by Betsy James
“You are so young,” said Bian. “You think you know yourself.”
I thought, I know myself better than you do!
She had straightened her back to scold but now turned half away. Since the time of the Bear she had been a little afraid of me. Jekka tried to look busy among the peas.
Her face soft with grief, Bian said, “My sister, Lisei, ran off with your father—a Leagueman!—and died reviled and lonely in a foreign place. By a miracle, her daughter has been given back to me. The Leaguemen killed Lisei with their cruel ways—don’t tell me they didn’t! Should I want her child, my heart’s light, to go back among her mother’s killers, for the sake of some lad’s bright eye?”
I felt naked and guilty and angry. But I knew I would go. If she forbade it, I would go anyway, in peddler’s cart or Roadsoul wagon or on foot if I had to. I would not be stopped, any more than the creek would be stopped on its road to the sea.
She saw it in my face. The sorrow in her own grew deeper, then resigned.
“So be it,” she said. “You’ll go. Then go blessed, dear daughter, and may Ouma, who ate you, care for you.”
I burst into tears, feeling like a snake for the pain I was bringing her. We embraced and stood in the melon patch weeping on each other’s necks until Jekka bounced over, asking, “What’s the matter?” As if she had not heard every word.
“Tell me about your lad, then,” said Jekka. “You little sneak! Tell.”
“No.”
I winced as she tugged the hairbrush through my curls. Each night we sat on the edge of the bed we shared and brushed each other’s hair. Mine was always worst. In Creek it had grown to a fiery mop, tangled like fleece.
“You pick up brambles like a dog,” she said. “Tell me about your lad, or I’ll torture you. I’ll find a sparrow’s nest in here, there’s everything else. Besides”—she put her arms around me, brush and all—“if you’re going away, you have to tell me. Because you won’t be here to tease anymore.”
I did not know what to say or do. Loving was easy for Jekka, but I could not seem to get the hang of it. It was like jokes—I always got them a half beat behind everybody else and laughed into their silence.
I turned and hugged her—awkwardly, for I had had little practice. She wiped her eyes, attacked my hair again, and said, businesslike, “Your lad.”
“He’s not a lad.”
“He’s a fish?”
I flinched, not from the brush. “He’s a man. And I don’t know for sure if he’s—what you said. Mine.”
Jekka leaned close and whispered. “No cabbage worms?”
I grabbed my pillow and smacked her with it. She grabbed hers, and in the hot summer dusk we fought all over the bed till hers leaked feathers that stuck to our faces and we flopped down panting. She said, “Thank me, Cousin. What if you still thought that’s how it is?”
For it was she who had explained to me where babies come from. When I first came to Creek, fifteen years old, I still thought they came from cabbage worms, the fat green kind you pull off and step on. My League aunts wore gray linen so voluminous that you could not tell when they were pregnant and claimed they found their babies under cabbages in the garden.
I had hunted for babies there. I wanted one. Babies laughed, and you could hold them. But it seemed you needed a husband to find one, which made no sense, as my uncles would have nothing to do with gardening.
Jekka—she was a year older than I—had found this so funny that she had rolled in the grass kicking. Her own explanation was so appalling that for weeks I could not look at the men of Creek. I wondered why my cousins in Upslope had not told me—Siskya, for instance, who had taunted me cruelly about my mother—in order to watch me squirm. Then I realized Siskya had not been told either and had been sent to her marriage bed dreaming of cabbage worms.
“Thanks,” I said now, spitting out feathers.
Jekka sat up, her braid all fuzzy from being whacked. “So—you and your lad weren’t lovers?”
I wished she were not so frank, I wished I would not blush or feel my heart wrench where it beat. “I just barely met him.”
“Yet you’ll go back to him? Cousin, you’re crazy! What’s his name?”
I blushed worse and said in my smallest voice, “Nall.”
“Nall.”
It frightened me to hear that name from Jekka’s mouth. It made everything real as bread.
“Tell me about him,” she said. “In a week, two weeks, you’ll be gone.”
