Outside the Gates

by Molly Gloss

  Afterward, the man made a sweet, wet cake of honey and blackberries and flour ground from seeds of wild blue rice.

  “It has rained for seven days,” he said gruffly, as if that were the reason for sharing a sweet treat.

  By that fall, the red-back wolf pups born in the spring had grown out of babyness. When the fall’s weather went dry and windy, Vren spent three days with them. It felt good to be able to wrestle roughly with someone and play serious games of hunt-and-ambush in the thick brush below the den. And he liked to feel himself part of that big family, to share in their noisy, open love. In the darkness, the boy raised his voice in high wailing star-song with the pups and the parents and a young uncle who had become his particular friend. He even slept in the wolves’ small den, curled up tightly with the others so there should have been no room for loneliness.

  In a while, though, he found he was homesick.

  From the ridge behind the den he stood and watched the great flights of gray fisher-geese. From that high place, on the clear days, the line of the tableland seemed very close, as if one might walk to the foot of the plain in an afternoon. But the boy did not look toward the Gates. For a while now, he had only seen the faces of those people in his dreams.

  He watched the geese. Then he bumped noses with each of the wolves, in thanks and farewell, and he went home again to Rusche.

  2

  The Empty House

  IN THE FALL, soon after the boy had tied his sixth year-knot in Rusche’s string, he went down the valley of the White Stone River to take wool from the yellow bears. There were several families of them who grazed the lower end of the valley in that season. Every year, Vren came and spent a few days of the fall camping among them. He combed burrs and ticks from their coats, and then, as they stood or lay patiently, he cropped the long, coarse wool from their shoulders. Their hair would lengthen again, and thicken, before the cold weather had set in. And the bears’ wool, woven over hearts of teba-string, made a warmer, tougher legging than the ones Rusche had used to make all of teba-cloth.

  The boy liked being among the bears. They were calm and easily pleased. There was not much cleverness in their small, close-set eyes, but Vren saw peace there, and dignity. He spent four or five days with them, following as they wandered up and down the valley, harvesting blackberries and cattail stems and mustard leaves, through the long orange afternoons. Then he put in his old troublesack the few things he had brought with him, took up the big light bundle of the bears’ wool, and he went off home again.

  It was a good day for walking, cool and cloudy. The boy and Rusche, coming and going from their house to the berry fields, had over the years worn a thin trail along the banks of the White Stone River, and the boy followed it easily. It crossed and recrossed the water, choosing the open bank wherever windfallen trees or rocks or thickets stood in the way.

  In the shallows foxweed sometimes found sunny places to grow, and there the boy could see the thick seed pods already ripe. He went on by them. He and Rusche could come up this path in a day or two with a basket and a seed comb and harvest what the deer had not found. He did not want to stop for foxweed now. He was suddenly impatient for Rusche, as he always was when he had started home after being away. He went upriver steadily, wading across the water and across again, following the path. He took off his leggings and carried them in his troublesack so the cold clear water splashed his bare calves. He let the water run right in and out the open sides of his elbec sandals.

  Rusche seemed always uncomfortable at leave-takings and home-comings, and that had made the boy shy of them also. It was his habit to come in as if he had not gone away. He would set down his troublesack and begin at once to help the man beat out a spruce cloth or weave the flat strips of cattail leaves to make a mat—and it was only from the corner of his eye that he saw, each time, Rusche’s slight, slow smile welcoming him.

  Now, when he came up from the riverbank toward the high tebas where the house sat, what he felt was not shyness. It was stronger and stranger than that, an unquiet that blew through him like a wind. All at once he became unwilling to go the last short way to the house. He stood just beyond sight of it and took a breath, but the dark thing he felt only settled in his chest. He stood a long time, waiting, without quite knowing for what he waited. And finally, though he had none of his breath or his heart back, he went on again, slowly, until he could see the house.

