Listening at the Gate

by Betsy James

  He turned his face back to the Gate.

  I gabbled as if I had just run next door. “Listen—Nall—I was horrible, hateful, a shrew. Nall—don’t forgive me, how could you? But I had to come, to tell you.” My voice trailed off. “Then I saw you in the water and …”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Yes, it does!”

  No answer. Below him the black waves raced.

  “Nall!”

  The mad night was fading, yet it stayed in him: His body had a darkness. Without passion or grief, like his father, Hsuu, he said, “I killed my Aieh for nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Aieh is nothing.”

  Yesterday how I had wanted to hear those words! Now I was bewildered. “She is not,” I said.

  “She’s nothing. You are nothing. The world, it’s nothing.”

  “That’s not true! It’s right here, it’s the same as always.”

  The same as always. The world where brothers are tortured, daughters sold, lovers hate each other. That world.

  “Nothing matters,” said Nall.

  Over his body a blueness crept.

  Like fronds of frost on pond water, it began at the tattooed whorl on his back and grew like ice crystals, spiraling over his shoulders and haunches, calves and hands, even the curves of his ears: the sea’s tattoos, no mortal color.

  He turned his hero’s face to me. I watched it change, letting go of its human quirks and loves, becoming his father’s: impersonal, inhuman, the sea’s.

  All the waves in the world were draining west.

  “Nall!”

  Once I had warmed him by holding him against my body. But now he had blocked me with silence, I had paid him back with spite; we were equals, all right, but not lovers. Just a shrewish girl and a man with a cold face.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Loving is hopeless. It’s nothing.”

  I could watch him die as I said that. Blue waves poured across his back. I touched him; blue spirals crept onto my own hands. I pulled my hands away; the spirals faded, but my hands wanted to go back there, to wear the tattoos he was accepting. It was all a lie, as he said. Everything came to this, to nothing.

  His face began to enter that greatest peace, death. All but his eyes, which looked at me across the widening gap that filled him with sea.

  I thought, When his eyes go peaceful he will have passed the Gate. Then I will follow him, one last time.

  Nee, nah, nothing!

  Nondany’s merry, nearsighted glance, his hand held out empty.

  I said aloud, “But he gave it like a gift.”

  Nall’s eyes were not merry. In his face, as it died into nobility and peace, his eyes were bright with rage.

  I had a thought so terrible that I smothered it. Something never to be said to a lover, a dying man.

  But I felt it real as a rope’s end in my hand, and I could have beaten the man to death if he had not been dying anyway.

  “You liar!” I said. Not shrewish, just furious. “You say it’s all nothing—but you hate me!”

  He flinched as if struck.

  “And you won’t say it!” I said. “You won’t say anything. You coward! If you can’t scrape up the guts to speak when it’s that bad, I don’t care if you die. You think I’d waste my life chasing all over this damned cold ocean after some silent hero? I’d rather make love to a fish.”

  His mouth opened, panting. I was too angry to care. I threw away my stupid childish dreams, letting him go. Let him swim on his own, damn him! And I would too.

  “You were the one who told me to swim for myself!” I jumped up. “Do it, then! Roll back into the sea! But you’ll have to do that yourself too—I won’t push you. Swim through the damned Gate if you want, and be peaceful forever. You won’t have to talk to anybody there!”

  He drew a huge breath. His face contorted, he rose to his knees and screamed, “For you they killed me? For you I came back from death? I sang, I broke the bonds, I swam—for what? A witch!”

  “I am not a witch!” I cried, stamping my foot. “Or a portent or a goddess or a—a—whatever you thought. I’m a girl You had a girl already, why didn’t you tell me? Bouncing her breasts under your nose—she has no scars!”

  “I’ve had plenty of girls,” he shouted back. “D’you think I’d lie alone? Am I a stone? You slept with that hunter!”

  “I did not—you know I didn’t! I kissed him is all, I wish I were kissing him now! I wish I were anywhere but here with you!”

