At my dream of that noise, I woke.
"The angels," Blink was saying, "with their phones and their cars and their Road, they used to say: 'It's a small world. Getting smaller every day.'" He shook his head. "A small world."
He went on, after we had smoked, talking of winter. Of the winters of the Wars, and this black powder that had kept the fighters against the angels alive, and how he came to have it now; and the winter the Long League was made manifest; and the winter Great St. Roy locked the door of the Co-op Great Belaire, and the speakers began their long, hunted wanderings, and about his lost leg; about the rest of the world, beyond the oceans, from which no word came any more…
"His lost leg?" I said.
"From cold," said St. Blink. "Frozen, and rotting from it, and had to be cut off. In years before, the angels' science could have replaced it, made him a whole new one, a real one; but he had to be content with a false one."
Patent as sunset water… "Which is in the warren now," I said.
"So it is." Interminably the snow continued its silent, blind descent. "You cry, Roy said, just after, and brood, and think you might as well be dead. But you get an artificial one, even if it's not like the angels could make, it's wood but it works; and you force yourself to get up and walk, feeling foolish with it as much as hurt. But you set to, and one day you can keep up. You can't dance, maybe, and it's a long time before you make love again, but you get along. You learn to live with it. You even laugh; for sure Roy did. But still he always had one less leg. No matter how good it got.
"And what Roy thought, who saw the Storm, was that from then on we would all be as he was - all legless men. Whether it was the choice of childlessness, or further back, in the angels' decision to hammer the world into a shape convenient for men, no matter what the cost - whatever it was, we lost that terrible race.
"And it left us legless men." Twilight would be forever today, starting almost as morning ended and sliding imperceptibly into moonless night. "And we can laugh. We have our systems, and our wisdom. But still only one leg. It doesn't get better, a lost leg, like a cold. We learn to live with it. We try."
He shifted, ever so slightly. "Well, these are winter stories… See how gray the light is today, the world's as sleepy as I am. Little Belaire's closed up now, they're all close inside, and the old stories told… and spring comes, when it comes."
And we slept again, not having moved. The days went by full of blown snow, the sun's trip quick and cold and veiled. No stars, no moon for days: the fox: the birds.
Sixth Facet
There was a day, after gray rain had melted the last hillocks of black-peppered snow, and many birds had come home, and the woods were filled with new smells as with a stretch and a yawn, that Blink and I crept down the ladder and stood in the new air burdened with odors, looking around blinking and trying to stand up straight.
At the last full moon Blink, after judging the weather and counting something twice on his fingers, had put away his jar of black powder; but the first warm days found us still sleeping out the last of our long sleep, staying in bed as you do on a fine morning when you know you should be up, but perversely roll and toss under your untidy blankets until the sun is high. Now we wandered slowly in the woods, greeting the others who had come from hibernation, a snail and a basking turtle, a woodchuck so lean he seemed to be wearing someone else's baggy clothes, and the trees too; and as Blink and I stopped to watch the woodchuck sniff the air I was filled with gratitude that I had made it, made it through another winter through which many had not, a winter that was over now, a winter which is half of life. Life is winter and summer, a day is half asleep and half awake, my kind is man and they have lived and died; and I have come through another winter to stand here now on the winter-turned earth and smell the wet woods. I thought of Once a Day, I saw her vividly on travels far away. St. Roy had lost a leg to winter, but had lived to see spring. I sat down with the weight of all this, and looked up at Blink, ancient and lined, whom the winter despite his powder had weakened and aged, and knew there were those in Belaire who hadn't lived. I knew that what the powder Blink burned had done was to stop: stop all this that I felt now rush over me intolerably. It had started again as the powder wore off, and it was enormous. I sighed to breathe it out but could not; and wept suddenly, big panting sobs where I sat on the bursting earth.
At Little Belaire they would be making new rooms from old in honor of spring. Buckle cord would be shifting walls and opening doors all along Path, new dirt would be walked into hard floors, sun would be let in. Belaire opens like a new insect in the warmth, and Leaf cord trims and decorates and invites people to watch it unfold. Insulation is taken down, rooms swept of leaves and winter, favorite chairs lugged along Path to favorite bits of sun; and a new word that makes all the cords hum with thought and laughter.
"And you want to go home to it," said St. Blink.
"What? Go home? Why do you say that?"
"You don't answer when I speak to you, you can't hear what I say. You've been staring out the window all morning when there is a way out of the house, and things to do too, I don't just mean hauling and fixing, there are things abroad now to see and flowers blooming. And you sit instead indoors."
"It's not really indoors here."
"You know what I mean. You itch all over, but there's no place to scratch."
"Well, I can't go back," I said. "Of course."
"Of course."
There would be the bees swarming and the expeditions out beyond Little Mountain to see the new bread, and Mbaba's birds returning; and soon the travelers from the List coming, and perhaps she among them this time, and so much to tell her.
"I suppose," I said, "there are other places in the world."
"Yes," Blink said, "I suppose there are; other places, and just as nice."
I got up from my window and hustled down the ladder, almost angry with him. Because he was right: I went out to sit in the blooming meadow and let myself think Yes, I want to go home, now, in spring, now, I want to go home; my throat was hard and painful with it. I wanted to go home so badly for such a long time that day that I was only a little surprised when my wanting summoned from the leafy trees by the brook two pale boys, lankier than they had been, one with a red and one with a blue band around his neck. Among other more important things, I had forgotten, during the winter, which was which.
They climbed the bank in their dawdling way, stopping to poke into bushes for animals; when one saw me he waved, and I waved back. It was as though they had been waiting all winter just around the turn of the brook for the first hot day of spring.
"Hello," said, I think, Budding. "Are you a saint yet?"
"No," I said. "Not yet."
"Well," said the other, coming up behind, "they'd like to see you back in Little Belaire."
"No Moon went in the fall," said the first, "and again in the spring; your mother misses you."
His brother hunkered down on the meadow and ran his hand through his lank blond hair to find a leaf. "Maybe," he said, "if you had a whole year, and you're not a saint yet, you should go home and start again later."