Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  My mother had told me that Mbaba was growing solitary, the way old people do; and it was true that as I grew up, Mbaba came to spend most of her time in this room. But she wasn’t ever really alone. Because around the walls were Palm cord’s carved chests, of which Mbaba was the keeper. The carved chests are like—like honeycombs. What they are most like is Little Belaire itself: interrelated, full of secrets, full of stories. Each of the hundred drawers is marked with signs and carved in a different shape, depending on what’s in it: each drawer was designed to hold just what it holds in the chest and to tell things about it: how it came here, what it has done, and what stories it can tell. Mbaba was never alone, because of all the souvenirs in the drawers of Palm cord’s carved chests.

  I lay naked under the thick rugs on Mbaba’s bed, watching and listening. Mbaba, talking to herself, went around the room; she pressed one long finger to her collapsed toothless mouth, as though trying to remember something. She gave it up and came to busy herself about the pipe. The pipe in Mbaba’s room is old and very beautiful, made of green glass, shaped like an onion, and hung on chains from the dome above. There are four stems hung around it in loops, woven in bright colors like snakes; and there is a metal bowl at the top in the shape of St. Bea’s head, her mouth wide open to accept the chips of St. Bea’s-bread.

  Mbaba struck a match and held it lit in one hand while with the other she filled St. Bea’s mouth with blue-green chips of bread from her barrel. She touched the match to the bread, took down one of the long stems, and inhaled; a dark bubble ascended from the bottom of the pipe to the top above the liquid level, where it burst and let out its smoke. Above the metal mouth ropes of thick, rose-colored smoke twined up around the chains, ascending to the dome; all around Mbaba was a rosy mist, the smoke coming from her nostrils and mouth. The smell of St. Bea’s-bread is a good smell, dry and spicy, toasted, warm, a smell with a lot of insides. It doesn’t taste like it smells; it tastes … like everything. Like anything. All at once. It tastes like other things to eat: dried fruit sometimes, or sour grass, or hazelnuts. And charred wood too, and dandelions; grasshopper’s legs; earth, autumn mornings, snow. And thinking of it then and smelling it made me jump out of bed with the rug around me and run across the cold floor to where Mbaba motioned to me, grinning. I wriggled down next to her; she grunted as she took down a stem of the pipe for me. And so we two, me and my mother’s mother, sat and smoked and talked.

  “When we wandered,” Mbaba said, and a bubble of laughter rose inside me because she was going to tell when-we-wandered. It could have been any story on this morning, because Mbaba knew as many stories as there were things in the carved chests, but this is the one she told:

  “When we wandered, and this was a great long time ago, before any now alive were thought of or their cords thought of or even Little Belaire itself thought of, St. Andy got lost. St. Andy got lost seven times when we wandered, and this was one of the times. He got lost because he had to pull St. Roy’s wagon and the treasures of Big Belaire that were kept in it, and the whole of our fires burning where people sat to warm themselves. St. Andy’s wagon was a source of great amazement to them, even though they couldn’t figure out how to get a lot of the drawers open. St. Andy would have liked to sit down and warm himself too, and maybe have a bite to eat, but he was kept busy by the people of the place showing off the ingenious wagon. Finally he said, ’If you’ll let me sit down and thaw out a little, I can work a miracle or two and entertain you.’ Well, they let St. Andy sit, but didn’t offer him any food or drink. St. Andy got tired of waiting for them to offer and decided to put everybody in good spirits with a miracle.

