by Betsy James
I looked back. The dark throng of crabs was tiptoeing in again. Something white fluttered in the cave’s depth.
The manat nosed around bony headlands. We passed two more caverns without looking in them. The cliff above us rose into darkness, strange eddies tugged at us, the rain drummed down.
At the head of a narrow bay the sea had spit up a gray beach, and over it arched a cave with a sandy floor. Warily, Nall ran the boat alongshore and climbed out.
I huddled, my paddle planted in the gravel. There were crabs, but not so many. He came back from his quick, seeking run and said, “Here.”
My hands would not work. I tried to stand; he caught me as the manat tipped me out, swung me to the shallows, and grabbed the boat as it shot toward the sea. My legs were numb from sitting, they dumped me in the water. He picked me out and hauled first me, then the manat out of the rain and into the cave, above the highest tidemark, to cold sand.
He grubbed in the boat for a blanket. It was wet. He put it around my shoulders anyway and began to hunt for driftwood. His face was drawn. I tried to say, I’ll help, but from cold or horror I could not speak. The sodden blanket was heavy, the coldness in my heart flowed out and turned the whole world cold—there was no warm place. The thoughts I had frozen in order not to feel them grew monstrous, freezing everything else.
Tide wrack lay under the overhang of the cave, and was dry. It was white with human bones. Nall sorted through them, kicking aside skulls and femurs to gather scoured cedar logs. When he came to dump his gleanings at my feet, I shrank away.
He had found two little planks and a straight stick. He whittled at them with his knife. Fetching a length of cord from the manat, he searched again among the charnel-house drift until he found a strong, springy twig, which he strung to make a bow. He turned a twist of the bowstring around the stick, and knelt.
“Watch,” he said.
Laying one little plank on the other, he set one end of the stick in a newly cut notch, found a fist-size rock with a dimple in it and used it to anchor the free end of the stick so that it stood upright like a drill, and leaned his chin on it to brace it.
He began to draw the bow back and forth, making the stick spin.
It sounded like a bumblebee, fat and clumsy and flying in bursts—a close, busy sound in the rain and drear. Soon the first thick puff of smoke rose up, smelling of forest, earth, hearth: land things.
He pulled and pulled at the bow until the smoke was white. Then he dropped bow and stick to lift the plank where the drill had been.
The smoke stopped. Nothing was there but a pile of fine black dust.
“No,” I said. Even the cedar scent was gone.
“Wait.”
Cupping his hand around the dust, he blew. One red coal glowed there, like a seed.
On the sand he had built a little nest of cedar bark, and into that he tipped the coal. Lying on his belly, he blew gently, steadily, without pausing except for breath. White smoke rose around his head. He coughed and blew. More smoke came thick; he blew, and as it wreathed and thinned, I heard the lively voice of fire. He rolled aside to show me, between his hands, the nest of baby flames.
He fed it twigs, then sticks, then branches. It blazed on the jagged ceiling, roared and danced, was hungry, ate everything he gave it. The blanket began to steam and stink; he took it away from me and propped it to dry on three sticks. He dragged a whole tree trunk from among the scattered bones and shoved one end of it into the blaze.
A spark landed on my foot. I did not brush it off. He brushed it off, then sat behind me with his arms around me, putting me between himself and the fire.
My knees baked, and Nall was warm. But my heart was cold as bone.
I felt him sigh. His voice buzzed in my ear, singing a little worn song that Downshore cowherds, mostly children, sing as they drive their cattle home along Scythe Road.
Barn for my cuddy-o,
When the day’s done;
Saw a hundred lilies-o,
Never picked one.
Barn for my cuddy-o,
Lily for the lady,
House for the gentleman,
Cradle for the baby.
I thought of slow flanks and swaying udders, the tired children with their willow switches. I could not bear that Nall should try to comfort me, when there was no comfort.
Turning my head, I saw his face and knew that he sang to comfort not me, but himself.
