Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  “And it would have worked out, perhaps, if the Storm hadn’t come; men would have chosen their numbers as they chose to build Road and put up a false moon next to the real one. But the Storm did come; and who can say it wasn’t hastened by this terrible choice of theirs? And in the winters that came after, in the Wars and catastrophes, millions died by all the old means the angels thought they had removed forever from the world, and few were born by this new means of theirs.

  “And we are left now, we few, unable to reverse what they did; carrying a part of ourselves outside ourselves, in the white pot; left with their choice still.”

  There was a winter when I was five or six, when I had gone looking for my mother, Speak a Word, and come upon her in a curtained place; I had come up quietly, and she didn’t see me, for she was intent on what the old gossip Laugh Aloud was saying to her, which I couldn’t hear. I saw then that Seven Hands was with them, and so I came no closer—this was when my knot with him was most tangled. I knelt there and watched them in the winter light. Laugh Aloud had the box of pots open before her, and with one finger she moved the white one across the table to my mother. My mother’s nose was shiny with sweat, and she had an odd, fixed smile on her face. She picked up and put down again the fourth pot.

  “No,” she said. “Not this year.”

  Seven Hands said nothing. Did he wish it? Did it matter? He said nothing, for the angel’s choice was only for Speak a Word. “Not this year,” she said, and looked only at Laugh Aloud, who pursed her lips and nodded. She placed the pot in its fourth place in the holder, and returned the holder to its box. The top of the box closed with a little noise.

  At my dream of that noise, I woke.

  “The angels,” Blink was saying, “with their phones and their cars and their Road, they used to say: ‘It’s a small world. Getting smaller every day.’” He shook his head. “A small world.”

  He went on, after we had smoked, talking of winter. Of the winters of the Wars, and this black powder that had kept the fighters against the angels alive, and how he came to have it now; and the winter the Long League was made manifest; and the winter Great St. Roy locked the door of the Co-op Great Belaire, and the speakers began their long, hunted wanderings, and about his lost leg; about the rest of the world, beyond the oceans, from which no word came any more …

  “His lost leg?” I said.

  “From cold,” said St. Blink. “Frozen, and rotting from it, and had to be cut off. In years before, the angels’ science could have replaced it, made him a whole new one, a real one; but he had to be content with a false one.”

  Patent as sunset water … “Which is in the warren now,” I said.

  “So it is.” Interminably the snow continued its silent, blind descent, “You cry, Roy said, just after, and brood, and think you might as well be dead. But you get an artificial one, even if it’s not like the angels could make, it’s wood but it works; and you force yourself to get up and walk, feeling foolish with it as much as hurt. But you set to, and one day you can keep up. You can’t dance, maybe, and it’s a long time before you make love again, but you get along. You learn to live with it. You even laugh; for sure Roy did. But still he always had one less leg. No matter how good it got.

  “And what Roy thought, who saw the Storm, was that from then on we would all be as he was—all legless men. Whether it was the choice of childlessness, or further back, in the angels’ decision to hammer the world into a shape convenient for men, no matter what the cost—whatever it was, we lost that terrible race.

  “And it left us legless men.” Twilight would be forever today, starting almost as morning ended and sliding imperceptibly into moonless night. “And we can laugh. We have our systems, and our wisdom. But still only one leg. It doesn’t get better, a lost leg, like a cold. We learn to live with it. We try.”

  He shifted, ever so slightly. “Well, these are winter stories…. See how gray the light is today, the world’s as sleepy as I am. Little Belaire’s closed up now, they’re all close inside, and the old stories told … and spring comes, when it comes.”

  And we slept again, not having moved. The days went by full of blown snow, the sun’s trip quick and cold and veiled. No stars, no moon for days: the fox: the birds.

  SIXTH FACET

  There was a day, after gray rain had melted the last hillocks of black-peppered snow, and many birds had come home, and the woods were filled with new smells as with a stretch and a yawn, that Blink and I crept down the ladder and stood in the new air burdened with odors, looking around blinking and trying to stand up straight.

  At the last full moon Blink, after judging the weather and counting something twice on his fingers, had put away his jar of black powder; but the first warm days found us still sleeping out the last of our long sleep, staying in bed as you do on a fine morning when you know you should be up, but perversely roll and toss under your untidy blankets until the sun is high. Now we wandered slowly in the woods, greeting the others who had come from hibernation’, a snail and a basking turtle, a woodchuck so lean he seemed to be wearing someone else’s baggy clothes, and the trees top; and as Blink and I stopped to watch the woodchuck sniff the air I was filled with gratitude that I had made it, made it through another winter through which many had not, a winter that was over now, a winter which is half of life. Life is winter and summer, a day is half asleep and half awake, my kind is man and they have lived and died; and I have come through another winter to stand here now on the winter-turned earth and smell the wet woods. I thought of Once a Day, I saw her vividly on travels far away. St. Roy had lost a leg to winter, but had lived to see spring. I sat down with the weight of all this, and looked up at Blink, ancient and lined, whom the winter despite his powder had weakened and aged, and knew there were those in Belaire who hadn’t lived. I knew that what the powder “Blink burned had done was to stop: stop all this that I felt now rush over me intolerably. It had started again as the powder wore off, and it was enormous. I sighed to breathe it out but could not; and wept suddenly, big panting sobs where I sat on the bursting earth.

