Night Gate

by Isobelle Carmody

  “What about the other wild things?” Mr. Walker protested. “They will smell that we are not wild things.”

  “You’ll just have to avoid them,” Billy said, sounding exasperated. “You have to go as wild things, otherwise we will have to explain about the bramble gate and admit to coming from another world.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elle said. “I thought we were going to see the keepers about the wizard. Surely we’ll have to tell them everything.”

  Billy glanced at Rage, and she saw that, like her, he had come to the conclusion that they had better avoid the keepers. “I think we should learn a bit more about the keepers before we reveal ourselves to them,” he said.

  Elle cast herself down on the grass with an expression of utter boredom and said she might as well sleep if they were not going anywhere. Goaty lay neatly beside her, and Bear and Mr. Walker curled up to sleep, too. Billy stayed beside Rage, gazing down at the pier. Several people were moving around the hut and the winch. They looked like workers, not passengers.

  “What do you suppose the lions smelled on Bear?” Rage asked Billy.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It was very strange. That sprite said they saw something in her future.” He shivered. “I could not bear it if something bad happened to her, Rage. Her life has been so hard already.”

  Rage understood. She felt the same about Mam. But she was beginning to see that something had been wrong with Mam even before the accident. That was why they had moved so often, and why Mam never made any friends. Rage had thought they went back to Winnoway for Grandfather Adam’s sake. Now she wondered if they had come back because Mam hoped to heal whatever had been hurt inside her.

  But Grandfather Adam had been just as cold and hard as ever.

  Strangely, instead of hating her grandfather for the way he had been, she found herself trying to imagine what had happened to make him so blind to joy and laughter, so stony to Rage and her mother. It couldn’t be because of Mam and her brother running away, as she had always thought—Mrs. Johnson had said Grandfather Adam was like that even before he married Grandmother Reny. That meant something must have happened to him even before Mam was born.

  Later, as Rage laid out a supper of what remained from the baker’s supplies, Elle vanished for a time. Returning, she shook herself mischievously, showering Rage and Billy with water. She had been for a moonlight swim. Goaty woke from his nap with a shudder as Elle and Billy fell into a wild romp. They were scolded happily by Mr. Walker, whom they almost squashed. Remembering what Billy had said about the difference between being a dog and being human, Rage wished she had their ability to put aside cares and live in the moment. But she was too human. Billy had once said that to be human was to be free to make choices, but really, being free only meant you had to worry about everything your choosing might cause.

  She leaned back against a tree and closed her eyes. Listening to their puffing and panting, she could almost pretend she was home with Mam.

  She wondered what the kids at school had thought when she didn’t come to classes. They knew her mother had been in an accident and had been awkwardly kind when Rage returned to school, but she hadn’t wanted anything from anyone except to be left alone. One of the boys had asked why her father didn’t come, and the teacher had shushed him, but Rage wasn’t offended. There were lots of kids in the school who did not live with their fathers, and at least one other boy who didn’t know his father. Unlike him, Rage never thought about who her father might be. She didn’t know why, but his absence hadn’t hurt her at all. She had Mam, and that was enough for her.

  After they had eaten their fill, Rage suggested they all sleep. It was unlikely another boat would arrive before morning. There were some bushes on the side of the mound farthest from the road, where they would not be seen. The animals curled up readily enough, even Billy, but Rage found she could not sleep, despite being tired. She wrapped her coat around her shoulders and thought about Mam, wondering how she was.

  She could hear Mrs. Somersby: Mary Winnoway will die if she doesn’t wake and exert some will to heal….

  Rage found she was crying, but it didn’t much matter because it was dark and all of the animals were asleep. Then she noticed Bear watching her with dark eyes that caught the light of the moon in twin points.

  “You are thinking of your mother,” Bear said in her soft, gruff voice. “I smell your remembering. Long ago, I cried for my son. It is hard when you call and no one comes.”

