The Voice of the Square

We crossed the Square together, and for the first third of it nothing happened.

I did not understand how heavy the place was until I walked through it beside the thing it was looking at. Nobody looked at me. I was a silhouette among silhouettes, a smudge, a footnote to the green-and-white thing at my side. But the crowd's attention lay on her like weather. I felt it in how she walked: shoulders a little forward, head carried half an inch lower than it wanted to be, the pace of someone crossing a frozen lake who has decided not to listen to the ice.

"They'll stop," I said, "once you've gone."

"They start again when I come back."

"Why do you come back?"

"Because the north road begins on the other side of this square," she said, "and because I will not take the long way round for a crowd of people who have never done anything to me except want what I have." The brittleness stiffened. "I did that for a very long time, you know. I took the long way. I made myself small. I learned to walk with my hood up and my hair down over my face, and it did nothing, because the hair is the part of me I can't make go away, and you can't hide a flag by folding the pole."

"Why can't you hide it?"

"It's the last thing to go and the first to come back. Everyone who has had a body knows that. You'd know it, if..."

She stopped.

"If I'd had one," I said.

"If you'd wanted one." She said it carefully, like a woman stepping over a crack. "Never mind."

We were perhaps two thirds of the way across when the voice began.

I did not see where it started. Voices in a crowd rarely have origins; they have thresholds, like water, and one moment there is only the murmur and the next there is a sound that has crossed the line into speech. It came from our left, from somewhere among the arcades, a thin high voice straining at the upper edge of control, and it said:

"Look at it."

She stopped walking.

"Look at it," said the voice again, louder. "Look at that hair. Just look at it. She walks across here like she owns the place. Like it's nothing. Like it's a joke."

"Don't," said the woman beside me, very softly. It was not to me.

"What did she do?" The voice cracked on the question. "What did she ever do that I didn't? I've been here since before the lamps were lit. I did what they told me. I waited. I never asked for — I never — and she just..." Something shook in it, and I understood, with a small cold drop in my chest, that it was not rage. It was disappointment. It was the sound of someone who had been promised something by a world that had no right to promise it, and had believed, and was now standing at the end of the believing with nothing in her hands.

"It isn't fair," said another voice, farther off.

"It isn't fair."

"Cursed thing."

"Take it off her."

"Why her?"

It spread the way fire spreads in dry grass: not in a line but in patches, one after another, each flaring from the last. A hundred voices, a thousand, none with a face, none with a name. The voice of the masses. I have heard it called that in the markets, as though it were a single instrument. It is not. It is only a great many small sorrows that have found a common vowel.

I looked at her.

She had gone entirely still. Not the stillness of a plant, which is alive, but the stillness of a plant in the first hour of a hard frost, when the cold has come in and everything is holding its breath to see how far it will go. The green hair hung straight. The haze about her shoulders had thickened until I could see it plainly, a pale vapor curling off her in slow ribbons.

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"We can go," I said. "Please. We can go."

"I know," she said.

She did not move.

"I know we can go. I've gone every other time."

And then the rings came.

I need to tell you about the rings, and I need to do it properly, because it is one of the things most often misreported about the Between. There is a rule, one of the oldest, that any soul who carries a curse carries it in a certain way. It shows. You cannot hide it, though you may spare it; it rises out of the body like heat off summer stone, and it takes the form of rings. They are thin and pale, and they spread outward from the soul in widening circles across the ground, and the number of them, and the speed at which they go, is a measure of what the soul is. A little power gives a ring or two. A great deal gives you more than you can count.

They are not a weapon. They are a statement. They say how large a thing you are, in the plain unargumentative language of arithmetic. You cannot raise them or lower them by wanting. They are what you are.

Hers came out of her like ripples out of a dropped stone.

They were the color of frost on a window, a blue-white so pale it hurt to look at, and they lay on the cobbles and spread, one after another after another, thin as wire, each wider than the last. I began to count. I stopped at fourteen. I had a feeling that the count was the point, and that the Square had already finished it; and I understood, from the way the whole crowd drew in its breath, that every soul within sight had just learned precisely how small it was.

The first voice stopped in the middle of a word.

I think it was unfair. I think it was un —

I have never forgotten what I saw next, because it is one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed, and I have never been able to laugh at it without feeling ashamed. The silhouette from whose throat the voice had come went white. From the feet up, like milk filling a glass. It stood there with its absence of mouth open on the unfinished syllable, and its outline blanched until it was the color of an unwashed sheet. And all around it, in waves, as the pale circles passed beneath them, others went too: the ones who had taken up the cry, the ones who had said take it off her, the ones who had said why her. A hundred silhouettes, a hundred and fifty, bleached from the ground up, each one frozen in the posture of its last complaint.

A silhouette is already, by definition, the color of having nothing to say. I would not have thought it could be made paler. But I watched it happen, and the proof was all around me: a square full of linen on a line, hanging in the windless air, not one piece of it moving.

They were not hurt. I want that understood. They were not struck, or frozen in any physical sense. They were only afraid. It was the fear of a slave standing before an owner who has never once raised a hand, and who need never do so, because the owner is simply there, in the full measure of what she is, and the slave has seen it and cannot unsee it. Their fear had no weapon in it. It was only a knowing, and the knowing had taken their legs.

I felt nothing. That is what I remember: how little. The rings passed under my feet, one after another, and I stood in the middle of them as in the shallows of a pale river, and nothing happened to me. I am almost sure they dimmed as they went by. I would swear that each ring, as it reached me, went a little softer, and passed with care, the way a person lowers his voice when he walks past a sleeping child.

I did not fear her. I had not raised my voice. And whatever it is the rings read in a person, it did not read in me what it read in them.

She stood at the center of a hundred blanched and silent souls, with the green hair lifting around her head in a wind that did not exist, and she was shaking.

She did not look triumphant. I had not expected it, but it undid me all the same. She looked like a person who has been forced, once again, to do the thing she hates most, and who has learned, after many repetitions, how to do it without looking at what it costs. I could see her shoulders. They were the shoulders of someone who has done this so many times that the shame has become a habit, like a limp.

"Enough," she said.

She did not say it to me.

"I said enough."

The rings stopped. They did not fade; they were called back, drawn in toward her across the cobbles with a slow, reluctant effort, like a woman reeling in a long cold rope. As they passed over each blanched silhouette, the color returned: a faint grey at first, then a darker one, until the crowd stood once more in its ordinary shade, and one by one the knees remembered themselves.

Nobody spoke.

There was no more voice. There was no more why her. There was only the sound of a great many people not looking at a woman, with enormous concentration, and shuffling away in a loose and humiliated tide toward the arcades and the four roads, and leaving a wide, wide circle of empty cobbles in the middle of the Square.

In some places they would call that a victory.

"Come on," she said, in a voice so flat that it did not sound like hers. "North road. It isn't far."

She walked. I followed. Behind us, in the emptied Square, one silhouette was still standing exactly where it had been, mouth open on a word it had not been able to finish; and I think, to this day, that it is finishing it.