by Betsy James
“Thank goodness, Lali Kat! I can’t carry all of them, and Nondany’s not fit—such a racket! He wants to take the laddie to Lilliena’s house, quiet at least, and it has a window to the sea. He wants to see them come.”
“He told you, then.”
She hefted her shrieking son. As Nall helped Nondany to his feet, she nodded at them and said to me, “Remember when you found Nall? When you brought him to us here in Downshore, and we were dancing? I told you then, a Rig brings luck or storms. You can’t choose. Get you to Lilliena’s, and I’ll dress my two for the dance. We’re Badger clan, like Nondany.”
The stone room quivered with sound. “Quite a beat,” Nondany shouted. “Glory. Yet I think I prefer smaller music.” Nall gathered up the boy so deftly that he only whimpered and kicked one foot.
We went out into the plaza. We could not enter it, for the crush in the open was too dense to cross; we edged around it, keeping to the colonnades. There all life wept, it howled in the dance, it screamed in rage and despair and love.
I thought, I have been here before, but in a dream.
I tried to shield Nondany with my body, saw Nall hunched head down, one hand spread over the child’s face to ward off careless knocks. It was I who had said Dance! yet I never hated humans so much as I did on that endless, jarring journey sunwise around the plaza that had been Downshore’s, as it became again Tanshari’s.
We gained the west side and stumbled down an alley. The crowd thinned, becoming mostly children.
I could call them that because they were younger than I, but wild with the drum and too big to be controlled by adult threats. They knew Nondany and came thronging, girls and boys. They knew Nall.
Prancing backward in front of us, they said, “Are you going to Nondany’s eyrie? Will you watch there for the Rigi?” They reminded me of hedgehogs, which in the Hills are called urchins: prickly, suspicious, full of life. “Those old people have to dance, but we’re going to see the Rigi come!”
Nondany tipped back his head to peer at them, for they were taller than he. “If the Rigi are singing when they come—”
“We’ll listen! We’ll remember for you!” A big-eyed girl with a gold ring in her nose ran alongside Nall, saying to him, “And we’ll sing for them. We’ll sing that song you taught us. My father’s clan is Seal, but my mother’s an Otter. Can they tell? Will they kill me?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
At the west end of the alley a blockade had been flung up: hay bales, driftwood, smashed chairs. Next to it a shop’s tiny window displayed crockery and tin spoons.
“My sister’s shop,” said Nondany.
The door was locked. He had the key. I turned it and forced the stiff bolt, the urchins shoving and telling me how. “Lilliena’s in the plaza with her little dog,” they said. “She’s telling Otter clan the right way to carry their standard and showing Badger clan how to dance. So she’s not here.”
“Life is merciful,” said Nondany.
The urchins wanted to come in with us. More had gathered, as though they had a signal network. But Nondany said, “Leave us to be old, eh?”
“He’s not old,” said the girl with the ring, pointing to the child in Nall’s arms.
“Ah, but he’s wise,” said Nondany. “Get along now, loves. Be joyful.”
“All right!” She jumped straight into the air with a squeal of energy, terror, delight. The urchins scattered down the street. We entered Lilliena’s tiny shop and shut the door.
The room’s wide shelves held scanty goods: a bolt of milled cloth, cheap toweling in lengths, a new kettle, the mirrors and spices and ribbons traded by my father’s people—Tanshari’s unpaid debt. “Through the back,” said Nondany.
We came into a walled courtyard open to the sky. There an old apricot tree overhung a rose garden, a table, a few chairs. You could hear the sea break beyond the wall. At the west end the doors of the rough-walled house stood open to a kitchen and to a spiral staircase.
This we climbed to a second story, then to a squat tower. Nondany lurched on the stairs. At the top was his eyrie: a tiny room where a window looked out over the water, its shutters thrown open to the summer evening. It held a chair, a table with inkwell and quill, a nightstand, a narrow bed. In the wall next to the doorway was a Year Altar, on it the striped pebble and the wasp-nest brain.
