by Betsy James
I clung to the songs like a swimmer to a floating log. The twin girls played hand slaps; I saw their mouths move but could not hear for the noise of the drum. I thought, That drum is the grandmother of all hand slaps.
I heard a song I knew.
I am the ash that snuffs the fire,
I am the knot that halts the loom,
I am the tangle of desire—
The Rigi’s song, but Nall’s new words. I would not listen, not to that! Nor did Nall seem to hear it. I wondered whether a messenger had run to Sell, to tell an old woman her singer had come home.
The Reirig’s wives and children did not dance or sing or touch me. They crept in and out of the furred pavilion, staring. Once the Reirig himself came, striding like a roebuck on his long legs and dragging a man by the hair. Away in a muddle of shadows another snarling, gnarring fight broke out, louder than the last; he bounded after it. If the Reirig was not divided, it seemed the Rigi were.
Nall’s eyes shifted, candles moving in an empty house. The noise rose like a fever, drawing the singers back into the dance until Nall and I knelt nearly alone. I looked for Queelic. The knot of young men had closed around him like a clot of ants on a wounded mouse. I could tell where he must be only by following the rope. Seeing no flash of blows, I thought, They’re touching him to death.
I shifted my arms on Nall’s waist. Under my fingers I felt the slippery loops of Aieh’s hair. I did not want to touch it and moved my hand away. The thong that tied the coil to his belt was half undone.
A rope is safety—but this rope was drowning him. I thought, That’s it! She has bound him to her with her rope.
“Nall.” I pretended to rouse him by tugging at his belt, but it was the rope I tugged at. It came away in my hand. I said, “Nall, look there, it’s Queelic.” With my free hand I turned his face toward the knot of warriors. With the other I slid the coil of rope under my thigh and sat on it.
His face stayed where I had turned it, though he did not seem to look at anything. The crowd of men around Queelic rose and melted into the dance—all but Hsuu, who squatted at Queelic’s shoulder like a blue toad.
Queelic saw me. He rose to hands and knees. Hsuu moved to block his path; Queelic spoke. Hsuu stood aside, and Queelic came to me crawling like a child, dragging the rope.
He reached the limit of his tether where I sat. He peered at Nall, then whispered, “Excuse me, Kat. Would you help me get this other boot off? Please?”
I shook my head in despair. Then shrugged. Why not? I let go of Nall, and Queelic put his booted foot in my lap, his tied ankle pointing toward the stake. As I wrestled the boot off, he said, “You knew about this!”
“What.”
“All of this! The Rigi. That’s why he brought you to be their queen.”
“I’m nobody’s queen.” I threw the boot aside and put my arms around Nall again.
“I never knew about this. Nobody ever said. They wouldn’t, though. Nobody says much about the world. I think that’s strange.” He looked again at Nall. “Kat, is he all right? I thought he must be praying. But he looks odd.”
“He’s fine, they knocked him out by mistake, it’s taking him a while to get his breath.”
Queelic looked doubtful. But he said, “I’m fine too.” He patted himself here and there. “I tried to get away at first. But how do you run away from these folks?” He stretched his arms, stared at the sky. “Look at that. So many stars! Kat, do you remember playing kickball? Well, you wouldn’t, you’re a girl. But that drum’s made me remember what you’re supposed to say before you start the game. It goes,
Kick in the ass,
Kick in the eye,
How many stars are in the sky?
Did you ever wonder how many stars there are?”
“Not really,” I said. But I was thinking, He’s gone mad like his father; now I have two babies to look after. As if I spoke to a four-year-old, I said, “An awful lot of stars.”
He frowned. “Did you ever wonder what stars are? Are they holes poked through to a bright place? Or are they fires up there?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“I could find out. If I paid attention and didn’t lie.” His face hardened. “That’s what I do at Dad’s place, when I’m not on customs duty. I use numbers to lie. I fix the books so people will think they owe us more money than they do. Like Downshore—they owe us a lot, but not half as much as we say they do. If they’d learn accounting, they’d figure it out. But they won’t—they’re afraid of money, so they trust us. They shouldn’t trust us.” He looked at me with clear eyes. “I’m shit, like I said. Because numbers aren’t to lie with. Numbers are truth.” Laying his hand on my knee, he said, “Hear me, Katyesha Marashya N’Ab Drem! I won’t lie anymore. Not ever.”
