by John Crowley
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.”
Once a Day laughed at his craziness, and then returned to her work. Of any there at Service City I found her absorption most beautiful, because I loved her, but they were all like her in it. On each thing they did their attention was complete. It was as though the thing to be done directed the doer, as though the task were master.
Of course there weren’t many things the List did. One of them was to fly kites in March. There were many in that building, broken and whole, hung between a pile of plastic boots and gray capes and a stand of furled umbrellas. On the right day, chill and blowing, a day like a stiff new broom for winter, they would all be scattered across a brown hilltop with their hats tied on and their raggedies snatched at and billowing, and all their bright-tailed kites aloft. Or then again maybe they wouldn’t.
Anyway. On a day still and odorous, with pale things sprouting in the forest, the kite tile was moved, and there were three in one pile and nine in the other; the ones who stood to see it turned made their small sound of satisfaction as April was revealed.
A silvery, sidewise-falling shower struck splashes from puddles. The puddles, silver-edged, reflected a soft green that was indistinct, rain-shrouded, all around. In this tile only was the girl not in blue; she and he were identical in shiny yellow coats, and her calves curved gently rising from the wide mouths of yellow boots. Her umbrella, though, was blue; and though it rained in other months, it was only in April that the List took out their umbrellas to water them.
On a showery day I watched them, through the way-wall, strolling across the wide stone with their umbrellas in bloom. Some were patched, some bent and with missing struts, some stretched wrong on the frame and looking like bats’ wings. Houd was among them; his gray and green barred umbrella was larger than the others and had a strangely carved grip, and he grinned at me just as though he could see me through the way-wall as I could see him.
They began to come in when the bell sounded five times, not for evening but in the middle of the day. They shook water from their hats and from the flapping umbrellas—not allowed taut indoors, for some reason—and they smelled of the warm wet day, and brought in green things, ferns and shoots and blossoms sparkling with drops. As they collected around the floor, Zhinsinura, who had had a high seat brought out for her, watched them as the cats did, and her gaze was the same, a mild and accustomed curiosity. She sat them down without words, her big hands lightly guiding them; children were shushed and the milling subsided as people found seats facing her, arranging themselves with the List’s patience for such things. After a time two rough half-circles had been drawn up, one closer in all of women and girl children, and an outer one of men and boys.
Once a Day went past me, brushing the clean rain from her face, smiled at me and went to sit with the women. I would have liked to sit by her, but this was the day the List remembers the Long League and Mother Tom, and on such a day the men know their place, sit back and hold their tongues.
Beyond the way-wall, the rain grew strong for a moment, like a fit of sobbing, then lessened. We were silent. Zhinsinura began speaking, and the cats grew curious.
FOURTH FACET
“In the last month of winter,” she began, almost as though she were I talking only to the cat at her feet, “which is the first of spring, the ice on the river, which had been solid and could bear weight, broke up and floated away in great clashing chunks, which makes a pretty sight.
“The ice asked: How is it that the river could accomplish such a thing? And the river might answer: Ice set itself a task it could not finish, and all that was left undone remained the river; and for the undoing of what you did do, well, it wasn’t I at all but time and changes, and I am left.
“I say the river might answer so, but it doesn’t answer, there being no ice left to answer to.
“If we were to tell a story about ancient times, we would say that the men were angels who could fly: they were the ice’s brittle, still surface. The river flowing quick unseen beneath we would name the women and their League. And as for time and changes, well, they have always been the same, without another name.
“Now the men in those times said to the women, ‘See: we have thrown Little Moon into the sky, our planters have escaped the sun, and we must struggle to further these works forever. Men have things to do, and must use their time properly; any of you who can do so may help in these tasks. But while we build a new moon and get it put up next to the old one, you are still controlled by the old moon; you can’t use your time properly; that is your greatest weakness.’
“And Mother Tom said to the League: ‘That is your only strength. Spring is coming, and the ice must break on every river. Time is in need of you, and, dark or light, will put you to its use.’”
She reached behind her chair and took up a tall box which she set before her. The front of the box was made to look like a sort of archway; and when Zhinsinura turned something at the back of the box vigorously, the archway brightened, and it seemed we looked into a garden where a fruit tree flowered, and where a huge, fat woman waved. She waved: I mean it wasn’t a picture of her waving, she waved, her hand rose, made a hello, and returned to her side; then it rose again, waved again, came down again, then rose again and waved. While she waved, Zhinsinura spoke, her hands resting lightly on the box.
“Mother Tom said: ‘I’m part man, part cat, part dream, and All Woman.’
