Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  Yes. In a way. I think he would be Palm cord.

  Are you crying? Why?

  No. Go on. Was that all your education was, the stories about the saints?

  Oh no. There were other things. Painted Red told us stories about ancient times, long and fabulous stories impossible to remember all of, unless your memory is like a gossip’s. The longest I remember her telling was called Money, and it went on for days and covered great stretches of time, and was full of angles. It was hard to believe it was all true, but it was told by a truthful speaker, and there was proof, though not very impressive for all the fantastic comings and goings and great powers of the stuff. It was just an oblong piece of paper, worn and limp like skin, with tiny figures all over it, and leaves I think, and a face in the leaves. It looked magical for sure, but not something to die for, as Painted Red insisted so many had.

  But mostly, what Painted Red said wasn’t as important as the speaking of it; she would talk to us often about nothing really, and gradually and with a skill I only see in looking back and couldn’t ever explain to you, she made us truthful speakers. We were honest when we were young and came to see her, there’s no other way for kids to be, even when they’re not telling the truth; but when we went out from Painted Red’s room at the end of a year or two years or five years, however long Painted Red thought each of us needed, then we were truthful speakers: in the ancient way, which we could not have explained but always there-after did, we Really Meant what we Said and we Said what we Really Meant.

  Even Once a Day, St. Olive’s dark child, Whisper cord keeper of secrets—even she learned, almost against her will, to speak truthfully. She could not then lie to me, not truly. If she could have—if she weren’t a truthful speaker—then it may be my life would not now be utterly bound up in hers, and her story my story.

  The day the Money story was finished, Once a Day came up beside me as I was going along Path and slipped her arm in mine. I was too astonished to speak; she had done it as though she always did it, though in fact she had hardly spoken to me since the first day.

  “Do you think Painted Red is wise?” she asked me.

  I said, of course, that I thought she was very wise; perhaps the wisest person in the world.

  “She knows a lot,” Once a Day said. “She doesn’t know everything.”

  “What doesn’t she know?”

  “There are secrets.”

  “Tell me.”

  She glanced sidelong at me, smiling slightly, but said nothing more. Then at a turn of Path she drew me into a curtained room there. It was dark, and crowded with things I couldn’t make out; someone asleep was snoring softly. “Do you think she knows all about Money?”

  I didn’t answer. For some reason my heart had started to beat fast. Once a Day, watching my face, took from a pocket an object that seemed to glow in the darkness. She held it up before me.

  “This is Money too,” she said. “Painted Red didn’t say anything about this Money.”

  It was a small disc of silver. On its surface was a head, not drawn but cut so that it seemed to be coming forth from the glittering surface; its eyes caught the little light in the room and seemed to study me. She turned it in her hands and showed me the other side; a hawk with open wings. She took my hand and placed the disc in it. It was warm from her flesh. “If I give you Money,” she said, “you must do what I say.” She closed my fingers around it. “You’ve taken it now,” she said. Painted Red had said people had once given others Money to do their bidding. I felt as though I were participating in a sin as old as the earth. But I didn’t want to refuse the Money in my hand. “What,” I said, and found my throat almost too dry to speak, “what do you want me to do?”

  She laughed, as though a joke had been told or a trick played. Without answering, she ran out. Under my thumb I could feel the face on the Money she had given me, its features and the upswept brush of its hair.

  The next days she didn’t come to Painted Red’s; I glimpsed her with grownups of her cord, on errands of their own, and if she saw me she didn’t acknowledge it; and when one day she slipped late among us in Painted Red’s room she said nothing to me. It was as if nothing at all had happened between us; perhaps, as she saw it, nothing had. I rubbed the Money in my pocket and thought of nothing but her. What was the word Painted Red used? An ancient wore!?I was hot.

