by Betsy James
Hsuu looked about. At the fire; at the gangly children grown still; at the smoky town. At the two of us, standing before him a little parted, as we had been at the ama’s last scream: here as we had been there, as if time and space were not real.
Hoarse surf, the roar of fire.
Nall limped toward his father. The point of the lance, held level, stopped him.
“Who kills the king is king,” said Hsuu. “Until the next king kills.”
“There never was a king,” said Nall. “Nor a priest, nor an elder. Only each one of us listening, and the world rushing in and out of the Gate.”
“Yet at the Gate you heard—”
“Nothing. That a king is no greater than a grain of sand, nor life than death. Tell me, Father—does that have another name?”
Hsuu pursed his lips. As though to himself, in answer or prayer, he said, “The great deep.”
He raised the lance away. But Nall’s lame leg half buckled; it gave him to the rising blade so that it nicked his breast as it rose, canceling the Reirig’s mark. As he found his feet again a line of blood ran down over his ribs, into the waist of the patched breechclout.
Hsuu held the lance upright. Nall went to him. He laid his hand on his father’s heart.
Brown hand, blue breast. Neither man spoke. Maybe the hand meant Stop. Maybe it meant Father.
Hsuu lowered his head. Looked about. Turning from Nall, he walked to me and put into my hand the lance, warm as a paddle shaft. “That is not mine,” he said, “and my son will not have it. Let it be yours, Bear.”
The smooth shaft, the ponderous, balanced weight. I looked east over my shoulder. The urchins had the same thought and opened a path for me.
I ran to the fire and hurled that beautiful bullies’ tool into the middle of it.
I had never thrown a spear; I chucked it as if it were a clothesline prop. It rattled on a burning bedstead and tipped a fish crate before it sank into the heart of the flames. Heat made the air ripple—or maybe it was the boundary charm, dissolving forever.
I came back to Nall and Hsuu. They looked alike, all right, both mouths open. Then my own opened as I saw the boats that sculled in the cloudy light—truly saw them.
Manats, yes, but also vois, full of people. Small people, even. Children. They were singing.
Hsuu closed his mouth, pursed his lips. As he raised his hands to wave them in, he said, “We have come to speak with the father of the eagle.”
“Eagle?” said Nall. He had begun to shake, fingering the nick at his breast. I was afraid he would fall, and leaned on him so it would look as though I were the one leaning.
“Keeo the eagle,” said Hsuu. He nudged his chin toward the boats diving out of the dissolving mist, through the long waves.
“Keeo?” Nall stared. He clutched me with his bloody hand. “It’s Queelic!” Then, “Aieh!”
A voi had grounded and heeled. Its oarswoman leaped into the waves, but her passenger wobbled on a thwart, grabbed at the air, and fell into the sea.
Nall steadied himself at my shoulder, then ran.
I let him go. It was easy, like letting go the hummingbird you have found stunned and held in your hand a moment to marvel at.
He ran to Aieh. His leg folded, he fell into the surf. Aieh wore Queelic’s shirt over her sealskin, tied by the sleeves; I watched her try to pluck Nall out of the sea with one hand, Queelic with the other, until both men got to their feet and Nall had Aieh in his arms the way he had held me sometimes, and I had to watch Queelic flounder to the beach instead.
He tottered toward me, went dizzy with earth, and sat down. “Kat!” he said, waving. “How did you get here?” He stood up, sat down again. “The land moves,” he said. “That’s odd.”
It was Nondany’s earthquake, nobody left standing but me. Queelic sat splay-legged; Nall and Aieh knelt in the surf as though knit together; Hsuu stooped to pick up a handful of sand. All around us boats heeled; wild, warlike men sang as they bent to the ropes, steadying their craft to haul them in.
“Queelic.” I did not think he was real. In an instant I would wake, flailing, in deep water.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, looking shy, “they’ve given me a new name.”
Hsuu heard him and said, “Keeo,” the eagle’s cry.
