by Betsy James
His face did not change.
“They’re asking where you are.”
Silence.
“Nall.”
He said, “I won’t go with them.”
My arms let go of him. “Won’t go?”
“No.”
“But Ab Harlan will—he’ll—”
“Yes. I saw what the lads did to the man with the cuff links.”
I stared at him. He stared back. His tears had stopped; his eyes were all pupil.
“You—Is it because of your foot? You can’t fight?”
“I was trained to fight. A lame foot is nothing.”
“Then what—”
“I’m leaving.”
The waves stopped breaking. The night wind stopped. But it was my breath that stopped, until with a gasp I caught it. “Leaving?”
“I’m going back to the Rigi’s land.”
My mouth said No, with no sound.
“Kat,” he said. “Kat. I swam and listened. Murmurs; words that are not words; the voice of water. I said, Tell me what I am to do! Then I knew in my heart. I must go back to the Rigi’s land, and listen at the Gate.”
“The Gate—”
“At the world’s mouth, where it speaks clearest. I’ll listen to the world being born, singing itself, and I will sing that. Whatever it is.”
I said, “A song to sing when Dai is dead?”
“I won’t know what song until I hear it.”
“A song. But you—but we—we have to get Dai.”
“I have to listen.”
“Nall, I saved your life!”
He did not say, And you said I owed you nothing. He said, “So I must use it.”
“And not lose it? Oh, and I kissed you!” I shoved him away, scrabbled to my feet.
He caught my wrist. “Do you think this time is just about you and me? Something is moving. Something is changing. Do you think we are only for ourselves, not waves in the great sea?”
Or threads in the great loom; but I had forgotten that. I had no home but Dai and no room in me for anything but Dai withering in the smoke of Ab Harlan’s hate, the safe world withering.
“The world is breathing through the Gate,” said Nall. “It wants to be born, it wants listeners. Was it only for ourselves that we sang the Rigi’s song?”
I jerked my arm out of his fist. “Yes! And what good was it? You come. You go. Dai called you brother! What do you care for him—or for me?”
“Come with me,” he said.
I stood with my mouth open.
Behind him the foam of the wave tops was blue in the last light. He held out his hand, his face in shadow. “Come with me to the Rigi’s land.”
I said, “I will die first.”
He let his hand drop.
“I’ll go with the men and fight,” I said. “I’ll get my brother back. You—you think you can swim back to your people? Who’ll save you there, some pretty Rig girl? You’re not a seal, not a man. You’re cold, a fish. Swim, fish!”
I turned to run.
He said, “I won’t swim. I’ll take the manat.”
I ran out of the cowshed, up the steps. The veranda was jammed with angry people who paid no attention to me. Men with grins like dogs moved or stood in the dying light, jangling with hatchets and gaffs. They were dressed in festival clothes, they smelled of iron and sweat, they wolfed bread and withered apples and threw the cores over the veranda rail.
Standing with Pao was a fisherman, fair and young, who held in one hand a big knife of the kind used for gutting salmon, in the other an apple that he ate as he spoke, steadily and fast. “We’ll be at the guardhouse within the hour. We’re a hundred and twenty men!”
Pao’s voice was full of pain. “Rosh, you’re sure he’s in the guardhouse? I thought—”
I heard my own voice say, “He’s not in the guardhouse.”
Rosh the fisherman heard me. A portent is of no use once the storm has struck; he gave me the sparest nod between bites. “Yes, he is. That’s where they dump us when we won’t pay the tariff.”
“You saw him there?”
“Ha! We were too busy with Mister Prettycuffs, who’s taxing the worms now.”
“But you didn’t see him.”
“Didn’t need to. Wasn’t him on the gibbet.”
“So you thought he was alive. And you told Robin that.” The pins that held the world together were falling away, the shoulder that had kept the demons at bay dissolving like smoke. “They wouldn’t put him in the guardhouse because you got me out of it. Has nobody thought of that? He’ll be in Detention, at Ab Harlan’s place.”
