by Betsy James
I jumped. My whole skin was an ear. Again near-speech, a querulous wail. I thought, The trees are full of souls! Then saw two black stump shapes that bobbed their heads. Owls.
Nall was listening for something else. His eyelids puckered as if in pain. Then he was off again, following Aieh’s silver ghost through the grove. The stars were so bright that they cast shadows. We skirted another meadow, where hissing grass leaped in the wind and the land began to fall away on either side.
The rasp of the wind filled my hearing. Then I thought it was my own blood I heard, hissing in my veins. The more afraid I got, the louder it grew, until I covered my ears and it lessened, so I knew it was outside of me.
“Nall!” I said, whisper or shout.
He halted as if shot. I crashed into him and said, “There’s a sound.”
“The Gate.”
“What—”
“Everything rushing through.” He jerked his chin in the direction we were going. “In the sea beyond the bay there, beyond the dance.”
“The dance—but that’s where the Rigi are!”
“I am a Rig—,” he said, and stopped. Aieh circled back, looking at him without expression. He shook his head, said, “—and—and I know where we are. Self lies at our right hand, there. At our left is the dance.”
“But—”
“You should not have come.”
“I’ll stop here, then! I’ll go back! If you don’t want me—”
He took my wrist and pulled me on, west. I thought he held me so that I would not run off. Then I thought it was for comfort, because he was afraid. Then I could not think, for that sound was everywhere. He let me go, and we ran on into the noise of blood.
We dodged through a wood and out again, onto a broad ridge hummocky with grass, littered with pale boulders like statues in every shape stone can weather to. The rushy roar grew louder, became a giant breath. Aieh flew west straight as a homing bee. The ridge narrowed, but I could see nothing, only stones, and caves under stones; we came to a promontory jagged with spines and slabs, and began to climb among them.
Aieh pushed past us, scrambled ahead. I clambered with feet and hands. Nall’s heels flashed at my eye level.
He pulled himself over a high step, reached down, and without waiting for my hand he dragged me up by the slack of my shift. I landed on my belly, rolled into Aieh, jerked away from her, and sprawled, staring west over water.
We lay on a rocky headland, the north jaw of the mouth of a great, round, west-facing bay. The water in the bay was still and crinkled, but outside its mouth the western sea came marching in rank after rank of waves, an army of water striking the shore, over and over forever.
The sound had softened and grown vast, just noise. Fallen to my left, Nall dropped his head onto his forearms. Raised it.
“Las,” he said. And in the Plain tongue, “The Gate.”
I followed his eyes. At the bay’s mouth a black rock stood in the night sea. It was split in two, like a shrine in the sea.
East before it and west beyond it, shining shoals of water spread in fans too wide, too long to be what they must be: the tide rushing through the break in the rock. That was what made the sound, as though all the water in the bay, in the sea, were tipping through that gap.
The split rock was textureless, quite black. No starlit birds nested there; it was not speckled with nests or dung. Just east of it, the only other rock in the sea, a tiny skerry broke the wash: Stillness.
I was numb. I thought, That doesn’t look hard to get to.
Nall’s lips moved. I looked at his face in the starlight and I was nowhere in it, had never been in it. He was pure intent, set on that split black rock.
Aieh touched his arm. “Selí,” she said, nodding to the north. I could see nothing there, only darkness and waves breaking. Nall’s fixed look wavered. “Selí,” she said again, but softly. “Ama.”
He nodded but did not turn. Instead he began to creep, flat on his belly, to the south rim of the promontory. She hesitated, then crept after him.
I would not be left. I followed the pale soles of their feet, crawled to Nall’s elbow, crowded my cheek next to his, and looked where he looked, straight down.
Seaward was the Gate; landward, the bay spread out round as the moon. Below us earth and ocean met in a shining edge. The water side was wrinkled glass, the land side a curving beach thick with rocks. Dark, long, crowded in hundreds, in thousands, the rocks moved, like the shrines.
“Rigoi,” Nall whispered. Seals. All the seals in the sea.
