"Did you breed cowards," Mary said, "—on your Range?"
Catania closed her eyes, climbed the second narrow step ... and took one step more. The air was still and very cold.
When she opened her eyes in gloomy light, she saw a round steel rail, a withered seat, and a big thin-spoked wheel. Then she turned—and shadowed rows of little people stared at her, smiling, their eyes bright as beads.
Catania shouted and fell. She saw her father running to her—a dog was tearing at her face, dragging her along the ground. The bite was so strong it didn't hurt, but she felt the pulling, and heard fangs scrape on her bones.
Her father reached her. She saw sunlight flash on his knife, and tasted her blood and dog blood together.
... Catania roused, and saw a folded little foot in a rotted shoe. She yelled and rolled away, scrambling to her feet in the narrow place. A withered lady was sitting with her head thrown back in dim light, laughing at something past Catania's shoulder. The little foot was hers.
Backing away, Catania hit the round rail with her hip. Now, she saw there were many people sitting in long rows down a narrow way. They were mottled gray and black, crumpled and shrunken as last year's spoiled potatoes—but dressed like children's dolls in scraps of woven cloth. ... Most still had their eyes—dry, buried, shiny black buttons peeping from deep sockets—with fluffy hair and brows sifting over them. They had wrinkled little noses, with nostrils twisted tight.
One had an eyeless child on its lap. The child wore a dress, and was hugging something ... a lump of fur with ears.
Catania stood still, and took a breath of air as thick and slow as freezing water. Staring into shadow, she recalled her vision of the dog's biting, and saw that these were people of remembrance, Warm-time people long dead in their big steel box with the running dog painted on its side.
"Catania," Mary called, standing down by the two steep steps. "Catania, come out now, or they will keep some of you."
"I'm coming," Catania said—but didn't move. She was hearing sounds ... a faint continuing roar, like Gardens' waterfall, like distant water thundering from the Wall in a morning melt. She heard this sound very clearly, and it wove and wove until she thought she could see things through the dark ice of the box's long windows.—But not dark ice. Dark glass... glass. Through it, Catania began to see bright-colored things go by, rushing....
She walked down the narrow way as if there were miles to go between these rows of people. Her bare feet slipped in cold grease as she went—and she supposed that Mary One-eye, and all the Garden Ladies in their times, had come and rubbed bird fat on the steel to save it from rusting.
Catania walked in close dimness to look at those who must have been Warm-time people—look at them as a doctor should. But she couldn't bring herself to touch them. She was not doctor enough for that.
She saw no sign of trauma, no bone-ends protruding from shriveled skin. None of their heads, frizzed with tufts of hair, had been broken. The leather of their throats had not been cut.. .. They might have starved to death, but it wasn't likely, not sitting so neatly in their rows.
No, they had frozen to death in a night. And rested in cold the centuries since—cold that must have come to seem warm to them, so they sat easy, dead, and smiling in shadow.
"Come out!" Mary was behind her, tugging at her arm, and Catania let herself be pulled back and back past the rows of people. She was helped down the two steps, then her bare feet felt stone beneath them.
"Look," Mary said. She led around to the blunt front of the big box, where letters—spotted and missing pieces—said, turbo-bus.
"It's a Warm-time traveling bus."
"Yes," Mary said, "—a traveling bus. There were black wheelings under it during the first five Ladies' lives, but they broke and rotted away."
"What does 'Turbo' mean?"
"I don't know. Peter Librarian says it means going around and around."
"Maybe it traveled around and around someplace," Catania said, and began to weep.
"There, now...." Mary took Catania's arm and led her away from under the split stone ceiling and sheets of icicles, out to where she'd left her moccasin boots.
Catania couldn't stop crying. She tried to catch her breath.
"Now, you're wiser," Mary One-eye said, "—and see where Gardens gets its memories." She made Catania sit down on a stone, then knelt and rubbed her cold feet until they were warm again. "Better?" she said. "Better?"
"Yes," Catania said, and slowly stopped crying. She leaned away to blow her nose between her fingers.