  The way people revolve back into the crowded warm interior of the warren in winter is matched by the way they come out as it gets warm again, slowly, the old ones staying in wrapped up till late in the spring, but the kids running out before the snow melts and catching crocuses and colds. I spent days in the woods, exploring with Seven Hands, gathering with Speak a Word, my mother, but often by myself; and one raw evening, carefully screened by a winter deadfall, I saw something that might unlock Once a Day to me.

  I found her wrapped in red playing Rings with another girl of her cord. I couldn’t tell her what I wanted with someone else present, so I sat and watched and waited. A game of Rings can take days, depending on what cord is playing it; Whisper cord uses it to tell the future in a way I never understood, and Once a Day had even further rules which the other girl got mad at, and at last left. I was alone with her.

  She tossed the linked rings across the figured board, pouting, and gathered them up again. “It’s hot in here.”

  “Outside it’s nice,” I said.

  “Is it?” she said, half-watching her aimless throws.

  “I could show you something you’d like. Out in the woods.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a secret. If I take you, you have to not tell anybody.”

  Well, they’re lovers and collectors of secrets, and she questioned me further, but I wasn’t telling, and at last she stood up and told me to take her.

  The woods were budding pale green, and the streams were swollen with spring, the ground soft and growing. Thin clouds whipped away in the cold sky, but the sun was warm as afternoon went on, and we carried our shaggies over our shoulders, stumbling through ancient dead leaves and wet roots deep in the woods. On wet black branches new leaves glowed like glass and shook off water from the morning’s rain as we pushed through them. “Here,” I whispered when we had come to the place.

  “What?”

  “Climb up. I’ll help you.”

  She climbed, clumsy-graceful, up the great fallen logs that spring had forced a few new shoots from. Her thighs tensed with effort, which made hollows in her flanks; her smooth pale legs were smeared with bark-rot, and there a tiny ruby scratch. At the top we crowded together into a narrow crotch that let us see, down in a cave protected by the tangled roots, a family of foxes. The mother and her cubs were just discernible, and no doubt invisible from everywhere but the one place where we stood. And as we watched, we saw the bright-tailed male return with a dead animal swaying from his jaws.

  We watched in silence the wiggling cubs at their mother’s belly, taking a few blind halting steps and turning to nuzzle her again. I was pressed close to Once a Day, who in order to see better had thrown an arm around my neck and lay against my back with her cheek pressed to mine. I could tell by her rapt silence that she was impressed with my secret. One of my legs was going to sleep, but I wanted her never to move.

  “How many are there?” she whispered.

  “Three.”

  “And she has them all at once?”

  “Like twins.”

  “Twins?”

  “When a woman has two babies at the same time.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Mbaba told me it happens. Sometimes.”

  She pushed away from me at last, and climbed down. At the bottom she watched me descend; she shook her hair from her eyes as I jumped from the last big log, and walked toward me, commanding me with her eyes to do the same; we met, and she took my face in her hands, smiling, and kissed me. I think I surprised her by how fiercely I responded, and she pushed me away at last, holding me at arm’s length, and, sti
ll smiling, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ll show you a secret now,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Come on.” She took my hand and led me back through the greening wood to where the twenty-three towers of Little Belaire were growing among the trees.

  She took me quickly along Path where it led to the deepest center of old warren. “Where?” I asked as we ran. She pointed but said nothing, only flicking her head back in a flash of smile. Soon all the walls around us were of angelstone, and the lights were few, the doors small. It was warm here too; we were walking above the tanks and the stones that warm Little Belaire. There was a turn where she paused, uncertain; then she pushed through an ancient curtain, and we were inside a tiny stonewalled bare room, gloomy and warm, with a single small skylight in-one corner. Through it the afternoon made a diamond shape on the rough wall.

  My eyes grew big: on a chest near one wall stood a leg. Once a Day turned to me and laughed very small. It wasn’t, I realized after a moment, a real leg, but a false one, yellow and waxy like dead flesh, with corroded metal parts and ancient straps. I stared at it.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “It’s a leg,” she said, and took my hand in hers and squeezed it. I wanted to ask whose it was, but only stood with my hand growing wet in hers.