  Bear’s words made Rage feel guilty, but they also reminded her of a time when she had wakened to a cry in the night and had gone into her mother’s room to find her asleep and dreaming. “Sammy!” Mary had cried, turning to the window. Moonlight poured onto her wet cheeks. “Don’t leave me….”

  “Life is full of calls that are not answered and people who go away and do not return,” Bear went on.

  Rage nodded, her thoughts jumping to Grandfather Adam and his brother, Great-Uncle Peter. Mam told her that Great-Uncle Peter had fought against the creation of the dam in their valley. He and a lot of other people had marched and chained themselves to bulldozers and written letters to politicians, but it had been useless. The day the river was dammed, the water flooding what had once been his property, he left Winnoway forever. Could Great-Uncle Peter’s departure have hurt Grandfather, just as Mam’s brother’s leaving had hurt her?

  Rage looked at Bear, blinking back tears. “I’m sorry we took Billy away from you, but at least he lives and he is with you now.”

  “Sometimes it is too late,” Bear said, so softly that Rage thought she might have imagined it.

  Rage shivered and thought with longing of Mam, and of the times she had crawled into bed beside her on cold nights and had been kissed and cuddled close to her. More than anything in the world, she wished that she were home and that Mam were sleeping an ordinary sleep, safe in her own bed.

  “I have to find the wizard and get home,” Rage whispered to herself. The whisper fled before her into a dream of boots crunching along the river road.

  She heard a voice calling her name and thought it was Mam’s voice, faint because it had to travel from one dream to another in all the confusions of sleep.

  “Help me….”

  “I’m coming, Mam,” Rage muttered.

  “Beware…dangerous…magic…”

  Rage frowned and came closer to waking. The voice was not her mother’s after all, but that of a man.

  She opened her eyes to find Billy kneeling in front of her. Behind him the sky was still pitch-black.

  “You were calling out,” he said softly.

  “I was dreaming.” Rage rubbed her eyes and looked around to see Elle, Mr. Walker, and Goaty all cuddled up together, still asleep.

  Billy helped her up. “Sometimes I used to dream I was chasing a ball. I would wake and find myself biting my own tail.”

  “Do you miss being a dog at all?” Rage asked, putting her coat on properly.

  He sighed. “Life was very vivid and simple. I didn’t think so much. Once you start thinking, it is hard to stop.” He shook his head as if that was not quite what he had meant. “The world you make in your thoughts is brighter than the real world.” Again he shook his head.

  Rage stuck her hands in her coat pockets to keep them warm and turned to look down at the pier. She was surprised to find a square, flat-topped boat tethered there. A cabin in the middle of its deck had an enormous wheel on each side, where the iron cables that stretched across the river were attached. The water was barely visible, for a thick, impenetrable mist lay over it like a ghostly eiderdown. There were torches lit around the pier and on the ferry, the mist smearing their brightness.

  From the activities of the crew on deck, it looked as if departure was imminent, though there did not seem to be any passengers.

  “We ought to go,” Billy prompted her gently.

  Rage hesitated. The centaur had called the water the River of No Return. Now that the moment of crossing was
upon them, she hoped that the name would not prove to be an ill omen. Maybe I should go over alone, she thought.

  “We must stay together.”

  She turned to find that Bear had spoken, and wondered if it was possible that the old dog could read her mind. She knew better than to ask. Since they had come to Valley, Bear had communicated almost as little as when she was a dog, though she had given up bossing the other dogs.

  Rage drew a deep breath. “Billy and I will go first. Remember, you three must convince them that you are wild things wanting an audience with the High Keeper.”

  “What about me?” Mr. Walker asked sleepily.

  “You can go in my pocket.”

  “What I want to know is, how are we going to find out about the wizard if we don’t ask the keepers?” Elle demanded.

  “We have to go to an inn, of course,” Mr. Walker said. “Then we’ll find a keeper who doesn’t like the other keepers, or one of their servants, and they’ll tell us what we need to know.”

