Little, Big

by John Crowley

  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.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.

  —Attar, Parliament of the Birds

  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. They had all gone to sleep, as children, to those old stories; and later they courted with them; and told them to their own children. The big house had always been their gossip, they could have surprised its inhabitants by how much they knew of it and its history. At table and by their fires they mused on these things, having not much other entertainment in these dark days, and (though altering them in their musing into very different things) they did not forget them. And when Sophie’s summons came, surprised to be unsurprised, they put down their tools, and put off their aprons, they bundled up their children and kicked up their old engines; they came to Edgewood, and heard about a lost child returned, and an urgent plea, and a journey to go on.

  “And so there’s a door,” Sophie said, touching one of the cards (the trump Multiplicity) which lay before her, “and that’s the house
here. And,” touching the next, “there’s a dog who stands by the door.” The silence was utter in the double drawing-room. “Further on,” she said, “there’s a river, or something like one….”

  “Speak up, dear,” Momdy said, who sat almost next to her. “No one will hear.”

  “There’s a river,” Sophie said again, almost shouted. She blushed. In the darkness of her bedroom, with Lilac’s certainty before her, it had all seemed—not easy, no, but clear at least; the end was still clear to her, but it was the means that had to be considered now, and they weren’t clear. “And a bridge to cross it by, or a ford or a ferry or anyway some way to cross it; and on the other side an old man to guide us, who knows the way.”

  “The way where?” someone behind her ventured timidly; Sophie thought it was a Bird.

  “There,” someone else said, “Aren’t you listening?”

  “There where they are,” Sophie said. “There where the Parliament’s to be.”

  “Oh,” said the first voice. “Oh. I thought this was the Parliament.”

  “No,” Sophie said. “That’s there.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence returned, and Sophie tried to think what else she knew.

  “Is it far, Sophie?” Marge Juniper asked. “Some of us can’t go far.”

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “I don’t think it can be far; I remember sometimes it seemed far, and then sometimes near; but I don’t think it could be too far, I mean too far to get to; but I don’t know.”

  They waited; Sophie looked down at her cards, and shifted them. What if it was too far?

  Blossom said softly: “Is it beautiful? It must be beautiful.”

  Bud beside her said, “No! Dangerous. And awful. With things to fight! It’s a war, isn’t that so, Aunt Sophie?”

  Ariel Hawksquill glanced at the children, and at Sophie. “Is it, Sophie?” she asked. “Is it a war?”

  Sophie looked up, and held out empty hands. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s a war; that’s what Lilac said. It’s what you said,” she said to Ariel, a little reproachfully. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” She got up, turning around to see them all. “All I know is that we have to go, we have to, to help them. Because if we don’t, there won’t be any more of them. They’re dying, I know it! Or going away, going away so far, hiding so far that it’s like dying, and because of us! And think what that would be, if there weren’t any more.”

  They thought of that, or tried to, each coming to a different conclusion, or a different vision, or to none at all.

  “I don’t know where it is,” Sophie said, “or how it is we’re to go there, or what we can do to help, or why it is that it’s us that have to go; but I know we must, we have to try! I mean it doesn’t even matter if we want to or don’t want to, really, don’t you see, because we wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for them; I know that’s so. Not to go, now—that’s like, it’s like being born, and growing up, and marrying and having children, and then saying well, I’ve changed my mind, I’d rather not have—when there wouldn’t be a person there even to say he’d rather not have, unless he had already. Do you see? And it’s the same with them. We couldn’t refuse unless we were the ones who were meant to go, unless we were all going to go, in the first place.”

  She looked around at them all, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Stones, Flowers, Weeds, and Wolfs; Charles Wayne and Cherry Lake, Bud and Blossom, Ariel Hawksquill and Marge Juniper; Sonny Moon, ancient Phil Flowers and Phil’s girls and boys, August’s grandchildren and great- and great-great-grandchildren. She missed her aunt Cloud very much, who could have said these things so simply and incontrovertibly. Daily Alice, chin in her hand, was only looking at her smiling; Alice’s daughters were sewing calmly, as though all that Sophie had said were just as clear as water, though it had seemed nonsense to Sophie even as she had said it. Her mother nodded sagely, but perhaps she hadn’t heard aright; and the faces of her cousins around her were wise and foolish, light and dark, changed or unchanged.

  “I’ve told you all I can,” Sophie said helplessly. “All that Lilac said: that there are fifty-two, and that it’s to be Midsummer Day, and that this is the door, as it always was; and the cards are a map, and what they say, as far as I can tell, about the dog and the river and so on. So. Now we just have to think what next.”

