by Betsy James
He held his paddle crosswise between us. “Kat. What you said about the cranes—that’s heart-true.”
“Then do it! Once you find where the world’s songs are, and you listen to them, they get louder. Louder than anything. Why can’t you listen for them?”
He turned his face away, a gesture I began to know. “Between the cries of the cranes, between all the voices of the world is—that. It hums so loud, Kat. I can’t not hear it.”
“Is—is it death?”
“It’s greater than death.”
I tried to think of something greater than death, and could not.
He said, “What if that sound is the only sound there is?”
“It’s not! There are cranes! I could hear them and so could you—don’t tell me you couldn’t!”
That crooked half smile. “I can hear you.”
“Listen to me, then!”
He put his hand on my angry face, next to my mouth. “So tell me something.”
“What?”
“Whatever you like. Paddle and tell.”
“I’ll tell you the story of the merchant’s ugly wife,” I said. “That’ll teach you that nothing’s stronger than death.”
I turned around and took up the stroke. Over my shoulder I told him the story my boy-cousins used to tell to scare the breath out of me, about the merchant who is tired of cooking his own breakfast so he tries to get his wife back from death. At the part where the wife shows up with her guts all rotting out, I made Nall make puking sounds the way you are supposed to—uullghgh! When I looked back at him he had his grin on, the west all dark behind him.
So I told him another story, from Creek this time, about how Ouma the Bear Mother got her husband, Trouble. Then a little one about bats. Whenever he was silent for too long, I looked back and saw his eyes looking at nothing, as if he were listening to it; so I told another story, or I remembered some wicked joke of Jekka’s, or sang a skipping rhyme.
I taught him a goat holler from Ten Orchards. I sang a hoeing song of Bian’s. I yelled all the taunts my cousins and I had ever heaped upon each other. Sometimes he smiled, or warmed his feet, while I squealed, on my thighs.
But there are gaps you cannot fill with talk, and spaces between stories. In them I had to let him go, to drift toward that other place; and it seemed the closer we came to the mainland, the less he spoke.
At first I was terrified and chattered faster. Yet his paddle still bit the water in its rhythm, and sometimes I could trust that. Then we were both quiet, hearing only the hiss of wind and the chiss, chuck of the paddle blades.
“Nall.”
“Eh.”
“What do you want most in the world?”
Chiss, chiss, chuck.
“To shave,” he said.
Chiss, Chuck. Men are strange.
“Kat. What do you want?”
I want my brother, whom I never loved enough when I had him. I want peace. Home. Children. You to be the man I called, happy the way you were before so that I can be happy, so that I can love and possess and be safe in you forever and ever.
Chiss, chiss, chuck. I said, “Hot corn bread with butter and honey.”
He caught the back of my shift, he rose on his knees and twisted me back and kissed me all stubbly until my mouth burned. The wind blew us sideways. “Damn,” he said, sat down, and took up the stroke.
We flew on and on. I thought, Where is the shore of nothing? Do I stand there? What is it I gather, and braid, and tie with the knot that does not slip, and throw into nothing for this man to catch—if he wants it?
Is it myself I throw?
I did not think my rope of songs and stories was greater than death. It did not need to be. Songs are like butter and honey—they are for when you are alive.
28
The ruddy peach, love,
Cold frost shall wither,
The cherry’s cheek, love,
Be dust forever.
The mountain’s sides, love,
Shall valleys fill;
Though it beat quick, love,
Your heart shall still.
From a Fiddle Tune. Downshore.
ONE BY ONE we raised the skerries out of the eastern sea. The sun went down behind us, night rose before us, and the stars came out, winking one and two and countless. They were clear to follow. We flew over the dark water all night or all my life, a thousand lives, under the dome of stars.
Dawn came pink and tender in the east. We worked intrance until a moment when, between stroke and stroke, we had to rest or die.
We had raised my shining island. How tiny it was! The body of the clerk was gone, already become eagle or fish. We drew up the manat for an hour, no more; we dragged ourselves to the circle of grass where I had wanted to make love to this man with dark smudges under his eyes who fell asleep with bread in his hand, who whined in his sleep like a dog and woke out of nightmare with a shout.