Her voice was falsely stern and full of tears. I said in a rush, “All right. But don’t tell Bian.”
“That would be crazy.” Jekka hooked her little finger with mine and promised silence for life—unlikely, since she chattered like the jay she was named for. I began the story as I have told it. But without thinking I slipped from the Hill tongue into the Kitchen Hessdish I had spoken as a child.
Jekka said, “What?”
“I’ll speak Plain,” I said. The Plain tongue is what all peoples speak, though with different accents, and what they write in. Careful not to slip back into Hessdish, I told Jekka about my father’s cold, thrifty house; my cruel cousins; the harsh, correct men in black boots and hats—among them my father and two uncles—who sat in my aunt’s parlor smoking pipes, watching one anothers’ eyes, speaking in half sentences that bought and sold anything and everything in the west country, including girls.
I told her how Father had sold me to Ab Harlan, the chief Leagueman, to be the bride of his son. Jekka hugged her knees. “Oh, Kat, it’s like a wicked ballad! You never said you were to marry. Was his son handsome?”
“Homely. Like a fumbling white grub, with pimples. His name was Queelic.”
Jekka squealed, I knew she would. In the Hill tongue cuilic means “midden,” the place you throw kitchen scraps and chicken droppings. “But you were only fifteen,” she said.
“If you’re a League girl, they marry you off young. You have to be untouched—’an unmarked lily,’ ” I said, quoting my auntie Jerash. “They won’t tell you where babies come from, but you’d better know how to make cream dill sauce.”
“Oh well, I like your cream dill sauce. So your father tried to sell you. What would he have gotten for you?”
“His reputation back.” That was all. Except he could work for Ab Harlan the rest of his life, and there would be money in that. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”
I told her about the night beach, about seeing the big-shouldered wet shape of the drowned seal half raise itself and show me the face of a man. “Jekka,” I said, “you won’t believe this. But there’s a tribe of people out there, on islands in the sea. They’re called the Rigi, and—”
“Rigi!” Jekka grabbed my shoulders. “Kat, are you telling me your lover is a Rigi?”
I shushed her, afraid Bian would hear. “A Rig. That’s how they say it. And he wasn’t my lover. I’m not even sure if he still—”
“There are songs about the Rigi! They’re seals. Then they take off their skins and they’re people. They’re magic.”
“Don’t be stupid! Bian calls us daughters of the bear; do we turn into bears? Do we go about in bearskins?”
“We wear bearskins for the ceremonies.”
“But we don’t turn into bears. It’s the same with Nall and sealskins,” I said. “Probably.” Except he had no sealskin anymore.
“But, Kat, a Rigi—or a Rig, you said—cast up by the sea, like a man in a song. How could you stand to leave him?”
“Because I couldn’t—Because back then I wasn’t—”
How to explain to Jekka what I had only begun to understand myself? Slowly, I said, “You know how it is—when you don’t know anything, but maybe you know you don’t know anything?”
“When you first came to Creek, you certainly didn’t know anything,” Jekka said generously. “But, Cousin, such a story! Does Mother know?”
“Only that there was a—a lad I liked, in Downshore.”
“Glory!
” She was delighted to know something her mother did not. “But still. To leave him!”
“I had to. I just went. Before I could change my mind.”
It had felt like tearing myself in two. Winter daybreak, dressed in my mother’s wedding clothes so I would look like a Hillwoman in the home-going holiday press, I had stood on Mailin’s hearth and wept. On the striped pallet at my feet Nall slept hard, one arm flung out, and it was the end of everything because he would not wake and say good-bye to me.
Then I had done something important. Jekka would have done it without thinking, but to me it had felt like jumping off a cliff. I knelt down beside him and whispered, “Nall!”
He did not stir. His eyelids jumped with dreams. I slid my hand under the blankets, against his thigh. He grunted like a puppy, opened his eyes, and looked up as if I were the dream he was in.
“I’m going,” I said. My tears fell straight down.
He looked straight up. “You will come back to me,” he said. It was not a promise or a command, but what he knew would be. As if he had said, The sun will rise.
