by Betsy James
Near the main bonfire it was crowded, and I had to slow down. People took my hands and kissed me, asking, “Where’s Nall?”
I said, “Where’s Mailin? Have you seen Mailin?”
A woman snatched her little daughter out of a cloud of children and charged her with taking me to Mailin. I would sooner have trusted a mayfly; the girl wore borrowed silks and was wild with night, shrieking, all eyes. She took my hand, and I swear she flew instead of walking, like a june bug on a thread.
She pulled me away from the crowds, along the beach to a lean-to cobbled from a canvas awning and the turquoise Roadsoul cart. There the wind flattened a wide fire, throwing shadows so fitful that it was hard to pick out Mailin and Robin, and Suni on a blanket with her children sprawled in her lap like sleeping puppies. Pao wrestled with the awning, sharing a hammer and shouts with an old Rig and a Roadsoul lad. A shadow in the lean-to was young, dark-clad Ab Hiun, crouching against his wife as she held their child close. He had his big hat off, fanning the baby’s face.
When we came into view of this, Mailin’s new house, I stopped. My child guide took this as dismissal and slipped my hand, flitting back to her game of tag. I stood alone outside the blustery circle of light.
Ab Hiun waved the wide black hat. Then he set it aside and did what I had never seen any League father do: He held out his arms, and his wife put the baby into them.
He looked terrified, as if he might break it. But he got it held, and his wife took up the hat and fanned. Ab Hiun gazed at his child’s face. He nudged back the blankets and touched its sweaty hair.
I stepped into the shifting light. Mailin saw me, then the rest, all their glad faces. Ab Hiun and his wife shrank around their child. Robin came to draw me to the fire, saying, “We were worried! Where’s Nall? Did you talk to your father?”
“Father’s dead,” I said. “Lying on the settee. The candle was still burning.”
They stared, dumbfounded. Robin said, “Oh, Kat!” and laid her cheek on mine. “Where’s Nall?”
“He stayed at the house.”
Mailin looked at me sharply, but Suni made an answer for them by saying, “Will he bring Ab Drem away?”
I imagined my father’s body in Nall’s arms and shuddered. “Tomorrow will be soon enough. That house is cold even in summer.” As though Father were meat.
Ab Hiun said from the lean-to, “Ab Drem is dead?”
“Yes,” I said. “Alone.”
“He was long ill,” said his wife. She looked at her child, and two tears tracked down her cheeks.
Mailin touched her shoulder. “Lali Minashya, the fever is nearly gone.”
The woman I had known for years without knowing her name, Minashya, nodded untrustingly. When for my father’s sake her husband began to murmur the words for the dead, she snatched the baby from him with a look of horror.
Before they could ask more about Nall, I said, “Where’s Dai? And Queelic and Aieh and Hsuu? Oh, where’s Nondany?”
Mailin looked at me as though she could see through my skin into my heart, an empty room with a guttering candle in it. “Nondany’s at his sister’s house. Robin can give you news of Dai. Queelic is off on some errand—Lali, that lad gives me hope for this life. Aieh went with him. Hsuu is down on the beach with Harlan.”
“It was hard to get his boots off,” said Robin. “Harlan’s. He was afraid of the little waves at first and screamed, but then he giggled. Dai’s gone to our house. The house is gone, but you saw the cowshed is still there—and Moss is in it! She’ll be in pain from the milk; Dai went to her as soon as we heard—What’s that?”
The drum had beat so unvaryingly that we had stopped hearing it. Now it stuttered; there was a change in the commotion near town, and I could run out with Pao to look and not be questioned.
A fuss of shadows heaved at an alley mouth, as if something were trying to get born there. Then the great, round, rolling shape of the drum emerged, bumping down the path to the beach, helped along by a host of hands. It was still being beaten in an approximation of its rhythm—I could not see by whom, only hear thump, thump and happy yells.
“Taking it down to the strand, as is proper,” said Pao. We went closer. The drum rolled between the fires. People danced as they walked, whole and wounded, Rig and Tansharian, some with grieving or bitter faces, but mostly merry.
