she knew too much, and so did he) she only said. “I guess. Close.”
Smoky’s hand, pressed to his chest beneath his breastbone, began to tingle, and he said “Oh-oh,” and stopped.
They were at the top of the stairs. Faintly, below, he could see the drawing-room lights, and hear voices. Then the voices went out in a hum of silence.
Close. If it were close, then he had lost; for he was far behind, he had work to do he could not even conceive of, much less begin. He had lost.
An enormous hollow seemed to open up in his chest, a hollow larger than himself. Pain gathered on its perimeter, and Smoky knew that after a moment, an endless moment, the pain would rush in and fill the hollow: but for that moment there was nothing, nothing but a terrible premonition, and an incipient revelation, both vacant, contesting in his empty heart. The premonition was black, and the incipient revelation would be white. He stopped stock still, trying not to panic because he couldn’t breathe; there was no air within the hollow for him to breathe; he could only experience the battle between Premonition and Revelation and listen to the long loud hum in his ears that seemed to be a voice saying Now you see, you didn’t ask to see and this is not the moment in which you would anyway have expected sight to come, here on this stair in this dark, but Now: and even then it was gone. His heart, with two slow awful thuds like blows, began to pound fiercely and steadily as though in rage, and pain, familiar and releasing, filled him up. The contest was over. He could breathe the pain. In a moment, he would breathe air.
“Oh,” he heard Alice saying, “oh, oh, a bad one”; he saw her pressing her own bosom in sympathy, and felt her grip on his left arm.
“Yeah, wow,” he said, finding voice. “Oh, boy.”
“Gone?”
“Almost.” Pain ran down the left arm she held, diminishing to a thread which continued down into his ring finger, on which there was no ring, but from which, it felt, a ring was being torn, pulled off, a ring worn so long that it couldn’t be removed without severing nerve and tendon. “Quit it, quit it,” he said, and it did quit, or diminish further anyway.
Okay, he said. Okay.
“Oh, Smoky,” Alice said. “Okay?”
“Gone,” he said. He took steps downward toward the lights of the drawing-room. Alice held him, supported him, but he wasn’t weak; he wasn’t even ill, Dr. Fish and Doc Drinkwater’s old medical books agreed that what he suffered from wasn’t a disease but a condition, compatible with long life, even with otherwise good health.
A condition, something to live with. Then why should it appear to be revelation, revelation that never quite came, and couldn’t be remembered afterwards? “Yes,” old Fish had said, “premonition of death, that’s a common feeling with angina, nothing to worry about.” But was it of death? Would that be what the revelation was, when it came, if it came?
“It hurt,” Alice said.
“Well,” Smoky said, laughing or panting, “I think I would have preferred it not to happen, yes.”
“Maybe that’s the last,” Alice said. She seemed to think of his attacks on the model of sneezes, one big last one might clear the system.
“Oh, I bet not,” Smoky said mildly. “I don’t think we want the last one. No.”
They went down the stairs, holding each other, and then into the drawing room where the others waited.
“Here we are,” said Alice. “Here’s Smoky.”
“Hi, hi,” he said. Sophie looked up from her table, and his daughters from their knitting, and he saw his pain reflected in their faces. His finger still tingled, but he was whole; his long-worn ring was for a time yet unstolen.
A condition: but like revelation. And did theirs, he wondered for the first time, hurt like his did?
“All right,” Sophie said. “We’ll start.” She looked around at the circle of faces which looked at her, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Flowers, Stones, and Weeds, her cousins, neighbors and relatives. The brightness of the brass lamp on the table made the rest of the room obscure to her, as though she sat by a campfire looking at the faces of animals in the surrounding dark, whom by her words she must charm into consciousness, and into purpose.
“Well,” she said. “I had a visitor.”
III.
But how could you have expected to travel that path in thought alone; how expect to measure the moon by the fish? No, my neighbors, never think that path is a short one; you must have lions’ hearts to go by that way, it is not short and its seas are deep; you will walk it long in wonder. sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping.
It had been easier than Sophie would have thought to assemble her relatives and neighbors here on this night, though it hadn’t been easy to decide to assemble them, or to decide what to tell them: for an old, old silence was being broken, a silence so old that they at Edgewood did not even remember that it had been sworn to, a silence at the heart of many stories, broken into like a locked chest to which the key is lost. That had taken up the last months of winter: that, and getting the word out then to mudbound farms and isolated cottages, to the Capital and the City, and setting a date convenient to all.
Is It Far?
They had almost all agreed, though, to come, oddly untaken-aback, when the word reached them; it had been almost as if they had long expected a summons like this. And so they had, though most of them didn’t realize it until it had come.
When Marge Juniper’s young visitor passed through the pentacle of five towns which, once upon a time, Jeff Juniper had connected with a five-pointed star to show Smoky Barnable the way to Edgewood, more than one of the sleeping householders had awakened, feeling someone or something go by, and a kind of expectant peace descend, a happy sense that all their lives would not end, as they had supposed, before an ancient promise was Somehow fulfilled, or some great thing anyway come to pass. Only spring, they told themselves in the morning; only spring coming: the world is as it is and not different, and contains no such surprises. But then Marge’s story went from house to house, gathering details as it went, and there were guesses and supposings about that; and then they were unsurprised—surprised to be unsurprised—when they were summoned here.
For it was with them, with all those families touched by August, taught by Auberon and then by Smoky, and visited by Sophie on her endless spinster’s rounds, just as Great-aunt Nora Cloud supposed it would come to be with Drinkwaters and Barnables. There had been, after all, a time, nearly a hundred years ago, when their ancestors had settled here because they knew a Tale, or its tellers; some had been students, disciples even. They had been, people like the Flowers had been or had felt themselves to be, in on a secret; and many had been wealthy enough to do little but ponder it, amid the buttercups and milkweed of the farms they bought and neglected. And though hard times had reduced their descendants, turning many of them into artisans, into odd- jobbers, pickup-truckers, hard-scrabble farmers, inextricably intermarried now with the dairymen and handymen whom their great-grandparents had hardly spoken to, still they had stories, stories told nowhere else in the world. They were in reduced circumstances, yes; and the world (they thought) had grown hard and old and desperately ordinary; but they were descended from a race of bards and heroes, and there had been once an age of gold, and the earth around them was all alive and densely populated, though the present times were too coarse to see it.
