by Betsy James
“That is the root of all wars—and of all peace.” She held me in spite of my stiffness, as I had held Rosie’s fists and knees. “Your work is worthy, Lali Kat. Go, fight with Nall and with yourself, as long as you may.” Her cheek on mine was soft and old. “All my life I’ve wanted to go west over the water. Take my heart with you!”
Nall spoke a word in the Rigi’s tongue. Mailin sighed. “IT1 push you off,” she said.
I climbed into the rear hatch. Mailin helped Nall run the manat into the creamy foam. When it was waterborne, he hopped in quickly, for the seas had the wind behind them and the boat wanted to turn broadside to the waves. Soft spray burst up. I watched his working back and tried to match his stroke. When we came through into a quieter space between waves, I looked over my shoulder. Mailin stood thigh-deep in the water, waving, very small, behind her the house full of people to whom I had not even said good-bye. I had a panicky feeling that I had lost something, dropped it out of my hand. Then I realized it was Nondany’s nothing; the paddle was in my hand. Behind me Downshore and Upslope faded to smoky shadows, and we were on the open water when the sun rose.
13
It rises, it falls
It rises, it falls
It breathes
All around us it breathes
It rises, it falls
Tide Chant. The Rigi.
I THOUGHT SOMETHING as big as the sea must make a sound. It made no sound. Around the little manat the huge water tipped and hove, rose and fell as the sun turned it from gray to a cold green like glass, in silence. Only where the sea touched something else—prow, paddle, my dipped hand—did it hiss and crackle, a tiny noise in that bigness. The boat’s lashings creaked.
In front of me Nall’s shoulders changed from a shadow to a scarred brown back. My paddle kept time with his—right, left, right—as we rode west across the shining plain I had seen from the mule cart, toiling up hills that fell away beneath us and rose again, paddling toward a distant, bare arc of sky.
The manat was so small that the swell rolled under it and passed, as if it were a drifting log. So small; I shipped the paddle, touched the water with my palm. Below my hand the translucent blue-green glass went down, powdery as if with dust motes for the first fathom, then dark.
“How deep is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a bottom?”
Chiss, chiss went the blade of Nall’s paddle. He spoke over his shoulder between strokes. “Here, close to land, the fishermen can drop their nets and draw them up full of creatures. Crabs, crawling sideways. Dogfish—sharks no bigger than cats. Shrimp with feelers striped white and red. Lobsters.” He shook his head. “They drag up a world, and all they know to do with it is eat it.”
I thought of the seafloor far below, a cold meadow, beasts grazing on it. “When we aren’t close to land anymore, will there be a bottom?”
“I don’t know.”
A wind came up at our left hand, writing on the water a script that changed and changed. A commotion at the horizon became a cloud of birds.
Nall pointed with his chin. “Those little islands, the skerries—they lead westward. Between them the water is not so deep; creeping skerry to skerry, the fishermen feel safe. But they don’t venture west of the last one, for there the water deepens beyond the sun’s reach.”
“So they can’t get at the lobsters?”
The line of his cheek bunched in a smile. My heart made a little lurch toward him. But if I let it move, it would spill its cargo into the sea of pain, so I held it still again, tight and cold.
“There are no lobsters in the deep,” he said. “Eaters and eaten both love sunlight; they crowd together in the shallows where it can touch them. We say—they say, one may eat the cool beings: fish and lobster, mussel and crab. But not the warm beings: whale and orca and seal. So they say. The Rigi.”
We’re going to the Rigi’s land, I thought. Where the world is born. But I could not feel anything about it. The part of me that thought seemed to work fine; it was my heart that was frozen. I said, “What lies west of the last skerry?”
“The great deep.”
“And west of that?”
“The Isle of Bones, where the Rigi lay their dead. Where they laid me.”
I saw now the magnitude of this journey, impossible. But Nall said, “When I broke free and swam, the first fetch was the longest. After that I followed the skerries. I ate mussels and drank rain from the rock pools. But the air was colder than the sea, so I swam again.”
