Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Homer
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage...
Richard Lovelace
"What are you doing out here," said Alice in a calculating fashion, eyeing the mysterious woman before her with a challenging, almost flippant, air, before catching herself with a frown and adding politely, "Your... Highness."
Whatever assumptions the Duchess had been making about the girl standing before her (and indeed, she was operating under several), the cool woman in white velveteen would not find their following conversation a reason to be perplexed. She rather thought them a going concern, the idiosyncrasies of her subjects and land, and wasn't the type to ruin a nice lie-down over it. This not only for Alice's having spent so much time among mad people that she was understandably apt to mimic their ways after a while, but also because of what Alice wound up telling her-which would occupy the stately woman for quite some time.
"Out for a breather," replied the Duchess, her voice ever a smooth enigma. "An impromptu visit; I rarely make it out to these border lands anymore." They both looked about the open catch for a moment and listened to the snow falling. "It all starts to look the same in weather like this." She breathed in through her nose, and a bit of steam escaped her in the neatest fashion. "But you have not answered my question, which I asked you first."
"Taking a turn about, myself," said Alice, casual, going over the plaster golden bells carved on a white pony nearby.
"How perspicacious; we are of one mind," said the Duchess, and moved her mouth into something like a little smile. Alice gave her a sidelong look, and the woman gestured lovely to a nearby sleigh on the platform, hand in black glove. "Shall we sit down and talk of many things? It has been so long since we've seen you last." Alice had absolutely no intention of sitting down with this woman, let alone voluntarily spending five minutes breathing near her, but did not declare it in quite those terms.
"I must beg your gracious pardon," she intoned, sniffing with the loftiest of nose-raises, which really did not help the fact that her nose was growing chill. "I had it not in mind to stay out long, for it is rather cold, and I am not feeling well."
"Perhaps I shall amend your title to something more descriptive," replied the monarch, and Alice turned toward her to see that she was amused, "Lady Mondegreen might suit you. You did seem, although perhaps I misjudged you, shall I say, exuberant upon first seeing this old thing." Alice took a moment to walk about and inspect the old thing of which the Duchess spoke. Images carved into the center rotella gave sequential dramatization to a man falling in love with a woman and promptly turning into a wendigo before chasing her like a hine o'er the hills. Rhapsodies of love and scissored jaws. It would have been disturbing in any other shades but these charming pastels with ivory inlay.
"I wonder what it's doing all the way out here," said Alice to herself, "Probably there was a gigantic tree here, and someone carved this out of it, and it plays Mars, Bringer of War or something."
"Actually," and here Alice nearly jumped, for she had gotten somewhat lost in her own speculation and the Duchess was suddenly standing next to her, "It plays Tales from the Vienna Woods, of that I am sure, but I remember hearing from someone once that it's broken." Alice leaned in what braver observers might have categorized as an openly petulant fashion against a nearby barley pole.
Toward the Duchess Alice felt the tender, sisterly sympathies she might have felt for a scorpion recently taken up residence in her slipper. The woman who pushed the Hatter upon her as guide and jerked him back with a hook just as they were starting to get on, but more importantly as things were beginning to make sense, she thought insistently. That was right, wasn't it? But she was Alice, and this in itself created a conflict between her obligations in politesse and the overwhelming urge to poll this woman's feelings on the controversial political issue of a good kick in the shins.
"Where is the Hatter?" she said, ever careful to tiptoe softly about issues, approaching them with delicacy, never one to suddenly become rash and get directly and pointedly to the heart of the matter with tones-of-voices and arms-crossed-over-selves.
"The papers say he is exiled," said the Duchess, apparently musing, for she was suddenly brushing her gloved fingertips over the gilt on a large cricket's harness.
"For treason. Are they correct?"
"They do exaggerate in their way," was the reply Alice got.
"Well, where exactly is that... if I may ask? Some sort of prison?" The Duchess unbent, a thoughtful expression reaching her, and said,
"He is where he is, and that is an idle place indeed," in a voice about half a mile away. Alice stood with her shoulders squared, giving the woman's profile a look coming up on disgusted loathing, but managed to reign it back in. "I have often speculated if... if he is not the cause of so many problems."
