by Betsy James
He shook his head.
“Then you need to eat something, that’s what.” I sounded like Mailin. “Where’s the food?”
I started to get up. He caught me back. “Sit down!”
“It’s nothing,” I said, feeling the goose egg behind my ear. It was sticky with blood. “Don’t hit me with nothing too often.”
He grinned. That had changed too, to a wry half grin that matched the wrinkle at his eyebrow. He rose and began to rummage in the manat.
Right away I tried to stand. The log room tilted like the sea. Nall turned back with his hands full of bread and meat; he threw these down cursing, picked me off my feet, and sat me on the sand again. “Sit still! Eat.”
I was not used to hearing him swear. I said, “No fair! You’re stronger.”
“In some ways. Kiss me.”
I already had bread in my mouth, and looked up at him startled. He kissed me bread and all, then sat down and put his shoulder against mine. There was only room enough to sit close, like harvest mice in their nest of grass.
The bread and fish were tough and tasted better than anything I had ever eaten. We worried at them like dogs. The creek water from Self was fresh and holy
I said carefully, “Do you remember last night?”
He hunched his shoulders. “The taste of it. And Aieh.”
“Did you know Queelic was there?”
He stopped with bread halfway to his mouth. “Queelic! At the drum?”
“He walked west and they caught him. They brought him to the Reirig.”
“Did the Reirig kill him?”
“Not then. The warriors tied him to a stake. He talked with your father for a long time.”
Nall whistled softly. “What is afoot in this world? Were the Rigi to join forces with the Leaguemen—”
“Oh, never!”
“Queelic is Ab Harlan’s son; power makes strange marriages. And my father is a strange man.”
I did not think Ab Harlan was strange, only fat with sickness, like a boil. “Queelic is dead, I think. Nall, he—” I wanted to tell him how Queelic had tried to save Aieh with his shirt, but it made me so sad, I could not. Instead I said, “He liked your father.” How odd that sounded. “He liked your father a lot.”
“I loved my father once. Hsuu.” In that sighing name I heard the ocean, restless on the world. “Here is what you can’t know about my father: Is he working for you? Against you? Does he care for you at all? Does he have plans, or is it that he moves like the sea, flowing here, flowing there, changing as the sea changes?”
He spoke as if to himself. “He killed me without killing me. When he took my skin and my name, he gave me death—and one narrow chance. I took it. Maybe I was the chip of wood he cast on the water, and how chance played me might tell him how the great current of the world flowed.” He glanced at me. “Maybe we are that for him still, you and I.”
“He has no heart or soul, then!”
“Why should he? He is the sea. The sea doesn’t love. It is.”
I remembered that blood is salt, that we all bleed.
“He watches how the world flows,” saidNall, “then he chooses.”
“Maybe the world itself is choosing,” I said, “and we are its decision.”
He was not looking at me. “Kat,” he said. “About Aieh.”
I pushed sand grains around with my finger.
“She was crazy for a child. But … barren, like so many now. There was nothing I—Anyway, I was crazy too. For—I didn’t know for what. For the east, the sun. Something calling and calling.” He put his finger on mine. “Aieh and I fought like bobcats.”
I nodded. Raím and I had fought like that. And the fight at the Gate had been a bobcat fight, but with words instead of clawing and snarling. I wondered whether, if I listened very hard, I would find that bobcats speak Plain.
“Then Liu died and I was even crazier. The new Rigi’s song, the one I heard on Stillness—do you remember the last line?”
I had heard it last night at the drum. I sang,“I am the child. I come, I come.”
He looked at me straight. “It wasn’t Aieh’s child.”
“How did you know?” I burned all over.
“I knew. And that was the end of Aieh and me—or it would have been, but the rest happened so fast; they caught me and killed me. She never knew.”
“Poor Aieh,” I said, and meant it.
“And there on the Isle of Bones, with both of you—” He bowed his head. “I have dragged ruin behind me, I have destroyed the people I love. For nothing.”
