Otherwise (53 page)

She stood before me. She had put on a coat of softest black covered with stars, black as her hair. “Rush that Speaks,” she said, looking deeply into me, but like a sleepwalker, seeing something else. “How did you think about me when I wasn’t there?”

She spoke truthfully, I thought, I hoped, but her speech was masked, masked with a blank face like a cat’s or like the blank secret faces of the ones who had found me in the woods. “You never thought of me?”

The cat came from the woods, warily, and passed us. “Brom,” she said, not as though to call to it but only to say its name. It glanced once at us as it passed, and started up a path toward the camp. She watched it for a moment, and then followed. She glanced back at me, her arms crossed, and said, “Come on, then,” and all the years between now and the first day I had seen her folded up for a moment and went away, because it was just that way she had said it to me when I had followed her to Painted Red’s room when we were seven, as though I needed her protection, and she must, reluctantly, give it.

She didn’t ask how I came to be here, so I told her.

“Are you a prisoner?” she said.

“I think so,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

Something more than years had happened to Once a Day, more than a mask put over her speech. The girl who had kissed me for showing her a family of foxes, and lain down with me as Olive had with Little St. Roy, was gone, gone entirely. And I didn’t care at all, at all, so long as I could follow this girl I had found, this black-robed starred girl, forever.

EIGHTH FACET

A
t evening I sat alert among them, though they were easeful, resting their backs against the walls of their camp in the gathering dusk. For what they were discussing, they didn’t seem fierce enough.

“We could tie him to a tree,” said one of them, moving his hands in a circle as though tying me up, “and then hit him with sticks till he’s dead.”

“Yes?” said the older one, the one with gray in his beard. “And what if he doesn’t hold still while all this tying and hitting is going on?”

“I wouldn’t,” I said.

“We’d hold him,” the first said. “Use your head.”

Once a Day sat apart from me, with Brom, looking from face to face as the others spoke, not concerned in it, it seemed. I would never be able to run from them in their forest.

“If we had a knife,” said another, yawning, “we could cut his tongue out. He wouldn’t be able to talk then.”

“Are you going to be the one to cut it out?” Once a Day said, and when he didn’t answer, she shook her head in some contempt.

“We don’t have a knife, anyway,” he said, not much cast down.

They were afraid, you see, that I’d go back and tell everyone where their camp was, and that they would be invaded or stolen from; there were thieves still; they had no reason to trust me. They just didn’t know what to do.

“If we were nice to him,” Once a Day said. “And gave him things.”

“Yes, yes,” said a voice, someone lost now in darkness, “and one day he’s dark, and then what does any kindness mean?”

“He’s not like that,” she said in a little voice. And no more was said for a long time. I jumped when someone near the door got up suddenly; it was the old doorkeeper, who went inside and came out a moment later pushing before him a white ball of light, cold and bright, which when he released it floated like a milkweed seed and shone softly over the men and women seated there. My mind was set on my fate, but when he released the light and it floated, I thought of Olive and the full moon; I looked at Brom, and the other cats there, who regarded me with the same frank candor that was in the faces of those discussing hitting me till I died. And in Little St. Roy’s ear Olive whispered her terrible secrets.

“I have an idea,” I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. “Suppose I didn’t leave.” They all looked at me with the same graceful indulgence they granted one another. “Suppose I just stayed on with you and never went back. I could help out; I could carry things. Then I’d grow old, and die naturally, and the secret would be safe.” They were silent, not thoughtful particularly; it was as though they hadn’t heard. “I’m strong, and I know a lot. I know stories. I don’t want to leave.”

They looked at me, and at the Light that moved slightly when the breeze pushed it. Finally one young man leaned forward. “I know a story,” he said. And he told it.

So I spent that evening between Brom and Once a Day, not sleeping, though they were asleep in a moment. Nothing further had been said about hitting me or cutting me; nothing further at all had been said, except the story, which I smiled at with the rest, though I hadn’t understood any of it.

