Was it?
I think it had been done long before, in order to heat the place. You said a hot breath blew from it. I think it was just an engine, to make heat…
Maybe so. And the little house on the wall, in the warren, was only a bombom, a barom, a thing to tell the weather. Is it all only and merely and just? Why is it you know so much and understand nothing at all?
I'm sorry.
No; no. It's only that this is the hard part of the story, the part that was hardest to live through, the part hardest to tell rightly; and if you don't understand it, the story won't make sense. You must try to imagine me there, angel; you must imagine me, because if you don't imagine me I won't exist. None of it will exist.
Yes. Go on.
In October Twenty-eight Flavors was an argument of odors. There was a long counter there, wood-grained like the tables, behind which rose a great mirror, black-flecked and dulclass="underline" and on it were drawn in white two people, a man with an apron and a tall hat, and a boy to whom he offered what looked like a giant version of the Four Pots. It was in Twenty-eight Flavors that the List kept and made their medicines. From the ceiling hung brown roots strung in loops, and on the plastic were heaps of wrinkled leaves and the crushed buds of flowers; in the great stainless-steel ovens and sinks behind the mirror, things were baked and washed and mixed: the kitchen, they called it. Brown Houd, who knew much of such things, went among them with a confusion in his cup, looking and grinning.
A confusion?
They made confusions from leaves and such, boiling them with water. There were confusions to wake you up, others to put you to sleep. There were confusions that made you strong or weak, stupid or smart, warm or cool. "It confuses the dark and light," Houd said, "and gives you a pause: for a while you think only about the confusion, and not about everything."
"Everything?"
"That's Relativity," he said.
In that crowded house were also hung the long golden leaves to dry, which Houd and others there smoked in little pipes, racks and racks of it, smelling as it looked, dry and golden. It hung near the calendar, whose October tile of the two children raking orange leaves to burn was changed by Houd to November's: those two walking arm-in-arm, scared perhaps, past leafless trees through which black crows cawed. One curled brown leaf was tossed past them, on a curved black line that meant Wind.
I think Houd was a child of November, like me. Often he would sit much of the day on a huge stump on the edge of the stone plaza Service City occupied, well wrapped up, and there he could be visited. The white smoke from his pipe was like the smoke from the orange leaves the calendar children burned, but the leaves that piled up around his stump were gray, and he himself was the color of November: nut-brown and whorled like wood.
"It's not like your bread," he said to me; "it won't do you any good to inhale it; inhale it enough and it'll kill you, so the angels said, who smoked it by the bale… I only tell you that because it does taste good, once you get used to it." He offered the pipe to Once a Day, who refused it with a grimace, and to me. It was an acrid, harsh taste, that fit the day, autumnal and burnt and brown.
He sniffed the air and put the pipe back between the teeth that liked it. "You know things now that you won't know again in the year. It's in this month, they say, that you can see the City."
"The City," someone said, in a low tone of delighted horror, and the children said, "Tell it, tell the City."
"Say on a day like this," Houd said, raising his yellow palm to us, "in a big sky like that deep with clouds that turn in the wind, a wind you can almost see, that you know will bring cold rain again soon. See there? Where that gray knot of cloud is like a tabby face? It could yawn - it could yawn now - and out of it would come, of a color like it of gray stone and frozen earth, the City. The City that the angels plucked out of the earth like a root. It'd be far away and high, floating, but still you would see the high square towers on it like crystals growing on a rock; and below, the whole plug of earth that came away with it, and tree roots feathering the top and bridges hanging torn away, and tunnels from which roads run out to nothing. And the clouds would wind and stream around it, that might be its own ancient smoke, and half-hide it; until it grew closer (if it weren't quickly swallowed up again to leave you wondering), close enough for you to see the glitter of its uncountable glass, and the bits of rock and earth that fall ceaselessly from its base; and you would see that the vast wind turns it, makes it revolve ever in the sky like a great wheel.
"And in its square streets where nothing lives the dead men walk, made too of stone or worse; and, stuck in life like death, and dreaming, make no motion.
"That would make you shudder."
"Just the story does," said Once a Day, and clutched herself.
"That's like this month," Houd said. "It's the world's shudder that winter is coming."
Just the story does… Little St. Roy called the clouds Cities in the Sky; and Houd called the City a cloud, and put the four dead men there to make the children shudder, a November shudder. And long ago Seven Hands had said all lost things end up in the City in the Sky, to make Mbaba laugh when her spectacles were lost. Somewhere a burnt sun was beginning to set; the sky and the afternoon were smoky with it.
"Then winter does come," I said.
"Oh, winter comes," Houd said. "But only when it comes." He puffed his pipe and grinned. "That's Relativity," he said; and everybody laughed, of course, except me, of course.
The great forest which circled around the stone plaza where Service City sat, two fingers of a gigantic hand about to pinch Service City out like a bug, didn't seem to grow and thin insubstantial in winter as Belaire's woods did. It was much greater than that woods, and seemed to grow, as Belaire's did not, at a great rate: the ivied buildings seemed now more settled into the forest even than when I had come in the spring. You could still see Road through the black trees; but it wouldn't be so forever.
The forest was strong; the world was slow but strong. As Service City fell back into the forest, so Road was drowned in brooks and broken by winter weather. And so too, I thought, was Belaire drawn in; the bridges around it fell, and its paths to the great world were blocked, slowly for sure, but for sure. All our men's places were stained and whelmed by the world and winter; the leaves piled up behind Service City and littered its stone plaza, they found their way into Blink's tree house; and on the roofs of Little Belaire they were bound up in hoarfrost with bird droppings and last year's nests.
Yet at Belaire the ancient war of man with the world was if not still fought at least remembered. Maybe it was because Dr. Boots's List lived not in a gentle river valley but in a great and impatient forest, but it seemed they had forgotten such things; they no longer struggled to hold back the world, nor even much remembered how the angels had fought and won and lost against it. But there it is: the whole tangle of their lives was based on something they were trying to forget.
For the doctor was there, indoors for winter, along those walls; she could climb the stairs to the mezzanine, way-wall admitted her, and she looked out all the eyes which I looked into, though I didn't see her.
They should have seemed childlike, the List, with their changeable sadnesses and enthusiasms, their dark and light, their endless, pointless small bickerings. But they weren't childlike; they seemed old - not aged, but like grownups, with histories, with old knowledge, old manners, a careful, circumspect way - and how could that be, I wondered, that they could change like children and play like kittens, that yesterday and tomorrow could be real for them only as a dream is real, and yet seem circumspect?