  “This was the first miracle he did. He took from a drawer of the wagon a silver glove that whistled when you wore it, and a ball that whistled the same note. St. Andy showed them both off, and the people were interested, I imagine. But then St. Andy threw the whistling silver ball as hard as he could off into the darkness. They could hear it clattering in the trees. St. Andy stood holding out his hand with the glove on it. And pretty soon back comes the ball and lands in St. Andy’s hand again, as gently as a bird. Everyone was astonished. St. Andy threw the ball again and again as the people whistled and clapped. But the ball took a long time to get back each time, and soon the whistling and clapping stopped, and finally people said, ‘Well, we’re very bored with this miracle, let’s have a different one.’ St. Andy thought there were a lot of tricks you could do with the silver ball and glove, but he didn’t know how any were done; the men were prodding him with sticks and making remarks, so St. Andy put aside the ball and glove and said, ‘I’ll show you another miracle. I’ll show you a man eat raw meat who has no teeth And he opened his mouth to show them he was toothless as a melon, just like me.

  “They agreed that might be interesting, but said they had no raw meat, only cooked meat. St. Andy was very hungry and said that would be fine. They brought the meat and set it before him—and he suddenly threw open his mouth to show a full set of perfect luminous white teeth. He chomped and tore the meat with his mouth open, gnashing the amazing teeth so all could see and hear.

  “After he had eaten his fill, he stood up to leave while everyone was still impressed. They weren’t too overcome not to take the silver ball and glove for themselves, so I can’t prove to you that part of the story is true. But for the rest, see here”:

  And, as often at the end of a story, Mbaba got up and went to the carved chests, her eyes flitting over the drawers, touching the signs with her fingers till she found the right one. From it she drew out a wooden case carved in the shape of a mouth; and from the mouth case, her eyes sparkling, Mbaba drew out St. Andy’s perfect, luminous white teeth.

  “False teeth,” she said. “Fits all.” And she popped them in her mouth, fit them in with her tongue, and opened wide for me to see. I was screaming with laughter. She looked like she had a huge mouthful of something, and when she opened her mouth it was—teeth! “That’s how he did it, that’s how,” she said, “with these very teeth, which are as old as anything and still good as new.”

  That was at my birth-time, in my seventh year; almost ten years ago now.

  What is it?

  Nothing. Go on now.

  What was it I said that startled you?

  Go on.

  Well … Seventh years. Every seventh year, you visit a gossip who knows your cord well, to have the System looked at for you, and learn what state you’re in. I don’t know why it happens every seventh year, except that there are a lot of things we count off by sevens. And it seems—from the two sevens I’ve lived through—that seventh years are the ones where you are, somehow, most yourself. There are other times you could consult a gossip; for the untying of a knot, or anytime you don’t understand yourself. But everyone goes in their first seventh year, and every seventh year thereafter—fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight—and the first seventh year is a rose year as well.

  But to explain about the rose year, I have to tell you about the Four Pots, and Dr. Boots’s List who makes them, and before that about the League, and the Storm which ended the angels’ world … maybe my story doesn’t really have any beginning after all.

  SECOND FACET

  The gossip Mbaba took me to was an old woman named Painted Red, who was a friend of Mbaba’s from youth. Painted Red was, Mbaba remembered, of Water cord when she was young, and her name had been Wind, before she learned to read the System and gossip.

  “She hasn’t always known our cord,” Mbaba said as she got me ready to go. Her breath was faintly visible in the cold. “Only in the last few years has she studied it.”

  “Not since I was born’”

  “Well, yes, since before that,” Mbaba said. “But that’s not really so many years, you know.” We were ready. “She’s very wise, though, they all say, and knows Palm well, and all its quirks.”

  “What are its quirks?”

  “You!” she said, and tugged my ears. “You should know, of anyone.”

 
“She lives near Path,” Mbaba said as we went along, “because she likes to feel the feet of those going by.”

