by Betsy James
In the silence that followed, Queelic remarked in his mad, ordinary voice, “Least Night—that’s day after tomorrow.”
But I was seeing Mailin’s house on the beach and Rosie sleeping, Nondany patting her hands, and paidmen with pikes standing at any escape up the cliffs.
I had left them.
For Nall I had left them. Nall, who did not move at all, even his eyes, but stood holding the gunwale of Aieh’s boat while the little waves tripped and fell forward on the stones.
He said, “Where is Hsuu, my father, in all this?”
“At the Reirig’s fire.”
“Is he shouting Kas! with the rest?”
“Hsuu never shouts. He watches. It is the Reirig’s lance he wants.”
“You are sure of that?”
“He killed you at the Reirig’s word.”
“He—and others.”
It hurt me to see Nall trying to make a good father out of a bad one. Maybe Aieh felt the same, for she said, “You would call a shark a sunfish!”
“My father is neither bad nor good. He is the sea. Was it he who called the seals away?”
“The Reirig says he called the seals himself.”
“He does not have that power. The seals would be my father’s work. Where are they?”
“Why should I tell you?” Aieh picked a round pebble from the beach. “Bij,” she named it, and threw it into the sea. “Maybe you will see for yourself,” she said. “Such a busy ghost. Why have you come?”
“I am going to the Gate.”
We, I thought. We are going to the Gate.
“I have come back from Tanshari to listen at the Gate,” said Nall.
Aieh’s eyes went wide. Narrowed. “The Gate killed you before,” she said. “Spying on the Reirig. Listening to songs that no one can forget even when you are dead. The Gate will kill you again!”
So I was not the first girl to whom Nall had told his tale of listening from the rock Stillness. I was not the first at anything.
“You think you are a seal priest?” said Aieh. “You are a man, that is all.”
“Men have listened.”
“When they were seals—the heroes in our ama’s songs!”
“Songs are made from men’s lives,” said Nall. “Aieh! The whole world is at war. The Black Boots are killing from the east; now you say the Rigi will kill from the west—”
“Not if you stop them.”
“What?”
Behind Aieh’s shoulders the green waves followed, followed on one another, all coming here. She said, “You shall take Tadde’s place. You shall call us together. Who better than you? You have been killed once already; what can the Reirig take from you? Among the factions there are warriors enough to face him and snatch his lance. Already they sing your song in secret, the song your father killed you for. When they see you, they will love you: Tadde’s comrade, the son of Old Sea, come back from the dead.”
“Are you mad?”
She laughed. How beautiful she was! “Mad? Do men rise from the dead every morning? Why should you come back to me—to us, on this day of all days?”
“I am not a leader! I am a listener.”
“And a hero, you hope. A man of the great songs. Take Tadde’s place, and you shall be that. Our healer, the man who unites us against the Reirig—”
“Stop!” Nall raised his hands before his face. “I am going to listen at the Gate!”
Aieh’s cheeks burned. Queelic watched with his mouth open.
“Truth!” she cried. “That is what you lust for, not women! The Reirig’s wave will overwhelm the world, but you are busy bringing back a song: ‘How Bij the Pure of Heart Snatched Wisdom from the Gate’!”
“Aieh!”
She turned to me. “He thinks he is a god. But he is a man. I know.”
“Oh, shut up!” I said.
To Nall she said, “For all her scars, that girl knows nothing about the world, nothing about you. But I know you. You are mad like your mother. You swim out too far.” She leaned to look in his face. “You listened before, and what did you bring back? A song. Listen again, and there will be no songs at all, for it is not the Reirig who will kill you, but the Gate itself. Man of my body, this is the truth: Your people need you.”
“My people! I am a skinless, nameless ghost.”
“You are the man I know.”
Nall put his hand over his eyes.
“Leave him alone!” I said. “The Rigi would truly kill him!”
“Why? He will lead them,” said Aieh. “And he will be with me.”
