by Betsy James
The floor was polished; the slap of our feet was loud. Someone was singing.
Sweet cow, my honey,
Let down your milk.
I’ll give you bright money
And a gown of silk.
We piled into the end of that blind, barren chute. Queelic had a key. He wrenched open the door of the last cell, to reveal Dai huddled naked in a corner, head down, singing Detention into a cowshed.
He looked up blinking. “Dream,” he said. Robin’s arms went round him. “No,” he said, and burst into tears.
I tumbled in after her. They held each other, so I had to hold them both. He seemed whole; he did not smell of seared flesh, only of shit. “We thought you were dead,” I said. “We thought you were racked and hanged!”
When he could speak, he said, “Father stopped him.”
“Father. Our father?”
He nodded against Robin’s cheek. His head had been shaved again, and on his skull, more naked even than Aieh’s, every childhood scar showed clear.
“Sister, listen.” He freed one hand to grope for me. “Had the iron in the coals, Harlan did, to put behind my knees. Comes Father, how he walks now, bent. ‘Don’t touch him,’ he says. ‘That’s my son.’
“‘So it is, old man,’ says Harlan, ‘and I’ll kiss him.’
“‘I’m dying,’ says Father. ‘You touch my son, I’ll rise from my grave and find you. You fear the Rigi? Fear me! Harlan, I’ll kiss you for the rest of your putrid life—I’ll rot your guts with dreams!’ Harlan looks furious. Sick. But he throws down the iron. Father turns to go. Then he looks at me and says, ‘I see you finally shaved that beard.’”
For the first time Dai looked about; beyond Queelic’s shoulder, skin-clad Rigi were nosing along the corridor. In a whisper he said, “What’s happened?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Queelic. “I’ll find out.” As he turned, the dark crowd seeped forward, like water through a crack.
Dai pressed closer to Robin. “Who are they?”
“The Rigi,” said Queelic. He began to make his way through the press, saying, “Let me by, please. Thanks. I’ll just slip by.”
“Who’s that?” said Dai.
“Ab Harlan’s son, Queelic. Remember him?”
“That’s not Queelic.”
“I know,” I said. “But we’d better go with him.”
Robin helped Dai to his feet. He stared like a man who wakes to a different world than the one in which he fell asleep.
In the narrow corridor, in the storerooms, in the accounting hall with its main doors open—the Rigi were everywhere. They poked into corners, stroked locks, murmured among themselves.
I expected theft. Saw none. In Ab Harlan’s parlor a handful of gold crown weights lay spilled across the floor, jeweled quills stood in silver holders, untouched as though a dream spell lay over all. It had to be Hsuu’s doing. Only a Roadsoul child slipped in, nicked a silk throw from the daybed, and stuck out her tongue at me.
Outside, the sun had set and the high sky shone with a pearly, eggshell twilight.
The Rigi filled the square. Among them Queelic’s shirt was luminous, seeming to float on the pool of beings who crouched around Ab Harlan in his silk cravat. The League-man’s body was lax as a fallen marionette’s, his head propped on Hsuu’s blue thigh.
“Shu-shu,” Hsuu whispered.
Ab Harlan’s skin was not blue. Nor was it its usual pallor, but pink and damp. He seemed to stare at the clear sky; tears poured from him, and the exhausted wail of a child, too frightened to cry, who cries at last. The right side of his face jerked.
Hsuu pursed his lips. “Keeo, give me a knife.”
Queelic had none. Nall drew his knife and passed it to Queelic, haft first. Queelic held it for a moment, then gave it into Hsuu’s blue hand.
Hsuu laid the knife against Ab Harlan’s throat. No one moved to stop him, under that clear, dim sky.
He cut Ab Harlan’s silk cravat. He sliced the waistcoat and shirt down the front, cut the cruel band of the tweed breeches. Ab Harlan sprawled. His wails went to sobs, and he seemed to stare at the new moon, curved like a cradle in the sky.
Hsuu handed back the knife.
Queelic said hoarsely, “You said you’d talk with him.”