  “You hurt me!” He raised his fist.

  I raised my own. “Don’t touch me!”

  He stared at his fist. Dropped it. He fell to his hands and knees, vomiting water and bile. I was crying by then, the ugly kind that twists your mouth and makes you blind, until I had to sit down on the same rotten rock that he was on, listening to him retch and spit and sob in that horrible way men do that sounds like tearing something apart, tearing it open.

  “I can’t,” he cried. “I can’t bear it.”

  “I know.” Because how can anybody bear it?

  Except we were. Weeping and puking and bearing it.

  I raised my blubbery face and blinked till I could see him. “You’re all pink,” I said.

  He looked at himself. The blue frost had faded. He was bruised and clotted and common, like a beggar’s baby.

  He said a word I had never spoken, one for which my father would have locked me in the woodbox for a week. My father was not there, though. So I said it too.

  He stared at me. Hiccuped. Stared.

  I stared back. In that moment I heard a sound heard only in stillness: the wing-flick of a bird changing direction in the air.

  That dawn bird I never saw, nor knew what it was. The stillness was the sea; the whistling suck of water at the Gate had slacked, beginning to turn back toward the land.

  His hand was still a fist. He fumbled it out to me. I took it. He opened it.

  Then, scrabbling on the rock, we held each other so tight we made new bruises; we shook, we gasped till the horizon swam. In my arms his body went warm as a cat’s.

  Holding him, I thought, Who is this man? All I know about him is that he lives, and dies, and lives.

  23

  What great stone drops?

  What unseen hand slaps the bowl of sea?

  What breath, drawn and drawn,

  swells what breast,

  stirring the whole cold sea

  to lift and surge,

  to rise and roll,

  to break, and break, and break

  upon this shore?

  Wave Chant. The Rigi.

  AND IT WAS MORNING, on a stone in the sea at the end of the world.

  The water did not roar. It murmured and chuckled, dark emerald patched with foam. A gold mist lay on it, and on the Gate that loomed in the endless waves from the west. I thought I heard the drum, but it was my own heart.

  The man in my arms pushed away a little. The dawn air moved between us. I felt shy holding him, as if he were a stranger.

  All around us was the sound of water: plish and sigh, chirp and lip, muffled by mist. Under it hung a resonance like the fading hum of a gong, so pungent that I could almost smell it. I raised my nose like a bear.

  “Thirsty,” said Nall.

  Me too. I thought I would die of thirst, in the middle of all that water. I rose, tottering as if I were a thousand years old, and dug in the manat I had stolen. In my search for rope I had thrown one of the water skins overside, but the other was still there, wedged in the stern. I dragged it out and brought it to Nall.

  He held it in both hands. Did not drink.

  I licked my lips. “You were thirsty?”

  He blinked. Stared at the water skin, at the manat docked on its tail. He said, “That’s how you got here?”

  I nodded.

  “Bear Spit.”

  I was comforted that he remembered that name, that he made me drink first. His hands did not
shake, but when it was his turn he took the skin clumsily, as if he had never held one. He had that look a newborn has, of lopsided bafflement.

  The mist coiled around us. Except for the dim, cleft shape of the Gate we might have been on a drifting raft.

  The rope was still wrapped in bights around the jag of rock, its far end floating in the sea. I pulled it in. The air bladder was gone from it; so were the deer mouse sash and the pouch of gold. The raveling end of Aieh’s braid had unmade itself into wet dark hair.

  I untied it from the bow lines, coiled it, and brought it to Nall where he sat staring. “I stole it from you. I’m sorry.”

  He took it, with a waking look at Aieh’s sealskin, folded as if for ceremony on the deck of the tiny manat. “My Aieh—”

  A few hours ago I would have flown into a rage at her name. I could still feel in me that being who wanted everything for herself; she squealed and bit, but I held her tight like Rosie, and in the end she wept.

  I thought, Who was I last night? And knew the answer: I was myself. One of my thousand halves. Not one I liked, but mine.