  At Little Belaire they would be making new rooms from old in honor of spring. Buckle cord would be shifting walls and opening doors all along Path, new dirt would be walked into hard floors, sun would be let in. Belaire opens like a new insect in the warmth, and Leaf cord trims and decorates and invites people to watch it unfold. Insulation is taken down, rooms swept of leaves and winter, favorite chairs lugged along Path to favorite bits of sun; and a hew word that makes all the cords hum with thought and laughter.

  “And you want to go home to it,” said St. Blink.

  “What? Go home? Why do you say that?”

  “You don’t answer when I speak to you, you can’t hear what I say. You’ve been staring out the window all morning when there is a way out of the house, and things to do too, I don’t just mean hauling and fixing, there are things abroad now to see and flowers blooming. And you sit instead indoors.”

  “It’s not really indoors here.”

  “You know what I mean. You itch all over, but there’s no place to scratch.”

  “Well, I can’t go back,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  There would be the bees swarming and the expeditions out beyond Little Mountain to see the new bread, and Mbaba’s birds returning; and soon the travelers from the List coming, and perhaps she among them this time, and so much to tell her.

  “I suppose,” I said, “there are other places in the world.”

  “Yes,” Blink said, “I suppose there are; other places, and just as nice.”

  I got up from my window and hustled down the ladder, almost angry with him. Because he was right: I went out to sit in the blooming meadow and let myself think Yes, I want to go home, now, in spring, now, I want to go home; my throat was hard and painful with it. I wanted to go home so badly for such a long time that day that I was only a little surprised when my wanting summoned from the leafy trees by the bro
ok two pale boys, lankier than they had been, one with a red and one with a blue band around his neck. Among other more important things, I had forgotten, during the winter, which was which.

  They climbed the bank in their dawdling way, stopping to poke into bushes for animals; when one saw me he waved, and I waved back. It was as though they had been waiting all winter just around the turn of the brook for the first hot day of spring.

  “Hello,” said, I think, Budding. “Are you a saint yet?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Well,” said the other, coming up behind, “they’d like to see you back in Little Belaire.”

  “No Moon went in the fall,” said the first, “and again in the spring; your mother misses you.”

  His brother hunkered down on the meadow and ran his hand through his lank blond hair to find a leaf. “Maybe,” he said, “if you had a whole year, and you’re not a saint yet, you should go home and start again later.”

  “Maybe,” said the other.

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking of my mother, and of the little that No Moon could tell her, and how easily I had left and how little I had thought of hers or anyone’s feelings. A hot wave of shame and impatience made me jump up with clenched fists. “Yes. Yes, I should,” I said. “Maybe I should …”

  “Where’s the saint?” the twins said, almost in unison.

  The saint. I turned from the twins and looked back toward the woods, where from the cover of the hawthorns a brown face ringed with white hair peeped out at us like some shy wild thing, and disappeared into the shadows when he saw that I saw him. I stood half-way between the woods and a fallen log where the twins sat absorbed in something they had found. “Wait!” I shouted to the twins, who looked up, surprised. They were in no hurry.

  I remembered the spring before, when I had crashed through these trees in search of him; it had been just a wood then, like any wood. Now, like a face you’ve learned to love, it had grown so familiar that the first wood was gone forever, and I knew this one only, which had a path through it, secret like Path, by the split birches, around the dense evergreens and down the bank to the mossy, ferny places and the black fallen trees where mushrooms grew, up the slate outcropping splashed now with clinging green, and up the sloping, brambly ground to where the old oaks grew, and to the oldest oak. To Blink, who sat at its foot, looking down it seemed in sorrow.

  I crept up slowly to him and sat by him without speaking. He didn’t look up at me, but now I saw that it wasn’t sorrow that made him look down, but something in the grass at his feet which he watched intently: a black ant of the largest kind. It struggled through the bending grasses, its feelers waving unceasingly.

  “Lost,” Blink said. “Can’t find his nest, lost the path. Nothing worse than that can happen to an ant. For an ant, being lost is a tragedy.”

  “What is that? Tragedy.”

  “Tragedy, it’s an ancient word; it meant a description of a terrible thing that had happened to someone; something that, given circumstances and some fault in you, could happen to you, or to anybody. It was like truthful speaking, because it showed that we share the same nature, a nature we can’t change and so cease to suffer. If this ant ever finds his nest again, and could tell about his experience and the suffering he felt, they’d have a tragedy. But he’s unable, even if he does get back. In a way, no ant has ever before been in the tragedy of being lost; this one’s the first, because ants have no way of telling about such things, and so being forewarned. Do you see?”

  “I think I do.”

  He raised his eyes from the ground and regarded me calmly. “Well. I think my stories are all told, Rush, the important ones; and now that those two look-alikes have come back, you’ll be going home, I suppose.”

  Old Blink! I had learned truthful speaking in that winter with him, and the weight and tenderness in his words made no answer possible. I only knelt by him and waited. He said nothing more, though; only watched the ant struggling through the grass like a man in the dark.