“That’s it. I never liked ‘Queelic’ I’m not going to wear boots anymore either. They were making my toes look strange.” Cautiously he stood. He stared at the hazy cliffs, the gaping urchins, the gathering manats. “Did Hsuu tell you? I’ve invited the Rigi to talk to Dad. I didn’t think so many would come, but that’s best, isn’t it? More folk to speak.” He sniffed the smoky air. “Are we interrupting a feast or something? I heard they have wild parties in Downshore, but I never went to any.”
“‘Talk to Dad,’” I said like an imbecile. “Your father is burning Downshore.”
“Burning it? It’s real estate!”
“Burning and killing.”
“Well, well.” In Queelic’s suddenly soft voice I heard an echo of Ab Harlan’s, and shivered. “Then we’re getting here just in time, aren’t we?”
Manats thickened on the sand. Singing rose in the air. Boats sliced the foam, row on row, tilting in the shallows. Lean, armed, windblown men leaped out singing; they lifted others out: old women, young women, old men, all singing. Children the age of the urchins who, behind me, were singing too; and all were singing the same song.
I am the sigh that stills the scream,
I am the word that frees the dumb,
I am the light that ends the dream.
I am the child. I come, I come.
I stood in the breaking wave, remembering Aieh’s words—Already they sing your song in secret—and then the urchin’s: We’ll sing that song you taught us!
I looked for their teacher. Aieh had helped him to his feet, and he stood swaying, his arms around her. I wondered how much Nondany had understood, peering from his window.
Nondany was not the only watcher. Other eyes had seen the manats dive in, the paidmen flee; they had seen Nall walk to meet the lance and me fling it into the fire. The heaped barriers at the town’s alley ends had been torn down, and little shivering figures crept out.
But one was running: Mailin, followed more slowly by lame Pao and Robin, ponderous in her new weight. “Alele! Ai alele!” Mailin cried in the tongue of her Rig ancestors. As Hsuu turned to look, she held up what she carried: her own ancient sealskin, saved from the fire.
Behind her, all along the beach, the people of Tanshari were stumbling down to the sea.
Old women, hobbling on feet already sore with dancing. Old men, their hands trembling. “Ai alele!” they said, weeping. The urchins went to meet their grandparents, singing, drawing them to the fire.
The smaller children came; their parents tried to snatch them back, but they were like minnows slipping through the fingers, running to the thin, wild Rig children as they were lifted from the vois, smooth head to tousled head. The smallest were afraid to go alone; they dragged at their mothers’ hands, and their mothers swung them high and came.
I looked at Hsuu, who could call seals. His face was as always: serene, mutable.
The men had hung back, dazed with war and the dance; now they hurried after their families. The Tansharians and the Rigi met, they touched. They began to speak and call in the Plain tongue; looking from face to yearning face, I could see no difference, one tribe from the other. In the gang of children on the beach I saw the twin girls who had kissed me; they were dressed in all their best: one string of blue beads and one of white. They had found the Roadsoul girls and were shoving, laughing, running in circles. Somebody had already slapped somebody. There were tears.
“Queelic,” I said. “I mean, Keeo. How did you do this?”
“Do what?”
I waved at the heeled manats, the wild-haired children.
“Me?” said Queelic. “I didn’t do anything. They were coming anyway. We talked, that’s all—Hsuu and
me and the rest, the younger ones. And one old lady. Nall’s grandma she was, and Aieh’s, too.”
“Their ama! When did you—”
“After you left for the Gate. The boss was in a fit—men with spears all over. Nobody noticed Aieh and me. We went up the hill to those campfires, and this old lady comes stumping out of the dark.” Queelic spoke in a torrent, as all about us the human torrent rushed and mingled, poured and withdrew and poured again in eddies like the surf where it mixes with sand, only the sound of this surf was singing.
Queelic said, “Was she in a fury! She could speak Plain, but she wouldn’t. Aieh had to translate, and I thought, ’Look out, Nall, if she catches him!’
“So it’s getting light—we see them fetch you in the boats, but we can’t get at you for spears. Then all of a sudden they’re calling for grandma, and off she goes, cursing gibble-gabble under her breath. The spears let her through—but, Kat, you’ll have to tell me what happened next, for I can’t cipher it.”
