by Betsy James
“O Ama!” he said. “She pulled us with her through some gate—away from my father, first, and then from that dead man. She pulled us away with her death.”
Those old, unflinching eyes—the heart slapped on the counter like money, and keep the change. Like him, I said, “O Ama. But, Nall—what will happen to her? Wherever she is, he is there too.”
“I don’t know. I can’t get to her.” All the layers and worlds of the universe were piled around us, but we could not see them, we could not find their gates. We clung to each other like children waked in the night. “Kat, who are we? What are we?”
I could only hold him.
Whispering, I said, “When in the world is it? Is it still now?”
“I don’t know.” A shadow at the smoke hole became a gray cat looking down at us. Nall held out his hand to it; his hand shook. “Tinga!” he said.
The cat ran away. “Not Tinga. Tinga had a white breast. Maybe it is still now.” He drew his hand across his eyes and stared at the bed, the worn mat, the empty goods pole with no sealskin on it. His face was desolate. “I think it is now.”
I sat up, holding tight to his arm.
“I never killed a man before,” he said. “She snared rabbits for the pot. My ama did. She broke their necks. She taught me how. The rabbit is alive, you move your hand a little and it’s dead.” Hush, hush said the waves. “I am killing and killing. That dog man, and my ama, and Aieh and Queelic. You, nearly.”
“Only the Reirig for certain,” I said. I was sure I was alive now. The light grew brighter. The carvings on the walls were like those on the ring I had thrown away, seals frozen in play. I said, “Is—is the world still stopped?”
“It never was. She pulled us out of it.”
There was no way to think about this. “Then—your father is the new Reirig?”
“Someone is.”
The earth I had mislaid, of dirt and bread and common daylight, came back in pieces. “The tidal wave, the Rigi. Will they still—”
“A crested wave must rush somewhere. If one leader is dead, they will find another.”
“Then we have to go. Now.” I got to my knees. “It’s only morning; they won’t leave until tonight. We’ll go ahead of them and warn Mailin.”
This was impossible. In stories the hero travels forty days and forty nights, through every danger and travail, without rest; in stories. I looked about at the old-lady clutter of spindles and yarns. “O, Ama! Couldn’t you have pushed us out in Downshore?”
Nall got to all fours. What if Downshore was nothing to him now, and did not matter?
He tried to rise. As on the wrestling ground he fell back, then grappled himself to his feet. Clinging to a beam of the low ceiling, he looked at the bed, at the stone cupboards with their meager stores. At me. Took a breath. “To my manat, then,” he said.
I helped him gather the bread and berries, the fish and the water skins. He took a stone sheath knife from the wall and belted it around his naked hips. I said, “Must we run back the way we came last night?”
“Not if there’s a manat where there should be.” He put out his hand. I set mine in it. He said, “Kat.”
I thought it was a question, and waited. But he only held my hand, in this room he must know by touch. The beach wind whuffed at the smoke hole. I thought I could hear every dream ever dreamed in that place, every lullaby sung.
I began to draw my hand out of his. He would not let me. He pressed aside the hide curtain over the door and pulled me after him, into the warrenhouse of Selí.
The corridor was narrow, lower-ceilinged than the room and lit by gaps in the overhanging slabs. It smelled of wood smoke, of roots and grass and midden and the sea. We crouched along it, feeling our way on stone walls that were carved like Hsuu’s body in spirals and whirlpools, all soft with time and smoke and groping hands.
Room after room; I thought of the warrens of hopping rats in the dry hills of Creek, where I had lain at dusk to watch the big-eyed, whiskered tenants creep out and dance. Branching corridors, nooks, niches, stone cupboards, deep shelves—what a house to be a child in! Sleeping rooms spread with straw, storage rooms with shadowy alcoves, heart’s hide-and-seek.
“Nall!”
He froze.
“Someone’s singing!” The tune was melodic and dark, a faraway ballad heard on a nighttime street.
He strained to listen. “Moles,” he said. “Digging and singing. Nothing more.”