He gazed at me, grave and straight. With a shock I realized he was perfectly sane. He had just fallen through, all at once, into a deeper layer of himself—as if he had crashed through rotten floorboards into the basement.
Maybe he read my thoughts. He said, “I think I’m a little crazy. That’s all right. I was crazier at Dad’s. There I was tied to a desk, now I’m tied to a stake.” He laughed and shook the rope. “These folks live like birds or fish. The way Aieh does, just her skin on. And that old blue man, he’s the one to watch out for! The fancy boss is kind of stupid.”
He leaned in and whispered. “If you ask me, Hsuu’s the real boss. A strange one. It’s like he’s watching, waiting for something. I asked him about those stones we saw—the split ones? Split with one blow, it looked like, and I couldn’t think how they did it so I asked him. He goes like this”—Queelic pursed his lips—”and he says, ‘Each being is a gate.’ He talks in riddles, see, the way Aieh does. The way songs do.
“So I said, ‘Maybe the answer is: You split them with a wedge? You get a little crack started so the balance is off, then you press there and snap!’” Queelic snapped his fingers.
“So Hsuu smiles to himself. He says, ‘And what would that wedge be?’ And I said, ‘Ice? A tree root?’ But he shakes his head. He says, ‘What splits every stone in the universe is longing. There is no other force. The tide longs for the shore; when it touches the shore, it longs for the sea again.’
“See—he answered his riddle with another riddle!” Queelic laughed. “So I said, ‘I give up!’ and Hsuu says, ‘That is wisdom.’”
These words frightened me. There was no one I trusted less than Hsuu, even the Reirig. But Queelic said, “That old man is deep.”
“He’s Nall’s father.”
“His father!” Queelic stared at Nall. His look grew hesitant. “Kat, honest—I’m not sure Nall’s all right.”
“He is! He will be! It’s just—it’s like a dream to him. As if he were a ghost.”
Queelic nodded. “They’re dreamy. I’ll bet they’re different in the daytime, though. More like people. Like Aieh.” Queelic turned the name over on his tongue. “Aieh. And right now they’re working themselves up for the invasion. There are different clans and whatnot—I don’t have the shape of it yet—but some of them like the boss and some don’t. It’s the same as at home, really.” He did seem to feel at home, smiling. “I hope I get to see them by daylight, before they leave.”
“When—did they say when they’ll go?”
“To kill everybody? I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure it was polite.” Queelic looked at Nall again. “He knows how to dream. That’s why you love him. Aieh does too. I thought it was his muscles.”
He crawled off a little way and sat thoughtful, watching the dance and playing with the knot at his ankle. He could have untied it, but he did not.
21
The rose it has as bitter a thorn
As ever from a stem was torn,
And love it has as bitter a sting
As ever knife from heart did wring.
Love Song. Downshore.
“NALL.” I WANTED HIM to raise his head and look at me. I wanted him to tell me Aieh’s love m
eant nothing. Queelic’s strange sanity had waked me, like a drenching with cold water.
But behind Nall’s abandoned face he was sinking, as if he held a stone that he would not let go of though it dragged him under.
Out of the whirling dancers Aieh came creeping back.
Her eyes were fixed on Nall. I began a lunge to stop her, but I remembered the stolen rope and had to keep sitting on it. She put her hand under Nall’s chin. He raised his head and looked at her.
As before, I lifted my hand to slap hers away. Then I saw Nall’s straining face with no desire in it, no hope, and stopped my hand in midair.
Without a glance at me Aieh spoke quickly in Rig. Nall mumbled an answer. He groped at his belt where the hair rope had been.
She saw the empty thongs. “His rope!” Now she looked at me. “Where is his rope?”
