Otherwise (56 page)

“That’s like this month,” Houd said. “It’s the world’s shudder that winter is coming.”

Just the story does… Little St. Roy called the clouds Cities in the Sky; and Houd called the City a cloud, and put the four dead men there to make the children shudder, a November shudder. And long ago Seven Hands had said all lost things end up in the City in the Sky, to make Mbaba laugh when her spectacles were lost. Somewhere a burnt sun was beginning to set; the sky and the afternoon were smoky with it.

“Then winter does come,” I said.

“Oh, winter comes,” Houd said. “But only when it comes.” He puffed his pipe and grinned. “That’s Relativity,” he said; and everybody laughed, of course, except me, of course.

The great forest which circled around the stone plaza where Service City sat, two fingers of a gigantic hand about to pinch Service City out like a bug, didn’t seem to grow and thin insubstantial in winter as Belaire’s woods did. It was much greater than that woods, and seemed to grow, as Belaire’s did not, at a great rate: the ivied buildings seemed now more settled into the forest even than when I had come in the spring. You could still see Road through the black trees; but it wouldn’t be so forever.

The forest was strong; the world was slow but strong. As Service City fell back into the forest, so Road was drowned in brooks and broken by winter weather. And so too, I thought, was Belaire drawn in; the bridges around it fell, and its paths to the great world were blocked, slowly for sure, but for sure. All our men’s places were stained and whelmed by the world and winter; the leaves piled up behind Service City and littered its stone plaza, they found their way into Blink’s tree house; and on the roofs of Little Belaire they were bound up in hoarfrost with bird droppings and last year’s nests.

Yet at Belaire the ancient war of man with the world was if not still fought at least remembered. Maybe it was because Dr. Boots’s List lived not in a gentle river valley but in a great and impatient forest, but it seemed they had forgotten such things; they no longer struggled to hold back the world, nor even much remembered how the angels had fought and won and lost against it. But there it is: the whole tangle of their lives was based on something they were trying to forget.

For the doctor was there, indoors for winter, along those walls; she could climb the stairs to the mezzanine, way-wall admitted her, and she looked out all the eyes which I looked into, though I didn’t see her.

They should have seemed childlike, the List, with their changeable sadnesses and enthusiasms, their dark and light, their endless, pointless small bickerings. But they weren’t childlike; they seemed old—not aged, but like grownups, with histories, with old knowledge, old manners, a careful, circumspect way—and how could that be, I wondered, that they could change like children and play like kittens, that yesterday and tomorrow could be real for them only as a dream is real, and yet seem circumspect?

Like a dream, yes… I thought winter would make Once a Day sad, you know, dark; but she was the same, or never the same the same, and whatever the game or trick of dark and light was it was a thing which happened day to day, moment to moment, and not by seasons. In the mezzanine we made private places for ourselves where we spent the long, long twilights; sometimes the sadness of them would make her sad—no, in the sadness of them she would happen to be sad—and we would let out a Light early to pretend it was already night. Her summer-tawny body grew pale again, and the light hair that downed her limbs dark. And we dreamed together amid the crowd there. I thought it was for shame, a shame like their old manners, that she never spoke of these things elsewhere, and never wanted them spoken of, as though they hadn’t happened. But it wasn’t shame. It was that she wanted to mark nothing: wanted to make each time the only time, as pastless as a dream. There were no words: she wanted none.

And then I woke. And now I only know I dreamed, and am awake.

THIRD FACET

T
he big snows fell in that month in which the calendar children, bundled up, made a faced pile of snow with twigs for arms and a hat like the hats the men of the List wear. On a day in the month that followed, February, we lay on the mezzanine and watched snow fall, turning to rain; through the veil of it the black trees seemed to proceed slowly toward us, though they came no closer. Once a Day lay against Brom, carefully biting her nails to the length she liked them and filing them smooth on the rough stone of the wall. Around us we heard tiny winter stories told, stories of doors in the forest, tiny doors at the top of worn steps, a light inside; they open a crack, and eyes look out.

This was the time of the List’s long laziness; if it could be said they ever waited for anything, you could say they did little in this time except wait for spring. It was now that most of their children were born, the time carefully calculated; below, a group was cooing over a new child, a girl I supposed by the way they made much of it. Two older children stood at an open bin of the long white bins in an endless game of changing clothes; one stepped out of a black, shimmering belt and changed it for the other’s frayed wig and false fur. They dangled jewels and stained ribbons, arm-clocks and rags of shirts, each twirling for the other’s criticism and grudging admiration. I watched them, enjoying their moments of pale nakedness; their voices rose up to where we sat, low and indistinct.

“The door in the elbow,” the sleepy storyteller near us said, “the door open a crack, through which winter comes, blowing on the heart.”

I thought of Blink, bundled and sleepy, saying
It’s a small world.