  “Come here,” she said, and tugged me to the other side of the room where above us a thing hung on the wall. She pointed at it. “You must never, never tell anyone you came in here and saw this,” she said to me in an urgent, commanding whisper. “It’s a very secret thing in my cord. I’m going to tell you about it even if I shouldn’t.” Her blue eyes were grave, and I nodded gravely too.

  The thing on the wall was made of plastic. It was like a tiny house with a high-peaked roof; but it was flat, with only a little shelf that stuck out in front of it. It had two doors, one on each side. Three people lived in the house, one of whom—I watched with hair rising on my neck—at that moment was backing into the right-hand doorway with tiny jerking motions, while the other two came jerking out the left-hand door. The one disappearing inside was an old woman, bent and hooded and gnarled, leaning on a stick; the two who began to appear were children, with their arms around one another.

  “How do they move?” I said.

  “That’s the secret,” Once a Day said.

  In the space between the two little doors was pasted a strange pink and blue picture; it showed a great mountain (you could tell because tiny people were shown standing below looking up at it) that was four heads, four men’s heads; four heads as big as mountains—four heads that were a mountain—with great grave faces and one with, it seemed, spectacles.

  “This one,” Once a Day said, pointing to the old woman whose hooked nose could just be seen inside the door, “hides when the sun shines. And these two”‘pointing to the children’“come out.” She looked up at the bright skylight. “You see? And when the weather changes, they move. It’s ancient as anything. There are lots of secrets.”

  “Those four,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “Those are the four dead men. And are they mad.”

  We stared at the four stony faces, with the sky behind them falsely pink and blue. “It’s their own fault,” Once a Day said.

  It was warm in the room, and a prickly heat was all over me, but in spite of it I shivered. The false leg. The thing on the wall that moved when it was light and dark, that only Whisper cord knew the secret of. And her small hot hand in mine.

  A cloud went over the sun just then, and the diamond of sun disappeared from the wall. I watched the tiny children and the old woman, but they didn’t move.

  SIXTH FACET

  How am I to tell you all of this? How? In order to tell you any single thing I must tell you everything first; every story depends on all the stories being known beforehand.

  You can tell it; it can be told. Isn’t that what it is to be a saint? To tell all stories in the singe story of your own life?

  I’m not a saint.

  You are the only saint. Go on: I’ll help if I can. Before nightfall it will be told; before moonrise at least.

  I wanted to say: Whisper cord lay coiled within the cords of Belaire like an old promise never quite broken, or a piece of dreaming left in your mind all day till night comes and you dream again. But to say that I must tell you about cords. About the Long League of women, and how it came to be and came to be dissolved. About St. Olive and how she came to Belaire, and found Whisper cord. About Dr. Boots’s List, and the dead men; about how I come to be here now telling this.

  Cords. Your cord is you more surely than your name or the face that looks out at you from mirrors, though both of those, face and name, belong to the cord you belong to. There are many cords in Little Belaire, nobody knows exactly how many because there is a dispute among the gossips about cords which some say aren’t cords but only parts of other cords. You grow into being in your cord; the more you become yourself, the more you become the cord you are. Until—if you aren’t ordinary—you reach a time when your own cord expands and begins to swallow up others, and you grow out of being in a single cord at all. I said Painted Red had been Water cord, and her name was Wind; now she was larger than that and she had no cord that could be named, though in her way of speaking, in the motions of her hands, the manner of her life, in small things, she was still Water.

  Water and Buckle and Leaf; Palm and Bones and Ice; St. Gene’s tiny Thread cord, and Brink’s cord if it exists. And the rest. And Whisper. And was it because of her secrets that I loved Once a Day, or because of Once a Day that I came to love secrets?