“I will come back to you,” I said. Unless I died, I would come back.
He smiled. His lips were chapped from salt water; they tucked back at the corners. He had a broken canine tooth.
“Kat,” he said. He raised his good hand and fumbled it into my curls, he pulled me down and kissed me. That was how I knew the wild smell of him, my mouth against his.
I did not tell Jekka any of this. All I said was, “I told him I’d come back.”
“Well, of course you must!”
I was grateful to her. But I did not want to be asked anything else. Let Jekka pry all she would, the real thing was how I felt: like a root groping in darkness for water it knows is there, that it must have. Nall was that water.
Jekka saw my face and shut up. But she could never be silent for long. She fidgeted and said, “Have you had news of him, all this time?”
I shook my head. News from the world outside Creek was scanty. Bian had had a letter or two from Mailin and had read them to me because I could not read them for myself yet. All they said were things like, Dai lives in Downshore now and Dai’s cow had a calf. At least, that was all Bian had reported; suddenly I was suspicious.
“So you’ll just go to him and see what happens,” said Jekka. “You’re crazy. You’re brave. Cousin, how do you do it? You’re little and red and cross, yet the men are all over you, like bees on a fruit loaf.”
“They are not,” I said, red and cross.
“Says who? I know one Creek lad who wishes you’d let him hook his sash loom to your hearth.”
“I don’t have a hearth, Jekka. If you mean Raím, I’ll always care for him. But it would be fight, fight, fight—you know what he’s like! He tries, but he’s in a rage half the time. And before he was blinded, he had a girl in every market town.”
Jekka shrugged. “He’s a man. You think your Rig won’t be like that?”
I did not answer. She did not know Nall.
“Anyway,” she said, “are you so perfect yourself?”
“I’m not that bad!”
“Better you than me, then. I’m rotten when I’m crossed. But I do see that you must leave Raím and go back to Nall.”
I nodded, not happily. I did not look forward to telling an angry, grieving man that I would come to visit him no more, even for talk. I would go back to Nall; but there were the scars on my breasts to remind me that I was not the naive child who had pledged to return. I was no longer an unmarked lily.
“Mother will be growling like Ouma herself for weeks, I hope you know,” said Jekka. “Oh, Cousin, I will miss you, miss you! If the roads are safe, I’ll come visit. I’ll make Mother take me to Downshore for Long Night. Will I meet him then? Nall.”
“I don’t know.” The room was hot, but I shivered. The whole world shivered, one deep tremor, then nothing. “I don’t know what will happen.”
“Watch out for cabbage worms,” said Jekka.
I shoved my feet under the sheets and against her thigh until she fell off the bed onto the floor. That was another thing she had taught me: that when you love someone, you must jokingly mistreat them, just a little. It makes it easier when you leave them, or they die.
Raím worked alone in his stone bothy outside the village. Even with the door open it was so dark in there that I barely saw how his hands paused at the weft, his head bent for a moment.
“Go back to him, then,” he said.
“You knew I’d go. Sooner or later.”
He would not answer. We had been over it a hundred times, and it never got easier. He was too much like me—“freckles like a trout and a temper like a tomcat,” as Bian said. Maybe because he had been a hunter, it was hard for him to want something except the way a hunter does, who kills what he wants and then gobbles it up.
He tapped the weft with a wooden comb. Because he would not speak, I did not say anything either. I could see the bold pattern on his loom better than his hands, and watched it grow a little. His designs were as strong and startling as a lightning strike. Once, galled by Creek’s rigid traditions, he had cried out, “There must be a place where all patterns came from, before the world was made!”
“Rotten piece of shit!” he shouted now. The wooden batten comb had broken in his hand. “Devil’s rotten son of—” He threw it on the floor, and I could think, See how you are? You’re not a listener, you’re a curser! If you weren’t so impossible, maybe I could stay in Creek and love you!
That made it easier. A little. I stood in the square of sun from the door and wept—silently, because I did not want him to hear me—catching each tear on the end of my tongue.