Barn for my cuddy-o,
House, hearth, byre.
Supper for my honey-o,
By the kitchen fire.
“When you first came to Downshore,” I said, my voice strange and small, “you didn’t know what a cow was.”
He shifted his eyes from whatever he had been looking at. “I was cold. You laid me against the cow to get warm.”
“It wasn’t me did that. It was Dai.”
So the name was spoken, and I cried.
I had not known you could get warm by crying, but it was so. Crying, I turned in his arms to be warm in front, and felt him shake with his own tears.
The blanket got dry. We forgot to eat, and touched each other’s faces. I untied the deer mouse sash. On the warm sand we spoke in whispers, then without words.
The old skulls stared. The fire died down; one of us would rise, naked, to scratch for wood among the cold bones, and then slide back under the blanket to be warmed.
It was the first time laughter was heard in that place, the first time anyone built a fire on the Isle of Bones.
Morning came white, with fog thick as wool crowding the mouth of the cave.
I sat up. Nall slept with his feet in the ashes, his unshaven face peaceful as water in a cup.
I watched the blanket move with his breathing. Then I slipped out from under it shivering, raked up the last coals, and kindled a new fire. When it was crackling, I picked my way through the bone pile to the sea.
Little waves lipped the sand. Crabs tiptoed. In a whisper I told them, “Poor things, you didn’t get to eat us.”
In the cold salt water I scrubbed all over, even my hair. I crept out with goose bumps, and in my unbelted shift I built up the fire, swept the sand with a twig, and set bread and cheese on a flat rock to make a kitchen. I wished for my honey crock. The skulls, my in-laws, grinned. By poking in the manat I found an old black cook pot. When I brought it back, Nall was awake, kicking his feet over because they were too close to the fire.
He snaked his hand out of the blanket and grabbed my ankle, growling, “Bears!’
“No biting!” Last night I had bitten him, to teach him about bears; the marks were on his neck.
“No mercy.” Then his laughter changed and he said, “Hold me.” The fire sank neglected, and the washing was all to do again.
Later he reached across me and took up the deer mouse sash that lay tangled in the sand. “This is a pretty thing, Bear Spit. Did you make it?”
“A—a friend wove it for me.”
His quick eyes admired the weft. “Can you weave?”
“No. But I can make bowls.”
“How?”
“I roll snakes of clay, then I coil them and pinch them,” I said. I pinched him. “Then I take a piece of dry gourd, and I scrape and scrape and scrape the clay until it’s thin, until only emptiness is left, with a little bit of bowl around it. Then I fire it in goat shit.”
“So you can weave, but with earth and fire. You are earth and fire,” he said, rolling over, pulling me with him.
“And you’re water, Mister Long Wave! To make a bowl strong, I have to drive the water out—with burning goat shit. Out! Out!” I pretended to push at his face. He laughed and caught my hands. “I made a crock for you, with wild honeycomb in it,” I said, “but they broke it.”
“You have brought me nothing broken.”
“Only scarred.”
“Scars are writing. They are the marks left by stories.”
“Can you write?”
“No.”
“I can.” I liked it that there were things I could do that he could not. He had more scars than I did, but I had stories he did not know about. Like the Bear, which I had not yet tried to explain. And Raím.
I felt secretive, powerful, adult. Examining his scars, I said in my haughtiest Leagueman’s voice, “I won’t accept this. It’s been damaged in transit.” He shouted and pounced, until I squealed, “I take it back!”
He rose, chucked a stick on the coals, and followed my footprints down to the sea. Against the mist his silhouette tipped forward as he dove.
I splashed in the shallows. I could touch the thought of Dai with the edge of my mind, like touching a bruise so deep, it had bled through my whole body. But that had happened in some other world. When Nall’s sleek head bobbed alongside the rocks, I put my shift on loose and damp, and made tea.
