Listening at the Gate
Page 10
“Manat?”
He turned to the little boat and slapped the hull. “Greased sealskin, from seals washed up dead on the beach—when there were still seals. Whalebone frame.”
The round-bellied manat reminded me of Nondany’s din-darion. “You made it?”
“I work at the shipyard. We build big, timid boats that hate to leave the shore, but for myself I built this.” He lifted the manat into shin-deep water, pulled out the double-bladed paddle, and slid into the rear hatch as if he were pulling on trousers. “When I’m alone, I use two water skins to balance my weight. But with you in front it will trim just right.”
He had built it knowing I would come back. I said, “Is there a paddle for me?”
He jumped out again and kissed me. “Take off your shoes.”
I shed my wet sandals, waded into the sea, and stowed them in the stern. The little boat dipped and nodded. He steadied it against his thigh and showed me where to set my hands on the coaming of the front hatch.
I put one foot into the hull. It slid out from under me, dumping me on one knee in the baby waves.
He caught it as if it were a runaway pig. “Stay low. Keep your weight on your hands.”
I tried again. The manat rocked wildly as though it had no weight, and I did not dare step onto my foot.
Again he steadied the hull. “There is only one thing to know. The manat is you. A little skin and bone to keep the sea out—but you are its weight, its balance. You and I.”
The boat bobbed, light as a cup. I took hold of the coaming again and thought myself in. The inside of the hull kissed one bare heel, then the other, and I sat down sweetly like a coot on the water.
“I knew it!” He tossed his paddle into the air, caught it, and gave it to me still warm from his hands. He began to push the manat away from the sandspit.
“Wait—aren’t you coming?” I tried to jump up. The manat rolled over like a barrel.
He fished me out, spitting, and caught the escaping boat with the other hand. “I was coming. Now you can learn how to shake the water out.”
I shivered, soaking wet, thinking how I had put out my hand to catch myself and felt it go through water as if through nothing. “If we tip over, we’ll drown.”
“We might.”
Between us we dumped the water out of the manat, repacked it, and set it again on the sea. Paddle in hand, I held the coaming and hopped into the front hatch.
“Bear Spit,” said Nall, and I knew it was praise. The boat’s balance shifted as he entered it, steadying around our two bodies. At the corner of my eye I caught the flick of his paddle.
“You can use the blade to stop yourself from rolling over,” said his voice behind me. “Shall I teach you? Or shall I be boatman for us both?”
“I want to be my own boatman. Boatwoman.”
He showed me how to paddle myself back upright with my wooden fin. I could not do it, but it gave the water substance, something to push against. I thought of where I had been not long before, standing by a little creek that hurried to this sea.
“Home,” said Nall. “Mailin’s.”
We pushed away from the sandy refuge. As my arms began to understand the stroke, I looked past the surfy skerries to the whole ocean, broad and black. The prow wavered like a compass needle around some point in the west, as though I had a destination, still formless, out there.
“Nall.” So strange to speak his name, after so long thinking it. “I want to go back.”
“Back?”
“And trade places with you. I’m not afraid. I just don’t like being in front.”
We paddled back to the sandspit and changed seats. With his shoulders as foreground the horizon felt more stable.
I laid my cold legs along his thighs. Away across the breakers stood the cliff we had scrambled down and the deserted beach—my beach. Lights bobbed there.
“Nall, look! Torches!”
“Yes.”
“But nobody goes there, ever. Leaguemen don’t go near the sea.”
“Money does.” He turned the manat’s nose to the north. “Those will be paidmen.”
I am quick to learn work. Soon I could match him stroke for stroke. But when we were well out on the water, I looked back and saw the torchlight still prying along my little beach. I began to shake, so that my paddle clattered on his.
He glanced over his shoulder and began softly to sing the Rigi’s song. Listening, I grew quieter and caught the paddling rhythm again. When he had sung it once through, I said, “Sing the new words. The ones they killed you for.”