“What!” I said, waking too.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
We struck eastward and sank that island in the sea. From the front hatch of the manat I watched the mainland rise.
First I saw the circle of the world, all water as it had been, and pillowy white clouds. Then distant sea cliffs drawing a pale, broken line that sank and rose as though it were the cliffs that moved, not we. Then bluey foothills. I picked out the prominence that was Horn Loft. On shore it seemed so high, but from the sea it was just a bump on the long line of cliffs and hills, all obscured with a haze like smoke.
Then I saw it was smoke.
Nall stopped paddling. We caught a faint tang of burning. Along the line of cliffs a dozen pale threads were combed up, leaning south a little, tangling their ends into the haze that smudged the Loft.
“What are they burning?” I said.
“They are being burned.”
“Have the Rigi—”
“No. Ab Harlan.”
At the sound of his voice, more than the words, I knew what I was seeing: a white-hot poker laid along the thigh of the land. From the lift of the swell I could see, at the base of every thread, a tiny dot of flame.
I rose to my knees. Behind me Nall’s paddle said chiss, chiss quicker.
I had never before come to Downshore from the deep sea. It took me a moment to recognize the gray stone town, the smoking docks, the beach south of it with tiny people on it—and the flames.
“Nall. Nall!”
“Oh, heart, be steady”
For one flame was Mailin’s house.
The white-gray smoke swelled and streamed, the orange flames were almost dark in the bright midday. A fat billow rose up as something collapsed—walls, or the long veranda—and the base of the column of smoke no longer had the square shape of a house, but only fire.
Nall said, “While I listened at the Gate.”
Chiss, chiss.
“We,” I said. “We.”
I shook. I could not paddle. Then I stopped shaking. Still far out, we turned broadside to the shore because the men running on the sand were not bright-shirted but dark, like beetles.
I did not dare think, or ask, or listen. Then I knew that if I did not do those things, I would float offshore until the manat sank, and I became the sea.
I took a vow then for always: I will think, and I will ask, and I will listen. I spoke the worst first. “Have they killed them? Mailin and Rosie and him,” for I was too distraught to remember Nondany’s name, only his hand held out.
“Maybe.”
“Or captured them?”
“Or run them back into town. There’s no smoke from town.”
We had not yet been out four days. I felt like a mother who takes her eyes off her child for an instant only, and when she looks up, he is gone.
Chiss, chuck.
I spoke over my shoulder. “Where to?”
“Horn Loft.”
We angled south. The water turned from blue to green. High on the cliff I could see my father’s house, the color of a grazing
sheep. As we paddled closer a wind held us off; it brushed up the nap of the waves and pressed bolsters of smoke onto the water. We coughed. We began to see floating trash, broken barrels, a crate with a hen perched on it sailing out to sea.
The foot of Horn Loft was a ridge of bare rock, the harbor’s south breakwater. We drew the manat in as close as we dared, like a mallard hugging the shore. We were hidden from town, but neither could we see it, only billows of smoke.
“Hold it there.” Nall vanished overside. Then he was leaping up the rocks of the breakwater, streaming like an otter. At the ridgetop he peered through gaps in the smoke, then leaped down again and into the water. He hung from the prow by one hand, making the manat dip a little.
“They are besieged,” he said. “Alleyways barricaded with felled trees and broken chairs, paidmen running or standing—two hundred, maybe. None within bowshot of any window, so there must be archers within, not yet out of arrows.” He blew water off his lips. “Kat, I know a way into town. I may win through, or I may die. Do you come with me, or no? From here you can paddle south, past the sea marsh—”
“I’m coming.” I thought again of the winged child in the fire, and laughed aloud.
He stared up at me, all spangled with seawater. “So be it,” he said. He hove himself into the rear hatch. We paddled to the north end of the breakwater; beyond it we would be visible from the docks. He climbed out onto the rocks and motioned me to get out also.
