Inside the house, the sunset over the water glinted and glittered on the ceiling and across the dark, rug-hung walls so that it felt as though we were under water too. The gurgle of the river made me sleepy, and sitting with the water-walker and his family made me feel like a fish visiting fish friends. Sewn Up talked as he lowered and filled a glass pipe; his voice was a good one, with odd insides that made me laugh, and made No Moon laugh even more. I asked him why he didn't live in Little Belaire.
"Well," he said, motioning to the two boys with a spoonful of bread, "they liked the water, and the stream that runs through Little Belaire wasn't enough water for them. Their Mbaba said they moped a lot, so I said if they liked water, they should come back and stay here; and if they liked people - other people besides us, anyway - they should stay at Little Belaire. Well, they get along best with each other, so here they stay."
"We were born here," Blooming said, and Budding said, "This is our spot."
"I took them back, you see, for a while," No Moon said; "it's their home, in a way, as it was mine and still is. But they like it here."
"Aren't they going to be truthful speakers?"
"Well, if we're truthful speakers, so will they be, won't they? There are two truthful speakers in the river house and no river in Little Belaire, so it all works out fine."
And it was better for them, too, Sewn Up said; people would always make much of them, there were people who came a great distance just to see them, and he didn't want it to go to their heads; he had pointed out to them that there was nothing really so remarkable about them. They said nothing to this, only smiled the same smile; they knew there was something very remarkable about them, and so did we.
There was a thick, dry smell of smoke in the cool room, easier to breathe almost than air. When Sewn Up talked, puffs of smoke mimicked his words from his nose and mouth. "Odd you should find it odd to leave Little Belaire," he said, sprinkling new bread onto the blue ashes. "It seems you've made the same choice yourself, and younger than we were by quite a bit."
"Oh no," I started to say, but thought that, yes, I had, and had no intention of returning, not for years and years; yet I had been feeling sorry for Budding and Blooming, who couldn't stay there in the best place in the world all the time. "I'm just, well, ranging; I'll go back, one day. It'd be terrible if I couldn't ever go back." And terrible it did seem to me for the first time.
"Well," No Moon said rising, "stay here anyway as long as you want. We have room."
So when I could think of no more news of the warren to give them, and the lights No Moon lit were growing low, I followed the two boys up a winding flight of stairs to a room with glass windows all around, open to the clear night which Little Moon sped across. But sleepy as I was, it was a long time before we were quiet under our shaggy blankets. I lay amazed and listened to Budding finish Blooming's words and then Blooming Budding's, as though they were one person. Giggling and laughing at things I didn't understand, they rolled over each other like otters; they had looked tan in the sun, but in the pale night light they were white against the dark covers.
They had treasures to show me, tucked away at the bottom of the bed and in boxes, an empty turtle shell, a twitch-nose mouse in a nest of grass. And, taken carefully from its hiding place in the wall, their best thing. It was a little cube of clear plastic; inside the plastic, poised for flight, a fly. A real fly. A cube of plastic with, who could tell how, a fly right in the middle of it! We turned it in the moonlight, our faces close together. "Where did it come from?" I asked. "Is there a story? Where did you get it?"
"The saint gave it to us," said one, and the other was drawing out something else for me to see, but I stopped him at hearing that.
"A saint gave you that? What saint?"
"The one we know," said Budding.
"You know a saint?"
"The one who gave us this," said Blooming.
"Why did he give it to you? What is it?"
"I don't know," said one. "It's a lesson, he said. The fly thinks he's in the air, because he can see out all around, and can't see anything that holds him back. But still he can't move. And let that be a lesson, he said."
"It was just a present," said the other one.
"Can I see him?" I asked, and they must have been surprised at the urgency in my voice. "Is he far away?"
"Yes," said one.
"No," said the other. "He's not too far. Walk all morning. We can take you. He might not like you."
"He likes you."
The two of them looked at each other and laughed. "Maybe that's because," said Budding, and "there are two of us," said Blooming, and they stood with their arms around each other, grinning at me.
With true Leaf cord politeness, they let me choose where I would sleep, but I lay awake a long time, listening to the gurgle of the brown river, with a saint to see tomorrow, already, so soon!
Third Facet
In the morning, Sewn Up ferried us across That River on his contraption, laughing and making jokes: I've never seen anyone as happy to be up in the morning as he, except maybe myself on this morning, off to meet a real saint. Budding and Blooming wore thick shirts against the morning chill and the mist that lay thickly over the river and its fragrant tributaries, and I shivered. No Moon had given me more bread, and a nice plastic bottle full of grape soda she'd put up in the winter, and a kiss.
"I'll go to the warren in the fall," she said. "I'll tell them I saw you, and that you were well."
I thought of a thousand messages she might bring for me - gone only a day! - but I kept quiet and only nodded, an adventurer's uncaring nod, and climbed behind Sewn Up.
The twins and I followed a rushing tributary of the river for some time till it ran quietly between its wooded banks; when the sun was high and hot and the mist gone, we came to an inlet where a little dish of a boat was tied up among the saplings at the water's edge. It was something angel-made of white plastic, and (like so many things in the world) put to a use the angels surely never intended; certainly, with its odd ridges and projections and strange shape, it had not been made for a boat. So hot and still it had become that Budding and Blooming threw their warm shirts into the bottom of the dish, and I sat on them and watched the twins pole along. Some white water-flowers came away with the boat from the inlet, and the twins pulled them out of the water to wear for hats; naked, they poled upstream, the leaf shadows flowing over them, wearing flowers in their hair.
When the stream became shallow and poured fast over shadowed rocks, we tied up the boat and followed the stream up its narrowing rocky bed. The breath of it was cold in the warming woods, still fed by snow melting in far-off mountains. When we had tramped through the new ferns at its side for a long way, Budding and Blooming signaled me to be quiet, and we climbed the bank. Past the trees that bordered the stream was a small sunny pasture full of small white flowers; and on a slope amid them lay the saint.
He was fast asleep. His hands were crossed over his bosom, and he snored; his feet, clad in big boots, stuck up. His white hair lay all around him on the ground, and his beard spread out around his small brown face so that he looked like a milkweed seed. We crept up on him, and Budding whispered something in Blooming's ear that made him laugh. That woke up the saint, who sat up suddenly, looking around confused. Seeing us, he sneezed loudly, got up grumbling, and stumbled off toward the woods across the pasture. Budding cried out and started chasing him as though he were a bird we'd raised; Blooming followed after, and I hung behind, embarrassed at how they approached him.