Outside the Gates

by Molly Gloss

  Stubbornly he said, “I don’t think Rusche would go with him,” and shook his head again. But he thought, more desperately, Why would that one want to take him?

  The woman looked down at her hands again. She braided and unbraided her small bony fingers. It was a while before she spoke. Perhaps, as the boy had once done, she was thinking of how much to say, how much to leave out. Finally she answered the question he had not asked.

  “Whatever Shadow belongs to each of those seven people,” she said, “the spellbinder now owns it. From one of them, he gets a clear light, even in the darkness. From another, a boat made from mud, when he wishes to follow a river. His dreams, now, are woven as he likes. And no rain falls where he is standing.”

  Her eyes came up again, slowly, to Vren. Finally she said, “He is only dull and mean-spirited and selfish.” As if that were reason enough.

  5

  A Cat’s Angry Back

  IN THE MORNING, the boy and the seer-woman and the wolf traveled downriver together in their pillie-reed canoe. Trim was fearful of the boat, so the boy sat with him in the bow, one arm around his neck, as the woman with her long notched paddle pushed the canoe out into the river. Vren, too, was uneasy. But the woman quickly proved a good pilot. She kept the boat straight in the deep channel of the river, veering only a little, sometimes, to take them around rocks or fallen trees or the litter floating down with them on the flood. Often she used the paddle itself to push them away from a hazard. The notch she had cut in the end of the paddle always gave her a good firm grip, even on moss-slickened stones.

  Slowly the woodland about them grew darker and thicker. The leafless hardwoods became fewer and the evergreens crowded in tall and straight and skinny, with all their boughs at the top. The forest here was like a huge high tent with many poles holding it up.

  Under cover of those trees it was dry and dark, but on the river, by midday it began to rain again, falling straight down from the sky above the boat. Vren hunched down under his cape and his hat and sat close to Trim for the little bit of warmth from the wolf. The woman pulled up the hood of her cloak, but she looked no more comfortable than the boy. Her cloak was made from the skin of an arad-elk. As it grew wet, it hung heavy and shapeless and cold from her shoulders. Probably later, when it dried, it would be scratchy and unbending. It was, Vren thought, a poor reason for the death of the elk.

  He was now stiffly aware of all that came and went inside his head. Even as he thought this of the elk hide, he turned round to give the woman a shamefaced look. She only paddled on quietly without taking her eyes from the water. Vren wondered if it was with her eyes, only, or the touch of her hand, that she could look inside somehow or know a thing that had happened. And after that, slowly, he grew more at ease with her.

  In the afternoon the river began to fall a little more steeply downhill. The clay banks narrowed and steepened, giving way at places to rock. Finally the boy heard a sound he knew from the White Stone River, the low steady growl a white water place makes. It echoed off the trees so there was no telling how far away it was.

  The woman stood in the stern of the canoe, holding her paddle like a balance pole, peering ahead. From where he sat, the boy tried to look too, but the river bent and then bent again, out of sight. There were only poor places here to pull the canoe out of the water—the river ran quick and deep right up to its high mud banks—so the woman sat again and simply kept the boat straight and steady in the channel. When the boy looked back, he was glad to see her face was calm, and that her hands made a strong, neat grip on the dir-wood handle of the paddle.

  It was only when they came around the second turn that the sound of the breaking water grew very much louder, and then they could see the narrow stone banks and the long white uproar of the rapids.

  At once the woman’s paddle cut into the water, and the bow of the boat swung sharply toward the shore. Then Vren saw, as she had, the only place where they might yet be able to pull the canoe out of the water. The river, in this flood or an earlier one, had taken a bite out of the bank, and in that little scallop the water was shallow and still.

  Shel drove the boat crosscurrent toward it with quick, deep strokes. But the river, gathering its strength for the white water, took them on swiftly downstream. Vren, without pole or paddle to help her, sat uselessly a moment, clinging to Trim. Then, with his heart beating against his ribs, he took off his hat and his bulky teba cape, grasped the side of the boat with both hands, and slipped over into the river.