Hsuu rubbed his hand across Ab Harlan’s face and held up his wet palm. “Salt water,” he said. “The oldest tongue of all. Harlan, you are one of us.”
“Then so am I.” Queelic stumbled as he turned away. “What shall I do now? I only wanted to show Dad that the Rigi are real. I never thought past that.” He looked at the scattered houses where whole families crouched, terrified, in the dark. “What about the rest of us?”
Robin and the others came fording the crowd. Dai was still naked; he looked hairy and noble, like a bear. Robin said, “If this were a story, we would tear down these walls!”
“Is that the story we want?” said Mailin. “Give me the truths of stone, of fish and tree and child. They don’t conquer. They are.”
Dai said, “The League would never buy it. No profit.”
“No profit without it,” said Mailin. “If the world’s in ruin, where’s your business?”
“Rebuilding is always profitable,” said Dai. “Ruin us, then loan us cash for mortar, hey.” I knew then that he was not whole after all, and that I must love him as I had promised. “Let the damned League crouch in their houses,” he said. “Let them puke with fear!”
Robin said, “There are children in those houses.”
I thought of the child’s sob I had heard, of my uncle’s face at the grate of the guardhouse cell—anguished, as if I had been his daughter. “We could go to Ab Jerash’s house,” I said.
Queelic’s face lit. “Jerash is decent,” he said.
I was in a rush to try it, in this strange war where dreams came real, where you walked up to your enemy’s door and knocked on it. I wanted to say, Nall come with me!
But I felt uncertain. Since the instant my foot had touched solid earth again, nothing had felt real. Perhaps this cresting wave had washed the Gate from Nall at last; but I was afraid to ask. I said, “Queelic, would you come?”
But Queelic would not leave his father—his fathers, speaking to each other in the oldest tongue. Dai, too, shook his head, still stunned.
Nall said, “I’ll come with you.”
He sheathed his knife and fell in beside me. We padded down the echoing streets. I stole a sidelong look at his face and said, “Are you still hearing it?”
A nod.
“But—all this, and Ab Harlan, and Dai!”
He shook his head. Maybe he had no words. Maybe nothing mattered.
I did not know what to say.
34
Shut the doors, lock them tight.
Light shine on me through the night.
Round about my little bed,
Ghosts and demons darkly tread.
From A Box Bed Prayer. Upslope.
THE DUSK WAS as peopled as Soulsday midnight, when the dead rise up. The drum beat on the wind, the streets and paths were full of beings weeping and laughing and singing. I was not sure if they were living or dead, if maybe this invasion had raised souls from Tanshari’s old arem.
They moved about the gardens, leaped the low walls, called at the windows in voices half song, half cry. They touched the closed doors. The houses stood like stones.
Ab Jerash’s gate was open, his door shut. Nall said, “Will he be armed?”
I almost said, Does it matter?
“No,” I said. Jerash had six daughters; he had married off two of them, but the rest needed dowries. “He can’t afford paidmen.”
“Still.” Nall whistled into the night. Three shadows came running, not ghosts, but warriors in sealskins with bone ankle rings—clan brothers, maybe. They spoke together in Rig. The warriors’ teeth gleamed; the anklets rattled on their strong feet. I was afraid all over again and said to Nall, “If Jerash sees these, he’ll never let us in!”
I had spoken like a Leagueman, as if the Rigi were dogs and could not understand human speech. One of them, a lean lad with a nicked ear, grinned at me and said, “Bear, we shall be the wind—heard, never seen.” They sifted back into the dark. I heard chuckles, and the sound of someone making water. Nall and I crept up to the door of Graystone House.
The front stoop offered no cover, only bare stone steps that I had scrubbed a thousand times. The door, whitewashed to ward off devils, shone blue in the starlight. I knocked on it like a Rulesday visitor and said, “Uncle Jerash! Auntie!”
No one answered. But I had learned a lesson at the accounting house and whispered to Nall, “Come round to the back.” The kitchen was there, and the box beds.
We slipped through the garden. The shadowy Rig warriors ran with us and nipped over the wall into the blackberry bushes. I heard soft laughter; they had found the ripe berries. We crept under the shuttered windows to the kitchen steps.
