by Betsy James
Ab Harlan was a blot, white-faced. His paidmen straightened his cape, brought him a black speaking-trumpet. I watched his heavy body tense, heard his reedy words in Trader’s Plain, which sounds like breaking glass.
“Give—her—to—me.” Tiny words in the wide, smoky day. “I will make your life easy. Give me the witch, and I will smooth all your roads.”
“He’ll smooth our necks,” said a voice in the crowd behind us.
Another said, “We sold ourselves. To that.”
Ab Harlan said nothing about his precious, his irreclaimable son. Perhaps he had tired of that tack. The thin cry, smaller than a marsh bird’s, wearied of cajoling.
“I’ll press the iron to you! Live mute as beasts, die mute! Beware the dusk!” and many more such things, taunting like my boy-cousins. I wondered how old he had been, in that box. Now he was grown—and rich enough to make a six-year-old’s revenge real with pike and fire.
His tiny pale face had gone red. As in the guardhouse, he cried at last, “I shall purge myself of you!” He threw away the trumpet and turned to reenter the chair, but he paused there with his back to us, bent over, shaking with rage, vomiting.
I shrank from my own skin. I watched him climb back into his box, be lifted and trundled back up the road.
Around us people sobbed. “‘Beware the dusk!’ he says. Oh, life, what will he do? Lali Kat, you see that he’s mad? He’ll make us pay the balance in blood!” I thought, but did not say, What you don’t know yet is that you must pay the balance two ways.
Half carried by the crowd, we ran back down to the street. The word “council” flew from mouth to mouth. The sun had sunk westward; the colonnades cast bars of shadow on the yellow walls. Nall made a way for us through the pushing hands. A tribe of little boys followed us because we were something about to happen at last.
The Downshore council room was a street inn. Awnings shaded its sidewalk tables, but we passed under them into the greater privacy of a kitchen that smelled of garlic and stale beer. A table had been carried in from outside and chairs and crates dragged from here and there by sweating, white-faced people.
League councils are all men. They have a saying: Women and devils speak only evils. The Creek council is all women, and they say: A man is a boy with a bigger stick.
In the Downshore council there were men and women, old and young, poor and prosperous; there were farmers and mothers and sailors and cooks, and for all I knew, there were hens and kittens, too. It seemed to me so mixed, bizarre, ragged, and chaotic that, being League-bred, I thought, It’s a native mob.
Jostling for the makeshift chairs and leaning on the walls were Lake women and River men, lads from the canyons and the sand plains, Shorefolk of every clan, and even three shocked, angry women from Ledges, which is not far from Creek; I knew the style of their tattoos. There were plenty of tattoos in that room, and braids of every twist, earrings and nose rings and toe rings, and any color and cloth of summer costume you could think of, even a Roadsoul woman with full skirts and naked breasts. She gave me a bold, mocking glance, as if this world full of roads belonged to her.
There were fifty or sixty people, and everyone talking. They moaned, shouted, argued, wept. A baby screamed. In this tumult who could debate anything?
Mailin and Pao sat at the battered table. Nondany perched next to them on a tipped crate, eyes closed, leaning against the wall. Robin stood beside Pao; I could look at her now.
I followed Nall through the crowd. The shouters stopped shouting; their faces turned to us like sunflowers. We pushed to the front and squeezed in between Mailin and Nondany. The room began to be hot.
The lines from Mailin’s nose to the corners of her mouth seemed carved by tears. She laid the flat of her hand on the table in front of her.
That was a soft sound, yet I heard it, because every voice had gone silent. Looking around, I saw that folk had had the gist of the news already.
“Neighbors,” said Mailin. Every eye in that room was on her, and I knew without being told that this council had met every day since we had left, in spite of raids and rage and burning. They knew one another.
Mailin said, “Each part risks and gives to the whole, according to its calling. These two no less—Kat and Nall. What little I knew of their task you have heard already.”