  They all did think, many of them not much used to the exercise; many, though their hands were to their brows or their fingertips together, drifted away into surmise, wild or common, or sank into memory; gathered wool, or knitted it; felt their pains, old or new, and thought what those might portend, this journey or a different one; or they simply ruminated, chewing and tasting their own familiar natures, or counting over old fears or old advice, or remembering love or comfort; or they did none of these things.

  “It might be easy,” Sophie said wildly. “It could be. Just a step! Or it might be hard. Maybe,” she said, “yes, maybe it’s not one way, not the same way for all—but there is a way, there must be. You have to think of it, each of you, you have to imagine it.”

  They tried that, shifting in their seats and crossing their legs differently; they thought of north, of south, east, west; they thought of how they had come to be here anyway, guessing that if a path there could be seen, then perhaps its continuation would be clear; and in the silence of their thinking they heard a sound none had heard yet this year: peepers, suddenly speaking their one word.

  “Well,” Sophie said, and sat. She pushed the cards together as though their story were all told. “Anyway. We’ll go step by step. We’ve got all spring. Then we’ll just meet, and see. I can’t think what else.”

  “But Sophie,” Tacey said, putting down her sewing, “if the house is the door …”

  “And,” Lily said, putting down hers, “if we’re in it …”

  “Then,” Lucy said, “aren’t we traveling anyway?”

  Sophie looked at them. What they had said made perfect sense, common sense, the way they said it. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Sophie,” Smoky said from where he stood by the door. He hadn’t spoken since he’d come in and the meeting had started. “Can I ask something?”

  “Sure,” Sophie said.

  “How,” Smoky said, “do we get back?”

  In her silence was his answer, the one he’d expected, the one thing everyone present had suspected about the place she spoke of. She bowed her head in the silence she had made, and no one broke it; they all heard her answer, and in it, hidden, the true question that was being put to them, which Sophie could not quite ask.

  They were all family, anyway, Sophie thought; or if they came, they counted, and if they didn’t, they didn’t, that’s all. She opened her mouth to ask: Will you come? but their faces abashed her, so various, so familiar, and she couldn’t frame it. “Well,” she said; they had grown indistinct in the sparkling tears that came to her eyes. “That’s all, I guess.”

  Blossom jumped from her chair. “I know,” she said. “We all have to take hands, in a circle, for strength, and all say ‘We will!’ “ She looked around her. “Okay?”

  There was some laughter and some demurrers, and her mother drew her to her and said that maybe everyone didn’t want to do that, but Blossom, taking her brother’s hand, began to urge her cousins and aunts and uncles to come closer to take hands, avoiding only the Lady with the Alligator Purse; then she decided that perhaps the circle would be stronger if they all crossed arms and took hands with opposite hands, which necessitated an even smaller circle, and when she got this linked in one place it would break in another. “Nobody’s listening,” she complained to Sophie, who only gazed at her unhearing, thinking of what might become of her, of the brave ones, and unable to imagine; and just then Momdy stood up tottering, who hadn’t heard the plan Blossom had urged, and said, “Well. There’s coffee and tea, and other things, in the kitchen, and some sandwiches,” and that broke the circle further; there was a scraping of chairs, an
d a general movement; they went off kitchenwards, talking in low voices.

  Only Pretending

  “Coffee sounds good,” Hawksquill said to the ancient lady beside her.

  “It does,” Marge Juniper said. “Only I’m not sure whether it’s worth the trouble of going for it. You know.”

  “Will you allow me,” Hawksquill said, “to bring you a cup?”

  “That’s very kind,” Marge said with relief. It had been quite a trouble to everyone getting her here, and she was glad to keep to the seat she’d been put in.

  “Good,” Hawksquill said. She went after the others, but stopped at the table where Sophie, cheek in hand, stared down as in grief, or wonder, at the cards. “Sophie,” she said.

  “What if it’s too far?” Sophie said. She looked up at Hawksquill, a sudden fear in her eyes. “What if I’m wrong about it all?”

  “I don’t think you could be,” Hawksquill said, “in a way. As far as I understood what you meant, anyway. It’s very odd, I know; but that’s no reason to think it’s wrong.” She touched Sophie’s shoulder. “In fact,” she said, “I’d only say that perhaps it’s not yet odd enough.”

  “Lilac,” Sophie said.

  “That,” Hawksquill said, “was odd. Yes.”

  “Ariel,” Sophie said, “won’t you look at them? Maybe you could see something, some first step….”

  “No,” Hawksquill said, drawing back. “No, they’re not for me to touch. No.” In the figure Sophie had laid out, broken now, the Fool did not show. “They’re too great a thing now.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sophie said, spreading them idly around. “I think—it seems to me I’ve about got to the end of them. Of what they have to tell. Maybe it’s only me. But there doesn’t seem to be any more in them.” She rose, and walked away from them. “Lilac said they were the guidebook,” she said. “But I don’t know. I think she was only pretending.”