And yes, you see: circumspect, as I said, and careful for themselves: for they won’t disappear, the List would never choose that, though it sometimes seemed to me that disappearance was what they aimed at in the end—no, but they will be wholly taken in, because they have forgotten, doubly and for good, the ancient struggle of man against the world, forgotten doubly and for good the string once tied around all men’s fingers; and in the forest, like shellfish in a secret shellfish bed, they will move only for the current’s sake, and keep their counsel as close as cats, endlessly counting off the twelve seasons of the year while the forest and the water and the winter eat up the angels’ works and Road and perhaps even Little Belaire…

“The shortest month is February,” Once a Day said, testing her filed nails against her cheek for smoothness; “or the longest too.”

The floor below belonged as much to the cats who walked it as to the people they walked among. I said there were cats who lived at Little Belaire; but the List seemed to live with their cats and not the reverse. They were deferred to. Houd had told me that the cats of the List were not of the same family at all as the cats I had known; these great, pacific, wise animals were descended from a race the angels invented, so to speak; a race they made out of the old race of cats, altering them by the same means we men had been altered, and for the same reason—convenience. And in the thousand generations that came after, they had been altered further by careful selection of mates. They hunted little, but ate the food made for them in the kitchens of Twenty-eight Flavors; almost never did I hear them make that eerie, tormented cry I had used to hear, like a lost baby, in the woods near Little Belaire. I said the List were grownups: but now looking down at the floor where the cats walked I thought it was the cats who were the grownups, and the people their children. And as children learn their manners from watching grownups, so the List learned theirs from cats.

I was proud of this small insight; I had no notion how close I was to the truth, and therefore I was as far away as ever.

Zhinsinura came through the way-wall, and others after her, dressed in their raggedies—winter warm-clothes piled on however to keep the cold out.

“We’re going to the forest,” she called up to us. “You come.”

“Why?” asked Once a Day.

“A cat’s lost. Help find her.”

The cat’s name was Puff, a very old and tired orange female with a big scruffy mane, blind in one eye. She’d been gone two days, Zhinsinura said as we struggled into warm-clothes, which wouldn’t have worried anyone if it was Brom or Fa’afa, but Puff in the winter… She hurried our dressing.

It was wet, black, and hopeless in the forest, a thin rain still falling, and I didn’t know how they drought they would find anything but mud and old snowbanks to fall in, but they kept on through the day just as though they had a path. We spread out, and soon lost sight of each other, and I found myself struggling along beside someone I didn’t know, bound up to his eyes in gray. He slashed at the dirty snow with a stick, breathing wet clouds from his nose.

“Help me here,” I said, my foot caught in something beneath the snow.

“Dog days,” he said.

We pulled me loose. “What did you say?”

“Dog days.” He waved his stick, indicating the forest. “February’s the lean month for them. They’re said, when they find nothing at all to eat, to run around in a circle till the weakest drops, and then he’s it. I don’t know. I guess that’s fair. But usually they find something.”

Like Puff, I thought, old and cold as she was. The story at Little Belaire was that all the dogs had long ago been eaten or killed, but in this forest… “Dog days,” he said again, his eyes shifting from side to side above the gray scarves covering his mouth. We stopped to get our bearings. The relentless drip seemed to fill my ears, making it hard to hear other sounds. The high trees’ tops were lost in fog, and their black trunks seemed rotten with wetness. The forest crackled suddenly quite near us, and we spun around: two of our number came out of the trees toward us, dressed in black like the day. We called out and kept on; and now my eyes were shifting around like my gray friend’s.

For a long time we tore through a thicket of harsh bushes, clawed at by springing limbs and tripped up by roots. Beyond it the ground fell away sharply into a sort of depression in the ground, whose lowest part was filled with dark water edged with papery ice. As we came out on the edge of this bowl, he saw one thing on its far side, and I saw another.

He saw Puff, off to the left, struggling up through the snow to reach the crest on the other side.

I saw Once a Day, off to the right, also climbing, trying to reach Puff.

We both pointed and said, “Look!” at the same time. Once a Day must have been to the cat’s blind side, because the cat kept on, desperately, up to her chin in snow; and just then we heard what she was running from. The noise tore through the fog, a sharp, snarling yelp made again and again that made me freeze in terror. Once a Day stopped too, but Puff kept on; the woods crackled and thrashed to the left, and there burst from cover an animal. The man next to me bared his teeth and hissed out in fear, and the animal—a dirty-yellow, skinny, big-headed thing—stopped and with great snaps of his head looked from Once a Day to Puff who was disappearing over the ridge. The woods behind him spoke, and a red one charged out; he didn’t stop at all, but hunched his skinny back up through the snow. The yellow one followed. Bursting from the woods, a spotted one slipped into the water and slopped out again, climbing after the others.

