by Betsy James
The wind shifted, blustering in the fringe of grass. “Thief!” yelled a high, hard voice.
16
I shall have a hope chest, I shall have a ring,
I shall have a white hearth, and marry with a king.
I shall have a baby, pretty as a jewel;
You shall have a monkey child, and sup cold tea and gruel.
Hand Slap. Upslope.
NALL JERKED HIS HEAD BACK and cracked it on the low roof.
“Filth!” cried the voice.
He clutched the back of his head. I clutched the knife and jammed against him, trying to be invisible.
Nothing happened.
He dropped his hands. Crawling to the grass curtain, he leaned on his forearms, listening.
Wind. Crickets. Gulls.
Then the clear voice, not near, screaming, “I will tear out your heart!”
He exhaled as though hit. “Aieh!” He shoved me aside, he slid out of the cleft and ran the way a lizard does, on toes and fingers, toward that voice.
I dithered, making little lunges. Through the grass I saw him already far away up a little rise, throwing himself flat. Without caring what happened I ran after him across the open, fell over his legs, and squirmed up next to him as he parted a screen of blowing grass.
Twenty feet below, down a sloping bank framed by the grass like the stage of a traveling show, lay a pretty graveled beach. Our manat leaned on the shingle, and next to it a second skin boat without a deck, like a dory.
Queelic knelt in the seaweed, his arms lashed behind his back. In front of him a slim girl rocked on her toes, slicing the air with a curved flint knife.
She wore a sealskin belted around her hips. Nothing else. Her head was shaved; through its fine, dark fur I could see the shine of her skull. She hooked the tip of the knife in the soft place under Queelic’s jaw. “Flesh-eater!” she cried in the Plain tongue.
Queelic tried to raise his chin away from the knife.
“I have your manat,” she said. “Let the others eat what they will, and die. No one leaves the caves!”
“Do it,” said Queelic through shut teeth. “Stop jumping around and do it.”
The girl let the knife drop a little, beating away tears with her free hand. “I can kill! I have killed and killed. Otters, and the goat.” She set the hook again under Queelic’s ear.
Nall was on his feet. “Aieh!”
The knife nicked Queelic’s throat as she whipped around to face Nall; did not see him; saw him; screamed.
Screamed and cowered. The knife went flying. She snapped into a heap on the gravel, crying, “Uhui! Uhui!” in a high bird’s voice.
He leaped the bank in three strides that brought down stones. She groveled. He implored her in Rig.
“Uhui!” She huddled her arms across her face.
He turned back to me. “She thinks I’m dead!” he said. His face said, Am I?
“You’re all right!” I said. “You’re here!”
I flung both legs over the ledge and half ran, half slid down the bank. It was too steep; I hopped twice, caught one foot, flipped in the air, and landed with a squawk.
The girl stopped screaming. She stared between her forearms, white as shell.
I sat up, holding my behind. That is how the clown enters, and everybody laughs.
The cowering girl pushed herself up a little on her arms, but it was not me she stared at.
“Bij,” she said.
Aieh was her name. She was beautiful. Her slenderness and dark shaved head made her eyes look huge; her eyes were silver. Her sealskin kirtle was mottled silver and gray, like the constellation called the Hunter, stitched along the edge with jet.
Flinching, she put out her hand to touch Nail’s feet. He knelt. She rose to her knees, and then it seemed she must touch him everywhere, sobbing, crying in the Rigi’s tongue.
Now it was Nall who looked as though he saw a ghost, who answered in whispers.
I stood up. They did not notice. I rubbed my elbows and found I still held Liu’s knife; it had cut my palm. Nall stared like a sleepwalker. His hands moved at Aieh’s waist.
I opened my mouth. But I could not speak those murmurous Rig wind-and-water words; only Plain, or Hill, or Kitchen Hessdish, which sounds like sharpening a hatchet. I did not have brown breasts or silver eyes. My breasts were purple with scars, and a bruise on one buttock was going to match.
Queelic knelt on the shingle like a stunned hare. He cleared his throat. “Kat. Could you cut this rope?”