“Moles can sing?” I was enchanted. Root, root for food, they sang, grumping and mumbling. Bug and grub and slug. “Nall, they speak Plain!”
“Come. Come,” he said, like the ama.
It was a maze. We turned left, turned right, doubled back. I began to panic; I saw dim light as from a tunnel, Nall ran for it, I shot after him so fast that when he stopped on the threshold I bounced off him and sat down. In the wall by the door was a stone split down the middle, the halves set left and right to frame a niche.
“Year Altar,” said Nall, panting. “We should leave something. But—it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” I had nothing left to leave. “Give me the knife.” I cut a lock of my hair, of his, laid them on the altar. “Say something?”
“You.”
“Blessed, blessed,” I said, all I could think of as he yanked me up the tunnel toward the light so fast that I had just a glimpse of what else lay there: a carved fish pierced with a bone lance, a child’s bracelet, a withered plum.
Like hopping rats we pushed our noses into the whisper of blowing sand. I looked for Sell and saw only random chimney stones, ruinous as the Tells of Creek. A second look showed a stone quern, a driftwood drying rack, a basket like one of Mailin’s but frayed and faded, set down on a rock. All silent.
Not quite; as Nall pulled me into a run, I said, “There is singing! It’s not moles!”
He did not even slow down, bobbing one leg short like Pao’s fox, through scrub that lined a path worn deep by bare feet. He ran toward the singing; it was a quick, pattering ditty like a hand slap sung so fast that the words were blurred.
“Nall, there are people!”
He shook his head, pulled me into a looming green thicket and down the bank to a little fast creek overhung with evergreens and a tree like a river poplar with shivering leaves. All the branches leaned east, away from the wind.
I still heard singing. Nobody was there.
I had been to a fair once in Ten Orchards, when on the packed midway a fiddler roamed from booth to booth; I never saw him but I heard him, his thread of melody caught and then lost. That was what it sounded like. Surely Nall could hear it?
“Birds,” he said. He rummaged in a hedge thick with white blooms that bent to touch the water. “The little gray ones that go in flocks.”
“But those just chirp.” O lark, o leaf, o sweet lea, never leave me! sang the tiny voices.
He dragged a battered manat from beneath the hedge, waded into the water, and leaned on it, searching. “Leaks. Always did. Get in front, you’ll have to bail. Kat! Get in.”
A cloud of mouse-gray birds fled from the evergreens. I said, “Everything is singing!”
“Get in!”
I got in. While he scratched among other half-derelict boats for paddles and bailer, I refilled the water skins from the stream. The water was sweet and slightly warm, it eddied around my wrists—creek water, not the infinite sea. The populars sang shhh, the evergreens sang ahhh.
He gave me a paddle, warped and gray. “East.”
“You’re sure where east is?”
“I can smell east. Comes with being a Rig.” He pushed us off, jumped in. “Or whatever I am now.”
Nothing.
I saw his face and thought, Until now you’ve always known who you were and were not. Are you really nothing? Or are you just finding out that you have a thousand halves, like me?
He was not used to that. I was. In fact I almost liked it, this listening for everybody’s songs but wearing nobod
y’s tattoo.
For the first time in my life I saw an advantage in being who I was. A strange ease crept over me, like feeling the pain leave a burn. I turned to look at Nall and found for myself how hard that is to do from the front hatch of a manat. I gave him my upside-down hand instead.
We slipped from the creek mouth. Mist crowded us to the shore. We worked our way north, or east, or south, I could not tell—anywhere but west. With food but no hands free to eat it, Nall paddled and I bailed, for the sea came in fast.
“To my manat before we founder,” he said. I broke a lump of bread for him and he tucked it in his cheek like a squirrel, still paddling. I heard voices in the water but they were little ones, monotonous and bright—fish, probably. I was so tired and hungry that I wept as I bailed, wiping my nose on the shoulder of my shift. I was afraid to speak what I feared: that Nall’s manat had been discovered and was gone.