Big seals, little seals crammed the long beach, singly and in clots and bunches, dark bodies on pale sand. The shifting wind brought the stink of their crowded life, crowded sleep, its belches, farts, moans, and snores. It brought the sound of a drum.
Nall gazed raptly down, as though that fertile, squirming herd were his home. “Hom meshai,” he said, and his tired, tense face was glad.
Seeing that village of flesh, I knew I stood outside it and always would. I had splashed in the creek; I had run the high mountains and walked the dusty inland roads; but this was a different place. It was too much sea.
Aieh’s face was as expressionless as a cat’s. The pelt around her waist shone rumpled silver, the sleek fur on her skull made her head look wet. I thought, It’s true: Aieh is a seal.
Nall looked at me. He seemed puzzled. “Dua ‘eam?”
“What?”
He did not answer. Aieh hid a smile. She nudged him to look inland, beyond the seals, where the dark island glittered with fires—red stars that blinked and bobbed to the sound of the drum. The Gate roared.
“Aremoi?” said Nall. He stared from me to those starry fires. “Eh! Aremoi Lasai. “
Aieh slid back from the edge. “Im Selí, Bij? Selí!”
His half-dreaming face. “Ki nibo—”
She smiled again. “Nibo kashoé.”
I said, “I can’t understand!”
Nall put his hand on my mouth. His hand was cold. He gaped like a fish in air, said, “Ovai—ne, ne!” Tried again: “Or this journey has been nothing. Come with me.” Still on his belly, he scrambled sideways. Not north to Selí, but south and east, toward the fires.
I followed him because he asked me to. Because I had to be wanted by him—for certain, forever.
Aieh came with us. We crept down among rocks, toward the drum that beat, monotonous, like something that keeps happening—not urgent, but inevitable.
“Nall—”
He made a fierce gesture: Be quiet.
I was quiet, and followed.
Once down from the rocks we pushed through scrubby beach plum and low, sticky weeds that smelled like milk. We crawled up a windy dune on our bellies. The sand was loose and cool. I crowded Nall’s heels. Aieh squirmed alongside him like a lizard.
Below the slipping rim he stopped. When I nudged up level with him, he pinned my wrist. So close that I felt the heat of his breath, he said, “Do you want to know who I am?”
Terrified, I nodded.
“Then look.”
Slow as moonrise, we pushed our heads over the crest of the dune.
The dance was there. Right at me—loud sound, dark motion. Flesh pumped and gleamed; the darkness was fur, it was gaps between shine, whatever was not flesh. Seals dancing—no—I saw legs, teeth, faces human and not human. I could see nothing long enough to know it. Fish in a boiling ocean, haunch and shoulder, groin and straining mouth, dreams grown bodies. Half-and-half and a thousand halves, dark as the woodbox, rage and naked joy: the Rigi.
Whimpering, I ducked my head.
Nall’s eyes were all blackness, like a seal’s. He rose, he stood. On the crest of the dune he raised his arms and spoke his name, the name of a dead man.
“Hai!” cried Aieh. “I knew if he heard the drum, he would remember who he is!”
He froze. He had been seen.
The pulse of the dance went chaotic, like tide rips meeting. From the crowded darkness rose a cry, and the R
igi poured up the dune toward us.
19
Rararanga!
Thunder in the stone!
Rararam!
The house falls down!
Rararash!
Ouma gnaws her bone!
Rai! Rai!
Wailing in the town!
Earthquake Chant. Creek.
I FELT NOTHING. Blankness. Then rushing, and a black weight as Nall threw himself on me.
I thought he would devour me and screamed with my mouth full of sand. But he locked his arms around me as together we were grabbed and swung high, like a turtle lifted by an eagle to be dropped on the rocks.
We were dropped. Just let go of, Nall underneath. Voices screamed, “Uhui! Uhui!” Aieh’s voice screamed other sounds, high as a gull’s cry and unheeded. The firelight stuttered with running shadows. Nall lay on his back gaping, not breathing. I wrenched myself away from him.
“Get up,” said. Everything was motion and cries, I could see nothing to name. “Get up!”
He did not move.