I stared at the knife in my hand. At Queelic. I said, “I forgot you.”
“That’s all right. Everybody does.”
It was a thick hide rope, but the knife cut it like nothing. I was glad to spoil that girl’s good rope. Queelic touched the nick under his ear and stared at the blood on his hand.
I would not look at Nall and the girl. I said to Queelic, “How did you get here?”
“I walked.” He seemed cheerful, not quite sane. “Down a big crack. It got too hard, so I climbed out and walked on the grass till I got to those rocks, the split ones. That’s where that—that girl got me.” He licked his lips. “I forgot to bring the water.”
I dropped Liu’s knife in the pocket of my shift and dug another water skin from the manat. Queelic’s hands shook. I held the skin while he drank.
Without thanking me he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and stared at Aieh. “Who is she?”
“I have no idea.”
“I think they know each other.”
I looked then. Nall and Aieh had their hands on each other’s faces. Their lips still moved in that liquid tongue. I said loudly, “There are two people here who don’t speak Rig.” As I put the water skin back in the manat, I saw Nall silence Aieh with three fingers on her mouth.
He did not meet my eyes. “Aieh is my cousin,” he said.
“Oh.” So many cousins.
“Tadde is—Tadde was her brother. Tadde and Liu.”
Brothers turning to bone. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Aieh’s hand, soft as a cat’s paw, was kneading Nail’s thigh. The skin around her mouth and nipples was dusky, as if her blood gathered there, and her dark eyelashes were stuck together with tears.
She pointed at Queelic. “Filth! He ate my brother’s flesh!”
“Me?” said Queelic. “I don’t even like pork chops.”
“Manflesh-eater! Black Boot!”
Queelic turned to me. “Is she one of those Rigi things?”
“I suppose.”
He crossed his arms. “The Rigi eat babies.”
Nall looked amazed. Aieh spat. Reluctantly, I said, “When we’re little, they tell us that if we’re bad, the Rigi will drown us and eat us.”
“The Rigi bring nightmares,” said Queelic. “My father has nightmares. That’s why he has to drink.”
“Lies to frighten children!” said Aieh.
I said, “So where did you learn that rubbish about the Black Boots?”
It was Nall who answered, as though dreaming. “From Tadde. He told us little ones, ‘Be still, or the Black Boots will eat you. Starting from the middle.’ Then he blew on our bellies.”
Weeping, Aieh pushed her face against Nail’s shoulder. With the palm of his hand he smoothed, smoothed the fine dark plush on her skull. When she murmured in Rig, he said, “Speak in Plain.”
“Why have you come back from the dead, talking like a savage and bringing Black Boots to foul my Tadde’s body?”
“No, no—Queelic was left in the cave for punishment.”
“Not for dinner,” said Queelic.
“There were three there with Tadde. I saw their tracks!”
“You see them. Queelic. Myself. And Kat.”
Aieh stared as if she saw me for the first time. “That scarred girl? Who is she?”
My wretched blush began; my ears buzzed with it. I looked at Nall, who never blushed, and saw him blushing until last night’s bear bites stood out dark on his neck.
S
oftly as a cat leaving a lap, Aieh withdrew from him and sat apart, staring at the gravel. “Bij,” she said.
“My name is Nall.”
But he seemed lost. His eyes asked me something, yet his hands still reached for her. I looked away, picking at the fringe of the deer mouse sash. When I looked back, he had a wrinkle at one eyebrow that had not been there before. He looked from me to Aieh. More at Aieh, I was sure of it.
Everything in me drew back from him, like petals curling away from a fire.
He said, “Aieh and I—”
I turned my head away. I had watched my League aunts punish their husbands like that; it worked, too. When I raised my eyes, he was leaning toward me, his face beseeching. I dropped my eyes.
He said, “Aieh and I were—we’re cousins.”
He had been going to say something else. And why hadn’t he reached for me and pulled me into the place she had left? He should be saying, Aieh, this is my lover. Kat and I called each other; she’s what I longed for, a woman all earth. She saved my life.
I thought of many things he might say. He did not say them. He looked confused, caught.
