by Betsy James
7
One a-down,
Two a-down,
Three a-down,
Pulled under—
Four a-down,
Five a-down,
Six a-down,
Torn asunder—
Seven a-down,
Eight a-down,
Nine a-down,
Drowned—
They found her braid and bracelet,
But her heart they never found.
Count for Playing Jacks. Upslope.
THE SUMMER NIGHT was hot and black. From outside the guardhouse came the sounds of day ending: tramping feet, an argument, a road guard beginning a song.
Bring me a drink, brothers!
Bring me a pretty broad,
Or an ugly broad, no matter,
A jade for the prod—
He was hushed in mid-verse. A late drover braved the curfew with his lowing cattle. In Downshore at this moment Dai would be stroking the nose of his cow. I wondered whether he had paid his tariff.
Quick steps. Ab Jerash’s voice low and hurried. “Niece.”
I turned where I stood. Saw his eye, his cheekbone, dusky at the grate. In our lives he had rarely addressed me. I had more rarely spoken.
“Niece, what have you done?”
“I—”
“This is not good. It will not be good. Where have you been?”
“With—with Mother’s people.”
“And the man? The demon. The one you … went off with.”
“He—”
“You were quiet. A quiet child. Katyesha! To go with a demon’s get! Not even some—some beggar boy with the moon for his white mare, but an animal. A beast.”
The beggar boy. Even my uncle remembered that game.
“No matter. It’s done, now we’ve to deal with it. Harlan will have the pus out of the pimple. And you’ve ruined your father.” The dim eye closed as if in pain. “God of Light! Harlan will—”
Outside, a little clatter; my uncle’s cheek disappeared from the grate. I heard boots, his voice and Ab Seroy’s in low quarrel. I stood in the dark thinking nothing, trying to make myself invisible, to not be.
Their voices faded. Day sounds ceased.
My legs began to shake. I sat down against the wall and drew up my feet. Sometimes I sat straight, to ease the strain on my bound arms. Sometimes I put my head on my knees. Every few minutes the boots of a guard passed the door of my cell, the candlelight blinked with the shadow of a body. But the boots never paused, as if their owner was afraid to look through the barred window at the witch. Crickets sang. The night went on and on, and I could not think, I could not breathe.
All my childhood, winter and summer, I had slept in a black box bed with the doors latched. It had been smothery like this. I had never been clear whether the box was to protect me from the demons that roamed the night or to protect my father from me: my dreams, my red hair, my nasty woman’s body that yearned and bled. Now I was back in that bed, and it was alive with Ab Harlan’s terror, his avid disgust. Again and again his hand forced Queelic’s onto my breasts. I could not get away from it by writhing, or shaking, or clenching my body into a ball. A rat rustled under the floor.
Yet in that same closed bed I had sung the Rigi’s song.
The song had been too big for the bed, it had burst it open. The bear bore her children in darkness, then brought them out into the spring sun. Jake had said, My life is my own.
I stood up. I began to kick the tin chamber pot around the cell.
The guard came at once and put a frightened face to the bars.
“I’m thirsty,” I said. “Bring me water, please.”
“You’ll get none, witch,” he said, and went away.
I kicked the pot, singing a stamp dance from the Hills.
Trout! Newt! Otter!
Sound of rushing water!
The guard came back. “Stop, or I’ll use force!”
“Bring me water, or my demons will blister your mouth till your lips peel back from your teeth!”
He disappeared like a chipmunk down a hole. I went to the door of the cell and stood on tiptoe to look into the hall. In the nodding light of the candelabra both its doors stood wide. At the western one three paidmen milled, clutching their truncheons. The first guard had gone looking for someone; already boots were clumping down the corridor.
Queelic’s frightened face appeared at the grate, the guard behind him. I stepped close; he scrambled back away from the barred window and said, “You have to be quiet.”
“No, I don’t. I’m thirsty. He won’t bring me water.”
To the guard Queelic said, “Get her some water, then.”
