by Betsy James
You shall have water soon enough, I thought. You shall have kas—too much sea.
“In the name of day,” said Mec, “where did you go?”
“To the Gate,” we said together.
A change came in his face. “Then something will happen,” he said. “Good or ill, so be it, only that it come.” He gestured back up the tunnel. “To Mailin, then? And may I live to hear your story, that’s all.”
The men turned from their killing mission to lead us up the tunnel. The lad with the knife came reluctantly, looking back.
Here and there light fell from a high grate, greening the slime that furred the walls. I saw the worn remains of stone shelves and cupboards like those in the ama’s quiet room. We came to the bottom of a shallow shaft where steps went up and light fell down. In the wall was the Year Altar, a split stone niche, nothing in it but a green weed looking upward at the light.
We looked up too, heard voices and children’s crying. It was the children, peering, chattering about the armed men they had just watched go down the hole, who saw us climb out of it. Like sky beings around a window in the clouds they stared down, they shrieked, “The witch! Mailin’s witch!” and ran for their elders, who ran and shrieked with deeper voices as we clambered over the threshold of buried Tanshari, into the plaza of Downshore besieged.
I had known that plaza since I was old enough to go to market, scuttling furtively in kerchief and cloak. Now, as I climbed out of the dark in my filthy undershift, I could see how the square had begun as the open-air courtyard of a warrenhouse.
Once cookfires and looms had been busy there while children played, women ground barley in stone querns, men mended nets. But now the square was refuge for frightened families harried from outlying farms, Hill and River and Lake folk driven from the festival fields, Roadsouls in painted wagons—all camped almost waterless in the midday sun.
It was festival in reverse. The striped awnings that should have sheltered the pie stands shaded tight-faced men with bandaged thighs; girls who should have been flirting sat stunned and dull, fingering their torn bodices. Children wailed and clung to their fierce mothers. And an old man who should have been hawking turkeys and grumbling about watered rum was not there at all.
Smoke hazed the square. The sunlight fell straight down and cast no shadow.
As we stepped into the terrible light, a cry went up, and the crowd scrambled away shouting. But when nothing happened—neither curse nor miracle—they rushed forward again in a roar of voices. They pressed, gabbled, turned in a slow dance with us as its center. It was broad day, the people spoke Plain and wore colored shirts, yet they milled, stared, groped like the Rigi. Like the Rigi, they seemed to be in a dream, but it was a nightmare.
Mec led us among them. Like the Rigi, they touched us. Though Nall was naked except for the knife belt, it was his turn to put me behind him. I fixed my eyes on the blue spiral on his back as the word “Witch! Witch!” hissed around us like fire in dry grass.
But mingled with that word were others. We had been their doom; yet their hands caressed. “Lali Kat,” they murmured. Young voices called as if to a comrade: “Nall! Nall!”
Then Pao was there, too big to shoulder aside, and Mailin running behind him with a face so glad and so unhappy that I broke away and embraced her as she wept. Then Nall’s arms were around her too, so that she was between us, as if she were our child.
“This way,” said Pao. The crowd pressed but did not snatch. Their eyes looked inward. I remembered their watchfulness on the beach that first night and thought, They expected this. If not this, then something; they knew the balance was wrong, that they must pay
I wondered how folk prayed, in this place.
They stared at my scars. I clung close to Mailin. Near the north colonnade was a Roadsoul cart with tattered canopies; a brazier cast up heat ripples above a dinted copper pot in which a little water boiled. Round it, over cobbles speckled with blood, women moved among the damaged, wrapping wounds and giving what comfort they could. Robin was one of them, big-bodied and slow.
I could not look at her. I looked away, and saw a boy with no feet.
He had been born with feet, of course. Now he had none, just bandages torn from somebody’s green-checked shirt, oozing pinkish yellow. His legs were eerie to look at, nothing on the ends of them. He was the age of the lad in the tunnel, twelve or thirteen, and motionless on a blanket—a Down-shore lad by his dress, but it was a Roadsoul woman in blue silks who fanned his face.