“Say what you saw.”
“Couldn’t see anything—that’s why I’m asking. All’s pretty quiet; then there’s a great set-to, all noise, like a dogfight. Howls. The crowd breaks like the wind blew it, and there’s grandma and the fancy boss stone dead, and you two vanished, and everybody yelling ‘The end of the world!’ and Hsuu running around trying to keep the muscle men from killing each other. And then—like magic—”
“What?”
“Here and there, and then all together, the Rigi start to sing. That song they’re singing now, about the child. It’s Nall’s song, did you know? The Reirig hated it, but everybody whispered it anyway, Aieh says, and they just got fed up and belted it out loud. I wish you’d heard them. Seemed they were all of one mind for once, even Hsuu—”
“Hsuu sang that song?”
Queelic nodded. “His voice—you can’t describe his voice. But it seemed an opportunity. You know how the League is about opportunity, so I just edged in and suggested that the Rigi come see my father. Since they were already packed. Aieh! Ask Nall to explain what happened.”
She had her hand in Nall’s, drawing him stumbling through the crowd. The Rigi wanted to touch him: their singer, the man who had killed the Reirig.
“We talked a lot,” said Queelic. “Aieh and me, and Hsuu, of course, and the young men. The Rigi shouldn’t be shut away out there. The babies are getting born with club feet, the barley’s got some disease, and the men are fighting each other. The kids are too thin. I don’t want the Rigi to die out. I like them.”
Aeih said, “You talk as if we were creatures. Birds.”
“I know. I want to learn to be one.”
Nall took his hand out of Aieh’s. Queelic greeted him; Nall seemed not to hear. He came to me and held me, awkwardly first, then hard, as at the Gate. The wound across his heart still bled, and the blood seeped through my shift, first warm, then clammy as he leaned away. He did not look at me; he gripped my arms above the elbows. I could not read anything in his face but endurance.
I thought, We are all neither more nor less to him than a king or a grain of sand.
“No,” he said.
I did not know what that meant: No, you’re not the one I love or No, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
“No. It’s not over,” he said. “The wave has not broken.”
I thought it had broken. I did not know if I could bear it to break more. But Queelic looked around at the crowd as if it were commonplace, a fair. He looked at the smoking ruin that had been Mailin’s house. “Best be getting home,” he said.
“To whatever’s at home,” I said. “Paidmen.”
“They might kill me,” he said. “I’d rather be killed than go back to what I was doing—cheating with the books and frisking henwives for the tariff.” He shaded his eyes to watch the activity on the beach. “How beautiful! All human life is numbers, like the nests of ants or bees.”
“My father used to say, ‘War is numbers,’” I said.
“Everything is numbers. War also.”
“And love? And sex? And singing?”
“I don’t know. But it might be there in the middle of them, like the stone in the peach.” The low sun lit his face. His pimples were clearing up.
“Numbers,” said Aieh. “What you showed me—that ‘nothing’ has a name: zero. An egg.”
“But of what bird?” Queelic smiled, and I had a glimpse of the eccentric charm he would grow into. “Well, I’d better not show up at Dad’s place half naked. Kat, Aieh took me swimming before we left, and I’ve got a sunburn I won’t say where. I couldn’t swim, either. Aieh, may I have my shirt back?”
She gave it to him. He shrugged it on unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeves. She yanked it around on him, like a mare that licks her colt until it staggers. “Keeo, you need a better skin.”
“This isn’t my skin, you know that.”
“Therefore you need one. Your real skin is so pale, like a bird’s.” One full sleeve unrolled and fell down over his knuckles so that their hands, for an instant clasped, were hidden.
At Aieh’s waist the shirt had been a white rag, but on Queelic’s back it was a Leagueman’s shirt, and Queelic a Leagueman. The pressing, impetuous crowd began to stare, and a low snarl rippled through it. A group of young men from Tanshari gathered, chanting “Black Boot! Black Boot!” in time with the drum. “Keeo! Keeo!” cried the Rig warriors, whipping out knives. The Reirig’s men were wolves again.