"Peter Librarian," Mary said, "—and Librarians before him— believe the traveling bus was caught when early Cold-time snow came down a hillside all at once, and stopped their going. Covered them up, so they froze and died. Then, later, a summer melt made a sudden river that took them under the ledge."
"It's so sad."
"Yes," Mary said. "Sad, and happy." She wrapped Catania's foot cloths, then put the moccasin-boots on her as if she were a child. "Aren't you wiser, now?" she said.
"Yes," Catania said. "I learned that bright things pass by...."
"Well learned, Tall Scar-face." Mary stood up. "And if you will only give an eye—just break it with your fingers and show it to the people—you may come and do as I did, and ride on the Running-dog bus for three days and three nights with no water and no blanket and no food. Then you will travel with the travelers, and become truly wise."
"I can't—"
"Don't say a thoughtless 'can't' to me, Catania!" An angry Mary. "—I know you better than you know yourself. You are wise already, and will become wiser. Then, what service will you do? Only spread your legs and dream of love with a man whose strength comes from death, and will go back to it?"
"Mary—"
"I'm offering you the gift of all of yourself. Don't refuse it."
Catania stood up from the stone. "Your people aren't my people."
"And yours are not a people, anymore. Their place is gone, and what they were has gone with it. They will be nothing until they have a new place, and have lived three lives there." .
"Then the more reason," Catania said, "—not to leave them."
Mary stopped looking angry, and smiled. "Oh, see, see how clever you are, to have found such an answer? Clever enough, and strong enough to hold my people in your arms when I am gone."
"No."
"Clever," Mary said, "—and see how strong, to refuse me." She stood watching Catania, her head cocked like a bird's for better seeing. "I promised you two wisdoms. Would you like to see the second?"
"I don't know…."
"Oh, but you do know! You would be eaten with curiosity, otherwise." Mary made an odd frowning face. "Look at me, then. Look at me. Look... at me...." Mary's frown grew deeper, and she slowly crouched... then squatted as if she were shitting. She began to huddle in upon herself like an unborn baby, grunting her way tighter and tighter, until she was curled close in her green robe, and shut in upon herself. She groaned as if in great effort, and her face, bowed into crossed arms, was dark with blood.
Catania was afraid for Mary's heart, and said, "Don't do... what you're doing." But Mary One-eye didn't seem to hear her, only kept knotting herself into herself, making the sounds of strain.
"Mary," Catania said... then stared. The fat woman, now a large green lump upon the stone, shifted and rocked from side to side. Then heaved... heaved, and lifted up.
Catania thought Mary must be standing—be starting to stand as she rose. But there was no part of her still on the stone. She lifted a little, then more and more until she hung in the air—no higher than Catania's waist, and no lower.
Mary, in the air, a great green-cloth ball with a dark and swollen face, began to slowly roll, making a snoring sound of great effort.
Catania shouted for help where no help could come. The shout echoed under the stone. She drew her knife, backing away, spitting like a cougar at dogs beneath its den. "Don't," she said. "Don't!" And turned and ran from under the rock she
lf into sunlight.
Outside, she slapped her face to waken. "Foolish dream," she said aloud. "Foolish dream..." She tripped and stumbled over rocks and a rotting hemlock trunk, almost falling on her knife.
Then she realized she wasn't dreaming, sheathed her blade, and shouted back to the deep rock ledge. "You fat bitch!" She'd heard from Salesmen about hypnos-fooling, and now it had been done to her. "You one-eye thing, you fooled me stupid!"
Catania thought of going back to kill Mary One-eye for proving the truth of Jack's tale of nasty wisdom—the Boston flying wisdom that always brought badness with it. She was thinking of going back with her knife, when she heard a soft sound that grew louder.
Something moved in shadows under the rock ledge. It swayed a little from side to side. Then a hunched wad of green, with feet tucked in, sailed slowly out into the light and staggered through the air as high as Catania's head. It made a sound of snoring as it came.
If this is so, Catania thought, then everything is dreaming. And she ran from that wisdom, as much as from Flying-Mary.