“Get it yourself,” said the guard, and walked out into the night.
Queelic looked around for the others. Two of the paidmen had discovered they too had business outside, where the lowing of cattle announced another drover ripe for a fine. The third crossed his arms and turned his back. Queelic wilted, biting his thumb. His wretched face grew still with thought.
He moved out of sight. Splash of a dipper in a pail. He returned with a tin cup and held it to the bars.
“Take it.”
“My hands are tied.”
He looked nonplussed.
“Hold it there and I’ll drink,” I said.
With his fingertips barely touching the handle he jittered the cup at the bars and tipped it just far enough for me to put my lips to it.
The water was stale and warm. He watched me drink, watched his hand holding the cup.
“Thank you,” I said.
A slight nod. He set the cup on the floor and wiped his hand on his breeches. “Don’t bother the guards.”
I laughed.
“He’ll kill you,” he said. We both knew who he meant.
“Queelic—”
“You have to be quiet. It’ll be worse if you don’t.”
“Trout! Newt! Otter!”
The last guard had deserted the hall to join in a shouted argument outside. Cows bellowed. Queelic clutched his big hat.
“Sound of: rushing water!” I sang.
He ran to the west door and shouted, “Quiet out there!”
Nobody paid attention, certainly not the cows. A paidman was yelling, “You people try to sneak past in the dark. You think I chose to be stationed on this stinking coast? Show me your papers and pay in full—tariff on forty-seven cows and a fine. You’re out after bloody curfew and you know it.”
“Forty cows,” said a cheerful voice.
I knew that voice.
“Forty-seven. You think I’m blind, you dirty Shoreman? Bring them past the post there. One, two, three …”
On tiptoe I strained to see beyond the doors. Someone had lit a torch, and by its light I saw cattle mobbing right up to the steps; Queelic; the three paidmen; and a bald, broad-shouldered man in a farmer’s sandals and short pants.
It was not Dai.
Then he turned his face, seeming to look straight at me across the dark. It was Dai, but his wild hair and beard were shaved clean off, as they had never been since he could shave. His face was as smooth as a boy’s.
“Forty,” he said, grinning, rocking on his heels. “Count the legs, divide by four. Old joke. Ha.”
I drew breath to yell. Saw the paidmen’s shining dirks, Dai’s empty hands, and shut my mouth.
Something scuffled at the other set of doors, the east one. The goat boy we had seen on the road poked his head in and looked around. He withdrew, and was replaced by the nose of a cow.
At the west door the guard had shoved his face close to Dai’s, saying, “Don’t give me your bullshit.”
The cow trotted into the wide hall. It was followed by a second cow, then a third. A brisk, silent dog nipped at their heels.
These were not placid milkers, but the hairy little beef cattle that are quick as goats, with bad dispositions. Their horns were long and sharp. There were seven in the hall now, more coming fast; they began to jostle and bellow, th
ey trundled against the big desk, crushed a chair. One candelabrum pitched over with a crash and snuffed out.
“Hey!” It was Queelic at the west door, running.
“Moo-uhl” bawled the cows, now fifteen.
“What?” cried Queelic. Wet manure hit the floorboards. The second candelabrum fell over, and the hall went black.
Dai shouted, “Yo-o hup! Brother!”
Thump, screech in the cell behind me. I spun round. Shadows moved at floor level, opening.
“Kat,” said a low voice, breathless with laughter, “come down into the dark.”
“Nall!”
He was an invisible heat that tugged at me, groping for the rope that bound my hands. He smelled like night.
Cold metal at my wrist. The rope fell away. He was back down the blacker gap left by the shoved-up plank, dragging me after him. The tramp of cattle was loud. There were shouts and a cry.
It stank down there, of slop water and refuse pushed out of sight. I crawled on my elbows. His heel was hard and cool, slipping away.
New air fanned my cheek, and the darkness changed. I saw the line of his shoulder; he grabbed my arms and with the sound of tearing cloth yanked me out into yelling black dark, the smell of cattle, thunder and roar. He was a hissing shadow that looked left, right, grabbed my hand, and jerked me into a crouching run, straight west across the plain.