Rosh’s face said he had never heard of Detention. But he was already fighting a war and said readily, “Then we’ll grab him out of there! We’re a hundred and twenty men.”
“Ab Seroy is dead!” I shouted. “Do you think Ab Harlan’s pokers aren’t already in the fire?”
Around us the crowd had grown silent. I put my hand over my mouth. Mailin looked old and sick. Robin’s face was painted white.
Rosh flushed. His hand tightened on the knife. I had made him a fool; his revenge, till now focused on Ab Harlan, shifted a little to me. “You’d know how Leaguemen think, wouldn’t you? And where’s your pretty laddie? Our Rig, our magic man; no sign of him since the Axe nicked his face.”
I said nothing.
“Gone scarce, eh? Rigs are scarce, this one’s scarcer.” He glared about. “Has the Rig saved us? Been here a year and more, and what’s changed? Tell me! We’ll save ourselves. It’s not magic we need, it’s blood!”
Voices tried to hush him. Eyes turned from me to him, then back to me; more and more eyes. The men who had seen me only on the dark beach last night now let their eyes travel downward from my neck, began to back away. Even Rosh looked again, fell silent, edged.
I gathered the torn collar of my shift in my fist. Faltering, I said, “I’ll come with you and fight.”
Mailin made a little sound.
“No,” said Rosh, staring.
“Let me come! I can use a knife—”
“No.” He turned to the others. “Let’s go. Right now. We’ll get Dai! Listen. It’s not just for him. If Dai’s a martyr, it’s for us—sucked and bled and spat on, ground in the dirt. We’ll kill them.” He bared his teeth. “We’ll have a little talk with Harlan. Convince him of a couple of things. Those two we took today, they’re convinced by now.”
Hard, relieved laughter rose from the crowd. Knives chimed, and bodies began to move away from me, down the veranda steps. A voice in my head kept stuttering, Please let—Please let—
As if I yanked open a stuck door, I made myself think the thought whole: Please let Dai be dead. Let Ab Harlan have hanged him, because hanging is quick.
There was a girl I knew in Creek, younger than I, who had such skill at pottery that they said she would be Clay Keep before she was twenty. One winter morning she had a fever, and the next she was dead.
I thought of her, begun and stopped. I thought of Dai’s cow, Moss, cropping grass—the life of this blade, that blade surely stopped. But that was for a reason: to feed a cow to make milk. But for Dai’s life and mine, stopped, I could see no reason at all.
I might have run to Mailin, but she was part of what had stopped. As the crowd streamed yelling down the steps, I went the other way, into the dark room where Rosie lay. Though it was summer, I was cold. I sat on the edge of the bed feeling nothing, smelling the sweet, fusty odor of day’s-end child.
Something moved in a corner. My body jumped. And this was the strange thing: it jumped to protect Rosie, as if she were my child.
The thing in the corner was Nondany, sitting in a chair. I had forgotten him. “Half-and-Half.”
I leaned away, silent.
“So it is,” he said.
I think that was the quietest house I was ever in, after those men had gone. Quiet as a grave, as a winter night when frost snaps in the cistern. I heard the house’s pilings groan, and the hiss of
the sea.
“That Rig,” I said. I did not want his name in my mouth. “He didn’t go with the men. He’s running away, back to the Rigi’s land.”
Nondany sat back in his chair. His foot tapped. “Did he say why?”
“He wants to listen at that Gate.”
The tapping stopped. Began again. “By life! And what will you do now?”
“He wants me to run away with him. I will not.”
Nondany rose, he came over and sat on the bed. Next to my coldness he was hot as a stove. I got up and went to the window. The sea growled; I started back, hugging my elbows.
Nondany smoothed Rosie’s blouse, her hair; he picked up her two fat hands. She slept as though dead.
