"Maybe," said the other.
"Maybe," I said, thinking of my mother, and of the little that No Moon could tell her, and how easily I had left and how little I had thought of hers or anyone's feelings. A hot wave of shame and impatience made me jump up with clenched fists. "Yes. Yes, I should," I said. "Maybe I should…"
"Where's the saint?" the twins said, almost in unison.
The saint. I turned from the twins and looked back toward the woods, where from the cover of the hawthorns a brown face ringed with white hair peeped out at us like some shy wild thing, and disappeared into the shadows when he saw that I saw him. I stood halfway between the woods and a fallen log where the twins sat absorbed in something they had found. "Wait!" I shouted to the twins, who looked up, surprised. They were in no hurry.
I remembered the spring before, when I had crashed through these trees in search of him; it had been just a wood then, like any wood. Now, like a face you've learned to love, it had grown so familiar that the first wood was gone forever, and I knew this one only, which had a path through it, secret like Path, by the split birches, around the dense evergreens and down the bank to the mossy, ferny places and the black fallen trees where mushrooms grew, up the slate outcropping splashed now with clinging green, and up the sloping, brambly ground to where the old oaks grew, and to the oldest oak. To Blink, who sat at its foot, looking down it seemed in sorrow.
I crept up slowly to him and sat by him without speaking. He didn't look up at me, but now I saw that it wasn't sorrow that made him look down, but something in the grass at his feet which he watched intently: a black ant of the largest kind. It struggled through the bending grasses, its feelers waving unceasingly.
"Lost," Blink said. "Can't find his nest, lost the path. Nothing worse than that can happen to an ant. For an ant, being lost is a tragedy."
"What is that? Tragedy."
"Tragedy, it's an ancient word; it meant a description of a terrible thing that had happened to someone; something that, given circumstances and some fault in you, could happen to you, or to anybody. It was like truthful speaking, because it showed that we share the same nature, a nature we can't change and so cease to suffer. If this ant ever finds his nest again, and could tell about his experience and the suffering he felt, they'd have a tragedy. But he's unable, even if he does get back. In a way, no ant has ever before been in the tragedy of being lost; this one's the first, because ants have no way of telling about such things, and so being forewarned. Do you see?"
"I think I do."
He raised his eyes from the ground and regarded me calmly. "Well. I think my stories are all told, Rush, the important ones; and now that those two look-alikes have come back, you'll be going home, I suppose."
Old Blink! I had learned truthful speaking in that winter with him, and the weight and tenderness in his words made no answer possible. I only knelt by him and waited. He said nothing more, though; only watched the ant struggling through the grass like a man in the dark.
"Tell me what I should do," I said at last.
"No, no," he said, as though to himself. "No… I guess, you know, all your foolish talk about me being a saint did affect me a little. Enough so that I wanted to tell you a story you would remember, and could repeat. But it's no story, is it, only 'and then, and then, and then' endlessly… A saint, no. If I were a saint, I wouldn't tell you, now, what you should do. And since I'm not a saint, I can't."
I thought of Seven Hands, and the day we had gone to see Road. He'd said: "If you're going to go somewhere, you have to believe you can get there. Somehow, some way." I thought of Sewn Up and No Moon, living at the river house but tied to the warren by strong cords. I thought of Once a Day. No: though Belaire tugged at me, I couldn't go home again. Not yet.
"Blink," I said. "You said, about the four dead men, that if I wanted to know more, I should ask the Long League, or the angels."
"Both gone."
"Dr. Boots's List is a child of the League. And knows things the League knew."
"So they say of themselves."
"Well," I said, and took a breath. "I'll go ask them, then."
He sat silent, blinking at me as though he had just then noticed me kneeling by him, and wondered how I had got there.
"Maybe," I said, "I’m not to be a saint. Maybe not. But there are still stories to learn, and tell." I reached down with a finger and made a path through the grass for the ant, who stopped his labors, bewildered. I wondered if I would weep. I had wanted to be a saint.
"I know the way there," Blink said. "Or I knew it once."
I looked up. His brown face was creased in the beginnings of smile-wrinkles. He hadn't wanted to tell me what to do; but I had chosen as he would have chosen for me. "I wonder, though, if they'll tell you what you want to know."
"There was a girl," I said, "a Whisper cord girl, who years ago left Belaire, and went to live with them. If I could find her, she'd tell me."
"Would she?"
I didn't answer. I didn't know.
"Well," Blink said, "if you listen now, I'll tell you how to reach them. That's the first thing."
I couldn't think, at the same time, of Little Belaire, of Once a Day, and of the directions Blink would give me, so I held up my hand for a moment, palm toward Blink, as gossips do before they hear a tale, and made myself as much as I could an empty bowl; and Blink told me then how I must go from here to where the List lived; and he told it in such a way that I couldn't forget it: because in a way he was a saint, he was: my saint.
We rose, and linked arms, and walked out into the blinding meadow strewn with new flowers. The twins came to their saint, who patted them and giggled, become again the little old man they knew. We sat and talked, and his eyebrows danced up and down and his tiny hands slapped his knees. The twins supplied news from the warren, what little they knew. He listened, and yawned in the heat; finally he lay down, his feet up, on the slope. "Yes, it goes on there as always… No new thing, and if there were you wouldn't know of it… well. And then, and then, and then. Another spring, and getting hot too… Quick enough it comes and goes…" He was asleep, hands behind his head, breathing quietly in the warming south wind.
We went away quietly. I gathered my pack, but left the fine string hammock for Blink: a small enough gift.
"We'll be at the river house tonight," Budding said; and Blooming said, "Then you'll get home tomorrow."
"No," I said. "I'm not going home. But I'll go with you as far as the river. I'll find Road there."
"I thought you weren't going to be a saint," Budding said.
"I don't know about saints." We had reached the edge of the little brook. "But I decided to leave home, and I think I ought to stay left." I looked back as we went into the woods and caught a glimpse of Blink, asleep in the meadow. I wondered if I'd ever see him again.
I wonder if I ever did.
Seventh Facet
I stood next dawn at a great joint of Road, kicking apart the pink embers of the night's fire. Southward, Road fell away to woodlands gleaming in a clear morning, westward it led into lands still night. Above my head, spanning all of Road, was a great green panel supported on rustless pillars, that creaked and swayed in the rising wind. It was lettered, meaninglessly to me, except for two arrows of stained white: one pointing south, one west. I packed my little camp and went south.
In the afternoon I came into the wooded country I had seen. Road entered the forest; and the forest too entered Road. The forest stepped down steep inclines in great trees, and gracefully out onto Road in saplings and weedy trees which tore up the gray surface as spring breaks ice on a river. The liquid slide of the big trees' shade was over it, and when I waded a stream that had cut a deep wound across it, I saw that among the stones in the stream were pieces of Road. And will it all one day be washed away? I thought of Blink talking about the bits of the great angel sphere.