“Will we go to the Isle of Bones?”
“No. We’ll slip past it and on through the islands, west. No one must see us.”
“No one?” My first, foolish thought was, But how will I learn songs for Nondany? My second was, Of course the Rigi mustn’t see us. The Reirig and the elders killed Nall, they’d kill him again. My third was, What would they do to me?
“They won’t see us,” said Nall.
I looked at the dim horizon, as if it might suddenly blacken with manats. “Don’t the Rigi come east to the skerries? If there are lobsters?”
“I told you about the Ni’Na’; the Rigi can’t cross that boundary without the Reirig’s lance.” He stopped paddling for a moment. “This side of the Isle of Bones it changes.”
“What changes?”
“Whatever it is. What won’t let them out.”
“You got out.”
“I was dead,” he said. “I was no longer a Rig.” He stopped paddling and turned in the hatch till I could see half his living face. “Soon we’ll stop at a place I know. We’ll eat and sleep a little and ready ourselves for the deep.” He reached out his hand to me. From that awkward position he could offer it only upside down.
Instantly I was shy, with nowhere to hide on the whole wide ocean; yet my heart was cold. I looked away over the water. After a moment he withdrew his hand. We paddled west.
The manat nosed ashore in the lee of a grassy islet, in a confusion of little waves. Even loaded it was light enough to carry up onto the shingle. Nall stood twisting his back to ease it, while I dug out Mailin’s bundle.
“Look!” I said. In the clear water of a tide pool a perfect flower grew, ivory tinged with pink.
I reached to pick it. Nall knocked my hand away. “It has a bitter sting,” he said.
With food and a water skin we climbed rocks splashed white with bird droppings, in the sharp iodine smell of seaweed. A notch in the tumbled stones led upward, fifty, sixty feet to a small plateau.
The island was an acre or two, furred with grass that bent, bent in the wind from the west. It was dimpled with corries and stacked with wind-eaten stone, but there was a nook at the top of the cleft where the grass was soft and dark green with summer. Everywhere the sun shone, glittering on the bowing blades. Nall threw himself down and lay looking up at the blue sky.
I sat next to him, my knees drawn up. He pushed one hand through the grass and took hold of my ankle, laid his other hand across his eyes. Above us gulls and kittiwakes mewed and drifted. Wind combed the grass into whorls like a baby’s cowlick. His hand slacked on my ankle, and he slept.
I remembered he had hardly slept for two nights, and I felt toward him a cold, devouring tenderness. The world and this journey could not be real; my brother’s name could not be thought, much less spoken. All my life and need fixed on Nall.
Right here, I thought, we’ll make life new. This is my island, and I name it Shining. There will be no grief here, no horror. Just us. I’ll wake him and we’ll make love. We have to.
I touched his thigh. He woke. “What?”
“N-nothing,” I said. “There was a beetle on you.”
His mouth quirked. He found my hand and held it, saying, “Wake me when this shadow touches that stone.”
So I watched him sleep, driven toward him. The ground got hard; an ant crawled up the back of my knee. I drew my hand out of his, stood, and began to explore my shining home.
Here’s where he’ll bu
ild our house, I thought, reckless as a gambler bluffing with a bad hand. We’ll get water from the rain. I’ll plant cabbages. Our children will play in that grassy place, out of the wind. We’ll have a cat.
I wandered among the boulders, touching them. We could get a kitten from Mailin, I thought. I would not let the image of Robin come. Aloud I said, “And Nall shall have a workshop, looking west.”
I walked to the edge of the western cliff and looked down.
Ran back, nearly falling. At the grassy swale I gasped twice before I could cry, “Nall!”
He rolled to his feet. I pointed, he ran where I pointed, we stood looking down at the waves that pushed the body of a man to and fro.
Nall squinted west. Empty ocean. He began to pick his way down among the rocks. I followed because I would not be left alone.