On the bed, like a napping child, lay the dindarion. All strings but one were broken. The varnish was blistered, and the neck, like the Reirig’s, canted at an odd angle.
Nall looked down at it, then nudged it aside with his elbow. It groaned like a living thing. He laid the boy down in its stead and straightened the dirty little smock. The child’s chest moved with quick breaths.
We heard the drum, but distantly. The waves were louder. I moved to look out the window, but Nall snatched me back, pointing to the floor: A black arrow lay there, its iron tip shattered on the stone wall.
He eased his face around the window frame. Searched up and down the shore. Nodded. As he moved the chair for Nondany, I looked out over the sea.
That quarter of Tanshari did not overlie the old arem, but had been built out onto a low, rocky spit. A strip of beach stretched below us, but it was empty, washed by the falling tide, without even footprints. Birds picked at the shining sand. In the west the black cloud bank that had pursued us had rolled closer, waiting to swallow the falling sun.
To the north on the smoking docks I saw the clustering tiny figures of paidmen. South, on the beach below the ruins of Mailin’s house, another lot had built a pale daylight bonfire and were tossing into it broken furniture and other rubbish, as if it were a Year Fire.
“Pull the bed to the window, will you, my dears? So I can see, and tend my laddie too.”
“Beware any movement on the beach,” said Nall. We shifted the bed. I pulled the dindarion away from the boy’s feet. He lay still, sleeping or fainting.
Nondany lowered himself into the chair with a grunt. “This is my specialty,” he said. “Watching wars from a height. A slight height, as I am not tall.”
The nightstand held a clay cup and water jug, half full. I looked around for something to use as a towel besides the skirt of my dirty shift, remembered the toweling in the shop, and sent Nall to fetch it. He was slow to return. I stripped the case off the pillow and used that to wet and wipe Nondany’s face, then the boy’s hot arms and legs. I gave Nondany water from the clay cup, then drank myself. I filled the cup for Nall, but he was not there.
Western light lit the Year Altar. Nondany bent over the boy. I put down the cup, stepped to the landing, and looked down the dark stairs.
Nall was not there. I thought, Has he gone? To swim and listen, to get clean, to get away from us?
I had a vision of the water pouring out through the Gate, the line trembling in the air between the stones. I clattered down the stairs and shot into the courtyard.
He was there. Just standing, seeming to stare at nothing in particular. He held the toweling in his hands. When he saw me, he started. He looked at the cloth, held it out. “I was coming,” he said.
I took it from him. The rose garden smelled like smoke and babies’ faces.
“Stay here if you like,” I said. “If we need you, I’ll call.”
“I’m coming,” he said. He did not move.
“There’s water upstairs.” I turned away and left him to come if he would. It was the sea he needed. All I had was a water in a clay cup.
Nondany had angled his chair to look west over the ocean, south over land. Waves wrinkled the empty sea. At the bonfire the little poisonous figures of the paidmen strode about in the smoke.
“Well, well,” said Nondany. “So here we are.”
He did not ask where I had gone, or where Nall was. He laid his bandaged hands on his lap, palms up, and tipped the chair back. I thought of my auntie Jerash, who whenever I tipped my chair had whacked my head with a spoon. She would be hearing the drum now; so would her daughters, my girl-co
usins in their gray gowns who rocked their dollies to threats and frightened one another with taunts about the Rigi. I saw the door of the black box bed burst open, the childish nightmare come alive.
There was nothing I could do.
I could only be. Away from the fever in the plaza, away from the unknowing girls who even now were being chivvied out of their dresses, settled in their box bed whining and pinching, giggling after the doors were shut, or shivering, silent, at the sound of that drum.
So I did nothing. I sat in the high, quiet room with Nondany and the child, and listened to him talk.
About chickens. How they have personalities, which I knew already. He taught me a little song from Graygardens that will make the hens come, every time.
About mudpies. In Arkelina even the grown-ups make them, on the day of a certain saint who ate mud in penance and died of it. The children sing for cakes that day and get them, and their parents get stones for raisins.
