The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  Barani took to smoking, discarded her kains and bajus for shirts tucked into waist-high denims and mulling endlessly over newspapers as she bit a blood-red bottom lip.

  Ria knew hard times were coming when the rice was replaced by tapioca and sweet potato, the lauks dry and rationed—a dried fish a day, only two cloves of garlic, a quarter of an onion to mix in with sambal if there was nothing else to eat. Even before the fighting rolled above them with a shake and a dull roar like distant thunder. When it happened, Ria had been having an argument with Barani about not being allowed to work. Ria thought she could hear children playing deeper in the settlement. It was about three in the afternoon by the clock. The enemy had not even waited for nightfall.

  The sisters jerked their heads up, lifting startled gazes to the room’s ceiling before Barani had tackled Ria and pressed her down to the floor. Barani’s body covered hers and her hands were over Ria’s ears. In those first moments of the war’s onslaught, it was Ria who froze, her gaze locked with the bit of wall in front of her in the shack behind Pak Arlindi’s house that they were occupying at the time.

  Later, as the war progressed, and food rations and fuel had to be smuggled in, the black market began its cutthroat trades and, as if everything else had to be shadow-swallowed, the lamps outside were permanently switched off so that travel in the settlement needed to be aided by handheld lights, apertures opened just a slit. Enlistment offices no longer cared what race you were or if your papers were genuine. So long as you were old enough to hold a gun, or at least looked legal doing it. Men like Acra left for the surface in droves to fight.

  Ria had no friends among the other children, but Acra had always been there for her. Then he married a Human whom Ria thought very plain-looking. The wedding day had been a simple affair; it was no time to be decadent. Ria had not wanted to go, but Barani made her. And when she’d been dragged to the dais where the couple was seated to bestow their blessings, Barani said loudly to Ria, “Dah, enough. He is getting married already. What for face long-long?” Ria could feel Barani’s smirk and almost see the gleam in her violet eyes.

  Ria had mumbled her blessings to the couple’s sandaled feet and would have left for the far end of the tikar if Acra had not called after her. She could not look at him at first, but the gravity of Acra’s eyes had forced her mortified ones to meet them. She’d peered up to see Acra and Kak Manyari smiling at her. Something about Acra’s smile had made her believe him when he said, “Later, when Ria is big, confirm got a lot of admirers.”

  Had made her believe he was coming back.

  Ria had been with Kak Manyari, helping the latter burp her daughter, when she watched him leave with Gemir. The only reason he gave for enlisting was, “Manticura is my country too.” A smile, a cocky two-fingered movie star salute, and he was gone, a simple cloth bag slung across his body.

  No news of him came during the two years the fighting went on for. Then Gemir came home, an arm mangled and a part of his face burnt away, leaving an eye blind. Ria was outside Kak Manyari’s hut, holding in her hand the single cassava Kak Manyari had told her to bring to Barani as she watched him limp forward. He absently ran his good hand through her hair, either not noticing the serpents or simply not caring any more. Kak Manyari came to the door, tiny now that the rough years had picked her flesh right off the bone and tinier still as she peered around the large man’s body. Gemir must have known who she was searching for and in answer, he pressed something into Kak Manyari’s hand. The woman stood still for a beat before thanking him and disappearing back into the house.

  Ria stared after Gemir as he left, returning perhaps to his own world of pain now that he’d delivered another’s right into their hands. Inside, Kak Manyari had her back to the door, and was putting away dried plates into a small cupboard by the makeshift stove, her movements near frantic. There weren’t a lot of plates to put away. There wasn’t much to clean off of them after a meal either. When she was done, she took them out, even the ones she hadn’t used, only to put them back in again.

  Ria went over and made to help. Kak Manyari looked and seeing Ria, she pointed to the cassava root, saying kindly with a shaky smile, “Ria, go home lah. Cook the cassava. Later, Kak Bara scold you again, you know?”