It was a Leagueman. He lay on his back, his feet on the shingle and his head in the sea. He was barefoot; his feet looked naked and pitiful, very white. Lazy waves broke across his face.
“It’s the clerk who takes the tariff,” I said. His eyes were open, brown eyes in a face without expression. The mark of Jake’s reins was on his cheek. I remembered the two sails I had seen from Mailin’s porch. “He’d be one of the hostages. They left him here because he’d be so afraid of the sea.” He’s not afraid now, I thought.
“His neck is broken.”
When you are hanged, your neck is broken.
“Maybe they threw him from the cliff,” said Nall. But I was already climbing like a monkey. From the cliff top I watched him make a quick search of the shore, finding no other human sign. By the time he returned to the grassy level, I had piled the food and water next to the crushed grass where he had lain.
“I won’t stay in this place,” I said.
We slipped the manat into the waves and paddled out, swinging in a wide arc to clear the western shore. Later we made an uncomfortable meal inboard, passing bread and water over the rocking deck.
All day we followed the string of stony islands westward, stopping only to stand and stretch, and on that whole wide ocean were only ourselves and birds. Once, deep down, a shadow passed; once, far away, something furious chased something frightened out of the water in a shimmer of spray. But I never saw the creatures, if they were creatures, or heard any sound but water’s. Everything was shadow and shine. Our paddles dipped and dipped, like fins.
The sky began to be everything, ranked and cliffed with cloud, slabbed and canyoned, green and white and gray and blue. I stopped looking at it. Instead I looked at one place on Nall’s back near his spine where there was a dark mark the size of my thumbnail. I thought it was a birthmark and then saw it was a tattoo, blurred and faded, a spiral like the writing on Raím’s bowl. I stared at it until it pulled me downward, then at the sky until it pulled me upward. I thought of the desert with the little creek running across it, the sea with the little islands strewn across it—everything backward, like the image on your eyelid after you have stared at something bright. Somewhere there were mountains and flowers, but not here.
Painted white by birds, the skerries were cairns on a trackless track, each farther from the last. Late in the day we pulled past the last one and came onto the great deep.
We spoke little. At first Nall tried to. But the silence of the huge sky became the name I could not speak; my answers got shorter and shorter, and after a while he fell silent too. Sometimes he sang under his breath, a minor tune.
Cold sea
Deep sea
Green wave
Under me
Low wind
Cold wind
Bright day
Soon end
His voice was steady, grieving. I thought, He has forgotten me.
I did not listen anymore, but paddled in the song as if it were the sea, for a thousand miles and a thousand years.
The sun had long since hidden itself in low, mild cloud. We went toward that cloud bank seeming to go nowhere, paddling, quiet. Nall paused, his paddle in the air. He turned his head this way, that way, snuffing or listening.
“Here,” he said. “Can you feel it?”
I could not feel anything. I would not let myself feel anything, except the paddle in my hand.
He pushed his hand in front of him, pressing at the face of the air. The spiral mark on his spine coiled as his muscles strained, and my bare legs, lying along his, felt him shiver. Something broke across my face, like a spiderweb or the skin of the water when you slide under it.
He let his breath out. “Ah.” Looked back. “We are in.”
Nothing had changed. The light was bluer, but that was the cloud.
We went on, seeming not to move. True, the wind was in our faces, but I thought too that Nall might be paddling slowly, to spare me. My hands were hard from work, but by early evening they had blistered in the soft place between fingers and thumb. My shoulders hurt.
I laid the paddle across the deck. “Nall.” My voice was thin between the water and the sky. “Do we keep going all night?”
He stopped his steady stroke and stretched each arm, shook out each hand.
“I’m tired,” I said. Hearing the plaint in my voice, I sat straighter. “Not so very.”
He made that awkward half turn to look at me. “We’ll stop. But not yet. There”—he lowered his voice—“there is the Isle of Bones.”
I looked past his shoulder at what I had thought a cloud among the thousand clouds, low-laid and dark. “We have to pass it?”