“Look there!” said Pao.
It was Ab Jerash, in shirtsleeves. Queelic walked beside him. Aieh followed Queelic with both hands on his waist, and two more bare-chested Rig girls followed her the same; they were doing that line dance where you kick your feet out all together, left and right. Ab Jerash glanced nervously at the girls and waved his hands to the music. He even jigged a little in his boots. He was a diplomat.
“Lali Kat,” said Pao, “can your heart encompass what you have set in motion, like that rolling drum? You and Nall.”
Time collapsed like a folded fan. In one breath I was walking with Nondany on the road to Downshore, eager and secretive, holding Nall’s face in my heart; in the next the world had turned over, and in place of that man’s warm face was nothing.
I turned and saw Mailin’s fire through the shadowy shape of the cart. Her face blinked into the light, then the Roadsoul woman’s, then Ab Hiun’s. I remembered Nondany saying, If things get too surprising, Half-and-Half, you’re welcome at my sister’s house.
“I’m going to Nondany,” I said to Pao, and before he could ask another question, I ran again, into the dark.
Ran and ran. I had hurried from Creek, eager for Nall; hurried to the Gate to save the world and then raced back to warn; hurried to confront Ab Harlan, then to rescue Dai, next to knock on Ab Jerash’s door; hurried to my own old house, knocking and calling Father! Father!; hurried to open the door, to arrive, to be safe, like a fleeing deer that does not see the cliff until there is nothing under its feet, falling, still running as it falls.
I ran toward Nondany’s house through the windy scrub, limped over shell middens on my worn-out sandals, climbed the path to the alley mouth where the drum had been rolled out.
But it was not the alley with Lilliena’s shop in it. Right away I got lost in the maze of streets. The lanes were full of broken furniture and crockery, crushed flowers, lost shoes. People came and went through this ruin as if it were not there, except for one old woman who swept her dooryard in the dark, tidying up after war.
The starlight did not reach to the bottom of the alley. Whenever I heard voices, I stepped into a doorway or behind a lilac tree; there were as many hiding places aboveground as the warrenhouse had had below. I thought of Sell, of the ama’s quiet room that smelled of honey and sand and peace. I thought, If she were here with the rest, everything would be all right, she would tell me what to do. But she was dead, and Father was dead, and I ran.
I came to the plaza. Without the drum it was as quiet as a body whose heart has stopped. Starlight silvered everything; the trees, shielded from the wind, were still. I could hear the voices of all the people who had ever lived there, Rig and Tansharian and Lake and Hill, all dead. Then the ghosts turned into lovers standing close in a doorway, a sad man scratching in the trash, a cat.
I turned down the alley I thought was Nondany’s. Wrong again. I went back to the plaza and tried another. Everything felt changed. A trio of drunks burst upon me, singing dirty and talking big; I kept still and thought myself invisible, like a nighthawk’s chick on its nest of stones. They rolled past. I was left still holding my breath, so quiet that I heard, faintly, a voice singing in some inner garden.
Love and rose are red as blood
When their blooms are in the bud;
Ah, but each droops pale and wan
When its flower has blown and gone….
I opened my mouth to shout, “Nondany!” But the revelers still bellowed in the street; I held my tongue. I climbed a cobbled buttress and ran along the tops of the stone walls above empty patios, following the voice to a shadowy court where I looked down on the
garden cool with roses, and on Nondany’s untidy head. He had a chair and a little glass lamp, and he held the broken dindarion across his lap. A little, hairy dog crouched at his feet. The burned boy lay unmoving in a mess of blankets on a stone wall bench, the rags that covered his upper face white as bone in the lamplight.
Oh, heart! That love so soon should fade, And that sweet flower in dust be laid …
He could not strum the broken dindarion; perhaps it was comfort to hold it.
“Nondany!”
He jumped, looked everywhere but up.
Because it was not the piggie song, I was afraid the boy was dead. I ran along the wall to the apricot tree, swarmed down it, and dropped into Nondany’s outstretched arms.