I wanted to say, You haven’t destroyed me! But he had said I was nothing.
Instead I said, “How do you know how the universe works?” I put my finger in the middle of his palm and rubbed the hollow of it. “You know what I think is strange? Queelic. Born to a mad father, kidnapped, marooned, his throat near slit, roughed up and tied up, and now I suppose he’s dead. But, Nall—last night at the dance he seemed completely happy. How can anybody know whether what they’ve done is good or bad?”
His hand curled around my finger, let it go.
I said, “Before they killed you, your hair was long?”
He looked up, puzzled. “Never cut.”
“Did you braid it?”
“One or another of my cousins would braid it. Or my ama; we braided each other’s.”
“My cousins wore three-fours and rake-rows and hand-me-overs. I was the one who had to braid them. There’s a chant you say to make the plaits lie smooth.
The sun crosses the river,
The moon crosses the river,
The water runs down
And the light rolls over.
Braid me up tight, Mama,
Comb me out free.
Birth me, bury me.
So let it be.
“I think the world is like a little girl’s braid,” I said, “bound up and combed out, over and over. How can you say of it, ‘This hair is good, this one is bad!’ ‘This hank is evil, and that one’s holy!’ It’s just a braid, loosed every night and plaited up new every morning.”
Nall pulled one of my curls straight. “Did your cousins braid your hair?”
“It was never long enough. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes. When I raised my head on that cold beach, it was just dawn. I saw a little being with a stick, singing. Then I saw your hair and I thought, It’s the sun!”
“But it was only me.”
“And only me. Hero of nothing.”
Gulls sang jeers, high up. I do not think gulls like people much, except their garbage.
I put my arms around him. “Aieh said, ‘One loves fools.’ But there’s nobody else to love, as far as I can tell.”
We held each other. The surf sighed. After a little I sighed too and said, “We’d better go.”
“If I go like this, I will fail in mid-ocean. I must rest, if only for an hour. You too. The tide will soon touch us; we’ll wake and be gone.” He rose, packed what was left of the food into the manat, and lay down in the sand. He tied the bow line of the manat around his wrist. This made me uneasy, for who was there to steal it? But I was too weary to ask. I squirmed down next to him and laid my arm across his waist.
His eyes were still open, looking and looking.
“Nall. What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“Stop it.”
He laughed, grim, and shut his eyes. His body gave a little twitch, falling asleep. Then I could sleep too. I dreamed that something big and old and quiet came, and watched us while we slept.
Water touched my hand. I had fallen through that quiet dream into black sleep, and when the tide touched me I thought I was in deep water—that I had tipped over the manat, I was pressing the sea with my hands and they went right through.
I woke with a gasp that sucked salt water, coughing and clawing at the sea. I got right, found the sun, scrabbled upward, and bumped the bottom of the manat. Saw Nall’s legs, his underwater fa
ce streaming bubbles, his hand grabbing. Then both of us were bobbing next to the manat in the blue, empty ocean. The bow line was still tied to his wrist.
He cursed, spat water from his sleepy face, and clutched the slack of my shift. “I thought I had hold of you,” he said.
“What—”
“It changed. I feared it might.”
“Changed—”
“The island. They do.”
I hung on to the coaming. “Have we died?” I said. Or maybe I had dreamed the white sand, the sunny logs.
“No. It’s the Ni’Na’,” he said in a more awake voice. “The island changed while we slept. I shouldn’t have stopped there, but I’d hit you; there was nowhere else. I thought it would hold.” He rubbed water from his face and looked around at the sea that was empty of islands.
“Was it—Did something wash us away?” A tidal wave. Kas. The Rigi.
“No. It changed. From an island to—to whatever it is now. Get into the manat; we must go.”
Stunned, obedient, I tried to pull myself up by the coaming and nearly capsized the boat. Even with Nall as counterweight I could not climb from fluid onto solid, nor make that house of giant logs into this bare, bright sea.
