Listening at the Gate

by Betsy James

  I did not know what to say. Queelic stared from the corpse to Nall, his forehead puckering. I told him, “Nall’s people live out here. The Rigi.”

  Then I was sorry I had said it. Queelic shrank, crying, “Rigi? The Rigi aren’t real! They aren’t flesh!”

  The cousin smelled terribly like flesh. And Nall looked real enough, gnawing the knuckle of his clenched fist.

  “You mean here’s where they live?” said Queelic.

  “Farther west.”

  His face followed my gesture. “Is that true?”

  “Ask Nall. I’ve never been there.”

  “But it’s near two years since he carried you off.”

  “He did not! I carried myself off! Can’t you imagine a woman doing anything without a man?” But of course he could not. Two years ago I could not have either. “That’s not where I went.”

  “You should have,” said Queelic.

  While I puzzled at this, Nall turned to me from his brooding and said, “I told you, something is coming. It is near. Queelic, we’re bound west now. You see my boat. There’s no room for you.”

  “Don’t leave me here!”

  Oh, exquisite revenge! But the ledger with its ranked retaliations. I said, “Nall. We could ferry him to the west side of the island. You said there was a beach.”

  “He’d still be on the Isle of Bones.”

  Queelic said, “I know I have to die. I just—I don’t want those wet crawling things to eat me.”

  “If you die on the far side of the island, it will be birds,” said Nall.

  “I wouldn’t mind that. I’d like being part of a bird.” Queelic looked west. “Take me to where the birds are.”

  “There’s no room in the manat.”

  I said, “Take him first, then come back for me.”

  “I won’t leave you in this place.”

  “It’s just your cousin.” Because I was too afraid, I walked to the corpse and looked at it. It was bad. Then not so bad—a man turning into bone. There was enough left to see he had been tattooed with smoky blue spirals, like the one on Nall’s back, but more and bigger. A crumpled sealskin lay across his breast, silver with a dark blotch the shape of a human hand.

  The breath of the cave stirred my hair. “There’s a wind coming from somewhere,” I said. “We should look back there; maybe there’s a fissure to the top.”

  Nall made a clicking noise with his tongue that meant admiration. “Queelic, did you look?”

  Queelic shook his head.

  Slinging the strap of a water skin over his shoulder, Nall stowed the paddles in the manat and dragged it above the tidemark. With Queelic stumbling behind we climbed up into the cave and nosed into the current of air like salmon swimming upstream.

  It was nasty rock—jagged, with a feeling underfoot of pits and knives. There were pools of slimy wet. When we got back away from the light, the scuttling crabs were fewer, but there were other things: a constant noise of something small and frantic trying to get away. I stepped on a wetness; it burst. The cave was never pitch-dark, never light, but a faint shine that slicked all surfaces came from somewhere ahead of us.

  “Up there,” I said.

  The rocks got drier as we climbed, until we stood in a narrow canyon full of light from a high, bright slit. The rocks underfoot were speckled with bird dung.

  “No way up,” I said.

  But Nall had begun to climb, testing ledges and chimneys. I tied my sandals to my sash and scrambled after him. “Wait,” he said. “We must be sure of climbing down again.”

  With my eyes on that high sunlight I did not want to think about going back to wet things, and the cousin. When Nall said “Come,” I followed quickly. He made me go back and put Queelic between the two of us, because he shook.

  We made a clumsy chain of our hands and crawled upward. Queelic’s slick-soled boots made him nearly helpless; Nall hauled him over ledge after ledge by armpit or collar while I shoved from below. I climbed easily, as if my toes were fingers, and where the stretch was too great, Nall put down his hand, we clasped wrists, and he pulled me up neat as a trout.

  On scraped knees we clambered underneath the bright window. It was fringed with grass, and the wind blew in our faces. With a last leg up, a heave and scramble that sent loose stones spinning down into the pit, we dragged ourselves over the rim into a world of birds. Loud with alarm, a nesting colony wheeled in the blue. Nall stood up. Spreading his arms wide, he shouted, “I have never been up here before!”

