"July," Once a Day said. The evening bell rang.
In July I went with her on expeditions to gather things, plants and rocks and soils and funguses the List uses for their medicines; and when we grew tired of searching, we lay to watch clouds.
"What are dark and light?" I asked. "Why do you say someone is dark, and another time that he's light?"
She said nothing, only pillowed her head on her hands and closed her eyes.
"Is it a game?" I asked. "I remember Little St. Roy said, about Olive, that when she was dark she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air."
She laughed at that, her flat stomach shaking. "I heard that," she said.
"What did he mean?"
She lay silent for a time, and then rose on one elbow to look at me. "When will you go back to Little Belaire?" she said.
The name in her mouth sounded odd; it was the first time I had heard her say it here, and it sounded like a place impossibly remote. "I won't," I said. "I promised I wouldn't."
"Oh, they've forgotten that. If you left, no one would mind; no one would ask you where you went."
"Would you mind?" I said, for I hadn't heard in her speech that she would, or that she wouldn't; had seemed to hear only that there was no minding in her, which couldn't be so. For a moment my heart felt cold, or hot, and I quickly said: "Anyway I don't want my tongue cut out."
"Tongue?" she said, and then laughed. "Oh, they were dark. Now…" And she looked away from me, closing her mouth, as though she had told a riddle wrongly, so that its answer was revealed. But nothing had been revealed to me.
"It was a joke of Roy's," Once a Day said. "A joke is all; an old joke. Look, look, we're falling!"
Below us - yes, below - the sky was tumbled full of clouds. By some magic we stuck to the grass, we were even cross-legged and calm, but we were falling endlessly into cities, faces, monstrous white animals, holding hands to hold onto the roof of the world: strange, when the clouds roll close below you and the sky is grass.
And July's tile turned at the time table made seven in one pile, five in the other.
The calendar's two children lay in deep shade; the boy was asleep, a straw hat over his face and a long yellow straw in his mouth, his small bare feet wide apart. She in her blue dress sat beside him looking over a field of the same yellow straw to a red angel's tower with a conical top; and the gray clouds of a summer storm grew far off. August.
We had a shade house we shared for summer, under two maples that grew together on a hill, and we could see far off too, though all the angels' works were gone, and Once a Day wore no blue dress; no dress at all. The edges of our house changed as day went on, and the brown bodies of our guests moved with the shade.
"Four doors along the spine," Houd said. One of his skinny legs he dangled over his knee, and a wide hat shadowed his face, from which his wooden pipe protruded. "And press with all your might against them, you wouldn't be able to open them. That's my opinion."
"That's because they are open," Once a Day said, yawning. "The heat makes me sleepy."
"Just as hard to shut them," Houd said.
"No," she said. "They blow open; as doors are blown open one by one down a corridor by wind; and that's the end of that; they're open."
"You're light to think so," Houd said, and Once a Day yawned again and stretched out her little tawny body on the matted grass so her breasts were nearly flat; she smiled me a sleepy smile.
"Sun's come around," someone said. "Everybody move one place."
Shade.
At evening one let out a light he had brought, but the air drew it away toward Service City, and one by one they followed it there. We lay together as the moon rose and remade our shade house all different.
"Do you think," she said then, moving away from me by a series of slow changes of posture, "that there are four doors along your spine? And how do you think they open?"
"I don't know," I said, following her.
"Neither do I."
There was a faint rumble of thunder, like someone huge, over the horizon, grumbling in his sleep; and as we lay together our moon house too gradually moved away from under us, leaving us splashed with still, cold light.
And September's tile shown at the time table made eight in one pile, four in the other.
"I know her," I said when I saw it, "and now I know those two as well."
"How could you know them?" she asked.
"Because you showed them to me. Look: there's the old one, who comes out when it's dark; and see? she waits now, inside, in this month, and the two children are out…"
"No, you're wrong."
"And in the next months she'll be out, and they'll be hid."
"They won't," she said. "They're just two, like any two…"
"Dark and light," I said, "just as you said, don't you remember…"
"No!" she shouted, to silence me.
The tile we looked at showed a golden engine-summer day. The two children walked together with shining faces; slung over his shoulder by a strap was some Book, and she carried proudly a bright September apple. In all this it was like every other tile, he and she, she in her dress of blue, in a day just the color of the month it pictured, as though squeezed from the month as from a fruit. But in this month only, there was somebody else: the children walked smiling toward a tiny red house with a peaked roof, in whose door could just be seen a small and aged woman.
And yes, it would grow dark, though it was nice now; the old woman would come out, and the two children must retire to wherever they could, to wait out the dark months, isn't that right? The angels, even in their covered cities without weather, would not have forgotten that, that in warm perfect engine summer the old woman waited…
"No!" she said, and ran from me.
"I want to understand," I said, when I found her amid her pillows on the mezzanine. "You have to speak truthfully to me. There was the house on the wall you showed me, where St. Roy's leg was kept. The children came out when it was light, and the old woman when it was dark. In between were the four dead men, who never changed. It was about the weather. So are the tiles."
"Yes. About the weather."
"Yes. But, when we saw it, a cloud passed overhead, and the old woman didn't come out; and the last time I saw it, on the day you left, it was spring, and yet the old woman stood there..
She lay face down away from me, her head on her arms like a cat; now she turned her face to see me. "Then," she said, "was it about the weather?"
"I don't know. What else was it about? Why can't I hear it in what you say?"
She turned her face away again. "The tiles are about the weather. The angels made them to tell the months, and they are very true. That's all."
"Then why did you run from me?"
She said nothing, and though she lay still I felt her run from me further. I wanted to pursue her where she ran, and I took her shoulders in my hands as though to stop her, restrain her: but she had fled.
There's a certain kind of dream, the kind where you set off to do an urgent errand, or a task, and directions are given you, but as you go on the places you have been sent to are not the places you intended to go, and the nature of the task changes; the person you set out to find becomes the one who sent you; the thing you were to do turns into a place, and the place into a box of treasure or a horrid rumor; and the goal can never be reached because it's never the same goal; and yet you search on, never surprised by these changes, only persistent, only endlessly trying to do the changing thing set before you.