* * *
Catania ran until she was sick with running, and stopped to lean against a tree trunk to catch her breath. Someone was calling, faint and far behind her. She thought it might be Mary One-eye, calling her name.
There was a Catania then, that ran on, ran away along the ridge through pine, hemlock, and fir, to where Carlson Gold-bracelets waited... . But the other Catania was tired of running, and when she'd caught her breath, turned to walk back the way she'd come.
She found Mary lying in sunlight by a fall of stones, not far from the gully. The little woman's robe was soaked with melting snow, and she was trembling. Her lips were blue-white, and when Catania put an ear to her chest to listen, she heard the heartbeat stumbling.
"I'll build a fire," she said, stroking Mary's forehead. "Then you'll be warm, and we'll go home together. Carlson Gold-bracelets will be worried about us."
Mary nodded and took a deep breath. "It must... it must have been a frightened Scar-face, to run so far away."
"Yes," Catania said. "A frightened Scar-face. Two new wisdoms, were one too many."
Mary smiled, then coughed a catch of a cough. It was the cough Catania had heard from old people, when their lips were so pale.
She broke dead sticks and stacked them, shaved fine flakes of wood from one, then struck her flint and steel to make a spark, and blew it into fire.
"Better," Mary said, as the warmth came to her. She was lying on Catania's caribou jacket, and her lips had become more red than blue. "Better...."
"Will Carlson worry?"
"He will worry, and wait," Mary said, and lay silent, resting for a while. Then she turned on her side to watch the fire. "Listen ... what I just did, my mother's sister learned to do from an old Dreaming-man who came to Gardens. My aunt was our Lady, then." Mary cleared her throat, and coughed a little. "The Dreaming-man had no sense, but he told stories that going-sitting-in-the-air was done in New England, and other things, too. He said a man there, named Asa Phipps, had learned to keep warm with his mind—learned it hundreds of years ago, when the cold first came down."
Mary closed her eyes, and Catania thought she was going to sleep.
But after a while, Mary opened her eyes and said, "This man had a gift in his mind to warm himself. And it seems that from his gift, the New Englanders discovered others' mind-gifts, and bred those who had them. ... At least, that's what the old fool told us."
Mary reached out and pushed a twig deeper into the fire.
"I've heard of mind-done things," Catania said. "Jack said he'd heard of them—that one was seen in a storm ... and monsters. But I didn't believe it. There is none of that in any copybook I've read."
"My sensible Sweet One," Mary said, "—copybooks don't hold all wisdom. Perhaps our age of ice has been a teacher, too.... And as to these mind-gifts, I don't know any other, but I learned from my mother's sister that what you do is push and push and push the ground away. And if you have the piece of jelly-meat in your head that allows it—and you push hard enough so it hurts—then the ground can be pushed away from beneath you, so fools think you are flying as birds fly."
"It's very frightening to see," Catania said. "It makes real things seem less real."
Mary took a deep breath. "I'm feeling better." She took more deep breaths. "My aunt couldn't go far or fast, traveling in the air, and neither can I. A little way only, and with great difficulty—though enough to remind my people of obedience. Walking is much easier."
Mary slowly sat up. "I could try to teach you that wisdom, Catania. Perhaps you have the piece in your head to do it."
"I would rather run behind our dogs."
"I know," Mary said. "It is startling—but still a poor wisdom compared with the Running-dog bus." Then she was quiet, staring into the fire, one-eyed, old, and weary.
"Are you comfortable? Are you hurting?"
"Yes—and no, Doctor." ... As soon as she was able to stand, they walked back along the ridge in the afternoon, going slowly, though Mary seemed then as strong as ever. As they went, she took Catania's hand.
"Don't disappoint me," Mary One-eye said, and said nothing more until Carlson Gold-bracelets came to meet them, looking worried.
* * *
Catania found Jack, Torrey, and Pat Weber above the Trapper camp, testing sleds for frame cracks and loose lashings. Myles and Donna Weber were polishing the steel runners with shale stone.