“Sing it with me.”
I am the ash that snuffs the fire,
I am the knot that halts the loom,
I am the tangle of desire,
I am the love that clouds the womb.
I am the sigh that stills the scream,
I am the word that frees the dumb,
I am the light that ends the dream.
I am the child. I come, I come.
Something lived between the words of the song—I could not name it. I thought of the child I had dreamed, its wings of fire.
Not for the first time I wondered how he had come to hear those words and why to someone—his father?—they had seemed so wicked that he must be killed. The Reirig with his elders killed me, he had said. I knew his father was an elder of some sort, but the word “Reirig” was new.
And Nall sat here before me. Nall I could speak to him.
I said, “Are there paidmen among the Rigi?”
“There are men who kill for pay.”
“Your father and the elders, did they kill you for pay?”
He paddled awhile in silence. “Yes. But not for money.”
I thought of pay that is not money—that is reputation, for example, what my father had wanted in exchange for me. “What was the elders’ pay?”
“The favor of the Reirig, the One Seal Priest. His favor means food—food and women—and food means strength. Someday the Reirig will weaken, and someone will kill him and be the new Seal Priest. Some strong man. Someday.” Nall gave a short laugh. “He’s not weak now.”
“Did your father want to be the new Seal Priest?”
“No one knows what my father wants.”
I had begun to believe Nall was real, but I could not make the Rigi’s land be real—a nation with priests and fathers, children and hunger. Maybe little girls there played hand slaps. For the first time I wondered whether all of Nail’s scars were new, and how he had broken that tooth.
I did not want the Rigi’s land to be real. I wanted only Nall.
We rounded the cliffy point called Horn Loft. From this vantage the lights of Upslope were hidden. Away to the north I could see sparse campfires on the festival fields, many fewer than there had been at Long Night. Closer in, Downshore’s two and three stories of tiled roof angles caught the starlight like an untidy crystal. The quays laid dark arms on the water. Where the prow of the manat pointed to the beach south of the harbor, torches jerked and fluttered like disembodied spirits.
I was afraid again. “What are those?”
“They’re waiting for us.”
“Paidmen!”
“No. Friends.”
“So many?”
“Nobody has trouble alone.”
I thought of Jake the turkey man. In faint starlight, then fluttering torchlight, we slipped toward the beach. Shadowy bodies met us, splashing waist-deep into the waves, tugging at the manat.
“Got her. He’s got her,” said soft voices. Men’s faces looked up, tense and wary, palms slapped the hull.
Nall slid out into the water. I was afraid the manat would roll, afraid of the dark bodies and hard eyes. The hull hissed on sand and went stable. My paddle was wrested from me, someone seized me under the arms and lifted me into the air, and I wept onto Dai’s neck like a found child.
“Ho, Sister.” He patted my back, carrying me to shore. “Hey, now. You got here. All’s well. Don’t drown me, eh?”
I peered under his arm. In this, the dead middle of the night, a crowd stood staring. Torchy shadows became fishwives in mended skirts, mustached brewers and lean fishermen, shopkeepers and farmers with lined faces. Roadsouls in rags, festival travelers, grandmothers, young girls, babies carried blinking out of bed.
I had seen Downshore crowds, but those had been merrymakers of market or carnival. These people were quiet. Nall lifted the manat higher on the sand. In the torchlight all eyes moved from me to him, then back to me. Faces were veiled, watchful. Even the children, tottering with sleep, were watchful.
I pushed my face back into Dai’s shirt.
I heard Mailin say, “Neighbors!” Turning, I saw her among them, silver-haired and strong. “This much is set right. Go back to bed. Who knows what tomorrow will ask of us?”
A little ripple went round the gathered bodies. No one moved. They held their children tighter and gazed at me, at Nall. Someone said, “He’ll close the roads now, Mailin. No one to move to or from the town.”
“Pay ‘em off,” said another voice. A riffle of bitter laughter.