I could see for myself, in glimpses, that the hodgepodge gray stone town had been made an impromptu fortress. The walls that turned the winds now turned the spears and black arrows of the paidmen who tramped round them, keeping a no-man’s-land one bowshot wide. They looked like ants. Like the Rigi.
They had burned the wharves, or tried to. The pilings stood, but the boat sheds were gone and the heavy decking of the piers smoldered. So did the hulks of boats torched to the waterline and set adrift. The little harbor was a midden of deliberate ruin: drifting hulls, smashed carts and wagon wheels, a child’s hobbyhorse, a dead sheep—the world made garbage.
“Let us be ruin too,” said Nall. “Dead already.” He stored the paddles and rolled the manat to float belly-up. Bouyed by the air bladders, its hull looked like a dead porpoise adrift in the trash. “Duck under, Kat.”
It was like being inside a dindarion. The oiled skin dome glowed amber, echoed with water noise. I held on to the coaming, my feet hung down over the deep. Behind me Nall said, “We can move a little, kicking. But not fast. We are flotsam. Here and there we drift.”
We kicked, drifted, edged. The waves were long and low, and once we were inside the breakwater they stilled. Nall ducked in and out, rose like a seal to spy, slid back. Debris brushed the hull. A broken tree limb snagged my ankle; a bed weirdly vertical in the water thumped us like a horse. The stripped body of a man nudged the prow, his dangling arms seeming to embrace the sea.
Hidden behind half-swamped dory or reeking hulk, we tipped the manat for new air, then became a dead seal again. We worked our way toward the smoldering wharves until we were under them, adrift among the slimy pilings.
The prow bumped rock. Seaweed undulated, fading into the dark below. Nall ducked out, ducked back. “Come.”
The ledgy rock on which the piers were built was jagged with barnacles; I cut my shins and never noticed as I dog-paddled from the manat to the stone. There I clung among the weeds, the sea still covering my mouth. Above us here and there the decking had been burned away, but most of the planks were so thick and wet that they had borne the fire. The cracks between them cast on the oily surge a warp of sunlight that blinked with moving shadows, and the water echoes under the pier were broken by angry South Road Plain. “—wish to shit I was home fishing the Coora, not burning kids and damned witches in this—”
I turned my eyes to Nall. He was sunk in the water like a frog, little more than his eyes showing. Those eyes looked upward, not at the paidmen, but at a black hole among the rocks, square and so ruinous that I thought the sea had made it.
His hand met mine underwater and put the bow line in it. Slow as a hunting snake, he eased out of the sea. When a shadow passed above, he paused, then moved again. He disappeared into the rocky hole, the knife in his hand.
I clung to the seaweed. The water plucked and tugged, the manat tried to pull me away. Many breaths. Then Nall’s face in the black rift, his hand saying, Come.
I raised my hand with the bowline: What do?
He opened his hand: Let go.
I let go. The line sank away. The overturned manat drifted, its prow turning dreamily back to sea. I crept up into the smoky air, taking weight on my feet as the water gave me up. The Bear’s foot upon the mountain.
The tunnel stank of drains and fear. I could not stand straight; each step was slippery. The smoky reek of day turned to dank underground night, not sewage, but slime and lightless moss.
Nall went quickly, but I had to run my hands along the stone so as not to fall. Under my fingers I felt, all dressed in algae, the links and whorls of Hsuu’s face.
“Nall.” He splashed back to me, let me guide his hand. The spirals trailed away down the dim corridor. I said, “The walls of Selí!”
“Of Tanshari. Buried deep. Once a lineage house, now a drain.”
“No, it’s a root.” The alleys and walls of Downshore had sprung out of the ancient warrenhouse in a tangle, looking for light like vines. The turns and doublings, the round chambers and worn lintels were abandoned and wet. I could see that Nall had come and gone by this road many times. I had a thought, that he had been a person in Downshore while I was a person in Creek; yet that made me uneasy, as though it could not be real.