  The current pulled his legs out ahead of him and tangled his long shirt around his thighs. Below the waterline, the slick curve of the boat started to slide from his grasp. He wriggled his fingers into the bundled, water-swollen reeds of the boat and began to swim hard, with whipping kicks, toward the shore. He could feel the boat move sideward a little, like the catching of a breath, with each of his strokes.

  With his head down, braced against the boat, he could not see where they were. He could only hear the din of the water and Trim’s fretting, snapping whine. So when the canoe lightened suddenly, he thought with a jump of alarm that Trim must have come in the water after him. Then his toes kicked the muddy bottom and he saw it was the woman herself who was wading chin-deep beside him, dragging the stern of the boat toward the near edge of the river.

  There was no slanting shore, even here, but a steep cutbank of mud. Silently, panting, they struggled to get the canoe above it. Trim whined and fidgeted and finally gathered his haunches and leapt out of the jostled little boat onto the bank. Then they were able to pitch the canoe up onto the shore and climb up beside it.

  For a while they only sat. The boy could hear the thin shrill whistle of the woman’s breath above the noise of the river. He himself was shaking with cold and tiredness and the end of his fear.

  There would still have been time, probably, to scout a path around the rapids. The afternoon was only half-used. But he was glad when the woman stood and, without a word, began to build a rough bark lean-to.

  • • •

  Vren thought of taking the woman’s carry-basket and hunting along the riverbank for the chain seed he had seen there. But she quietly heated her raspberry tea and brought out for each of them another lump of her hard, wild-rice bread—and the boy was afraid that he might belittle her simple traveler’s food. He sat quietly with her in the early dusk and chewed at the bread and afterward was almost as hungry as before.

  When the woman’s eyes touched him in that small, flickering way—her Shadow look—he felt naked and dreadful. He was not very much surprised when she said, “I would have taken the basket, myself, and hunted along the bank of the river for the muddabs that live there under the stones. But I was afraid that might offend you.” She was smiling a little, as she watched him.

  Vren ducked his head from her and lowered his eyes. “They have not much soul, those little shellfish,” he said in embarrassment. He did not tell her that he had sometimes befriended them, as he had the ant and the lowly worm. Perhaps she would see that, anyway, inside his head. He said, “Trim eats muddabs if he’s hungry enough,” so that she would feel free, like Trim, to get her own dinner, as she would have without Vren in her camp.

  She still smiled a little. After a moment she made a small, soft sound that could have been a laugh, or a sigh.

  “Anyway, I haven’t the stubbornness, tonight, to get past those shells,” she said. “I would rather pound a little chain seed and make a boiling dumpling.” She handed him the empty carry-basket.

  Her eyes seemed doelike now, very round and clear in that wide, wrinkled face. The boy saw suddenly why he could not stay afraid of her. Her kindness was there in her eyes, too, with the Shadow.

  He took the woman’s basket and went through the trees to the river. It was tedious work, stripping the chain seed pods by hand without a proper seed comb, but the basket slowly filled as the boy worked his way upstream in the dusk. When the last of the light was gone, he carried the basket back to the camp.
<
br />   Between them, they had few tools. The boy had in his troublesack only the few things he had taken with him to camp among the bears, and the few more he had found at Rusche’s empty house. Shel’s troublesack was traveler-light. She had no proper tea-bowl, just one big wooden bowl for cooking, and the big plain carry-basket. She took a rock with a little dip in its top, and the blunt end of a tree limb, and with those tools ground the seeds slowly, a few at a time, while the boy heated boiling-stones on the fire and filled her wooden bowl with water. Then, from the seed-flour and raspberry tea and an old sprouted onion, the woman made a soft dough. Together she and the boy used notched sticks to lift the boiling-stones from the fire and drop them one by one into the water in the cooking bowl. The hot stones brought the water quickly to a boil, and into that boiling water, the woman put handfuls of her dough. The dumplings rolled and swelled in the steaming water, and sent out a pungent smell into the darkness.

