So absorbed was I in all this that I failed to hear the saint returning till the house creaked and moved with his climbing up the ladder. There was nowhere to hide; I picked up my pack quickly and slung it over my shoulder, just leaving, and stood fearful and embarrassed as his head - at first astonished, then displeased - appeared in the doorway.

He gave his attention to getting in the door, and when he stood inside - shorter than I was - he considered me. I was too embarrassed to speak. He caught a thought then, and came to me smiling, holding out his hand to me.

"Good-by," he said politely, and I shook his brown hand. He turned away then and stood in the low arch made by the limb with his back to me, waiting for me to be gone. But I couldn't bring myself to leave. His hands behind his back clasped and unclasped impatiently. Inspired, I reached into my pack and pulled out the bottle of grape soda that No Moon had given me; and when he peeked around to see if I had gone, I showed it to him, smiling, still afraid to speak. His gaze stopped on the bottle for a moment, and when he looked away he began to rock back and forth on his big boots. I waited. At last he edged away from the arch, ducked down beneath a cluttered table, and drew out an old glass, lumpy and full of bubbles. Without looking at me, he put the glass on the table, and I brought the bottle to him. He looked up then suddenly, smiling as broadly as his small face could. "My name is Blink," he said. "What's yours?"

"My name is Rush that Speaks." I put the bottle on the table, and we both watched a bit of sun from the window stab through its purple heart. St. Blink broke the seal and the bubbles crowded to the top. He poured out a foaming, hissing glassful, recapping it tight quickly to keep the bubbles in. He picked up the glass and drank two long noisy gulps. A moment later a small musical belch escaped him, and he smiled at me fondly. "Did you know," he said, sitting down slowly in a creaking chair of bent wood and rushes and turning the glass in the sun, "that in very ancient times, to keep summer fruits, they would boil them down into a thick paste, like honey, very sweet, and eat them that way?"

There was another chair there like the one he sat in, and gingerly I lowered myself into it. "No," I said, and felt a strange lump in my throat. "No, I didn't know that; but now I do."

"Yes," he said. He looked at me curiously, nodding his head and sipping his soda. I allowed my arms to rest on the arms of the chair. I knew - though I was afraid, as yet, to let myself wholly believe it - that! had come to a place I had long sought, and could stay.

Fourth Facet

And I thought, as that summer went on and I was not sent away, when I would come through the woods with water and see the tree house amid its speaking leaves, that perhaps Blink had found me just as I had found him: someone whom he had long waited for. I would smile at our luck even through the complicated task of getting myself up, and then the water up, and then the water inside and into Jug.

Jug on its table stood as high as my chin; made of plastic, bright yellow, sleek and edgeless. It had a top that fit snugly, which had once been clear but was now cloudy. Water from its little tap, though it had been standing all day, tasted as fresh and cool as though you drank it from the stream. Painted or somehow sealed on its front was a picture of a man, or a creature like a man, with thick square running legs and arms thrown wide. One fat hand held a glass from which orange liquid splashed; the other hand thrust up one clublike finger. His head, orange as the liquid in his glass, was immense for his body, a huge sphere, and bore an expression of wild glee, of unimaginable shrieking joy. That was Jug.

I asked if it was one of Blink's souvenirs from the city. He had made a trip to the city when he was young, and he would tell stories about it at night. "I took it to carry the rest of the things I found," he said, "because it was light and big. I strapped it to my shoulders." And he would tell about the silent city, more silent than anywhere, because almost nothing lived there to make noise. In ancient times there had been not only the men but the populations that lived on men, birds and rats and insects; they all disappeared when the men left. He had walked through the silence, and climbed into buildings, and took Jug to carry the things he found.

When he told stories of the city and the things he had found there, I thought Blink might be Bones cord, or even Buckle, though Buckle cord has no saints at all in it. But I wasn't satisfied with this. When I saw him with his specs on, at the table working at his crostic-words, absorbed in their mystery, and beautiful in his absorption, brushing away a fly and crossing and uncrossing his big feet in perplexity, I was sure he was of St. Gene's tiny Thread cord. But still it wouldn't do.

Why didn't you ask him?

Ask him what?

What cord he was.

Well, if I didn't know, how was he to know?

But you knew what cord you were.

Yes. And if I had known St. Blink in the warren, with his friends and his occupations and the places he chose to live, I would have known what cord he was, too. Your cord, you see, isn't something you discover just by examining yourself, the way you look into a mirror and discover you have red hair. In Little Belaire, you are in a cord, and a cord is - well, a cord, like a piece of string, not like a name you bear. That makes it clearer, doesn't it?

Well. Just go on. What was it you said he was doing, so absorbed, that made you think he was Thread cord?

He was at his crostic-words.

When St. Ervin came to learn to be a saint from St. Maureen in her oak tree, he was never once allowed up into the house she had built there, never once, though he stayed for years. She would dispute with him sometimes, and tell him to go away and leave her alone; he wouldn't go, he insisted on staying, he brought presents and she threw them away, he hid and she discovered him and ran him off with a stick, well, the story is very long, but the end is that when St. Maureen was dying and St. Ervin came to her as she lay too weak to run him off, and wept that he could not now ever be a saint, she said, "Well, Ervin, that's a story; go tell that." And died.

When I had been a few days in the tree house, I told Blink, in some embarrassment, why I had come, and like St. Maureen, he only said, "You want to be a saint? A saint? Then why are you here? Why don't you be about it?"

"I thought," I said, head down, "that maybe I could stay here with you, and listen and watch, and see how you became a saint, and learn to do the same."

"Me?" he squeaked in consternation. "Me? Why, I'm not a saint! Whatever could have given you that idea? Me a saint! Boy, didn't they teach you to speak truthfully in the warren? And couldn't you have heard it in all I said? Do I sound to you like St. Roy?"

"Yes," I said truthfully.

Abashed, he turned to look at his crostic-words. "No, no," he said after a little thought. "I'll tell you what. A saint will tell you stories of his life, and…"

"And so do you, about going to the city, and all the things you found there."

"There's a difference. The stories I tell are not of my life, but of our life, our life as men. It's the difference between wisdom and knowledge. I'll admit to knowledge, even to a lot of it, if it makes you happy to have found me; useless knowledge though it is. But wisdom - I’m no angel, I know this much, that wisdom need not come from knowledge, and sometimes can't at all. If it's knowledge you want, well, I haven't had anybody to tell about it for years, so I'm glad you've come; if it's wisdom, then you'd better be about it any way you can find; I'll be no help."