Until you wake, and there is no search after all.
"Once a Day," I said, and laid my cheek against her hair, which hid her face; "Once a Day, tell me there's no winter; tell me winter never comes, and I'll believe you."
Second Facet
On a blowing, rain-swept day which I would have called the first day of November but which the calendar called the twentieth of September, I went to Twenty-eight Flavors, summoned by Zhinsinura. She sat at the time table with September's tile before her.
"Did you wonder who they are?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said.
"Just two," she said. "Like any two in this month. The other is an old woman, to whom in this month they go for counsel." She smiled at me. Her big solemn head was made bigger by her wide gray hair, and her eyes were many-pouched and always sad; but her smile was quick and real. "And how do you get on, now, warren boy?"
"Fine," I said, and would have said nothing more, but that Zhinsinura wouldn't hear in my speech just what I meant, what was fine and what not. "Can you tell me, though, what a letter from Dr. Boots is?"
There were others there, working and sitting, some I knew. I had got used to being stared at around Service City; I would have preferred now to be alone with Zhinsinura, but that's not the List's way. The others looked at me with great interest.
"It's a letter," she said. "And it's from Dr. Boots."
I felt their eyes on me. I looked down at Zhinsinura's long hands feeling the smooth edges of the tile. "There's something," I said carefully, "a thing, that I don't know."
"Always, I should hope."
"That's what she seems to mean. Your dark and light, you know, it's not an easy thing to understand. I thought I'd seen a path, that it was about winter coming; but that was only another riddle; and she seems to say the riddles are answers."
"Every riddle is its own answer," said Zhinsinura. "That's easy. But how could a riddle know its own answer? Don't think I mock you. I don't mean to, a bit. It is a secret thing. The truthful speakers haven't much believed in such secrets, is all. You ask for her secret, though you may not know that's what you're about; and she can't tell you without learning it herself. And she wants not to learn that secret."
"How can you have a secret you don't know?"
The others there looked away now. They didn't like this conversation, not the younger ones; the older weren't listening any more; but Zhinsinura only laced her fingers together and leaned toward me smiling. "Well, how do you speak truthfully?" she asked. "Let's both tell a secret."
"That's not a secret," I said. "It's something you learn so well you forget you know it."
"Well then," she said, opening her hands, "there it is."
Painted Red had said: for Whisper cord a secret isn't something you won't tell, but something that can't be told. "There's something," I said slowly, like someone stupid, "I don't know. I want to know it. There must be a way to learn it, because you all know it. If it can't be told, I'll learn it any way there is."
Zhinsinura's steady eyes seemed hooded and pouched from so much seeing. "Do you know what you ask?" she said gently. "You know, a thing about secrets is that once you learn one, you know it for good. It's your secret. You don't go back out and stand outside again not knowing. There's no way back Out."
"Like way-wall," I said.
"Way-wall?" she said smiling. "There's no such thing."
Everybody laughed gently, as though an old joke had been told at just the right time. Their laughter woke the tiger cat named Fa'afa, who was always near Zhinsinura. She touched its head and it rested again.
"You know," she said, "the League had no love for the truthful speakers. Perhaps it was that their women wouldn't join the League in the very ancient times, or then help out after the Storm when they might have, but only kept to themselves. Then perhaps it was the League's pride, that you all had survived without their help. It was only long after women had gone to others to tell them the League was dissolved that Olive went to the warren. The League thought never to make peace with you; and there were some, to the League's shame, who tried to prevent Olive. Well. All that is old.
"But we have grown old differently, in all those lifetimes since then. I know how differently: I visited your warren often, oh, so long ago it's neither light nor dark now. There was a boy there - well, a boy, an old, old man now if he's lived - who asked me to stay there with him, with you all. I wanted to, though I was afraid; in the end he was more sensible; but I think we both knew we would end up in a corner. And even so, I think the harder way is to come here from there. Your girl could because she is a cousin; you… well. I don't say it to frighten you."
She looked away, raising her long bony arm to shake down her bracelets. The evening bell rang. She thought; then said: "Yes, there is a thing you don't know. Yes, there is a way to learn it, though not this time of year; and it's too soon for you, anyway. Stay; listen and learn; and don't ask for what's not given you." She moved the sticky stone from the twentieth to the twenty-first day. "You say she ties riddles for you. Well, I'll tie you another. I'm not afraid to tell it because ay, though it's not a riddle at all you'll think it's one; and bee, if you're going to stay here I think it will have to be by your way and not ours; and see, it's the day and the time for it anyway.
"This is the riddle: you can tie a string around your finger to remember something, until you forget there's a string tied around your finger. Then you will have forgotten doubly, and for good. This calendar is the string tied around our finger - and the letter from Dr. Boots is how we forget it, doubly and for good.
"You can look for a path through that. I know your famous Path. If you want to find it here, think this: path is only a name for a place where you find yourself. Where you're going on it is only a story. Where you've been on it is only another. Some of the stories are pleasant ones; some are not. That's dark and light."
I sat with my head bowed before her and the September tile between us and listened; and I might have understood, too, if I had ever in all my growing up been told a story that wasn't true.
"Did she send you away?" Once a Day asked. She sat amid baskets of apples that were being brought in through the way-wall, helping the children sort from them the bad ones, which would spoil the others.
"No," I said. "I don't think she did."
She polished on her starred robe and held up for me an orange apple that blushed red like a cheek. "I'm glad," she said.
I had been wrong about her speech. There was no mask put over it to hide from me; only an opacity filling it up, from within, filling up its transparency as fog fills up transparent autumn mornings. Yet overhead the sky is blue. Zhinsinura had offered me every way not to enter into their secrets; what she didn't know was that I had already gone in, by the pool in the forest, no, long before then, in a game of whose-knee in Little Belaire that seemed now as long ago as a time when angels flew; and I had always known there was no way out. I had never truly looked behind me to see.
She was right, you know, I think, about way-walclass="underline" that there's no such thing.
Yes?
I mean it wasn't a thing, like a door; only a condition. A condition of the air in the doorway, air altered, as ice is only altered water.