“Mother Tom had had an Operation, you see. She had been a man, and then been turned into a woman. And very well, too, these were the days of every possibility and contrivance. Her female parts were real, as real as her man’s parts had been; she named her female parts Janice, after a woman murdered on Road, from whom they had been taken. She said, ‘Janice would be glad, if she knew.’ The doctors then could just replace one set of parts with another, easy as that, and in their angel way thought that was the end of it; but Mother Tom’s female parts began to grow a person outward from them, a woman, that dark by light outgrew the old man Mother Tom had been. Mother Tom said, ‘Janice is changing my mind.’ Mother Tom weighed as much as any two women, and had a voice like a loon, and wanted to be a Woman entirely, even to being in the women’s League.
“The angels had a joke, in those days, about the League. When the League meets, they said, women with breasts like pigeons fold their hands before them and speak to other women from between bowls of cut flowers. They all wear
flowered hats, and they speak only foolishness.” Zhinsinura took a nut, and a cracker for it, from within her deep pocket. “It was a good joke,” she said, “but the angels didn’t know why it was funny.
“I have wept,” she said, “to think of their struggles to use their time properly; and I have thought of them weeping. Mother Tom wept often after those meetings, when once again the women had struggled more with one another than with the angels; wept when she heard in her dreams their voices, abused and frightened and angry and silly and above all Feminine. ‘Feminine!’ Mother Tom would weep. ‘Feminine!’ She was beginning to learn, I guess, what she had let herself in for, and was glad to know it. ‘I wouldn’t be a man again for all the planters in the universe,’ she said, ‘or all the Money in the bank or all the cities in the sky.’
“Mother Tom confused the League, and for a long time she was not allowed among them, but she wouldn’t stop talking, whenever she was let to, and as the years went by her story grew longer: about what was to come, as much as she could see; about men, for she had been one; about dark and light, though what was there to say? The women began to listen, some of them; and understand; but sometimes they would only look away, and smile, and not listen, and wait for it to be nice again.
” ‘Nice!’ Mother Tom would shriek. ‘Nice!’ For as she grew older, and as more and more of the League’s women listened to her, the less Mother Tom wept and the more she shouted.
“The angels made a mistake, then. They had always thought the League was funny, and they thought Mother Tom was funnier still. But Mother Tom knew men, and kept on talking, and grew older and louder, and the more listened to the older and louder she got; until men were like someone who had a bird in his hand that is struggling to escape: squeeze tight, and the bird dies; don’t squeeze tight, and the bird escapes. The angels squeezed tight, and the bird escaped. It was ever their way.”
Zhinsinura broke and ate her nut with calm absorption. “You see,” she said, “the angels at long last got the joke: that as long as women struggled to use their time properly and join the terrific enterprises of the angels, there was nothing to fear, but as soon as the women shut up, as Mother Tom told them to shut up, then the angels’ enterprises were in terrible danger. So what they did was to send some two or three to Mother Tom’s garden, this garden, and kill her. Mother Tom was near eighty then. And they killed her.
“If you were to tell a story about ancient times,” she went on, “you would say that the day the angels killed Mother Tom in her garden was that day in winter which is the shortest, the day on which winter begins in earnest, but the day too after which the days, however slowly, begin to lengthen toward spring. Because, in her long life, Mother Tom had finally got herself understood by the women she loved, the angels for a long time thought the bird was dead. The ice grew thick—but the river was deeper; the ice was silent, and the river spoke only to itself, all unheard.
“The river spoke about Mother Tom. It was in those days that this picture was made, to remember her by, and a thousand like it, which women kept. They said of Mother Tom: when she was dark she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.
“About the things Mother Tom had said. About what was to come, which their men came home every night from planning for and struggling with and failing against and using their time properly to defeat: and they remembered Mother Tom’s advice, when the men talked: shut up.
“About gardens and clothes and the difficulties of food and how the lights kept going out. About their children and which was most beautiful, and Money stories, and what to do when the lights went out for good. About the latest of the angels’ wonders and how it seemed that soon there would be nothing impossible and their men could give them everything they wanted.
“Everything they wanted.” Zhinsinura passed her hand over her eyes and touched the box in which Mother Tom waved endlessly. “I would have been dark, dark, dark, then; am dark to think it. How hard, how hard! To be time’s tool when those who think themselves time’s masters tell endless, useless tales to bind it, tales which even if the women understood they could never contradict. To watch your kind like a sick cat eat and be not satisfied, to gorge and cough up worms. And still shut up. And never know, any more than any tool can, when the need for you will come—or if perhaps you have been wrong, and your task is not after all simply the satisfaction of that endless angel hunger, is not after all Everything you Wanted. It wasn’t Mother Tom, no, and she had known it wouldn’t be—it was that long fire that made time’s tool, endlessly shaping it in the flame of dark and light until its task was ready.
