by Betsy James
He looked at Hsuu, a glare like an ape’s. “A man’s son wanted to kill me once. That man was loyal—perhaps. So loyal that for my sake he killed his own son—perhaps. Or did he have other plans? Because that son has sought to return from the dead, on this night of all nights, to kill me.” He pushed Nall’s body with his foot. “But see—he is dead again himself, and he has brought me a gift besides. The plots of my enemies always fail.”
He bared his teeth at Hsuu, grin or threat.
Hsuu seemed no less moved by this, and no more, than a wave by rain. He pursed his lips.
The Reirig glared about at the crowd. “The world is made ready. The wave rises, the towering waters shall fall upon the sorry shore, and I am your priest and king!”
Turning back to me, he wiped my eyes with his thumb—not as Nall had done on the sandspit, but as if he cleaned a dog’s eyes. “I am the Dark Moon,” he said. “Do not cry anymore, Sun Girl. You shall be my wife. Moon shall have Sun, and the world shall be whole again.” He stared around at the crowd. “Its warring parts shall be one, because it shall be mine. All of it. I am king of the universe,” he said.
His laugh was sincere and easy. I had known men in Creek who laughed like that, who hunted bears and women and got them. Raím had been such a man, once.
The Reirig took Nall’s arm and jerked him to sitting. Nall lolled; I knelt and held him up. In front of his half-open eyes the Reirig swung his lance like a pendulum, butt end, blade end.
It thrummed. The black blade twinkled. He spun it; its glitter and hum made spirals in the firelight as his hands, like a juggler’s, tossed and caught the shaft that seemed to squirm like an eel, to fill the space around us as whirlpools fill a tide race.
I stared in a trance. I could not even be afraid. Nall raised his face to the sparkle like a child with a pinwheel, and in that instant the blade slithered past me and brushed his breast. Zik!
He did not flinch. The Reirig snatched the lance out of the air, grounded the shaft, and leaned on it.
This happened between breath and breath. Left to right, a slender wound crossed Nall’s heart, and a tiny rivulet of blood ran down over the nipple. He did not move.
Hsuu looked on, pursing his lips.
The Reirig smiled behind his tattoo. He reached to play with my curls again; they pleased him. He used them to pull me up, so that I had to let go of Nall and stand. “Girlie, come along to me.”
I tried to shake my head, No.
“Come along,” he said. But when he let go of my hair, I knelt, gathered Nall out of the sand, and held him.
The Reirig laughed. “That is dead, girlie. Leave it, and come along to me.” He took my wrist, as one might coax a child to lay down a dead kitten.
“No.” I could see the pulse in Nall’s neck, his eyes racing behind closed lids.
The Reirig’s pull at my wrist grew harsh. “You want that, girlie? Bring it. I give it to you. You may keep it until it stinks. Come along to me now.” He swung the lance point to hang at my neck.
I stood up, lifting Nall as well as I could. “Get up now,” I said, wheedling like a mother. He was mine; everybody said so. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s go.”
He rose, staggering. The crowd whispered; I had forgotten them. The Reirig turned toward the drum, motioning me to follow. Nall’s legs buckled. I could not hold him up, and fell with him.
Softly the crowd closed behind us. A hundred hands raised us, they held us up and touched us forward, we were carried by hands like driftwood on a wave.
In the press was Aieh, her insolence gone. She stared at Nall, her face all horror. I threw her a look of hate and pulled him safely past her, through groves of human shadow, between shining fires, along the beach to the edge of the seal colony, its stink and roar.
The seals were restless as tied dogs; they groaned and squirmed away—even from Hsuu, who trotted behind us. Those closest to the water plunged into it, then jerked and came back, invisibly tethered.
Nall reeled like a drunk. The drum got louder until it was only loud, and then I saw it, like a whale’s back on the sand. The arms of eight drummers rose and fell against the smoky sky.
Seaward of it, the seals moaned and snaked their necks. Landward, firelit ladders stood out of the earth, flames leaped, piles of rocks smoked red in a clutter that sprawled uphill into the dark. It was the inferno, the fiery place to which—so my cousins said—my mother had gone.