"How can one man be the cause of every problem, I don't quite see," said Alice in a quieter way upon hearing this reflection. The Duchess looked up from inspecting her gloves.
"Given enough time and space, even in the smallest amounts, anyone can effect the proper course of events."
"Why was it necessary to exile him at all? Or without any warning, or a proper trial? The Queen of Hearts at least did that..."
"I am not the only decision-maker," she said simply. "And I act in what I perceive to be the best interests of this country. But I will not shy from accrediting my own decisions, be their outcomes good or bad." She took a sudden breath, "Did he tell you anything that night?"
"Cherchez la femme," said Alice, and felt very curious for having said it, for the way the Duchess simply outright asked about the night, it was offputting knowing that she knew what had happened.
"And you think, I think, he meant me?"
"I don't know who else he might have meant." Alice adjusted her hands inside her warmer.
"What about you?" A crow began to heckle them from nearby, and Alice turned to watch it flap its wings at them from across the clearing aggressively before launching into the sky. "Find the woman, find yourself."
"It is possible, though at a moment like that I can't see him asking me to reflect upon it—I am sure he was more concerned of his own safety, and of that precious hat." She felt like slumping down in the sleigh after all.
"Is there anything—" began the Duchess, "Anything at all about these people disappearing, that you know?" A strange twin star was beginning somewhere within Alice, a kind of contrition for having been so rude to this woman, whose features had changed genuinely into a sad worry, but also an unlabeled feeling regarding this worry over mysterious disappearances when she seemed herself to have the power and inclination to pull people out of thin air and sally them forth into idle places.
"It's something in the forest," intoned the girl in a low voice. "I've seen it, like a great whirling storm or dust devil, but the Mock Turtle thought it looked like a mirage or a sheet of water. You can hear it before it comes, a low buzzing and burbling—" They both looked at each other, both thinking the same unspoken name.
"No, the Jabberwock is long dead," said the Duchess evenly. She flexed her fingers and pulled gently at her collar, adjusting the diaphanous muffler beneath it, and Alice was struck for just a moment how the woman had her hair arranged in its usual twist, but so it covered her ears in the cold now.
"The March Hare is gone," said Alice finally, looking at the earlobes peeking out.
"I am sorry for it." And she did sound it.
"I tried to pull him out of the Hatter's hat," said sardonic Alice more to herself than anybody, "But I'm not enough of a magician, or I didn't reach far enough." The Duchess gave a short laugh, and was about to say something, but there came suddenly through the snow and the cold open air a train whistle so fresh and full of smoke they both looked up, and pretty soon a young page in a peacoat appeared and bowed.
"Well," said the Duchess, "This does cut short our conversation, but I must take my leave." The regal comportment upon her, she looked at Alice with a steady eye and made a strange gesture with her palm. "Mind you don't stray too far. Be seeing you." She blent quickly with the snow and was gone before she had rounded the merry-go-round.
Alice leaned against the pole nearby, running her finger over the little jar inside her warmer, staring off into space. She did feel slightly ill now—and tired, and frustrated, and useless. She should have tried harder to glean something out of the Duchess, anything important, thinking this now before she realized she was standing at the moment in the center scene when the man was holding a parasol over the shy lady. The parasol handle was a real handle, and it opened out to show the control box, with several switches, but a blank hole where a winding key should have gone. She took out the hammer, stuck the handle in the notch, and turned it, hearing a crank and a grinding clack as the levers engaged themselves. The calliope began slow and fidgety before popping a few times into its lively organ, and the fairy lights in the canopy flickered in jeweled patterns.
It did indeed play Tales, in a hooting tooting way, and the platform and the center revolved on separate speeds so the images turned into a zoetrope of the man endlessly courting the woman and then eating her, courting her and then eating her, until at last Alice let the box come round again and she turned the hammer back sideways, the lights flicking off, the sound cutting out, the horses all heaving to a sudden end, a great stillness coming into the forest. The sun was lowering, and she stepped off the platform.
