by John Crowley
It was as though I had been taken in, by the forest, and forgotten that I had ever been elsewhere. I continued to be afraid at night, but that seemed proper; in the day I walked, turning my head side to side to see only trees. I even stopped talking to myself (which truthful speakers do all the time, alone) and just watched, as the forest watched me. I had become part of it. So much so that when between waking and sleeping in a moonless night I heard two large animals pass near me, and one come close on padded feet, I only waited, absolutely still like any small prey, alert but somehow unable to wake fully and shout or run. And they passed. And next morning I was hardly sure they had been there. I sat smoking in the morning, wondering if I should be grateful I had escaped; the forest had so far convinced me that I was the only man in the world that it was not until I heard human voices singing that I realized it was a man who had passed me in the night.
The birds talked to each other and even the sunlight seemed to make a noise as it fell unceasingly, but the human voices were another kind of noise, which sorted itself from the forest’s as soon as I heard it. For a reason I remember but can’t quite express, I hid when I heard it was coming closer, coming from the way I had come. From within the great ferns at Road’s side I watched; and along the broad gray of Road came, not men but one, then two, then three enormous cats. I had seen cats before, shy feral faces in the woods, and one or two who lived at Belaire and caught mice and moles. These cats were not of that kind; it wasn’t only that they were huge—if they had stood on their hind feet like men, they would have been nearly my height—but that their soft, padding motion was purposeful and their lamplike eyes so observant, so calmly smart. I had heard of one cat like them: the cat that came to Belaire with Olive.
They sensed me, and without altering their steady padding came toward the place I hid; I was afraid for a moment, but they were not threatening, only interested. And now down the road those singing came into sight: ten or so, in black, with wide black hats that shaded their faces. When they saw that the cats saw something in the ferns that interested them, the singing died away, and, as interested as the cats, they came toward me. I stood up and stepped out onto Road. They were more surprised than I was, because of course it was they I was looking for, though I hadn’t expected to find them so soon.
I greeted them as they gathered around me, and smiled. One said: “He’s a warren boy.”
“How did you find our camp?” another said.
“I didn’t know I had.”
“What do you want with us? Why have you come here?”
The urgency and hostility in their voices made it hard to say, hard to say anything at all; I stammered. The first who had spoken, tall and long-limbed, strode over to me and took my arm, holding tight and looking hard into my face. “What are you?” he said, low and insistent. “Spy? Trader? We want nothing more from you. Did you follow us here? Are there others hidden in the woods?”
They all stood close around me, their faces secret and blank. “I’ve come,” I said, “to—to see you. Visitors to Little Belaire aren’t treated this way. I didn’t follow you, I was ahead of you. I don’t mean any harm to you, and I’m alone. Very much alone.” It was amazing to see them pause and puzzle over this, and look darkly at me; because of course I had spoken truthfully. And with the force of a blow I realized that none of those I faced did. Perhaps Once a Day, supposing I found her, no longer would; nobody that I would meet, for hundreds of miles around, spoke truthfully. My throat tightened, and I started to sweat in the cool morning.
Another man, whose beard was grizzled gray and whose movements were as graceful as the cat’s beside him, came up to me. “You have your secrets, there,” he said. “You guard yourselves. We have our secrets. This camp is one of them. We’re surprised, mostly.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know where this camp is you talk about, and if I went on now, I’d never be able to find it again. If you want, I’ll do that.”
We had nothing further to say, then. They wanted to go on to this camp, and I didn’t want to lose them; they didn’t want to take me to it, but didn’t know how to part from me. I was a real wonder.
The cats had started to go on, having grown bored with me, and some others drifted after them as though summoned. The question of me wasn’t resolved, but the cats seemed to make up everyone’s mind. The big man took my arm again, more gently, though his look was still black, and we started down Road after the cats. (There would be a lot of arguments and hesitations resolved that way among the list, I would come to find; the cats decided.)
Soon a spur of Road fell away from Road itself, and led downward in a sharp curve, broken in places and seeming about to lose itself in woods; and only when, at the bottom, it straightened itself and joined Road again, but Road going in another direction, under a bridge hung with ivy as with a long garment, did I realize we had gone around one of the great somersaults I had seen Road do so many years ago. Through the trees we could see its broad back humped as it made its big circles; no doubt the whole forest was seamed with Road, if you knew where it ran. Where does it go? I’d asked Seven Hands. Everywhere, he’d said.
We left Road then, and went through what seemed impassible woods, though there were hidden paths, and came to a small stone clearing, and nestled in the woods at the edge of the clearing was their camp: a low, flat-roofed building, angel-made with wide windows filled in now with logs. Before it were two ranks of decayed metal piles, almost man-high, that had once been engines of some kind, of which I could make nothing.
Before the door sat a bony, black-hatted old man, who waved to us slowly with a stick. The cats had found him already, and sat in the sun by him switching their tails and licking. The tall man who held me showed me to the old one. “He stays outside,” he said, and looked at me; I shrugged and nodded as though that would be all right with me, and they went through the door.