  When they had eaten the good, hot dumplings, the boy set to work by firelight, as he had the night before, picking the last of the black river-bottom mud from his cape. The woman quietly watched him, but not with her deep-seeing look. She seemed now just a plain-faced old woman, small and lonely, someone he could befriend.

  He had spoken seldom to any person other than Rusche, but he had listened well when Rusche had visited with others. So he knew he should not ask the woman to tell about herself. Instead, he said, “We have a small house above the White Stone River. You visited us there sometimes, in the summer. Do you remember? Our river has little white stones in its bed, like the blossoms on strawberry plants in the spring.”

  “I remember,” the woman said, nodding without surprise. “Yours was the round beaver house under the teba trees. Once, I remember, we sat up very late talking. You were much littler then, and you fell asleep sitting up beside us. The weather-worker carried you off to bed.”

  The woman’s words brought up in him a slow, melancholy ache, but she said, without seeming to read his thoughts, “It is a good place. You’ve put the house below the wind and above the flood line. And the trees hold off the rain. From the doorhole you can look a long way down the river’s valley, in both directions. I thought, when I saw it, that someone had chosen that place very well.”

  Vren felt proud of his house, suddenly, as if he had chosen the site himself. He said, “There are soapberries all along the river there. And in the spring, red clover. The po nuts in the canyon behind us have thin shells because the little hot springs keep the air warm. There are good elbec fields at the Basket Meadows, half a day from us.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “I’ve been to that place, myself, for the elbec,” she said. “I built a wintering house, once, in the lake country near there. From that house I could look out to a ridge shaped like a cat’s angry back. Do you know where that is?”

  The boy thought he remembered a ridge like that, near the Basket Meadows. It made him feel better about the woman, imagining her in an ordinary house not so very far from his own.

  “You don’t go back to the same house, then, in the winters?” he shyly asked her. There were many who wandered in that way, finding nothing and no one to hold them to one place. Once, in bad temper, Rusche had said, “They flee their own Shadows.” But a few times, from anger or boredom, Vren himself had wanted to go.

  “Every winter a different place,” Shel said. “And no house at all from the spring to the fall. I have lived, so, for more than fifty years.”

  There was a tired unhappiness in her voice that made the boy look up from the combing of his cape. In his own short time traveling on the trail of Rusche, he had been too often afraid and gloomy, too often lonely and hungry and cold. Now, in the woman’s face, he could see those miseries woven into each of the fifty years of her wandering. He could see them in the lines of her face as clearly as if he were the one with the seer’s Shadow—and the very last of his fear of her disappeared.

  He had not thought of it before, but now he said, “You are kind to help me find Rusche.”

  The woman ducked her chin. “Your weight balances the boat,” she said, as if it annoyed her to be reminded of her kindness. Then, after a moment, she sighed and the irritation went out of her face. “Those eight will finally, somewhere, put ashore and leave the river,” she said. “And I will let you out there, if we can find the place. After that, if you overtake them, that one will bind you to him, just as he has the weather-worker and the others. And that will be the end of you.”

  She smiled, but it was only a small curve that did not reach her eyes. “It is hard to find the kindness in that,” she said.

  The night before, lying awake inside his spruce tree shelter, Vren had thought endlessly of Rusche and of the spellbinder. He had slowly begun to wish that Shel had told him a tale of giants, or of great monsters with three heads and ugly, warty necks. When he imagined those things, he was only afraid. When he thought of Rusche going away with the spellbinder, his feelings grew dark and muddy. There was pain in them, and shame, and a different, more secret kind of fear. After a while he had begun to imagine that when he looked in Rusche’s face, and said Rusche’s name out loud, the man’s own heart would unbind him. Now he sat very still and silent, not looking toward the woman. He was afraid, if he looked toward her, she might say something more. With only a few more words, she might blow the whole of his hope down around him, like a house made of leaves.