He came out of the water shaking like a dog and stood over the fire. We sat together on the blanket and ate like soldiers after a battle, shoulder to shoulder, not caring whether we saved enough for later. The scalding tea tasted of the leather water skin.
He was serious again. I was not. Creek, Downshore, even Ab Harlan felt far and strange; Nall was real, and here. I pushed my toes into the fire-warmed sand and linked my hands across my knees. The cave seemed homey, the skulls like a row of beaming ancestral portraits.
“I like this place,” I said. “Let’s rent it.”
He smiled, but not quickly enough. The look of peace that we had made together was gone from his face. “We must go,” he said.
“It’s too foggy.” Mist filled the cave mouth. I raked my fingers through the sand, and when I lifted them, they held a ring. “Nall! Look!”
It was heavy gold, carved round with swimming seals. I put it on my finger. It fit.
“Drop it,” he said.
“It was just lying here. In the sand where we—right in the sand.”
“It belongs to someone. She wanted it with her. Throw it in the sea.”
“No! It’s for us. Look, there are two seals on it.”
“It’s not ours to keep.”
I closed my hand into a fist, the ring on my finger. “Nothing’s ours to keep. Not even a fireplace in a bony old cave.”
“That’s true.”
I took off the ring without looking at it and tossed it into the sea, then got up and began to gather food sacks and kick sand over the fire.
“Kat.”
“I know. You told me.”
“Kat.” He sat on the sand naked, a crust of bread in one hand and nothing in the other. “I’ll tell you my name,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The name they took when they killed me. I’ll tell you that.”
He was offering me the name because I could not have the ring. I was ashamed, afraid.
“But you must never speak it.”
I did not want the name. I wanted the ring, solid and flashy on my hand. I remembered how I had given Raím the bowl he had not wanted, with writing on it that he could not read.
Nall said, “Shall I tell you?”
“No. Yes.”
I knelt beside him. He paused; then he cupped his hand around my ear and whispered.
I flushed.
“Never speak it,” he said.
“I promise.”
I did not know what to do with the name, where to keep it. It was hot, like molten gold.
He knew it was not the gift I wanted. He was watching my face. I gave him a tiny crooked smile and pushed my finger along in the sand until it touched his thigh.
He said, “I had another name. A nickname. You can speak that.”
“What is it?”
“Bij. Say it, Kat.”
“Bij.”
He held me so tight, it hurt. “My ama called me that. And my cousins. They carried me everywhere; they were glad when I learned to walk.”
“What does it mean?”
“A small, very round stone, of the right size to play marbles.”
I said, “I don’t know what to call you anymore.”
“My name is Nall. The boy who had those other names is dead. Kat, among the Rigi I have no skin.”
I saw what he meant, that he had nothing to protect him—no name, no sealskin, no custom or family or habit or religion, those things of which human beings make skins to be safe in. He was utterly naked. And I had thought him poor in his cowshed!
“Nall, then. If the Rigi saw you, would they think you were a ghost?”
“Uhui—that’s how you say ‘ghost’ in Rig. Maybe I am.”
“That wasn’t a ghost with me last night!”
“No?” Bullying soft kisses, deft hands. He was going to the Gate, he said. But had he been a moth going to a candle flame, I would have gone with him.
15
Living in the world
by being small
and keeping still.
Like a nighthawk’s egg:
fragile, speckled,
laid on the bare ground.
The Nighthawk. Creek.
I RETIED THE DEER MOUSE SASH with its pouch of coins. We gathered bundles and blanket and packed the manat. We left the fire still smoldering and pushed away from the cave.
The world was dirty white fog that coiled like smoke from a snuffed wick. “The shroud of the dead,” said Nall. “When we reach open water, it will thin.” To our left the sea faded into the dank air; to our right the gray cliff dissolved above our heads. We picked our way along its foot, eyes on the foam that fringed it. The manat was noiseless. Even the drip of water from the paddle blades seemed slow.
