"Don't," she said gently, looking at the gra.s.s, at the glitter of the hoppers. She meant: don't darken me now, not now of any time.

Far off, we saw someone coming toward us, in a sleeveless black coat and a wide hat. Houd. He stopped some way off and watched us for a moment. Then he raised the stick he walked with, summoning her, and turned and walked away.

"I'm to go now," she said, and rose.

"Do you know I lose you by it?" I said, but she didn't answer, only started after Houd toward Service City.

I put my head on my knees and looked at the gra.s.s between my feet. Each blade of gra.s.s, tiny bud, tinier bug, was clear, clearer than I had ever seen them before. I wondered at that.

No! I leaped up, and Brom stopped playing to watch me. I caught up with her as she started across the wide, sun-heated stone plaza. Winter had cracked it, adding minute wrinkles to its face as years add them to a human face.

"Once a Day," I said to her back, "I'm going away. I don't know where, but I'm going. In a year, I'll come back. But promise me: promise you'll think about me. Think about me, always. Think about... think about Belaire, and the foxes, about the Money, think about how I came and found you, think about..."

"I don't remember foxes," she said, not turning to me.

"I'll come back and ask you again. Will you think about me?"

"How can I think about you if you're not here?"

I grasped her shoulder, suddenly furious. "You can! Stop it! Speak to me, speak to me, I can't bear it if you don't... All right, all right," for she was closing her face against me, turning away, taking my hand from her as though it were some accidental obstruction, a dead branch, an old coat, "only listen: no matter what you say, I know you can hear me: I'll go away now, and we can both think, and I'll come back. In the spring."

"This is spring," she said, and walked away across the plaza. I watched her, vivid, white, and living for a moment against the immense absent blackness of way-wall; and then gone. Blink: gone. As though she hadn't been.

And what if, I thought, my heart a cold stone, what if she had spoken truthfully to me, what if she had heard in all I said that I could no more go away from here for a year - for a month, for a day - than Brom could speak or St. Blink tell a lie?

I don't remember the rest of that day, what I did with myself. Perhaps I stayed where I had been left, on that stone. But at evening, before I could see her return, I went to Twenty-eight Flavors to find Thinsinura.

She stood with other old ones at the long counter, pondering with them a great piece of smooth slate which had been carefully coated with beeswax, so that signs could be made on it. After some thought, she brought forward one woman and gave her a pointed stick; as the others smiled and nodded, she bent and made a sign on the wax. Zhinsinura hugged her then, and she departed with one or two others.

"I want to go too," I said, and Zhinsinura turned her hooded eyes on me. "I've pa.s.sed all your tests. I haven't asked for what wasn't given me: but I ask now for that."

She held up her hand for the others to wait, and took me by the shoulder to the time table, where we could talk alone. "No tests were set you," she said. "But I will ask you this: why did you come here?"

There were a lot of answers to that, though only one that mattered now. "There was a story," I said, "about four dead men. A wise man I knew told me that you here might know the ending to it. I suppose he was wrong. It doesn't matter now."

"The four dead men are dead," she said, chin in her hand. "The League destroyed them, the four clear spheres with nothing at all inside them; they destroyed all but one, which is lost for good, as good as destroyed..."

"There were five."

She smiled. "Yes. So there were, five." In her hooded eyes were answers to that mystery; the last test was not to ask for them.

"I don't care now. I only want to stay, here, with her. I can't, unless I know what you know, unless I understand..."

"What if it doesn't help? I think you truthful speakers put too much faith in knowing and understanding and such things."

"No. Please. It's not even understanding I want. She... I want, I want to be, her. I want to be her. I don't want to be me any more. It doesn't help. Nothing I know helps a bit. I don't know if being her is better than being me, but I don't care anymore. I give up. Help me. I have no more reservations."

Zhinsinura listened. She chewed a finger and thought. We were alone now in the place, except for the cat Fa'afa, who wasn't interested. I looked down at May's tile between us: the children (who had not grown older in a year) stood in a wooden house with a wide door, a house filled with cut yellow gra.s.s in piles - the sun shone from it and lit their cheeks and placid downcast eyes. Hands on their knees, they looked down at a cat. A tiny tabby lying on her side, at whose nipples sucked three, four, five kittens. More than any cat mother and her children I had ever seen, it looked like the family of foxes I had found for Once a Day. Would I forget them too?