He heard, though. His voice softened a little. “If you’re going to go, then go. There’s a gift for you on the shelf by the door. In that bowl you made.”
I looked in the bowl. To make it I had gathered red clay, wedged it, rolled it, coiled and pinched it up from base to rim like a sleeping snake. I had scraped it and polished it into a bowl the size of Raím’s cupped hands, empty and light as an eggshell, and had fired it in the Clay Court, where only women can go, and brought it to him.
It was not what he wanted, but it was what I could give him. Now it held a rolled-up sash.
I unrolled it. It was woven of cotton spun fine as silk, patterned with the footprints of the deer mouse, brown on cream.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice quavered.
“Put it on.”
It fit perfectly. His hands knew the measure of my waist. “
Now go,” he said.
Still weeping, I stood in the doorway. He began to sing to himself, as if I were no longer there.
Stag in the forest lies,
No one will bury him.
Only the gray wolf
Will own him, sing over him.
I took up the bowl I had made. I sat down in. the dust against the doorjamb and picked up a twig of charcoal from the dirt floor, and on the smooth red pottery I began to write.
He heard me there. He had ears like the wolf in the song and could hear the scratch of the twig. He pretended not to hear.
I wrote his song on the bowl, spelling the words as well as I could, beginning along the outside rim and spiraling them down and around like a snake. Beautiful and strange, silent as a snake coiled in the sun, yet singing at the same time. A snake that had swallowed a song.
He would never see it. Nor would anyone. In a day his hands would rub it away.
I set it back on the stone shelf with a little clink. His hands and his singing did not pause, and I did not say good-bye. As I went out, his little cat ran in with its tail straight up, so I did not leave him entirely alone.
That was the first song I ever wrote down. Not the Rigi’s song, but Raím’s, on an empty bowl that I left in Creek.
3
She went away,
Following the loud water.
As far as it could stumble,
My heart fo
llowed after.
She said she would come back
Up that long track to me,
But the creek runs onward, downward,
Till it meets the sea.
Song for Someone Leaving. Creek.
ON THE MORNING I LEFT CREEK, there were five oxcarts going, full of carters and sellers and families with children. The road was not much troubled by bandits, though the Leaguemen said it was and hired paidmen who were worse than bandits to guard their pack trains. Usually it was safe to travel village to village, if you knew people to stay with. Bian knew the Low Track; that was the way we had come from Downshore in midwinter, following the river valleys below the snows. But she knew people on the High Track, too—friends and friends of friends.
“She goes to Marga’s house. Marga’s,” she told the carter for the fifth time, talking right through her tears, stopping sometimes to hold me where I stood.
I was ashamed because I was not bleeding tears the way she was. She and Jekka and Raím would stay here, in the red-tiled town with its rosebushes, watching the mountain and feeling the emptiness of my leaving; but I would see the mountain grow small, as I passed through door after door into new worlds.
From the beginning I had not been what Bian had hoped for. Or what my father had hoped for, or my League aunts, or Raím, either. What, then, if I were not what Nall—
A great wail burst out of me, so that everybody stared and Bian gathered me to her breast. For a minute I had a mother and could scream the way a baby does and be comforted by arms.
Then I could not breathe, mashed up against her bosom. She peeled me off, wiped my eyes and nose with her hand as if I were little, and said, “You’ll be fine. You’ll be safe. You’ll be with friends all the way. I don’t need to tell you—” to mind your manners, she almost said. Then she remembered that I had been eaten, though not by the right thing, and was as much a woman as herself. She looked away.
I kissed her and said, “I love you,” and climbed up over the hub of the wheel into the cart along with the other passengers. Jekka, her face as blubbered as mine, handed up my bundle. My little cousin Mamik cried because everybody else was, and my uncle Emmot blinked a lot and puffed fast on his pipe. The cart jerked; we fell over in a heap, and when we got up, we were moving, everyone trotting alongside down the red road at an ox’s pace, crying, “Good-bye! May fate will that we see you in the winter! Be happy—oh, be happy!”