Then I saw that the ladders stood in hatchways that led underground; the smoking rock piles were chimneys for underground rooms, the flames were firelight. There was a rack with drying fish, a thatched frame that sheltered a loom, a little cradle. Thin women and children moved among their meager goods, cooking at the fires. Not an inferno but a kitchen: an arem, a warrenhouse.
Before it stood a pavilion built of the rib cage of some ocean leviathan, softened inside with furs. This too was the mouth of an arem—a fine one, for the women who peeked from it were plump and coy, and fat children hid behind their knees. When they saw the Reirig, they scuttled away below like mice. Before the pavilion was a throne made of an enormous jawbone with blunt teeth. The Reirig tossed his sealskin down across it.
A knot of men greeted him. Nall had said that an elder need not be old; many were younger than the Reirig. They wore jet-edged sealskins and ivory anklets; they were hardy and nervous and armed. Like wolves of second rank they watched their leader every instant, reading him for any weakness.
He showed none. He prowled among them. His elders did not grovel but inclined their heads a little, watching him from the corners of their eyes. Some were half tranced with dancing and moved with the beat where they stood.
Hsuu had gone to stand among them. Wherever the Reirig was not, he was, like a fish that moves without a sound. The elders watched him, too.
I stopped walking. The hands that held Nall released him and he fell, pulling me with him onto the trodden sand. We were not far from the throne, next to a little skin lean-to where a guard might shelter from the rain. A bony dog lay there; it rose and licked Nall’s face. The drum beat. I could not hear the Gate as sound but only as fear; I could not feel anything, or think in words.
The Reirig muttered with the elders. Whatever he said, they did not like it, and one who wore a bandolier full of flint knives dared to raise his voice. Quick as a wasp, the Reirig snatched a knife and put the tip of it under the man’s ribs. The blood ran down, and he had to stand on tiptoe not to be gutted. The Reirig held out his hand. Gasping, the elder pressed that hand to his forehead, and the knife was withdrawn.
Hsuu watched. Sometimes he looked at me or at Nall. Sometimes he looked over the heads of the crowd, west, toward the sea.
The Reirig left the elders and came to where I crouched with Nall. He tossed aside the bloody knife and smiled. “Curs,” he said. “What is there yet to do? Only to dance the best dance, then go east and kill.”
He took my chin between finger and thumb. When I pulled away, he laughed; it was not even cruel laughter. “Pretty woman,” he said. “It is no use to love the weak. The strong will give you strong children. Leave your pet, and come along in to me.” He gestured toward the pavilion of fur and bone.
“No,” I said. But it meant yes, for I had nothing to make it no, only Nall across my lap like a corpse.
The Reirig laughed again, so sure of himself that his shoulders dropped, relaxed as a child’s. He took hold of my hair, turned up my face, and kissed me.
In Creek a man had kissed me like that once, as if he had the right. My mind was too frightened to help, but my body remembered and I writhed away.
The Reirig thought this even better sport. He caught my elbows, pulling me to him. “This salmon fights me?” His teeth, sharp as a ferret’s, snapped at the air before my face, my neck. He dragged me through the crowd of elders and warriors that parted to let him through, to the mouth of the bone pavilion made soft with furs the way a spider’s hole is lined with silk. It smelled of heat down there, of food
and blood. I heard soft laughter.
Then I heard, over the drumbeat, a different commotion. The elders heard; they shifted their gaze from the Reirig’s prize-taking.
He heard it too. He liked commotion, it seemed, for he let me go and stared over the warrenhouse fires, the swaying crowd.
Something white flashed and flapped there: Queelic’s shirt. Queelic was in it, carried high on hands and shoulders, shielding his face with his arms.
20
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Katyesha’s a liar!
Say a prayer, pull her hair,
Roll her in the mire!
Children’s Taunt. Upslope.
QUEELIC’S BODY FLAILED in the air. I heard his muffled squeak as they carried him toward the Reirig’s throne, saw the hundred hands upon him like the crabs on Tadde’s body.