So that was why we had come home to a welcome, and why I had been safe in the throng. “Now hear it from them,” said Mailin. She raised her hand from the table and held it out to us. “Be brief,” she said.
The council muttered. They did not want us to be brief. They wanted the stories, all of them; they wanted to go on that journey with us, to see what we had seen and stand where our feet had stood, so they could say that the news we brought was not true. Nondany watched from half-closed eyes. It was so quiet that I heard, closer than the hubbub in the plaza, the chirp of a finch on the windowsill.
I tried to catch Nall’s eye, to ask without words who should speak first. But he was speaking already.
“I went to listen at the Gate, where the world is coming to be,” he said.
“The Gate,” said whispers. The lost Gate, only a story now; the Gate where the living do not go.
“I went to hear whatever it was we needed to hear,” he said. “That was my calling. Kat came with me, from love and courage—”
“It wasn’t courage,” I said.
“—but we fell into the hands of the Rigi. This was through my own weakness—”
“It was not! We were both—”
Mailin said, “Lali, let him speak.”
I shut up. Nall said, “Among the Rigi we found a plan already laid. You are sick with Ab Harlan, but the Rigi are sick with exile—and resolved to end it. We found them poised like a toppling wave, warriors in their hundreds ready to pour east—to kill you, who are the seal-killers, and take Downshore for their own.”
Brief enough. A murmur like a moan went round. “But you got away. Living, you came back—”
“I was rescued. The price for that being the lives of a girl and an old woman.” One of his hands was a fist. “With the help of Kat, in her strength, I could return to tell you that if the invasion happens as it is planned, the horde follows us by not many hours. Most like it is my own father who leads it.”
Movement in the crowd. Mec the boatbuilder said, “But did you listen at the Gate?”
“Yes.”
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing,” said Nall.
Nondany’s eyes flew open.
Nall took a breath. “Everything—” Then stopped, shut his mouth, shook his head, stepped back. Finished.
Mailin looked grieved. Pao, astonished. The council groaned. I thought, That’s all? That’s all you have to say?
But Nondany pulled his shoulders away from the wall; the crate came down with a bang. In his clear voice he sang:
If I must be pressed
From east and west,
May the wine wrung from me be good!
Drink up, friends!
In the silence that followed, he said, “Drinking song. From Hearth Hill. Grape’s point of view.”
Folk began to weep and shout. Little groups fell into panicky argument, and the heat of the room went intolerable, laced with the stink of smoke, until I thought Harlan was burning us already.
“Storm the main road!” said a burly butcher. “They’ll kill plenty of us, but we’ll kill them, too, and the rest will win free.”
“Surrender to him! He’d never—”
“But the man’s mad!”
“Burn the town, and ourselves in it! I will not see my children in that devil’s hands!”
The pitch of the quarrels grew higher. Once again Mailin laid the flat of her hand on the table.
This time the sound of it could not be heard. But it was seen. Those close to her fell silent; they hushed their neighbors, until in the end the silence itself was heard.
“Lali Kat,” said Mailin, “it’s your turn. Tell us what y
ou know.”
What I know? Had I not just spent four days finding out that everything I thought I knew was wrong?
My ignorance stood around me. Mailin, whom I had thought strong and eternal, looked defeated and old. Her haven home was ash. Dai was dead, or worse. The people of Downshore, whom I had thought hale and wise, were bloodthirsty, disorganized debtors who had sold themselves to a madman. And Nall, for whom I had deserted family and friends and lovers—who was he? Nothing, he said, and so was I.
The people looked at me, waiting. I hung my head. In a tiny voice I said, “I went with Nall because I didn’t know what else to do. I abandoned you. I still don’t know what to do. Except—”
I shuffled my feet. I had worn a hole right through the sole of my sandal, and I could feel the flagstone I stood on, still cool.