  He had to shout. The birds screamed, the wind blew, the sun blazed on rutted gray stone that sloped to green grass far below, on dissolving mist and the huge blue sea. Away westward, like mountains in a mirage, islands floated on the indigo deep.

  “The Rigi’s land!” said Nall. He snuffed the wind as though it carried the odors of strange fruits, unnamed flowers. Queelic stared from hands and knees, his pale forelock blown back.

  Nall let his arms fall to his sides. He gazed at the shadowy islands until I touched him and said, “Could anyone see us?”

  He started and crouched. Shaded his eyes. “No one is here. We’d see their boats.”

  The Isle of Bones was a huge stone raft, shoved up on the east to form the cave-riddled cliffs. From where we crouched the land sloped west, stony at its height but growing grassy as it tilted toward the sea. Above a narrow beach stretched a green, treeless field in which gray geese were grazing.

  I stared at them. The geese became stones leaning in no order, a frozen dance.

  “Shrines,” said Nall. “Or tombs, they might be.”

  “Are they old?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old?”

  “Who could know?”

  In Upslope the tombstones stood in tidy rows, bearing long names that looked chiseled yesterday. In our kale yard my mother’s stone said only LOVING WIFE OF AB DREM, with no name at all. Dai would have no stone; I could not think of him alive, of the poker, but on the gibbet the birds would eat him. With what speed he would become part of this wild, flying world!

  A scrabble was Queelic, crawling away from the slit that opened downward into the dark. He sat down with his eyes on the west and said, “I guess this is where I stay.”

  Nall bit his lip. “Go anywhere. Nothing can save you.”

  “I like it here.”

  “Behind those rocks you’ll be out of the wind.” Nall unslung the water skin and set it on the stones.

  Queelic did not look at it. He took his eyes off the islands and looked at Nall instead. Then he turned to me and said, “Now I know why you didn’t want me.”

  “Nobody asked me what I wanted.”

  But he was creeping to Nall on hands and knees. He stuck out his hand. “Nall, I’m obliged to you.”

  Taken aback, Nall gave his hand a quick shake.

  “She went to the best man,” said Queelic. “You got her. Enjoy her.” To me he said, “I’m glad you’re his. I don’t know if I’d have liked you.”

  He crawled off toward the rocks. Nall frowned after him. “Kat, do they all talk like that?”

  “Mostly.”

  He shook himself. “He’s as brave as he knows how to be. We must go.”

  “He forgot the water skin.”

  “Leave it.” Nall swung himself over the lip of the pit, found footing, and raised his arms to lift me down.

  “Nall. Do you enjoy me?”

  He kissed me. “I only know about joy,” he said.

  We climbed back down into the dark. It took much longer than going up, an ugly scramble full of false starts, retracings, little falls. The last rags of mist were on the water. The cave was wet; it stank. What was left of Nall’s cousin was still there, but the manat was gone.

  There was a groove in the gravel where the keel had been dragged. Nothing else. The water lapped and chuckled.

  As I stared at the bare beach, my wrist was grabbed. I half fell as Nall yanked me back into the dark fissure, his head darting like a hawk’s.
r />   I said, “The fishermen who dumped Queelic—”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “The Rigi.”

  He pulled me farther into the dark. The rock was horrible underfoot, like sharkskin, in the shaft he climbed so fast that I panted to keep up, tearing my shins on the boulders.

  “Wait for me!” I said.

  He waited, but I could see the shine of his bunched muscles, ready to spring up the next pitch. I was so frightened that I climbed right up places where before he had had to help me, as if I had grown extra legs like a spider.

  At the last ledge he stopped so suddenly that I banged against him. He motioned: Stay. Levered himself through the gap to daylight, vanished. Reappeared, reached down, and dragged me up. The birds screamed.

  “Keep low,” he said.

  The cliff was empty. The water skin lay where we had left it, and I snatched it up. We ran below the brow of the cliff to the pinnacles that made a little shelter. Queelic was not there, either. The ocean was bare and blue.

  We lay flat, panting. “Didn’t want to be caught down there,” said Nall. The muscles stood out around his mouth.

