Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  When twenty days had passed, and the stone had made its way through all the squares, we sat again in Twenty-eight Flavors. There were others there that day to watch, and they stood in the heat as Zhinsinura’s big hands moved the June tile to the face-down pile and showed the next. When it was revealed, they all made a satisfied sound, like aaaah.

  That picture let me know, and laugh to know, that however strange and old the angels were, still they were men, and knew what men know, if they could make this. The same two children, she still in her blue dress, lay on green grass darker than June’s, older with length of hot days, and looked into a sky my great changeable clouds were piled up in, cities in the sky. But what made me laugh: the grass and they were at the top of the picture, and looked down into the clouds which floated below: and that’s how it feels, in summer, to watch clouds.

  “July,” Once a Day said. The evening bell rang.

  In July I went with her on expeditions to gather things, plants and rocks and soils and funguses the List uses for their medicines; and when we grew tired of searching, we lay to watch clouds.

  “What are dark and light?” I asked. “Why do you say someone is dark, and another time that he’s light?”

  She said nothing, only pillowed her head on her hands and closed her eyes.

  “Is it a game?” I asked. “I remember Little St. Roy said, about Olive, that when she was dark she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.”

  She laughed at that, her flat stomach shaking. “I heard that,” she said.

  “What did he mean?”

  She lay silent for a time, and then rose on one elbow to look at me. “When will you go back to Little Belaire?” she said.

  The name in her mouth sounded odd; it was the first time I had heard her say it here, and it sounded like a place impossibly remote. “I won’t,” I said. “I promised I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, they’ve forgotten that. If you left, no one would mind; no one would ask you where you went.”

  “Would you mind?” I said, for I hadn’t heard in her speech that she would, or that she wouldn’t; had seemed to hear only that there was no minding in her, which couldn’t be so. For a moment my heart felt cold, or hot, and I quickly said: “Anyway I don’t want my tongue cut out.”

  “Tongue?” she said, and then laughed. “Oh, they were dark. Now…” And she looked away from me, closing her mouth, as though she had told a riddle wrongly, so that its answer was revealed. But nothing had been revealed to me.

  “It was a joke of Roy’s,” Once a Day said. “A joke is all; an old joke. Look, look, we’re falling!”

  Below us—yes, below—the sky was tumbled full of clouds. By some magic we stuck to the grass, we were even cross-legged and calm, but we were falling endlessly into cities, faces, monstrous white animals, holding hands to hold onto the roof of the world: strange, when the clouds roll close below you and the sky is grass.

  And July’s tile turned at the time table made seven in one pile, five in the other.

  The calendar’s two children lay in deep shade; the boy was asleep, a straw hat over his face and a long yellow straw in his mouth, his small bare feet wide apart. She in her blue dress sat beside him looking over a field of the same yellow straw to a red angel’s tower with a conical top; and the gray clouds of a summer storm grew far off. August.

  We had a shade house we shared for summer, under two maples that grew together on a hill, and we could see far off too, though all the angels’ works were gone, and Once a Day wore no blue dress; no dress at all. The edges of our house changed as day went on, and the brown bodies of our guests moved with the shade.

  “Four doors along the spine,” Houd said. One of his skinny legs he dangled over his knee, and a wide hat shadowed his face, from which his wooden pipe protruded. “And press with all your might against them, you wouldn’t be able to open them. That’s my opinion.”

  “That’s because they are open,” Once a Day said, yawning. “The heat makes me sleepy.”

  “Just as hard to shut them,” Houd said.

  “No,” she said. “They blow open; as doors are blown open one by one down a corridor by wind; and that’s the end of that; they’re open.”

  “You’re light to think so,” Houd said, and Once a Day yawned again and stretched out her little tawny body on the matted grass so her breasts were nearly flat; she smiled me a sleepy smile.

  “Sun’s come around,” someone said. “Everybody move one place.”

  Shade.

  At evening one let out a light he had brought, but the air drew it away toward Service City, and one by one they followed it there. We lay together as the moon rose and remade our shade house all different.

  “Do you think,” she said then, moving away from me by a series of slow changes of posture, “that there are four doors along your spine? And how do you think they open?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, following her.

  “Neither do I.”

  There was a faint rumble of thunder, like someone huge, over the horizon, grumbling in his sleep; and as we lay together our moon house too gradually moved away from under us, leaving us splashed with still, cold light.

  And September’s tile shown at the time table made eight in one pile, four in the other.

  “I know her,” I said when I saw it, “and now I know those two as well.”

  “How could you know them?” she asked.

  “Because you showed them to me. Look: there’s the old one, who comes out when it’s dark; and see? she waits now, inside, in this month, and the two children are out…”

  “No, you’re wrong.”

  “And in the next months she’ll be out, and they’ll be hid.”

  “They won’t,” she said. “They’re just two, like any two…”

  “Dark and light,” I said, “just as you said, don’t you remember…”

  “No!” she shouted, to silence me.