The Bear’s foot upon the mountain. Upon the maze of habitation that lay under this town, carved in spirals like roots and tendrils climbing up to make the grove that was Downshore: a forest full of birds calling in many tongues, creatures crying in many tongues. With my ears which were the Bear’s, which, like it or not, had listened at the Gate, I heard them all singing—a racket at first, then drawn into order by a rhythm like a heartbeat.
“Oh!” I said. My hands flew up, clapped once, twice. “The drum!”
Nondany let out a held breath.
I said, “I don’t know anything—except that they’re people. The Rigi. I thought they’d be monsters with claws. Even after I met Nall, and he didn’t have claws.”
Nobody laughed.
“There are great-grandmas there. And little girls, and babies. There are men with spears; they can kill you, but they’re men with spears, they’re not devils. They founded this town, they used to live here. They miss it, they’re sick without it, their children are dying. The Rigi named Downshore. It was called Tanshari.”
It went round in a whisper: “Tanshari.” Of course they knew the name. There were old songs.
A huge impatience overcame me. Maybe it was impatience to find out what death was like, since life had been so different than anybody said. Or maybe it was trustfulness, like Nondany’s, or just my rotten temper.
“You people of Downshore, you keep saying you were one with the Rigi once. Why don’t you act like it? Get out your big drum, the Sun Drum. The Rigi have one too. When they hear yours, I mean ours, maybe they’ll like it. Welcome them! If they kill us, at least we’ll die singing.
“You have no idea how lucky you are!” I said to their worn, startled faces, Nall’s among them. “You grew up singing. The Leaguemen are people too, same as the Rigi, but they’re—deaf or something. Deaf in their hearts. I don’t know what’s the matter with them. I cannot tell you how stupid it is to grow up with nothing but jump-rope rhymes!”
Into the astonished hush I chanted, loud.
Hinky-jink! You stink!
Bring your father meat and drink!
If you don’t, he will beat you,
And the Rigi roast and eat you!
Silence.
Then such a laugh filled the room—Nondany’s, too big for his little body. He beat the table with both elbows, curled his tongue, whistled like a wrestler’s mountebank, and shouted, “Half-and-Half!”
Only I knew what he meant. But Mailin’s face softened. Pao’s eyebrows went up. Old women nodded at one another.
My little courage trembled, and I said, “If Ab Harlan hears the drum, he’ll be angry. It will make him fierce!”
“So it’s time to be fierce,” said a young man in a smith’s apron. “Not with the swords we don’t have, but fierce for life. I stand with Lali Kat. I’ll die singing!”
“Though we die tonight,” said a tall woman, “let’s send the sun on its journey.”
“If we are to dance once more only, why, let’s dance our best,” said a little tailor. He jumped onto the table and rapped out a step, nack-a-nack-nock, for he had clogs on. “Those Rigi—maybe they think we’ve forgotten Tanshari. That we’ve forgotten the songs and the Cauldron and the dances of the tribes. Let’s show them we remember!” A shout went up. He cut another step. “Let’s teach Ab Harlan to dance!”
“Dance, Harlan!” The council rumbled with laughter, dark and bright as coals. “We shan’t abandon the sun. Though it be to the square and not the shore, call the clans and bring out the drum! The drum!”
There was no need for Mailin to lay her palm again on the table or to make a plan. Downshore knew how to celebrate Least Night, how to organize the dance called the Cauldron that lasts all the shortest summer night. Indeed, they had been almost ready when this trouble began. Folk turned toward the door, springing to the tasks they knew.
At the threshold they stopped, for a girl had put her arm across it. She looked fifteen, the age I had been when I found Nall on that winter beach. She had curly hair and freckles; she looked like me as I might have been and spoke as boldly as I might have spoken then, if I had not been born my father’s daughter.
“Downshore is burning,” she said. “Let’s throw it in the Year Fire! That name and time is done. Our name is Tanshari now.”
“Tanshari! Tanshari!” flew back and forth across the room. With no more words the council pushed out through the inn, back into the plaza, where the shadows were lengthening.
The young smith kissed the freckled girl and swung her to his shoulder. She clutched his hair as he ran, both of them laughing as if days, lives, worlds had no end.