  It squatted as ever, under the low branches of the tebas, but it was clearly empty and cold. There were bits of stepped-on food and broken sticks on the ground in front of the doorhole. The house Rusche had built with his own hands looked now sad and poorly made, as if no one could ever have lived snugly there. The boy stood where he was and stared.

  “Hello,” he said after a while, and was ashamed to hear his voice sounding thin and afraid.

  “Haloo-oo!” he said again, in a loud shout that went out into the trees and then down into the cold center of him. There was no answer. He had known there would not be.

  The house had been like a squirrel’s nest, its walls and ceiling hung with their harvest of summer and fall. Now all of the food and most of the tools were gone. Only a few jumbled things had been left behind. The boy and Rusche had split and shredded a pile of red teba bark, and the soft unwoven strings lay stepped on. There was a broken digging stick on the ground, too, with an old wooden seed-beater and a berry basket with a hole to mend, and things without workaday use: the boy’s old star chart, a carven set of Seven-Sticks, and Rusche’s long calendar string, tangled among the ashes of his last fire. The boy straightened the string carefully and counted knots. There was no knot marking this day, and none for the day before.

  The boy walked up and down both banks of the river, from the Cat’s Tail to the Big Turn. He walked slowly, looking for a print of Rusche’s foot in the mud or the grass. There was nothing that seemed clear enough to follow. He went along each of the smaller paths they had made, to mushroom beds and patches of mint and fields of elderberry. He climbed his high lookout tree and stared over the woods until his eyes burned. He used a long stick to poke into thorny bushes and into boggy places where he knew the mud could swallow something big as a man. He even dove down into the deep places in the river, swimming slowly through the cold water with his eyes wide open.

  At night when the light was gone, he went back to the empty house. There was a firestick in his troublesack but he did not break it to make a fire. He lay down alone in the cold darkness and slept little. He was careful not to think of Rusche. Instead, carefully, he thought of the landmarks of the UnderReach, drawing on the darkness of his closed eyes a chart as fine and complete as the star chart he and the man had once made together. This one, though, was a map of all the places he had already searched, and all the others where he might yet find Rusche.

  The sleep he got was filled with broken pieces of frightening dreams.

  On the second day he went all the way up to the elbec fields at the Basket Meadows, half a day’s walk. He went round them, calling Rusche’s name out loud. And then he walked slowly back down from there alone.

  On the second night, when he shut his eyes, he could no longer draw a map against the darkness. All the places he knew had been searched. When he saw Rusche’s face behind his eyelids, he opened his eyes again and stared at the two stars showing through the smokehole in the roof.

  In a while, in silence and darkness, he felt the wolf come and stand in the doorway of the house. It was Trim, the uncle, who was, after Rusche, the first and best of Vren’s friends. The wolf made a sound, a growl so faint it was like a cat’s purr, and then he came in and lay beside the boy. The boy put his face against Trim’s rough coat, his arms around the thick neck. He had not cried for Rusche yet, but now that Trim was there he did cry a little. He felt better afterward, as if he had taken off something that was too tight.

  The boy knew at once that the parents had stayed behind with their spring-born litter. They had given Trim, who was unmarried
and youngest of the three, the charge of their friend. Vren did not wonder at all how the wolves had found out his need. He was sure he would have known theirs.

  • • •

  In the morning, in a cold gray light, Trim went over many of the places the boy had already searched. He kept his muzzle close to the ground, smelling for Rusche as Vren had looked for his footprint.

  The boy knew there must be many old scent-marks around their house, so he waited patiently, sitting on his heels, while the wolf nosed about. After a short time, Trim lifted up his head and looked straight at the boy and then turned and started off. He led Vren over the hill and into the long canyon behind it, where there were leafless po nut trees and the sweet smell of the hot springs. The boy had looked along that path all the way to its end the day before, but he followed the wolf. Past the po nuts, the trail was dim, seldom used. There was no neighbor’s house known to lie that way, only sparse bushes of thimbleberries and, in the spring, spider-leaf and thistles. In a short time, the paths worn by Rusche and Vren dribbled out. Still the wolf went on, along the trails of deer and bear.

