Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  He had stayed long enough to meet and confuse the names and faces of his new tenants, Folk she knew as dearer than relatives; and he had ridden off, to court, to battle, to his other growing properties. Except for a fidgety week or two in summer, a politic ball at Yearend, he came to Redsdown little. Sometimes she felt it might be the better way. Sometimes.

  She left one speckled egg from her basketful in a dark corner for the bam elf she knew lived there. She plucked a bit of straw from her autumn-auburn hair and let the Visitor take her basket. Stone steps worn to smooth curves took them out an arched side door into a breezeway that led to the kitchen; the leaves of its black vines were already gone purple with autumn, and the rain swept across its flagged path in gusts, sticking Caredd’s billowing trousers to her flank. The Visitor tried clumsily to cover her with the old cloak he still wore, but she shook him off, ran tiptoe laughing through the puddles and up the kitchen stairs, brushing the clean rain from her cheeks, laughing at the Visitor making his careful, intent way toward her.

  There were great rooms at Redsdown, chill halls lined with stiff-backed benches, tree-pillared places with fireplaces large as cottages, formal rooms hung with rugs and smelling of mildew. But when there was no one to entertain, nothing to uphold, Caredd and the rest stayed in the long, smoke-blackened kitchen with the Folk. There, there were four fireplaces hung with spits, hooks and potchains, with high-backed settles near and chimney corners always warm; there were thick tables worn so the smooth grain stood out, piled high with autumn roots to be strung or netted and hung from the black beams above. The rain tapped and cried at the deep small windows but couldn’t come in.

  Two ancient widows sat making thread in a corner, one of them meanwhile rocking ever with her naked foot a bagcradle hung there in the warmth. “If Barnol wets the Drum with rain,” they sang, “then Caermon brings the Downs the same…”

  “Rain indeed,” said the Defender Fauconred from within his settle. He dipped a wooden ladle into a kettle steaming on the hob and refreshed his cup. “And when will it stop, ladies?”

  “Could be tonight, Defender,” said one, turning her distaff.

  “Could be tomorrow,” said the other, turning hers.

  “Could turn to snow.”

  “Could continue wet.”

  Fauconred grunted and filled the cup of Mother Caredd, who took it with a slow, abstracted graciousness, set it on the settle-arm, and began to put up her cloudy white hair with many bone pins. It seemed that Mother Caredd’s hair always needed putting up; Caredd rarely saw her but she was piling up, endlessly, patiently, its never-cut length.

  “Now you see, Visitor,” she said absently, “those are rainy-sounding names for weeks, is all; Barnol and Caermon, Haspen and Shen… as Doth is dry and Finn is cold…”

  “I wondered about their origin,” the Visitor said. He sat next to Caredd, looking from one speaker to the next as though in a schoolroom, teacher or pupil or both. Mother Caredd had no more lesson to say, and shrugged and smiled. The unhappy end of her playing at politics had left her vaguer even than she had always been, but also somehow calmer, more lovely, and gently accepting; where the Visitor disturbed and perplexed Fauconred, and fascinated Caredd, Mother Caredd just smiled at him, as though his dropping from heaven were the most natural of things.

  “For any real answers,” Caredd said, “you’ll have to go to the Grays, in the end. For all old knowledge.”

  “They know?”

  “They say they know. Help me here.” She was trying with her long patient fingers to restring an old carved instrument.

  “They say,” Mother Caredd went on as though to herself, “that all the Just have names for their names. Is that so? Naming their names, and why… Their Guns have names too, all of them, don’t they? I wonder if the Guns’ names have names, and so on and on…”

  “I don’t know, Mother,” Caredd said, laughing. “Could they remember all that?”

  “I couldn’t. But I wouldn’t want to, would I?”

  Caredd loved her mother fiercely, and though she allowed herself to smile at her rambling chatter, she let none mock her, and would die to keep her from being hurt again.

  “The Just,” the Visitor said, nodding; these he knew; but after a moment asked: “Who are they? How would I know them?”

  “Murderers,” Caredd answered simply. “These keys are warped.”

