On the evening of that first day we talked little; we grew silent and still as though asleep, but watching the clear cold sunset fade behind the fuzz of black trees on the mountains beyond the pasture. Later, that month's full moon lit the bald, still earth and we listened to the cracks and snaps of its freezing. Clouds gathered, moving fast over the moon's white face. By morning the year's first snow was falling, dusting the ground with a fine cold powder which the bitter wind blew around like dust.
Jug kept water as warm in winter as it had kept it cool in summer. Once a day perhaps, I would fill a pipe with St. Bea's-bread, all flaky with cold. At full moon time, St. Blink would climb complaining from his Bear, and light charcoal, and burn more of the black powder. When there was a warm spell, we would sometimes crawl out and open the two front doors and climb down the ladder, moving with careful gravity like two ancient invalids; and then back up in a short time utterly exhausted, though having seen a great deal.
We slept a strange, utter sleep, coming out only past noon as winter truly took hold, and passing back in again as evening came; many days passed without comment, only glimpsed between one doze and another. Snow choked the woods deeply; we sat all day once absorbed in the progress of a fox across the trackless pasture, and watched the doings of jays and sparrows, falling asleep when they did. Two chipmunks of the oak at last found a way into the tree house, and would run cheerfully over us, breathing our heated breath; they slept in Blink's lap for three days of blind violent storms that sheathed the forest in ice, which seemed to make music in the fine blue morning that followed, music too blinding to look at. The chipmunks slept. We slept, dust and loose bits of moss and spines of leaves blown up around our feet by drafts. We had become a part of Blink's beloved sleeping oak, hearing its branches creak and snap in wind, grieving when a great weight of ice broke one fine limb. Snow fell from its branches to thud on our roof, and then slide from our roof to the ground. I blinked less often, I came to notice; and when I blinked, often I slept. My left hand lay on my right for half a month.
On a white afternoon sometime in that endless season, a warm day when Blink had struggled out to take powder from the jug to steam us into our deep hibernation again, I asked, "Where does it come from?"
"Where does what come from?" he asked, looking around to see if I meant some beast.
"The powder," I said. "And how does it do that?" Already it had begun to do it; the penetrating smell was in the air, sharp and metallic, like the warm breath from a brass throat, and I felt my haunches wiggle more comfortably into the seat I had sat in so long.
"Ask the angels how it does what it does," he said. "They'd tell you, but you wouldn't understand. Can't you tell how it does it? Listen to it work; you've got time." With great care he worked himself back into his chair as I tried to listen to the powder work. I could begin to tell what he meant; and I knew that by winter's end I would know how it did what it did, though I wouldn't be able to explain it to anyone who hadn't spent a winter with it.
"And where it comes from," Blink was saying, finding a way to sit he liked well enough to stay in, "well… that's a tale…"
I said we slept a lot; but awake, I felt strangely clear and smart, as though everything were taking its time to reveal itself to me with slow precision, to surprise me that it contained more than I'd thought it had: not only the hunting fox's every movement, but St. Blink's long tangled histories, unfolding meantime, twisting but patent, as the peach-colored brook was patent at sunset running through the black and white pasture.
He went on, talking about the powder, and about other powders and medicines the angels had made; about how the angels, not content with altering the world for their convenience, had altered men too to fit the altered world, paving and remaking their deepest insides as they had the surface of the earth. About medicine's daughters: he said, "Medicine is to medicine's daughters as a dry stick is to a tree. Medicine is like paint; medicine's daughters are like the change of color in a crystal. Medicine changes you, fights your diseases, drowns your sorrows; medicine's daughters make you a suggestion that you change yourself - a suggestion that you can't refuse. A medicine lasts as long as a meal; medicine's daughters leave you changed long after they've disappeared from your body."
Four of medicine's daughters are contained in the Four Pots, the first to cause you to throw off nearly every disease, and the last, the bone-white pot and its white contents, was made to solve a strange problem that was caused by the first. "The angels learned to heal the things that kill men young," Blink said, "and hoped therefore that they might live forever. They were wrong in that, but so successful at keeping men alive that it seemed that soon there would be in the world far too many healthy people, as good as immortal, unable to be killed by anything but their own stupidity, flowing from the wombs of women like ants from an anthill, and no food and no room for them all. Think of the fear and revulsion you feel when you kick into a nest of ants and see them swarm: men felt that for their kind, and the Law and the Gummint most of all, who most of all bore the burden of keeping the world man's.
"And so, by a means we have forgotten, a means like medicine's daughters but far more subtle even, they made themselves childless. It took some generations, but at last they made this childlessness permanent: it would be passed on then, from mother to child. And they made the medicine's daughter which is in the fourth of the Four Pots to start up again the inside goings-on which their means stopped. When it's taken, a woman can for a while conceive: but her child will be childless, until she too makes the choice to take the medicine's daughter. It's as though we were born without eyes, as though our eyes were not stuck in our heads but passed down from mother to child like a treasure, and every child had the choice to take them up or not.
"And it would have worked out, perhaps, if the Storm hadn't come; men would have chosen their numbers as they chose to build Road and put up a false moon next to the real one. But the Storm did come; and who can say it wasn't hastened by this terrible choice of theirs? And in the winters that came after, in the Wars and catastrophes, millions died by all the old means the angels thought they had removed forever from the world, and few were born by this new means of theirs.
"And we are left now, we few, unable to reverse what they did; carrying a part of ourselves outside ourselves, in the white pot; left with their choice still."
There was a winter when I was five or six, when I had gone looking for my mother, Speak a Word, and come upon her in a curtained place; I had come up quietly, and she didn't see me, for she was intent on what the old gossip Laugh Aloud was saying to her, which I couldn't hear. I saw then that Seven Hands was with them, and so I came no closer - this was when my knot with him was most tangled. I knelt there and watched them in the winter light. Laugh Aloud had the box of pots open before her, and with one finger she moved the white one across the table to my mother. My mother's nose was shiny with sweat, and she had an odd, fixed smile on her face. She picked up and put down again the fourth pot.
"No," she said. "Not this year."
Seven Hands said nothing. Did he wish it? Did it matter? He said nothing, for the angel's choice was only for Speak a Word. "Not this year," she said, and looked only at Laugh Aloud, who pursed her lips and nodded. She placed the pot in its fourth place in the holder, and returned the holder to its box. The top of the box closed with a little noise.