Shouts followed us, then the clang of metal. I pulled my hand away to run. My blouse shone white and I pulled it off, pulled off the flapping torn skirt and ran in my dark shift. A horse crashed past, ridden by whooping phantoms. Under the bare sly and waning moon I ran through brush and grass, away from the deserted main road and south along the cliffs, following a shape that loped with a lurching gait like an ape’s.
Ran and ran. There was no place to stop, there were fires where there should be none, and the smoke of torches. Ran stooping, so as not to break the skyline.
We came to my father’s house, passed it. No light shone there. A notch in the cliff marked my old path to the sea.
At the cliff’s edge the shadow I followed crept among the snapping pine boughs and crouched, panting; it heard night noises inaudible to me, jerked its head to listen, then lunged down the path. I followed. Below me the sea trembled like molten lead, surf hissed among rocks and sea-stacks. Waves had all but consumed the little beach where I had sung so long ago.
At the bottom the path spilled onto the rind of sand. Nall—if it was Nall, I could hardly tell if it had a man’s shape—grabbed about in the sea wrack. From among the drifted logs, he dragged a dead seal—I was dreaming—no, it was a tiny boat. He ran it into the water, snatched me round the waist, and thrust me into it. I sat down in wet, clutching anything, and was thrown into the sea.
Pulled under, water at my breast. I could neither cry nor call, only hold on as the waves came, higher than my head.
They did not touch me. The balance of the boat changed, settled. On either side of my thighs warm human legs braced with each stroke of a two-bladed paddle that flicked at the edges of my sight.
As each wave came I cowered, we cut through it, the spray wet me and ran away down the oiled skin deck. We leaped like a deer running, we jumped and dove and did not sink. Through a wilderness of rocks fallen from the cliffs above, we rode the moving sea.
Behind me the oarsman grunted as he drove the blades into the waves. I could not see him, did not dare turn. We pulled beyond the shallower surf, and our leaps became glides; the stars did not jerk in crazy zigzags anymore, but swooped and swung. The panting behind me became a half-shouted song.
Eh, he, hau!
Eh, he, hau!
Eh, he, hásjele sásjele! Eh, he, hau!
I tried to turn and see the singer. The boat wobbled.
“Sit still!”
I sat still. The paddle flickered. The sea was dotted with great rocks, like houses on a plain but not houses; there was nothing of earth.
Everything I had been too afraid to feel rushed up as panic. Clinging to the boat, I shouted straight forward at the sea. “Is there land? Where is there land?”
“Eh,” said the voice behind me. The paddle’s rhythm changed. Another dozen strokes and the boat slipped into the lee of a rock as big as a tiny island, where spring storms had built a narrow sandspit. There, as if something had grabbed us, the plunging stopped. The paddle clattered on the hull. A starry shadow splashed round and straddled the prow.
This time he looked down, and I looked up. Short and strong, naked except for breechclout and knife, his face still in shadow. I put up my hands, maybe to ward him off. He took them, and as if I were a fish on a line, he lifted me out and set me on wet but solid earth.
I staggered. He caught my waist. Waves burst white and soft. I had no breath, I was afraid to look anywhere.
He said, “This is a safe place.”
Then I could look at him. Last time it had been he who needed a safe place and I who brought him to it.
He was smiling. He said, “Is your name still Kat?”
I nodded.
“Mine is still Nall.” He smiled broadly. He had a broken canine tooth.
I said, “Oh—it is you!”
He laughed clear down to his feet. Nobody else could laugh like that. I raised my open palm, wet with sea, and he kissed it.
8
Smell of the nape
of your neck, of your hair,
rise and fall
of your side with the tide
of your breath,
warmth of you all up the front
of the warmth of me—
see,
see,
see in the dark,
see in the dark without eyes.
Winter Dreaming Croon. The Rigi.