  “Bandits, as I told you,” Fauconred said, frowning into his cup. “The men without law or honor; the women whores.”

  “Madmen,” said Mother Caredd.

  “Why Just, then?” the Visitor asked Caredd.

  “A name from longer ago than anyone remembers. Perhaps once the name had a meaning. It’s said they’re dreamers.” She plucked a dampened note. “Nightmare dreamers.”

  “Old names persist,” Fauconred said. “Like Protector, Defender. Protectors and Defenders of the Folk, anciently.”

  “Protectors of the Folk against…”

  Fauconred knitted his gray brows. “Why, against the Just, I suppose.”

  Caredd strummed a tuneless tune and put down the ancient instrument. The two widows went on spinning their eternal thread. “If it snows on Yearend Day,” they sang, “then, snow and rain will fall till Fain/Brings the New Year round again…”

  By evening, the rain had blown away toward the City, leaving only a rent sash of clouds for the sun to color as it set. To watch, Caredd had climbed a hundred stairs to the long, fanged battlement that guarded Redsdown’s Outward side, and then up between two broken castellations to where she knew of a flat, private place to sit. On the tower behind her, two forked banners, sunset-red, snapped tirelessly in rhythm with her own heavy cloak’s blowing. She pulled it tighter around her, drew her knees up, wondered what Redhand was about tonight… There was a polite, introductory sort of noise on the battlement below. Caredd smiled down at the tireless Visitor.

  “Even here?” she asked. “Those steps are long.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the Visitor. “I’ll go back.”

  “No. Stay. Better to talk to you than… Stay.”

  “I was wondering,” he began, and Caredd laughed. He put his head down and went on carefully. “Wondering why no one of the Folk will talk with me.” He had gone about the farms with Caredd, watching her stop everywhere to hug and talk and fondle babies, be cooed over herself by old ones who treated her as something between a cherished pet and a princess. But their happy chatter had ceased before him, turned to a cool reserve; he had never had any yield him anything but a nod and a wary, almost frightened smile.

  “They think you are a creature of the Grays,” Caredd said simply.

  “A… creature?”

  “Of old, the Grays could make combatants against the Seven Possessors. Creatures not anything but one of the Seven Strengths. The Folk have a thousand stories about such things, battles of the Seven Possessors against the Seven Strengths. Moral stories, you know; Gray knowledge or teaching made into a story about a battle. The Folk take them for real, the Sevens, real enough to see with eyes and touch.”

  “But the Gray in the village—he’s just as afraid of me.”

  Caredd laughed again. “Old Driggory? He’s afraid that you might have been sent to do battle against his own Possessor, the one named Blem.” The Visitor looked puzzled. “Drunkenness. A good old man Driggory is, but a simple country clerk; he’d hardly know what the great Grays are capable of. Because it’s from him, you see, and all his cousins, the village clerks and little Grays, that the Folk have learned their tales of the Sevens, from long ago.”

  The Visitor shook his head. “I wanted to talk with them. How can I explain I am no creature of the Grays?”

  Caredd looked down at the strange personage below her, who looked up with his infinite blank eyes. Indeed, if there were Gray champions of the Right, they might look like this: or then Demons too. “Whose creature are you?” she asked.

  The Deep had drunk the sun once more, and though the clouds Outwa
rd weren’t yet drained of all color, the sky above had been swept clean of cloud, and on that blue-black ceiling already burned three of the Wanderers, pink, gold and red, all decrescent. “I can’t remember,” the Visitor said, as though for the first time.

  “Perhaps,” said Caredd, “you are no Strength, but Possessed; and the Possessor has eaten your memory and made your hair fall out. The Possessor Blem can do that; they show it in the pageants at Yearend.” She was a wind-blown silhouette in the crack of battlement, and the Visitor couldn’t see her little mocking smile.

  “And if I am?” said the Visitor. “I don’t think I am, but if I am?”

  “If you are,” Caredd said thoughtfully. “Well. I wouldn’t know what then, and neither would Driggory. You’d have to go to Inviolable and ask.”

  “Inviolable?”