“Nall!”
“Bij, you are a Rig.”
“Nall, don’t listen!”
“Bij—”
“Nall!”
He leaped away from us, to the sea. As he unbuckled his knife belt I ran after him, splashing into the waves. I caught his arm. “Where are you going?”
“To wash. Let me go.” Another face shone through his man’s face, like a stone through running water. He shook me off, and dove.
17
Ride to the east,
Ride to the west,
Kiss the girl that you love best.
From a Circle Game. Downshore.
I TURNED BACK to the beach, soaked to my sash. Aieh picked up her hooked knife and said, “You should not try to keep that man from the sea.”
I thought, If she kills me, I’ll scar her first, with fingernails or teeth.
But she dropped the knife into a sheath at her waist. With an angry, uncertain face she watched each furrow darken, crest, crash, and dissolve. It was the darkening that made the wave.
Nall did not come back.
I drifted to Queelic, who sat staring west.
“He’s left us with her,” he said. “And she’s got her knife back.”
I did not answer. I thought of Dai saying, You’ve got Nall now.
Queelic said, “Is all that true? The Rigi are going to kill everybody on the coast?”
“Ask her.”
“I don’t like to. I mean, with her bare bosoms.”
“She’s as dressed as if she had a shirt on, for her.”
Queelic unfolded his legs. Stretched them. “I guess they’ll kill my dad?”
“Why are you asking me?”
He was musing on something. “When Dad was little and his name was still just Harlan, his dad had a special box made, to lock him up in when he was bad. Did your father lock you up?”
“In the woodbox once,” I said. “I wouldn’t wear petticoats.”
“Right. Grandda would laugh, ‘Down you go to the Rigi!’ Then he’d shut Dad in the box, along with a rotten pig’s carcass and a live cat.”
I stared, horrified.
“He’d leave him in there for a day. Or two. So you see, Dad doesn’t like the thought of the Rigi.” Queelic stole a glance at Aieh. Her face looked translucent and she was blinking hard, but she glared right back. He dropped his eyes. “Dad doesn’t like the feel of fur—or skin. That makes it difficult when he has his ladies in. He kept the box, though.”
“Did he do that to you?” For the first time I wondered what my own father’s childhood had been like.
“Oh, no. I have five older brothers; he never paid any attention to me.”
“My father would have given his right hand to work for your father.”
“So he gave you instead.”
I stared again, then said, “I wasn’t worth to him near what a hand’s worth.”
“More than me. I’m not worth shit.”
Because that was exactly what I had been thinking, I hurried to say, “That’s not true!”
“Oh, I’m fine at sums. Fine, fine,” said Queelic, and giggled. It gave me the creeps. “You never said where you got those scars.”
“A bear.”
“Really? Then you’re not a witch?”
“Do I look like one?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t know anything.” He flapped his hand toward Aieh, then toward the horizon with
its dreaming islands. “Nothing’s what I thought. Dad doesn’t know about this. Dad’s not out here at all.”
I walked up and down the shingle. Nall did not come back. I could not sit or lie down, with every moment more uneasy; I started to climb the bank, thinking to walk on the green grass by the shrines, but quick as a fish, Aieh stood in front of me, knife in hand. “Stay,” she said.
In Kitchen Hessdish I said to her silver face, “You’re a pig’s daughter. Your blood stinks.”
She replied in Rig. Maybe she said the same thing. I turned back to the beach, trying not to think what I thought: that Nall had gone on, swimming, to the Gate.
Time itself had changed. Queelic had said, day after tomorrow, but on that beach there was only this moment, the green wave next after this one. Aieh tinkered at her boat until she ran out of ropes to toy with. She pretended not to look out to sea, but I saw her do it. It was what I was doing. Queelic had fallen asleep and sprawled snoring on the shingle; I looked at him instead. When at last I turned back to the dissolving waves, Nall was wading out of the sea.