  “Tell me what I should do,” I said at last.

  “No, no,” he said, as though to himself. “No…. I guess, you know, all your foolish talk about me being a saint did affect me a little. Enough so that I wanted to tell you a story you would remember, and could repeat. But it’s no story, is it, only ‘and then, and then, and then’ endlessly…. A saint, no. If I were a saint, I wouldn’t tell you, now, what you should do. And since I’m not a saint, I can’t.”

  I thought of Seven Hands, and the day we had gone to see Road. He’d said: “If you’re going to go somewhere, you have to believe you can get there. Somehow, some way.” I thought of Sewn Up and No Moon, living at the river house but tied to the warren by strong cords. I thought of Once a Day. No: though Belaire tugged at me, I couldn’t go home again. Not yet.

  “Blink,” I said. “You said, about the four dead men, that if I wanted to know more, I should ask the Long League, or the angels.”

  “Both gone.”

  “Dr. Boot’s List is a child of the League. And knows things the League knew.”

  “So they say of themselves.”

  “Well,” I said, and took a breath. “I’ll go ask them, then.”

  He sat silent, blinking at me as though he had just then noticed me kneeling by him, and wondered how I had got there.

  “Maybe,” I said, “I’m not to be a saint. Maybe not. But there are still stories to learn, and tell.” I reached down with a finger and made a path through the grass for the ant, who stopped his labors, bewildered. I wondered if I would weep. I had wanted to be a saint.

  “I know the way there,” Blink said. “Or I knew it once.”

  I looked up. His brown face was creased in the beginnings of smile-wrinkles. He hadn’t wanted to tell me what to do; but I had chosen as he would have chosen for me. “I wonder, though, if they’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “There was a girl,” I said, “a Whisper cord girl, who years ago left Belaire, and went to live with them. If I could find her, she’d tell me.”

  “Would she?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

  “Well,” Blink said, “if you listen now, I’ll tell you how to reach them. That’s the first thing.”

  I couldn’t think, at the same time, of Little Belaire, of Once a Day, and of the directions Blink would give me, so I held up my hand for a moment, palm toward Blink, as gossips do before they hear a tale, and made myself as much as I could an empty bowl; and Blink told me then how I must go from here to where the List lived; and he told it in such a way that I couldn’t forget it: because in a way he was a saint, he was: my saint.

  We rose, and linked arms, and walked out into the blinding meadow strewn with new flowers. The twins came to their saint, who patted them and giggled, become again the little old man they knew. We sat and talked, and his eyebrows danced up and down and his tiny hands slapped his knees. The twins supplied news from the warren, what little they knew. He listened, and yawned in the heat; finally he lay down, his feet up, on the slope. “Yes, it goes on there as always…. No new thing, and if there were you wouldn’t know of it … well. And then, and then, and then. Another spring, and getting hot too…. Quick enough it comes and goes …” He was asleep, hands behind his head, breathing quietly in the warming south wind.

  We went away quietly. I gathered my pack, but left the fine string hammock for Blink: a small enough gift.

  “We’ll be at the river house tonight,” Budding said; and Blooming said, “Then you’ll get home tomorrow.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going home. But I’ll go with you as far as the river. I’ll find Road there.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to be a saint,” Budding said.

  “I don’t know about saints.” We had reached the edge of the little brook. “But I decided to leave home, and I think I ought to stay left.” I looked back as we went into the woods and caught a glimpse of Blink, asleep in the meadow. I wondered if I’d
ever see him again.

  I wonder if I ever did.

  SEVENTH FACET

  I stood next dawn at a great joint of Road, kicking apart the pink embers of the night’s fire. Southward, Road fell away to woodlands gleaming in a clear morning, westward it led into lands still night. Above my head, spanning all of Road, was a great green panel supported on rustless pillars, that creaked and swayed in the rising wind. It was lettered, meaninglessly to me, except for two arrows of stained white: one pointing south, one west. I packed my little camp and went south.

  In the afternoon I came into the wooded country I had seen. Road entered the forest; and the forest too entered Road. The forest stepped down steep inclines in great trees, and gracefully out onto Road in saplings and weedy trees which tore up the gray surface as spring breaks ice on a river. The liquid slide of the big trees’ shade was over it, and when I waded a stream that had cut a deep wound across it, I saw that among the stones in the stream were pieces of Road. And will it all one day be washed away? I thought of Blink talking about the bits of the great angel sphere.

  I was in the forest seven days without it thinning or breaking, only growing deeper and older (though not as old as Road). It was an ancient place, and nice to be in—nice to follow Road through, anyway. Night made it different; it made you think that a thousand years ago there had been no forest here; there might have been houses, or towns, and now there were only trees, huge and indifferent, the undergrowth thick and impassible except by animals. Only Road here was for man any more; and Road would be conquered in the end. The fire I built made a great vague hole in the dark, and kept animals away, though I heard noises; and the nations of the insects made their songs all night. I slept lightly through them, waking and dozing, my dreams like waking and my waking like a dream, all filled with those ceaseless engines.