  “They, whoever—they’ll think we’re still in the cave.”

  “The elders will know of that way up.”

  “Old men could never—”

  “Elders aren’t old. My father—” he said. His face was as tight as the skin of the manat. “They’ve seen my boat, Rig-made but not Rig. There will be a hunt.”

  “Queelic.”

  “A Black Boot! Pity him, when they find him!”

  Not if, but when. “They’ll think the manat is his,” I said. “We could hide while they—” Then I saw my own evil, and stopped.

  Nall’s look of disgust was for me, or maybe for the idea of Queelic in a manat. To atone for my thoughts, I cried, “But where is he? Queelic!”

  No answer. Bare rock. Below us on the wrinkled gray-green slope I saw no winking dot of white that might be Queelic’s shirt. I thought of my father’s board game, War, in which the porcelain pieces—baron, chancellor, slave—were taken away one by one until there was nobody left.

  Nall made a hushing motion.

  I said, “He hasn’t gone and—”

  I was thinking of the clerk, broken at the bottom of a cliff. Here was a cliff. I moved to look over it.

  Nall grabbed me back and crept to the edge himself, his head barely breaking the line of rocks. Returned. “No boats. But we were slow, climbing twice.”

  “Did you see Queelic?”

  “It’s straight down into the sea.”

  “His shirt in the water, could you see that?”

  He was not listening. His glance went right and left, and that animal look was on him. I said, “Listen. We could sneak down past the shrines, to the beach. If they hunt for us”—by “they” I meant monsters, darkness, the Rigi—“if they hunt, they’ll leave a boat on the beach. We could steal it—”

  Nall said, “Beach.”

  I thought, He can swim from a beach. I can swim only in a millpond.

  “We’ll go down.” He motioned me to leave the water skin.

  “It’s all the water we have!”

  “It’s his. If he’s dead, he’ll take it with him. Drink first, and thank him.”

  We drank, spoke thanks into the empty air, laid the skin by the rocks like an offering, and began to creep down the slope toward the green meadow.

  Rain and wind had dredged ravines into the island’s back, shallow at the top, deepening as they descended. Nall found a steep, boulder-choked channel that twisted left and right. Once in it, we could not be seen, but neither could we see. We had to clamber up, down, around the boulders, like ants. At every bend Nall motioned me to wait while he climbed the rubbly bank and looked about.

  I hated that he took the lead. But it was his world: moony limestone, pitted and razor-edged, a scaling, spalling book laid open to reveal stone flowers, insects, fish. It cut my hands. I thought of the red, round-bellied sandstone of Creek, such kindly rock that I had sometimes laid my cheek against it to feel the last of the sun.

  Descending, the ravine became a stone-walled tunnel so clogged with fallen rock that we traveled as much sideways as forward. It was cold and smelled like stone; our little scrapes and rattles made big echoes.

  Down and down. It was never so steep that I needed Nall’s hand to help me; if I spoke, he hushed me; I did not exist except to be signaled to keep quiet, to come quick, to wait. He scrambled far ahead. Above, at the lip of the ravine, short grass ducked in a wind I could not feel.

  I rounded a boulder, shrank back. The rift had opened to wide day, gray stones on green grass.

  We had come among the shrines.

  Though broad, the stones were hardly taller than a man; they looked like stooped humans struggling to stand up out of the earth, pocked and mottled like the flanks of whales. Maybe there were fifty stones in that field. Close to, I saw that each was double, as though it had been split from top to bottom by a single blow, then pulled apart to make a gap just wide enough for a body to squeeze through.

  One of each pair was taller. The shadows they cast on each other were without texture. The air between them shimmered.

  Nall knelt behind a boulder at the gully mouth. I ran to crouch beside him. Panting, rising, he motioned again: Stay here.

  I said, “I will not!”

  He jumped, stared, mouth open.

  “I will not stay in these horrible rocks and watch you be killed. If you try to leave me, I’ll yell!”

  He sank down again behind the boulder. I watched him make his change, back from single-minded beast to man.