The Richardsons and Olsens were checking sleds at their fire. Joan had one of the dogs on its back, scratching its belly while she examined pads and paws, the dog grunting, kicking with pleasure.
Catania stood by a pine watching them ... watching them do their Trapper chores. Now, it seemed to her they were like strong children, not quite grown—even Jack—and knowing only those narrow things that comforted them.
Catania saw herself telling them about the Running-dog bus, and Mary-in-the-air. She saw herself telling—saw them as they heard—and, deciding to say nothing about the two wisdoms, hoped that decision would prove to be a third.
Mary One-eye had taught her too much—too much for her to stay in Gardens to become a Mary, using wisdoms like nasty flying to frighten people, and giving an eye so orders would be obeyed. How could such bad things come to good?
But still, those wisdoms had had their way, and she was not as much a Trapper as she had been.
I have been shown two wisdoms, and am those two things wiser, but less happy. If our joys, like children's, are the pleasures of ignorance—then how sad must be All-knowing God?
Jennifer Weber will keep her leg.
We leave Gardens tomorrow. We go south.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DOCTOR CATANIA OLSEN
CHAPTER 15
The camp stirred through the afternoon and evening with getting ready to go. The Trappers packed the sleds with furs, tools, and weapons, as well as the travel-food the Garden people brought. Two goats, a big billy and small brown milking nanny, were part of that food, kept alive so as not to lose their meat by spoiling in warming weather.
The weather was already spoiling the snow. They would have to drag-travvy soon.
When the food came, the Garden children came with it to play with the gentler dogs, and say goodbye to Trappers who'd been kind to them. Those men and women who had lost their own children, had made goodbye presents of carved little jointed dolls for the girls, small bows and blunted arrows for the boys. The Trapper women, particularly, held and stroked the children, and were reluctant to let them go.
Later, at full dark, Garden May came with five other Garden girls—Francine Kemp, Ruth Bissel, Cross-eye Jane, Nuncie Lewis, and Small-Paula, each carrying an ax and a big cloth sack of their possibles. It was surprising Small-Paula came, since she'd been in camp only one time before, but she said that Mary had sent her.
The Trappers, restless, slept then woke throughout the night. Catania tended Bailey Auerbach's arrow wound, then unbandaged Jennifer Weber's
leg and smelled the injury, which didn't stink and was plugged with yellow. She bandaged it with fresh boiled cloth, and saw Jennifer settled in the Webers' sled to ride.
"Go easy with her," Catania said to Helen, and Helen said she needed no advice on sledding her dead sister's child.
The stars were washing away into gray, and Catania was standing by the Weber-Edwards' fire—tired, and eating some small smoked bird that still kept its little toasted feet—when Carlson Gold-bracelets came through the camp and said that Mary wished to see her.
"Don't go," Lucy said. "Let her come here to say goodbye."
Carlson gave Lucy a bad look.
"I'm happy to go see the Garden Lady," Catania said, so he would look better, and he did.
"Go where, Catania?" Jack said. He had come up behind her.
"Mary wants to see me."
"She's seen you many times. Now, we're leaving."
"Don't take advantage," Carlson Gold-bracelets said to Jack, and put his hand on his ax. "If I fight you, I will have no honor left."
"No," Catania said, and stood between them. "I'll go to her to say goodbye."
"A short visit," Jack said.
"A short visit."
* * *
Mary was sitting cross-legged on a red cushion by her hearth, combing her hair out with a trade-comb that looked to be made of silver. Her long hair was shaded light brown to gray, like a mink's pelt.
She looked up at Catania, and said, "I see you have decided wrongly."
"I am going."
"The weakness-choice."
Catania said nothing.
Mary gestured to a cushion. "Sit down," she said, and set her comb aside. "Silence will not do you now, Scar-face. And we have become friends and that will not do you now. Tell me, what if I take a hand from you—the hand you use to grip your bow? What sort of Trapper will you be, then?"
"A different sort of Trapper when I leave," Catania said, though her throat seemed to close while she spoke. "—As you have already made me a different sort of Trapper,"
"And if I take the eye you're too weak to give?"
SNOWFALL Page 20