Otherwise (45 page)

“Winter’s coming,” I said.

“No,” she said sleepily. “No, it’s not.”

“It has to sometime.”

“No.”

“Well, if winter …”

“Hush,” she said.

EIGHTH FACET

I
n a winter of rain, long after this, after my year with a saint, after my letter from Dr. Boots, a winter that I spent alone and often asleep, there was a trick I learned my mind can do: sometimes, halfway between waking and sleep, it would grow young again. How can I explain it? As though, for a brief moment, I would be a younger self; or as though a whole moment of my past would be given back to me, complete, no part of it missing, and so suddenly that often I wouldn’t know which moment it was; before I could learn, I would fall asleep, or the effort of concentration would bring me awake and it would be lost.

Well, this was interesting, and I had time to practice it—in fact I had nothing else at all to do—and there were times I could do it for some time together, all my being reliving a past time, except for a small watching eye to marvel at it. I thought I was at the end of my life in that endless winter, and it seemed right that I should be allowed to review, in bits and glances, my short life, which seemed so long to me: like Mbaba going through the contents of her carved chests. I had no choice about when I find myself; I could be two or ten. I could be on the roofs in summer, my head thumping with heat under a hat and a veil, tending the bees with my mother. I could be deep in, in winter, in the stuffy warmth, learning Rings with Once a Day, my head full of that winter’s notions, with that winter’s flavor: because each season of each year—could it be each day, each morning and evening?—has its own taste, distinct, entirely forgotten, till you taste it again.

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn’t itself be told.

And once I closed my eyes, and waited, and didn’t move, and found myself in my tenth spring, sitting with the others at Buckle cord’s door, looking out at the flowering trees that littered with petals the way that led to the south, and watching come up that way, stark in their black clothes against the pink and white spring, a band of travelers, come to trade for bread. Around me the translucence of Buckle cord’s walls pale yellow in the sun; beneath me the dirt of the floor, laid with bright rugs; beside me in their figured cloaks Water cord’s traders and the pale sacks of bread. And next to me, just then slipping her hand from mine, Once a Day. I came awake in winter, wide-eyed, cold, my heart beating; and listened to the cold rain falling.

For many weeks that spring Once a Day had talked of nothing but the traders of Dr. Boots’s List, who were to come; when she wasn’t talking of them she was silent. The traders of the list came every year in the spring, they were almost our only visitors, and their arrival was a great event, but to Whisper cord they were more than visitors. “They’re my cousins,” Once a Day said, a word I didn’t understand; when I asked her what she meant, she couldn’t explain, except that it tied her closely to them.

“How can that be?” I said. “They aren’t truthful speakers. They aren’t your cord. You don’t even know their names. Not one name.”

“My cord is Olive’s,” she said, “and Olive was of the League. So is Dr. Boots’s List. That’s what ‘cousins’ means.”

“The League is over and dead,” I said. “Olive said so.”

“Don’t talk,” she said, “about what you don’t know.”

There were a dozen or more coming up the way now, mostly men in wide low black hats ringed around with flowers. As they came closer we could hear their singing: or perhaps not singing, for there weren’t any words, and no tune either, only a low humming in different tones and volumes, a burr here and a rumble there, changing as one left off or another started, each with his own sound. The old men and women of Water cord went down the hill to meet them, and the younger after to take their burdens, intricately tied packs and cases and bundles. There were greetings all around, quiet and formal, and the black-hatted men and tall women came up through Buckle cord’s door into the pretty rooms they make near the outside, where I waited with Once a Day and the others come out to greet them. The bells they wore jingled and they talked in odd burring accents and old blurred speech, and their bundles were laid aside till fruit sodas and winter nuts were brought. Once a Day wouldn’t take her eyes from them, though if one in his survey of those sitting there happened to look at her she looked away; I hadn’t before seen the smile she smiled at them.

From a distance, black and bearded, they had seemed severe, but when they were close it was otherwise; their long straight robes were minutely decorated in gold and colors, and caught in complex folds for show, and their bells were tied on at surprising places that made you laugh when they rang. In their jingling, slow-smiling midst, you felt them to be people of immense ease and comfort, with grace and energy enough to sit forever. They reminded me of Painted Red telling about St. Olive’s cat.

Bread from the fall gathering was handed around by the Water cord traders to the visitors, whose bells and bracelets sounded as they passed the glittering handful of flakes from hand to hand to be felt and sniffed and looked at. Old In a Corner threw handfuls of it into the great brass mouth of St. Bea—almost as large as life—that topped a huge amber glass pipe, moved here to the outside on a tripod the day before in expectation of guests. It was hundreds of years old, and one of Buckle cord’s chief treasures, even though it had no story about it except how old it was, so Palm cord wouldn’t have thought it such a wonder.

One of the traders came and lowered himself gracefully to sit next to Once a Day. He was a brown, wrinkled man like a nut, his wrists and hands gnarled and rooty, but his smile was broad and his eyes alert and smiling too as he looked down at Once a Day, who looked away from him, overcome. When he looked away, she looked up at him; when he looked down at her, she looked away. Then she undid from her wrist the bracelet of blue stones she had found in an old chest and claimed as her own.

She held it up to him, and he took it lightly in his yellow-nailed fingers. “This is nice,” he said. He turned it, and held it to the light; he smiled “What do you want to trade for it? What do you want?”

“Nothing,” she said.

