I was wrong, of course. La Reine des Neiges knew me far better than I had ever been able to get to know myself. Presumably, she intended to demonstrate that she knew humankind better than humankind had ever got to know itself.
It wasnt really her opera, although she was its composer. It was my opera, intended for my ears only. It was the stories of Prince Madoc and Tam Lin rolled ingeniously into one, with a few additional embellishments echoing idiosyncratic features of my own biography. Damon was in it, as Cadwallon. The daughter of Aculhua was a curious alloy of Diana Caisson and Christine Caine. La Reine des Neiges played the Queen of the Fays. Janet of Carterhaugh was no one I had ever actually known, being far too perfect to have been tainted by mundane existence.
In this retelling, Madoc Tam Lin actually went to Hell, as the tithe due to the Ultimate Adversary, and Janet had to come to reclaim him: a female Orpheus outdoing her model. The metamorphoses were all in there, reflected by the metamorphoses of the music. The singing voices were crystal clear and incredibly penetrating. I wasnt hearing them in the sense that they were sound waves vibrating my eardrums they were playing directly into my brain and into my mind. The meaning of the words was amplified and extended by the emotional tones and signals, forging a whole whose kind I had never glimpsed before.
The opera had a happy ending, according to the conventions of that kind of fiction. Janet won me and I won her and we both won free. If thered been anyone in the audience but me theyd probably have needed a bucket to collect the tears of joy except that la Reine des Neiges could have supplied them all with customized operas of their own, whose effect went far beyond mere empathy.
The meal prepared for me by la Reine had been the best I had ever eaten or imagined eating but it had only been a meal. The sharpness of vision I had experienced since being abducted into la Reines VE had been impressive, but it was only a special effect. The music was something else entirely.
I had never understood music, because it had never reached me before. I had perceived, vaguely, that it contained and concealed meanings, but I had never been able to decipher them. I had never felt the resonance of music in any but the crudest manner. I had tapped my toe in time with the beat, and that was about it. Beyond that kind of resonance, however, is another: an emotional and spiritual resonance which goes to the very essence of human being. The machine-generated popular music of my own day had been based on averaging out the most elementary responses of which human brains were generally capable; it was lowest common denominator music. La Reines opera my opera was at the opposite end of the spectrum. It was unique. As she played it, employing hundreds of instruments
and voices, she played me . The opera was a masterpiece, and more. It was an analytical portrait: a mirror in which I could find myself reflected as I had never been reflected before.
It seemed impossible. La Reine had only known me for a matter of days. Whatever records had survived from my first life had been transcribed by such rudimentary equipment that to call them sketchy would be a great exaggeration. And yet she had the means to reach into the very heart of me. She had the means to stir the depths of my soul how else can I put it? and she knew exactly what the results of her agitation would be.
Perhaps I exaggerate. Im a man like any other, and for all my fetishistic attempts to be different and unique Im probably more like the rest than I care to think. My individuality is mostly froth: a matter of coincidental names and accidents of happenstance. Perhaps La Reine didnt have to know very much about me in order to convince me that she knew me through and through. Perhaps it was all trickery, just as music itself is all trickery but at the time it was overwhelming. At the time, it swept me away. I thought that it told me who and what I was more succinctly, more accurately and more elegantly than I had ever imagined possible, because rather than in spite of the fact that it employed the seemingly ridiculous artifices of opera.
In the space of a couple of hours, la Reine des Neiges taught me the artistry of music. But that wasnt the point of the exercise. That was only the beginning. Opera employs music to facilitate the telling of a story: to make the meaning and the emotional content of the story more obviously manifest. The story my opera told was only my story in a metaphorical sense, entirely reliant on my fascination with the names I had been given, but the fact that it was mine, and mine alone, made my identification with its hero complete. I lived as he lived; I felt as he felt. I went to Hell, and was redeemed by the love of a good woman.
Love was another human matter that I had never quite contrived to master. I suppose that I had loved Diana Caisson, after an admittedly paltry fashion, and that she, in her own way, had loved me but I had never loved or been loved as Janet of Carterhaugh loved my avatar Madoc Tam Lin. Nor had I ever loved or been loved as the Queen of the Fays loved that alter ego. So la Reines opera made a considerable contribution to my sentimental education, no less considerable because it was wrought with trickery and narrative skill. The fact that the hero of my opera had no real existence, being only a phantom of mechanical imagination, was part and parcel of the lesson.