We exchanged further smiles. He was no more doorkeeper than the rotting rows of angel engines before us. I said: "Years ago..
"Yes, oh yes," he said, nodding reflectively and looking upward.
"Years ago, there was a girl, who came to you from Little Belaire. A young girl, named Once a Day."
"Swimming," he said.
I didn't know what to say to that. Perhaps he was senile. I sat for a while, and then began again. "This girl," I said, "came here, I mean perhaps not here, but came to live with you… Well. I'll ask the others."
"Not back yet," said the old man. "Is she back yet?"
"Back yet…"
"She went off to the pool in the woods, a while ago. That's the one you mean?"
"I don't know, I…"
He looked at me as though I were behaving oddly. "She went out to meet you last night," he said, "when Brom knew you were close. Isn't that right? And came back early, early this morning, after greeting you. Then she slept. Now she's at the pool. I think."
He thought I had come with the rest, from far away. And that I must have seen her… And I had: between wake and sleeping, two had passed me. A man, and another, who must have been a cat. I jumped up, startling the old man. "Where is this pool?" I said loudly. He pointed with his stick toward an opening in the woods that showed a path. I ran off.
How huge the world is, and how few in it, and she passed me in the darkness in the forest and L hadn't known. I was hurrying through the woods as though to a long-lost friend, but thought suddenly that perhaps I shouldn't rush on her: she may not be the person I knew at all, might not know me at all, why am I here anyway, and yet I rushed on as fast as I could. The path went straight up a mossy rocky ridge; on the other side I could hear water falling. I climbed, slipping on the moss, and scrambled to the top, and looked down.
A deep rippled pool of water that leaves floated across. A little falls that poured into it chiming and splashing; the rocks were wet and shiny all around it, black and green and bronze. And at the water's edge, a girl knelt to drink, her hands under the clear water and her breasts touching its surface. Beside her, drinking too, was a great white cat marked black in no pattern. He had heard me; he raised his huge head to look, the water running down his white chin. She saw him look, and rose to look too, wiping her mouth and her breasts. Her face made something like a smile, quick, with open mouth, and then was still, alert as the cat's, watching me climb carefully down the rocks to the pool's edge opposite her.
But this is not she, I thought; the girl I had known had not had breasts, her dark aureoles were like small closed mouths, like unopened buds. This one's thick hair was black, and her eyes startlingly blue, her down-turned eyebrows made an angry sulk; but it wasn't she. Six springs had passed; there was a light beard on my face. I wasn't I.
"Once a Day," I said, at the edge of the pool, my hands on its wet rocks as hers were. Her eyes never left mine, and she made again the smile I had seen from above, but now, close to her, I could hear her quick exhalation as she made it; and when the cat beside her made it too, I saw that it was a cat's smile, a smile to bare teeth and to hiss.
I could think of nothing to say that she would hear. The cat had made himself clear, and she had made herself as the cat. I tore off the pants and shirt I wore and stepped down into the icy water. She watched me, unmoving; in two long strokes I reached and touched the rocks where she sat. When I grasped the rocks near her feet, and began to say a word about cold water, she rose and stepped back, as though afraid I would touch her. The cat, when I drew my numb body out and water streamed from me, turned and loped away silently. And then she, deserted and pursued, without a word turned on her toes and ran from me.
I called after her, and almost followed, but felt suddenly that that would be the worst thing I could do. I sat where she had sat and watched her wet footprints on the stone dry up and disappear. I listened: the woods had stopped making noise at her passage; she hadn't run far. There was nothing I could do but talk.
I don't remember now what I said, but I said my name, and said it again; I told her how far I had come, and how amazed I was that she had passed me in the night; "come more miles than I thought I could hold," I said, "and I don't have any other gift for you than that, but as many more as you want…" I said that I thought of her often, thought of her in the spring, had thought of her this spring after a winter in a tree and the thought had made me weep; but, but, I said, I haven't chased you, haven't followed you, no, by the Money you gave me I said I wouldn't and I didn't, only there were stories I wanted to hear, secrets I learned, from a saint, Once a Day, from a saint I lived with, that I wanted to hear more about; it's your own fault, I said, for setting me on a path I've walked ever since, and you might at least say my name to me now so that I know you are the girl I remember, because…
She stood before me. She had put on a coat of softest black covered with stars, black as her hair. "Rush that Speaks," she said, looking deeply into me, but like a sleepwalker, seeing something else. "How did you think about me when I wasn't there?"
She spoke truthfully, I thought, I hoped, but her speech was masked, masked with a blank face like a cat's or like the blank secret faces of the ones who had found me in the woods. "You never thought of me?"
The cat came from the woods, warily, and passed us. "Brom," she said, not as though to call to it but only to say its name. It glanced once at us as it passed, and started up a path toward the camp. She watched it for a moment, and then followed. She glanced back at me, her arms crossed, and said, "Come on, then," and all the years between now and the first day I had seen her folded up for a moment and went away, because it was just that way she had said it to me when I had followed her to Painted Red's room when we were seven, as though I needed her protection, and she must, reluctantly, give it.
She didn't ask how I came to be here, so I told her.
"Are you a prisoner?" she said.
"I think so," I said.
"All right," she said.
Something more than years had happened to Once a Day, more than a mask put over her speech. The girl who had kissed me for showing her a family of foxes, and lain down with me as Olive had with Little St. Roy, was gone, gone entirely. And I didn't care at all, at all, so long as I could follow this girl I had found, this black-robed starred girl, forever.
Eighth Facet
At evening I sat alert among them, though they were easeful, resting their backs against the walls of their camp in the gathering dusk. For what they were discussing, they didn't seem fierce enough.
"We could tie him to a tree," said one of them, moving his hands in a circle as though tying me up, "and then hit him with sticks till he's dead."
"Yes?" said the older one, the one with gray in his beard. "And what if he doesn't hold still while all this tying and hitting is going on?"
"I wouldn't," I said.
"We'd hold him," the first said. "Use your head."
Once a Day sat apart from me, with Brom, looking from face to face as the others spoke, not concerned in it, it seemed. I would never be able to run from them in their forest.
"If we had a knife," said another, yawning, "we could cut his tongue out. He wouldn't be able to talk then."
"Are you going to be the one to cut it out?" Once a Day said, and when he didn't answer, she shook her head in some contempt.