“To the angels, the Storm was the darkest time since our kind began: for what does ice know about spring? And though the League was full-grown then, and all their stories learned by heart when they gathered here for the first time after the fall of the Law and the Gummint, here on this floor in Service City and in a thousand places like it; and though they remembered Mother Tom, and knew now what she meant, and knew somewhat what to do to begin to help—though they knew all this, yet they were not light then. For remember, children, remember: for all that the women of the League knew better, for all their dark and light, they too were angels themselves. Never forget that, for it is their greatest glory. I have felt them meeting here then, in those days: and I know that whatever skills they had, it was terror, dark, and panic that they felt; and that whatever they created later, they knew that their task just then was mostly to watch the angels die. For with a sound like weeping and laughter, the ice had parted in the sun.”
The women before Zhinsinura, some of them, had listened intently, chins in hands; others had been preoccupied with hushing children, or nudging cats away, or changing their places for better ones. The children played at distracting each other, as children do when serious things are said. For it was an old, old story, after all, and heard hundreds of times; this was only the day in April when the List chose to tell it all together. I had listened perhaps more intently than any of them.
Mother Tom in her garden raised her hand, waved, lowered her hand.
“We who are the League’s child,” said Zhinsinura, “and who remember Mother Tom—we who feel those ancient women still to be here, here, where they guarded and dispensed the food that once burdened the thousand shelves long since gone; where they made medicines to save lives now long over; to where they returned from their journeys with stories and angels’ things which remain here still; where their plans were laid, and where the old agreements were come to which made the world the way it is today; and where in the end that struggle was resigned—we don’t forget, though we regret nothing, as no one in old age regrets the death of a parent long ago.
“If you were to tell a story of the days in which the League grew to be the Long League of famous memory, you would say that a cat is curious when it’s not comfortable. That their curiosity found the secrets of medicine’s daughters and all the angels’ medicines, we are grateful. That it uncovered the four dead men, most horrid of all the angels’ secrets, and destroyed them, we shudder at: and praise their courage. That it learned Dr. Boots and so came to know dark and light as we do, well, what is there to say? But the League as it was is gone; the curiosity is satisfied; the struggle over. Dark or light, the world is lighter than it was.”
She shook her head, smiling, and brushed shell crumbs from her lap. “Yet think of it,” she said, smiling wider and looking out over them, who caught her smile, “only think of it long enough to feel how odd it is, children, how odd in the end, far, far more odd than either happy or sad. May comes now, and that communion: the oddest of all. I want no one’s secret: only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!”
On the faces around me, as Zhinsinura asked, it seemed to dawn on them: the one thing I had known and they had not, seemingly. There was even a ripple of laughter that rose here and caught there, grew deep among the men and died away as our ev
ening song did. Their laughter at the oddness of it was the first time they had seemed like ordinary people—I mean like truthful speakers—since I had come there.
In their laughter, it seemed, that day came to an end. The rain would go on till night, or through the night; in the silver glimmer of it the afternoon was already dark. Zhinsinura still sat, with Mother Tom before her, and broke nuts to eat, while the rest of us stretched and moved, walked and talked again.
I made my way to where Once a Day sat before the box inside which Mother Tom stood waving. It had grown dimmer in that garden, and Mother Tom’s eternal wave moved more slowly. Because Once a Day still watched it, I watched it.
“What did she mean,” I asked, “when she said ‘May comes, and that communion’?”
“She meant our letters from Dr. Boots,” Once a Day said, her eyes not leaving the box.
There was a flowering tree in the garden, and now, close to it, I could see that there was a tiny cat curled up at her big feet. Mother Tom’s hand rose, and a petal began to drift from the tree. Her hand rose high and waved; the petal reached the ground; Mother Tom smiled, and the cat at her feet closed its eyes peacefully. Mother Tom lowered her hand; her smile faded as her hand came to rest against her side. Then the whole garden seemed to give a minute shake. Mother Tom’s face became set and grim and apprehensive, the cat’s eyes were suddenly open and alert. Her hand rose, in the same way; her face lightened to a smile, the cat’s eyes began to close—and another petal fell from the tree, exactly then.
When she was dark, they said, she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.
She waved, and waved again. Each time, her face would be dark and apprehensive, then lighten to a smile; each time as she smiled the cat would close its eyes. And each time another petal would drift in rocking lightness to the ground.