  He listened about. No sound anywhere. Wiped his face in his elbow. “I go first,” he said. “I motion. You follow.”

  It was what we had been doing already. But I had to know he could speak. “Thanks,” I said.

  He ducked across the open to the first pair of stones, his body rosy against them. The jerk of his head was sharp and slight: Come.

  I ran to him over the green grass. It was tussocky and wet with the night’s rain. The crack between the stones was like a crease in the air. It trembled. I would not look at it. I crammed against his shoulder. The other shrines leaned in random lines, couples forever a little parted.

  I followed him to the next pair. The wind stirred the air like water in a bowl; the short grass bobbed in all directions. From the corner of my eye I saw a pair of stones move.

  They moved together, separate and one. I looked again. Nothing had moved.

  But as we crouched at the next stone, I saw movement again, and at the next, always just at the edge of vision. When I caught up to Nall, I whispered, “The stones are moving.”

  “Yes.” He breathed hard, but that was from running. He ran on. I followed him, stumbling as though the ground heaved with an earthquake.

  When we reached the far side of the field, he turned. I turned with him. The stones that had been following us froze, motionless since the beginning of the world.

  Nall said words in Rig. “Tell them, Kat. You must.”

  “I can’t speak Rig!”

  “In the Plain tongue, then. ‘Until I pass the Gate.’”

  My hair stood up. “Until I pass the Gate,” I said.

  The stones were still. Nall laid his hand on my belly and spoke more words, he dragged me into the mouth of another ravine, we clawed up the side of it, ran across a stony open, and half dove, half rolled through tall weeds into a shallow overhang a few yards deep where a fringe of grass hid us, like a curtain. There he lay gasping, his forehead on his hands.

  I lay next to him. When I could speak, I whispered, “What—what else did you tell those stones? “

  “Who you are. So they would know you. They’re my ancestors.” He turned his filthy face to me. “This island is my tomb.”

  A little wind blew. Beyond the stirring green curtain, crickets began to sing.

  Under the ledge some rodent had made a
nest of twigs and the delicate bones of birds. The floor was powdery dust; it stuck to our sweating bodies. Nall’s face screwed up like a baby’s, and he sneezed.

  “Shhh!” I hissed. Nothing happened, except the crickets stopped. They began again. I said, “You knew this place was here.”

  There was barely room for him to get up on his elbows. “‘Beach,’ you said, and I remembered this. The beach lies just beyond.”

  He spoke like a human. He had said, My ama would come looking for me and make me talk like a person. I felt grateful to her. I asked, “Was it here they brought you after they killed you?”

  “No. To the caves. The shrines are for families. We came on feast days, to serve the dead.”

  “I thought your ancestors were seals.”

  “One must have also a home on earth. For a little while.” His voice changed. “Now you have seen it.”

  “What?”

  “Between the stones. Worlds beyond worlds are rushing between the stones of the Gate; death hangs there, like a wrinkle in the air.”

  “But—those are shrines, you said. Not the Gate.”

  He gazed at me. I dropped my eyes.

  He said, “What happens when we die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either. Yet I have died at least once. Maybe it is different every time.”

  I shivered.

  He kissed me. “When I was little, still Bij, my ama brought us to the isle to make offering. The others laid fish and herbs before the stones, but I had stolen something, I wanted to hide it, so I ran away.” He pulled one of my curls. “I thought, I’ll do what Mother does; I’ll become some other being, and vanish.’ So I dreamed myself into a harvest mouse, and ran off, and found this place.”

  “You—you turned into a mouse?”

  He smiled. “Surely. I was a mouse all morning. Then I ran back to my ama, and she spanked me right where my tail was.”

  I nudged his shoulder with mine. “What was it you stole?”

  “A knife of Liu’s. He wouldn’t give it to me, so I stole it and I hid it here.” He squirmed forward and slipped his hand into a crack in the rock, withdrew it, and laid an oval stone knife on my palm. It was clear obsidian, long as my finger and sharp as glass. One end was snapped off. Over his face, which was full of awe and distance, crept an old guilty look. “It was broken,” he said. “I wouldn’t have stolen his good one.”