We picked our way along the half-seen shore. A soft, conjoined bubbling was a chorus of clams. Now and then we swung out so far that the hiss of surf on a beach could be heard but not seen. In that leaking boat it frightened me to lose the land, but Nall said, “An arem, there on the shore. Out of sight is safest.”
I made him name each settlement. Lissliss, “Sand Walking.” Hoyroynoy, “Logs Roll at Night.” Saiaushu, “Needle Eel Whistling.” Kaskas, “Tidal Waves.”
The sound of the paddles became kas, kas, kas. I bailed. In a trance of sweat I saw in my mind Hsuu riding that wave, whirling the Reirig’s lance, but its movement was spiral and I could not tell where his blow would fall. I did not know what he wanted or intended, only that the sea, his sea, had risen and would follow us. He could loose even the seals against us. I wondered what our leaking manat looked like from below, to a bull seal.
After we passed each arem, we returned to tracing the coast. The cliffs rose higher. Sheltered from the west wind, the trees in the riven clefts grew taller, thick-trunked and bearded with moss. They sang a deep melody, spicy as pine.
“The trees are singing,” I said. I tried to catch the words.
“Bail,” said Nall.
We ran in under a looming cliff, slipped through foam and then through a cleft in stone, a trailing curtain of vines. I woke out of the trees’ song, saw where we were and thought of ambush, a shower of blows. But there was only the cove in daylight stillness, waves splashing the tiny beach.
Everything lay as we had left it. Nall flew at the manat, swapping gear, flinging spare provisions out of Aieh’s voi. I stood listening. The cove was full of the voices of flowers and bees, roots and buds, hidden birds. I could not untangle the melodies and listened to them whole, like part-singing. Our footprints still marked the sand above the tide line, as though we had been carried off by eagles.
Nall ran his manat into the sea. “Get in.”
“Look!” I pointed to Aieh’s footprints, naked and slender. I thought I could hear her voice.
“Get in!”
“They’ll be gone with the next high tide—”
He grabbed me and swung me into the front hatch, steadied and shoved the boat in the same motion, jumped in. “Work,” he said.
We shot out of the mouth of the cove, our faces stroked first by vines, then by the sea wind. A kittiwake dove away, squealing something funny. I laughed. Nall said, “To the Isle of Bones.”
“We have to go there?” I had trouble paddling. I was distracted by songs. Deep in the water something thrummed like a plucked dindarion.
“We have to pass it,” he said.
“Can’t we stop and rest?”
“Not till we pass it.”
“It’s far!”
“Yes.”
The sound of the water dripping off my paddle was round as grapes; I wanted to eat that sound. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Give me another hunk of bread,” he said. “You take one too.”
It was not bread I was hungry for. The whole sea was to eat, the sky was ripe with words just out of reach. I could almost sip, almost taste as they slipped by me, passing and passing. I listened. Sometimes I remembered to paddle and listened to that—kas, kas or chass, chass, which in Hessdish means “lust, lust.”
Sometimes I forgot to paddle. The sea hummed. Not like a dindarion but like a great drum; keeping time with it, I paddled again, and the sound it made became toom, toom, almost below hearing. I went on and on. I forgot hunger. I could boost the boat along with sound.
Behind me Nall worked and said nothing. But I did not need to talk anymore, that big beat was under everything, heaving it along, making the world pour in, pour out like rising tide, falling tide, bright, dark.
“Kat.”
“Ah.”
“Did you eat?”
“Ah.”
“Kat!” He put his cold feet on my thighs.
“Ai!” I cried, turning in a fury.
He withdrew his feet, pulled a loaf from Mailin’s oiled bag, broke another hard chunk, and gave it to me. His face poured sweat. “Put it in your mouth. Don’t listen.”
I put it in my mouth and said through it, “I can eat and listen.”