So I knew for sure that the rope was the magic by which she was drawing Nall back down among the Rigi, binding him to herself. I spread my empty hands to show her the rope was not there.
Nall pawed at the dangling thongs. Aieh seized my shoulders and shook me. “Where is it? You have thrown it somewhere!”
“Maybe the oak brush pulled it off as we ran.”
“You have it in your bodice!”
I pulled down my shift.
“Your scars are no use to him. He must have his rope! Can you not see I must bind him?”
“I’m sure!”
Aieh made a desperate sound. I laughed in my heart. I had the rope now, and Nall would stay with me.
“So be it, then,” she said. “Even so.” She spoke to Nall again in Rig, seeming to plead.
He put up his hand and fumbled at her mouth. With almost his old strength he wrenched away from me, lurched to his feet, and put his arm around her. For shock and rage I would not rise and snatch him back; besides, I had to sit on the rope.
He put out his hand toward me. I would not take it. Aieh tugged at him. He laid his arm across her shoulders and, with her, shambled into the crowd that opened to receive them, then closed after them. I heard his voice above the drum, speaking in Rig.
I took the hair rope from under my thigh and beat the sand off it. I put it in my bodice, above the deer mouse sash. It was all I had left.
I lay down against the lean-to and pulled my knees up to my chest. Something sharp hurt me: Liu’s knife in my pocket. But I did not move. If I made a sound, nobody heard it.
I must have slept, because I woke. The stars had shifted. The Gate roared, the drum boomed, the Rigi quarreled and danced. I was curled tight, like a sheet that has been knotted wet and left to dry, and I remembered only the taste of a vicious dream.
My eyes were swollen. I opened them a slit and saw what had waked me: a creature hairy and black, with a groping claw. Whining, I shrank from it, then saw it was Nall.
A sealskin covered him, even his head. Beneath the seal’s empty-eyed face his own face looked out at me vivid and driven, his own, as it had not been since we hid in the little shelter by the shrines. “Kat, Kat,” he said, looking this way and that like a hunted fox.
He smelled of blood. He smelled musky, like a woman, like Aieh. The skin was Aieh’s.
I struck his hand away.
He pulled the sealskin around him. “There is no time. I must leave you—”
I sat up, rotten with dream, full of vileness like a cup. “Again?” I said.
He drew back. I thought with relish, Feeling better, eh? I’ll bet you are. So listen.
I said, “You went off with Aieh. Where?”
“Not far—”
“‘Not far.’” I put into my voice all the filth I felt. “Just out of earshot?”
His face went tense. I rejoiced and said, “Was it nice to be home again?”
He took my arm. “Oh, love—”
I jerked away. I heard my own voice shrill and shrewish, like my League aunts’ voices when their husbands came home drunk. “Don’t touch me! Did you think I loved you? It’s a man from Creek I love! The one who made my sash. He’s a handsome, big hunter—his eyes are blue.” I gasped and said, “When I was in his arms, I never thought of you!”
The drum beat. I heard the distant sea.
“It was a lie, then,” said Nall, his voice so soft. “All but the Gate.”
He stood up. I stood too, twisting away from him, shouting. “Aieh’s your damned Gate!”
He turned and was gone, limping along the shore between the humans and the seals.
I stood where I was.
Queelic came creeping to me across the starlit sand. He plumped himself at my feet and rolled up his sleeves.
I sat down next to him. What else was there to do? In his face I saw my father’s as I wished I could think of him: not evil, just young, doing the best he could.
Unbidden, my hand reached out and touched his.
He let me touch him, then withdrew his hand and said, “Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“They were lovers before. Nall and Aieh. They look at each other that way.” He slid me a glance. “You think I’m a little boy, that I’d never notice anything like that.”
I had bent my face to my knees, my hands clasped against my body, against the hair rope. Clumsily, Queelic patted my shoulder. “Kat, don’t cry.”
I said, “I wish I’d married you after all. I wish I’d listened to my father.”