“Call the council?” More laughter.
Mailin said, “Yes. The council, tomorrow. We still own our hearts and voices. Have we better than that?”
The people looked angry and shamefaced. Again they turned to me, with eyes that said, Do something.
“Go home,” said Mailin. “Tonight is for rest and readiness.”
No one moved. Nall set the manat on the sand between me and the crowd and straddled it. They edged back from him a little. He said, “Go now.”
There was a little stir, looks of distress and doubt. Then, with a shush of feet in sand, the people shouldered their children and left. Like that. The beach was empty, pitted with footprints, and the torches were bobbing back along the tide line toward town and the Least Night camp.
I stared at Nall as if he had told the rain to stop raining and it had. He was stowing the paddles in the manat. Dai handed me to Mailin and joined Nall; from her strong arms I watched the two men embrace.
“Lali Kat, did you plan this homecoming?”
“Oh, Mailin!” No one had called me lali, which in Downshore means “sister,” since the day I left for Creek. Between one breath and another I was destroyed with weariness and rescue, weeping and shivering, stumbling in the slipping sand. Someone took my other elbow: Nondany, his hair gingery silver in the starlight.
“Oh, you said you’d see me at Mailin’s!”
“Half-and-Half! By life, this was all my fault. I should never have left you to fall so far behind. I’d guessed you were my rumor. But I never dreamed it had gotten so bad. The Leaguemen—”
I would not hear about Leaguemen. “You broke your word!” I said. “You told Mailin I was coming!”
“He did,” said Mailin. “Thank goodness.”
“It wasn’t how you think. I simply—There is a Rig at Mailin’s house.” Nondany looked back at Nall like a henwife assessing a good layer. “I came straight over. When I got here, the news was all over: Piki the goat boy had seen the guards seize a red-haired girl. So I spoiled your surprise; but I think it has been sufficiently surprising.”
“Quite,” said Mailin.
I told Nondany, “I learned a song for you. The paidmen sang it.”
“Then life is back to normal,” said Mailin. “We’re bringing our songs to Nondany, like children with their frogs and buttercups.”
Indeed, Downshore looked just as I remembered it, like a childhood dream. Mailin’s house stood on its pilings above the beach, the high doorway casting a stripe of firelight down the steps and out across the sand. The steps still made their hollow boom; the black-and-white cow was still tethered, lowing, beneath them. On the broad veranda the otter’s little black shape stood poised against the orange light.
Mailin’s man Pao limped out. He scooped up the otter, and flung it over his shoulder like a fur piece. “Welcome!” he said, folding me in his huge hug. The otter trampled over to my shoulders and back to his, the parrot screeched like a gate hinge, the kitchen smelled of bread and garlic.
“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “There’s even a boxful of kittens on the hearth!”
Also on the hearth was a pretty woman, very pregnant, tugging at her braid.
“This is Robin,” said Mailin.
Dai ran up the steps, took Robin’s hand, and said, “Sister, like you to meet my wife.”
“Wife!” I gawked at her belly. Truly, Bian had not read me everything in those letters.
Robin burst out laughing. “Two more months,” she said.
“Dai!”
He blushed and said, “You’ve been gone awhile.”
Robin dropped his hand and took mine. “We live below the south brow, near the Upslope boundary. It’s good pasture. Dai bought the land, and Nall helped him build the house and cowshed.”
Dai slipped his arm around what was left of her waist and told me the really important news. “Moss calved. This spring. A pretty white heifer.”
“I’m glad,” I said, for wife and child and calf. The world lurched and shifted like the manat. I could not get used to Dai. Was it his shaved head or his new fatherhood that made his face look older, even hard?
In the bright kitchen his glance sharpened on me. “Sister! They did that? Oh, the bastards!”
He seized my shoulder. The torn shift still covered my breasts, but I had turned my head, making the claw marks ride higher. Everybody stared, even Nondany, and Mailin said, “Lali Kat!”