  Ria didn’t reply. She finished putting all the plates away and, once done, took Acra’s name badge and sealed envelopes, crumpled and smudged in dark dirt, from where they had fallen on Kak Manyari’s floor. She pressed them into Kak Manyari’s hands, closing her fingers over them. Ria knew that when Kak Manyari focused on her face, the woman was wishing Ria’s eyes would do to her what they had the power to do. Ria glanced at the little girl asleep on the mat, prone on her front and a pudgy fist in her mouth, who appeared very Human save for the body covering of scales and the cleft that ran along her head instead of hair. She was still in the middle of moulting, so there were bits of translucent honeycomb skin stuck to her, just waiting for a good scrub in the bath. Kak Manyari blinked hard once, like a woman clearing her eyes, before squeezing them shut to let herself cry.

  Kak Manyari’s sobbing recalled Ria to Gemir’s limping walk— the sound of his footsteps having been the first tap and stutter of an unhappy message from an already unhappy world.

  A few days later, she stood with a crowd in the centre of town, at the settlement’s only newsstand, and there it was in a stack under a single lamp: all the soldiers Manticura had sent to meet the invading forces at pocket meeting points, on the frontlines with dead, frozen aftermaths. All those men, and Acra, lost. She gazed down at the topmost paper, making no move to take it. On the front page, in a photograph taking up half of the precious reporting space, the Capital Building flew a flag that was not Manticura’s. Ria did not need to read the headlines to know who or what had won.

  For years, “Manticura” had meant nothing to her. There were only the immediate spaces: the courtyard and the jungle with no end, the breathy hollows of Nelroote’s cave and tunnels. The world, when not in books, was a source of intrusion and the nauseating memories of small statues that were once alive. Another flag meant another government, another set of plots that were really just one big hole to throw everyone into.

  Then, she understood. “Manticura” was the bigger space Acra had left to protect, so that the niche he’d carved with his family and the niches he’d helped carve in opening the gate for Bara and herself would be safe.

  When she drew back from the papers, she found that she was surrounded by anxious faces. Not directed at her the way anxious faces usually were. People were crowding in close, peering over her at the printed news, commenting on what she had seen and read. They spoke all at once and asked the same thing: what was going to happen to them? Far too many had not heard from sons or husbands.

  Out of new habit, Ria kept her snakes close to her head as she pushed through the crowd. No one moved out of her way. For the first time since her arrival at Nelroote, it was as if she was invisible. She might as well be in the dark. She was about to disappear into a narrow alley when she stopped to look back, at the huddled bodies, their spines curved out as if they formed part of a despairing drum. She could hear crying over the buzz and more than one child stood back, unmoving. Ria found herself turning sharply away, looking up at the bit of ceiling between the zinc and plywood awnings. She wondered if this new government was going to tear a hole through and make a sky, a proper sky. Maybe they would all be taken away and made into thralls that smelled of rot and barely had hair sticking to their scalps.

  She made her way to Pak Arlindi’s, walking the memorised route without the aid of a lamp, and was about to round the house to the shack when she heard Abang Seh, Pak Arlindi’s youngest son, say: “I heard the other settlements are going to ally themselves with the Esomiri occupiers.”

  She had been told countless times not to listen in on adults’ conversations, but Abang Seh was practically Barani’s age. She dropped to a squat against the house and listened.

  “That doesn’t me
an we do the same,” Pak Arlindi shot back. “War is bad enough. We still want civil war? Humans fight the non Humans, gitu?”

  There was a loud thud of something blunt hitting a hard surface. “I should have gone out there! With Abang and Kakak when they allowed people like us to fight for the country. I should have joined them!”

  “And now they are dead!” Pak Arlindi boomed. Softly, he added, “Your mother will not lose another child.”

  “Pak—”

  “What we have now, we protect. Fight for the home here and not the one that’s already lost. Now the problem is we have two entrances. The western one is at least well-hidden and secure. But the eastern one…”

  “The one that leads to the central chamber?”