We crept past the caverns we had passed last night, dim black mouths that led somewhere upward and back. A cold breath sighed from each, pressing my curls to my cheek. It’s only air, I told myself. There must be fissures that go up to the cliff top, and the wind blows down through them.
But the cave we were passing was the one with the body in it. I did not want to think about the wind or any odor that might lie on it. I bent to the paddle, but not before I saw again that flash of white in the pit of the cave, quick and gone.
This time Nall saw it too. He paused in his stroke with a low exclamation.
“It’s a ghost,” I said. “Don’t stop.”
“Ghosts are the color of fire.”
“Leaguemen’s ghosts are white. Nall, it wouldn’t be … Dai?”
He did not answer, staring into the dark.
“Let’s go.” As I dug my paddle into the water, I heard a keening whimper, like a gull’s cry.
“Something’s there,” said Nall.
“Don’t!”
But he was sculling the prow to face the cave. I felt like the shell of a hermit crab, dragged willy-nilly behind its tenant. “Nall, no!”
The white thing rose among the rocks and crossed the cave mouth, weaving and dipping: It was the ghost of the clerk, in white shirt and dark trousers. “Ah! Ah!” it cried. It raised its arms above its head, the way the corpse had lain in the water.
I back-paddled so hard that foam creamed around the paddle shaft. But Nall was pulling forward, left and right; we went nowhere.
I hit him with my paddle. The manat heeled and shuddered. He wrenched around, shouting, “You’ll sink us!”
“You think you can take us anyplace you want!”
The ghost stopped waving its arms and stared at us.
“It’s a hostage,” said Nall, holding his ear. “The other one the fishermen put off. How did they come out so far, past the Changes?”
I lowered my paddle. It was not the clerk—the clerk had been plump. This man was thin and young.
“It’s Queelic,” I said.
“Who?”
“The one the bull chased. The man I was to marry.”
“That’s the man?”
Queelic waved one arm and said, “Ah?” again, as though he did not know what language to speak.
“He must be half dead with fear,” I said. I began to paddle us in. On the second
stroke I remembered it must have been Queelic who had recognized Dai on the night of my escape.
Nall stared at his rival, then took up the stroke. We pulled alongshore a few yards out. I looked away from the corpse. “Queelic!”
He looked more boy than man, with his pale, blotched face and nose too big for him. His body jerked, as though he might flee back into the cave. But maybe whatever was back there frightened him worse, for in the end he stood where he was, shivering in his tall black boots.
“Queelic, it’s Kat.”
He gawked back and forth from me to Nall.
“Did the fishermen leave you here?”
A slight nod.
“When?”
His eyes were on my scars. His throat worked. At last he whispered, “I don’t remember.”
I wanted to hate him. But all I could think of was the death cave in the rain and no fire. Nall jumped out into the little waves and pulled the manat to shore. Queelic retreated up the shingle.
“This is Nall,” I said, climbing out.
“The—the demon king?”
Nall looked him up and down. “You were going to marry Kat?”
Queelic’s eyes widened. Then he shut them. “It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want her.” Swaying, shuddering, he turned to me and said, “Tell him to do it!”
“Do what?” I said. “Who?”
“Your demon. He’s got a knife—tell him to kill me quick. I know he owes me.”
“Owes you?” I imagined a fat ledger like the one my father kept, with entries that were not money and pelts, but slights, insults, murders. “Nobody’s killing you. Not us, anyway.”
“Kill me! Don’t leave me in this place.” Queelic’s eyes flickered toward the corpse.
Under his breath Nall said, “I will know who it is.”
“It hasn’t got a face,” said Queelic.
Nall stalked to the thin feet that here and there gleamed white with bone and stood looking down. His eyes closed. Opened. He knelt, rummaging.
Queelic swallowed.
Nall rose and returned. “It’s Tadde,” he said. “My cousin Tadde—I told you of him. Those are his tattoos, what’s left of them. Ai, Kat, that it should be Tadde!”