"Hi, hang along there, wait! Hullo!" cried a voice in the woods.
"Hello?" said Alice, thinking perhaps the Duchess had forgot a glove.
"This way, over here!" She shuffled through the snow, looking all around, but there was no one, and it half occurred to her that it might have been a myna bird or some other trickster, and was just turning to go back.
"No, wait, really!" said the voice from high above her. She looked up and could see a figure standing on a branch in a bare oak tree. "Hullo!" it cried, waving its arm at her, "I saw the lights from the roundabout, I'm so glad you could fix it!"
"Oh, well, you're welcome," she ventured.
"Come this way, she'll want to thank you properly," called the voice, the figure swung out, and Alice followed the trees that trembled and shook slightly as it progressed farther, where the forest grew a bit darker and the trees still had some leaves, or great drapey moss still hung. Low green lights sat among the notches in the pines. Voices above her conferred, one excited, one lower, solid. There was a long slow creak with the sound that a weed makes when it doesn't want to let go of the earth, and Alice turned full around to find herself nose to nose with an upside down woman.
Of course she started, not because the woman was upside down, or very close to Alice's face, but for the lack of warning; otherwise she might have taken this first meeting with a bit more aplomb off the mark.
"Hello," said the woman in a different voice from the first one. "And who might you be?"
"Er... Lady Mondegreen," said Alice on a whim. The woman was dangling from a very long piece of what looked like cloth rather than rope, and she reached out to wrap it about her legs and bring her head up proper.
"Huh!" said the woman, now with her legs going out in opposite directions in what looked to be a very painful contortion, but her face was bright and interested in this newcomer. "You're that girl everybody's on about, aren't you?" This lady had a very pointy nose that turned up at the end, and an energetic, athletic way about her that was not bulky or Amazonian, but spry and lean. But Alice was chiefly concerned with the arrangement of her glossy black hair, arranged into two neat buns at the back of her neck. It made her head look like one giant—"This is the Court of Clubs, you're quite welcome here!"
"Oh my," said Alice very slowly, and then roused herself. "Thanks very much, um...?"
"I'm the Queen, so you see," said the Queen of Clubs, and pointed with her finger out and thumb up at the tiny gold crowns on either side of her collar; her outfit was a black and white affair that had Alice struggling to keep her eyebrows in check, for it left no question as to the development of her muscle groups. "Page tells me you've fixed our roundabout, I'm awfully indebted to you, you know."
"Not at all," replied the girl. "Your... roundabout?"
"We used to be a circus," said the Queen, twisting herself a seat on the ribbon, "But the merry-go-round broke down, and we're stuck over here, and we don't come down at all, for just anybody, and so it's just been sitting there, rotting, I imagine."
"It works rather nicely now, and in good health, I think."
"Brilliant," said the Queen in genuine feeling, "How on earth did you manage to fix it? You must be a genius, you must." Alice was unsure about that.
"It only needed a winding key." The Queen opened her mouth and stared at Alice very wide.
"Good Heavens," she said now in quiet reverence, "I never think of these things myself." She turned over into a backflip and began to swing back and forth. "Would you do us the interminable honor of staying for perhaps a little while? Such intelligence; you can help us think up a way to get it crossed back over the border."
"Border?" Alice suddenly felt a low dip. Two wires and a bar were lowering into her plane of view, and another athletically-keened female with sharp hair cut to her chin appeared on the swing, and though it was a very narrow bar, she lounged upon it as one does a comfortable cushion.
"Ah, Page," the Queen said, "This is... you said Lady Mondegreen? What a curious name indeed! This is my daughter."
Alice thought it was rather curious that the princess was called Page, but apparently this was her name, and, as the Queen put it, "I don't have a Jack, for I have no son, and there is no sense in calling her a Jack, for she is not one at all, and I am glad to have her."