  The tile we looked at showed a golden engine-summer day. The two children walked together with shining faces; slung over his shoulder by a strap was some Book, and she carried proudly a bright September apple. In all this it was like every other tile, he and she, she in her dress of blue, in a day just the color of the month it pictured, as though squeezed from the month as from a fruit. But in this month only, there was somebody else: the children walked smiling toward a tiny red house with a peaked roof, in whose door could just be seen a small and aged woman.

  And yes, it would grow dark, though it was nice now; the old woman would come out, and the two children must retire to wherever they could, to wait out the dark months, isn’t that right? The angels, even in their covered cities without weather, would not have forgotten that, that in warm perfect engine summer the old woman waited…

  “No!” she said, and ran from me.

  “I want to understand,” I said, when I found her amid her pillows on the mezzanine. “You have to speak truthfully to me. There was the house on the wall you showed me, where St. Roy’s leg was kept. The children came out when it was light, and the old woman when it was dark. In between were the four dead men, who never changed. It was about the weather. So are the tiles.”

  “Yes. About the weather.”

  “Yes. But, when we saw it, a cloud passed overhead, and the old woman didn’t come out; and the last time I saw it, on the day you left, it was spring, and yet the old woman stood there…”

  She lay face down away from me, her head on her arms like a cat; now she turned her face to see me. “Then,” she said, “was it about the weather?”

  “I don’t know. What else was it about? Why can’t I hear it in what you say?”

  She turned her face away again. “The tiles are about the weather. The angels made them to tell the months, and they are very true. That’s all.”

  “Then why did you run from me?”

  She said nothing, and though she lay still I felt her run from me further. I wanted to pursue her where she ran, a
nd I took her shoulders in my hands as though to stop her, restrain her: but she had fled.

  There’s a certain kind of dream, the kind where you set off to do an urgent errand, or a task, and directions are given you, but as you go on the places you have been sent to are not the places you intended to go, and the nature of the task changes; the person you set out to find becomes the one who sent you; the thing you were to do turns into a place, and the place into a box of treasure or a horrid rumor; and the goal can never be reached because it’s never the same goal; and yet you search on, never surprised by these changes, only persistent, only endlessly trying to do the changing thing set before you.

  Until you wake, and there is no search after all.

  “Once a Day,” I said, and laid my cheek against her hair, which hid her face; “Once a Day, tell me there’s no winter; tell me winter never comes, and I’ll believe you.”

  SECOND FACET

  On a blowing, rain-swept day which I would have called the first day of November but which the calendar called the twentieth of September, I went to Twenty-eight Flavors, summoned by Zhinsinura. She sat at the time table with September’s tile before her.

  “Did you wonder who they are?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Just two,” she said. “Like any two in this month. The other is an old woman, to whom in this month they go for counsel.” She smiled at me. Her big solemn head was made bigger by her wide gray hair, and her eyes were many-pouched and always sad; but her smile was quick and real. “And how do you get on, now, warren boy?”

  “Fine,” I said, and would have said nothing more, but that Zhinsinura wouldn’t hear in my speech just what I meant, what was fine and what not. “Can you tell me, though, what a letter from Dr. Boots is?”

  There were others there, working and sitting, some I knew. I had got used to being stared at around Service City; I would have preferred now to be alone with Zhinsinura, but that’s not the List’s way. The others looked at me with great interest.

  “It’s a letter,” she said. “And it’s from Dr. Boots.”

  I felt their eyes on me. I looked down at Zhinsinura’s long hands feeling the smooth edges of the tile. “There’s something,” I said carefully, “a thing, that I don’t know.”

  “Always, I should hope.”

  “That’s what she seems to mean. Your dark and light, you know, it’s not an easy thing to understand. I thought I’d seen a path, that it was about winter coming; but that was only another riddle; and she seems to say the riddles are answers.”

  “Every riddle is its own answer,” said Zhinsinura. “That’s easy. But how could a riddle know its own answer? Don’t think I mock you. I don’t mean to, a bit. It is a secret thing. The truthful speakers haven’t much believed in such secrets, is all. You ask for her secret, though you may not know that’s what you’re about; and she can’t tell you without learning it herself. And she wants not to learn that secret.”

  “How can you have a secret you don’t know?”

  The others there looked away now. They didn’t like this conversation, not the younger ones; the older weren’t listening any more; but Zhinsinura only laced her fingers together and leaned toward me smiling. “Well, how do you speak truthfully?” she asked. “Let’s both tell a secret.”

  “That’s not a secret,” I said. “It’s something you learn so well you forget you know it.”

  “Well then,” she said, opening her hands, “there it is.”

  Painted Red had said: for Whisper cord a secret isn’t something you won’t tell, but something that can’t be told. “There’s something,” I said slowly, like someone stupid, “I don’t know. I want to know it. There must be a way to learn it, because you all know it. If it can’t be told, I’ll learn it any way there is.”

  Zhinsinura’s steady eyes seemed hooded and pouched from so much seeing. “Do you know what you ask?” she said gently. “You know, a thing about secrets is that once you learn one, you know it for good. It’s your secret. You don’t go back out and stand outside again not knowing. There’s no way back out.”