The crowd must have been warned away from the wounded, for they milled beyond an invisible line with their big-eyed thirsty children, their bloodied faces watching, us silent as stars. In the shade under the cart two dirty little Roadsoul girls played hand slaps as if this were an ordinary summer’s noon.
I said, “Nondany?”
“In the hall under the east colonnade.” Mailin pointed. “The worst wounded are there—it’s cooler.”
“Wounded?”
“His hands are burned. Badly enough.”
“Was he saving his papers?”
“Papers? No! He dragged an old woman burning from her tent on the festival grounds; the paidmen came at night, they threw oil and lit it. She died, thank goodness.” Mailin looked from me to Nall. Tears stood in her eyes. She said, “I did not think to see you again.”
“May we meet with you alone?” said Nall. “Now?”
He spoke in an undertone. The Roadsoul girls under the cart pricked up their ears like puppies. Mailin threw them a sharp look and said to Pao and the rest, “Wait on us one moment.”
She led us away from the chaos and stares. Back under another bit of canvas she sat down on a crate as though she were too weary to stand. She looked this way, that way. “Now,” she said.
Nall knelt and put his mouth to her cheek beside her ear, as though to kiss it.
“The Rigi are coming,” he said. “If the wave that has gathered breaks—and it must break—they will be here this night, to kill us any way they can, and take Downshore again for their own.”
A tidal wave is coming. A forest fire is coming. Death is coming—what will you do? Mailin sat still, her head a little inclined to catch Nall’s whisper. A shiver went over her.
“Well,” she said. “It seems they will find us right here.”
Nall leaned back.
“Kat?” said Mailin.
I started. I had been looking at Nall’s face, feeling the strangeness that I had felt since I put my foot again on solid earth. What was he feeling? If the world was nothing, did this matter to him?
“They’re coming in manats,” I said. “Hundreds. We saw them.”
Mailin slumped a little. “My great-grandfather had a manat,” she said. I had forgotten she was Rig kin; surely she knew we stood on a buried warrenhouse. “Is it in pursuit of you two they come?”
Nall shook his head. “We fell into the middle of it. We could do nothing.”
You killed the Reirig! But he had only killed a man. The Reirig still lived, only now perhaps his face was Hsuu’s.
“But—you won through to the Gate?” said Mailin. “You listened?”
He nodded.
She looked wary and puzzled, like a woman whose son has come home from war a stranger. “What did you hear?”
He let his silence say it. That silence grew long.
When still he did not speak, Mailin put her hand on his chest, next to the gash made by the Reirig’s lance. “There is no one in this life I trust more than I trust you,” she said.
A shadow crossed his face. He did not speak.
She did not press him further. She turned back to the plaza and said, “So, then. For every birth, a death. For Long Night, Least Night. The elders run up the debt, the children pay. How shall I tell this to my friends, who are already half dead with grief?”
I had drawn a breath, hearing the ama’s words in Mailin’s mouth. I said, “I’ll go to Ab Harlan. It’s me he wants.”
I felt Nall flinch.
Mailin looked at me, and for the first time since I had known her I saw her angry. “It’s not your debt, but ours.”
“I’m one of you,” I said. Then I thought, What if I am choosing not just for myself, but for a child?
Mailin took my hand. “For your generous heart we will thank you all our lives, however long those may be. But Ab Harlan isn’t healthy like a beast, that he can be satisfied. We could gorge his maw with witches until the seas dried, and he would still lust.”
I knew this. Not just of Ab Harlan, but of the League: profits never high enough, kitchens clean enough, children good enough. The swarming, untidy world was not manageable enough, nor would be until it was dead—until they had killed it.
I thought of the obsidian cone of water sucking out through the Gate. With every tide it reversed, poured back, and so made balance; but Harlan was a gate that sucked one way only, a mouth without a stomach. I felt awe, and pity.