He lifted his eyebrows at her, passing the bracelet from hand to hand; then he smiled, and clasped the bracelet around his own wrist, and without a word, giving it a brief shake to settle it among the others he wore, attended to the trading again. Once a Day, with a secret smile, took up in her hand a corner of his black robe that lay near her, and held it.

Through the afternoon the men and women of the List opened their cases, laid out their goods, and the Bread was measured out. They had brought Four Pots, each set of four in its own case; it was the black one of these, which contained a rose-colored stuff, that had made me dream with Painted Red, and the others are for other uses; the List calls them “medicine’s daughters,” and they alone know the secret of them. They had implements and odd pieces of angel silver, which they called “stainless steel.” They had boxes and jars filled with sweet herbs and dried spices, sugar made from beets, and flea powder for cats; for Buckle cord, old things to fix, edged tools, angel-made nuts with their own bolts attached; for Palm cord, ancient found things, keys, whistles, and a ball of glass inside which a tiny house was snowed on.

For these we traded glass bowls and other glass, spectacles bound in plastic, papers for smoking, rose, yellow, and blue, honeycomb, turtle-shell polished to look like plastic, and yards and yards of translucent plastic ribbon on which were hundreds of square pictures, good for belts. And of course Bread, in sacks, as valuable to them as the medicines they brought were to us. In two or three rooms the trading went on filled with sweet smoke, a murmur of talk, and the deepening color from the yellow walls; so many wanted to trade, or just to see the visitors and hear them, that I had to give up my place, but Once a Day kept hers near the brown man who wore her bracelet.

The visitors slept that night with Whisper cord, in twos and threes in rooms far from Path and near the outside—these were ancient precautions, just forms now, but still observed—and late at night, if you passed the rooms where they were, you saw them deep in talk, or laughing together. And I did pass by, not daring to enter their circles though no one had said I was forbidden, and loitered outside, trying to overhear what passed between them.

In the first dawn I awoke alone, crying out because I saw a sudden face looking down at me, but there was no one there. As though summoned, and too much still asleep to ignore the summons, I followed Path quickly toward Buckle cord’s door, running from dim pool to dim pool of blue light which poured from skylights above; no one was awake. But when I came near Buckle cord’s door there were other shapes coming onto Path, and I hid and watched.

Dr. Boots’s List was leaving, guided out by a woman of Whisper cord, their big packs on their shoulders altering their shapes in the dimness. The door was shown them, a square of blue dawn growing brighter, and the woman withdrew without farewell. They waited a moment till they had all collected, and started toward the door; and someone small darted out from Path to overtake them.

I stepped out from where I hid and took Once a Day’s arm, somehow not surprised now though I hadn’t for a moment suspected it. “Wait,” I said.

“Let me go,” she said.

“Tell me why.”

“No.”

“Will you come back?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Tell me you’ll come back. Promise. Or I’ll follow you. I’ll tell Seven Hands, and In a Corner, and your Mbaba, and we’ll follow you and bring you back.” I spoke in a frantic, rapid whisper, only half-aware of what I said. I hadn’t released her, and now she took hold of my arm that held her, and so we stood joined, staring at each other’s half-seen faces.

“I gave you Money,” she said, quiet but intent. The Money was in my sleeve; I was never without it. “I gave you Money and you must do what I say.” She took my hand from her. “Don’t follow me. Don’t tell anyone where I’ve gone, not today, not tomorrow, not till I’m far away. Don’t think about me any more. By the Money I gave you.”

I was stilled, hopeless and afraid; and she turned away. The last of Dr. Boots’s List, the brown, rooty man, glanced back at her as she hurried to catch him.

“In the spring,” I said. “You’ll come back.”

“This is spring,” she said, not looking back; and she was gone. I went to the door and watched them, cloaked and hatted in the misty dawn, go single-file away to the south; and Once a Day in a blue dress, her black hair flying, running to catch them; and I thought, before the mist, or tears, made them invisible, I saw one take her hand.

I hid that day, for there was no one I could go to who wouldn’t question me, no one I could talk to that my speech wouldn’t betray me to. Almost, almost, in an agony of doubt, I went to Seven Hands; but I didn’t. She wouldn’t be missed unless I raised the alarm, for she could be anywhere, and safe anywhere, in the tangle of Belaire; but I didn’t know if it was best. I knew nothing, and so I left the decision to her. I thought: it’s been arranged; Whisper cord arranged it; grownups decided on it. I didn’t know if this was true, but I tried to believe it; and I hid.

Seeking places where I would be alone, I dug deeper into the old warren, and came, late, to the room Once a Day had led me to the spring before, the room that on its walls of angelstone bore the little house where the two children and the old woman went in and out their little doors according to the weather, and the false leg stood in a corner.

How could it be that I hadn’t known? We had been like two fingers of the same hand; we were truthful speakers; yet I hadn’t known, any more than I understood now. Perhaps, I thought, it hadn’t been till that very moment, that dawn, that she had decided; but I couldn’t believe that. She had known, and planned it, and thought about it, thought—it must be—about nothing else for days; and yet I hadn’t known.

I thought about what she had said: cousins; and how she, who was Whisper, was of the League even as Dr. Boots’s List was, however distantly. I thought that whatever secrets Olive had brought from the League that Whisper cord knew, Dr. Boots’s List must know more, just as they knew medicine and traveled, as the old League had; I thought about what Painted Red had said, that for Whisper cord a secret isn’t something you won’t tell, but something which can’t be told.