Zhinsinura leaned toward me and stroked my cheek; I felt her rings catch at my beard. "I love Boots," she said quietly. "I'm as old as anyone I ever heard of, and I would not have had it any other way. I love Boots; so I will grant your request; and I hope you will be done by as I have been. But remember: there is no hoping for it to do anything. It will do as it does, and is not accountable: not Boots, not me or your young girl, not even, as you will see, you.

"But that's too many words already. They won't help." She rose, and led me to the counter where the slate slab covered with wax lay. "Be alone tonight," she said. "Come early tomorrow and find me. I'll take you. You'll have your letter from Dr. Boots." She gave me the pointed stick. "Now sign the List."

All their marks were there; Once a Day's was there. I had no mark, so carefully and clumsily I scratched on the List the palm sign of my cord.

I was alone that night, though I didn't sleep. I lay thinking that however much it had been Once a Day that had brought me to this, it must anyway have lain on the path I had walked from the beginning. I had seen the four dead men, and Once a Day had whispered Olive's inaudible secrets in my ear; I had gone out to be a saint to solve those mysteries, and learned that winter is half of life, though I could come no closer to Once a Day's heart than that - could come no closer ever, unless I took this last step. I thought of Zher, as I had seen him the first day I had come to Service City, and thought that now Once a Day sat among the old ones as he had, as though a lamp were lit within her. Tomorrow I would be as she was. And my only regret, now, is that I didn't pack my old pack that night and leave Service City forever.

I came early to Zhinsinura, shivering and yawning with morning chill and expectation, and followed her through the forest to the river's edge. There was a log raft there lashed with plastic closeline; a man and a woman my parents' age sat within it waiting. He and I, when Zhinsinura was seated, untied the boat and poled it with poles worn and smooth out onto the May-quick river.

Silent but for the spank of the river on the raft's sides and the chuckle of the forest, we followed the current. Zhinsinura smoked tobacco, and continually changed the pipe from place to place between her teeth. "About the letter," she said once, "we have only an old joke. The angels said every letter has three parts: the Salutation, the Body, and the Complimentary Close." I listened to the roll of the ancient words and said nothing. The gullied banks were tumbled with ruined places, mostly become forest now, revealed only by an angelmade angle or straight line in the moss. We glided past them, pa.s.sing through drooping willows as through thin draperies, and after a time came up against a wharf in the river, swung the raft around and tied it up.

A path from the wharf led up to a - what was their word - glade: a kept place of young willows and soft gra.s.s, which the sun reached into. Some of the List were there and watched us approach, but gave no sign; some were naked. In the center of the glade stood a small house of angelstone, which over time had sunk and was now partly buried in the soft earth; a narrow path led down to its low door. Zhinsinura took aside the two we had come with; they nodded together, looked at me smiling, and sat to wait. As she had before waywall, Zhinsinura took my shoulder in a firm grip and led me down into the darkness within the little house.

There was but one small window. For a moment the dimness was spangled with the sunlight still in my eyes. I saw that the small square place was empty; then I saw that it was not. There stood there a box, or pedestal, as clear as gla.s.s or clearer; inside it, silver and black b.a.l.l.s or k.n.o.bs were suspended in rows as though in water. And on top of the box was a clear sphere, the size of a man's head, with nothing at all inside it.

"The fifth," I whispered.

"Boots," she said. She was drawing on her hand a silver glove, a silver glove that glowed like ice. "Sit," she said. I sat; I didn't think my knees would hold me anyway; Zhinsinura with her gloved hand pretended to turn one of the k.n.o.bs within the box. The k.n.o.b turned. The clear sphere, with a small noise like a shocked, indrawn breath, changed instantly to black: black so black it appeared no longer a sphere, a black circle cut out of the world.

"Now close your eyes," Zhinsinura said; "It's best to close your eyes." I did; but not before I saw that with her silver glove she was pretending to turn another of the k.n.o.bs within the box; and that the black circle was rising from the pedestal, moving like a Light; and that it came toward me.

And then there came the time that I must tell you of, but can't; the time when Boots was there, and I was not. When I was not in Rush that Speaks, and Boots was; when Boots lived; when she was Rush and I was not; when I was not at all. I remember nothing of it - I wasn't there - and though Rush was stained with Boots's being, stained and colored with it forever, he remembers nothing, forgot all even as I returned to him: because though Boots has many lives she has no memory. I know only the last thing Boots did: and that was to close her eyes. And then she left him. It was in that moment, when Boots left, that I got my letter: my letter was myself.