It was true. The bread itself spoke. I heard the voice of the woman who had made it, kind and worried like Bian’s, and the little piping songs of the barley grains. I laid the paddle across my lap so that I would not lose it while I listened, but I heard the paddle singing and was so astonished that the bread fell out of my mouth. We had come into the lee of cliffs, not close; at the edges of my eyes, left and right, Nall’s paddle flashed black. It sang back to my own paddle, a song like the big trees but higher, like wind in branches, then a pant-song that went change, change. I could not quite get the words, but I knew that was it. Things changing, dying, being born.
A high keening, birds and mourners; a low chumbling, crabs and worms. No words, just a tearing apart. I smelled dirt, I smelled warm flesh, I heard a voice singing and knew whose it was, felt a warm arm.
“Sit down!”
But I cried, “Oh, Ma!” and rose in the hatch to step out into her arms, onto the thrumming drumhead of the sea. The black edge of Nall’s paddle came singing from the corner of my eye, and all the singing stopped.
26
The earth is round. The sky is round.
In all directions, the world is round.
Days come and days go.
Years come and years go.
The world grows light,
Dark,
Light,
And it is still round.
Circle Game. Downshore.
SILENCE. NO MOTION. Hot sun.
My lips lay against salt. Against flesh, my mother’s breast; her hand stroked my hair. I had stepped across, and she held me.
I moved my face against her and smelled Nall’s skin. He held me in his arms, my face on his shoulder. I had drooled on him.
I woke weeping. My head throbbed and spun. He held it still against him, whispering, “I hit you. I hit you hard.”
“She was there, I heard her!”
“They’re all there. Traces in the air, voices from dreams. I had to keep on. I was afraid I would hear my mother.”
“Not—not your ama?”
“I wouldn’t be afraid to hear her.”
We held each other, bereft. The sun burned hot. I opened my eyes on brilliance and shut them, wincing. “Where is this?”
“A little island east of the Isle of Bones.”
I had thought there were no islands east of the Isle of Bones, not until the skerries; but my head ached. “You heard—them singing?” If Nall could have been a little slower … If I could have heard Dai’s voice …
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t we hear them when we were in the cave?”
“We weren’t the same as we are now.”
“What has changed?”
“I don’t know. Be still.” He wiped his eyes with his wrist.
Through slitted eyes I saw looming driftwood logs, wide and tall as houses, with giant root wheels tilt
ed in the air. Their flanks made a little room, and in it we huddled. The walls were wave-scoured, with shells and little stones wedged in the wood; the floor was sand, the roof was sky.
“Where’s the manat?”
“We’re leaning on it. Hush.”
I was afraid to hush, for fear I would listen again and be drowned. But I could not help it. I heard my ear ringing as it had when my cousin hit me, then wave-hum, then a chipper singing that might have been sand fleas. The songs were still there, but they did not possess me as they had. I could listen or not, and I could sort them a little. Deep and peaceful, those old logs were chanting hoyroynoy.
I stopped listening, to prove I could. The world went more ordinary. I said, “Are we still in the Rigi’s land?”
“We aren’t out of it.”
I pondered this, dull-witted.
“We’re in the Ni’Na’, the Changes.”
I remembered how, when we came, he had pushed at something and said, We are in. That was all; no islands; but if the voices of the dead had changed, maybe the boundary had.
“Somewhere in the Ni’Na’,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
At these words my mind began to move a little. “Nall, are you still hearing—that? What you heard at the Gate?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing.” I would say the word, at least. “Tell me what it sounds like.”
For a long time he did not speak. I thought he was not going to and tipped my head to see his face. It too had changed. Still his, certainly, but older—gaunt and quiet.
“Like a sea whose waves are not waves,” he said at last. “Like a sky full of stars.”
I thought of Queelic. “Stars make a sound?”
But he was not listening to me. “It’s so big,” he said. “Or so tiny.” He tilted his head like a listening dog. “No words, no music, no tongue, no rhythm. Only space, but full; a rich emptiness; nothing. Not even the beat of the drum. What was there before the beat of the drum?”
The place where all patterns came from, before the world was made. But how could that be nothing? I thought of the way the patterns on Hsuu’s face had canceled themselves to make stillness and said, “It’s your father getting at you.”