  Rage looked at Mr. Walker and wondered if he was ever going to realize that life was never as easy as stories made it out to be. She did not voice her fears about the nature of banding or of keepers. She glanced over Billy’s shoulder and saw that there was an increase in activity around the winch. She wondered if they ought to wait and catch a later boat. But if there were more passengers, it would be more dangerous. Better to use the cover of darkness while they could.

  “We’d better go before we miss the boat,” she said.

  Mr. Walker climbed into Rage’s pocket. Then she and Billy set off, having instructed the others to wait a little before following.

  A big-bellied man, wearing a white cap and a thick black jumper that matched his wooly beard, watched them come down the hill.

  “We would like to cross,” Billy announced.

  The man jerked his head at a small ramp running from the shore to the deck of the ferry. “Get aboard, then. Ferry casts off in ten minutes.”

  The ferryman’s eyes slid down to Rage’s wrists, but she had deliberately let her coat sleeves fall down over her hands. Then he looked up and past her, his eyes narrowing a fraction, and she knew the others must have arrived already.

  “You together?” he asked Rage.

  She turned and made a play of looking behind her vaguely, then shook her head. “Of course not,” she said, and went aboard, followed by Billy.

  “We three wild things wish to see the High Keeper,” Elle announced to the ferryman, exactly as Rage had bidden her.

  “Three, you say?” Rage turned in time to see the ferryman’s eyes harden as they settled on Bear. “What is a true animal doing this side of the river?”

  “What is the matter?” Rage asked, trying to sound like a curious bystander.

  He slanted her a look. “Surely even folk from the outer villages know that keeper laws allow only cats and dogs and domestic true beasts this side of the river. A bear belongs in the provinces. The stone mountains, maybe, or the greenland. The keepers are bound to want to know how it got out of Order and into the hands of the wild things.”

  Rage swallowed. “I heard its friend say it was a wild thing.”

  “It’s a bear, or my life on it.”

  Bear lumbered forward and gave a rumbling gurgle that was almost a growl. The man paled and held up his hands. “Take no offense, bear! It’s keeper business, keeping Order. I’m a riverman, and river folk go with the flow. I’ll take you, for there’s no law against natural creatures crossing from the wild side, but you won’t be allowed back.”

  Bear came aboard, followed by Elle and Goaty. The man kept a wary eye on them all as he untied the ropes that held the boat stable against the pier.

  Once they got into the middle of the river they lost sight of both banks. They could hear the creak of the winch pulling them along the cable, the slap of water on the hull, and the occasional sneeze from Goaty. Even Elle’s eyes could not penetrate the mist. It was eerie and clammily cold. Rage had the feeling that they were not moving at all.

  They drifted separately along the deck to meet behind a pile of crates, out of sight of the ferryman and his crew.

  “I am afraid there might be trouble on the other side,” Rage said in a low voice.

  Bear grunted. “There is always trouble when humans are involved.”

  “Mama, you must convince them that you are a wild thing,” Billy said urgently, stroking her arm. “There’s no use just growling at them.”

  “I will do what needs doing,” Bear said, shrugging away his hand. She moved to the edge of the ferry, sat down, and stared across the swirling water. She looked very bearish in the dull light.

  “That man said Mama is out of Order,” Billy murmured. “Seems like Order covers a lot of things.”

  “I think in this case it means Bear is not in the place the keepers want her to be,” Rage whispered. “Let’s talk to that ferryman and see if we can find out anything that will help us.”

  After making a few meaningless, casual comments about the river and the mist, Rage asked the ferryman, “What will happen to the bear on the other bank?”

  He shrugged. “If it is a true beast, it will be sent to the provinces.”

  Rage said lightly, “What if it turns out to be a wild thing?”

  “It will be set free.” He gave her a speculative look. “What’s it to you what happens to the beast?”

  “Nothing, except I thought it was a wild thing and pitied it,” Rage answered. “But if it is a natural animal, I guess it will be well looked after in the provinces.”