Mailin had begun to rise like an old woman, using my hand to help. I said, “The Rigi have Ab Harlan’s son,” and she sank down again onto the crate, openmouthed. “It’s Queelic, the boy I was to marry. He’s dead by now, most like.” I told part of the tale, adding that poison to the wicked stew.
But Mailin said, “Ab Harlan’s son in the Rigi’s land? Oh, my children! Say what you will, something is changing.” She straightened her shoulders. “We’ll call the council. Pao!”
I said, “May I see Nondany?”
“Robin will take you. Robin!” And before I could protest, Robin was there, holding out her hand.
“To Nondany,” said Mailin. “We’ll send for you all as soon as may be. Nall, help me.”
He turned to go with her. I had a strange feeling, as if he might vanish. I caught his hand and said, “I’ll come right back.”
His hand was firm, with scabs on the knuckles. He nodded. Robin tugged me toward the colonnade.
I looked back. He was still there. The shrines on the Isle of Bones had moved only when I was not looking at them; I felt that if I were not looking at him, Nall would not be there at all.
Behind us the Roadsoul girls, squatting in the wagon’s narrow shade, were counting out.
Icey, dicey,
Tricey, fusty,
Nasty, hasty,
Pusty, pee.
Whinery, shinery,
All in her finery,
Eightery, ninery,
Out goes she.
29
Dancers! Dancers!
We must have many dancers,
Or the seals will forget who they are!
Dancers, robe well.
Pull the shell necklace over the head,
Pull the coral bead
To rest in the very center of the heart.
From Least Night Dance Chant. Downshore.
IT WAS NOT FAR, but it seemed far. I was afraid of the crowd, of the whispered “Witch!” and the hands that touched me. What was to prevent some terrified soul from throwing me to Ab Harlan like a bone to a dog? Yet Mailin had not seemed to think that a danger.
I could not look at Robin’s face, but her belly was so big that I had to think of Dai’s baby there, swimming unknowing under the bump of her navel.
She was saying, “If it’s a girl, she’ll be Lisei, for your mother. We don’t—we didn’t have a boy’s name yet. But maybe Nall.” She squeezed my hand. “Nondany’s in here.”
The hall had a stone door, with a blue blanket hung over it to block the heat. The lintel was carved in spirals, scavenged from the arem. I was afraid the crowd would follow us in over the threshold, but we entered the darkness alone.
In Creek I had stepped from brilliant day into the dim of Raím’s bothy and felt, until my eyes got used to it, that I was as blind as he. I felt so now. But I could hear.
The suffering was not loud. No shrieks, only incessant, irregular moans, mutters, sighs. Somewhere in the dark a child wept on and on, a tiny, puling, exhausted wail.
Toward that sound Robin led me. By the time we got to its source I had better eyes for dark and could see a child of three or so, the upper half of its face wrapped in leaking rags. Nondany sat next to it, patting it, as it twisted to get away from the pain it could not get away from. He patted with the back of his hand, also wrapped in rags. In a cracked drone, as though he had sung all night, he stared into the dark blur of the world and sang.
Loolee, loolee, you’re my pigalee,
You’ll be bonnie when you grow bigalee.
I knelt and put my arms around him. He started, then embraced me without hands. “Half-and-Half!” The hair was burned off most of his head, his eyebrows and eyelashes too, making him look expressionless, like a fish. “My singer, my weaver!”
I’m not the singer, I thought. That’s Nall. And the weaver is Raím.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Stupidly, for he burned with fever.
“Passable. Nall?”
“He’s with Mailin.”
The child writhed like a maggot. In a fierce, weak voice it cried, “Pigalee!”
Nondany began again to pat it. “He’s clinging to the song. He will live because of the song you brought me. See the great gift you have given!” He stank with the sweat of pain. “Your journey?” he said.
The wrong end of the bear. Kas, death, nothing. “I’ve brought you some songs,” I said.
He beamed.
“Pigalee!” said the child.
“Later you’ll sing them for me.” He licked dry lips and began, “Loolee, loolee …”
“Go get a drink. Rest. I’ll sing.”
