by John Crowley
“When I was a little kid,” I said, “I thought I would leave Belaire to go find things of ours that had been lost, and to bring them back to put in their places in the carved chests.…”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh.”
“I found a saint, though; a saint in a tree. And I thought I would stay and live with him, and learn to be a saint too. And I did.”
“Are you a saint?”
“No.”
“Well,” she said, smiling, with the grass between her teeth, “that’s a story.”
I laughed. It was the first time since I had found her again that Once a Day had been the girl I had known in the warren.
“And he told you to come here to find us,” she said.
“No. There was a story, a story you started, about four dead men…” A cloud passed over her face, and she looked away. “And my saint said the League knew that story. But that’s not why I came.”
“Why?”
“I came to find you.” I hadn’t known that, not truly, till I had seen her at the pool; but all the other reasons were no reasons at all, after that. I drew another sedge squeaking from its fibrous case. Why are they made like this, I wondered, in segments that fit together? I bit down on its sweetness. “I used to think, in Belaire, that maybe you had gone to live with the List, and it hadn’t suited you, and that one spring they’d bring you home dead. From homesickness. I saw how you would look, pale and sad.”
“I did die,” she said. “It was easy.”
The puzzlement in my face must have been funny to see, because she laughed her low, pleased laugh; pushing herself forward on her elbows, she brought her face close to mine, and plucked the grass from between my teeth, and kissed me with eyes and mouth open. “It’s nice you thought of me,” she said then. “I’m sorry you were dark.”
I didn’t know what that meant. “You thought of me,” I said. “You must have.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But then I forgot how.”
The cat Brom beside her made an immense sharp-toothed yawn, his rough tongue arching up in his mouth and his eyes crossing; she pillowed her head on her hands, as the cat did. “Nice,” she said; and slept.
That journey lasted many days, mornings and evenings of long walking and hot, vacant middles when we slept. Walking, the List sang their endless tuneless song, which at first I could hear no sense in, but which came to seem full of interest; I began to hear who was good at it, and waited for the entrance of their voices. Their singing was a way to lighten a load, I saw; it was like the second of the Four Pots I had used: it stretched time out so endlessly that it vanished, and the miles fell behind us without our noticing them. It was only when, one dawn, we came out upon a great spiderweb of Road, where huge concrete necks and shoulders supported the empty skulls of high ruined buildings from which the glass and plastic had been stripped hundreds of years before, that they stopped singing; they were nearing home, awaking from the dream of motion.
They didn’t stop when the sun was high, but hurried on, pointing out to one another the landmarks they saw, ruins great or small in the forest; and, at a wide sweeping curve of Road, cheering, they caught sight of their home. Once a Day pointed. I could see, far off, a black square; a square so dark black it made a neat hole in the noonday.
“What is it?” I said.
“Way-wall,” she said. “Come on!”
We left Road on a spur of concrete, and came out suddenly onto one of those wide naked plazas, vast and cracked, windy, useless, as though the angels had wanted to show how much of the world they could cover with stone at once. Buildings stood around the stone place, some ruined, others whole; one was the odd blue and orange that are the colors of the first of the Four Pots, and had a little steeple. The largest building, in the center, was made of huge arched ribs rising out of the ground to a great height; and taking up most of its flat face was the square of utter blackness. The ivy that covered the building like a messy beard didn’t grow on this blackness, and no daylight shone on it; it seemed to be a place that wasn’t there; my eyes tried to cross in looking at it.
There were others, people and cats, coming out of the buildings toward us, greeting and shouting; one was an old woman, taller by a head than I, striding ahead of the others, a huge tiger cat rubbing herself against her skirts. Her long arms used a staff, but she walked as though she didn’t need it; she motioned Once a Day to her and wrapped her in her long arms with a laugh. Once a Day hugged her and said a name like a sigh: Zhinsinura. The old woman’s eyes fell on me, and she raised her staff to indicate me. “And where did you find him?” she said to Once a Day tucked under her arm, “Or did Olive Grayhair send him to us, to tell us we’re all dead?” Once a Day snuggled laughing within her arms and said nothing.
“I came to stay,” I said.
“What? What?”
“I came to stay,” I said loudly. “And Olive’s dead many lives herself.”
She laughed at that. “You’re carrying,” she said. “Bread, is it? Come, put it down; we’ll taste it. If I were dark now, I’d question you. Staying is one thing, but… anyway, welcome to Service City.” She raised her stick and swept it around to indicate the buildings that stood on the stone plaza. “Well. Come, warren boy; we’ll think awhile, and see.”
She put an arm around me as strong as the bearded man’s who had taken me in the forest, and we walked together toward the black hole in the wall that Once a Day had called way-wall. Zhinsinura’s long strides took us directly toward it, and though I tried to make us turn away, she gripped me and we kept on till it loomed above us, making me dizzy with its unseeable no-place. I had a moment to feel limitless fear, that if we walked into it we would be lost in its blackness, blind, and we struck it. Or didn’t strike: there was a moment that felt like a cracked knuckle all through me—and we were inside, not in darkness but in the hugest indoors I had ever been in, vast, glittering with light; as though there were a raindrop on my glasses, there was an odd shimmer and sense of refraction everywhere and nowhere. I looked back at the black wall I had passed through and was looking outside. The light that lit this place fell through that wall. Way-wall!