“Beyond it is another landing, a place to rest. A little farther.”
We paddled on through the dimming day. The cloud bank became an island that was one tall cliff, gray and black and rough as a rotten tooth, riddled with stacks and caves and holes through which the sea poured in, poured out. Mist smoked from its ragged pinnacles, where skeins of birds tangled in the late light.
I shivered. Nall’s hand was out of reach unless he offered it; he did not offer. He twisted until I saw his tense profile and said, “Kat. From now on.”
I did not ask what that meant. I said, “I’m cold.”
“It’s the breath from the caves.” He swung up his paddle. We went on across the water.
After a long fetch we drew level with the riddled cliff, but south of it, not close. We paddled fast. Birds screamed. I thought of the dead clerk, his face under water. In Upslope he would have been laid in a grave. I thought of my mother’s grave and the breath of cold that had risen from it.
I dug at the swell. Still I was cold. I worked and splashed and sweat, but I could not get warm, and we did not pass the Isle of Bones. Panting, I stopped paddling to find that the wind had sharpened in our faces, the cloud bank thickened to bring an early dusk.
West of us I could see the little island we were heading for. Then I could not. Rain, walking over the ocean on gray legs, had blotted it out. Another few minutes, and the rain hit us, too; the wind eased, sheets of falling water flattened the swell. The world became a room with straight gray walls, the Isle of Bones just visible at our right hand.
To be sure of a landmark, Nall pulled the manat closer to the cliff and held it there with slow strokes while the rain poured down. I bailed. Paddling, bailing, we hunched and spat water, wiping our faces. The rain drummed on the skin deck.
Just a summer rain, I told myself. But I was cold. I began to shake and could not stop.
“Rain getting worse.” My jaw shuddered. “Go on to that place to sleep?”
“I can’t find it now.”
“Spend night in boat?”
He half turned, to that unnatural position. “You’re too cold.”
“Am not.” My teeth chattered too hard for more.
But he was already paddling, turning the manat to face the cliff that sloped into the dark.
“So,” he said. “We shall ask lodging of the dead.”
14
A dark place wants me
and I want it.
Do not tell the man about the dark.
Be the dark.
Be that threshold,
that cave,
that well so deep
not even a dropped stone
knows the bottom.
Women’s Song. The Roadsouls.
THE SPLASH OF HIS paddle was drowned in the drum of the rain. He drew the boat toward the Isle of Bones like a cat creeping into a sleeping house.
I tried to help. But I was clumsy with cold, the blades clacked on each other, and Nall hissed, stilling me with a downward jerk of his hand. Among leaden eddies we slipped along the foot of the eastern cliff. Above us hung breaks and caverns, darker in the dark. Posts and shoals of fallen rock trailed out from shore; right under our skin hull, rocks bladed with barnacles sawed up and down in the wash. We fended off with our paddles, making little runs along the cliff.
“Don’t like it,” I said, my voice too high. “West shore better?”
“Yes. But we need a cave. I can’t make a fire in the rain.”
“But in the caves—”
“Kat. I would not come here if there were anywhere else to go.”
So I kept silent and tried to watch for rocks. We crept around two more rockfalls, the rain boiled up a mist that the waves quenched. Before us a cavern opened its gullet to the ocean, wide and black. Nall swung the manat into a back eddy, and the hull groaned on gravel.
The stony beach twitched, like a blanket with somebody under it.
I sucked in one breath, then saw, in the dim light, that the gravel was thick with crabs. From the cave that magnified sound, I heard, through the rain, the clicking of their claws.
Nall put one leg overside. The boat teetered.
“Nall!”
Emerging from under the blanket of crabs I saw a human foot; two feet; legs. The crabs scuttled like cockroaches shooed from a feast.
He was back in the boat and pushing off, shooting us out too far, rocking and splashing.
“Not that cave,” he said, bending to the stroke. “Somebody’s using it.”