  “Like way-wall,” I said.

  “Way-wall?” she said smiling. “There’s no such thing.”

  Everybody laughed gently, as though an old joke had been told at just the right time. Their laughter woke the tiger cat named Fa’afa, who was always near Zhinsinura. She touched its head and it rested again.

  “You know,” she said, “the League had no love for the truthful speakers. Perhaps it was that their women wouldn’t join the League in the very ancient times, or then help out after the Storm when they might have, but only kept to themselves. Then perhaps it was the League’s pride, that you all had survived without their help. It was only long after women had gone to others to tell them the League was dissolved that Olive went to the warren. The League thought never to make peace with you; and there were some, to the League’s shame, who tried to prevent Olive. Well. All that is old.

  “But we have grown old differently, in all those lifetimes since then. I know how differently: I visited your warren often, oh, so long ago it’s neither light nor dark now. There was a boy there—well, a boy, an old, old man now if he’s lived—who asked me to stay there with him, with you all. I wanted to, though I was afraid; in the end he was more sensible; but I think we both knew we would end up in a corner. And even so, I think the harder way is to come here from there. Your girl could because she is a cousin; you… well. I don’t say it to frighten you.”

  She looked away, raising her long bony arm to shake down her bracelets. The evening bell rang. She thought; then said: “Yes, there is a thing you don’t know. Yes, there is a way to learn it, though not this time of year; and it’s too soon for you, anyway. Stay; listen and learn; and don’t ask for what’s not given you.” She moved the sticky stone from the twentieth to the twenty-first day. “You say she ties riddles for you. Well, I’ll tie you another. I’m not afraid to tell it because ay, though it’s not a riddle at all you’ll think it’s one; and bee, if you’re going to stay here I think it will have to be by your way and not ours; and see, it’s the day and the time for it anyway.

  “This is the riddle: you can tie a string around your finger to remember something, until you forget there’s a string tied around your finger. Then you will have forgotten doubly, and for good. This calendar is the string tied around our finger—and the letter from Dr. Boots is how we forget it, doubly and for good.

  “You can look for a path through that. I know your famous Path. If you want to find it here, think this: path is only a name for a place where you find yourself. Where you’re going on it is only a story. Where you’ve been on it is only another. Some of the stories are pleasant ones; some are not. That’s dark and light.”

  I sat with my head bowed before her and the September tile between us and listened; and I might have understood, too, if I had ever in all my growing up been told a story that wasn’t true.

  “Did she send you away?” Once a Day asked. She sat amid baskets of apples that were being brought in through the way-wall, helping the children sort from them the bad ones, which would spoil the others.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think she did.”

  She polished on her starred robe and held up for me an orange apple that blushed red like a cheek. “I’m glad,” she said.

  I had been wrong about her speech. There was no mask put over it to hide from me; only an opacity filling it up, from within, filling up its transparency as fog fills up transparent autumn mornings. Yet overhead the sky is blue. Zhinsinura had offered me every way not to enter into their secrets; what she didn’t know was that I had already gone in, by the pool in the forest, no, long before then, in a game of whose-knee in Little Belaire that seemed now as long ago as a time when angels flew; and I had always known there was no way out. I had never truly looked behind me to see.

  She was right, you know, I think, about way-wall: that there’s no such thing.

&nbs
p; Yes?

  I mean it wasn’t a thing, like a door; only a condition. A condition of the air in the doorway, air altered, as ice is only altered water.

  Was it?

  I think it had been done long before, in order to heat the place. You said a hot breath blew from it. I think it was just an engine, to make heat…

  Maybe so. And the little house on the wall, in the warren, was only a bombom, a barom, a thing to tell the weather. Is it all only and merely and just? Why is it you know so much and understand nothing at all?

  I’m sorry.

  No; no. It’s only that this is the hard part of the story, the part that was hardest to live through, the part hardest to tell rightly; and if you don’t understand it, the story won’t make sense. You must try to imagine me there, angel; you must imagine me, because if you don’t imagine me I won’t exist. None of it will exist.

  Yes. Go on.

  In October Twenty-eight Flavors was an argument of odors. There was a long counter there, wood-grained like the tables, behind which rose a great mirror, black-flecked and dull: and on it were drawn in white two people, a man with an apron and a tall hat, and a boy to whom he offered what looked like a giant version of the Four Pots. It was in Twenty-eight Flavors that the List kept and made their medicines. From the’ ceiling hung brown roots strung in loops, and on the plastic were heaps of wrinkled leaves and the crushed buds of flowers; in the great stainless-steel ovens and sinks behind the mirror, things were baked and washed and mixed: the kitchen, they called it. Brown Houd, who knew much of such things, went among them with a confusion in his cup, looking and grinning.

  A confusion?

  They made confusions from leaves and such, boiling them with water. There were confusions to wake you up, others to put you to sleep. There were confusions that made you strong or weak, stupid or smart, warm or cool. “It confuses the dark and light,” Houd said, “and gives you a pause: for a while you think only about the confusion, and not about everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “That’s Relativity,” he said.