I was hot with terror, with the Reirig’s snapping teeth and my body that had said No! when my mind could not. But when he let me go, something else did too. I ducked under his elbow and ran toward Queelic, yelling.
I thought the Reirig would kill me and did not care. I ran to Queelic’s tormentors and shouted, “Put that down!” As if they were dogs and Queelic a stolen roast.
They were young men, with bone ankle rings and faces like blades. They looked at me, at the Reirig, at Hsuu, who had checked the Reirig’s leap after me with some murmured word. They put Queelic down. Not gently, but at least he was on the sand, making no effort to get away. “Queelic!” I said.
He lowered his arms. He was smiling.
“Kat!” He sat up, trying to straighten his shirt. He had lost one boot. “I thought you’d be here,” he said. “I started to walk west, and I ran into these folks. I think I got here about as fast as you did!”
He dusted his sleeves. The forest of sinewy thighs moved to the drumbeat as the Reirig stalked toward us, showing his teeth. I grabbed Queelic by the arm and said, “This is my brother! Don’t touch him!”
Queelic waved me off with his bright, demented smile. “It’s fine, Kat. They all speak Plain. We talked as we came along.” He looked shy. “It’s nice of you to call me your brother.”
The Reirig brushed me aside. Queelic beamed at him. Clambering to his feet, he stood in his one boot and held out his hand. “You’re the boss, I guess? I’m Queelic, sir.”
The Reirig sneered at the hand. Queelic said, “I’m afraid ‘Queelic’ will have to do. I told these fellows my full name, but it seems in your language it means something rude. I’m a Black Boot.”
“Black Boot,” said the Reirig.
“I’m down to one boot, though.”
“Black Boot!”
Queelic put his hands in his pockets and grinned. “Born and bred,” he said.
The Reirig had laughed before, but not like this. He rocked on his heels; he roared. His spearmen began to nudge and chuckle, and the elders tittered—all but Hsuu.
Queelic laughed too. “Kat, these folks do love a joke. They told me some good ones already, but, well, they’re not nice. Oh, I forgot—” Turning to the youths who had carried him, he stuck out his bare ankle and said, “Weren’t you going to tie me up?”
They looked at one another, at the mirthful Reirig. Shrugged. Someone produced a length of rope and tied one end to Queelic’s ankle, the other to a stake, as if he were a pet parrot.
“Thanks,” said Queelic. “Kat, where’s Nall? Did he go already?”
I made a little gesture.
He peered. “That’s Nall? Doesn’t look like him. Hey, though—there’s Aieh!” He waved. “Aieh!”
Aieh knelt beside Nall, his face in her hands.
I ran to them. “Leave him!” I slapped her hands away. “Haven’t you hurt him enough? He’s mine!”
“Never!”
“He is!”
“Ask him whose he is!”
“He can’t answer. You killed him, tricking him into this. Oh, I don’t mean that,” I said, embracing Nall. “You’re all right, I’m here, I won’t let her hurt you—”
“He is not your child!”
“Who else will save him?”
“Himself,” said Aieh. “If he is able. Think of that, girl, before you strangle him with the rope you throw.”
Her hands darted to take Nall’s face. His eyes kindled a little; I knocked her hands away, and he sank again, out of reach. Weeping, she withdrew, leaving me in possession.
The Reirig watched all this, as pleased as a child at a puppet show who waits for the part where they chop off the clown’s head. Clearly, he could not decide which toy he wanted: me to play with in his fur pavilion, Queelic to humiliate, Nall to kill, or the wild dance itself. He stretched his arms wide, threw back his head, and howled.
Something like a dogfight broke out in the crowd to his left, a yarring and worrying, but of human voices.
The Reirig sniffed like a hound. Then he sprang away from the elders and gestured to his men; they joined him at a clattering run. The lot would have passed me without interest—it seemed the Reirig liked blood even better than women—but he saw me from the tail of those long eyes and paused to crow, “Thus are the Black Boots? I am the man the universe loves! Enemies come to kill me, and they are all fools.” He kissed me because the other men were watching. “You like dead men and their kin?” he said. He knew who Aieh was and did not care. “In two days’ time I shall give you plenty!”