  St. Roy—I mean Little St. Roy, of course, not Great St. Roy—said that Path is drawn on your feet. Little Belaire is built outward from a center in the old warren where it began, built outward in interlocking rooms great and small, like a honeycomb, but not regular like a honeycomb. It goes over hills and a stream, and there are stairs and narrow places, and every room is different in size and shape and how you go in and out of it, from big rooms with pillars of log to tiny rooms all glittering with mirrors, and a thousand other kinds, old and changeless at the center and new and constantly changing farther out. Path begins at the center and runs in a long spiral through the old warren and the big middle rooms and so on to the outside and out into the aspen grove near Buckle cord’s door on the Afternoon side. There is no other way through Little Belaire to the outside except Path, and no one who wasn’t born in Little Belaire, probably, could ever find his way to the center. Path looks no different from what is not Path: it’s drawn on your feet. It’s just a name for the only way there is all through the rooms which open into each other everywhere, which you could wander through forever if you didn’t know where Path ran.

  Painted Red’s room was deep in toward the center. There in the ancient small stone rooms, cool in summer and warm and snug in winter, the gossips sit and feel their cords run out linking and tying like a web all through Little Belaire. It was dim; there was no skylight as Mbaba had, but a pale green lens full of bubbles set into the roof. Mbaba spoke from outside, her hand on my shoulder. “Painted Red,” she said. Someone within laughed, or coughed, and Mbaba drew me in.

  This was the oldest place I had ever been in. The walls were of the gray blocks we call angelstone. Here and there a block was turned on edge, and the oval piercings that (they say) go through every such block’s insides made four small windows in the wall. Through these I could glimpse the little falls of the stream, lit by the slabs of glass that are set in the roof above it.

  Mbaba sat me down, and I tried not to fidget, aware and expectant. When she came forth from a farther room, Painted Red looked first to Mbaba and laughed low, her hands making welcoming movements that set her bracelets clicking. She was older than Mbaba, and wore a huge pair of spectacles that glittered as she nodded to Mbaba’s greeting. She sat opposite me, drew up her naked feet, and rested her arms on her knees. She didn’t speak to me, but her eyes behind the quick glasses studied me as she listened to Mbaba talk. When she spoke herself, her voice was rich and slow as running oils, thick with inflection I only partly understood.

  While they talked, Painted Red drew from a small pouch some flakes of St. Bea’s-bread, which she rolled into a blue paper to make a fat cigar. She took a long match from her pocket and motioned for me to come sit by her. I went slowly, Mbaba’s hands encouraging me. Painted Red gave me the match, and watched me as I struck it on the rough wall and held it with both hands to light her cigar. Her cheeks hollowed and a rosy cloud ascended as she inhaled noisily. The frank and friendly curiosity of her look made me smile and blush at the same time. When she had smoked, she said, “Hello, you’re a graceful fellow, I’m in a mood to talk to you. Don’t expect me to reveal too much of myself, though I’m sympathetic and can be helpful. Be at ease with me; I know it’s strange here, but soon we’ll be easy together, and then friends….”

  No, of course she said nothing like that, but it was all in what she did say, in her greeting, for she spoke truthfully, and was very, very good at it; so good that, speaking, she couldn’t hide from my knowledge of what she meant. Of course my knowledge then was very slight; when she talked with Mbaba, they both said things I couldn’t hear.

  “You are not,” Painted Red said, “a truthful speaker.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you will be soon.” She put her hand on my shoulder and raised her curling brows at me. “I will call you Rush, as your Mbaba does, if I may; your name Rush that Speaks is too much a mouthful for me.” I laughed at that, too much a mouthful! She said a word to Mbaba that meant she and I must be alone, and when Mbaba was gone, she stubbed out the flat end of her crackling cigar and motioned me to come with her into the small farther room.

  There she took from a chest a small narrow box that just fit in her lined palm. “Your Mbaba tells me good things about you, Rush,” she said. She opened the box. Inside were four small round pots with snug lids, each a different color: a black one, a silver one, a bone-white one, and one the pure blue of a sunset winter sky. “She says you like stories.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know a huge number.” Her face was gently grave but her eyes were sly behind the glittering glasses. “All true.” We both laughed at that; her laugh made me shiver with the weight and fullness of it, light and low though it was. I knew then that Painted Red was very holy; possibly she was a saint.