And not long after I had at last fallen asleep, before dawn, she woke me. “The cats are walking,” she said, her face dim and strange; I forgot, for a moment, who she was. I stumbled up, shivering, and smoked a little with her, and drank something hot she gave me in a cup; it tasted of dried flowers. Whatever it was, it stopped the shivers, that and a long cape of black she gave me, giggling when she saw me dressed in it. The others were laughing too, to see me in this disguise. In the long night while my fear passed, I learned something; that the truthful speakers have little need to be brave, because they always know where others stand. It had been only that these people couldn’t speak that way that had made me afraid of them when, in fact, they would do no harm to me. I had been afraid of men for the first time in my life, and I saw that it would happen often from now on—fear, confusion, uncertainty—and I would just have to be brave. Odd to find it out, old as I was, for the first time. And to think of the warren, where old people died peacefully, never having learned it.

The cats were walking: it was time to go. There was some discussion over who was to carry what of the things that had been packed the day before; I shouldered a big shiny black pack whose rustle told me it was full of dried bread, enough to last many through a year. It seemed right that I should carry it. And we set off along still-dark Road, in a long line, the cats dim in the distance and the sky beginning to glow to the left through the forest.

When the sun was high and the cats had had enough walking, we found a place to stop for the rest of the day, to sleep and dawdle through the afternoon with them, till evening when they were restless to move again. In a mountain meadow where tall feathery grasses grew up between dark pines and birches, Once a Day and I lay on our stomachs with our heads close and drew out sedges from their casings and chewed the sweet ends.

“When I was a little kid,” I said, “I thought I would leave Belaire to go find things of ours that had been lost, and to bring them back to put in their places in the carved chests.…”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh.”

“I found a saint, though; a saint in a tree. And I thought I would stay and live with him, and learn to be a saint too. And I did.”

“Are you a saint?”

“No.”

“Well,” she said, smiling, with the grass between her teeth, “that’s a story.”

I laughed. It was the first time since I had found her again that Once a Day had been the girl I had known in the warren.

“And he told you to come here to find us,” she said.

“No. There was a story, a story you started, about four dead men…” A cloud passed over her face, and she looked away. “And my saint said the League knew that story. But that’s not why I came.”

“Why?”

“I came to find you.” I hadn’t known that, not truly, till I had seen her at the pool; but all the other reasons were no reasons at all, after that. I drew another sedge squeaking from its fibrous case. Why are they made like this, I wondered, in segments that fit together? I bit down on its sweetness. “I used to think, in Belaire, that maybe you had gone to live with the List, and it hadn’t suited you, and that one spring they’d bring you home dead. From homesickness. I saw how you would look, pale and sad.”

“I did die,” she said. “It was easy.”

The puzzlement in my face must have been funny to see, because she laughed her low, pleased laugh; pushing herself forward on her elbows, she brought her face close to mine, and plucked the grass from between my teeth, and kissed me with eyes and mouth open. “It’s nice you thought of me,” she said then. “I’m sorry you were dark.”

I didn’t know what that meant. “You thought of me,” I said. “You must have.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But then I forgot how.”

The cat Brom beside her made an immense sharp-toothed yawn, his rough tongue arching up in his mouth and his eyes crossing; she pillowed her head on her hands, as the cat did. “Nice,” she said; and slept.

That journey lasted many days, mornings and evenings of long walking and hot, vacant middles when we slept. Walking, the List sang their endless tuneless song, which at first I could hear no sense in, but which came to seem full of interest; I began to hear who was good at it, and waited for the entrance of their voices. Their singing was a way to lighten a load, I saw; it was like the second of the Four Pots I had used: it stretched time out so endlessly that it vanished, and the miles fell behind us without our noticing them. It was only when, one dawn, we came out upon a great spiderweb of Road, where huge concrete necks and shoulders supported the empty skulls of high ruined buildings from which the glass and plastic had been stripped hundreds of years before, that they stopped singing; they were nearing home, awaking from the dream of motion.

They didn’t stop when the sun was high, but hurried on, pointing out to one another the landmarks they saw, ruins great or small in the forest; and, at a wide sweeping curve of Road, cheering, they caught sight of their home. Once a Day pointed. I could see, far off, a black square; a square so dark black it made a neat hole in the noonday.

“What is it?” I said.

“Way-wall,” she said. “Come on!”

We left Road on a spur of concrete, and came out suddenly onto one of those wide naked plazas, vast and cracked, windy, useless, as though the angels had wanted to show how much of the world they could cover with stone at once. Buildings stood around the stone place, some ruined, others whole; one was the odd blue and orange that are the colors of the first of the Four Pots, and had a little steeple. The largest building, in the center, was made of huge arched ribs rising out of the ground to a great height; and taking up most of its flat face was the square of utter blackness. The ivy that covered the building like a messy beard didn’t grow on this blackness, and no daylight shone on it; it seemed to be a place that wasn’t there; my eyes tried to cross in looking at it.