"Open your eyes," said Zhinsinura.

That - "open your eyes" - entered in at the doors of Rush. I was not, and that entered nothing; but still as quick as ever it found and ran along the old path which such things had taken countless times before. Only this time, as though it were a Light, it was able to see the path, infinitely long, which it took. The path was Rush: the walls and snake's-hands were his stuff, the countless steps and twists and false ways and rooms were him, chest full of Rush, it was all Rush: all along, Rush was handholds, ways, stairs, a path for that to get deep in. And I - I was nothing; but when Zhinsinura said that, "open your eyes," I uncurled outward from some tiny center of not-being and built Rush to receive it: the path those words took and the place the path led through spun out both together. The words watched me watch myself make a place that held a path which the words took through the place to where I built it. A place like spheres, like the trees of bread, but all within each other, spheres of bright complexity made only of making, each sphere fitting within a larger just in time to let "open your eyes" escape into the smaller, until the words and I had made up Rush to hold us both; and we all three, in a silent swift coupling, laced all our ways together. And I opened my eyes.

The black sphere was retreating from my face, returning to the pedestal to perch. Zhinsinura with the silver glove pretended to turn k.n.o.bs. The sphere settled; Zhinsinura turned a k.n.o.b. The sphere was clear again. Boots slept.

Zhinsinura said, "Can you go? We'll go now."

The whole great place I had built to hold Open Your Eyes vanished like a cloud, and just a little more quickly than I had built it, I built a new Rush with a new path to receive these new words. And I knew then (unmoving, unable to, hands gripped around my updrawn knees, mouth wide as my eyes were wide) that I had built oh how many million before, and lost each, changed from each, they were less real than clouds, I was less changeless than a banner in the wind, and I knew that I would build a million others, each as different as this one was from... what? How had I been, a moment before? What was the huge thing I had only just learned? Gone... I tried to grasp at something to Be, some house to Be in, and could not; and Dread came chasing out through all the spangled spheres of Rush, and I felt myself building a house for it to live in, and as soon forgetting I had ever lived in any other thing than Dread. I struggled to rebuild, remember, but struggle only enriched Dread's house, and I was only Rush here now afraid.

But sunlight happened then, for Zhinsinura led me out.

And the house of Dread was less than memory because Sun took up all my room.

I almost wept and almost laughed to think how I must build a house not just for every word but for everything at all that has a name. A Willow happened, and Walking on the Gra.s.s; a Person I Knew happened. Each time I turned my head a thousand things ordered their paths and chattered with each other about whose would be next, and each time I turned a thousand Rushes were made and fell away tinkling, sighing, whispering, crashing.

I stopped, stock still. Zhinsinura's tug on my hand made me recoil. I must be careful. Surely, in this rush, something, something is bound to lose its way. I must be careful not to draw Path wrong for any name to lose itself on. Wait, wait, I pleaded; but they wouldn't wait, and how had I ever been able to build fast enough for Everything? I was tense as stone with effort, and Dread was all I knew how to accommodate: but at Dread's door I stopped: something was rising in me, something was rising to meet all that I could not meet.

What rose was, I will say, Boots. I will say that though Boots had left, she had also stayed. I will say that Boots rose, and that out of her house deep within me she spoke and said: Forget. Forget you were ever other than the perfect house you are forever building, and whether it is a house of dark or light it will build itself. As for any name that enters there, it couldn't lose itself; for if the house is whole, why then isn't Path drawn just as wholly on its feet?

I will say Boots said this, I will say that this was what her letter said; I will say even that at her words the stone tension went out of me, I fluttered like a banner in the wind, and wept and smiled at once. I will say so: but the secret, oh the secret is that Boots has nothing, nothing, nothing at all to say.

Sixth Facet

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That's what time is like.

I know that at my center now is the time I was not there and Dr. Boots was. That's the kiss. The letter came, not then, but in the first step I took away: when I returned, as though new-born, to the place I had always lived: Rush and this world. Yet Boots is there, at the center; sometimes, in a moment that makes my heart beat slow and hard, or a dream shatter, or a present moment fall to bits, I can remember - taste, more nearly - what it was to have been Boots. I think that if I had lived on at Service City, and every year repeated that kiss, I would have come to be as much Boots as myself, to share Rush with Boots - as all the List shared themselves with her. And even as it was I knew, as I sat on the pier waiting for the raft to return, that I would carry Boots forever.

