There are no secrets In the House of Snow Only soft whispers. —An anonymous Gwotian poet, though this, and other poems are sometimes attributed to Málákáchná (Small Duck) of Standing River. * The oldest and loneliest hostel, at the northern edge of Standing River, had been built on the lip of an open, nameless stretch of bog-land. It had been a farm-house—or something—in the past: a single structure, and now it was a ramble of additions and dormers painted in green stucco with black trim. Ornithologists made common use of it on their cryptic, half-mystic sojourns. North Lodge, as they came to call it, saw a steady flow of bird-alchemists; they came, as always, to study the red-winged corvids, the archaeopteryx, and the hooded silverbeak: the grass heron, the great horned owl, and the kikimura. They came to train their ears to the shifting ecology of birdsong. A few of them (always a few) wrote elegies to the red-crested banshees, hoping—in some common, obscure way—to make amends and bring them back. There were no red-crested banshees in the bog lands, though rumor held that a sizable colony of them lived as near as dour lands of Fesh. No one had any need for the humans at home in Fesh, but their birds were welcome. The banshees, the ornithologists said, disliked the human voice here and refused to chortle their own songs in easy range of traffic noise, arguments, lies… There were other voices, however: two of them weaving softly in the moonlight. “Winter,” Dubovi said, a note of quiet wonder in the warm-brandy timbre of his words. “This is my first winter with snow.” The first fall of flakes had come early in the day, like the fluff of down, escaped from a parka or an old pillow one month shy of its next, desperate mending. By mid-day, Shepát had to shovel the North Lodge footpaths. He’d made quick work of it, with Dubovi’s eager help, and for the first time in three years, the drudgery of shoveling felt a little bit like play. “You’ll come to hate it,” Shepát said, as casually as the night’s mood allowed. It was a still night, heavy with the kind of expectation a waxing crescent moon might conjure; and the moon—like the shyest of brides—hid behind a thin veil of clouds in ways that Shepát read as demure and reticent. It was a night for deeper voices, of whispered entreaties or husky, teasing provocations, a night for deeper voices than Shepát’s airy near-baritone. It was the only voice he had and so he used it as well as talent and temperament allowed. He spoke enough—only just—to keep Dubovi talking, to coax the the waxing moon voice from the depths of Dubovi’s throat. “Maybe,” Dubovi said: a shrug in the sound of that word. “But not this year.” “Don’t be so sure.” If Dubovi smiled, Shepát didn’t see it; he kept his gaze fixed ahead. There were shadows, where snow-dunes held the night’s darkness on their western faces. In summer, there would have been animal sounds: insect noises and bat twitters…the yowl of a cat in some obscure distance, or a dog, barking. Now, there was only the soft, grinding crunch of footsteps and an ocean of night-quiet with Dubovi’s voice in it, like islands. “Next year,” Dubovi said. “Ask me. I’m sure I’ll repeat what I’ve said tonight.” “Next year,” Shepát repeated. “As the turtle walks,” Dubovi said, as if he’d always spoken Gwot. His accent said otherwise, but he knew the slang, the jokes, the old-lady idiom. Shepát wondered if he knew the moon voices as well. Probably so. The hostel lodge had been silent for weeks: empty for the most part, and—in ways that spoke of late winter—harrowing in that emptiness. There were few voices, Shepát’s and Dubovi’s dominant among them. At other times, Shepát might have felt a sense of harrowing ennui, and boredom with the itinerate horologists and tinkers and pot-menders making their collective way from Standing River to towns farther north, or from northern towns to the friendly, open border to the Haiga Lands. The horologists never went that far. They had no real place in the Haiga Lands, where tempors sang the hours with eerie, machine precision and where clocks were useless to anyone with ears. The wandering horologists always headed north, grumbling (at times) that the North Lodge clocks were their last until two days carried them to Standalone or Oest. It was good to find a different silence here, with Dubovi: outside and in the snow, even Shepát felt a chill nipping at his fingers and the tips of his toes. It was good that Dubovi had come from far to the south, below the Eight Haigas, which was beyond the lip of the world, in terms of Shepát’s current concerns, good that he’d stopped here, months ago. He’d offered no reasons for his arrival at the hostel lodge, but perhaps he’d come for the same reasons that drew Shepát, himself. To get away. To be somewhere else. To be a face among