"How many are there?" she whispered.
"Three."
"And she has them all at once?"
"Like twins."
"Twins?"
"When a woman has two babies at the same time."
"I've never heard of that."
"Mbaba told me it happens. Sometimes."
She pushed away from me at last, and climbed down. At the bottom she watched me descend; she shook her hair from her eyes as I jumped from the last big log, and walked toward me, commanding me with her eyes to do the same; we met, and she took my face in her hands, smiling, and kissed me. I think I surprised her by how fiercely I responded, and she pushed me away at last, holding me at arm's length, and, still smiling, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I'll show you a secret now," she said.
"What?"
"Come on." She took my hand and led me back through the greening wood to where the twenty-three towers of Little Belaire were growing among the trees.
She took me quickly along Path where it led to the deepest center of old warren. "Where?" I asked as we ran. She pointed but said nothing, only flicking her head back in a flash of smile. Soon all the walls around us were of angelstone, and the lights were few, the doors small. It was warm here too; we were walking above the tanks and the stones that warm Little Belaire. There was a turn where she paused, uncertain; then she pushed through an ancient curtain, and we were inside a tiny stone-walled bare room, gloomy and warm, with a single small skylight in one corner. Through it the afternoon made a diamond shape on the rough wall.
My eyes grew big: on a chest near one wall stood a leg. Once a Day turned to me and laughed very small. It wasn't, I realized after a moment, a real leg, but a false one, yellow and waxy like dead flesh, with corroded metal parts and ancient straps. I stared at it.
"What is it?" I whispered.
"It's a leg," she said, and took my hand in hers and squeezed it. I wanted to ask whose it was, but only stood with my hand growing wet in hers.
"Come here," she said, and tugged me to the other side of the room where above us a thing hung on the wall. She pointed at it. "You must never, never tell anyone you came in here and saw this," she said to me in an urgent, commanding whisper. "It's a very secret thing in my cord. I'm going to tell you about it even if I shouldn't." Her blue eyes were grave, and I nodded gravely too.
The thing on the wall was made of plastic. It was like a tiny house with a high-peaked roof; but it was flat, with only a little shelf that struck out in front of it. It had two doors, one on each side. Three people lived in the house, one of whom - I watched with hair rising on my neck - at that moment was backing into the right-hand doorway with tiny jerking motions, while the other two came jerking out the left-hand door. The one disappearing inside was an old woman, bent and hooded and gnarled, leaning on a stick; the two who began to appear were children, with their arms around one another.
"How do they move?" I said.
"That's the secret," Once a Day said.
In the space between the two little doors was pasted a strange pink and blue picture; it showed a great mountain (you could tell because tiny people were shown standing below looking up at it) that was four heads, four men's heads; four heads as big as mountains - four heads that were a mountain - with great grave faces and one with, it seemed, spectacles.
"This one," Once a Day said, pointing to the old woman whose hooked nose could just be seen inside the door, "hides when the sun shines. And these two" - pointing to the children - "come out." She looked up at the bright skylight. "You see? And when the weather changes, they move. It's ancient as anything. There are lots of secrets."
"Those four," I said. "Who are they?"
"Those are the four dead men. And are they mad."
We stared at the four stony faces, with the sky behind them falsely pink and blue. "It's their own fault," Once a Day said.
It was warm in the room, and a prickly heat was all over me, but in spite of it I shivered. The false leg. The thing on the wall that moved when it was light and dark, that only Whisper cord knew the secret of. And her small hot hand in mine.
A cloud went over the sun just then, and the diamond of sun disappeared from the wall. I watched the tiny children and the old woman, but they didn't move.
Sixth Facet
How am I to tell you all of this? How? In order to tell you any single thing I must tell you everything first; every story depends on all the stories being known beforehand.
You can tell it; it can be told. Isn't that what it is to be a saint? To tell all stories in the single story of your own life?
I'm not a saint.
You are the only saint. Go on: I'll help if I can. Before nightfall it will be told; before moonrise at least.
I wanted to say: Whisper cord lay coiled within the cords of Belaire like an old promise never quite broken, or a piece of dreaming left in your mind all day till night comes and you dream again. But to say that I must tell you about cords. About the Long League of women, and how it came to be and came to be dissolved. About St. Olive and how she came to Belaire, and found Whisper cord. About Dr. Boots's List, and the dead men; about how I come to be here now telling this.
Cords. Your cord is you more surely than your name or the face that looks out at you from mirrors, though both of those, face and name, belong to the cord you belong to. There are many cords in Little Belaire, nobody knows exactly how many because there is a dispute among the gossips about cords which some say aren't cords but only parts of other cords. You grow into being in your cord; the more you become yourself, the more you become the cord you are. Until - if you aren't ordinary - you reach a time when your own cord expands and begins to swallow up others, and you grow out of being in a single cord at all. I said Painted Red had been Water cord, and her name was Wind; now she was larger than that and she had no cord that could be named, though in her way of speaking, in the motions of her hands, the manner of her life, in small things, she was still Water.
Water and Buckle and Leaf; Palm and Bones and Ice; St. Gene's tiny Thread cord, and Brink's cord if it exists. And the rest. And Whisper. And was it because of her secrets that I loved Once a Day, or because of Once a Day that I came to love secrets?
She liked night more than day, earth more than sky - I was the reverse. She like inside better than outside, mirrors better than windows, clothes better than being naked. Sometimes I thought she liked sleeping better than being awake.
In that summer and the winter that followed it, and the next summer, we came to own Little Belaire. That's how it's put. When you're a baby you live with your mother, and move with her if she moves. Very soon you go to live with your Mbaba, especially if your mother's busy, as mine was with the bees; Mbabas have more time for children, and perhaps more patience, and especially more stories. From your Mbaba's room you make expeditions, as I did up to the roofs where the beehives are or along the learnable snake of Path - but always you return to where you feel most safe. But it's all yours, you see - inside to outside - and as you grow up you learn to own it. You sleep where you're tired, and eat and smoke where you're hungry; any room is yours if you're in it. When later on I went to live with Dr. Boots's List I saw that their cats live the way we lived as children: wherever you are is yours, and if it's soft you stay, and maybe sleep, and watch people.
We had our favorite places - tangles of rooms with a lot of comings and goings and people with news, quiet snake's-hands in the warm old warren where there were chests that seemed to belong to no one, full of rags of old clothes and other oddities. She liked to dress up and play at being people, saints and angels, heroes of the Long League, people in stories I didn't know.