I drew breath to call to him. Did not. Neither did Aieh, though she rose.
The water had made him ruddy and beautiful. He stood apart from us both, silent, retying his breechclout. Aieh went to him, speaking in the Rigi’s tongue—beseeching, nudging her chin toward the west.
He did not look at either of us. “I am going to the Gate,” he said.
So it was me he chose. Not her. I clasped my hands, dizzy with victory.
Aieh paled, she drooped. In a still, dull voice she said, “I must go back to the caves. I went hunting that flesh-eater, and never gave Tadde his rope.”
She lifted a fold of the sealskin that shone around her waist. A slender cord was bound above her belt, crisscrossing the silvery constellation of the Hunter. She passed this cord round and round her body, gathering it, and when she had all of it, she tossed the coil from hand to hand as if she did not care. It was like the horsehair rope that had bound me at the guardhouse, but made of exquisitely tiny plaits, braided, rebraided, braided again.
Queelic sat up sleepily. “That’s hair,” he said in his too-loud voice. Then, “It’s your hair.”
The rope was very long, and slim as a snake’s tail; it would never bear weight. But Aieh lifted a length of it and pulled. The muscles strained in her slender arms. “Four days making, never sleeping. I put words in it.”
“What’s it for?” said Queelic.
“Binding.”
“Binding what?”
“You are so stupid! When you die, you will be dirt! But when we die, we with skins”—she shot a desperate glance at Nall—”we will be our seals again and swim with our ancestors. This rope will bind Tadde to his skin.”
Queelic said humbly, “Other people’s religions are hard to understand.”
“Do you think this sealskin is part of me, Pimple Boy? I will show you—”
She began to unbuckle her belt. Blushing, Queelic said, “No, no! It’s clothes, I believe you!”
“Clothes!” She buckled the belt again. “Only for ceremony. It was bound to me when I was born; the men of my clan chanted for me at the shrines there. They will bind it to me again when I die.” She jerked her chin at Nall. “That man had no skin to bind, when he died. They burned it.”
“The thing in the cave—” Queelic looked peaked. “I mean, your brother. He had a sealskin.”
“Marked with the sign of a hand, my Tadde! And he will be a seal. But if no man chants at the shrines, he will not stay with the Rigi. He will swim away who knows where, and someday, when I am my seal, he will not know me.”
“Nobody would chant?”
“The Reirig set a watch on Sell; no man could leave. But I am not a man.”
“No,” said Queelic.
“Do you have a brother, Black Boot?”
“Lots.”
“And you, girl?”
“No.”
“Then you will not understand. I will not let my Tadde leave me, the way—the way one other did. If I were a man, I would know the chants; but I am not. So I will go to the cave and bind him to his skin with my hair. Only—now I must look at him again.”
Queelic got to his knees. “You shouldn’t. It’s not nice to see. Miss—I mean Miss Aieh—isn’t there some other way to bind him?”
“With blood,” she said. “But that needs a death. Better the rope, for he cannot have the chants.”
Nall said, “I know those chants.”
Aieh hugged the rope to her breasts; she threw her arms around him. Snatching at his wrist, she tried to tug him toward the shrines.
“But I am not a Rig.”
“Yes, you are! You swam away lost, because no one bound you. But your heart found the way back. And Tadde loves you; how could he not come to your voice?”
Nall turned to me. “I will do this. For Tadde.”
Aieh pushed the coiled rope into his hand. “Then he will not need this. I give it to you.”
He took it. “We’ll be back directly,” he said, “and then we must away.”
They walked toward the shrines. I saw Aieh’s hand slide down his arm and into his hand.
I sat down with Queelic and, like him, looked out to sea.
“Men with muscles,” he said. “Women like them.”
Nall came back from the shrines as he had gone—with Aieh, and silent. He did not want my help with the manat. He touched my hand once, then began to stow the meager stores, making sure the float bladders were firmly wedged at bow and stern. He had coiled the hair rope tight and small and tied it to his belt with a thong.