strangers and someone else for a time. Shepát had been a guest of the lodge, once, but his stay became residence and his residence became employment. The hostel-lodge was home, and though he said nothing of it, Dubovi’s presence seemed to follow the same course. There might come a time to ask after such reasoning, but not tonight…not now. Not with shy moonlight coloring veil-thin clouds. “You’re cold,” Dubovi said. “Only a little.” “More than a little, Shepát. Your teeth are talking to each other.” “Only slightly.” “We’ll go back. We’ll drink tea if you want.” Shepát nodded. “I’d like that,” he said. * What began with snow-flurries in the morning, ended with warmth, sleep in comforting darkness, and soft, diffuse moonlight slanting through an attic-room window. Shepát warmed himself in the common room, with Dubovi: talking quietly, breathing steam from his tea, and listening. He dreamed as well, but kept that to himself. It was easy with Dubovi. It had been since those scant months ago, when each of them was a stranger to the other. When it had been a shock to see hear Gwot words and Gwot inflections coming from so dark a guy from beyond the Eight Haigas. “Would your father hire another hand?” Dubovi asked, quietly, sipping tea. “My father?” “Yardro.” Shepát laughed. “He’s not my father. He’s no relation to me. He’s just the grumpy owner of the lodge. I drifted here, like dust, and I guess he’s too old to sweep me out of the corners. I’m a part of the lodge now. He’s too old to keep it up as he should, and so I do the heavy work, while he manages the books and spends his days grumbling in the back office; sometimes, he talks aloud to his memories.” “Could you use help?” “You’re offering?” A shrug. A sip of tea. “For a time. Until I hear what the wind has to tell me.” “Ask tomorrow,” Shepát said. “As the turtle walks.” As the turtle walks: such an easy promise to make, a blood-promise, maybe or a new moon promise, despite the waning crescent spilling nacreous light through the snow-tinged, cloud-veiled night. There were reasons for the promise, more felt than anything and maybe he’d speak the reasons. Later. As the turtle walks…but now, it was enough to lie in bed, toying with the echo of the conversation and recalling the brandy-warmth of Dubovi’s voice. As the turtle walks… He closed his eyes to the darkness and snuggled deep into the hollow warmth of down bedding. He shifted to his right side, curled like a fetus, like the seed-heart of a bean, into the promise of sleep and with his left hand he stroked the rich, Fesh cotton sheet, and something behind three months of dreaming conjured Dubovi’s presence there; his fingers spread and clenched, kneaded, kneaded, and kneaded, as if massaging warm flesh in a color darker than his own snow-cream pallor, a color like winter-dried oak leaves, clinging to a branch. He could almost hear Dubovi breathing. He could almost feel him there. Sleeping. Dreaming. Almost… …but only in his mind. * It snowed the next day, beginning in the still hours of dawn and going on, and on, growing heavier. The first flakes to fall were hard and like grains of sand for their sound as they hit the glass of east-facing windows. By mid-day, the flakes were large, fluffy, and misshapen. They carried an absence of sound with them, as if the world itself pulled silence down on itself before settling into a long, winter nap and quiet dreams of spring. “I’ll need help around here,” Shepát said to Yardro, in the kitchen, at breakfast. The air was thick with the commingled scents of tea, of coffee, and toasted breads. The old man sat, nursing a cup of dark, astringent tea; a brooding mask of introspection hardened the gnarled, wrinkled set of his features. “It’s easy going now,” Shepát continued, pouring tea for himself, “But it’ll be faster, and we can do more if there are two of us. It’ll be better for handling the snows, and in the spring, when we repaint, re-shutter, and mend the roof.” “You have someone in mind?” It was early; the snow was still as loud as blowing sand. The old man sat—and spoke—as if listening to that gentle, clicking susurration. Shepát nodded: “Dubovi,” he said. “He’s been here half as long as when I was when you took me on.” There were voices in the common room: the sound of grumbled complaints. There were three guests, not counting Dubovi, and one of them, the tinker, had planned to leave today. On account of the snow, he was stuck until the roads cleared. It might be a while, as North Lodge stood out of the way and off of any major thoroughfare. This was a bother on snow days: enough to cause Yardro to erupt with grumbles on occasion, and on occasion, threats to give up on the Lodge altogether. The old man was still. He moved a little, his head down-cast, eyes fixed on his breakfast brew, as if reading omens or