  “The Grays’ house in the mountains. Or”—a sudden thought that made her smile again—“wait till Fauconred takes you to my husband. His brother is a great Gray, oh very high.” She would like to see Learned’s unstirrable face, when this creature asked wisdom of him.

  The Visitor turned his bald face to the deep sky he knew had made him. Had made him for—somewhere within him some formed thing tried to coalesce: a reason, a direction, the proper question, the name uncoded. He stood stock-still and watched it light up fitfully the structured regularity of his manufacture… and then dissolve as quickly into blank unknowing again.

  “Very well,” he said, when he was sure it was gone. “I’ll wait, then. A little longer.”

  Learned Redhand was not particularly learned, though he was for sure Redhand. His family name had hardly hindered his quick rise through many degrees to the gray he wore, dark as rainclouds about to break; but still, it was due as much to his own efforts, to his subtlety if not depth of mind, to his unflappable grace of manner. Despite a certain cynicism in him, a smiling disregard for the dogmas of his Order that unsettled people, he had a deep affection for the elaborate systems, framed in ritual as though in antique, lustrous wood, that had taken the Grays countless centuries to create. But he had little interest in mastering those systems in all their complexity; was content to float on the deep stream of Gray knowledge, trailing one finger, buoyed by the immunity a Gray’s unarmed strength gave him in the violent world of the court.

  He did love without reservation, though, the house Inviolable, where he had first put on white linen, where he had grown up in the Grays and gained whatever wisdom he possessed. He loved the mountain that Inviolable had held since before any but they could remember, that looked down on the far-off City and Outward to the Downs, surrounded by the sounds and silence of sweet rocky woods., And he loved above all the ancient garden closed within its walls. Tended and nursed over centuries, its shadowed groves, vined walls, and sudden fountains had become a system of private places, singular yet unified, like states of mind.

  The year was late now in the garden, that was its mood. The dark groves were mostly unleaved, and the intersecting paths were deep-strewn with black and brown. The air was clear and windy; the wind gathered leaves and the voices of distant boys at play, blew rippling waves through the coppery ivy, white-flecked the many fountains with foam.

  How cold it must be now on the Drum, Learned Redhand thought, when even these fountains are blown black and gray… It had been some years now since he had had need to come back to Inviolable, and as he waited now in the garden for the interview he had asked for, he felt himself given over to an unaccustomed sweet nostalgia, a multiple sense of self and season, composed like a complex harmony out of the afternoon, the garden, the fountains—and himself, a boy, a man, in this same season but other years, with other selves in the same skin. It made him feel unreal, rich yet illusory.

  The narrow, flinty archway that led into Inviolable from the garden, high as ten men, had neither door nor gate, only a great black drape of some ancient, everlasting stuff, so heavy that the restless air could barely lift it; it rose a bit and fell with a low solemn snap of one edge, filled again with breath and exhaled slowly. Learned watched go in and out of this door young scholars and country clerks in bone-white robes; smoky-gray lawyers and iron-gray lesser judges followed by white-robed boys carrying writing cases; thunder-gray court ministers and chamberlains with their lay petitioners… And then he stood as one came out, diminutive, and smaller still with age, in gray indistinguishable from black and little different from an old widow’s black cowl, unaccompanied save for a thick cane. They stood aside on the steps for this shabby one, who nodded smiling side to side. Learned Redhand rose, but was waved away when he offered help; he made a graceful obeisance instead. The old, old Arbiter of all right and wrong, the grayest of all Grays, sat down on Learned’s bench with care.

  “It’s not too cold, here in the garden?” Learned Redhand inquired.

  “No, Learned, if you be brief.” There was little about the Arbiter Mariadn that revealed gender, except the voice; all else had grown sexless with great age, but the voice somehow was still the young Downs farm girl she had been sixty years ago. “But before we speak, you must remove that.” Her index, slim as bone, pointed to the bit of red ribbon Learned Redhand wore.

  He knew better than to fence with the Arbiter. As though it were his own idea, he detached it and pocketed it even as he spoke: “I come to ask you to clarify for me a bit of ancient history,” he said.