  Nall watched me cry. He held the rope bunched against his breast. “What’s his name?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The man you kissed.”

  “Him? Oh. Raím.”

  “Is—is it true what you said? That he’s the man you love?”

  “It was then.” I wanted to touch him. But I remembered how I had tried to own him and pressed my hands together. “I said it to hurt you.”

  “And I hurt you with silence.” He drew back his arm and threw Aieh’s rope wide of the rock. It uncoiled in the air, hit the surge with a whipping sound, and sank. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  I stopped crying. I rose and took his wrists, as I had taken my father’s once to stop him hitting me. “Didn’t we just fight about that? Why are you still saying it?”

  He turned his wrists slowly, until I had to let go. Then he took my hands and held them, looked at them as if he had never seen hands before. I was ashamed of my broken fingernails.

  “No words for it,” he said.

  I knew how that was. Like Nondany, I said, “Say it however you can.”

  He turned toward the Gate. Only then did I remember why we were there.

  “You listened?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t wonder. Who could hear in that water?”

  “No. Not that kind of hearing. I listened and heard in the way I can—the way I could. To that voice. Not a voice. Something; I don’t know what it was. Is.” He rubbed his face. “Swimming as a priest swims, listening, I heard—nothing. I hear nothing still.”

  “You’re talking to me!”

  “I mean, I still hear what I heard as I swam: the sound the whole world makes as it rushes through the Gate. And it is: nothing.”

  “The fight we just had was nothing?”

  His rage seemed to have burned clean through him, like a forest fire. “Fight, yell, hit, that’s real,” he said. “Isn’t it? It must be. A fist, isn’t that real? But when I listen beyond that place, to where it’s all being born—it’s nothing.” His gray eyes on me, baffled. “That’s what is real. Nothing. What then can matter?”

  The big, dreaming stone was split now by tendrils of mist. The sea had begun to eddy landward through it, the surge made a sound like an old man humming. There were many sounds in it; certainly not nothing. I half thought I heard laughter.

  “It’s shock,” I said. “My boy-cousin hit me with a bat once. I couldn’t hear out of one ear for days.”

  “No.” He set my hands together as Nondany had done with Rosie’s and said, “Kat, I heard nothing. Nothing the way nothing sounds.”

  “It makes a noise?”

  “No. Yes. No. A sound is something. This not. Yet there is—” He sat so still, I could see him listening. But the words were not there.

  I said, “Don’t listen like that.”

  “I hear what I hear. It used to be I heard each living thing singing, and it was she I heard.”

  “Aieh?”

  “No. My mother. Stone, minnow, cloud as she was—all sang, I listened. Now … I can still hear them, but under and beyond them is that other sound, that is no sound.”

  A sound that is not sound; a Bear that is not a bear. Like Bian, I was afraid in my turn and said, “It’s because when I—when we were both being so horrible, you said, ‘I must have silence!’”

  “No. Silence is something. This is nothing. Why couldn’t I hear it before? I think it has been there always. From the beginning of time.” He put out his hand and stubbed it on my arm, stared at it. “At the end of the world, at the beginning of the world; under the sea and over the sky; at the root and crown of the universe: nothing. At all. That’s what I heard. What I hear.” He leaned forward. “Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “It’s so. I can stand before my father now with no skin, and he can’t drink me up. I can stand before the Reirig. They are nothing, and so am I.”

  Hsuu, the Reirig! The world rattled awake. Yet around us was only water. I put my hand on the new wound over Nall’s heart. “The Reirig’s lance would pierce your breast!”

  “And I would die. And that would not weigh a breath more than my living.”

  “But you wanted the rope, you grabbed it. You fought with me!”

  “I’m a creature, and afraid. But if I had not grabbed the rope, the balance would not have changed: nothing to nothing.”

  He did not say these things in anger, or bitterness, or grief, but with awe. He laid his palms on my cheeks. They were warm.