“Wait.” He swam sideways, pulling the manat by the bow line. I clung to the stern. A shadow underneath us became a dark shoal. I thought it was the back of some leviathan and said, “Nall! Don’t—”
But he was standing on it, waist-deep and then knee-deep, steadying the boat. “Get in,” he said.
I would not put my foot on that black thing. But it came up to meet my thrashing knees and was black sand, opalescent where the sun could reach it. Surface currents had made ripples on it, and a school of tiny blue fish swam over it, each the size of a pea.
“Stand up,” said Nall.
“It’s not real. It wouldn’t come rising up like that, all alone in the middle of the ocean—”
“Stand up and get in! Hurry.”
I stood up dripping and stepped into the manat. He slid in behind me. The boat turned gently, and I saw around us a ring of islands, of which our shoal was one.
None of them had white sand or drifted logs. They had black sand and green trees that crowded down close to the lazy surf, draped with vines and yellow flowers.
I gazed and gazed. A flock of fork-tailed birds wheeled away from one isle and nipped across an inlet to another.
“What—what islands are these?”
“Just the Ni’Na’,” he said, and drove the paddle deep.
“But there was only sea.”
“Yes.”
“Did we pass them before? When we first came, when it was raining so hard?”
“They weren’t here.”
“Where were they?”
“Somewhere else. Or maybe they were here, but being something else. I could feel them, as we came.”
“Can you step on them?”
“You just did. And we slept on one.”
“But that was real!”
He said, “What is real?” and pointed with his chin. I turned and saw, just under the surface of the water, a sad little fat boat sunk on a reef—surely the fishing boat that had marooned Queelic. A shadowy shape, two, on the deck: drowned men.
We made haste away from it. When I looked up, the island on our left had grown a round green hill, soft with meadows. A host of voices, birdlike, sweet.
“Nall, can you hear them?”
“Yes.”
“What are they saying?”
“Su! Su!” he said. “I am! I am!”
It was a contented, beelike hum. I picked out one voice, then lost it. “Is it still the dead?”
“The unborn.” He dug at the water. “So they say. Waiting to come among us, to be given names and be told there are things that never change. To be taught that the shoals they stand on are real.”
“But you said the unborn wait beyond the Gate.”
“Not our dreams of them.”
I thought of the child I had dreamed, burning in fire. The manat shot eastward along the flank of the island. A drift of yellow butterflies floated over the shining green, and beyond the dipping grasses I heard a laugh so delicious that I thought, A child is chasing those butterflies.
I got to my knees, I turned around and grabbed Nall’s fists with the paddle in them. “Stop. Listen!”
Chuckle and chirp, that crow of laughter.
“They’ll be thrown to war,” he said. “One after the other, like roses to the Year Fire. And the sea will break on the rocks just the same, and the moon will rise, and the world will rush in and out through the Gate.”
I looked again and saw no island anymore. We had won free of the Ni’Na’, yet that busy, relentless song went on.
He kissed my hands and pulled his own away. “Paddle, Kat,” he said. “Let’s go home to our war.”
27
The work that night and day
goes on in darkness,
the strength that is always there.
That strength is the boat
that bears me, weeping,
over the black flood
that does not cease;
that work is the slow blow
after blow of the unseen
maul that makes me.
The god I worship is dark,
patient,
strong.
He made this wood.
He made this sea.
Boatbuilder’s Chant. Downshore.
WE WERE TINY on the big sea. The sun was fierce. The wind blew from the north and pushed us broadside; we wrestled with it and pulled east, east. Behind us a knot of cloud gathered to become an indigo wall, hazy where it met the sea. Glancing back, I sometimes thought it nearer, sometimes farther. I heard a flock of cranes high up and squinted to find them; they flew over us crying, and I thought they were fleeing from that cloud.
I heard grief in their cries. But maybe it was my own grief. Why do we hear what we hear?