  “You were ever nice in talk, Redhand,” Mariadn said. “Be plainer. Your faction—I’m sorry, your family’s faction—wishes the oath sworn to the Blacks set aside.”

  “The Protectorate wish it.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s complex,” Learned said thoughtfully, as though considering the merits of the argument. “By all the old laws of inheritance, it seems Red Senlin’s grandfather should have been King. In acknowledgment of those claims, he was named heir to Little Black. Now the Black faction seems ready to discredit the claim on the grounds that the Queen is with child, though none believes the King capable of such a thing after ten barren years of marriage. The Reds seem ready to force Red Senlin’s claim, and crown him now in repayment for the Blacks’ reneging.”

  “As a matter of principle, I suppose,” said the Arbiter coolly. “Just to set the record straight.”

  Learned Redhand smiled. “Arbiter, there is doubtless much to be won. Little Black’s reign has been long and dishonorable. The Red Protectorate suffered much from Black Harrah’s ministry; I think they surely wish revenge. No. Not a matter of principle. The reverse.”

  “And they come then beforehand to have their hands washed at our fountain. Why should we be muddied by their revenge?”

  Learned paused, looking into a pale, slate-colored agate he wore on one finger. The expert at circumlocution must first have his matter clear to himself: but when it was clear, he found no pretty way to say it. “Arbiter: Red Senlin means to be King. Many of the great support him in this. Even to war with the Queen. They wish their enterprise sanctioned by the Grays.”

  “And if we cannot sanction it? They must not ask for arbitration, Learned, unless they mean to abide by it.”

  “That’s the hardest thing.” He turned and turned the stone on his forefinger. “I needn’t preach to you that the strong chain of oaths seems barely a thread in these bad times. But I feel sure that if the Grays decide against Red Senlin, the Reds… will lose adherents, yes. Will lose credence in the eyes of the Folk. Will give pretexts even to the Just, who grow strong lately. But will proceed, anyway.”

  Too old in judgment to be indignant, Mariadn considered, her eyes closed. “And will perhaps then be beaten by the Queen, and all hanged, and their sin made plain.”

  “Perhaps. But I think not. Black Harrah is dead. And the Great Protector Redhand and all his adherents are with Red Senlin.”

  “Dindred possesses them,” the Arbiter said quietly. “Pride is their master, and what Strength can be called against him?”

  “Arbiter,” said Learned Redhand, more urgently, “t
he question of succession is surely doubtful. It could be settled reasonably two ways; surely there is much in law to be said for the Senlin claim. But consider further the Order we owe. I think Red Senlin, without our help, has even chances of doing this thing. With a Gray word behind him, the thing is nearly certain. If he has our judgment and wins, we are the stronger for it. If without our judgment, then our judgment will have little power hence.”

  “The power of our judgment is in its Righteousness.”

  “Yes. Of old. And we must take care for that power. It is threatened. The Just speak Leviathan’s name in the villages this year again. If the Protectorate act in disregard of us, then… then oaths far older than the Protectorate’s to Little Black’s kin are weakened, and begin to pass away.”

  The Arbiter Mariadn covered her old eyes with the long fingers of one hand. Only her finely lined mouth was visible; her voice held Learned Redhand like the gentlest of vices. “Learned. I am old. I see few visitors. Perhaps I can’t any longer grasp the world’s complexities: no, not these new heresies, I hate and fear them, so I am not qualified to speak. I must lean on you, on your worldliness, which I partly fear too… Only swear to me now, Learned, on all the ancient holy things there are, that what you advise you advise out of love and care for our Order. For our Order only.”

  “I do so swear,” Learned said without hesitation. Mariadn breathed a little sigh, rose and took up her cane. She started slowly back toward the black-hung doorway into Inviolable.

  “So,” she said, not looking back. “It shall be as you advise, if I can sway others. And perhaps, after all, it’s… only a little sin. Perhaps.”

  Learned Redhand sat a long time after she had gone, in the gathering evening, watching black leaves fall and float in the restless pool of the fountain. He should be in his carriage, taking news of his success to the Harbor: but it was success he suddenly felt little desire to announce.