  To her surprise, the man’s face darkened and he opened his mouth. Then he seemed to think better of what he had intended to say. He finally said mildly, “Some say there is sickness in the provinces.”

  Rage did not know what to say to this, but the ferryman returned to the previous subject awkwardly. “Time was, everyone petted and marveled at the wild things. Keepers didn’t much like the magicking of them. Felt it showed disrespect to the true animals the wizard had put here. Maybe people did think the true beasts dull in comparison to wild things, but that was just the novelty of them, see? There were no rules or laws about who could go where and do what. No objections if a girl wanted to study magicking, and no provinces, either. Humans, natural animals, and wild things went where they liked it best. Live and let live.”

  “Why did things change if everyone got along so well?” Rage asked, curiosity making her forget caution.

  The ferryman frowned at her. “Don’t the folk in your village teach history to their children? The keepers never liked the making of wild things, like I said. Rumbled and complained enough that the women who did the magicking left Fork and set up their own settlement in Wildwood. Keepers didn’t like that, either. Eventually they set up the provinces on the other side of the river and moved all the natural animals there. The witch women, as they came to name themselves, paid no heed to the keepers. Claimed the wizard would have let them know by now if he objected to their doings. By then the wizard had got reclusive and difficult anyway. Matters stayed that way until magic started to dry up on the wild side of the river. The witch women went to see the wizard about it. A hard, strange journey it must have been, through that Deepwood the wizard magicked around his castle, but when they got there, there was no one home. He had gone.”

  “So the keepers accused the witch women of driving him away with their magicking,” Billy guessed.

  The ferryman gave him a strange look. “Stands to reason, eh?”

  “Do you think the wizard left because of the witch women?” Rage asked.

  “Why else would he go?” the ferryman asked, but Rage had the impression he was being careful rather than truthful. She wondered suddenly if, like the baker’s sister and the centaur, he suspected them of being keeper spies.

  “Then what happened?” Billy asked. “Girls started being forced to come to Fork?”

  The ferryman looked at him. “Are you not bringing this young lady to the city fo
r banding of her own free will?”

  Billy looked taken aback, and Rage could tell that he had become so interested, he had forgotten their ruse. “Of course I am,” he said boldly. “But in the outer villages we never hear much of how things come about. We were told girls had to come to the city and stay until they were too old to have babies. That it was now keeper law.”

  “Well, it is,” the ferryman said, apparently mollified. Maybe he had decided they were not spies, for now he said, “The keepers had cause to clamp down hard on the witch women, what with them draining the wild side of the river of magic. Folk supported the laws, which said they must come to the city and give up magic, but the witch women refused to leave Wildwood. So the keepers formed the blackshirt brigade and set them to hunt down the witch women and bring them in to be banded. But of course they still had woodcraft enough to evade their followers. All but a few escaped, but they have a price on their heads.”

  “How exactly does banding stop the witch women doing magic?” Billy asked lightly. “I’ve always wondered.”

  The ferryman shrugged. “Don’t rightly know myself. It’s something about iron. Once a girl’s hands are banded, she can’t draw the magic up into her mind for the working of it. Welded on, they are, and there’s no way of removing them, save with the same heat that sealed them. The first couple of bands are only lightly welded because they have to be replaced as the wrists grow. But once girls become women, the weldings are made to last.”

  Rage felt sickened at the thought of the heavy bands she had seen on the arms of the baker’s sister being welded onto the arms of the little girls in the cart. “If all the magic is gone from the wild side of Valley, I don’t suppose the witches will bother the keepers for much longer.”

  The ferryman shrugged. “There are still a few pockets of magic left, but the fact that the witch women have begun sending the wild things to beg for keeper mercy tells how desperate they have become. Mercy is as scarce in Fork as magic is on the wild side of the river. The keepers won’t stop until all wild things have faded and all witch women are dead or in chains. That female wild thing and her faunish friend we’ve got aboard don’t look too bad, but most of the creatures that come over the river to plead are pale and hunched in their bits of rag, and near faded away.”