  In the pause, she imagined Pak Arlindi nodding. “The Lady’s tomb. We should send out a few able-bodied men to set up a guard outpost. They would be inexperienced. We all are, but…” Another moment of silence passed in which Ria found herself bracing against the wall to stand.

  “This is crazy,” Abang Seh began slowly, “but what about that snake girl?”

  Pak Arlindi sounded surprised. “Ria?”

  Abang Seh lowered his voice. Ria could imagine him darting his marble-like eyes from side to side, rocky brows furrowed down, worried. “She frightens me.”

  “Ria is harmless. As long as we have Barani, she won’t do anything.”

  “That child is possessed with something, I tell you, Pak. Always staring. Always so quiet. What she did to Kenanga…” A pause, then, “Men, women and children too. Young, old, all gone with one look.” Another pause to let it sink in. “One look; and government officials too. Before this war, they were looking for her like they did the other one, the one who killed the old president, remember? Heard that was why she ran, and Barani with her. We’ve been housing a wanted criminal.”

  “A child,” Pak Arlindi corrected him. “What she made was nothing more than a child’s mistake. The sins of a child are washed off by their innocence. Don’t you remember that?”

  “Innocence don’t last very long, Pak. But dangerous or not, not the issue. What I’m saying is with what she can do, we can—”

  A clattering reached her from within. Likely plates. “Are you listening to what you’re saying? Send one girl out, by herself, to guard an outpost?”

  “What is she? Fourteen, fifteen already? The men we’re sending are not going to be much older than her. Up there, men and women of nearly the same age are risking lives, getting killed. What difference does it make? How much growing up does she have to do before she understands?”

  There was a moment of considering silence.

  “But alone?” Pak Arlindi spoke finally.

  “Maybe not alone,” Abang Seh replied, sounding uncomfortable. “Maybe with Bara—”

  The doorknob that she held on to, to heave herself up, felt too large. The door was heavy when she pushed it in to a silenced room and orange faces floating in the dark. She heard the soft slaps of her feet meeting the cement floor as she approached. Once by the table, her voice rang hard and clear: “I will do it.”

  Pak Arlindi was the first to speak, to tell her that Barani wouldn’t want her to do this. Ria nodded. Abang Seh made to speak, his expression becoming guilty, but Ria only turned around and strode back out.

  She didn’t return to Barani that evening. It was as if she found herself locked out, without a key, and no one at home answering her knocks—locked out, but not panicking because there was some place she could go, some place she should go to instead. She made her way to the gate and out of it into the main tunnel. She didn’t even try to remember if she was going the right way as she navigated the dark, a hand out, nursing the briefest fear of her gaze being rendered useless by sudden blindness when it was most needed.

  The tunnels of Nelroote hummed a monotonous tune for the dead that resided along their lengths. She had never noticed it when she first came to Nelroote, but the hollows cut into the tunnels were packed with the bones of people, skulls facing out, from a time before numbered plots. There were also detours along the tunnels; narrower corridors that went into small rooms where still more dead were interred.

  Her destination was a chamber, the keramat of a dead paragon. She had found it a while back when she was out exploring without Barani’s knowledge. She’d come in from the entrance at the far end of the room. A straight walk up an aisle between stone seats, there was an alcove where a large stone sarcophagus was propped up on a slant. On its closed lid, the painted form of a woman stared out with eyes of gold leaf. At the woman’s feet were smaller figures, hands raised and faces averted from the glare of her ethereal glow, which radiated out in golden stripes. Before the alcove stood a stone table, empty save for the lichen that dotted its surface. The ceiling was held up by pillars and arcs covered in carved images sporting moss in their crevices. A portion of that ceiling was broken, or perhaps the hole was intentional, for there were no signs of wall sconces or fittings for lamps. Vines hung through it and crept in the spaces touched by the bruised light, specks of dust floating.