I nudged him over and took up the song as I had taken up the stroke in the manat. Nondany gathered himself. I whispered between verses, “Where is the little one’s mother? Are his eyes all right?” and was not surprised to see Nondany’s mouth make, soundlessly, the words “dead; blind.” I wondered what had become of the dindarion and his papers—if they were burned, or only half burned like the child.
He got to his feet by stages, Robin helping. As at Fenno Pass he said, “Would I were seventeen!”
I thought, You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be seventeen.
Robin followed him to the door. There she dipped a little water from a bucket and held it to his mouth. He looked toward me, then shuffled out under the blanket into the day, leaning on the wall with one elbow.
Robin came back. “I sent him to Mailin, for the council. We should go too.”
“But the boy must have the song. You’re my pigalee .. .”
“I’ll find somebody to sing.” She ducked out into the light.
I patted the boy and sang. The blanket at the door shook, and two men carried in the footless boy by the corners of a pallet. In the blink of daylight I saw on another blanket Rosh the fisherman, one-legged now. The next blink brought Suni; she made her way through the wounded, her baby on her hip and Rosie by one fist.
“Here’s your auntie Kat,” she said.
I hugged Rosie’s bunchy body. “Suni, it shouldn’t be you! Not in here, with the children.”
“It’s the same in here as out there, only cooler.” She settled by the whimpering child, her baby on her lap. Rosie leaned on me, quiet for once, three fingers in her mouth. Suni said, “Rose, we’re to sing a song for this laddie. Auntie Kat’s song.”
Rosie took her fingers out and said, “Pigalee.”
“That’s the one.” Suni began to pat the boy. She looked up at me, dark-eyed in the dark. “You went to the world’s end with him, they said.”
“Yes.”
I thought she would ask, What was it like? Tell me the story! But she said only, “It’s burning so big, Lali Kat. Surely the green grass must come springing.”
Rosie sat down. “Pigalee for the lad,” she said.
I left them to it. It could not be right that the world was nothing. I could feel every one of the somethings, so many that they were cracking the gates of my heart.
The crowd at the door was daunting. Suni had bid me wait there, saying Robin w
ould come for me; instead the one who came was a gaunt stevedore in a torn breechclout, dirty burlap folded over his shoulder. It was only by his eyes that I knew him—Nall, all black with charcoal.
“We shifted a burned beam,” he said, throwing the burlap aside. “The paidmen fired lit arrows.”
See? I thought. He hasn’t disappeared. Yet I could not shake the feeling. I made myself look at the common dirt on him, the scars.
“Harlan is at the gate,” he said.
“The Gate!”
“The town’s east gate. There beyond the alley mouth.”
I began to sweat. “Can he be seen?”
“They say so.” His eyelids were smirched with black; it made his eyes look pale. He was thin as the last of the moon. “The council is near gathered.”
“I want to see Harlan.”
We pushed through the throng. They made way for us, as if they knew where we were going. A woman in a flowered blouse said, “Don’t go out to him, Lali Kat!”
Murmurs of assent. “He’ll drink you up!” “He’s the devil!” “Lali, he’ll eat you and then eat us, too!”
I started to cry. “We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We’re here.”
“Ain’t we all,” said a rueful voice. A muttered laugh went up. The parting bodies showed us a crooked stairway that led up behind chimneys to a crowded lookout, where the watchers, seeing who we were, edged back and made room.
There was a pretty view of summer fields, hedges, dry-stone walls. Wraiths of smoke rose from the burned farmsteads. On the road, a bowshot east of us, a clot of men milled around a black sedan chair.
I knew that chair. I had seen it every week at the Rulesward. I hardly needed to look now, but I did.
The small door was thrown back. The gold-headed cane was thrust out. The plump, puddingy body struggled after it, head darting as the man glared about. As I watched Ab Harlan climb out of the black sedan chair, all I could think of was a little boy crawling out of the box his father had locked him in. And Queelic; I thought of Queelic.