I smiled at the old man from where I stood on the stone clearing, and he smiled back, seeming not in the least surprised or apprehensive, though he was clearly the guard and the doorkeeper. I noticed leaning against the building’s side a huge square cake of plastic, sleek as Blink’s Jug, dirty and cracked, but its red and yellow colors undimmed, that bore a picture of a shell. The sun was getting hot; finally I ventured over to sit with the old man in the shade of the building.
We exchanged further smiles. He was no more doorkeeper than the rotting rows of angel engines before us. I said: “Years ago…”
“Yes, oh yes,” he said, nodding reflectively and looking upward.
“Years ago, there was a girl, who came to you from Little Belaire. A young girl, named Once a Day.”
“Swimming,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that. Perhaps he was senile. I sat for a while, and then began again. “This girl,” I said, “came here, I mean perhaps not here, but came to live with you.… Well. I’ll ask the others.”
“Not back yet,” said the old man. “Is she back yet?”
“Back yet…”
“She went off to the pool in the woods, a while ago. That’s the one you mean?”
“I don’t know, I…”
He looked at me as though I were behaving oddly. “She went out to meet you last night,” he said, “when Brom knew you were close. Isn’t that right? And came back early, early this morning, after greeting you. Then she slept. Now she’s at the pool. I think.”
He thought I had come with the rest, from far away. And that I must have seen her.… And I had: between wake and sleeping, two had passed me. A man, and another, who must have been a cat. I jumped up, startling the old man. “Where is this pool?” I said loudly. He pointed with his stick toward an opening in the woods that showed a path. I ran off.
How huge the world is, and how few in it, and she passed me in the darkness in the forest and I hadn’t known. I was hurrying through the woods as though to a long-lost friend, but thought suddenly that perhaps I shouldn’t rush on her: she may not be the person I kne
w at all, might not know me at all, why am I here anyway, and yet I rushed on as fast as I could. The path went straight up a mossy rocky ridge; on the other side I could hear water falling. I climbed, slipping on the moss, and scrambled to the top, and looked down.
A deep rippled pool of water that leaves floated across. A little falls that poured into it chiming and splashing; the rocks were wet and shiny all around it, black and green and bronze. And at the water’s edge, a girl knelt to drink, her hands under the clear water and her breasts touching its surface. Beside her, drinking too, was a great white cat marked black in no pattern. He had heard me; he raised his huge head to look, the water running down his white chin. She saw him look, and rose to look too, wiping her mouth and her breasts. Her face made something like a smile, quick, with open mouth, and then was still, alert as the cat’s, watching me climb carefully down the rocks to the pool’s edge opposite her.
But this is not she, I thought; the girl I had known had not had breasts, her dark aureoles were like small closed mouths, like unopened buds. This one’s thick hair was black, and her eyes startlingly blue, her down-turned eyebrows made an angry sulk; but it wasn’t she. Six springs had passed; there was a light beard on my face. I wasn’t I.
“Once a Day,” I said, at the edge of the pool, my hands on its wet rocks as hers were. Her eyes never left mine, and she made again the smile I had seen from above, but now, close to her, I could hear her quick exhalation as she made it; and when the cat beside her made it too, I saw that it was a cat’s smile, a smile to bare teeth and to hiss.
I could think of nothing to say that she would hear. The cat had made himself clear, and she had made herself as the cat. I tore off the pants and shirt I wore and stepped down into the icy water. She watched me, unmoving; in two long strokes I reached and touched the rocks where she sat. When I grasped the rocks near her feet, and began to say a word about cold water, she rose and stepped back, as though afraid I would touch her. The cat, when I drew my numb body out and water streamed from me, turned and loped away silently. And then she, deserted and pursued, without a word turned on her toes and ran from me.
I called after her, and almost followed, but felt suddenly that that would be the worst thing I could do. I sat where she had sat and watched her wet footprints on the stone dry up and disappear. I listened: the woods had stopped making noise at her passage; she hadn’t run far. There was nothing I could do but talk.
I don’t remember now what I said, but I said my name, and said it again; I told her how far I had come, and how amazed I was that she had passed me in the night; “come more miles than I thought I could hold,” I said, “and I don’t have any other gift for you than that, but as many more as you want…“I said that I thought of her often, thought of her in the spring, had thought of her this spring after a winter in a tree and the thought had made, me weep; but, but, I said, I haven’t chased you, haven’t followed you, no, by the Money you gave me I said I wouldn’t and I didn’t, only there were stories I wanted to hear, secrets I learned, from a saint, Once a Day, from a saint I lived with, that I wanted to hear more about; it’s your own fault, I said, for setting me on a path I’ve walked ever since, and you might at least say my name to me now so that I know you are the girl I remember, because…
She stood before me. She had put on a coat of softest black covered with stars, black as her hair. “Rush that Speaks,” she said, looking deeply into me, but like a sleepwalker, seeing something else. “How did you think about me when I wasn’t there?”
She spoke truthfully, I thought, I hoped, but her speech was masked, masked with a blank face like a cat’s or like the blank secret faces of the ones who had found me in the woods. “You never thought of me?”
