The Watchtower (26 page)

All the time I was in Paris I'd listened to American tourists complain about the crowds. They should come here, I thought, starting off down a cobblestone street that ran narrowly between high stone walls. I didn't see a single person on the walk into the center of town. If people were stirring in the houses I passed, they did so silently behind thick stone walls and heavy wooden shutters. Or maybe they were all on their
grandes vacances
in Brittany or the Midi. Even the town square was deserted.

Beside the ancient church I did see a sign for the rue de la fee Melusine and, following that, a bar named for her. I followed signs for "the Vestiges" of the Chateau into an open square where a few workmen in green coveralls were strewing gravel on empty paths. There was a small Office de Tourisme, but its sign told me it wasn't open until 10:00 a.m. I climbed a hill, lured by cafe umbrellas and plastic flags, but found only an empty park with a double allee of pollarded trees, colored lights strung in between them, and stone, lichen-covered benches. I sat down on one of the benches and looked out over the Vonne valley, feeling sadness seep into me with the chill of the old stone.

In the story my mother had read to me the Chateau of Lusignan was a great castle with flags flying from its many towers. Melusine had built it for her husband, Raymond, and their descendants ruled there for over four hundred years. Now there was nothing, not even a plaque to commemorate where it had once stood. There wasn't enough left perhaps to even attract a few tourists. It felt as if Melusine and the dynasty she had founded had evaporated as surely as she had dissolved into water. What was left to return her to? What would she make of her once grand home?

I wandered back down the hill and past the closed tourist office, noticing now a small wooden sign pointing again to
LES VESTIGES DU CHATEAU.
I followed the arrow down a steep, narrow dirt path that clung to the hillside below the park. As I descended, I heard the rush of water and glimpsed flashes of silver between the trees--the Vonne running below in the valley. I came across a stone wall, a bit of toppled tower covered with grass and moss, like something from a Piranesi etching. I followed the stone wall through a narrow passageway into a round clearing full of wildflowers and dragonflies. Looking up, I saw the railing of the park and understood that the park was laid out on the foundations of the old chateau and these were its crumbling battlements. The vestiges, upon which the village held its fetes. I imagined dances at night, children running in and out between the trees, old men sitting on the benches that once held up the walls of the Chateau of Lusignan.

I thought at lathat Melusine would have been happy to see the chateau she raised tumbled down into rocks and moss. In the cracks of one of the walls I found a thin stream of water burbling up from some underground stream, even now seeming to erode the rock foundation further. I took out the Poland Spring bottle, uncapped it, and held it over the spring.

"You can go home now," I said, pouring the water into the spring.

The water from the bottle joined the stream, then pooled for a moment in the cupping rock. A faint mist rose from the pool and spiraled upward. Everything was perfectly still in the grove; even the dragonflies paused in their flicker and dart. I felt the way I had on the platform in Poitiers, that time had stopped, that I was
outside
time. The mist wreathed itself into a sinuous shape--a woman with serpent tail and batlike wings. She turned to me and I saw the same green eyes I'd seen staring up at me from a pile of goo on Governors Island, only these eyes were full of joy.

"Thank you, Marguerite, my sister, for bringing me home at last."

"It's Garet," I said, recalling that Melusine had called me
Marguerite
and
sister
on Governors Island just before she'd dissolved. "Do you remember...?"

"I remember
everything,
" she said with a shudder that made the mist ripple into shards of rainbows. "Did you find the box?"

"Yes, but then Will Hughes took it. He's taking it to the Summer Country to summon the creature that made Marguerite mortal--"

"You must ssssstop him!" Melusine hissed, water droplets spraying my face. "She becomes stronger each time she's summoned, feeding on the need of those who call her. If she gets loose..." The water molecules that made up Melusine wavered in the air with her agitation. I was afraid she was about to break up again, but then she steadied herself and went on, "She'll destroy everything if she escapes the lake."

"Why?" What I really wanted to ask was, if I stopped Will from summoning the creature in the lake, then how could he become mortal? And if he didn't become mortal, how could we ever be together? But those questions all seemed a bit self-centered in the face of global annihilation. "Why does she hate humanity so much?"

Melusine rippled in the air, her molecules refracting rainbows. "It'ssss a long sssstory," she sighed.

I sat down on a rock beside her. "Go ahead. I have hours before my train."

* * *

"In the beginning the Summer Country and the human world ran side by side like two streams running to the sea." Melusine's voice trilled like church bells in the still air, her lisp gone. I felt that she'd told this story to herself and others--perhaps heard it from others--many times, and like a stutterer who only stutters on her own words but not set pieces, she was able to recite it flawlessly. "irst fey and humans lived peaceably side by side but with little interaction as we were too different. We fey were ...
ethereal
." A pulse of air and water demonstrated what she meant. "But the longer we interacted, some of us became more ...
corporeal
." The droplets in the air became heavier and grayer, like the sky before rain. "Most of us then only wanted to
play
with the humans, but some of us became so enamored of them they wanted to
be
human. We took shapes that combined their features with the animals they loved. We appeared as winged men and fish-tailed women"--she swished her own tail--"as centaurs and unicorns and dragons. We learned what it was like to feel the sun on our faces and the rush of water over our skin. We learned what hunger and thirst felt like, and desire and love ... and pain." The heavy droplets began to fall. I was afraid she'd disappear entirely, but she collected herself in time and reassembled her molecules. She looked thinner, though, and fainter, and I wondered if she would have enough time to finish her story.

