Like a dream, yes… I thought winter would make Once a Day sad, you know, dark; but she was the same, or never the same the same, and whatever the game or trick of dark and light was it was a thing which happened day to day, moment to moment, and not by seasons. In the mezzanine we made private places for ourselves where we spent the long, long twilights; sometimes the sadness of them would make her sad - no, in the sadness of them she would happen to be sad - and we would let out a Light early to pretend it was already night. Her summer-tawny body grew pale again, and the light hair that downed her limbs dark. And we dreamed together amid the crowd there. I thought it was for shame, a shame like their old manners, that she never spoke of these things elsewhere, and never wanted them spoken of, as though they hadn't happened. But it wasn't shame. It was that she wanted to mark nothing: wanted to make each time the only time, as pastless as a dream. There were no words: she wanted none.
And then I woke. And now I only know I dreamed, and am awake.
Third Facet
The big snows fell in that month in which the calendar children, bundled up, made a faced pile of snow with twigs for arms and a hat like the hats the men of the List wear. On a day in the month that followed, February, we lay on the mezzanine and watched snow fall, turning to rain; through the veil of it the black trees seemed to proceed slowly toward us, though they came no closer. Once a Day lay against Brom, carefully biting her nails to the length she liked them and filing them smooth on the rough stone of the wall. Around us we heard tiny winter stories told, stories of doors in the forest, tiny doors at the top of worn steps, a light inside; they open a crack, and eyes look out.
This was the time of the List's long laziness; if it could be said they ever waited for anything, you could say they did little in this time except wait for spring. It was now that most of their children were born, the time carefully calculated; below, a group was cooing over a new child, a girl I supposed by the way they made much of it. Two older children stood at an open bin of the long white bins in an endless game of changing clothes; one stepped out of a black, shimmering belt and changed it for the other's frayed wig and false fur. They dangled jewels and stained ribbons, arm-clocks and rags of shirts, each twirling for the other's criticism and grudging admiration. I watched them, enjoying their moments of pale nakedness; their voices rose up to where we sat, low and indistinct.
"The door in the elbow," the sleepy storyteller near us said, "the door open a crack, through which winter comes, blowing on the heart."
I thought of Blink, bundled and sleepy, saying it's a small world.
And yes, you see: circumspect, as I said, and careful for themselves: for they won't disappear, the List would never choose that, though it sometimes seemed to me that disappearance was what they aimed at in the end - no, but they will be wholly taken in, because they have forgotten, doubly and for good, the ancient struggle of man against the world, forgotten doubly and for good the string once tied around all men's fingers; and in the forest, like shellfish in a secret shellfish bed, they will move only for the current's sake, and keep their counsel as close as cats, endlessly counting off the twelve seasons of the year while the forest and the water and the winter eat up the angels' works and Road and perhaps even Little Belaire.
"The shortest month is February," Once a Day said, testing her filed nails against her cheek for smoothness; "or the longest too."
The floor below belonged as much to the cats who walked it as to the people they walked among. I said there were cats who lived at Little Belaire; but the List seemed to live with their cats and not the reverse. They were deferred to. Houd had told me that the cats of the List were not of the same family at all as the cats I had known; these great, pacific, wise animals were descended from a race the angels invented, so to speak; a race they made out of the old race of cats, altering them by the same means we men had been altered, and for the same reason - convenience. And in the thousand generations that came after, they had been altered further by careful selection of mates. They hunted little, but ate the food made for them in the kitchens of Twenty-eight Flavors; almost never did I hear them make that eerie, tormented cry I had used to hear, like a lost baby, in the woods near Little Belaire. I said the List were grownups: but now looking down at the floor where the cats walked I thought it was the cats who were the grownups, and the people their children. And as children learn their manners from watching grownups, so the List learned theirs from cats.
I was proud of this small insight; I had no notion how close I was to the truth, and therefore I was as far away as ever.
Zhinsinura came through the way-wall, and others after her, dressed in their raggedies - winter warm-clothes piled on however to keep the cold out.
"We're going to the forest," she called up to us. "You come."
"Why?" asked Once a Day.
"A cat's lost. Help find her."
The cat's name was Puff, a very old and tired orange female with a big scruffy mane, blind in one eye. She'd been gone two days, Zhinsinura said as we struggled into warm-clothes, which wouldn't have worried anyone if it was Brom or Fa'afa, but Puff in the winter… She hurried our dressing.
It was wet, black, and hopeless in the forest, a thin rain still falling, and I didn't know how they thought they would find anything but mud and old snowbanks to fall in, but they kept on through the day just as though they had a path. We spread out, and soon lost sight of each other, and I found myself struggling along beside someone I didn't know, bound up to his eyes in gray. He slashed at the dirty snow with a stick, breathing wet clouds from his nose.
"Help me here," I said, my foot caught in something beneath the snow.
"Dog days," he said.
We pulled me loose. "What did you say?"
"Dog days." He waved his stick, indicating the forest. "February's the lean month for them. They're said, when they find nothing at all to eat, to run around in a circle till the weakest drops, and then he's it. I don't know. I guess that's fair. But usually they find something."
Like Puff, I thought, old and cold as she was. The story at Little Belaire was that all the dogs had long ago been eaten or killed, but in this forest… "Dog days," he said again, his eyes shifting from side to side above the gray scarves covering his mouth. We stopped to get our bearings. The relentless drip seemed to fill my ears, making it hard to hear other sounds. The high trees' tops were lost in fog, and their black trunks seemed rotten with wetness. The forest crackled suddenly quite near us, and we spun around: two of our number came out of the trees toward us, dressed in black like the day. We called out and kept on; and now my eyes were shifting around like my gray friend's.
For a long time we tore through a thicket of harsh bushes, clawed at by springing limbs and tripped up by roots. Beyond it the ground fell away sharply into a sort of depression in the ground, whose lowest part was filled with dark water edged with papery ice. As we came out on the edge of this bowl, he saw one thing on its far side, and I saw another.
He saw Puff, off to the left, struggling up through the snow to reach the crest on the other side.
I saw Once a Day, off to the right, also climbing, trying to reach Puff.