He glanced at me now and again, but I did not know how to talk to him, what to say. I felt as though a dark flood had risen, pushing everything askew; my words were all crooked in me.
Aieh’s face was tear-marked and bright. She climbed about in her own boat, tightening the lashings and inspecting its greasy, translucent hull, pretending to do what she had already done. All the while she looked at Nall, talking and talking in Rig. He no longer tried to make her speak Plain, though he answered her in it, in monosyllables. Her glances at me were secretive, brief.
Queelic’s face had reddened with sun. He sat staring west over the water. Now and then he sneaked a look at Aieh. When she caught him at it, she stared back boldly, and he dropped his eyes to his boots.
I could not bear it. I went to Nall at the manat and said, “Let me help.”
He was tying a length of hemp to the bow line of oiled hide and barely looked up. I thought, Who kissed me on the sandspit? Who was I with last night? Where has that man gone?
“I’ll teach you a knot,” he said. “A knot that will not slip, that ties together two ropes made of different stuff.”
I did not want to learn about knots. I wanted him to say he was sorry, that he loved me, only me, forever. I wanted him to explain what Aieh was to him, what he wanted, what I could do. The words sat in my throat. The knot was what he offered, so I learned that, hemp in one hand and braided hide in the other.
Aieh watched us. When Nall paid no attention to her, she stalked toward Queelic, who put his hand to his throat.
Nall nodded at my work. “On the water a rope is safety.”
So Aieh had given him safety; my own hair was barely long enough to braid. I handed back the knotted line. “Nall—”
He looked up. My heart clenched around my voice; I looked away and said, “What—what now?”
“The Gate.” Then, in an undertone, “Kat, Kat. I wish you had not come.”
I hugged my elbows.
“I was wrong to ask you. Wrong to let you. I thought it was meant. I thought—”
“Let me?” I said in a half whisper. “Who are you, my father? I chose to come!”
“And I let you. I have brought you to ruin. Aieh—”
“Don’t tell me—” I began to say, Don’t tell me about Aieh! but in the middle it became, “Don’t tell me what to do!” I put my arms around him, but he
felt wrong, all bones and angles instead of the sweet fit of the night before.
He got a soft grip on my curls and tipped my head back to make me look at him. He spoke in Rig.
I said, “I can’t understand you.”
“I know. And I can’t say it in Plain. What have I done?”
“Nothing!” I pulled away and stamped my foot. “J called you! I chose!”
“You don’t know what you chose.”
“Neither do you!”
Queelic squealed. Aieh was inspecting him fore and aft as if to see what a Black Boot was built of, ignoring his attempts to beat her off. She peered into his ear and said loudly, “We are leaving. You will come with me.”
“With you?” he said, his collar all awry. “West?”
I thought, She’ll get him into mid-ocean and help him over the side.
“Oh, I’d love to!” he said.
“If I leave you here, you will foul the shrines,” she said. “I will take you to the Home Stone, to a hidden place. There you can sit until you starve, or you can wander and be killed; whichever you like.”
I turned back to Nall, but our words had died. Bent over the manat, he said, “The Home Stone has a thousand bays and coves; one could hide there forever. Maybe. Though one must land unseen.”
“I told you the landings are unwatched!” said Aieh. “Today every Rig but the sick and the old is in pilgrimage, traveling to the Gate arem and the Reirig’s throne. The whole world will dance tonight. But not you, Pimple Boy; you will sit at Linn Cove and tell over every riddle you know.”
I said to Nall, “We’ll paddle through the islands, then on to the Gate?”
“It will be enough to raise Linn Cove with a whole skin.”
“I thought—You said we weren’t going to the Home Stone, but past it—”
“To Linn Cove first.”
“But they’ll see us!”
Aieh answered for him. “There are paths on the water as there are paths in the forest. Do you think we are fools? No one will see us.”