  When they had gone beyond the edges of land the boy knew, Vren fell behind a little and finally he stopped. He squatted on the ground and shut his eyes.

  He had learned, long before, that there were no monsters, no giants, here in the UnderReach, only a few poor cast-off people living in solitary shame. But Vren felt there must be some fearful, black thing hidden in each of them, for he remembered the look in his father’s face, and in the face of the Gatekeeper, and he remembered the old nightmare tales from his childhood inside the Gates. He had waited and watched for evil in himself and in Rusche, as a mouse watches for the shadow of a hawk, and now he wondered if Rusche’s going was a sign of it. For a moment, with his eyes closed, the boy felt as he had a long time ago, looking down from the pass into the dark, endless forest. He wanted to stay where he was, very still and small.

  In a little while, Trim made a sound of impatience. The boy opened his eyes and saw the wolf waiting, looking back. The red fur along his shoulders stood up in a high ruff against the chill. His eyes were yellow and steady.

  Slowly the boy pulled his troublesack to his shoulder and followed the wolf. He was careful not to look back along the narrow trail that went back to the empty house.

  • • •

  Just at dusk they came to a little lake without inlet or outlet, a pond the boy named Rain Lake. It was the first water since they had left the White Stone River. Trim drank from it and lay down on the shore. The boy set down his sack and unfastened his leggings and waded bare-legged in the shallows, amid the thin stems of wild rice. When he looked up again, Trim was gone. Like the boy, the wolf hunted his meal.

  The boy made a little fire and boiled and ate the rice. It was very dark by then, and the air felt cold and damp. He took Rusche’s calendar string from his troublesack and tied a day-knot in it. Then he tied the ends of the string together, looped it several times and hung it round his neck inside his shirt. That done he drew his cape close and lay down beside the small flame.

  His eyes burned, but he could not sleep without Trim. So finally, tiredly, he could not help but think of Rusche. He let himself imagine that, for the second time in his life, he had been cast away. He imagined that the man had taken all their things and willingly left the little round house they had lived in together for six years. He imagined him packing baskets and sacks, stowing everything carefully so he could carry it all from his shoulders and on his back and at his hips. He could even see the man’s face, looking angry as he ever seemed to, with his great brows hiding his eyes. But he could not see the man’s hands. When he tried to imagine Rusche’s freckled, big-knuckled hands tossing aside the star chart, or the long calendar string with, now, six of the boy’s knots in it, he could not.

  After that, with a kind of fierce anger and joy, he imagined monsters and giants, and the several different ways he and Trim would find to rescue Rusche from them.

  3

  A Giant’s Grumbling

  ON THE FOURTH day rain began, and it rained steadily after that. Vren hunched under his teba-cloth cape and the brim of his pointed hat. His good wool cloak was among the things missing from the house; and the teba cape, though it shed the rain, could not keep his shoulders warm enough. His long bear’s-wool leggings kept his legs warm and dry, but his sandaled feet were wet at once, and cold, and stayed that way.

  The boy’s mood went dark and heavy as the sky. In the rain, Trim began to have more trouble finding the trail. Sometimes they had to go back along the same path, or scout round and round in widening circles until the spongy wet earth gave up a clue to him. Each time the wolf lost the trail, Vren thought it would not be found again. When it was, Vren felt no cheer. He thought only that they would lose it again soon and it would not, that time, be found.

  On the sixth day, in the afternoon, Rusche’s trail led them to a house, near the bank of a flooded river. It was a sort of burrow built half in the ground, with a low thatched roof made of bundles of horse-tail grass. No one was living in the house now, but no animals had yet pushed in the roof, and black sticks lay neatly inside the fire-ring, so Vren thought the house had not long been empty.