A white fire rushed up in me, bleaching everything. I scrambled to my feet, straddled his body, and shrieked at the dark, “Stop it! Let me see you clear!”
The motion did not stop. But it slowed, like stirred water settling, the sediment sinking down. The drum took up its steady beat. In the hiss of the Gate the darkness circled us counterclockwise, becoming, in brief glimpses, teeth, claws, eyes.
Nall sat up, forcing me to stumble backward. Then he stood, trying in a blind, clumsy way to get in front of me.
The center of a circle has no front. All I could think was, He has no skin. His lips were drawn back from teeth as bare as a skull’s. I wrestled with him. Fear made me so angry that I shook—furious at his nakedness, his stupidity in bringing us here.
Murmuring, the crowd drew close.
He stopped fighting. I got my back to him and stretched my arms back around him, felt him press against me. Somewhere in the jangled shadow Aieh’s voice screamed on and on.
I tucked my chin down on my neck as the Rigi put out their hands and began to touch us.
At first it was a tapping soft as moths at a window. It grew firmer until it was a cat’s tongue, the nudging nose of a dog—a caress, insistent and yearning, like love.
Nall shrank from it. I hooked one arm back over his neck, and he hid his face in my hair.
I shouted at the circling shadows. “What do you want?”
No answer. Only the pressure, restrained and urgent, of many and many hands. The drum still beat. I saw the shimmer of sealskins; the claws were necklaces of claws, the eyes and teeth belonged to wild masks. The instant I recognized them as masks they were lowered. Behind them were wild faces.
I let go of Nall. He slid to his knees. Among the nudging hands I pushed back with my own hands, saying, “Stop it. Don’t touch him. Tell me what you want.”
The faces belonged to women, men, children—thin and windblown, mostly naked, half covered by the glittering skins.
They are not nightmares, I thought. They’re people.
I looked and looked, at brown skin and pale skin, hook nose and broad nose, hard mouth and sweet mouth, belly and breast. They moved to the beat of the drum, as though they dreamed. I looked at the hands that touched me, and among them I saw Nall’s.
I looked again. It was his, the hand that had caressed me in the death cave, but gone the color of shadow. When next it blinked past in the circling press, I took it and held it.
“Hsuu,” I said. “Old Sea.”
The circling stopped. So did the murmuring, and Aieh’s wailing voice. I looked at the father who had killed his son.
I had expected a cruel face. It was not. It was Nall’s face grown older, neither happy nor sad, on a hard, small, graying man who was naked except for a worn sealskin over one shoulder. Every plane, every ridge and crevice of his body was written over with dark spirals that by daylight must be blue.
From the edge of my eye I saw Nall’s face, stunned and open, so like his father’s in shape and set that I thought he must be sucked right into the other like a raindrop into the sea. There was nothing to put between them but myself. This I did, shouldering up big like a bear who sees the hunter near her cub. The Gate roared.
Hsuu’s face was expressionless, full of all expression; it seemed to ripple, like windblown water. Sweetness, outrage, fascination, fear—each moved him, none stayed. The sum was a dangerous stillness.
I said the first thing I thought. “I brought back your son.”
He pursed his tattooed lips. “My son is dead.”
“He is not!”
“I killed him.”
I pressed Nall’s face to my thigh. “You did not! Here he is. I called him, and he came to me!”
The crowd murmured, shifted. Away behind them a chutter of motion had begun.
Hsuu said gently, “I killed him with the hand you hold.”
I dropped that hand. I grew huge, enraged like a mother bear. To get Nall safe I devoured him, and tore Aieh with my claws. “If you killed him, I gave him life again! I called him and I named him. He belongs to me. I am Ouma the Bear!”
“Bear,” said Hsuu.
He would not know what a bear was. I raised my hands and raked them through the air, then pulled down the neck of my shift to show my scars. “See my tattoo? I made this world, all of it! I made your son—I made him new. His name is Nall now!”
The dreaming faces of the crowd turned to one another. “Nall, Nall” went whispering round.
Hsuu made a slight move forward, like a seal that noses its dead pup. I blocked him with my body. I felt so strong that I thought, Bian was right—it was Ouma herself who ate me.