  “I invited you into my body!” I said. “Was that nothing? And you were jealous of Raím, and you made me drink first from the water skin!”

  “I’m a creature,” he said again. “But nothing is the truth. The truth is nothing. I heard it at the Gate.”

  I was ready to fly into my usual rage, but his stillness stilled me. I thought of Raím, groping at a world he could not see, and my fury turned to strangeness. I thought, Are all the men I love blind or deaf? Or are they just men?

  I said, “You must believe what you believe. But so must I, and I say the world’s not nothing! It’s full of noise, right here: birds and winds and foam and the water splashing and us quarreling. Nall, it’s loud!”

  He pushed back my curls and set his forehead on mine. “That you called me and I swam to you—maybe it was a good thing.”

  “Maybe? By life—jump back in the sea and drown!” “No,” he said, as the staccato patter I had thought to be bursting bubbles became, in the mist, the sound of many paddles.

  24

  A mountain,

  A lake of fire,

  A glass mirror;

  Less and less he made it,

  Slimmer and slimmer;

  Until it fit at his hip,

  In his hand,

  In his heart.

  A sliver of glass,

  Clear as

  A black tear:

  Nothing!

  From it death gushes,

  Filling the world:

  Death stands,

  A mountain.

  Obsidian Knife. The Rigi (sung serially or antiphonally).

  I THOUGHT NALL might leap to cover himself with Aieh’s sealskin, or to get his knife. But he only rose to his feet, still holding my hand. Without the deer mouse sash my shift fell loose, as though I too were naked before the spears upright in the boats below.

  One voi and a swarm of manats had taken shape in the mist. In the first manat, dragging whorls of dark water around his paddle shaft, sat Hsuu.

  He sprang onto Stillness on the landward side. He had laid aside his sealskin; he wore a breechclout of the same indigo as his tattoos. Lightly, he climbed the rock.

  Nall drew me to stand a little behind himself.
There was not time for thought. Though it had come to nothing, we had done what we came for.

  Hsuu looked at the two manats, at us where we leaned against each other, at the ghostly Gate. I wanted to lay my ear on his chest to find whether I could hear a heartbeat there, or only the suffle of salt water. His neck was wrinkled leather, like a sea turtle’s. How could I have thought he was like Nall? Hsuu was old.

  Old as the sea, with no mercy in him. No cruelty, either, or affection or hatred or joy, though as he looked at us a tenderness crossed his face, like a cloud shadow. It faded. From his son’s manat he plucked the knife and, after a long look, Aieh’s sealskin.

  “He waits,” said Hsuu. We all knew who. He motioned us to the voi, turned his painted back, and began to climb down to his own boat.

  Barely moving my lips, I said to Nall, “Liu’s knife is in my pocket.”

  He said, “Shall I kill you?”

  I had not thought of that. “No.” Because I would not leave him. “But do you want the knife?”

  He shook his head.

  We clambered down from Stillness. If Nall’s listening was changed, so was mine; perhaps I had found what he had lost, for I swear the barnacles and crabs and weeds on that rock made a noise together that I could hear, a sound like the smell of iodine.

  A hard-faced man in a threadbare breechclout lifted me into the voi. I could not tell whether his scowl was anger or uncertainty. Another man tied Nall’s wrists in front of him; it seemed we had grown more dangerous since last night.

  Nall looked about like a child amazed by bluebirds. Nobody tied me; perhaps they guessed I could not swim like them. I crept into the circle of Nall’s bound arms, and he looked at me as if I were a bluebird too.

  We knelt together in the prow. I felt every breath he took. With each pull of the oars the bow wave drummed on the hide hull; I heard the birdlike chirp and crow of some animal deep in the water, unknown until a dolphin leaped, smiling its perpetual smile.

  “It’s singing,” I whispered to Nall. He did not answer. I thought, He is listening to that soundless sound.

  We rode the changed current eastward, back into the bay. The seals on the shore, penned and miserable, wailed songs as dreadful as the smell they made.