I say waited: I did for a moment try waiting, but couldn't for long; I became instead a pier man, who waited for nothing. I had no meanwhile.

"Can someone pole?" Zhinsinura said to some others who sat there with me. "He can't."

Slipping through the brown current the raft came to the pier; it struck, wet wood on stone, and swung about. The two on board stood up with its motion and looked at me from beneath their wide hats; one flung a white rope to me, and I stared at it where it lay without taking it. I heard them laugh, and I laughed too, but then forgot why in the task of watching the long poles laid up with a great wood sound. I sighed a huge sigh, as though I had just done sobbing; a sigh for the vast richness of it all.

They put me on the boat, and Zhinsinura came on; and the turning of it upstream turned the world in my eyes dizzyingly.

I suppose it was they, the two in the boat, who brought Zhinsinura the news about Once a Day. I think I can remember them talking with her, and they all three turning to look at me if I heard them say her name, I could not then build a house large enough to hold it; and watched instead the ripple of the water by the boat, the sun's countless bright eyes in the leaves overhead. I couldn't have known, wouldn't have guessed, that to be absent for a time, to be for a time inhabited by a creature simpler, less confused, more simply wise than I, could so alter me, could so alter the world that I am made of: but with growing joy I learned. I learned, as the raft moved and I slid through the day, as the day slid through me, to let the task be master: which is only not to choose to do anything but what has chosen me to be done. Without any suffering every cat knows how, every living thing but man, who must learn it. Letting the task be master is a hard task for men, hardest of all for the angel's children, however distantly descended. But it could be learned: learned is the only way it could be learned, for I am a man. Far away and long ago the angels struggled in great anguish with the world, struggled unceasingly; but I would learn, yes, in the long engine summer of the world I would learn to live with it, I would. It was after all so simple, so harrowingly simple. I felt my sweet taskmasters multiply, and from my eyes the salt tears fell, even as they do now from yours.

Zhinsinura crossed the raft and sat by me. Unable to speak to express my grat.i.tude to her, I only laid my head in her lap. She stroked my hair. "Once a Day," she said, "has gone this morning with some who are gone trading, to the west. She wasn't chosen to go; she chose herself. She said to Houd: I won't return until Rush is gone, and gone for good."

Doubly and for good. There are houses outside houses over time, far, far harder to live in than the million small ones within them; just then I was enjoying a little one about the intersecting ripples of the water skiers in the river shallows.

"If I had known this," Zhinsinura said, and then no more; for what is there to say? Then: "Rush," she said, "you must stay as long as you have to; but we want her to come home, sometime."

How wise of her to say it to him then! For I was light, and she knew it; and though I felt for sure a distant dark house begin to a.s.semble itself around all I did, I was light then, and watched the water skiers. I sighed, and perhaps it was for a vast and hopeless burden in this way lifted from Rush's back, and from Once a Day's back too. I thought, content, how sad it would be never to be able to go home again. I think I slept.

I'm very tired, now, angel. I have to rest.

Rest.

Take out your crystal, there's nothing, nothing more to tell.

Only the end. That won't be long.

The moon has risen. It's crescent now. It was full when I chose to come here. Is that how long I've been here?

No. Longer.

The clouds are thick. I suppose, below, they can't see the moon... Oh, angel, take it out, stop, I can't any more.

THE FOURTH CRYSTAL: The Sky Is Gra.s.s

First Facet

... and begin again with another, the fourth.

Perhaps you shouldn't waste them. We didn't finish the last.

It's all right. Can you go on now?

Did you tell me why you need such things, these crystals I mean? If you did I've forgotten.

Only to see... to see how strong you are. I mean whether the story will change, depending on who...

Depending on who I am.

Depending on who tells it.

Has it changed?

Yes. In small ways. I don't think... I don't think any other loved Once a Day as much as you, I mean as much as in this story. And I never heard of the fly caught in plastic before.

Will you tell me about him, the one who I am? Is it a man?

It is.

Do you love him?

Yes.

I wonder why I thought so? Because you remind me of her?. No, well, I'm not to know, am I? Well. I'll go on.

I'd tell you about how I pa.s.sed the time at Service City with Once a Day gone, except that I remember almost nothing of it, and that's not surprising. I remember only how it seemed at once empty and full. And I remember the cats: changing places around the floor, arguing and forgetting arguments, stepping down (by steps that were clearer to me than words) into rest, and from rest into sleep, and from sleep into deeper sleep. Watching them made me sleep too.