"The pain drove some of us further into our own world, which made our world
deeper
and began to separate the worlds. But others of us had become addicted to the sensations, the pain as well as the joy--I think maybe there were some who actually came to like the pain best of all because it made them feel most
alive
. Some say those were the ones who began taunting humans to hurt them, but others say it was the humans who, frightened by the strange shapes we took, tortured some of us. Whoever initiated the cycle of pain, once set in motion, no one could stop it. Our leaders believed it would be best for all--humans and fey--to dwell separately. The two streams of being were diverted, the worlds divided. Only some of us refused to go back to the Summer Country, especially the ones who had become addicted to pain, both the giving and receiving of it. They became what you would call
demons
and grew so awful that our leaders saw they could not leave the humans alone to deal with them. They set four guardians to watch over the human race and patrol the demons, one for each element. But the presence of the Watchtowers enraged the demons. There was a war and for the first time fey killed fey. One of the Watchtowers, the bravest warrior, my sister Maeve, was killed."

Oberon had told me that one of the Watchtowers had been killed in a war, but he hadn't said which--and I hadn't realized that Melusine was her sister.

"Wait, does that mean you were a Watchtower?"

"Yessss," she moaned, her lisp back in force. "I loved mankind as your ancestor Marguerite loved it. But when our sister Maeve was killed, our fourth sister was so stricken she turned against mankind. She would have destroyed every last human, so Marguerite and I, aided by the leaders of the fey, trapped her in a lake that lay between the two worlds."

"That's the creature in the lake?" I demanded. "She's your sister? And Marguerite's sister, too? Which makes her..."

"Your great-aunt. Yessss."

"So if I went to her and asked as a special favor for her grandniece to give Will Hughes his mortality back..."

20
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Effigy in Stone

Of all the ways I'd imagined embarking for the Summer Country, speeding down the E50 at 140 kilometers per hour in a Peugeot had not been one of them. But there I was, strapped into the passenger seat, trying not to squeal every time Octavia La Pieuvre used one of her hands to peel a hard-boiled egg or reach in the backseat for the map. She still had two hands on the wheel, after all, and seemed to be an expert driver.

"I drove an ambulance in both World Wars," she said when I complimented her. "Nothing like dodging exploding artillery shells to hone one's reflexes. This"--she gestured at the straight highway running between flat fields--"is child's play. I want to get to the hotel in Paimpont before dark so we can both get a good night's sleep. We'll need it tomorrow."

When I'd related to her that Melusine had said we had to go to the Val sans Retour, her pearly skin had turned ashen gray, but she wouldn't tell me why the place frightened her. I'd looked it up on the Internet and found out that the Val sans Retour in the forest of Broceliande, the modern forest of Paimpont, was mentioned in Arthurian legend as the place where the enchantress Morgan le Fay had trapped her faithless lovers. Was it just a coincidence, I wondered, that Melusine had said her sister's name was Morgane?

"This creature below the lake, Mor--"

All of Octavia's hands flew up in the air and the car swerved momentarily into the next lane. "We don't speak of the Watchtower who betrayed humanity."

I clucked my tongue impatiently. "We're on our way to see her and ask her favors. I should think saying her name was the least of our problems."

Octavia's hands resettled back on the steering wheel, but she still looked inky.

"And besides," I added. "It's not like I've never heard the name before. Morgan le Fay, half sister of Arthur, sorceress, is pretty famous. Is this woman under the lake the same person?"

Octavia sighed, but didn't answer. She tilted the rearview mirror with one hand and tisked at the inky flush on her face. Only when she had withdrawn a seashell-shaped compact from her purse, administered powder to her face, and clicked shut the compact with a decisive snap did she answer my question.

"Morgan le Fay," she declaimed loudly, as if inviting the universe to smite her, "Morrigan, Modron, Muirgen ... her names are legion. She is the oldest of the four Watchtowers and the most ... elusive. She is the gentle queen who escorts Arthur to Avalon, but also the enchantress who ensnares men in the Valley of No Return. She is Morrigan, the crow queen of war and destruction, and Modron, goddess of fertility and the harvest. She ruled over death and birth and could grant immortality to humans and mortality to the fey. They say she loved humanity best of all, but when her sister Maeve was betrayed and killed by a man, she determined to destroy the whole race. Her sisters Marguerite and Melusine tricked her into the pool at the center of the forest of Brocbnde and trapped her there using her own snares and spells."