About wind. You would not believe all the songs and stories and hand slaps and riddles there are about wind! Here is the same wind blowing over all of us, and it seems as if everybody has to grab a handful and make a song of it. “We had a wind skip,” I said. “We weren’t supposed to say it.” But I said it now for him.
The wind blows hard
The wind blows true,
The wind blows backward—
It’s you! Peeuw!
He laughed. “My Half-and-Half! I’ll just make a note of that—” Grimacing, he groped at the air and said, “I forgot. I can’t hold a pen.”
“Where are your papers?” I asked at last.
“Ashes. Like some of the children. We had discussed that possibility.” He sighed. “Work to do over.”
“I’ll help you,” I said.
As I spoke those words, I felt a little click, exactly as when, on my journey from Creek, I had slid the Weedrun boy’s bowstring into the nock. I said slowly, “I know so many songs and stories now. And tattoo designs, and dances, and embroidery designs, and chants and taunts and hand slaps and jump-rope rhymes. I know a little bit of everything. Because I have a thousand halves.”
I saw that I was both inside and outside of many tribes: Downshore and Creek and the League, the Rigi and the Roadsouls and all the peoples I had met on my journeys, and thousands I had not met. Women are a tribe, I thought, and so are men. Children are another. Warriors are a tribe, whether paidman or Rig or fierce lad with a fish knife. Creatures are tribes, like the singing moles and the birds; maybe even things are, like the old logs that chanted hoyroynoy. They chant and dance, and many of them paint and weave and embroider and make pots and tattoo themselves where their aunties wish they wouldn’t.
“It’s all tied together. Everything that we make, that we are. It’s the loom of countless threads; I saw it when I was the Bear,” I said, and burst into tears.
“So, so.” Nondany patted me with the back of his hand as he had patted the child, as I had seen Dai pat a cow that had just calved. Proud, relieved. “Half-and-Half, All-and-All. There! The world and I will be glad of your help. And never think your calling has to do only with songs! However, I am an exacting master,” he said, as if he had just hired me to begin in three days, when Least Night was done and everybody had hangovers.
Sobbing, I said, “But I can’t spell!”
“By life! As if that mattered,” he said in a sensible voice.
I stopped crying. I felt light and strange, as though I walked in a meadow full of every sort of flower under heaven, all mine for the gathering. Then I looked at the door to the stairway. It was still empty. “But Nall,” I said. “He’s changed.”
Maybe Nondany did not hear me. He had bent over the boy and was lifting in his bandaged paw the brown boy’s hand with its grubby fingernails. “Deaf and blind and burned and lame, one goes on,” he said. He laid the little hand down. “That gift I gave you, Half-and-Half—what did you do with it?”
I did not know what to say, but looked at my empty palm.
“Good, you’ve still got it. I have a task for you, your first in my employ. Will you remember this song for me, please? It was among those that were burned. I had it from a Roadsoul, though I’m sure its origin is Rig.”
He tipped his chair and sang.
At the gate of the great deep,
Souls are finding bodies,
Hearts are finding words.
Nothing turns to every shining thing, and rises
Like a flight of birds.
He waited, cocking an eyebrow.
“Oh—,” I said.
“Do you understand?” said Nondany. “Do you see?”
“Look! Look!”
For I was leaning out the window, pointing. The waves writhed, drawing shoreward. As far as I could see, across the wide horizon, the bright sea was alive with seals.
31
Both rose and briar
hall to the fire Fall.
From burned thorn
The year shall be reborn.
Year Altar Song. Tanshari.
“NALL! NALL!”
He rattled up the stairs and slammed into the room.
“Pigalee!” the boy wailed, waking. But the three of us were crammed at the window, staring at the sea.
It boiled. Seals bobbed, twirled, tumbled together, seeming to dance in the water. In the lucent surf their big bodies wreathed and darted, broke surface and splashed until a fine mist rose, gold and turquoise in the falling sun.