The last one out was the bare-breasted Roadsoul. She raised her empty palm and gave me a secret, sidelong smile.
30
These sounds will outlast us:
water striking earth;
the feet of moths on blossoms;
the feet of birds on wet stone—
cold, quick, small.
Pennywhistle Music. Tanshari.
MAILIN, PAO, AND Robin all knew what to do for Least Night. It had been half done for weeks. I did not know how to look at Nall, as if by offering my own plan I had voiced my doubts about him in public. I looked at his feet. I wished I were that other girl, so easy with her smith.
“Lali, take care,” said Pao. “This is a kind of madness.” Nondany’s eyes were closed. When I touched him, he jumped and said, “The sensation of burning—one can’t look straight into it. Well. I ought to help with the drum, but I must go back to my little lad.”
He rose with difficulty, holding his hands close to his chest. Nall moved then; without a word he and I left the others and walked ahead of Nondany, making a barrier of our bodies, fending off the jostling arms as we nudged along the plaza to the blue curtain that hid the wounded.
We should have gone straight in to Suni, but we stopped on the threshold and looked back at the square, in awe of what was begun. The chaos was too great for talk. Nall backed against the wall, on his face the drowning look it had worn among the Rigi.
They were bringing out the drum. I wondered where they kept it, it was so big: round as the moon, broad as a whale, dark with smoke. It rolled on its side, a ponderous wheel with hundreds of hands to help it on. I was afraid the children would be crushed, but they scattered out from under it like mice.
When they had trundled it to the center of the plaza, the hands tipped it on its side. It fell almost lightly, striking the flagstones with a boom that echoed off the stone walls. An old man carried four long drumsticks. The two drummers took their places: the girl and her smith. They limbered their backs, looked at each other, and raised the drumsticks.
A palm was laid on the drum rim; Mailin’s, of course. The crowd went almost quiet.
She lifted her hand, and the sticks came down.
In the closed canyon of the square the sound was enormous; it stopped everything but itself. The stark, sweating faces of the crowd froze, and Nall, at the first stroke, covered his ears.
I thought, Tell me that’s nothing!
Then the people swarmed and shouted. Booths, bundles, carts were hauled back to clear a dancing space.
Standards and masks appeared from closets where they had been guarded and mended all year; there were quarrels over who would carry them. Folk were in haste to dance, driven to dance as though the dance would save them—from the Rigi, from Ab Harlan, maybe from themselves.
Boom. Boom. The wind would carry that beat to the paid-men who waited beyond the no-man’s-land with torches and dirks. I wondered whether any of them had been pressed from little towns that danced the solstices with a Sun Drum. In my father’s house high on the cliffs, each summer and winter, I had heard that deep beat. Ab Harlan would be hearing it now, in his grand mansion.
Fiddles were brought out, and cymbals and flutes. An inner circle of dancers began to move clockwise round the drum, an outer circle counterclockwise. The plaza was already half in shadow.
I had danced one Long Night, Nall must have danced many, yet neither of us moved from the doorway. At Long Night the faces had been merry and open, sometimes drunken; now they were frightened. But as the beat went on and on, calling the people into trance, that fear was washed away by sadness, or longing, or only depth. The world went simple, as the beat divided it into two things: sound, no sound.
“Here,” I said aloud. “And not.”
Nobody heard me. The thunder was too great. Nall’s face was rigid. I guessed that he was back in his nightmare at that other drum, and I did not know what to do for him. I did not see how the wounded could bear the terrible noise.
I pulled his head down and spoke into his ear. “Too loud for Nondany.” He nodded and followed me in under the curtain. His limp was worse.
In that close darkness the sound was a horror. Some of the watchers had already carried away their wounded; Rosh was gone, and the footless boy was a corpse, uncovered and alone.
“Pigalee …,” sang Nondany. Rosie jumped and shouted, her hands over her ears. Suni ran to us, her baby screaming.
