"I must be St. Olive," she said, holding up to the light of a skylight a bracelet of blue stones she had found in a chest, "and you must be Little St. Roy and wait for my coming."
"How do I wait?"
"Just wait. Years and years." She dressed herself in a long sad cloak and moved away with stately steps. "Far away the League is meeting. They haven't met since the Storm passed long, long before. Now they meet again. Here we are, meeting." She sat slowly and put her hand to her brow; then she glanced up at me and spoke more naturally. "While we meet, you hear about it," she said. "Go on."
"How?"
"Visitors. Visitors come and tell you."
"What visitors?"
"This was hundreds of years ago. There were visitors."
"All right." I adopted a listening position. An imaginary visitor told me that the women of the Long League were meeting again. "What are they deciding?" I asked him.
"He doesn't know," Once a Day said, "because he's a man. But his women have gone to the meeting, bringing their babies and helping the old ones, all the women."
"But not the women of Belaire."
"No. No." She raised a hand. "They just wait. All of you wait, to hear what the League has decided."
I waited more while the League met. "Somehow you know," Once a Day said, "that someone is to come, to come to Little Belaire from that meeting, though it might be years, and bring news…"
"How do I know?"
"Because you're Little St. Roy," she said, losing patience with me. "And he knew."
She rose up, and taking tiny slow steps to lengthen the journey, came toward me. "Here is Olive, coming from the meeting." She progressed slowly, her eyes fixing mine where I waited for years in the warren, knowing she was to come.
"It's night," she said, her steps so slow and small she tottered, "When you least expect it, and then… Olive is there." She drew herself up, looked around surprised to find herself here. "Oh," she said. "Little Belaire."
"Yes," I said. "Are you Olive?"
"I'm the one you waited for."
"Oh," I said. "Well." She looked at me expectantly, and I tried to think what Little St. Roy would say. "What's new? With the League?"
"The League," Olive said solemnly, "is dead. I've come to tell you that. And I have a lot of secrets only you can hear, because you waited and were faithful. Secrets the League kept from the speakers, because we were enemies." She knelt next to me and put her mouth to my ear. "Now I tell them." But she only made a wordless buzzing noise in my ear.
"Now," she said, getting up.
"Wait. Tell me the secrets."
"I did."
"Really."
She shook her head, slowly. "Now," she said, commanding, "we must go and live together in your little room ever after." She took the cloak from her sharp shoulders, let it fall; she knelt beside me, smiling, and pressed me backward till I lay down. She lay down next to me, her downy cheek next to mine and her leg thrown over mine. "Ever after," she said.
"Why were the Long League aid the speakers enemies?" I asked Seven Hands. "What secrets did they keep from us?"
He was at work making glass-the glass of Little Belaire is famous, traders still come to deal for it - and all morning had been mixing beechwood ash and fine sand with bits of angel-made glass from all over; now he threw in a broken bottle green as summer and said, "I don't know about secrets. And the speakers were never the League's enemies, though the League thought it to be so. It goes back to the last days of the angels, when the Storm came. That Storm was like any storm, on a day when the air is still and hot and yellowish, and big clouds are high and far away in the west; and as the storm comes closer it comes faster, or seems to, and suddenly there is rain in the mountains, and a cold wind, and it is on top of you. The Storm that ended the angels was like that: even when they were strongest the Storm was coming on, perhaps it had always been coming on, from the beginning. But few seemed to see it, except the League of women, who prepared themselves.
"And so when the Storm at last came in a thousand ways, multiplying, it seemed very sudden. But the League wasn't surprised."
He trod on the bellows that made his fire roar. "The Storm took years to pass; and when everything was going off and the millions were left alone without help, and great death and vast suffering, multiplying as the Storm multiplied, were visited on every part of the land, it was to the Long League fell the task of helping, and saving what and who could be saved, and cutting away the rest; repairing the angel's collapse where it could be repaired, and burying it forever where it could not. And for this huge task the League broke its old silence, and all the women acknowledged one another, because you see it had always been secret before. And for years the Long League of women saved and buried, till the world was different. Till it was like it is now."
His molten glass was ready, and he took up his long pipe and fixed a ball of it, turning and turning it with great care.
"Did everyone do what the League told them? Why?"
"I don't know. Because they were the only ones who were prepared. Because they had a new way to live, to replace the angel's way. Because people had to listen to somebody." He began to blow, his face red and his cheeks impossibly round. The green ball grew into a balloon. When it was the right size, working quickly he snipped off the end of it, and began to spin the pipe in his hands. What had been a balloon widened, flattened into a dish, seeming at every moment about to fall from the pipe.
"But the speakers didn't listen."
"No. During those years, we were wandering, and building Belaire. The women of Belaire had never been of the League, had never acknowledged that the League included them, though the League was said to be a league of all women everywhere. But our women were indifferent to almost everything but their speech and their histories and their saints. That angered and frustrated the women of the League, I guess, angered them because they needed all the help they could get and frustrated them because they were sure that the League knew what was best for the world."
"Did they?" Seven Hands's dish had become a plate, faintly green and striated with its cooling.
"Maybe they did. I guess our women thought it was only none of our business.
"What's odd though," he said, as he took the plate of glass from the pipe, "is that in hiding the terrible learning of the angels from everyone, so that the world had to become different, the League was left alone with it. They, who hated the angels most, were in the end the only ones who knew what the angels knew."
"Like what?"
He held his circle of glass, flecked with bubbles and green, like the stirred surface of a tiny pond, up before his face. "Don't ask me," he said. "Ask women."
Mbaba asked me: "Is it your Whisper cord girl who makes you ask all this?" I didn't answer. Of all the cords, Whisper is the one that stays most to itself. Knots happen with others.
"Well," Mbaba said. "I don't know any secrets Little St. Roy knew. I think he told all he knew. Little SP. Roy wanted to be a gossip, you know, but in the end he said he wasn't smart enough. All his life he spent with them, though, serving them and carrying for them, and running Path with their messages. And listening to them talk. Little St. Roy said he was like an idea in the gossips' minds, and ran through Belaire with pails full of water and a head full of notions.