  She liked night more than day, earth more than sky—I was the reverse. She liked inside better than outside, mirrors better than windows, clothes better than being naked. Sometimes I thought she liked sleeping better than being awake.

  In that summer and the winter that followed it, and the next summer, we came to own Little Belaire. That’s how it’s put. When you’re a baby you live with your mother, and move with her if she moves. Very soon you go to live with your Mbaba, especially if your mother’s busy, as mine was with the bees; Mbabas have more time for children, and perhaps more patience, and especially more stories. From your Mbaba’s room you make expeditions, as I did up to the roofs where the beehives are or along the learnable snake of Path—but always you return to where you feel most safe. But it’s all yours, you see—inside to outside—and as you grow up you learn to own it. You sleep where you’re tired, and eat and smoke where you’re hungry; any room is yours if you’re in it. When later on I went to live with Dr. Boots’s List I saw that their cats live the way we lived as children: wherever you are is yours, and if it’s soft you stay, and maybe sleep, and watch people.

  We had our favorite places—tangles of rooms with a lot of comings and goings and people with news, quiet snake’s-hands in the warm old warren where there were chests that seemed to belong to no one, full of rags of old clothes and other oddities. She liked to dress up and play at being people, saints and angels, heroes of the Long League, people in stories I didn’t know.

  “I must be St. Olive,” she said, holding up to the light of a skylight a bracelet of blue stones she had found in a chest, “and you must be Little St. Roy and wait for my coming.”

  “How do I wait?”

  “Just wait. Years and years.” She dressed herself in a long sad cloak and moved away with stately steps. “Far away the League is meeting. They haven’t met since the Storm passed long, long before. Now they meet again. Here we are, meeting.” She sat slowly and put her hand to her brow; then she glanced up at me and spoke more naturally. “While we meet, you hear about it,” she said. “Go on.”

  “How?”

  “Visitors. Visitors come and tell you.”

  “What visitors?”

  “This was hundreds of years ago. There were visitors.”

  “All right.” I adopted a listening position. An imaginary visitor told me that the women of the Long Le
ague were meeting again. “What are they deciding?” I asked him.

  “He doesn’t know,” Once a Day said, “because he’s a man. But his women have gone to the meeting, bringing their babies and helping the old ones, all the women.”

  “But not the women of Belaire.”

  “No. No.” She raised a hand. “They just wait. All of you wait, to hear what the League has decided.”

  I waited more while the League met. “Somehow you know,” Once a Day said, “that someone is to come, to come to Little Belaire from that meeting, though it might be years, and bring news …”

  “How do I know?”

  “Because you’re Little St. Roy,” she said, losing patience with me. “And he knew.”

  She rose up, and taking tiny slow steps to lengthen the journey, came toward me. “Here is Olive, coming from the meeting.” She progressed slowly, her eyes fixing mine where I waited for years in the warren, knowing she was to come.

  “It’s night,” she said, her steps so slow and small she tottered, “When you least expect it, and then …Olive is there.” She drew herself up, looked around surprised to find herself here. “Oh,” she said. “Little Belaire.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you Olive?”

  “I’m the one you waited for.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well.” She looked at me expectantly, and I tried to think what Little St. Roy would say. “What’s new? With the League?”

  “The League,” Olive said solemnly, “is dead. I’ve come to tell you that. And I have a lot of secrets only you can hear, because you waited and were faithful. Secrets the League kept from the speakers, because we were enemies.” She knelt next to me and put her mouth to my ear. “Now I tell them.” But she only made a wordless buzzing noise in my ear.

  “Now,” she said, getting up.

  “Wait. Tell me the secrets.”

  “I did.”

  “Really.”

  She shook her head, slowly. “Now,” she said, commanding, “we must go and live together in your little room ever after.” She took the cloak from her sharp shoulders, let it fall; she knelt beside me, smiling, and pressed me backward till I lay down. She lay down next to me, her downy cheek next to mine and her leg thrown over mine. “Ever after,” she said.