“Half-and-Half! Falling from the sky, by life! No magic—I saw how you two dove out that window.” He embraced me with his elbows, holding his hands away. The little dog bounced but did not bark.
“The boy?” I said. I could see now that he slept. His pouting lips trembled with the ferocity of his dreams.
“Better, I think. By life!” He put me back from himself, his face furrowed with weariness and smiles. I wore my living breath around me like wind, thinking: Father is dead—and I’m alive.
I put my hand on the lad’s little, hot one. He spread his fingers and sighed.
“Don’t wake him!” said Nondany. “I’ll have to sing that song. It’s only justice that at the great change of the world I should have to sing some damned silly song ten thousand times.”
“So you know what’s happened—all about it?”
“All about it,’” he said. “By life, there’s a goal for me. Where’s Nall?”
I took my hand off the boy’s. “I don’t know.”
Nondany peered at my face. Raised both eyebrows. He sat down again, lifted the dindarion with his wrists, and said, “I don’t think you’ve met Lilliena’s little dog? I rescued him from a horrid fate: He was about to be eaten by Roadsouls. I’m convinced he remembers it, for he is voracious. His name is So It Is. Say hello to the lady, Sotis.”
The dog wagged and put up one paw.
I did not shake it. I said, “Nall and I. We went to my father’s house, to tell him—to talk to him. He was dead. On the settee. With his mouth open.”
Nondany watched me, silent. At last he said, “I have noticed, over the years, that the dead resemble one another more than they do their living relatives. I know that open, empty mouth.”
“I never saw him asleep.” That seemed like a mystery, almost the core of it. “He slept alone, in his box bed.”
“Nall was with you when you found him?”
“He’s still there. For all I know.”
“You quarreled?”
“No.” A quarrel has two sides, like the fight at the Gate. When nothing matters, there are no quarrels.
“Well, well,” said Nondany, tilting the chair. The boy whined in his sleep. “Not that it is any of my business. In the middle of this grand, this loud time. When I have sung that asinine song until my stomach is upset. And have chattered with a thousand people, including, I believe, an aunt of yours.”
“She came here? Auntie Jerash came down here?”
“With an entourage of daughters—very frightened, and with good reason. I was worried for them. But it seemed she had plans. She was laden with cloth and medicines, ready to do good. I nearly lost my laddie to her. I’m a cynic, Half-and-Half, but I’m persuaded that she was making such amends as she knew how to.”
“If she came down here, in the dark, that’s enough. More than enough.”
“So I felt. And here you are as well. But Nall—”
“I am not nothing!”
“No. Not only nothing.”
You are either nothing or you are something. I turned away, to climb back up the tree and keep running.
Nondany lifted the broken dindarion. Under his breath he whistled the song he had sung in his eyrie right before the Rigi came.
Some part of me must have been paying attention then, for now I turned back and said, “How?”
“How what?”
“If it’s true nothing turns to every shining thing, how does it do it?”
“If I knew that, Half-and-Half, I would be king of the sea and of earth and sky besides.”
“If I could turn nothing into every shining thing, I could have anything I want.”
“Ah. But that isn’t what the song says. It is not we who turn nothing into everything. Nothing does that by itself.”
I whispered, “But I don’t like what it does.”
Nondany touched the boy’s feet. Someone had washed them, and they were perfect: fat brown toes to kiss, to pretend to eat. I thought, He’ll be able to dance someday. If he wants to.
Aloud I said, “If nothing can turn to everything, then it wasn’t nothing.”
“What would you call it, then?”
“There’d be no word for it! There couldn’t be.”
I thought of Tadde’s seal speaking, how the four of us had each put different words in its mouth. How we all wonder at the same world, yet we explain it with different songs, tattoos, hand slaps.
Who could say for sure what Nall had heard, or name it? Each namer is different, each name has to be in some language and not another. I said, “We use whatever words we have.”
I did not look at Nondany. Maybe I dared look, at last, into the gap between the stones of the Gate.