There were others, people and cats, coming out of the buildings toward us, greeting and shouting; one was an old woman, taller by a head than I, striding ahead of the others, a huge tiger cat rubbing herself against her skirts. Her long arms used a staff, but she walked as though she didn’t need it; she motioned Once a Day to her and wrapped her in her long arms with a laugh. Once a Day hugged her and said a name like a sigh: Zhinsinura. The old woman’s eyes fell on me, and she raised her staff to indicate me. “And where did you find him?” she said to Once a Day tucked under her arm, “Or did Olive Grayhair send him to us, to tell us we’re all dead?” Once a Day snuggled laughing within her arms and said nothing.

“I came to stay,” I said.

“What? What?”

“I came to stay,” I said loudly. “And Olive’s dead many lives herself.”

She laughed at that. “You’re carrying,” she said. “Bread, is it? Come, put it down; we’ll taste it. If I were dark now, I’d question you. Staying is one thing, but… anyway, welcome to Service City.” She raised her stick and swept it around to indicate the buildings that stood on the stone plaza. “Well. Come, warren boy; we’ll think awhile, and see.”

She put an arm around me as strong as the bearded man’s who had taken me in the forest, and we walked together toward the black hole in the wall that Once a Day had called way-wall. Zhinsinura’s long strides took us directly toward it, and though I tried to make us turn away, she gripped me and we kept on till it loomed above us, making me dizzy with its unseeable no-place. I had a moment to feel limitless fear, that if we walked into it we would be lost in its blackness, blind, and we struck it. Or didn’t strike: there was a moment that felt like a cracked knuckle all through me—and we were inside, not in darkness but in the hugest indoors I had ever been in, vast, glittering with light; as though there were a raindrop on my glasses, there was an odd shimmer and sense of refraction everywhere and nowhere. I looked back at the black wall I had passed through and was looking outside. The light that lit this place fell through that wall. Way-wall!

And the place that black wall lit, the house that housed Dr. Boots’s List: I stood still in wonder at it. Zhinsinura walked away with Once a Day across the black and white tiles that made the vast floor, and their heels clacked and their voices echoed, for the place went up, up, up to the metal ribs that made the roofs curve. In that huge echoey space, so different from the warren’s hivelike insides, there were enough people it seemed to fill a city. At the back of the place a great shelf jutted out and made a second floor, reached by a wide sweep of stairs cable-flown from the ceiling; people sat on the shelf’s lip and on the stairs with legs dangling and called down to those below; the travelers piled up their goods and sat on them, talking to friends who embraced them, and children ran with drink for them across the tiles. Clouds of bread-smoke arose from groups visiting, and the big cats sniffed the air and mewed: The whole place hummed and buzzed with the purr of the List’s ancient speech (though some fell silent as they turned to see me) and none seemed surprised in the slightest to have stepped through Night and fallen into a treasure house of the angels.

For that’s what it was. Once a Day ran across the floor to me, skipping away from friends who reached out hands to her, and came to take me in amid it all.

All along the long, long sides of that place were bins and chests and cases, angel-made; some were waist-high to me and made of glossy white plastic, others were tall, with hinged doors of glass and made all, all of angel silver—there were so many of these there that the dull glow of them seemed to lower the heat in the place and make it cool. Some of the open low bins had mirrors above them, slanted in such a way as to make what was inside seem twice as much as it really was—only the angels would have thought of that.

Once a Day ran from one of these cases to another, showing me things kept in them which she had told me about while we walked—“and here’s this that I told you about and here’s that that I told you about,” and her eyes were wide and bright and she was light and I loved her intensely. She took me by the hand to see the huge pictures fixed all along the sides above the bins; though they were so large I couldn’t have missed them, she felt I must be shown, and stood pointing them out. The colors of them seemed as bright as the day the angels made them: one was carrots, beets, and beans; another had eggs and white bottles; one was a cow, with a smile like a man’s, which was ridiculous. As she stood solemnly pointing to the cow, she saw someone, and said softly, “Zher.”