"You're in the Farisides now," said the Page, Alice recognizing her voice as the one in the wilderness, "I'm terrifically sorry, I got so excited, but you are in our jurisdiction now, and I do think Mummy will be glad to extend to you the privilege of entourage." The Queen nodded, pursing her lips, all content and pride. Alice was trying to catch her breath.
"Does this mean I can't get back?"
"Back to where, dear?"
"To the capital, I'm supposed to be there, I have a house and everything, I've got orders—"
"To the capital... Oh, don't distress yourself," said this new monarch soothingly, reaching from her ribboned perch to put a hand upon the dear girl's shoulder, "Those people are mad, you know. Loony to the gills." She made a face and wound her finger in a circle out in the air rather than close to her temple.
"But the Duchess said—"
"The Duchess! I hope you aren't in league with her," this with an airly laugh. "I won't say she's a rotter or anything; she has done terribly good work helping us out with this nasty business of ruling, it does so get in the way sometimes."
"I thought she usurped the Queen of Hearts, she suspectly claimed to succeed to the throne," said Alice. The Page reached up and pulled down another bar swing and handed Alice onto it. While they three rose slowly into the air, passing trapezes and others on the ribbons, the Queen said,
"Ursurpation is such a vowel-filled phrase," dismissively, as though she were thinking sweet fond thoughts of her sister, "It's just that we all need a good break from the stuff of thinking every now and again, that's all."
"Have you seen a map of the Wonderland?" asked the Page as they helped Alice step onto a tree branch high up. She folded over the hand warmer with the jar inside and tucked it under her arm.
"Er, I've seen a globe of it," she said, concentrating on not falling half a mile out of a tree.
"Right, so you know how it's all set up, the four states and the center, which is the capital. It's a bit of a 'fallow land' system. All the Courts rotate every few years or so; one leaves their permanent place to run things generally for a bit, that way all the Courts get an even go at it."
"But wouldn't that cause the citizens distress, constantly going back and forth under different rules?"
"On the contrary," said the Queen, "They quite like feeling all perked up like that, bit of soda and vinegar in the old teapot. The Duchess fell into place because we all wanted a holiday at the same time—it's awfully convenient, since that way we have far more time between our court duties."
"Where does the Duchess go when she is on holiday?" The 'fallow fields' theory did dry up awfully quick when all five states had somebody in charge.
"Oh, I don't know," the Queen was waving over someone from a group of similarly black-haired people on bars nearby, "She hasn't gone on any that I know of. Hi there, come on!" A man with a very dashing waxed moustache and a jaunty top hat was making his way nearer them. He looked very much like a ringmaster: flat crop, tails, jodhpurs and riding boots drawing simple comparison. He seemed not inclined to remain aloft, but stepped out onto the treebranch with Alice.
"By Jove, an audience member!" he cried in the dramatist's drawl. The man clicked his heels together and bent half over to bow before uprighting again, nearly losing his hat.
"This is the King of Clubs, do come meet the Lady Mondegreen."
"She's out from Anglantine, Papa, can you believe it?" Alice looked up at the Page's words, realizing that the capital had a name with some surprise.
"Eh! With that whatsit, that blond woman, the Duchess?" He gave Alice the onceover once more. "You do look a bit like her, yars."
"I'm not related to the Duchess," said Alice, "I'm only trying to help her, something is eating creatures in the forest—"
"Are you sure you aren't the Duchess?" he said, leaning in and looking at her out from underneath an upcurved eyebrow. The King suddenly leaned back and roared with laughter, twisting his brillantine moustache between two fingers. "That would be very strange indeed, my deah, very strange!"
"Is there any way to get back into Anglantine?" she asked in a weakening voice, hoping to get somewhere with all this.
"Oh, now dear, why would you want to go back there? From here, you can go on to someplace else. It is quite unseasonable traveling weather, but then, every bit of life is an adventure, isn't it." Alice was growing quite tired now, and did not want to think about it so very much.
"You are perfectly welcome here, we haven't had anybody to watch us in ever so long since that roundabout hit a bit of a cropper, it took the whole of our floor with it; roundabouts are ever so popular these days..."