I had scrubbed those, too, and knew where the wooden bucket would be standing overturned to dry. Nall did not, and kicked it. It fell with a bang, and when I put my ear to the door crack, I heard that muffled sob and the snick of a latch.
“Uncle!” I cried at the hinge. “Auntie! It’s me. Katyesha.”
At the sound of that name, everything I had been when I wore it began to seep out of that house, turning me back into the girl who scrubbed the stoop. I hunched up my shift to cover the scars.
With Nall’s breath stirring my hair I said to the door crack, “It’s just me. And—”
And a demon, a beast. What else could he be, to them?
“It’s just me—and the beggar boy with the moon for his white mare.”
Silence. Then knocks and scrapes, my uncle’s voice hoarse and indistinct. “Katyesha.”
“Hello, Uncle. Are you all right?”
Silence. More knocks, voices too low to understand. I waited, my cheek pressed against the jamb. I smelled cabbage soup with onions.
My uncle’s voice, close to my ear this time but higher—for he was tall—said, “Have they killed him?”
No need to ask who. “No. But they have him.”
“Who are they?”
“The Rigi.”
The silence on the other side of the door stretched so long that Nall shifted on his bad foot. “There’s no such thing,” said Ab Jerash.
“I wish you’d stop saying that!” I said. “They’re all over the place. They’re eating Auntie’s blackberries and pissing in her kale yard, and you Leaguemen keep saying they don’t exist!”
After another, shorter silence my uncle said in almost his normal voice, “We’re concerned.”
I had grown up with language like this and knew it meant We’re terrified. “Ab Harlan’s been killing people,” I said.
“He’s excessive,” said Ab Jerash in a rush.“We’ve agreed he’s excessive. He stayed within bounds at first, and then—We could say nothing, Niece. They’re his paidmen. We’ve been afraid—” He stopped himself, having used so straightforward a word. “Afraid for our children. For our wives. I’ve sent for a delegation from Rett. Secretly, of course. When Seroy was killed, I sent word; I said, ‘Harlan’s excessive, he’s out of bounds, we’re losing important customers here. Setting a poor example.’”
My cheek was still against the jamb. There would be a crease down it. “Do you know what the paidmen have done?”
“We couldn’t stop them. Harlan has the money. I sent for the delegation; they’ll be here tomorrow or the day after. Powerful traders—”
“Will they bring paidmen?”
“Yes,” said Ab Jerash, very low. “I said there was trouble. But they won’t be an army. Not like—We saw that army on the sea. The League—we’re businessmen, Niece! We don’t make war. We defend trade.”
I thought of the boy with no feet. “How is that different from war?”
“A local difficulty. One little village …,” Ab Jerash began, and trailed off.
“Men’s daughters are raped. Their children are dead and their houses burned.”
“There must be reparation.” He did not say what the children and houses of natives were worth, or who might pay. “Niece, are all the paidmen dead?”
“Runoff.”
By his silence I knew he was doing sums: how many paid-men the delegation might bring, plus how many met running on the road who might be persuaded to come back to Upslope and at what price; who would pay them, with Ab Harlan lost; how many warriors were in the army of his nightmares. At last he said, “We might call a council with Downshore. If they will.”
“And with the Rigi.”
Silence.
“As soon as the delegation comes,” I said.
Silence. Then, “Could it be done?” Silence. “Perhaps so.”
“You’re such a good man!” I said before I thought. For he was; as good as he knew how to be. “Oh, Uncle, let us in!”
“I don’t—The one with you—” The devil king of the sea, the demon you ran off with, Niece. “I’m afraid,” my uncle said.
I knew what this honesty cost his pride. I suspected what it had cost him in money, with Ab Harlan. “If there’s to be a council, Uncle, you’ll have to know who you’re talking to.”
“I’m afraid for my girls.”
I turned to Nall and soundlessly mouthed, You try?
Nall put his lips to the hinge crack. “Ab Jerash. Will you speak with us?”
More silence. Ab Jerash said, “He speaks Plain?”
“We all speak Plain,” said Nall.