I saw how you might come to believe that your own word for this namelessness was the truth. The way my aunt Bian had to believe that what had eaten me was a bear—it just had to be. The way I had to believe the man I had called was the perfect lover I longed for—he just had to be.
And Nall, trying to name a mystery too big for naming, was able only to feel how unnameable it was.
Like the Bear that was not a bear. I said, “It has a big letter.”
Nall had heard Nothing that was not nothing—that is Everything. Everything: nameless; whole; rolling toward the shores of the world to be cast up and named, for a little while—“heart,” “fish,” “mountain,” “Kat,” “child”—and then dissolve again to Nothing.
He had said, I hear Nothing.
I could not hear what he did: that Sound that was not a sound. But I could feel the waves from its earthquake, the wind from its wings. Like him, I could call that “listening.” If I coiled my little words around what I felt, like clay around the emptiness that is a bowl, I could make songs.
Aloud I said, ‘“Everything is Nothing,’ he said. That’s the place all patterns come from. But to see it or hear it, you have to dress it; you can’t make songs from Nothing until it’s wearing words.”
Something wet lapped at my ankle.
I jumped. The little dog was licking and grinning. It was the ugliest dog I ever saw; its bottom teeth stuck out.
“For shame,” Nondany told it. “Interrupting the artist at her work.”
I stared around at the world that was changed and not changed, more vast than the sky. Nondany teetered in his chair.
I said, “I walked out and left Nall with my father.”
“Ah.”
“Father hates him.”
“Not anymore.”
“But I left him with a corpse—And his ama just dead—” I wrung my hands. “He keeps saying nothing matters.”
“You have just told me that Nothing matters a great deal. And you might have some compassion for him; while you have been finding your calling, he has been losing his. Or so he thinks.”
“But I don’t know who he is now.”
Nondany tipped his chair.
“I’m not even sure I like him.”
His foot tapping.
“I don’t know what he’s feeling.”
“By life!” Nondany roared. “Youth is something I no longer understand. Here you are, with a sound body and sound hands, a pretty face, and all the energy in creation, and what do you do? Think up yet another reason to stall. In my experience, which
is not slight, the way to find out what another person feels is to ask him!”
A wail rose from the wall bench.
“There now! I’ve waked my laddie. Husha, husha, mannie.”
“Ting piggie!” wept the little hoarse voice.
“I deserved that. I must forgo tirades.” Nondany began to pat. I heard someone moving in the house beyond the patio. “You said Nall might still be with your father?”
“Maybe. No. He wouldn’t stay there.”
“Where might he have gone? ‘Nall’—by life, that name confounds me every time. In the dialect of Welling, nall means ‘nameless’ and is one of the appellations of God.”
“He’s not a god!” I said, and saw that I had made him one. “I have no idea where he’s gone.”
That was a lie. For in my heart I saw where Nall had gone, clear as a morning dream.
I saw him standing in that still, cold room, unmoving, while the candle flame jumped on the last of the wick and went out. I saw him drag his lame foot to the door—his hands were stronger than mine, he could lift that latch with one thumb—and let himself out into the damp vestibule, then into the forlorn dooryard, shutting each door behind him.
I saw him in the big night, breathing the west wind; saw him walk to the cliff’s edge, press through the scrub pines, and, lurching a little, pad down the steep path to the beach. It would be quiet there, the footprints of paidmen long since washed away.
On the sand where I had found him, I saw the man I had called to me strip off his knife belt and breechclout. He rubbed his face, pushed back his curls, stretched his toes into the sand one last time. Then two strides; his shoulders leaned into the waves, and he was swimming west. In the sea he was not lame. He did not follow the line of skerries this time. Just swimming and swimming, into the dark.
As he drew closer to the nothing that he heard so clearly, I saw two shadows come nuzzling up from the deep: a seal with a mark like a human hand and one freckled like a fawn, welcoming him, drawing him down. Surely he would not be lonely forever. Surely they would find him a new skin.