From where we crouched two curving halls branched out. The end of each hall branched in turn, then branched again, these thresholds visible as faint lines. The air teemed with sounds of shadowy life: scrapes and thumps, muffled speech, the thin wail of a child.
My hair pricked up. “Ghosts!” I said.
“No. The living. The old warrenhouse is a sound box for the town above.”
I felt as though I were inside the body of a being. Then I was afraid. Some sounds separated from the rest and grew clearer, then clear: hoarse male voices, splashing feet. In the forgotten arem of Tanshari a red light bloomed like false dawn.
Nall grabbed me backward, down a corridor, around a corner pierced with broken stone tracery. Through this we watched the spirals on the walls grow ruddy, smelled the incense of pitch, and heard, as on the burned docks, a growl. “—split his stinking heart. Kill enough to—”
Paidmen. Worms at the root. But Nall leaned forward and called through the tracery, “Mec. Mec.”
Splashes, grunts. Silence. The tunnel went fiery with a torch. Beyond it eyes and teeth glittered in faces as drawn as demons’, a huddle of men stripped to their breechclouts and carrying boatbuilders’ tools: knives, chisels, slicks.
Nall leaned into the light.
A gasp. They jostled back, the torchbearer making a sign in the air.
Nall stepped clear. “Mec,” he said to the glaring leader. “Mec, I am no ghost.”
Smoke filled the tunnel. I coughed. They cringed back. Nall held out his hand; I took it and crouched out to join him.
“The witch! It’s the witch!” Mec raised his knife.
Nall pulled me behind him. “Who calls her witch?”
“The devil does,” said Mec. “is it you, man? Where’ve you been? Mailin said you went—”
“To the Gate,” said Nall.
They were silent, staring. The hall grew smokier. Mec said, “She said that. But the living don’t go there. Where did you go?”
“To the Gate.”
“Hunh.” Disbelief.
I could wait no longer. “What—what news of Dai?”
Mec’s knife wavered. “None. Devil’s still got him.” Maybe he began to believe we were not ghosts; he looked away as though ashamed and said, “That raid we made, when you two ran a—when you
left; we didn’t get so far as the guardhouse. They were on us like wolves.”
“Where are you going now?” said Nall.
Mec looked at us again, his face still black with suspicion. But he said, “Out. To kill paidmen. They’ve stopped our eyes and mouth, but”—he gestured down the way we had come—“they forgot the asshole.”
Grim laughter. The men let their weapons drop a little, rubbed their faces.
I said, “We saw Mailin’s house—”
“She’s above in the plaza, tending the wounded.”
“And Pao? And Nondany?”
“Above. Harlan’s burning the field from the verge inward, driving his rabbits into the net.”
“He says he can burn what he owns,” said a boy, maybe twelve. He held a long knife newly honed. “I’m going to cut out his tongue.”
“We’re ship’s rats to him,” said Mec. “It’s you he wants, Lali Kat.”
I leaned closer to Nall.
“‘Give me the witch!’ he cries. They bring him down in his chair, there beyond the alley mouth; he has a speaking-trumpet. ‘You’ve taken my boy, my precious child,’” said Mec in an unctuous whisper. “‘My baby, my dearest son. Yet I’ll forgive you if you bring me the witch girl. Bring me the witch! I’ll forgive your murders and call off my hounds.’” He spat in the water at his feet. “Doesn’t much want the son back, it seems. Good thing, for he’s gone, and my brother and his crew with him. It’s you he wants.”
“You told him I’d gone?”
“Why would he believe us, Lali Kat?”
To be lali again, a sister, made me cry. At that the men crowded round; the smoke got thick. “Fighting, fighting since you left,” said Mec. “Some of the festival folk won free, but plenty came on into town, for the hills and roads are full of his creatures, raping, burning. Where does that devil get gold to hire so many? Folk have come in from the steadings—he’s burning them one by one. We watch from the rooftops. Yesterday they burned the boats. They’ve closed the way to the river. There are wounded and dying in the plaza, the wells are near dry and we can’t get water.”
