A silvery, sidewise-falling shower struck splashes from puddles. The puddles, silver-edged, reflected a soft green that was indistinct, rain-shrouded, all around. In this tile only was the girl not in blue; she and he were identical in shiny yellow coats, and her calves curved gently rising from the wide mouths of yellow boots. Her umbrella, though, was blue; and though it rained in other months, it was only in April that the List took out their umbrellas to water them.
On a showery day I watched them through the way-wall, strolling across the wide stone with their umbrellas in bloom. Some were patched, some bent and with missing struts, some stretched wrong on the frame and looking like bats' wings. Houd was among them; his gray and green barred umbrella was larger than the others and had a strangely carved grip, and he grinned at me just as though he could see me through the way-wall as I could see him.
They began to come in when the bell sounded five times, not for evening but in the middle of the day. They shook water from their hats and from the flapping umbrellas - not allowed taut indoors, for some reason - and they smelled of the warm wet day, and brought in green things, ferns and shoots and blossoms sparkling with drops. As they collected around the floor, Zhinsinura, who had had a high seat brought out for her, watched them as the cats did, and her gaze was the same, a mild and accustomed curiosity. She sat them down without words, her big hands lightly guiding them; children were shushed and the milling subsided as people found seats facing her, arranging themselves with the List's patience for such things. After a time two rough half-circles had been drawn up, one closer in all of women and girl children, and an outer one of men and boys.
Once a Day went past me, brushing the clean rain from her face, smiled at me and went to sit with the women. I would have liked to sit by her, but this was the day the List remembers the Long League and Mother Tom, and on such a day the men know their place, sit back and hold their tongues.
Beyond the way-wall, the rain grew strong for a moment, like a fit of sobbing, then lessened. We were silent. Zhinsinura began speaking, and the cats grew curious.
Fourth Facet
"In the last month of winter," she began, almost as though she were talking only to the cat at her feet, "which is the first of spring, the ice on the river, which had been solid and could bear weight, broke up and floated away in great clashing chunks, which makes a pretty sight.
"The ice asked: How is it that the river could accomplish such a thing? And the river might answer: Ice set itself a task it could not finish, and all that was left undone remained the river; and for the undoing of what you did do, well, it wasn't I at all but time and changes, and I am left.
"I say the river might answer so, but it doesn't answer, there being no ice left to answer to.
"If we were to tell a story about ancient times, we would say that the men were angels who could fly: they were the ice's brittle, still surface. The river flowing quick unseen beneath we would name the women and their League. And as for time and changes, well, they have always been the same, without another name.
"Now the men in those times said to the women, 'See: we have thrown Little Moon into the sky, our planters have escaped the sun, and we must struggle to further these works forever. Men have things to do, and must use their time properly; any of you who can do so may help in these tasks. But while we build a new moon and get it put up next to the old one, you are still controlled by the old moon; you can't use your time properly; that is your greatest weakness.'
"And Mother Tom said to the League: 'That is your only strength. Spring is coming, and the ice must break on every river. Time is in need of you, and, dark or light, will put you to its use.'"
She reached behind her chair and took up a tall box which she set before her. The front of the box was made to look like a sort of archway; and when Zhinsinura turned something at the back of the box vigorously, the archway brightened, and it seemed we looked into a garden where a fruit tree flowered, and where a huge, fat woman waved. She waved: I mean it wasn't a picture of her waving, she waved, her hand rose, made a hello, and returned to her side; then it rose again, waved again, came down again, then rose again and waved. While she waved, Zhinsinura spoke, her hands resting lightly on the box.
"Mother Tom said: 'I'm part man, part cat, part dream, and All Woman.'
"Mother Tom had had an Operation, you see. She had been a man, and then been turned into a woman. And very well, too, these were the days of every possibility and contrivance. Her female parts were real, as real as her man's parts had been; she named her female parts Janice, after a woman murdered on Road, from whom they had been taken. She said, 'Janice would be glad, if she knew.' The doctors then could just replace one set of parts with another, easy as that, and in their angel way thought that was the end of it; but Mother Tom's female parts began to grow a person outward from them, a woman, that dark by light outgrew the old man Mother Tom had been. Mother Tom said, 'Janice is changing my mind.' Mother Tom weighed as much as any two women, and had a voice like a loon, and wanted to be a Woman entirely, even to being in the women's League.
"The angels had a joke, in those days, about the League. When the League meets, they said, women with breasts like pigeons fold their hands before them and speak to other women from between bowls of cut flowers. They all wear flowered hats, and they speak only foolishness." Zhinsinura took a nut, and a cracker for it, from within her deep pocket. "It was a good joke," she said, "but the angels didn't know why it was funny.
"I have wept," she said, "to think of their struggles to use their time properly; and I have thought of them weeping. Mother Tom wept often after those meetings, when once again the women had struggled more with one another than with the angels; wept when she heard in her dreams their voices, abused and frightened and angry and silly and above all Feminine. 'Feminine!' Mother Tom would weep. 'Feminine!' She was beginning to learn, I guess, what she had let herself in for, and was glad to know it. 'I wouldn't be a man again for all the planters in the universe,' she said, 'or all the Money in the bank or all the cities in the sky.'
"Mother Tom confused the League, and for a long time she was not allowed among them, but she wouldn't stop talking, whenever she was let to, and as the years went by her story grew longer: about what was to come, as much as she could see; about men, for she had been one; about dark and light, though what was there to say? The women began to listen, some of them; and understand; but sometimes they would only look away, and smile, and not listen, and wait for it to be nice again.
"'Nice!' Mother Tom would shriek. 'Nice!' For as she grew older, and as more and more of the League's women listened to her, the less Mother Tom wept and the more she shouted.
"The angels made a mistake, then. They had always thought the League was funny, and they thought Mother Tom was funnier still. But Mother Tom knew men, and kept on talking, and grew older and louder, and the more listened to the older and louder she got; until men were like someone who had a bird in his hand that is struggling to escape: squeeze tight, and the bird dies; don't squeeze tight, and the bird escapes. The angels squeezed tight, and the bird escaped. It was ever their way."