  Why do you say holy?

  Holy. Blink told me once that in ancient times they said a thing was holy if it made you hold your tongue. We said a thing was holy if it made you laugh. That’s all.

  Painted Red now chose the little black pot, opened it, and rubbed her thumb in the rose-colored stuff that it contained; then she rubbed her thumb on my lips. I licked it off. It had no taste at all. She took from another place in her chests a set of nesting black boxes and tubes with tiny lenses, and these she assembled in her larger room beneath the big lens, setting the tubes to point at a white space on the wall. She drew a string that closed the pupil of the green lens in the ceiling until its light fell in a tiny bright spot onto a minor which she placed at the back of the boxes. The light from the lens was reflected through the tube; a circle of pale green shone on the wall.

  She opened carefully a long box and, after some thought, drew out one of the many thin squares of glass it contained. I could see as she held it to the light that it was inscribed with a pattern, and when she slipped it into place, there was suddenly the same pattern projected onto the wall, greatly enlarged and as clear as though drawn there.

  “Is it the Filing System?” I asked in a whisper.

  “It is.”

  Years later, Blink told me the full name of the Filing System, and I made him say it over and over till I could say it too, and then I went on saying it, like a nonsense rhyme. Sometimes at night I say it over to myself till I fall asleep: Condensed Filing System for Wasser-Dozier Multiparametric Parasocietal Personality Inventories, Ninth Edition. Blink tried to explain what all that meant, but I forget now what he said; and even the gossips who sit and look at it all day call it only the Filing System. It’s from the Filing System that the cords are derived, though the angels who created the System knew nothing of cords, and the System is hundreds of years older than the cords which the gossips found there. “In ancient times,” Blink told me, “it wasn’t supposed to yield knowledge, only to keep facts straight; but the angels who thought it up had created more than that, and although whatever facts the System was to have kept straight are lost now, this new knowledge of the cords was found in it, which its makers didn’t know how to see there. It’s often so.”

  I looked at the wall where the figures glowed that meant my cord, and a great cord it is, with two great saints in it. “My cord has two saints in it,” I said.

  “You’re very clever,” said Painted Red. “Perhaps you can tell me more.” She spoke kindly, but I was abashed then, having spoken up before this thing I knew so little about. She waited politely a moment for me to speak again, and laughed gently at my silence; and then, turning to the System, after a long moment she began to talk, partly to me, partly to herself, about our cord and its ways and how Palm cord goes on with the business of life; and as she talked she put her hand over mine where I sat beside her on her couch. There was nothing in the room to see except the bright pattern on the wall, nothing to hear but Painted Red’s soft voice. When my lips began to grow oddly numb and loose, I hardly noticed. What I did notice was that Painte
d Red’s questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn’t only being talked about but called into being. When she asked me about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked me about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but—it was the rose-colored stuff that did it, of course, but I wasn’t aware even of that—though I knew that I hadn’t left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life.

  It seemed to take as long as my life had, too; but gradually the solid-seeming incidents of my life became thinner and more tenuous, less real than the face of Painted Red beside me; and I returned, a little surprised, yawning a huge yawn and feeling I had slept a whole night’s refreshing sleep, to the little room where the pattern still burned on the wall.

  “Rush that Speaks,” Painted Red said to me gently. “You are Palm for sure, and doubly Palm.”

  I said nothing to that, because in my growing up I had learned it was regarded as something secret, not to be spoken of, and possibly shameful, that my father Seven Hands was Palm cord as my mother was. It doesn’t happen often that both your parents are of the same cord; it’s almost as rare as when they are sister and brother. The gossips warn against it; it makes, they say, for knots.

  “When will Seven Hands leave?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, not surprised that she knew Seven Hands’s secret; she seemed to know everything. I wasn’t surprised either that she knew it was my greatest sorrow. “Soon, he says, is all.”

  “And you want him not to go.”