Last night’s coldness came back to me, changed, and I thought, You won’t notice me? I’ll make you notice me!
Driving the nail of one thumb into the ball of the other, I said, “How lucky, to find two cousins on the same day! I’m so happy for you.”
He winced. Aieh bridled and flushed; she stared at him. He had withdrawn his hands by then, and his eyes flew back and forth between us.
I said, “Maybe your cousins called you?”
He winced again. I did not care. Did he think knives were made only of stone? That I didn’t know how to use one? What had last night meant to him? And what was I? No wonder he wouldn’t let me have that ring!
Aieh caught his arm. He pulled it away. Her face crumpled, and she said, “Maybe the flesh-eater is that Black Boot girl!”
“Ah—” He crouched like a badger I had seen once in Creek, cornered by boys and stoned; but I had felt sorry for the badger. Not for him.
Then, in a breath, I saw him see a way out: I saw him remember the Gate.
He had a three-day beard, he was as dirty as I was, but a hero’s look came over him—distant, relieved. He straightened. “There are no flesh-eaters here,” he said. “Nor time to waste. I have work to do.”
He sounded so stern and sure that I grew unsure. Why were we making this mad journey after all? Not for ourselves. For the world that was sick, that needed true songs or—or something.
My fury wobbled toward guilt. Nall was on a quest. Why should he have to explain himself to a couple of angry girls? If he gained the Gate, he would be a hero; and a hero does not clean up petty messes. It is the world’s big mess he fixes, and then everyone is happy.
Aieh did not feel guilty. “Work to do?” She jumped up and seized the gunwale of her open boat, as though to shove it back into the surf. “When the wind is westerly, our ama weeps, and in her sleep she speaks a name!”
Nall jumped after her and held the other side. “She lives?”
“A broken heart kills only in songs. It is your mother who is dead.”
His fingernails went white. “What being did she become, that she could not come back?”
“None! She died in her bed. She coughed, and vomited, and drowned in herself. Too much sea.”
“So all is as it was.”
“Should it be different? Rage by day and murder by night, singers killed for songs and truth-speakers for truth.” Aieh’s tears ran down. “What good is truth? It is like loving—death ends it. There was one I loved once, and our ama loved him … but they killed him. There was another; he tried to hold back the wave, but you have seen him—the crabs are eating him.”
“Hold back the wave?”
Aieh shut her mouth. Queelic, who had been listening with his hanging open, said, “Kat, they talk in riddles here.”
Aieh turned on him. “Shall I read you a riddle, Black Boot?”
He had been trying not to stare at her breasts. He said, “I’m terrible at riddles. But I like how you talk.”
She looked at him as if he were some new fish pulled from the deep. “Listen, then, Pimple Boy,” she said. “I am green and blue, deep as life. I have withdrawn from the shore, leaving the reefs and tide pools bare; fish flap and gasp, and one can go on human feet where before only crabs could walk. I am towering, dark, deadly; piled upon myself, toppling; poised, like a drawn breath. What am I?”
Queelic wrinkled his brow. He put out his tongue like a schoolboy at sums, then said, “Water all piled together. Would it be that thing you just said—too much sea?”
“Such a wise Black Boot! But it has another name.”
“A really big wave?”
Nall made an explosive sound. Aieh said to Queelic, “And what happens when that big wave rushes back in upon the land?”
“It destroys everything. There was a wave like that in Wilwherra on the south coast, it knocked over a mill and drowned the workers and cost my dad a lot of money. A tidal wave. Did I guess the riddle? If I did, I think it’s the first one I ever got right.”
“It has one more part. I am a tidal wave made not of water, but of warriors with spears. What am I?”
“There isn’t any such thing,” said Queelic. “You can’t pile people up like that. They—Oh!” His ears went pink. “You mean—the warriors aren’t actually piled up. They’re just so tense and ready that they have to rush at something and wreck it, like a tidal wave. I got it!” He slapped his thigh. “They’d hit the land and overrun it, like paidmen. The answer is: an invasion!”
“You have solved my riddle, Pimple Boy.”