inspirations in faint wafts of steam rising from it. At last, he nodded. “Two more hands,” the old man said, contemplatively, and in measured tones. “The rooms’ll need painting in spring. There’s snow today, two more hands and another back at shoveling are necessary. There’ll be bedding to mend.” His eyes traced the contours of some private thought, and he smiled as old men smile when they know someone else’s unvoiced secrets. He touched Shepát with a gaze, and— —at last— —he nodded his assent. Shepát breathed a sigh. “I had two sons, once,” Yardro said, tenderly. “But that was long ago.” He was quiet, after that, for the rest of the day. Shepát spent the day with Dubovi, shoveling snow from the paths and building mountains of it. They spoke with one another and shared lunch in silence, while snow-bound guests (all three of them) played dice games and card games in the common-room. They listened to music coaxed from groove-etched disks of resin. They listened to broadcasts from Standing River and from towns to the north. Entertainments and weather reports. They sank into brooding, winter ennui, jealous—perhaps—of Shepát and Dubovi, for their shared tasks. It wasn’t likely that they wanted to go at the snow and the shovels, but it was clear that they wanted to do something…to move around, outside and draw labor-tinged air into their lungs; they kept to themselves, like sulking children. * Night fell. The day darkened from gray to black, and in night’s darkness, the snow-cauldron clouds tore themselves into clumps and ragged, tattered clots. Moonlight broke through the clearing, but the movement of wind-steered clouds broke the light—at times—and so, the night was made of two shades of darkness. There was a winter-breeze: as soft as a whisper. It shaped snow dunes on the windowsills, and Shepát—ignoring the snow-dunes, the irregular moonlight, and the soft wind itself—found Dubovi occupied with a book in his small room. “Will you walk with me?” he asked. Dubovi nodded. He smiled. “In the snow?” Shepát nodded, smiling. “Until our toes get cold.” * “You seem sad.” There was concern in Dubovi’s voice. There was a touch of fear. Shepát shrugged. “Yardro had two sons. Once. I never knew that.” Despite the darkness, it was easy to see; there was moonlight, when the clouds allowed it, and there was inkwell shadow, when the clouds came, but it was a gentle, soft blackness, alive with the lisping whisper of soft, playful wind. It was a good wind for snow-dunes, and when the moon showed itself—as a thinner crescent than last night—Shepát could see the gentle, expansive dune-shapes. “You care for him,” Dubovi said. “I never knew my father.” “You have only one?” Shepát laughed. “Only the Fesh have so few parents, but in Gwot, we don’t have the castle-big families that they have in the Haiga Lands. I knew my second father: husband to both of my parents and with a wife of his own as well…my second mother, married into our house twice more; she’s old-fashioned, like that. I have a brother by her, and a sister by the same mother whose stomach I lived in for nine months…before she kicked me out. Both of my mothers say that I have my birth-father’s confused eyes…sometimes green, sometimes brownish gray. They say I wear the same hair as he did: near blond, in the same shade as his…but I’ve only ever seen him in heliotype portraits, hanging on our quiet-room walls. It frightens me. He had a hardness in his gaze, maybe because his eyes didn’t know what color to be. It made him look mean.” He thought for a moment, and then: “I like your eyes. They are not like mine, they know what color they are, and they are happy with that. I wish my eyes were not like my fathers, I wish they knew how to be green or brown or gray and not the confusion that stares back at me from a mirror whenever the light is different. I don’t want them to harden my face when I grow older and still don’t know what color my eyes are.” Silence again: it was the peaceful non-sound of Dubovi listening to what he’d just heard, and after a while, Dubovi spoke. “It is similar in Libér; in my town. My family is normal…four parents in a household full of aunts and grandmothers, clucking like hens in gossip and fathers and co-fathers, grandfathers and co-grandfathers making their endless jokes about big Haiga’ii families—all of those parents and children! They have eight cities, all named Haiga-Something-or-Other. They’ll build more…a ninth city, a tenth, when another wedding takes place, because they’ll need to put that family somewhere. And, Shepát, I like your eyes. They are the color of bearded-man’s moss, growing from the trees in the swamps we call, Ish.” Shepát smiled. “Then maybe I should live in Ish, so that my face will not harden.” “There is no snow in Ish.” “I don’t mind.” “There is mud in Ish, and large reptiles