The mist rose in spirals, twisted like snakes. Oily, heavy coils piled link upon link, rising to dissolve, collapse, rise again.
“Nondany, can you see?”
“Enough.” His face was smooth with wonder. He leaned out so far that I grabbed the back of his shirt. I thought of the black arrow and looked north and south along the shore to the gangs of paidmen.
The glinting black figures crowded together, they pointed at the writhing columns of mist. Under the boom of the drum I heard the cricket chirps that were their yells. Seals thickened the water between the pilings of the docks, they shot into the shallows and raised snaking necks, they moaned and bellowed. What must have been thunder—the paidmen’s boots pounding the earth as they ran east, up the foreshore—I could not hear at all.
The coils of mist became a living forest, shimmering pink and emerald, thick as the trunks of trees. “Hoyroynoy,” I whispered. Tiny screams were from the paidmen at the bonfire running, falling, scrambling up to run again.
Nall was a man watching the moon rise. He raised one hand with fingers spread. From the base of the raking fog, like leopards stealing out of a forest, slipped host upon host of black manats.
A school of black fish, a flock of night birds, a swarming darkness that glittered with spears and new-edged knives. Black paddles flicked. The seals sank away, or maybe they turned into manats. Nall stood motionless. Nondany’s shoulder pressed mine as we watched our death come to us like dusk across the water.
The men fleeing along the shore saw the manats. They dropped their weapons and ran faster, clotting and struggling east up Scythe Road. It did not matter that they could run and we could not. It was our debt to clear, our fate to finish. They were paidmen.
The drum boomed without pause. The dancers could not see the manats. Perhaps they did not care; they were dancing to their death—the drum would shout and shout and shout until the drummers died.
But little figures were running down from town.
“The urchins!” I said. Darting through the fleeing paid-men like sparrows through thorns, the half-grown children of Tanshari were running down to the beach unarmed and wild, throwing their hands in the air to welcome the Rigi and die, celebrating the end of the world.
They ran to the bonfire like moths. I thought they would hurl themselves into the flames like altar goods, like roses. But they caught hands in great shifting rings and began to dance round it, stamping to the rhythm of the drum.
The men in the manats saw the fire too; they flew to it. On th
e bed the burned lad gave a nightmare scream.
The urchins raised their joined hands, they sang.
“I’m going down,” said Nall.
“Then I’m coming with you.”
He looked at me. “So be it.”
I turned to Nondany, who wept. “Thank you,” I said. For the life I had had, all of it; for the pain and confusion that were gifts now, for he had given me a bowl to put them in. “But you—”
“Me? You may not fuss over me! Get down there. Loolie, loolie, mannie. Go—By life, not that way!” he cried as we dove over the windowsill. “You’ll kill yourselves!”
The walls were rough-laid, with plenty of toeholds; it was no worse than the shaft we had climbed on the Isle of Bones, but I was clumsy, I fell the last pitch onto Nall and knocked him sprawling. He sprang up and yanked me to my feet, we scrambled down the barnacled wet rocks of the spit to the beach and ran toward the fire.
The sand was hard, still wet from the retreating tide. The drum boomed. The bonfire surged high; the urchins were hurling in driftwood and dry wrack to swell the blaze. Mist dimmed the sun. The waves were pale green bands broken by dark manats that did not roll or turn, but dove straight as bees to the hive of fire.
Nall stumbled as he ran. I gave him my shoulder for a crutch, and he used it without thanks. We ran south on the trodden sand until we came between the children and the boats.
“Nall! Nall!” cried the urchins, stamping and clapping, fiercer than the fire.
He did not answer, but faced the sea.
Quick as a needle, the first manat darted through the flattening waves. The rest hung back, but the paddler of the first leaped into the knee-high surf and lifted his little boat to land. His sealskin was tied across his shoulders. In his hand he carried, point forward, the lance: the One’s lance, which had opened the way through the Changes. Hsuu’s face writhed without stirring, like the sheen of oil on water.
Nall walked toward him. I followed. Nall made a gesture that said, This is mine. I fell back, but only a little.