  There was a strangeness in the air about that place, something that made him remember his own strong, dark feeling as he had come home to Rusche’s empty house—and fear began to crawl inside his skin. If whatever thing had taken Rusche had taken this person as well, perhaps it was after all a giant, and Rusche these many days dead, gone to feed a giant’s hunger. For the boy could not imagine any man or woman of the UnderReach who would have the power and the cause to empty every house they came upon. He would not imagine that Rusche, himself, had emptied this one.

  The boy named the river Ash, for its dark gray color—or perhaps for the burning up of his courage. This river, running now in flood, was many times wider than the White Stone. It moved very deep and dark and fast, sucking at its crumbly clay banks with a sound like a giant’s grumbling. Rusche’s smell stopped there, at the flooded edge of the Ash River.

  Vren stood and watched the rain fall straight down onto the gray water. He liked to swim in the White Stone River. He swam well and carefully. And he had once seen Trim ambush an old broadbill duck by swimming silently below the surface of a lake. But the waters of the Ash raised in him a deep, cold dread.

  Sliding past him on the river were limbs and rotted logs and full green branches of trees. As he stood watching, the water carried by the lifeless body of an opossum, its eyes dull and white and staring. A whole tree came as well, full-crowned and rooted, rolling heavily on the flood. He imagined the river’s swift current carrying him and the wolf downstream as easily as if they were little leaf boats. He thought, if they were each able to reach the other shore, surely by then they would have become separated. They might be days finding one another, and then days more finding Rusche’s old, rain-thinned scent—if it were there on the far bank at all. Perhaps Rusche had already drowned, like the opossum, his body carried away with the other debris of the flood.

  Gloomily, the boy went a little way upstream and down, to be sure there was not a shallower place where he might ford the river. Then, because he could not bring himself to lie down inside the empty burrow house, he camped under a spruce tree with boughs that came down low like a tent all around the trunk. Inside, it was nearly dry, and the floor was soft, piled up with the tree’s old brown needles. He could not have a fire there safely, and he was too tired and wet to look for something to eat. He only drank cold tea and ate a few bitter berries. And when the wolf went out to hunt, the boy lay alone and hungry under the tree.

  The sound of the rain made him feel sullen and friendless. It came to his mind that Trim, in loyalty, should have stayed with him tonight, should have gone hungry, as he was. And then, slowly, he allowed himself to think of turning back.

  There had been so few signs along the way—only a single footprint here, a scuff mark there
—that it seemed Rusche might be deliberately hiding his trail. If not that, then perhaps the trail was hidden by the one who had taken him. And that gave the boy a different sort of fear. If he could find them at all, how would he overpower a man or a thing that had been strong enough to overpower Rusche?

  Once, not very long ago, Vren had imagined himself and Trim defeating giants and monsters. But now, as he lay dismally alone in the rain, he imagined himself eaten by them, and Trim sent sprawling by the blow of a huge hand.

  • • •

  In the darkness later, he opened his eyes. He remembered no dream, but he remembered there had been one. His hands were sweating, though in the blackness under the tree it was very cold.

  He lay awake and glum, listening to the rain, until there was enough daylight to see the tree boughs that were the walls of his tent. Then he went out and dug a few sura roots with a stick and made a small fire in the open, near the spruce tree. While he boiled the roots in his small dir-wood bowl, he sat with his arms around his folded knees and stared at the Ash River.

  In a while, a thin spotted weasel came close enough to smell his foot, and he found he was glad of the company. He shared his sura with it, holding out a small piece on the palm of his hand.

  But it was the weasel’s willingness to come into his camp that made him begin slowly to worry. While Vren had been traveling with Trim, no small animal had come very near him. The wolf’s presence had kept them away. Seeing this weasel now unafraid of the day-old scent of wolf, the boy began to think of how long Trim had been gone from him. He remembered times when the wolves had hunted all night and into the morning; but surely, knowing the boy waited alone, Trim would not do that today.