Queelic beamed. “It’s like the words of songs!” he said. “I never understood till now—songs are riddles.”
“Aieh,” said Nall, in a voice I had never heard him use, “tell me what is happening.”
“Why? You have work to do.”
“Tell me for Tadde’s sake—and for our ama’s.”
She twisted her hands in front of her. I had to keep shutting my heart to what she must be feeling, seeing his living face that she had thought a skull among driftwood. She said in a mutter, “The Rigi will go back to Tanshari.”
“Eh!” said Nall.
Queelic said, “What’s Tanshari?”
“What your ass covers when you are at home, Black Boot!” said Aieh.
“There are no Black Boots in Tanshari,” said Nall. “They live above it on the cliffs, in Uslap.”
Tanshari and Uslap. “Downshore and Upslope,” I said.
“Give them their true names, Scarred Girl!” said Aieh. “The Rigi founded them! We were the first to step onto that shore, the first to take off our skins and be human. Tanshari, the coast, and all the land were ours, its fruits and grains and game. We were healthy then, not as we are now. Why should we not take back what is our own?”
“That was never Tadde’s hope,” said Nall. “He was a man of parley, not force. Who is it who would invade Tanshari?”
Well, I could guess whose power drove it, the way Ab Harlan’s drove the paidmen. Aieh said sullenly, “The factions want this, want that. But there is one thing everyone wants, and that is to be sick no more. To see their children born straight and whole. You think the Reirig would not see that and use it?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Why should I?”
“I cannot think of any reason.”
Aieh flushed and turned away. I hoped she would try again to shift her boat and go. But she turned back and said, “Tadde was a fool. A brave fool. He held us together with his good heart. He bribed his way to the Reirig, who drank grass wine among his wives, and said, ‘Seal Priest, your people are united in this: Open the way past the Changes! We would speak to the Tansharians, our relatives; if they hear us out, surely they will stop killing our seals. We can join again in the dance, and by traffic with earth we shall be cured of too much sea.’
“The Reirig let Tadde speak. But he said he must first listen at the Gate, to hear what was being born and be obedient to the will of the world.
“So he went there. Then he paddled back, and frothed at his mouth, and rolled his eyes and shouted, ‘I have heard the world that is coming to be! In it there is no peace with seal-killers or Black Boots. The Rigi shall return to Tanshari—as kas, the tidal wave. Kas, kas, kas! Rise, my warriors, arm the manats!’”
“Plenty would go,” said Nall behind his hand. “For goods, or glory, or because they are afraid of the Reirig.”
“Or to do something. Anything, to be no longer locked away. But Tadde told the factions, ‘Shall we kill our relatives to fatten the One?’” Aieh’s shoulders drooped. “Word of that got back to the Reirig. We found Tadde on the beach, no blood in him. He had gone to dig clams.”
“Eh, mimo,” said Nall, looking at the sea. “Oh, my cousin.”
“One loves fools,” said Aieh. “But the fools I loved are all dead. Liu and Tadde and—”
She stopped before she said it. But in the shape of her mouth I saw the name I was never to speak, the name that was mine to have instead of the ring.
“—and you.” Her voice rose. “The wave is cresting. Soon half the world will be dead, and the Reirig will feast in Tanshari. He will get more wives there—it seems those women are willing! And I stand here on the dead isle, talking to the dead!”
“When will it happen?” said Nall.
His voice was hard. Aieh caught her breath. “Now,” she said.
“Now?”
“The manats are ready. Tonight begins the Least Night cycle, and we dance. Tonight the Reirig and his warriors will draw in as many of the factions as they can—there will be fights, and corpses for the caves!”
She gathered herself. “It makes no difference who lives or dies. Were the Reirig to be killed, a dozen men wait to snatch his lance and be the One. The wave has risen; it will rush east. Tomorrow at dusk they will set out, with the lance to open the Changes; they will reach the coast on Least Night and kill every soul in Tanshari—seal-killer and Black Boot alike. They will eat land fruit and breathe the wind from the hills, and at the Least Night fire they will dance upon the shore.”