Once a Day had got to the top and over, beating the snowbound dogs, and the man with me was halfway to the pool’s edge, shouting and waving his stick, before I unfroze and slid after him. As we circled the pool, stepping up to our knees in black water and muck, two more dogs came yelping from the woods, and stopped when they saw us. They backed and ran to and from us as we tried to climb the bank, we not daring to turn our backs on them, shouting at them as they shouted at us. Two men now came from the woods following Once a Day’s footprints, and my stick friend tore the gray scarf away from his face and waved to them, and the dogs, seeing them, ran off in another direction.

Heavy with water, sobbing painful cold breaths, we got to the top. Puff, Once a Day, and the dogs were gone. The snow, stirred and foot-printed, melted out in hillocks along the wet black ground; and across the snow, starting at my feet and running crazily away in drops, was a long stripe of blood.

Cat’s blood: I grasped at that. Puff’s blood. Poor Puff, but old after all, still too bad, anyway it’s cat’s blood.… The two in black passed me, hurrying on, pointing out the signs of the trail to each other. I still stood stricken. Stick came up next to me, his sodden boots squishing.

“Dog days,” he said; “a lean month, and nothing’s that large, if they’re together they’ll try it…”

“No,” I said.

He went off, following the others, his head nodding rapidly side to side. “If she stayed with the cat,” I heard him say, “they’d take them both, oh yes, drag them to the woods, you hear the silence now, you see what that would mean…”

No, no, no, he’s not kept his head, I thought, starting after him, then turning back to look again at the snow, not kept his head about the cat’s blood that it was, why does he go on like that?

“Dogs are dogs are dogs are dogs at least,” said Stick.

“Why don’t you just look?” I shouted at him, my feet numbly plucking mud. “Why don’t you just be quiet about it and look?”

“Wood smoke,” said Stick, stopping still.

I smelled it and saw it at once: a dark smudge in the woods, browner than the gray day. He ran on toward it, calling out to the others; I only stood, still trying to speak truthfully to myself, scared, not knowing what a fire in the forest would mean anyway. Stick turned and waved to me, and disappeared in a clump of trees.

There was a path through the clump of trees, and at the end of the path a cabin of logs built against an old angelstone wall; ashy smoke rose up through a hole in the roof of wattles. The yellow dog, the first one Stick and I had seen at the pond, paced back and forth before the door until he saw us, and backed away and ran as we came close. From another direction the two in black came up to the cabin, and disappeared into the darkness inside, as though walking through way-wall; they seemed to be laughing. Stick went in. I came up last, and heard them talking inside.

I went in.

In the flare of firelight and smoke, the black-cloaked people sat laughing softly, relaxing in the warmth. Zhinsinura was laughing too; beside her old Puff lay asleep; and within her arms Once a Day lay, her eyes bright in the firelight, smiling. I crept to her, my fear still a hard knot in my stomach, to touch her, to know for real it was she.

“You’re all right,” I said, and the others laughed.

“Yes,” she said. “The doctor was there.”

“What doctor? What doctor?”

She only shook her head, smiling.

“How, what happened? How did this fire get here? How, what…”

Zhinsinura put her hand firmly on my wrist. “Hush,” she said. “It’s nice now.”

The others had fallen silent, and for a moment Puff awoke and eyed me with her one eye. I saw that I wouldn’t learn now, probably would never learn, what had happened, whose blood was on the snow, because it was then not now; it was nice now. I was not to ask for what I wasn’t given. I sat slowly, thinking: if it had been I among the dogs, I wouldn’t have found this nice place, because I would have looked for it.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is nice now; with the fire and all, yes.”

“He
was dark,” said Stick, whose face I could see across the fire grinning widely. “Dark even to shouting.” He laced his hands comfortably behind his head and showed more teeth. “Dog days,” he said, pleased.

And that’s how I found out what dark and light are.

You didn’t tell about February’s tile.

I don’t remember it well. I remember that it was “crazed,” you know, heat or something had made it a web of fine cracks. I remember that it was black, mostly, like the month. They stood on a bridge, I think, over a cold river; there was something huge out on the river. I don’t remember.

In March’s pale tile the hem of her blue dress curled with the same curl that marked the dead leaf’s path in November: the curved line that meant Wind. They stood in the wind atop a brown hill that looked to be the top of the world—nothing could be seen around them but a big sky, pale and purplish. The wind that blew behind them tangled their curls and held their kites high up, so high they seemed tiny.

In the still-roofed part of one of Service City’s ruined buildings, amid piles and bundles of the List’s things stored there, Once a Day found her kite. We sat amid the clutter and listened to Zher as she tied, with infinite absorption, a new tail for it. Her eyes were cast down, and her mouth seemed to obey the same commands that her hands were following: closing firmly to tighten a string, opening then pursing to find the next rag; when she made a knot, her tongue peeked out.

“When the moon is full in March,” said Zher, “the hare goes crazy.” His eyes grew wide and fierce. “He stamps his feet.” Zher’s leg kicked the ground with a thump. “He balls his fists and can’t
stand
it, can’t
stand
it.”

He stared around him, his leg twitching to kick again. “When another comes, he shouts out, ‘No room, no room!’ even if there’s plenty.”