“YOU CAME BACK,” he said. “I knew you would. You have grown up, grown beautiful.”
“You don’t know that, it’s dark, you can’t see me—”
“Oh, I see you.”
It was his hand he was seeing with, gentle as an eye. But I felt Queelic’s hand, I heard Queelic scream She’s horrible! as he wiped and wiped to get me off himself.
Nall’s hand found the scars. Went still. I tried to push it away.
It would not be pushed. “What made these?”
I was ashamed as dirt. “A bear.”
He drew a hissing breath, moved his hand along the puckered lines.
“Don’t!” But if I pulled away, I would fall into the sea. “I’m sorry—It’s—In the place where I was, every girl has to be eaten by a bear—”
“Eaten,” he said. “Some holy thing?”
“Yes! A ceremony. But it went wrong, it didn’t happen the way it was supposed to—”
“Eaten, yet not eaten. As I was killed, yet not killed.”
“Yes.” I felt relief like rescue and, still, such shame. “But I’m so sorry—”
“To be scarred? Kat. Look.” He made me look with my hand as he had, guiding it to the marks of rope on his wrists, the lines on back and thigh left by the rocks the surf had tumbled him through. He drew me down to feel his right foot; it was covered with a skein of ridges like a tangled net.
“It never healed right,” he said. “I am lame.”
Then I understood his lurching run.
He said, “Every holy passage leaves a scar.”
The world got huge, and clean, and me clean in it. I put my hands on his feet and said, stammering, “Don’t you dare let them scorn you! You’re a seal. On land you’re supposed to lollop along.”
He laughed; he laughed till he sat down backward, pulling me with him. He kissed my scars. Around us the ocean burst and roared.
“Oh,” I said, “wherever did you come from?”
“From the Gate!”
I heard the big letter. “What Gate?”
“My ama would smack you for asking,” he said, and laughed more. He put his arms around me and drew me up to stand leaning against the warmth of him.
I did not believe any of th
is, not even the sea itself. I began to laugh too, or maybe cry. “Ama? What’s an ama?”
“A great-grandmother. Mine. Smaller even than you, with white hair and a hard hand. And the Gate is the truth of the world, you Leagueman’s child!”
“Tell me the truth of the world,” I said. If anybody knew it, he would. Anything he said would be truth.
He put his lips to my ear, I could hear him smiling. “Are you listening?”
I was.
“The Gate is two stones in the sea. It lies west of the last island of all, at the world’s edge. Two stones in the sea—and everything that is, is born from it: seals, and cows, and Leaguemen, and songs. The whole world. You.” He touched his mouth to mine. “And me. From the Gate I came. I wanted to. My mother and father made my body, and my ama smacked me and told me not to meddle, and I meddled; and the Reirig with his elders killed me, and you called me, and I came, and you kissed me, and now you have come back to me, and I shall kiss you, kiss you.”
This he did. I could hardly stand, crazy with him, shaking.
“And now you have been reborn from a bear—”
“Eaten! Eaten and given back—”
“Spit back out, I think. It was your red hair. That bear’s mouth burned! It spat you—”
“Ptah!”
“Bear Spit. Is that what your name is now?”
I hit him with my soft fist. But he was stronger, he could trap both my hands in one of his and tickle until I squealed and then sobbed in earnest, because Ab Harlan was a nightmare and Nall was real.
He held me. Then he wiped my eyes with his knuckles, kissed me again, and said, “Let’s go, Bear Spit. Dai is waiting.”
“Dai—oh—Dai—”
“He was up behind Eb the brewer, on the horse that passed us. Didn’t you hear him laugh? The bull was chasing that blond boy.” Nall laughed too and wiped his own eyes. “You’ve come home to the hornets’ house!”
Sometimes he spoke fast and slangy, like a Downshore-man, sometimes quaintly, like a Rig. His hands smelled of tar, he was as full of life as a nut is of meat, and when I touched him I thought my heart would stop. “Get into the manat, Bear Spit,” he said.