As Ouma, I drew breath and roared like a she-bear.
But what came out was “Me-e-eh!” A bear cub’s squall.
I put my fist to my mouth.
Hsuu stood patiently. Was he curious? Loving? Angry? These feelings crossed his face, did not linger on it. Nall’s face was empty and growing emptier, the face of a man in a sinking boat who throws everything overside, everything, as he tries to stay afloat.
Hsuu said, “This man you own—”
As he spoke, a grove of spears clattered out of the crowd, upright and rattling like bamboo in wind. Running men held them, fierce in skins and silver earrings. They were not dreaming, or perhaps their dream was war. When they saw Hsuu, they stopped their pressing and low shouts and straightened, in deference or uncertainty.
Hsuu withdrew a little. The spear thicket wavered, parted like grass before a snake. The crowd muttered, “Reirig, Reirig,” they drew their sealskins round them and stumbled aside, as from among the spearmen stepped a man with a lance.
The sealskin over his shoulder was sewn so full of jet that it was all ornament—I could scarcely see the fur. The lance was long. In my mind I had made the Reirig fat and old, like Ab Harlan. But he was young and tall and naked, the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
He was tattooed in bands across his calves, groin, and breast; his shaved skull was tattooed, and his mouth. He was beautiful in spite of this, or because of it. I had to look only at the tattoos, because if I looked at his body itself I felt terror, as one might before a god.
He planted the butt of the lance in the sand. The jet on his sealskin chimed. He had high cheekbones and long, light eyes that I could not meet.
The crowd had scrambled back, all but Hsuu. The Reirig scratched himself and yawned, his teeth sharp behind his tattooed lips. He was tense as a bow, but he feigned laziness as he prowled toward us. With the sandy butt of his spear he prodded Nall’s shoulder. He spoke to Hsuu in Rig; his voice was deep and without inflection, like a dog’s bark.
Hsuu answered. The Reirig gripped Nall’s hair and bent back his head, twisting until I thought Nall’s neck must break. I let go of him just as the Reirig did, and he fell backward like a cloth doll.
Then it was my hair the Reirig gripped. His body gave off heat like a horse after a race. H
e tucked the spear into the crook of his elbow and used one hand to tilt my head about while he ran the other down my bare arm. He put his hand to his blackened mouth, wet his fingers, and drew them down the lines of my scars. Past his shoulder the faces of the crowd were half hidden in smoke from the fires.
“Look at me, girlie,” he said in Plain.
I looked at him. My father had called me “girlie,” and the dead Seroy.
His long eyes narrowed and he smiled, his white teeth peeped. “Girlie, where have you come from?”
I did not speak. I no longer heard the Gate; its roar had become my mind itself. I could not think, or reason, or get away from the noise.
The Reirig shortened his grip on the lance and held the blade at my throat. Like Liu’s it was obsidian, black glass.
I whispered, “Creek.”
He did not know where that was. He did not like not knowing. His smile faded to black; the lance point slid from my chin to my breast.
“In the mountains,” I said. “East. Where the sun comes from.”
He rubbed my curls between his fingers. “You have come from the sun?”
Oh, then I remembered it, like a dream in a dream: the sun shining in Bian’s kitchen window, glittering in the fur of bears, traveling sometimes from dawn to sunset across a cobalt sky without one cloud. “Yes,” I said. My tears welled up, spilled down. “From the sun.”
He was not listening. He had found the pouch tied at my waist. He hefted it. “Gold.” His lip flared like a cat’s. “Do you think I need gold? I who will own the world? I am the One!” He let it drop against my hip. He fingered the spear shaft, fidgeted. He seemed to forget me, flushed with possession like a child with too many toys. Two of his guards were speaking in low voices; he sprang at them, snarling. They cowered. He turned away satisfied, saw me again, sauntered back.
“Girlie. Why have you come from the sun now, on this very night?”
“To—to—”
I need not have spoken. He knew the answer. He knew all answers; he did not even need to listen at the Gate. “To show the world that I am king,” he said, “and that the plans of those who covet my lance always fail.”