I put my hands to my neck. “No, no! Those are old—they’re Hill scars—”
I looked for Nall, because the scars had not shocked him, and saw him stepping in over the threshold. In the common firelight he was a sunburned stranger, nobody I knew.
“Just Hill scars,” said Mailin, with a relief I did not understand. “I smell a story. But tell it later—already it’s less night than morning. Lali Kat, how long since you ate anything?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So I thought.” She began to ladle bowls full of fish stew.
“Mailin thinks all evils can be set right with soup,” said Pao. He dragged up benches and crates. “But she’s wrong. It takes biscuits.” With his bare hands he began to pitch biscuits off the griddle and into a basket.
Mailin kissed Pao. Dai kissed Robin and pulled her onto his lap. Abandoned and jealous, I looked away.
A warm hand took my wrist. Nail’s; as I looked at him, I knew his face again. He drew me to the hearth where he had kissed me from the striped pallet and pulled me down to sit between his knees.
I blushed all over, even my feet. Dai curled his tongue and whistled; Pao pinched Mailin, who fanned herself with a soup bowl; Nondany grinned like a maniac; and the parrot yelled, “Hot biscuits!”
I leaned against Nail’s chest. The life I had lived until that instant burned up and was gone, as if I had thrown it in the Year Fire.
With two spoons we ate from one bowl. The fire jigged in the grate. The only sounds were those that people make with soup, kittens make with a cat, and waves make on a beach near morning. In that round hour the world grew perfect, like a sun hanging just below the horizon.
9
Where do the winds go? What does the rain know?
Where is the egg when the bird has flown?
Where does the moon sleep? What makes the sea deep?
Where is the soul when the breast is bone?
What makes the mouth sing? What loves listening?
Where is the tune when the song is done?
Where is our joined heart, when at last our hands part
And we have returned to be sea, to be sun?
The Question Song. Downshore.
NONDANY SAT APART with Mailin and Pao, and they fell into talk of their own, hushed and
grave. He held the dindarion on his lap but did not strum it, only now and then laid his hand on the strings, then lifted it to make a deep hum.
I still leaned against Nall. I could not see his face, but his hand liked teasing—it nipped my chin or wrestled with my hand, fingers and thumb. I wanted Jekka there so I could say, See? I told you!
Dai and Robin nudged and kissed over their soupspoons. I said, “Robin, did you make Dai shave?”
“Not me. He looks awful. Like some paidman.”
“Shaved tonight,” said Dai, scratching. “Best disguise. Last time they saw me hairless up there, I was in the cradle.” He set down his soup bowl and said, “So, Sister. Welcome home.”
Nall’s hand stopped wrestling. The world moved forward out of its suspended ease.
“Seems Father’s folks welcomed you first.” Dai’s mouth had that new, tight look. “Was that our grandfather? The goat boy said it was.”
“No. He was just—he let me ride with him. When they asked, he said I was his granddaughter. To protect me.”
Robin said, “Probably he had a granddaughter.”
“They beat him,” I said. “Then they hanged him.”
“Yes,” said Dai.
“How—”
“How are things in merry old Upslope?”
The brother I had left two years ago had been sweet and anxious, as incapable of bitterness as a baby. Seeing his face now, I stammered, “There always was a guardhouse.”
“With two paidmen standing guard. Six at festivals.”
“There was a jail.”
“No Leagueman ever saw the inside of it. And there was a gibbet.”
“There was not!”
“There was. Hidden in Ab Harlan’s compound then. But nobody we knew was hanged on it, or ever would be. Sister, forgive me, but—you were a girl.”
Just a girl. I had scrubbed floors, gone to market, gone to the Rulesward, gone to bed; I had grown cabbages and milked the cow; I had been privy to the network of secrets and acid gossip by which my aunts maintained themselves against their husbands; and I had heard half sentences as I served my uncles tea. But while I lived in Upslope, I had never thought to connect my father’s big world of roads to my small, domestic one.