“How can it be that we did not know this?”
“There has been a separation.”
“Yes. Yes, there has.” Ab Jerash was at once more at ease talking to a man, though a native and a demon, than to me. He said, “Sir, good sir—can you understand that I’m afraid for my wife and daughters?”
“Yes.”
There were rattles on the far side of the door; it was unbarred and opened a handspan. My uncle’s pale face, hat-less, appeared at the crack. He had braced his body against the door. After a moment he stepped back and said, “Come in.”
We slipped into the kitchen; he slammed the door and barred it again. Even distraught he spoke the formal welcome of a League host: “I am in your employ.” It was to Nall he spoke it; it was not said to women. “Wife, turn up the lamp.”
The dark shape that was my aunt moved to the bead of light and raised the wick until the glare lit her hard, frightened face. Around her, as always, the flagstones gleamed slick as mirrors, the pots shone on the wall, and the hearth, which I had so often scrubbed on my knees with a chunk of pumice, was white as bone.
I realized that my head was uncovered, my hair uncut and uncombed, and I was dressed in dirty underwear.
I could not look at her. The more I blushed, the more I knew that I blushed, that I was naked, that she could see my body and my mind, every crime and shame and sluttery I had ever committed. I remembered being slapped for picking my nose.
“Good evening, Aunt,” I said. I waved my hand a little. “This is Nall.”
She had bent upon me a steel gaze. Then she looked at him, and her eyes went furtive, flinching.
I looked at him too. Narrow-hipped, nearly naked, he was as I had seen him first: a man, dark and desired. The lamplight slicked his thighs. Then I could look neither at him nor away from him, until at the edge of my vision my aunt’s shocked face burned and blurred.
He held out his hands to her.
She put her own behind her back, like a little girl saying, No! Tears sprang to her eyes, and to hide them she turned away.
I had never seen her cry. I did not know what to do except to cling to the old courtesies. I said, “Auntie, I’ve been with my mother’s sister in the Hills. Her name is Bian. She sends her kind regards.”
Without turning around she said, “If you think you’re going to—”
“Wife,” said Ab jerash.
She stood still a moment, then f
aced us with her eyes downcast. Her cheekbones stood out sharp. “My respects to your aunt,” she said.
I said, “Are the girls all right?”
She did not answer. But Jerash said to her, “Are they any safer where they are?” He went to the biggest of the box beds. “Daughters, come out. We have guests.” When the double doors were not unlatched from within, he said, “That’s twice,” in the tone that meant what it always had: Stop doing whatever you just did, or get a beating.
The latch rattled. Ab Jerash swung the doors wide to reveal four girls clutched together like mice in a nest, sobbing soundlessly, their fair braids rubbed into haloes. The littlest had buried her head in her sisters’ skirts, and I saw only her pink fists, tight as buds.
“Missa, it’s all right,” I said. But it is never all right for girls in wartime.
“Get up, get up,” my aunt said. “Lazy besoms! Your cousin is visiting.”
They scrambled out, clinging and trembling. Then they saw Nall, and would have stampeded back into the bed if their mother had not blocked the way, saying stone-faced, “Greet our guests.”
They bobbed like a covey of quail, whimpering, “Good evening, Cousin Katyesha.”
I did not know what to feel. I did not love them, nor they me. But what if the world had gone differently and I had been among them still, cowering in that bed? What if it had been Jekka in there?
“Cheer up, ratlings,” I said.
They startled and scowled. So did Auntie Jerash, who had smacked us for that word. Yet such is the power of insult that they composed themselves and truly looked at me.
And at Nall. Bodices were straightened, gowns shaken out, hair smoothed and tucked. Lila put her shoulders back. Ominya bit her lips to make them pink.
My aunt said sourly, “This is your cousin’s—this is—Mister Nall.”
Missa curtsied and piped, “Good evening, Mister Nall.”
Then she did something she should not have done, that in that house had never been done. She stepped forward, holding out to him her small, pink hand.
He took it in his brown one. I heard my aunt’s intake of breath. But she had named us guests and could not deliver smacks till later. “Missa,” she said.