I said, “Detention is in Ab Harlan’s compound. Somewhere in there. You go in the main gate—” There was an army camped around that gate. “No. But there are other ways in. There must be. I could find one. A man couldn’t get in, but somebody small, like me—” No one could get in there. I said, “I won’t hide, then. I’ll go straight to Ab Harlan.” At this thought my knees turned to water, I had to put my hands on the sill.
Nondany said nothing.
I said in a whisper, “That would be fair.”
“Bravely spoken. And Ab Harlan would enjoy it very much.”
I held on to the sill as the world jerked and clattered in disorder so evil, I could not breathe in it.
“Half-and-Half. May I ask you two questions?”
I nodded.
“Thank you.” Nondany’s voice was light, pedantic, a little cold. “One: What were you born for? And two: What will you do about Nall?”
I could not see his face in the dimness. To both questions I answered, “Nothing.”
“Interesting stuff, nothing. There’s a song about it.”
Nee, nah, nothing!
Nee, nah, nothing!
A wise man ate a seed,
And it grew into a weed
In his middle, till its roots
Had filled up his boots
And split apart his brain,
So he stood there in the rain,
As happy as a duck in a sweet spring downpour,
singing,
Nee, nah, nothing!
While he sang, he patted Rosie’s hands together softly, as if for one of his games. I said suddenly, “Do you have children?”
“One, long ago. Dead with his mother. We all do die.” He patted Rosie’s hands. “But don’t divert me. Another way to ask those questions is to say, It seems Nall knows his calling; what is yours?”
“My calling was that I called him. He came. Now he’s leaving.”
“So it’s meaningless?”
I did not answer.
“How incomprehensible is the world to one with a wasps’ nest for a brain!” said Nondany. “You think I’m joking. Yet the world is so vast and I know so little of it, I can hardly judge whether an event makes sense or not.” He looked out the window. “I have never been to the Rigi’s land.”
I looked too, over the soft, repeating waves to the western horizon. The sky there was a little lighter than the sea.
“Half-and-Half, what do you know about Nall and why he came? Other than that you called him?”
I thought, I know he had a great-grandmother. I did not say this.
Nondany said, “Have you asked him?”
“He’s a seal. Seals don’t talk to people.”
“Perhaps he was a seal once. At present he seems remarkably like a man. You are not curious about what a seal man might say?”
I stood stonily silent.
“One wonders whether he is curious about a woman who was eaten by a bear—Don’t jump, my dear. You think I’m not familiar with the customs of Creek?”
“It wasn’t a bear!”
“I thought not. You were blessed. Be grateful.”
I stared at that homely little man. He stared right back and said, “Have you told Nall what it was like to be eaten?”
“No. He’s a coward.”
“Is he.”
“You know nothing!”
“Next to nothing,” said Nondany. “Though I have a bit of experience with courage, and with being eaten by things that are not bears. Half-and-Half, you will find it a challenge, this talking about things that have no names. Yet it’s essential. As is doing what you must, even when you don’t know what that is.”
I turned to face him and his riddles, letting the casement hold me up. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “What should I do?”
“I have no idea.” He patted Rosie’s hands together. “But you might begin by appreciating your state. There’s a story they tell in Wicker Breaks—you know that Hill town? About a girl who was eaten by her bear, but she didn’t become a woman right away. First she had to pass some time as what emerged from the far end of the bear.”
“What kind of story is that!”
“What kind of story is this?” He dropped Rosie’s hands and stretched out his own to indicate this world as it is, this life, all of us.
I pressed my palms to my forehead. “What happened to the girl in the story?”
“I never found out. The tale was fragmentary.”
“You’re crazy!”
“My dear, if I were sane, I couldn’t bear to live.”
“Then die. Like my brother.”
“I shall. That’s a promise. But at this moment I’m alive, and I know my calling. Therefore, I shall ask you to sing that very silly song you were singing to Rosie on the veranda. About the piggie.”
“So you can write it down!”
“Eventually.” Bowing his head, he kissed Rosie’s hands, left and right, moon and sun, Rig and Leagueman. He patted them together. “At present I am occupied.”
I turned my back on him. Over the sea the stars were showing, one by one. I sang the song for him, very low. By the second time through he could sing it with me.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“So does it matter where you do it?”
“No.”
“Then you can do it just as well at the wrong end of the bear.”
“I said I don’t know what to do!”
“Who does?” said Nondany.
12
Find a stone that fits your hand.
Carry it for a long time.
Die.
Let the stone roll back into the sea.
How to Hold Beach Stones. The Rigi.
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. I stood at the bottom of the steps in the dark. A tiny clatter in the lean-to was Nall, working. I listened to those light sounds for a long time.
A noiseless shape slipped down the steps: the cat, leaving her kittens to go hunting. As if her motion moved me, I stepped across the trampled sand to the front of the lean-to.
In the slatted starlight he bent over the slim hull of the manat. Gleam of his haunch, blink of a knife blade. I wondered if he could see in the dark.
“Nal.”
He jumped. He must have been very intent. He cut a last cord and came crouching along the hull holding his short, curved knife, stroking his thumb along the blade.
“When will you go?”
“Before morning.”
“Why did you come?”
Silence. He said, “For what is happening.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mailin said you came because I called you with the Rigi’s song. She said you called me.”
“I must have. I thought I had.” He moved a little, like a man in pain. “I listen, then I sing, and live what I sing. All this”—he stretched out his hands like Nondany, toward the world—“it’s here, it came through the Gate. I’m part of it, so it must have been in my listening. Like a call.”
“I don’t want misty Rig talk!” But I heard Nondany’s dry voice ask, You are not curious about what a seal man might say?
“What does it sound like?” I said. “In the sea, when
you listen.”
“There’s a voice,” he said.
“Of what.”
“The Gate. Not words. But words cling to it.”
He spoke slowly, trying words, dropping them, the way I spoke when I tried to talk about the Bear. I said, “When the world first comes through the Gate, is it good? And if it is, why is it like this when it gets here?”
“I don’t know. If I listened, maybe I would understand.”
“Would understanding change anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what good is it?”
“I don’t know.”
I ground my teeth. I walked away from him, down to the water where waves were coming and coming from somewhere out in the dark. Walked back to him. “Tell me about the Gate.”
“I have.”
“Only a little.”
“It would be a story.”
I thought of Jekka brushing my hair. “Tell it.”
I would not sit. Neither would he. He set his shoulder on the pole of the lean-to. A little light fell on his face, from the high house where people raged and wept, but his body was dark.
“The Gate stands at the mouth of a bay,” he said, “on the west coast of the westernmost land there is: the Home Stone, the island where I was born. The Rigi keep the Gate. They have always kept the Gate.”
In his voice I heard another voice, surely his ama’s. I wondered what she was like, besides being smaller than me.
“In the beginning,” said Nall, “the Rigi, men and women, could put on their sealskins and, as seals, could swim in the water before the Gate, listening to the world being born. Then they took off their skins and were human, and they sang what they had heard. But in time—”
“—they forgot how to put on their skins,” I said.
He blinked. Nodded.
“I know that story. Creek calls it ‘How Ouma the Bear Mother Made the World.’ It starts out, ‘In the beginning …’ Then the beginning ends. We ruin it, we get lost and can’t go back. But go on,” I said.
After a moment he went on.
“In time the Rigi forgot how to put on their skins. But there were a few who still knew how, and how to listen; these became the seal priests. That was not so long ago, Kat. When the Rigi still came to Downshore to dance and trade, there were seal priests. They listened at the Gate for the songs of the making world, and at Least and Long Nights they sang them. Those songs were not for the Rigi only, but for the whole world. Even the Leaguemen.”