Nall broke away from me. Empty-handed, he ran between the gangs, his arms outspread. I ran after him; Aieh joined us, then Mailin and Pao. Queelic himself came, settling his shirt; the rivals fell back from him, or maybe it was from Hsuu, who padded beside him like a lion.
Leaning to Hsuu, Queelic said, “Can you make everybody listen?”
“I?” said the man who could call seals.
Nothing happened. Then the roar became a querulous gabble; we could hear the surf again. The dog men of both factions hesitated, looked sullen and puzzled.
Queelic put his hands on Aieh’s shoulders and said, “Shout her name.”
All together we cried “Aieh!” and found what a yell it made. Nall knelt to make a step of his thigh and Queelic clambered onto it, waggling about, yanking at Nall’s hair until he could stand straight. “Hello!” he shouted. “Excuse me!”
The quarrelers stared at him, at one another. Over the knock of the drum Queelic said, “Maybe you know me? I’m Ab Harlan’s son.”
There was a roar then! The throng seethed. Queelic flapped his hand at it, like a cook strewing cold water on a broth. It settled. Teetering on Nall’s thigh like a young eagle on a branch, he shouted into the hush, “I promised the Rigi we’d talk with my father. You Downshore people, you come too.” He wobbled, fell off his perch, climbed up again. “If there’s fighting, we can’t talk. Don’t fight.”
Pao said, “Does he think he can stop a war by telling it to stop?”
Mailin said, “It hasn’t stopped for anything else. Why not have a little boy tell it, Stop?”
I said, “He’s not a little boy.”
Queelic nodded at warriors and fishwives, Roadsouls and butchers, grandmothers and brewers and smiths. “Let’s go, then. Did anybody see where the paidmen went?”
“Ran up the cliffs,” yelled Mec. I thought about walking to Upslope under a rain of black arrows.
Queelic scratched his jaw. His beard was coming in red. “If you’re afraid, don’t come,” he shouted. “But I’ll walk in front, and if you want to talk with my dad, I’ll do my best to make sure he sees you.”
He lost his balance, fell off with a yelp, climbed back up, and said, “Keep the children at the back. And could somebody loan me some shoes? I can’t walk that far in my bare feet.”
What had been a riot became a muttered argument about shoes. Two impossibly ancient amas came shuffling hand in hand, one a Tansharian in shawl and culottes, the other a Rig in a sealskin worn to the hide, her breasts wrinkled and flat.
&
nbsp; “This is my own auntie’s child!” the Tansharian said, weeping and clutching her cousin. She shook off her purple carpet slippers. “You take these, boy. We’re going to sit right here on the beach and talk.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Queelic climbed down from Nall’s thigh and put on the slippers, saying in a low voice, “Kat, I’m ashamed. You know how it is—I’ve taken tariffs and all, but I never was in Downshore in my life. How do we get home?”
“Scythe Road.” He made it sound so easy that I believed it: just walk home and talk to Dad. “Or the cliff paths—they’re quicker.”
“Would you show us the way? Please. But we ought to walk through town; I need to see what I’m talking about.”
The real estate. “I know only one path,” I said. The one Dai had carried Nall down, so long ago.
“I’ll lead you,” said Mailin.
Mec said, “They’ll shoot us from the cliffs!”
Hsuu showed his strong teeth. “One stops a wave with arrows?”
It was too late to stop anything. It was almost too late for fear, as in the reddening sun the tide of bodies began to nudge and roll east toward higher ground.
Pao said to Robin, “Don’t come.”
“I’m coming.”
Nall had not spoken. Again I had the feeling that if I looked at him, I might see nothing. But there he was; he, and all the Rigi. When I called a man out of the sea, I had called a nation.
The improbable column of walkers began to stir and flow inland. With the children of all tribes running and wrestling behind us, the current flowed up the beach toward Tanshari and the drum.
32
Do not kill those upon whom your business depends.
Do not steal from allies.
Beware of animals and women.
Know your balance.
Watch your back.
From The Rules. Upslope.
THE BARRIERS at the alley mouths had been scattered. Next to one of them lay the swollen bodies of two paidmen, killed with a hatchet and left to the summer heat.