The cat came from the woods, warily, and passed us. “Brom,” she said, not as though to call to it but only to say its name. It glanced once at us as it passed, and started up a path toward the camp. She watched it for a moment, and then followed. She glanced back at me, her arms crossed, and said, “Come on, then,” and all the years between now and the first day I had seen her folded up for a moment and went away, because it was just that way she had said it to me when I had followed her to Painted Red’s room when we were seven, as though I needed her protection, and she must, reluctantly, give it.
She didn’t ask how I came to be here, so I told her.
“Are you a prisoner?” she said.
“I think so,” I said.
“All right,” she said.
Something more than years had happened to Once a Day, more than a mask put over her speech. The girl who had kissed me for showing her a family of foxes, and lain down with me as Olive had with Little St. Roy, was gone, gone entirely. And I didn’t care at all, at all, so long as I could follow this girl I had found, this black-robed starred girl, forever.
EIGHTH FACET
At evening I sat alert among them, though they were easeful, resting their backs against the walls of their camp in the gathering dusk. For what they were discussing, they didn’t seem fierce enough.
“We could tie him to a tree,” said one of them, moving his hands in a circle as though tying me up, “and then hit him with sticks till he’s dead.”
“Yes?” said the older one, the one with gray in his beard. “And what if he doesn’t hold still while all this tying and hitting is going on?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“We’d hold him,” the first said. “Use your head.”
Once a Day sat apart from me, with Brom, looking from face to face as the others spoke, not concerned in it, it seemed. I would never be able to run from them in their forest.
“If we had a knife,” said another, yawning, “we could cut his tongue out. He wouldn’t be able to talk then.”
“Are you going to be the one to cut it out?” Once a Day said, and when he didn’t answer, she shook her head in some contempt.
“We don’t have a knife, anyway,” he said, not much cast down.
They were afraid, you see, that I’d go back and tell everyone where their camp was, and that they would be invaded or stolen from; there were thieves still; they had no reason to trust me. They just didn’t know what to do.
“If we were nice to him,” Once a Day said. “And gave him things.”
“Yes, yes,” said a voice, someone lost now in darkness, “and one day he’s dark, and then what does any kindness mean?”
“He’s not like that,” she said in a little voice. And no more was said for a long time. I jumped when someone near the door got up suddenly; it was the old doorkeeper, who went inside and came out a moment later pushing before him a white ball of light, cold and bright, which when he released it floated like a milkweed seed and shone softly over the men and women seated there. My mind was set on my fate, but when he released the light and it floated, I thought of Olive and the full moon; I looked at Brom, and the other cats there, who regarded me with the same frank candor that was in the faces of those discussing hitting me till I died. And in Little St. Roy’s ear Olive whispered her terrible secrets.
“I have an idea,” I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. “Suppose I didn’t leave.” They all looked at me with the same graceful indulgence they granted one another. “Suppose I just stayed on with you and never went back. I could help out; I could carry things. Then I’d grow old, and die naturally, and the secret would be safe.” They were silent, not thoughtful particularly; it was as though they hadn’t heard. “I’m strong, and I know a lot. I know stories. I don’t want to leave.”
They looked at me, and at the Light that moved slightly when the breeze pushed it. Finally one young man leaned forward. “I know a story,” he said. And he told it.
So I spent that evening between Brom and Once a Day, not sleeping, though they were asleep in a moment. Nothing further had been said about hitting me or cutting me; nothing further at all had been said, except the story, which I smiled at with the rest, though I hadn’t understood any of it.
> And not long after I had at last fallen asleep, before dawn, she woke me. “The cats are walking,” she said, her face dim and strange; I forgot, for a moment, who she was. I stumbled up, shivering, and smoked a little with her, and drank something hot she gave me in a cup; it tasted of dried flowers. Whatever it was, it stopped the shivers, that and a long cape of black she gave me, giggling when she saw me dressed in it. The others were laughing too, to see me in this disguise. In the long night while my fear passed, I learned something; that the truthful speakers have little need to be brave, because they always know where others stand. It had been only that these people couldn’t speak that way that had made me afraid of them when, in fact, they would do no harm to me. I had been afraid of men for the first time in my life, and I saw that it would happen often from now on—fear, confusion, uncertainty—and I would just have to be brave. Odd to find it out, old as I was, for the first time. And to think of the warren, where old people died peacefully, never having learned it.
The cats were walking: it was time to go. There was some discussion over who was to carry what of the things that had been packed the day before; I shouldered a big shiny black pack whose rustle told me it was full of dried bread, enough to last many through a year. It seemed right that I should carry it. And we set off along still-dark Road, in a long line, the cats dim in the distance and the sky beginning to glow to the left through the forest.
When the sun was high and the cats had had enough walking, we found a place to stop for the rest of the day, to sleep and dawdle through the afternoon with them, till evening when they were restless to move again. In a mountain meadow where tall feathery grasses grew up between dark pines and birches, Once a Day and I lay on our stomachs with our heads close and drew out sedges from their casings and chewed the sweet ends.