Queelic dropped his hand. “You don’t really.”
“Yes, I do.” I raised my head and pushed back my hair, staring at him. “When you’re a kid, you don’t know what you want. You go after something, and in the end it’s worthless—there’s no way to live your life.”
“I know what you mean.”
“No, you don’t. Suppose you loved Aieh.”
He ducked his head and said, “Well, I kind of do. I do. You think I’m not a man. But she”—he raised his hands together, like a cup—“she’s like that water you brought me, when my arms were tied.”
“She’s lying with Nall.”
“I know. I don’t care. That’s part of her. She didn’t get to be Aieh by being like—like my aunts or something. The same with Nall. You women, you’re all alike! Except for Aieh.”
He tucked his chin down on his chest, as though I might jump for his throat. “I’m a man,” he said, “and I know. You won’t let Nall be Nall unless it’s nice for you. You want him in a box. So what if he can’t explain what he’s doing? You think it’s easy to explain to women? It’s easier to be a hero than explain to women, especially when they’re mad at you. So Nall doesn’t know how to talk to you? Well, you don’t know how to talk to him. I’ve watched him try, and you wouldn’t listen—you had to get your licks in. You can’t be bothered to wonder how it is for him. But he’s amazing. I wish he were my brother. Even if he’s got muscles.”
Queelic raised his chin. “So now you wish you’d married me, because you think that’d be easier. Well, it wouldn’t be. And I wouldn’t marry you, not for money. Not even money.”
I sat still.
“Don’t bother me,” he said. He crab-walked over the sand to the extreme opposite of the compass of his rope.
Starlight bathed me. I was made of porcelain, thin and breakable, like a player in my father’s game of War, or like an eggshell, smashed with the baby bird inside. A voice in my head said, It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, until my tears fell hot and my crying, perfectly silent, felt as though it would shake me to pieces. Queelic crept back, saying, “Kat, don’t.”
Then in a different voice he said, “Kat—”
I looked up. I saw Aieh slipping along the edge of the crowd.
She was completely naked. Queelic looked away from her, looked back. Through the dreaming dancers she crept, hugging her arms around her waist—not to hide herself, but as though she were cold. She came straight to us and knelt with her head bent, so slim and slight that she seemed part of the night.
“Aieh,” said Queelic.
“H
e has gone, then?” she said between the blows of the drum. “He said he must bid you good-bye before he left.”
I said, “Left.”
“For the Gate.” Aieh’s face had caught some of Nall’s sleepwalking; her eyes did not focus. “Girl. Kat. I begged him not to go. But there was no stopping him.”
“The Gate?” I said. “The actual Gate?” Then, “I thought he’d gone to you.”
“To me?”
I said it out loud. “You made love.”
Aieh looked down and away. “I could not hide that.”
“No.”
“But it is you he loves.”
“He said—He told you that?”
“Of course.”
I looked at Queelic. “I’ll try to listen,” I said. “I will try. But that he could say that and then—and then go to her!”
“Just now?” said Aieh. “You think it was just now that we made love?”
“You said—”
“It was long ago we were lovers,” she said, dreary. “Before he was killed. What—you think I would make love with him now? In the evil I brought upon him?”
“Then he didn’t—”
“The man whose name I used to speak is dead. I knew that man; you never will. I wanted—You saw what I wanted. But this is some other man.”
“Where did you take him, then? Just now?”
“I gave him my skin.” Aieh looked up with a face as wistful as Jekka’s. “I tricked that man we love into the tide of the drum. When he had no skin! He was dying. I could not right my wrong, but I could give him my skin.
“I sent for our ama in Selí. I thought maybe her love could bind him. But she is so old, she walks slowly; he would be dead before she came. I might have bound him to the skin with my hair rope, but it is lost. There was no time to search or quarrel, so I bound my skin to him with blood.” She unfolded her left arm to the firelight. On the creamy inside of her elbow a gash like an open mouth ran blood; it had printed an answering mouth on the pale skin of her waist. At her movement a new rill ran down her hip.