  The walls on either sides of the keramat contained whole skeletons in deep shelves cut into the rock, each shrouded in linen that must have once been beautiful but was now mostly rotted away by age and humidity. Valuable possessions had been placed in with them, around grinning skulls with indifferent eye sockets. All of them were arranged such that their heads were pointed towards the front of the chamber where the alcove was.

  Through the jagged rip of skylight in a portion of the arched ceiling, Ria saw that it was still day. Too bright, the way it always was on terrible days.

  The first man arrived moments after she did. She heard him approach and stop just inside the smaller doorway to the outer tunnels which led to the eastern gate. Without hurry, she lowered her gaze from the skylight to him, her hair raised and the throbs beginning to catch at the areas around her eyes.

  He was a young Human, perhaps barely even eighteen, his face smeared with dirt and grease, and half of his side a gory mess he was trying to hold together beneath an open hand. She’d never seen a soldier in person before, and maybe this one was not to blame for the darkness Nelroote had been plunged into since the day the war rolled in. Maybe he too was a mother’s son, a wife’s husband, or a daughter’s father. Maybe he too had a young woman in love with him, whose heart he unknowingly broke when he married someone else. But to Ria, the only good ones were the ones who left Nelroote to fight. The others didn’t matter, whatever the colour of the flag on their armbands.

  He saw her and his panting ceased with a ravaged gasp. The last grey picture of him wore the open, surprised expression of someone caught in the glare of a very bright camera flash. It was expected. What she didn’t understand was why the migraine continued to burn at her temples after and why her face had felt so tight as she looked upon the young man’s face, envisioning somewhere in his Humanness the features of a cherished Scerean man.

  Nearly fifty years on, and Ria turned her face back to the same skylight, into the downward flow of the floating dust in the sunbeam, and thought how it smelled of morning forest. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the creak and hum of a small hut all alone on a quiet day, the warbles of chickens as they pecked in the dirt outside and voices in low conversation—all those sounds riding upon gentle crests to her as she lay on her sleeping mat, the brightness of the day painting the insides of her lids orange. She breathed it all in, the everyday reminder of the life she possessed that never looked like it was ever going to leave her. She remained creaseless and unaged, even as those she knew from days-back-then folded up into maps of their travelled roads.

  She moved from the corner of the keramat to the side of the sarcophagus, where she kept the supplies, and filled a sweets tin with oil before fitting a makeshift spout over its small mouth. From the keramat, she went through the northwestern exit to get into what she called the commoners’ tunnel where, like in the one leading away from the southeast, th
e dead were interred by the numbers, their skulls and other bones making up the walls and pillars with thorny surfaces of protruding snouts alternating with flat faces. The skulls were cool to the touch, and she ran her hand along the rows of them as she added oil to the dying lamps. She often wondered if the ancient Nelrootians had a culture of death, or if these dead had been buried elsewhere before being exhumed and moved to the catacombs. There was a stone altar before the Lady’s alcove, upon which Ria’s own things were cluttered amongst the spread of offerings—usually alcohol, flowers and fruit.

  After the North Coalition forces had pulled out of Manticura, and after the country had settled into a slumbering state of development—cleaning up, burying, forgetting—the old practice of interring the remains of the deceased returned to Nelroote. Ria’s knives cut and peeled away strangers’ flesh, and her heads extracted their organs. Like ordinary garbage, the whole lot was burnt, bones and all, in special chimney-less furnaces used by the ancients. The ashes she would later place in family urns, to be housed in a smaller chamber, were one and the same with the dust that needed to be swept away to keep the homes of the living clean.

  Protecting Nelroote’s living from its dead, and later, its dead from the living, seemed like an unceasing task, but there was little else she could do; little else anyone would let her do, even if she were to ask. Hers was the face of stories told to children to get them to behave, and the name incited to quell injustice and violence in the settlement. Where before people had gazed upon her with muted curiosity, now no one would look her properly in the eye. Not even those who called themselves her friends, who thought of themselves as an extended arm of her family—when they really meant Barani’s, and Barani in place of “her”.