Our heroine sighed and was well on the road to a kind of despair when the Page waved her hands in the air, saying, "No, no, you must come and help me, you could use a good distraction, I can tell."
Alice was not quite so sure that a good distraction was the phrase she would use to describe the rest of her evening, but after a few drowsy turns of the wheel, her general anxieties were soothed, and they began to talk of this and that, Alice inquiring after the names of the other states.
"The other states? This one's called Farisides," said the Page, and hurled another knife. "Then there's Hinnothea, and Etlucindes, and the other one is Ottausots." She flipped another knife end over end, and it landed somewhere near Alice's ankle.
Alice mentioned the Hatter and the points upon which the Duchess had touched, and the Page let loose another dry thunk, this one sticking in a satisfactory way between the assistant's feet.
"An idle place, hmm." She threw the last knife and removed her blindfold before it went in near a rib or three. Alice looked up at it from where she had stopped spinning, and the Page came near to let her down. "Mummy, do you know any idle places around here?" The Queen was climbing up a ribbon past them, hand over hand, but paused for a moment to consider the question.
"An idyll place? I hear there's an excellent river where one might pass the time, but this time of year, it's likely to be rather idle itself."
"No, an idle place," said Alice. "Or a prison, or a place for the exiled."
"Hmm, the other states might have those, I can't remember if we do or not."
"How do I go about looking for those in the other states?"
"Oh, that would be tricky, seeing as we can't take you out there-we don't have jurisdiction to pass between states, and mind you, we haven't been down out of this court in—"
"Forever."
"Forever," repeated the Queen.
"How does one go about getting jurisdiction?"
"Oh," said the Queen now, sighing and twirling around, upside down, "You'd have to be part of a royal caravan, and those don't move in the winter."
"Is there any other way? Could I make a special request, or apply, or something?"
"What you need is someone with jurisdiction," she repeated.
"I need to find them."
"They aren't here."
"I know that," said Alice, piqued, "But I wish I could speak to them."
"Well, well," said the Page as the Queen shrugged and swung off in another direction, "In the meantime, let's have a bit of dinner and shove off to sleep, hey? I'm sure things will look nice and blue in the morning."
Alice thanked her and took their offer of a hammock for the night (blessedly one nearer the ground, though it was colder than the higher branches), wrapping her cloak about her and keeping her hands securely on the jar inside the warmer.
She had been asleep for some long time when she awoke and began to hear noises, but they were voices, and she did not pay heed until the tree she was in began to gently shake, and with it the hammock, but then the motion came in greater waves, as though someone had grabbed it and was shaking it with purpose and determination.
It was not until Alice opened her eyes really and truly that she realized someone with very large angry eyes was standing over her. It took her a moment to connect stranger looming over Alice with probably not supposed to go back to sleep before she blinked to adjust, and then she felt the scream start up somewhere near her center of gravity. These eyes had a peculiar set of heavy brows entilded above them, and a singular frown creating deep indentions between those. The dark hair had been jerked back into a severe little bun, and the great muscled arms rested, hammy fists akimbo, on a tank of a pelvis. Alice's shriek was justifiable, for anyone would reasonably begin to scream upon noticing someone hovering like an over-indulged vulture above their comfort-bedside (as uncomforting a bedside as this was), but this visitor's scowl in the morning darkness invited a particularly penetrating scream, not a girlish squeal or the stuff of a maid on a "dark and stormy night," but a musical upswing that ended flatly and abruptly, and for a reason.
"WOULD YOU KNOCK IT OFF," came the bellowing voice, nasal and trumpeting and authoritative and bossy all at once. Alice was bolt up, perfectly and absolutely awake by now, stunned and strangely glad to see this person, someone who commanded armies and shrank her opponents brassly, wildly, raucously.
"Your Majesty!" she cried in genuine astonishment, for surely by now, reader, you have ascertained that the Queen of Hearts was the one standing over Alice.
"Yes, you blistering howl of a child, stop hollering and get up!"