with dangerous temperaments. Unkind reptiles: quarrelsome people.” “I’d like to see them, one day.” “I’ll take you to see them…as the turtle walks.” “And your family?” “Them, too…maybe. I don’t need that particular family anymore; I need something else, and so I’m not so interested in going on the backward path.” There was silence for a while, and for reasons only he knew, Dubovi sat down and crossed his legs, lotus-fashion. The snow was soft: like down blanketing gravel. It whispered its chill through the thickness of Shepát’s winter pants. There was silence for a little while more. “You’ll get tired of shoveling every winter,” he said, glancing sidelong at the shadow that Dubovi had become in the darkness. “When the snows are heaviest, we’ll have to shovel the roof as well. This can be treacherous, but it must be done. We’ll use anchors and ropes and cleats on our boots to keep from slipping. And in spring, the house stucco ma need to be re-patched. It’s easy work, but boring. Like painting something that isn’t art, but in summer, when the ornithologists come, they’ll ask for guides into the deep bogs, and you’ll have to learn how to read the ground. Quicksand tells you where it is, if you know how to read for it, but it writes in a sloppy manner that’s sometimes hard to see. I’ll teach you the bog’s writing…in spring, as the turtle walks.” Silence. And then: “Yardro agrees to this?” A shrug. “In his way.” “And you…?” Another shrug. A half smile, hidden in the darkness. “You’re good to work with. Easy. Good to walk with. I agreed last night, but the turtle had only just started walking and I had to let him get where he was going. I’m not old-fashioned, but I’m from Gwot and that means something to me…the customs my grandparents taught me. The old stories mean something: the ones about Mayfly and Turtle. I grew up learning them and learning from them. They’re a part of who I am, and that part of me knows how important it is to let Turtle walk when he needs to, and how to dismiss a fool with Mayfly’s short-life promises. I didn’t want to make a short-life promise to you, and so I had to let Turtle walk. He’s done walking now.” There was a pause. And then. “We’ll have to move you from your room. It’s winter, and so the need isn’t so urgent, but when it’s warmer, you’ll have to sleep in the back rooms, where I sleep, where Yardra sleeps. There are other rooms there. You’ll have your pick of them.” There was laughter from Shepát’s side. “Even yours?” “It grows disorder: especially in the corners…you can help me keep in clean.” “I will,” Dubovi said. “You’re sure?” “I’ll help you keep it clean,” Dubovi said again. “As the turtle walks.” …as the turtle walks… * The oldest and loneliest hostel, at the northern edge of Standing River, had been built on the lip of an open, nameless stretch of bog-land. It had been a farm-house—or something—in the past: a single structure, maybe a home for a husband, a wife…a young family, a small family with two sons and no co-wives or co-husbands as-yet-coaxed into the domestic arrangement. Now it was a ramble of additions and dormers painted in green stucco with black trim. No family lived there: only an old, grumbling man, prone to reading old dreams in the steam of his tea. Two younger men lived there as well: helpers…workers, but not the old man’s sons. Guests stayed, by the dozens in the summer, but only three of them now. It was night. Broken clouds drifted across the sky, veiling the moon on occasion. The clouds were thin when Shepát first settled down in his talk with Dubovi. Now, they thickened, and the night’s whispered wind grew louder, harder, more pronounced. The night, already cold, carried a sharper chill, as the night aged. Shepát was dressed for a night on the bog, a night in the snow, but the sharpened chill bled through his parka, his snow-padded trousers, and his boots. He felt the paradoxical burning chill of winter in his fingertips and the tips of his toes. He curled his toes, in his thick socks and in his boots, as if to warm them, and Dubovi—at his side—seemed to read something in Shepát’s posture. “The wind has grown.” Dubovi said. “We’ve been sitting for a while. Let’s go inside.” Shepát nodded in quiet agreement. “My fingers are cold. My toes too.” “We’ll go inside,” Dubovi said, softly. “I’ll warm them for you.” THE END * Though thematically-unrelated, this tale takes place just north of the story detailed in "Ianna and Mehnet" and the "universe" introduced in "Runners" and explored, further in, "Not Exactly Vultures, are They?" and "The Phoenix in the Tree." It is also a response to the Writer's Gallery challenge for December. The month's topic is "Snow" and this is my answer to that particular call. Hopefully, you've enjoyed it, and as always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting.