by Betsy James
“And the Leaguemen ran the Rigi off.”
“Do you think the Rigi themselves had no hand in it? I told you they have their own Ab Harlan: He is called the Reirig, the One True Seal Priest. In the times Mailin spoke of, when Downshore began to kill so many seals, the Rigi screamed for a strong leader—aye, and got what they screamed for! A warrior. He killed the last priests, he named his cohorts ‘elders,’ and made himself the One. When those League lads killed and robbed the Rig, the Reirig seized the chance to rule a world with only himself as king. He led the Rigi into exile.
”The Reirig has no name, only ‘the Reirig.’ He is strong; when he begins to weaken, sooner or later some stronger man fights him hand to hand, kills him, and becomes in turn the One.
“Thus the Reirig’s face changes, but the Reirig does not change. He is always the One True Seal Priest. The only man—he says!—who can put on his skin and be a seal; who can swim, listening, in the sea before the Gate, return to shore, and sing the truths of the world. Shall I tell you what he sings?”
I nodded.
With the point of his knife Nall counted on his open hand.
“One: The old songs are sacred, never change them. Two: The Reirig is without fault. Three: The Reirig must have this woman for his next wife, and that naysayer must be killed. Four: The Rigi are never to make peace with the seal-killers or the Black Boots or any other beings on this shore.”
He folded his hand into a fist and set it on his hip. “Strange, how the voice of the Gate seems always to choose what suits the Reirig.”
“The League says that they are the chosen, that Light bleeds gold only for them, that they deserve the best goods.”
“It’s the same lust. The Reirig and his elders take the best of everything—food and shelter and women. Little is left for the people. The Rigi are like water trapped in a tide pool, with no tide returning.
“Kat, they are dying. It’s a sickness; they call it hsuu heo—‘too much sea.’ The fields are spent, the gardens scant, the wild herbs gone. Even the fish have fled. Whole families starve, or die of fevers that fill the lungs with water. Too much sea! Children as thin as grass die in their sleep; babies are born wrong. Girls are barren, their babies never born.” Nall turned his face away. “But the Reirig has many wives, many children, all rosy and fat. So do those elders whom he favors, for he feeds them.”
“Those he favors, he feeds—but if he feeds them, they’ll grow strong and kill him.”
“Yes. It sets man against man, all spying and guessing and killing in secret, each soul bound so tight, between need and fear, that it can scarcely breathe. So the sickness grows.” Nall turned. “Kat, why would I not come away out of too much sea? Stripped and killed and cast away, would I not swim if I could—east, to a woman all earth, with hair like the sun, who called to me from the shore?”
I could not even weep. I had no brother and no home on earth; I could not remember how it had felt to walk upon the mountain. “I was a little stupid child,” I said.
He looked at me. His chin stuck out.
I dropped my eyes. “Why don’t the Rigi just come back here? They have manats.”
“Manats—but sealskins, too. A Rig bound at birth to a sealskin does not leave the Rigi. With the blade of his lance the first Reirig scribed a line across the sea: the Ni’Na’—the Changes. No Rig can cross it. I crossed because they unmade me, they burned my skin. I am no longer a Rig.”
“What are you?”
“A listener.”
Again.
“Kat. Since the Rigi left these shores, no one but the Reirig has listened at the Gate. Except me.”
I looked at him then, all right. “You listened at the Gate?”
“Not in the old, true way. I am no priest. I could not become my seal and swim in the sea before the Gate. If I could do that! But there is a rock just landward of it, called Stillness, where the Reirig goes to put on his sealskin. I listened from Stillness.”
“And he caught you?”
“No. No one knew I went there.” He hesitated. “Almost no one. I had a—I had a clan.”
“Your ama.”
“And … cousins. All of us born to one arem, one warrenhouse: the arem of Selí. Three of us were boys, Tadde and Liu and myself. Liu was like Dai to me. A brother in my heart.”
I said nothing.
“All of us were trouble. Tadde was eldest. The Rigi are all factions and quarrel, but Tadde began to pull them together, speaking in secret of return to the mainland. Perhaps we could kill the Reirig—though Tadde was not a killing man—or steal his lance and open a way through the Ni’Na’. Rumors reached the Reirig, and he closed his fist still tighter.
“On feast days Liu and I sang together in the arems. Liu had a wicked tongue—he could make you laugh at your own death! He made a song against the Reirig.”
I thought of Nondany. “Sing it.”
“It has no lilt in Plain,” he said, but he sang.
Raven comes to Seal, he says,
“How does one listen at the Gate?”
“With that,” says Seal,
pointing to Raven’s anus.
Raven backs up to two stones,
he hears his own dung falling
and cries, “I know the secrets of the world!”
“Good song, eh?” Nall laughed, not merrily. “That song fled through the clans like wind—but the wind blows everywhere. One night, when Liu and I ran home along the strand, the Reirig’s men waited.” Nall touched his broken tooth. “It was my—it was Liu’s sister who found us. They had clubbed us both, and Liu was dead. They had cut out his tongue.”
I went hot and cold at once, as though I stood in snow and looked into a furnace.
“No word was spoken,” said Nall. “Liu’s death was the word. By it the Reirig told us, ‘Speak, and I shall speak death.’ So I knew I would speak. Songs are my speech.
“At the dark of the moon the time came for the One to listen at the Gate. When the sun had set, he left the elders making sacrifice on the shore and paddled to the rock Stillness. It was the intertide, when the currents are slack; I swam after him and crept up among the spires of rock.
“He had pulled up his manat and taken out a little picnic. This he ate, belching and tossing the bones into the sea. He watched the waves awhile, and picked his nose. Then he pissed in the sea, took off his sealskin—it was heavy with jet, surely uncomfortable—took a robe of otter skins from the manat, rolled up in it, and slept. He snores; but I knew that. Any night outside his arem you can hear him snore.
“I clung among the spires of rock. Still he slept. I crept out and looked for his lance, to steal it; it was not there, only his knife. I thought, ‘I’ll kill him as he sleeps.’
“But there before me was the Gate—the Gate! That petty king blubbering his lips was less to me than bird slime. Should I make myself a murderer for a turd?
“I hid among the rocks and listened. Tide and world rushed in and out of the Gate.
“Near dawn the Reirig woke. He scratched, farted, and splashed himself with water from a little pool on the stone; he never so much as dipped himself in the sea.
“In the intertide he paddled back to shore. I followed, swimming, and by the time I got back to the beach, he was singing the songs he had heard, his head rolling in holy madness. I have told you what he heard.”
“What did you hear?” But I knew.
“The song they killed me for. The Rigi’s song, made new. The Reirig said I profaned it and must be killed; but he killed me because I sang the truth instead of his lies.”
“When you first told me about it”—nearly two years ago, or two lifetimes—“you said you sang for a woman giving birth.”
“Liu’s wife.”
“She had twin girls, you said, and their arms were like a seal’s flippers.”
“Too much sea,” said Nall.
“Then your father helped the Reirig kill you.”
An uncertainty crept into his voice
. “The Reirig would have killed me in the birthing room, as I stood singing that new song. He would have slit my throat. But my father said, ‘Is my son’s sin so slight? If you kill him that way, he will still be a Rig and swim among the ancestors. Strip him of his seal: Burn his sealskin and his name, and lay him living among the dead. Then there will be nothing left but bones in the surf, for eternity.”
I knew I had a rotten father, but this was worse. “Does he hate you so much?”
“I—I did not think so. Until then. My father is—No one knows how he is.” Nall looked out at the moving water. “His name is Hsuu, ‘Old Sea.’ He is like the sea, which neither hates nor loves, but moves for its own reasons. Maybe he wanted to hurt my ama.”
“You said your mother didn’t cry.”
His face went wistful. “Perhaps she was being a seagull at that moment. Or a sand rat, or a shadow. It isn’t her fault. She becomes what she dreams; no one can hold her. But she’s very beautiful.” He looked at me as though to defend his parentage—a strange thing, for that shame was mine. “When I was small, she was my best playmate. She could be a frog, or a flower, or a fish swimming; but then she would forget me and swim off, or grow bored and turn into a cloud. I would be left crying on the shore. Then my ama would come looking for me, she would smack me and curse my parents, and carry me to her own place and make me drink hot soup and talk like a person.”
I did not know what to do with all this news. “Did your ama cry?”
“She shouted at the Reirig and his warriors. They knocked her down.”
He touched my cold arm. I let him. “You think I am running away from war,” he said. “Then you must think that. But the little man understands—Nondany. He knows that as it is here, so it is there. The League has no sea, and it has driven them mad; the Rigi have no earth, and it is killing them. Ab Harlan’s war and the Reirig’s are the same war, pouring through the Gate. And to the Gate I will go.
“Let the Reirig sing his lies: ‘This world is mine, and never changes.’ A world that never changes is dead. I’ll listen and sing the world changing, because it is alive.” He leaned to me. I could feel the heat of him on my coldness. “The world moves. It always has. But we are not alive with the world. Our tides are stopped, and that is our sickness: too much earth or too much sea. I’ll listen for that living change and sing it, though it cost me my life.”
“If you do that, will the world be well again?”
He looked at me as though I were crazy. “It will be the world, coming through the Gate. It has always been coming through the Gate. I only listen to it, and sing.”
“And if your listening makes no difference?”
“Then it makes no difference.”
I did not understand what he said any more than Bian had understood the Bear. I could see that whether or not Nall’s listening had made a difference, his singing had: It had gotten him killed. I hugged my hands under my arms, shivering in the summer night.
So what do you do when you can’t bear the world to be the world? When it devours brothers like a shark, twists babies, gives wealth and power to evil men? Do you go to where it is being born—if you can find that place—and see whether there, perhaps, it makes sense? Or maybe you just go searching for that place, because if you are moving, the pain is less?
I looked where Nall looked, west. Only darkness. But not empty; something waited out there.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“No.”
“But—but you asked me to!”
“Because we called each other. But you have said no. And, Kat—” His thumb still played on the knife blade; he moved his hand as though to put the knife out of my reach. “—if you go to sea in a small boat wanting to die, you do.”
I put my hands over my face, that had showed him more than I knew myself. “You said it might cost you your life.”
“It’s not for myself that I gamble with it.”
“Nall, take me.”
“No.”
Tied at my sash, the gold in its warm pouch knocked at my thigh. “I never got to make love to you,” I said. “Now I’ll never know what it’s like.”
His thumb flexed; he dropped the knife in the sand with a hiss.
“Take me with you,” I said. “I can run and hide now, and then die in bed someday, an old woman wetting herself. Or I can go with you.” I laid my hands on his chest. “I have to go with you. Father gave me money for his grandchild. Do you think I’d get a baby with anybody else?”
He groaned, he put his hand to his eyes. Then he pulled it away, staring. “I’ve cut myself,” he said. Blood from his thumb ran down his temple.
“Thumb cuts are terrible,” said my own cold voice. “They take forever to heal.”
He put his arms around me and pulled me down against the mummy skin of the manat. My knees and elbows knocked against him. “You’re bleeding on me,” I said. “You always bleed on me.”
“Kat, Kat—”
I stood up out of his embrace and said, “I’m coming with you. IT1 help you carry out the manat.”
I went to Mailin’s hearth, where the little group sat holding one another, and said, to nobody, “He’s going to the Gate. I’m going with him.”
Mailin put her hand to her heart.
They did not ask me why. Maybe, like Nall, they saw something in my face. Mailin rose and said, “I’ll put extra in his bundle.”
