When I came within sound of the stream, people were awake and dressing; I passed a room where six sat smoking, laughing and talking. Little Belaire was waking up. On ladders men opened skylights and smelled the sharp morning air, climbed down again. I was walking against many who were going to the outside. It was warmer than it had been the day Seven Hands and I went to see Road, and people would stay in the sunny outer rooms today, and at evening bring back with them something they would need for the winter, like a set of Rings or tools or a big pipe that had been hung up in the outer rooms for summer. Some would make expeditions to gather the last of the year's nuts in the woods; or they would meet each other in the outside rooms to weave and talk, if they were Leaf cord. Or climb to the top of Belaire and do sealing-work for the winter, if they were Buckle cord. Or discuss the affairs of their cord, if they were Whisper, or the affairs of others' cords, if they were Water, or the affairs of the world if they were Palm; and gossip about all the things they remembered and knew about and had heard of from the saints back when we wandered and before that back to Big Belaire and before to ancient times, so none of it would be forgotten.

There are always a thousand things to see and stop for along Path, snake's-hands to explore and people to listen to. In a snake's-hand near Painted Red's room I found some friends playing whose-knee, and I waited for a turn to play…

Stop a moment. When you said it before, a snake's-hand was something in talk. Now it's a place. And tell me about whose-knee, too, since you're stopped.

All right. I told you about Path: Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord's door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path - that's a snake's-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It's also called a snake's-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake's-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake's-hands. Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

Whose-knee. I've never been that good at whose-knee, but like every kid in Belaire I carried my ball and tweezers everywhere; it's part of every kid's equipment. My ball was a cherry stone tightly wrapped in some string; the tweezers are a rush almost as long as your forearm that's split almost all the way down and pegged just right so you can pick up a ball. You can play it a lot of different ways, with one ball or several, with two people or with as many sitting in a circle as you can reach with your tweezers. Whatever way you play, the ball is balanced on your knee - you draw up your knees like this - and another person picks the ball off your knee with his tweezers and places it on someone else's knee. The different ways to play are different ways of calling whose knee will be played, and who will move.

It has to be played very fast - that's the fun of it - and if you drop a ball or move out of turn three times, you have to ask to stay in, and the others can say Yes or No..

How do you win?

Win?

How do you beat the others?

Beat them? You're not fighting, you're playing a game. You just try to keep the ball in motion and stay out of the way of other people; and keep your ball on your knee, too. It takes a lot of concentration, and you can't laugh too much, though it can get very funny. Buckle cord plays it very well; they all wear very intent, serious faces and the tweezers fly around, snicksnicksnick. Also Buckle cord people all seem to have flat, broad knees.

Anyway, a place in this circle became empty, and I sat down. The girl opposite me, whose knee I would play, looked up at me once with eyes startlingly blue; startling because her hair was deeply black and thick, and her eyebrows too; they curved down and almost met above her nose. She only glanced at me, to make certain it was I whose knee she was playing, and set her ball.

"Whose knee?" they said, and we began. Little yelps of anxiety or triumph: "Miss! He has two." The girl opposite me played with a kind of abstracted intentness, as though utterly aware of a game, but a game she was playing in a dream. Her down-turned full mouth was partly open; her tiny teeth were white.

"Whose knee?" we said. "Big Bee moves Whisper cord," the leader said, and a lanky, laughing Leaf cord boy, after only the quickest glance around the circle, moved the ball of the girl opposite me. Whisper cord: yes, I would have chosen her too. Not only for her abstraction, her appearance of not being wholly present; not only that she seemed - to me, anyway - the center of this circle without having to claim that. Something else: some whisper. When it came my turn to move her, she suddenly raised her impossible blue eyes to me. The ball dropped.

"Miss!"

She retrieved the ball, not looking again at me. I tried to play well, now, but I stumbled over myself, missed my cord when it was called. I was soon out.

And all that, about the game, was a snake's-hand in my story; but just as there are snake's-hands that look like parts of Path, so there are parts of Path that look like snake's-hands. When I stood up, so did she; behind us others were calling out the words that meant they had claim on our places. When I came onto Path, she was ahead of me, going toward Painted Red's room; I followed at a distance. At a turning, she stopped and waited for me.

"Why are you following me?" she said. Her down-turned eyebrows gave her a permanent angry sulk that was only occasionally the way she felt, but I knew nothing of that then.

"I wasn't. I was going to a gossip named Painted Red…"

"So am I." She gazed at me without much curiosity. "Aren't you a little young?"

That was annoying. She was no older than I. "Painted Red doesn't think so."

She crossed her pale arms, thin and downed with dark hair. "Come on, then," she said, as though I needed her protection, and she reluctantly had to give it. Her name, she said when I asked it, was Once a Day; she didn't bother to ask mine.

Painted Red was still asleep when we came into the larger of her two rooms; we sat down amid the others gathered there, who looked at me and asked my name. We waited, trying to be quiet, but that was hard, and soon we heard her moving around in her other room. She looked out sleepily, blinking without her spectacles, and disappeared again. When she finally came out we had stopped trying to be quiet, and she sat down in the middle of the hubbub and calmly rolled herself a blue cigar. Someone lit it for her, and she inhaled deeply, looking around and feeling better. She smiled at us, and patted the cheek of the girl who lit her smoke. And my first morning with Painted Red began.

"When we wandered," she said, and began the story about St. Gary and the fly that I had heard Mbaba tell. She brought us a basket of apples, and as we ate them she told the story in her Water way, full of false beginnings and little ironies which if you stopped to think about you lost the thread; and the story was not quite the story I knew. When, at the end of the story, St. Gary let the fly go, nobody laughed. It seemed to have become, in Painted Red's telling, a riddle or something meant to be solved; and yet at the same time you felt that the answer lay within the story - that it wasn't a riddle but an answer, an answer to a question you didn't know you'd asked.