And the place that black wall lit, the house that housed Dr. Boots’s List: I stood still in wonder at it. Zhinsinura walked away with Once a Day across the black and white tiles that made the vast floor, and their heels clacked and their voices echoed, for the place went up, up, up to the metal ribs that made the roofs curve. In that huge echoey space, so different from the warren’s hivelike insides, there were enough people it seemed to fill a city. At the back of the place a great shelf jutted out and made a second floor, reached by a wide sweep of stairs cable-flown from the ceiling; people sat on the shelf’s lip and on the stairs with legs dangling and called down to those below; the travelers piled up their goods and sat on them, talking to friends who embraced them, and children ran with drink for them across the tiles. Clouds of bread-smoke arose from groups visiting, and the big cats sniffed the air and mewed: The whole place hummed and buzzed with the purr of the List’s ancient speech (though some fell silent as they turned to see me) and none seemed surprised in the slightest to have stepped through Night and fallen into a treasure house of the angels.
For that’s what it was. Once a Day ran across the floor to me, skipping away from friends who reached out hands to her, and came to take me in amid it all.
All along the long, long sides of that place were bins and chests and cases, angel-made; some were waist-high to me and made of glossy white plastic, others were tall, with hinged doors of glass and made all, all of angel silver—there were so many of these there that the dull glow of them seemed to lower the heat in the place and make it cool. Some of the open low bins had mirrors above them, slanted in such a way as to make what was inside seem twice as much as it really was—only the angels would have thought of that.
Once a Day ran from one of these cases to another, showing me thing
s kept in them which she had told me about while we walked—“and here’s this that I told you about and here’s that that I told you about,” and her eyes were wide and bright and she was light and I loved her intensely. She took me by the hand to see the huge pictures fixed all along the sides above the bins; though they were so large I couldn’t have missed them, she felt I must be shown, and stood pointing them out. The colors of them seemed as bright as the day the angels made them: one was carrots, beets, and beans; another had eggs and white bottles; one was a cow, with a smile like a man’s, which was ridiculous. As she stood solemnly pointing to the cow, she saw someone, and said softly, “Zher.”
It was a name. A boy, pale blond and with a pink tint of sunburn on his shoulders and nose, sat in a circle of people, mostly older, who seemed to keep a distance from him, though they smiled at him, and occasionally one reached out to stroke his arm or touch him. Once a Day went over to them. The boy Zher looked up at her, who was known to him, and at me, who was a stranger, and his look was the same. Once a Day went through the circle and knelt before the boy; he looked at her, his eyes searching her but seeming to look for nothing. She touched his face and hands, and kissed his cheek, and without a word came back and sat with me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Zher,” she said. “Just this year come of age, and got his first letter from Dr. Boots today.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a letter. And it’s from Dr. Boots.”
“Why is he naked?”
“Because he wants to be.”
Zher smiled a little, and then more; a laugh seemed to be within him, and those around him smiled too, and looked at each other and at him, and he did laugh, and they laughed-with him. Somewhere someone dropped something with a clang, and the cats’ ears all rose, and Zher’s head snapped around with eyes wide.
“Have you had this letter from Dr. Boots?” I asked.
“Yes. Every May month since I was his age; the first, the summer after I came; and just before I went out to the camp, and met you, this year.”
“Was it like that for you when you got your letter?”
“Yes. Just the same. I felt that way.”
“Were you silent? Do you have to be?”
“You don’t have to be. You just are, especially after the first. You don’t have anything to say. It’s all done. It’s all like it will be. Talking, after that, is just—just for fun. Just something to do.”
“When you talk to me—is it like that?”
She brushed her black hair with her hand and said nothing, and I didn’t dare talk more about it. Evening was falling in the room; the blue daytime shimmer turning dusty gold.
“Doesn’t he look beautiful?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Beautiful.”
“Yes.”
As the sun set, the singing began, low and quiet, touched off by the purring of some cat, Brom or Zhinsinura’s tiger, and taken up by one group of them, and then by another, a low sweet chuckle and drone and growl, each voice finding room in the medley to purr; and, as night came on, left off, voice by voice, Once a Day’s high sad sound nearly the last, until they were all silent. And the Lights were let out.
Perhaps the angels knew a way to make the cool globes dark in the day; the List just keeps them in black bags, and lets them out at night. There were many there, but still in that great place there were pockets and vague places of darkness. No one around Zher moved to bring a Light near him, and in the gloom I could see his fair body glowing as though a lamp were lit within him.
THE THIRD CRYSTAL
A LETTER FROM
DR. BOOTS
FIRST FACET
…And wait till I’ve inserted it.
What? Shall I begin again?
No. It’s all right. Here is the second crystal; see how tiny: yet it’s all there. Blink and Budding and Blooming, all that part.
How many more? The sun is setting. Look: the clouds below us are all pink and yellow.
The third is the last, usually.
Angel… tell me this now…
No. Not yet. Tell me: what happened next day, at Service City?
Well, that night we slept; she took me up the wide flight of stairs that led to the big platform which covered the back part of the place—the mezzanine, they called it (the List knew such words, words that rang like ancient coins flung down angelstone—mezzanine). There, rooms had been made with curtains and low walls, and it reminded me a little of home. Once a Day found us an empty nook piled with pillows, and we lay together there, she talking all the while as though to pull me into her List’s arms by strength of stories, until she was yawning too much to talk. She was so happy to be there, and so glad I was with her to see it, that it made me ache with some unnamable feeling—oh, Dr. Boots, you make them—no, you let them make themselves—so happy, so seldom!
Dr. Boots’s List can do a thing that I never could, that Once a Day had learned in her years with them: they sleep like cats. They cat nap. Once a Day would sleep for a time, and be up for as long, and sleep some more and be up again. All through that night I felt her get up and go and come back to watch me, impatient for me to get done my long sleep; but I was in the middle of thick dreams, the dreams a sleeper in a strange house has, and couldn’t wake. When I did, it was with a cry that woke me from some adventure; I lay staring, trying to remember where I was. I stumbled out through the curtains and found myself on the very edge of the mezzanine, looking out over the vast hall lit by a clear morning turned faintly blue by way-wall. Once a Day stood by it, bent over with her hands on her knees, by a little muscled brown man who sat holding up a ball of clear blue glass, turning it so the light shot through it; he bit on a tiny wooden pipe from which rose a fine white smoke.
When I reached them, stumbling past groups that fell silent when I smiled at them, I saw that on the brown man’s wrist was the bracelet of blue stones which Once a Day had given to him on the day of the trading at Little Belaire. His name was Houd, but when he said it it was as soft and long and unspeakable as a cat’s sigh. Others gathered around us, and I was made much of; they stared as frankly as cats at my pigtail and my spectacles and marveled at my ignorance of Dr. Boots and the List; and I couldn’t understand much of their talk, though I knew the words. Outside in the morning, Brom the black and white cat walked across the wide stone, and Once a Day and the others turned to watch me do what I had to do, being new to way-wall: I tried to walk out there. It doesn’t work that way; I could get close to it (always from it a hot breath blew, smelling of metal somehow) but—it doesn’t work that way. I looked around at them, and they were all smiling the same smile.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Houd said around his pipe, and Once a Day came and pulled me away. “It’s only one way,” she said laughing. “Don’t you see? Only one way.”
She took my hand and we went across the black and white squares of the floor and out the heavy glass doors ranged all along the back of the place, and around to the front through the real morning light, and then ran together headlong across the stone, with Brom beside us, and we must drown in its limitless blackness, but of course didn’t, and we were inside again, panting and hugging. “One way,” she said, “only one way! I learned that, I learned that; it’s all only one way, don’t you see?” And the brown man Houd seemed to watch me to see if I had heard in her words all that she said; and I knew I hadn’t.
There was one other thing that one new to way-wall has to do: I tried putting my arm through and then drawing it back out. I never tried it again.
In Little Belaire we said a month the same way we said a minute or a mile: to the angels they meant exact things, so that every month and minute and mile were the same length. To us, they just mean a lot or a little, depending. The List is the same, about minutes and miles, but they know how long a month is. They Count it off in a number of days, thirty or so to the month, twelve months to the year, and you are back at the beginning again; and
for a reason they explained to me but which I can’t remember, to every fourth year they add one winter day that has no number.
To me, the name of a month is the name of a season. I’ve been in years with two Marches and no April, or where October came in the middle of September; but I loved the List’s calendar, because it didn’t only count the days for some reason you might want them counted, it told too about the twelve seasons of the year.
The building at Service City that had the orange roof and the little white steeple was called by them Twenty-eight Flavors, and it was there they made most of the medicines and doses for which they’re famous. Once a Day took me there, and we sat at two seats that enclosed a little table, private in the dimness (Twenty-eight Flavors had once had big windows of glass, but most had been broken and filled with sticks and plastic). There were many tables there like the one we sat at, angel-made with a false wood grain and not even marred in how-many-centuries. On the table was a beautiful box such as the List makes for precious things, and with a reverent care Once a Day took off its cover.
“The calendar,” she said.
Inside the box were shiny square tiles, a pile of them face up, and another face down, about this size: two hands would just have covered their faces. The one showing, the one on top of the pile that was face up, was a picture, and below the picture were ranks of squares, a little like Blink’s crostic-words. The picture showed two children, younger than Once a Day had been in our first June, in a meadow impossibly full of pale blue flowers, which they picked with faces quiet and absorbed. He wore short pants, she a tiny dress of the same blue as the flowers they picked.
Once a Day touched a black word below the picture. “June,” she said. There was a small stone, made sticky with pine gum, in a square below the picture; she plucked it off and moved it to the next square. Ten days in June. The bell which hung before the way-wall house sounded four times, clear in the dimness, and we went to the great room for evening.