So she had known. In a cold fever I walked here, walked there as she cut more bread and cheese, put more dried meat and tea into the oiled bag. She moved as if she were as old as Hamarry, and when she looked at me, I looked away.
Nondany drifted at the edge of my vision, like the floating specks that move when your eye moves. The sky had gone pale and Mailin was tying up the bundle before he edged me into a corner and said, “Half-and-Half.”
I shook my head.
“No one has gone to the Rigi’s land for a hundred years,” he said. “Think of the chance.”
“For what.”
“To learn songs.”
I stared.
He peered like a mole with its squinty eyes and said, “I trust you completely. Whatever delights you will delight me. Or,” he said, cocking his head, “you could let it all be Nall’s journey. He’s strong.”
I said to the floor, “He knows what he wants.”
“You don’t?”
I said in a whisper, “I want it to be how it was before.” Mailin’s calm face, Dai’s chuckle, Nall’s seeking mouth.
Nondany was silent. When I looked up at him, his face was full of pain and tenderness. “Half-and-Half, it was just like this before. It has always been like this.”
I looked away.
“There’s a song—,” he began, then waved his hand to cancel the thought. “Never mind. I’ll give you something for your journey. A token. Not much; tokens belong in the Year Fire. I don’t want to weigh you down.” He held out his closed fist. “Here.”
I did not want anything. But it was rude not to take it. I put out my palm, and he opened his fist.
Nothing.
I thought maybe something tiny had fallen or had stuck to his palm. I looked about. His hand was empty.
He seemed as pleased as if he had given me a diamond. “Don’t lose it,” he said.
I did not answer, did not need to, because a dark hubbub had begun on the beach. I forgot my gift and gripped Nondany’s arm. We went to the kitchen, where Robin crowded against Mailin. Suni ran to the veranda rail.
It was not paidmen storming the steps, but our own men—the world was now our men, their men—without Dai. They were lying, to make their exploit bigger than its failure.
“Almost,” said Rosh, the young fisherman. Spittle clung in the corners of his mouth. “They threw us back, but we killed two South Road toadies. Larcody’s dead, but he died fighting, and his son swears he’ll fight in his stead. The Least Night crowds are arming; we’ll have more men tomorrow.” He saw me in the press and grinned. “
Lord Fat-Ass wants the witch. ‘Bring me the witch!’ he cries. He won’t get her. You’re safe with us, sweetheart.”
I thought, Am I hearing a Downshoreman? A Leagueman? A paidman? I said, “I am not your sweetheart.”
He muttered an apology of sorts. Then, to save face, he said, “Your little Rig’s on the beach with his boat. Let him come with us, if he’s a man. If he isn’t—”
“Watch your tongue,” said another. “Luck or storms.”
Rosh turned his sneer into plans, boasts, arguments. Soon the mass of them went off, leaving two men moaning on the hearth for Mailin to mend, if she could, and black gouts of blood on the kitchen floor.
I let go of Nondany. I ran away down the steps and along the beach to Nall, who had known, who had not even come up into the kitchen. He stood by the manat, the waves foaming at his feet.
I felt as I had in Creek when I ran up the mountain: that there was only one way open. Every home was closed, and every other way blocked, as if the world itself drove me.
A rustle behind me was Mailin, alone, bringing the food bundle. There was blood on her hands. I took the bundle and held it the way I had held Rosie.
Through her tears she said, “I put in plenty for two.”
Nall put his arms around her. They stood so still that a gull strolled up to their stillness and rose with a yelp when they moved at last.
She touched Nall’s cheek. “The world I knew is coming apart. All deaths seem terrible to the one who dies.”
Her world too, I thought. Yet she could bear it, and I could not. When Nall took the food bundle and she came to embrace me, I was stiff and cold, and if I felt anything at all, it was guilt that I would not stay to suffer a woman’s lot, the terror and boredom of waiting.
“War is too big,” I whispered at her shoulder. “I can fight with only one person at a time.”