He rattled off to his quarrel. I had an instant clear of nightmare, like the one I had had after Tadde’s ghost spoke. In it I thought, That man is not half-and-half. He is all one simple thing—himself—and he is happy. All that his happiness costs is everyone else’s.
So then I had only to kneel in the sand and keep my arms around my property. Nall’s eyes were closed. The trickle of blood from his breast slowed and dried. The Rigi danced. Under the drumbeat I could feel the wave rising, standing, the wave that must topple and break.
In glimpses between the men’s bodies I saw Queelic in the crowd of younger ones, cross-legged at the end of his tether. It was no youth who sat closest to him, but Hsuu, his tattooed head inclined, like a sea god listening to prayers. He seemed to ask questions.
Queelic seemed to listen, and to offer cheerful answers. He did not look parrotlike, but like a big, bedraggled eagle.
I gave up calling Nall’s name. Not even his baby name moved him. Once I put my lips close to his ear and began to whisper that other name, the one he had given to me; he withered like paper in fire, and I stopped in the middle, saying, “No!” I sat against the lean-to without feeling or thought, numb with the drum.
Together with the Gate’s roar it filled every space, the way heart’s drub and blood’s hiss fill the body. At first it was just a thump, endlessly repeated. Then I began to hear other rhythms playing off it: ticks and clacks, trills and flourishes.
These came from the crowd of dancers. A smiling woman knocked a gourd with a spoon. A young boy whacked two bones together. Everyone with hands clapped and slapped their own or others’. I had never had a community that was mine—not Upslope, not Creek, not even Downshore, where I had lived for one day—but the thought came to me, That drum is the drum that beat for all of us in the first home of all, through nine changes of the moon. No one is a stranger here. Not even me.
Tricking and playing with the drum’s rhythm were rasps, rattles, clappers, castanets. There were no stringed instruments; I began to crane and look for them, but there was no dindarion, no wood and wire and gut bridging the gap between the world of things and the human voice.
But voices there were. Songs and songs, in Rig mostly, but sometimes in Plain. The singers dreamed as they sang, yet they looked at me—strangers’ faces, kind or angry or timid or wild. Somewhere, sometime, a person whose name I could not remember had told me to listen for songs. So I did.
Love me, loose me,
Grip me, fly;
Sea on stone grinding,
Bird in the blue sky.
A young man with bone bracelets sang
that, treading and sliding. He threw me a kiss before he spun away. After him a sad, slim girl came chanting.
I am she who will use life.
Give it to me.
I am she who will drink it up.
My mouth is ready.
The crowd streamed past, masked or barefaced or with sealskins pulled up like hoods. Clans and factions: well-fed men in skins heavy with jet, the Reirig’s; lean men, quiet or quarrelsome; women with thin faces and strong feet; old women; old men. Each had to touch me, touch Nall. I stopped pushing away their hands.
“Nall,” they said, singing. Knuckles brushed his lips. Sometimes a voice said, “Bij,” but never that other name. Women with sharp cheekbones, their hair unbound to the ground, came singing and stroked my face. Men with faces like hatchets sang as they touched Nall’s feet.
They brought their children, naked and few: a newborn tiny as a cat; toddlers sleeping in arms or blinking with eyes too big for their faces. Twin girls, each dressed only in a string of beads, leaned on me weightless as wrens and kissed me before they were lifted away.
A skein of children danced, diving under one another’s linked hands.
One comes in and over,
Two go out and under,
Three come in and sigh,
Four go out and cry,
Five come in and stumble,
Six go out and crumble,
Seven come in and groan,
Eight go out alone,
Nine come in like spring tide
Over the green bright lands—
Deep water, lover!
Ten start it over.
They kissed, clapped hands, and let each other go. Their bare feet wrote in the sand as wind writes on the water.
No one moved to help, none to hurt. All eyes looked through me. Sometimes one would come with direct eyes, whispering “Selí” or “ama” or “singer, singer,” but those always said “Aieh,” too, and I would not listen. I held Nall tighter and they went away.
