Otherwise (43 page)

It was warm in the room, and a prickly heat was all over me, but in spite of it I shivered. The false leg. The thing on the wall that moved when it was light and dark, that only Whisper cord knew the secret of. And her small hot hand in mine.

A cloud went over the sun just then, and the diamond of sun disappeared from the wall. I watched the tiny children and the old woman, but they didn’t move.

SIXTH FACET

H
ow am I to tell you all of this? How? In order to tell you any single thing I must tell you everything first; every story depends on all the stories being known beforehand.

You can tell it; it can be told. Isn’t that what it is to be a saint? To tell all stories in the singe story of your own life?

I’m not a saint.

You are the only saint. Go on: I’ll help if I can. Before nightfall it will be told; before moonrise at least.

I wanted to say: Whisper cord lay coiled within the cords of Belaire like an old promise never quite broken, or a piece of dreaming left in your mind all day till night comes and you dream again. But to say that I must tell you about cords. About the Long League of women, and how it came to be and came to be dissolved. About St. Olive and how she came to Belaire, and found Whisper cord. About Dr. Boots’s List, and the dead men; about how I come to be here now telling this.

Cords. Your cord is
you
more surely than your name or the face that looks out at you from mirrors, though both of those, face and name, belong to the cord you belong to. There are many cords in Little Belaire, nobody knows exactly how many because there is a dispute among the gossips about cords which some say aren’t cords but only parts of other cords. You grow into being in your cord; the more you become yourself, the more you become the cord you are. Until—if you aren’t ordinary—you reach a time when your own cord expands and begins to swallow up others, and you grow out of being in a single cord at all. I said Painted Red had been Water cord, and her name was Wind; now she was larger than that and she had no cord that could be named, though in her way of speaking, in the motions of her hands, the manner of her life, in small things, she was still Water.

Water and Buckle and Leaf; Palm and Bones and Ice; St. Gene’s tiny Thread cord, and Brink’s cord if it exists. And the rest. And Whisper. And was it because of her secrets that I loved Once a Day, or because of Once a Day that I came to love secrets?

She liked night more than day, earth more than sky—I was the reverse. She liked inside better than outside, mirrors better than windows, clothes better than being naked. Sometimes I thought she liked sleeping better than being awake.

In that summer and the winter that followed it, and the next summer, we came to own Little Belaire. That’s how it’s put. When you’re a baby you live with your mother, and move with her if she moves. Very soon you go to live with your Mbaba, especially if your mother’s busy, as mine was with the bees; Mbabas have more time for children, and perhaps more patience, and especially more stories. From your Mbaba’s room you make expeditions, as I did up to the roofs where the beehives are or along the learnable snake of Path—but always you return to where you feel most safe. But it’s all yours, you see—inside to outside—and as you grow up you learn to own it. You sleep where you’re tired, and eat and smoke where you’re hungry; any room is yours if you’re in it. When later on I went to live with Dr. Boots’s List I saw that their cats live the way we lived as children: wherever you are is yours, and if it’s soft you stay, and maybe sleep, and watch people.

We had our favorite places—tangles of rooms with a lot of comings and goings and people with news, quiet snake’s-hands in the warm old warren where there were chests that seemed to belong to no one, full of rags of old clothes and other oddities. She liked to dress up and play at being people, saints and angels, heroes of the Long League, people in stories I didn’t know.

“I must be St. Olive,” she said, holding up to the light of a skylight a bracelet of blue stones she had found in a chest, “and you must be Little St. Roy and wait for my coming.”

“How do I wait?”

“Just wait. Years and years.” She dressed herself in a long sad cloak and moved away with stately steps. “Far away the League is meeting. They haven’t met since the Storm passed long, long before. Now they meet again. Here we are, meeting.” She sat slowly and put her hand to her brow; then she glanced up at me and spoke more naturally. “While we meet, you hear about it,” she said. “Go on.”

“How?”

“Visitors. Visitors come and tell you.”

“What visitors?”

“This was hundreds of years ago. There were visitors.”

“All right.” I adopted a listening position. An imaginary visitor told me that the women of the Long League were meeting again. “What are they deciding?” I asked him.

“He doesn’t know,” Once a Day said, “because he’s a man. But his women have gone to the meeting, bringing their babies and helping the old ones, all the women.”

“But not the women of Belaire.”

“No. No.” She raised a hand. “They just wait. All of you wait, to hear what the League has decided.”

I waited more while the League met. “Somehow you know,” Once a Day said, “that someone is to come, to come to Little Belaire from that meeting, though it might be years, and bring news …”

“How do I know?”

“Because you’re Little St. Roy,” she said, losing patience with me. “And he knew.”

She rose up, and taking tiny slow steps to lengthen the journey, came toward me. “Here is Olive, coming from the meeting.” She progressed slowly, her eyes fixing mine where I waited for years in the warren, knowing she was to come.

“It’s night,” she said, her steps so slow and small she tottered, “When you least expect it, and then …Olive is there.” She drew herself up, looked around surprised to find herself here. “Oh,” she said. “Little Belaire.”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you Olive?”

“I’m the one you waited for.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well.” She looked at me expectantly, and I tried to think what Little St. Roy would say. “What’s new? With the League?”

“The League,” Olive said solemnly, “is dead. I’ve come to tell you that. And I have a lot of secrets only you can hear, because you waited and were faithful. Secrets the League kept from the speakers, because we were enemies.” She knelt next to me and put her mouth to my ear. “Now I tell them.” But she only made a wordless buzzing noise in my ear.

“Now,” she said, getting up.

“Wait. Tell me the secrets.”

“I did.”

“Really.”