And then I left. I don't remember how I chose a day, or if I was dark or light; or how I chose a direction, except that it wasn't west. I do remember, in July, sitting on a rock far from Service City and making friends with a cow.

My beard was longer; I hadn't clipped it short in the warren's way. Beside me was my camp: a big square of something not cloth but like cloth, which Zhinsinura had given me out of the List's treasures. It was silver on one side and black on the other, and wrapped in it, though it was as fine as their finest cloaks, I was warm, and dry on wet ground. In my pack was bread, enough to last a year almost if I was careful, in a dry pouch the List makes; and Four Pots and some other doses; and a handful of fine blue papers made by hands I knew of Buckle cord; and matches, that fizzled out as often as not, not as good as my people make. And on my silver camp next to my pack Brom sat, watching the cow warily and ready to run.

Would you have thought Brom would have followed Once a Day? I would have. But he followed me. Or I followed him: it's easier that way with a cat, and I had no place to go; he was the adventurer. We ended here, in July, in gra.s.slands, good for walking in, where there were mice and rabbits for Brom to chase, and cows seen far off. I wore a wide black hat. In all the time I had lived at Service City, I hadn't worn a man's hat, but the day I left Houd took this one off his head and put it on mine. It fit. It wasn't as though I had earned it, though I hadn't worn one because I felt I hadn't earned it. It fit, is all.

The cow had seemingly lost her kid. Her great teated breast was swollen, and she made lamenting sounds because of it. Because I had camped there quietly for a few days, or because of Dr. Boots, the cow came close to me. I didn't move, but sat and smoked, and Brom hissed and she moved away. She came back and went away again in a little dance. Well, I thought, there's no way I can suck for you, friend. She came close enough finally for me to touch, though she threw off my hand when I tried. She had amazing eyes: great, liquid, and brown, like a beautiful woman's in a way that was almost comical, and long silky lashes.

After a day of this (Dr. Boots's endless patience!) I learned, and the cow allowed me, to stroke and squeeze her teats so the milk ran out. Once I started, she stood calm as a stone and let me, must even have sighed (can they sigh?) for relief at it. The milk ran out in quick, thin streams. As she was running dry, I took off my indestructible hat and laid it on the ground below her, and the last of the milk made a little pool in the bottom of it, and with some misgivings I tasted it. Warm, thick, and white it tasted; I wondered if I would remember the taste from when I was a baby, but I didn't, or perhaps I did, since I liked it. On my way to the brook to wash my hat I thought that if she stayed around, it would make a nice change from bread and water, and I supposed it wouldn't hurt me; it tasted good, and that's the best sign.

She did stay, and Brom stopped hissing when she came close, though I can't say they ever became friends. When I moved (I mean when Brom moved, and I followed) she followed me. I named her Fido, which Blink had said was a name the angels gave their animals in ancient times. Traveling with the two of them was a little tedious, but have I said I was patient? If I lost them, I would stop and sit, and in an afternoon or a day they would both have returned to me.

You would think I would be dark, darkest then of any time. It's not so. I was happy. It was summer, and a fine hot dry one; the sea of gra.s.s was endless, and ran silver in little winds, as though fish darted through its pools. For companion I had another cat, Brom, and a cow for milk; for amus.e.m.e.nt I had Rush. In the hours when Fido ate gra.s.s and Brom hunted or slept, I would walk along his paths, which Boots had showed me. I liked him. There seemed to be endless insides to him, nooks and odd places where he attached to the world and to words, to other people, to the things he knew and liked and didn't like.

It was only later, in the winter, that I grew afraid of him.

When October or so (without the List's calendar, I was back to my old judgments) made the gra.s.s sea brown and rain fell in banners across it, I began to look for a place to spend the winter. It was the first thing I had chosen to do since I left Service City; I thought perhaps I had forgotten how. Anyway, the place really found me: all I did was to find Road, and walk it for some days, and then go off on a little spur that (I knew) would lead back to Road again; and found myself looking into his face.

He was a head only, about three times my height, and his thick neck sat on a small square of stone cracked and weedy; all around the woods grew rank and full of falling leaves. Perhaps he had once been painted, but now he was a dull white save for dark streaks of rust that ran from his eye-places like grimy tears. Since he grinned from great ear to great ear, it seemed he wept from some unbearable joy.