vision, a memory—there are people there, and houses. They are her people. They throng outside, crammed into their hovels, scrabbling up roots to eat from the mud, living their grim, short lives. The stench from them is the reason she has planted her flowers. An island of beauty where she can live out her years. The magics she has woven to keep the world out.
Is the Fury out there? It appeared around the time she worked her warding magic. Perhaps her spells attracted it, like moths flocking to a candle flame in the darkness.
She turns away, to walk to the palace where, in marble courtyards, water tinkles and the sweet air is pleasantly cool. Up above her, atop the highest tower, stands the observatory from which she studies the stars. She likes to look at the stars, likes their distance and their perfection. Gardeners labour at her feet, trimming each blade of grass to the perfect length, removing any petal that shows the first signs of decay. She pays them no attention.
Soon, too soon, the colours of that day faded and she was back in her drab and dusty hut, the hard wood of the cot beneath her back. When she tried to sit up, the familiar agony within her raged suddenly sharp, tearing through her insides. With a gasp, she clutched her hands to her belly. The pain rolled through her, larger than her whole body. It drifted backwards and forwards, and by its movement she knew it. It was the creature outside the walls. That sickening malevolence was somehow inside her.
Crying from the pain of it, she crawled on all fours to the door of the hut, fearing what she would find but needing to know.
The walls, finally, were breached. They had shrunk in again, the garden’s loss of size visible to her eye, but it was much worse than that. The ancient stones had fallen, collapsing into rough piles, crushing the plants she had tended for so many years.
And the Fury. The malign entity was there, flying across the beds and leaving behind only dead shoots, rotting blooms. All her work was undone. Death had come, finally, to her garden. Still crawling, she tried to meet it, but she was spent, all her strength sucked into that well. The ugliness she detested had finally overwhelmed her.
She slumped to the ground, the world turning dark for a moment. She lay on her back, staring at the iron sky, ground hard beneath her. And the Fury, its shifting features close to her face, as if it were deciding how best to consume her.
“No,” was all she could manage.
“I have come for you.” Its voice was clearer, now, harder.
“Take me, but leave the garden. Please. Let this island of beauty remain.”
“Your flowers bloom from dirt and decay,” it said. “Do you not see it?”
The creature’s voice sounded more human than usual. There was a sadness to it that confused her, too. Shouldn’t it have been triumphant, exultant?
“What are you?” she whispered. “Why are you doing this?”
“You ask me that? You know who I am, although you deny it.”
“I do not.”
Something in its features changed then. She tried to blink clarity into her old eyes. What had always been foggy was taking on substance. Hard lines were coalescing in the mist.
The Fury had stopped lashing to-and-fro and its face, finally, was becoming visible. It looked back at her with her own face, a younger version of the one she saw in her broken fragment of mirror every day.
“You know me,” the creature repeated. “I am your rage and your guilt. I am you.”
“I crave beauty, but you want to destroy it.”
“Beauty is only a moment. The plant dies in the winter, but the seed survives, clinging to life among stones and darkness.” She could feel the creature’s touch on her cheek. There was an unexpected gentleness to it.
“I don’t understand,” she managed.
“You are the canker. Your magic drained the colour from the land, pulled it to yourself in your arrogance. You are the well into which everything is falling, into which it has always been falling.”
“How do you know of that?”
“I told you; I know because I am you. The part that you denied. You closed yourself off from the world, and you lost a part of yourself, too.”
Finally unable to resist, Syzygy Perland closed her eyes.
The fog filled her, and it was warm where she’d expected the chill of ice. The sharp pains tearing at her subsided in the bask of it. Inside her mind, other walls were tumbling down, revealing what had lain outside them all along.
She blinked her eyes open again, found she could stand. The fog was fading, dissipating into mist, into sunlight. She walked to the little wooden gate, still standing even though the walls on either side were rubble. The telescope on its tripod had tumbled to the ground. She pushed the gate open. It creaked but didn’t resist. It was just an old wooden gate. She stepped through. Where she walked, with each step, the muddy grey tinged to green.
She stood and breathed. The palace that had become a tiny patch of garden: she had fled from life. Carriage-journeys outside the palace walls as a child had been filled with such horror. Horror, but also a certain…fascination. She relived those journeys often, the images etched on her mind in sharp lines. She had watched the growing distaste upon the faces of her mother and father. The smells, the cries, the stares of the people outside. She had been told again and again: these were her inferiors. They were barely human. They welcomed their debasement; they knew no better. Now, she saw that they were still out there, the people she hadn’t seen. Gaunt, tattered figures. Somehow, they had survived. They saw her, knew her, but they neither bowed nor ran. They watched her, unsure. She had hated them and feared them, their squalid lives.
Syzygy returned to her little hut. It, too, was falling, the walls sagging to the ground. She would never sleep in it again. But the magical cabinet of ninety-six drawers was intact. Seeds not for a garden, but for a new world.
Carrying the cabinet back through the gate, she walked towards the people to share with them what she had.