  • • •

  In the morning they carried the canoe around the rapids and set it again in the river, at a place where the water had slowed. The character of the river had changed. Often now there were white water places or short, rocky falls. They had learned, in the one lesson of the day before, to listen for the earliest sound of a rapids. Then, immediately, they pulled the canoe up on the shore. From there the woman walked ahead to look over the stretch of river that lay before them, and wherever she judged the water not too rough, they floated it.

  Trim, squatting close beside the boy, shifted his weight anxiously with each shudder or wobble of the canoe, but the boy had learned to trust the woman’s skill. Her paddle would dip quickly, easily, to one side and the other, sending the boat straight through, like a needle piercing cloth. And where she was not willing to risk the frail little boat in a thundering rapid, she and the boy carried it on their shoulders along the shoreline to quieter water.

  In the afternoon, the river widened suddenly and slowed, going out of sight between blunt, rocky banks. The woman backpaddled while she studied the gorge. Vren saw that, once between those stone walls, there might be no other place to get the canoe out of the water. Though he strained to listen, he heard only the low purling of the water under the bottom of the boat, no sound that might have been rapids. And finally, with a shrug, the woman let the current take their little boat into the canyon’s mouth.

  It was windless and quiet between the high walls. In the stillness there, Vren heard some small creature, perhaps a pocket mouse, or a dragon lizard, scratching its claws across a rock. He heard the woman’s paddle dipping smoothly in the calm water. And it was only slowly that he heard the water ahead of them begin a steady murmur.

  The woman stood sometimes high in the stern of the boat, yet for a while there was no white water for them to see. Even when the boat came past the last left-handed curve, and the water’s sound rose up like a storm, there were no rapids. Instead, the river seemed wholly to sink and disappear, as though a great mouth drank it down. The cliffs on either side seemed to end there too, and beyond there was only the dull gray sky.

  Even above the booming of the water, the boy heard the woman make a small sound of surprise, and then a grunt, as she pushed her paddle down hard into the water. He looked quickly back toward her, meaning to look for her small, strong hands on the handle of the paddle, seeing instead the alarm in her whitened face—and his fear rose up behind his eyes and made him blind.

  Afterward, he only remembered the backstroke of Shel’s paddle, like a quickened heartbeat,
and above the din of the falls, the woman’s voice—no words left in it, just the shout. He wanted to shout too, but by then, without his remembering when it had happened, the river had filled up his mouth.

  The underwater was very dark and cold and bruising. Against his closed eyes he saw red star trails and then small winking yellow suns, but the only sound was the rush of the river in his ears. There was no getting up to air—he had lost track of which way the sky lay—but very quickly he did not feel afraid, he felt cold and heavy and far away from himself. He wondered if he might not be able to breathe the water, as a tayfish would, and as he had done, himself, in a dream. Finally, deliberately, he took the breath he needed, letting in the gray river’s water, and then suddenly the stinging air, as he rose and sank and rose again, floundering across the angry backs of the waves. He choked and coughed up thin streams of water—and became again, very suddenly and clearly, afraid.

  He could not remember letting go of Trim, but he was alone. There was no sign of the wolf or the woman or the pillie-reed canoe—only the dark, endless stands of trees sliding past on both banks of the water. Behind him, the falls had already gone out of sight with the river’s turning.

  “Trim!” He cried the name once, but it fell quickly and sank in the loudness of the river.

  He kicked out hard with his legs, stroked with his arms, working across the current toward the far bank. His breastbone ached so he had to take air through his mouth in short, jerky breaths that burned in his chest. Very quickly his arms and legs grew heavy. His strength felt small against the power of the river, but he was not afraid of drowning, he was afraid to rest. He was afraid if he rested the river would take back whatever he had gained toward the bank, as every moment, steadily, it took him away from Trim, and from Shel.

  He swam until his legs seemed no longer part of his body, but wooden sticks he controlled a little. His lips and his fingertips grew numb. Gradually, he began not to think of the others at all. He only thought of moving his arms and legs, driving his unwilling body across the water toward a sliding, endlessly distant line of trees.