She shook her head, slowly. “Now,” she said, commanding, “we must go and live together in your little room ever after.” She took the cloak from her sharp shoulders, let it fall; she knelt beside me, smiling, and pressed me backward till I lay down. She lay down next to me, her downy cheek next to mine and her leg thrown over mine. “Ever after,” she said.

“Why were the Long League and the speakers enemies?” I asked Seven Hands. “What secrets did they keep from us?”

He was at work making glass—the glass of Little Belaire is famous, traders still come to deal for it—and all morning had been mixing beech-wood ash and fine sand with bits of angel-made glass from all over; now he threw in a broken bottle green as summer and said, “I don’t know about secrets. And the speakers were never the League’s enemies, though the League thought it to be so. It goes back to the last days of the angels, when the Storm came. That Storm was like any storm, on a day when the air is still and hot and yellowish, and big clouds are high and far away in the west; and as the storm comes closer it comes faster, or seems to, and suddenly there is rain in the mountains, and a cold wind, and it is on top of you. The Storm that ended the angels was like that: even when they were strongest the Storm was coming on, perhaps it had always been coming on, from the beginning. But few seemed to see it, except the League of women, who prepared themselves.

“And so when the Storm at last came in a thousand ways, multiplying, it seemed very sudden. But the League wasn’t surprised.”He trod on the bellows that made his fire roar. “The Storm took years to pass; and when everything was going off and the millions were left alone without help, and great death and vast suffering, multiplying as the Storm multiplied, were visited on every part of the land, it was to the Long League fell the task of helping, and saving what and who could be saved, and cutting away the rest; repairing the angel’s collapse where it could be repaired, and burying it forever where it could not. And for this huge task the League broke its old silence, and all the women acknowledged one another, because you see it had always been secret before. And for years the Long League of women saved and buried, till the world was different. Till it was like it is now.”

His molten glass was ready, and he took up his long pipe and fixed a ball of it, turning and turning it with great care.

“Did everyone do what the League told them? Why?”

“I don’t know. Because they were the only ones who were prepared. Because they had a new way to live, to replace the angel’s way. Because people had to listen to somebody.” He began to blow, his face red and his cheeks impossibly round. The green ball grew into a balloon. When it was the right size, working quickly he snipped off the end of it, and began to spin the pipe in his hands. What had been a balloon widened, flattened into a dish, seeming at every moment about to fall from the pipe.

“But the speakers didn’t listen.”

“No. During those years, we were wandering, and building Belaire. The women of Belaire had never been of the League, had never acknowledged that the League included them, though the League was said to be a league of all women everywhere. But our women were indifferent to almost everything but their speech and their histories and their saints. That angered and frustrated the women of the League, I guess, angered them because they needed all the help they could get and frustrated them because they were sure that the League knew what was best for the world.”

“Did they?” Seven Hands’s dish had become a plate, faintly green and striated with its cooling.

“Maybe they did. I guess our women thought it was only none of our business.

“What’s odd though,” he said, as he took the plate of glass from the pipe, “is that in hiding the terrible learning of the angels from everyone, so that the world had to become different, the League was left alone with it. They, who hated the angels most, were in the end the only ones who knew what the angels knew.”

“Like what?”

He held his circle of glass, flecked with bubbles and green, like the stirred surface of a tiny pond, up before his face. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “Ask women.”

Mbaba asked me: “Is it your Whisper cord girl who makes you ask all this?” I didn’t answer. Of all the cords, Whisper is the one that stays most to itself. Knots happen with others.

“Well,” Mbaba said. “I don’t know any secrets Little St. Roy knew. I think he told all he knew. Little St. Roy wanted to be a gossip, you know, but in the end he said he wasn’t smart enough. All his life he spent with them, though, serving them and carrying for them, and running Path with their messages. And listening to them talk. Little St. Roy said he was like an idea in the gossips’ minds, and ran through Belaire with pails full of water and a head full of notions.

“Later when he lived with Olive he told hard stories. But he always had, though maybe he didn’t think so, nobody knows.

“In those days the Filing System was just being learned, and Olive came to learn it as well as any; Little St. Roy said, ‘Remember, Olive, it’s time to stop when hunting for your identity turns into hunting it down.’

“He said, about Olive, that when she was dark she was very, very dark, and when she was light, she was lighter than air. I don’t know what that meant. Maybe Whisper cord does.”

When I asked Painted Red, she said: “I don’t know what angel’s secrets Olive might have brought. They aren’t in the story I know. There is a cat in it, and a Light. That’s all.

“It was a night in the middle of October,” she went on, “when Little St. Roy was sitting near the outside to watch the full moon. The big many-paned skylight that these days is deep in was in those days nearer to the outside, and was the best place to sit and see the moon. He was busy watching for the full moon when, just as Little Moon came over, tiny and white, presaging Big Moon, a noise startled him, and he looked up to see before him a huge yellow cat. Little St. Roy said he felt the hair on his nape rise as he watched the cat regarding him frankly. And as the cat regarded him there came floating through the door from the outside a ball of light.

“A round ball of white light, as big as a head, floating at about a man’s height, gently as a milkweed seed. It floated to a stop above the cat’s head, and then there was a gust of wind and the Light drifted till it hung over Little St. Roy’s head. Now, like all his cord, Little St. Roy could see things that no one else saw, and he looked at these signs and waited for what was to happen, which he guessed: and as he sat unmoving, a person followed the globe of light: a tall, lean woman, beak-nosed, her gray hair cut off short.

“‘Oh,’ she said when she saw Little St. Roy. ‘I’m here.’

” “Yes,’ said Roy, for he knew now who she was: that she was she whom he had waited for. ‘At last.’

“Her huge cat had sunk slowly to the floor and placed his head on his paws, and she went and sat with him, gathering her cloak around her. “Well,’ she said, ‘now you must take me within, and call together everyone who should hear what I’ve come to tell.’