My listening was not the same as it had been before we passed the Changes. Then I had heard actual voices, sometimes words; now what I heard as we paddled was like the sound made by Nondany’s dindarion: wordless, a hum and sparkle that was the sea itself, the sky itself, the little quick boat creaking and splashing.
If I listened to this—as if with my skin, not my ears—I could make out a pattern. Not of sound, exactly, nor sight, nor taste, nor any one sense, but of all of them together, piecing out the shape of something the way blind Raím might learn the world from touch, smell, taste.
Sometimes I thought it was some great fish singing, deep down. Or the boat itself singing as it sped along, or a horizon cloud putting down legs of rain, or the blister on my palm, or everything in chorus. I saw with my mind’s eye, heard with my heart’s ear, felt with my soul’s hand, and because I had no name for this, I had to say, I saw … I heard … I felt …
At the edge of vision I saw Nall’s black paddle flick, flick, flick.
I thought, Jekka would shape a bowl to be this boat, Raím would weave a cloak to be that cloud. They could fit clay or yarn around what they hear-see-feel, but here I have neither clay nor wool. I have words—but not for what I feel.
Well then, I thought as I dug, and dug, and dug at the water, I’ll use the words I have.
So it was ordinary words that came as we swung eastward on the skin of the sea. Not in Rig or any holy tongue, but in the peddlers’ cant my auntie Jerash called Pigsty Plain.
Shining sky,
Shining water.
Oh, be joyful,
Father’s daughter!
It was good to paddle to. It even grew a little tune. Nall behind me neither sang nor spoke. I turned to see him still-faced, pulling stroke and stroke and stroke like a crane’s wing in the air.
“Nall.” I spoke his name twice before he looked at me. “Do you want water?”
He licked his lips, nodded, and shipped the paddle. We bobbed on the circle of ocean, under the circle of sky.
I passed him the water skin, got to my knees to stretch my back, and knelt facing him. He drank without spilling a drop. When it was my turn I wet the front of my shift and snorted water up my nose.
“You’re better at water than I am,” I said, and sneezed. Each quarter of the sky had different clouds, that dark bank still in the west. Nall had his back to it, but I knew he knew it was there.
I said, “I want dry land. Roadsouls singing rude songs around a campfire—that’s what I want to hear.”
He gave me that crooked new grin. It made lines around his eyes like the sun’s rays, yet there was such sorrow in it. I did not want to ask, but I did. “Are you still—”
He nodded.
My heart swelled with grief; I thought it would burst my shift. What happened then was what always happens: I got angry.
“You just stop that!” I said. “You’ve forgotten how to hear the world, that’s all. That damned Gate sucked it out of you. I’m going to tell you how.” He opened his mouth to speak, but I tumbled on, kneeling backward in the manat. “Remember that flock of cranes? High, high up, keeking and churring? You look for them, but they’re so high, the sky is so deep and it has so many layers to it, you can’t find where to see. Then your eyes get it right, and there they are, tiny and thronging, beating their big wings. That’s what listening to the world is like,” I said. “Isn’t it? Or seeing, or feeling, or however you name it. There’s no right word for it. Listening, and suddenly, there.”
He put his forefinger at the base of my neck, in that little hollow place. “There are no layers in nothing, Kat. No birds, and no sky.”
And no child? What if there already is a child? Is that nothing?
“Be a stone, then!” I jerked back around and sat down. “Some old Rig stone, split down the middle forever!”
I paddled. He did not. The manat was like a dead body; paddling felt like running with both legs broken.
Then at the corners of my eyes I saw flick, flick, and the manat flew again like a bird.
“Kat.”
I would not answer.
“Kat. Turn around.”
I would not turn around because I was crying; I did not want him to see that and know he had won. I kept paddling. The manat went dead. I dragged at it awhile, then wrenched around onto my knees again, shouting, “You just let the Rigi come, then! While we sit here in the middle of the ocean talking!”
