Listening at the Gate Read online

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Betsy James

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Debra Sfetsios

  The text for this book is set in Zapf Calligraphic BT.

  The illustrations for this book are rendered in pen and ink on scratchboard.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  James, Betsy.

  Listening at the gate/Betsy James; illustrations by the author.—1st ed.

  p.cm.—(The seeker chronicles)

  Sequel to: Dark heart.

  Summary: After seventeen-year-old Kat leaves the Creek home of her mother’s sister, she returns to Downshore and becomes embroiled in upheaval there and in the land of the Rigi, as well as in Nall’s quest to go to the Gate.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-85068-4

  ISBN-10: 0-689-85068-9

  eISBN 13: 978-1-439-11647-0

  [1. Fantasy.] I. Title. II. Series.

  PZ7.J15357Lis 2006

  [Fic]—dc22 2005002113

  For all my midwives, some of whom are men

  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.

  Origin Chant. The Rigi.

  Beginning

  1

  Aash, aash, Huss, huss,

  Shuu, shuu,

  Aah.

  Lullaby from Selí The Rigi.

  A SUMMER NIGHT, black and starry. The wind blew from the west, urging the waves onto the shore, chasing veils of sand stinging and scouring up the beach. The short grass bowed to the east in the darkness, whistled, and bowed again.

  Underground, though, all was still. In the great warren-house of Sell, in a low, driftwood-beamed room that was her own, an old woman sat on a reed mat, spinning by candlelight. A little naked boy lay against her, as near as he could get but for the spindle, watching her hands work.

  Odor of beeswax, whirr of the spindle, rattle of the whorl in the clay cup. A cricket creaked. Away down the corridors of the warrenhouse the voices of the clan were indistinct. The surf said suff, suff on the beach below.

  As though to herself, the woman sang,

  Thou art a man upon the land,

  Thou art a beast upon the deep,

  Thine the fin that hides the hand,

  Thine the dream that riddles sleep …

  The boy stirred at his great-grandmother’s thigh and whispered, “Ama.”

  “Bij.” That was not his real name, just a little name he had.

  “Ama, I hear the Gate.”

  She frowned. “It is the wind you hear, my mouse. You cannot hear the Gate from here. It is far away, and out in the great sea.”.

  “I hear it.”

  “What does it sound like?”

  He listened, his head raised from her thigh. “Like Tinga.”

  The gray cat sleeping by the fire pit heard her name and opened her eyes.

  “Shaking,” he said. He sat up and shook himself to show her how it was. But he could not purr as fast as Tinga, and he said crossly, “No.”

  “Shu-shu-shu.” His ama pushed the brown curls from his face and looked at the eyes raised to her, gray as rain—her granddaughter’s eyes, which she had gotten from a father nobody knew, a spirit, maybe, or the sea wind, or rain itself. “The Gate is not for you, mouseling,” she said. “Leave it to the Reirig.”

  “Why?”

  “It is his now.”

  “Was it mine before?”

  “Maybe. But now it is his, and if you meddle with it, he and the elders will take away your skin and your name, and they will kill you.”

  His round face showed only interest. Killing was common, but not the other part. “Take away my skin?”

  “Yes. The skin of your seal, the one that your father hunted for you when you were born.” She pointed to it, folded on the goods pole: a dark, smooth pelt. “They would burn it, and burn your name, and lay you in the caves. You would not be anymore,” she said.

  He gazed at her. “I would still be your nani.”

  “And I your ama.” She caught him to her old breasts. “When I am dead, I shall be my seal again and play in the sea; and someday, my nani, when you are old with many children and you die, you shall be your seal again, and we shall play together. Will that be good?”

  His nodding head bumped her collarbone.

  “So you must not meddle with the Gate or the Reirig,” she said, “for to lose your skin is to lose your seal. You would not be one of the Rigi anymore, only a man, no better than a Black Boot. And then where would your ghost live, eh? In the east with the sun and the seal-killers?” She tried to make him look at her, to be sure he heard.

  He stood on her thighs with dirty brown feet, looking not at her but westward, where the sea itself shook, the whole world trembled at once. “What is the Gate?”

  “Tcha!” She lifted him down, turned him round, and spanked his bare bottom. When she was done, he straightened his back and said again, “What is the Gate?”

  “You are a demon child!”

  He said nothing. His chin stuck out.

  “You have seen the Gate. It is two stones in the sea.” She took up her spindle again, but the gray stare defeated her, and at last she put the thread aside, muttering, “Better from me than from your mad mother!” Taking him on her lap, she said, “The Gate is where the world is beginning to be.”

  He frowned. His great-grandmother amended it to, “Where the world is coming from. Where do you think you came from?”

  “Mother found me in an oyster shell.”

  “And you are my pearl! But that is not how you came. This is how. Your mother dreamed you. In her heart she could feel you longing to come. You were at the Gate, but a little on the other side, just beginning to be. Your mother could make a body for only half of you, so she lay with your father, and he made your other half. Then you came through the Gate into your mother’s belly, and you grew there, and came out yelling, and here you are.”

  The boy stared at himself. “Which half of me did Mother make?”

  “Your halves are all spiraled together, like water in a tide race or your father’s tattoos.”

  “Where was I before Mother dreamed me? Before I longed to come?”

  “You are too young to wonder that!”

  He gazed.

  She dropped her eyes. “I told you. You were swimming in the sea just beyond the Gate, to the west, with everything that is not yet.”

  “If I was not yet, how did I swim?”

  “What seal priest’s ghost is speaking through this baby’s mouth?” The old woman looked at the roof beams as though some spirit hovered there, but there were only the shadows cast by the wavering candlelight, the boy’s shadow made big by it.

  “I am not a baby,” he said. “I am a man, and I will go to the Gate.”

  “No.”

  “I will go.”

  She tried to snatch him up and spank
him again, but he dodged her, nimble as a minnow. “I will go west to the Gate and east to the sun,” he said. “I will go everywhere in the world, and then I will come home to you.”

  “Nobody comes home from those places,” she said with wet eyes.

  “I will,” he said.

  2

  I have a gold swan

  That swims a gold lake

  Within a gold cage

  Safe out of the rain,

  Locked with a gold lock

  That never was opened

  Except by the key

  On my father’s watch chain.

  Girls’ Hand Slap. Upslope.

  WINTER IN A DARK HOUSE, night at the window. Everything tidied and scrubbed, even the hearth. A meager heap of coals glowed there, and on the table one candle.

  On a high black chair a little girl sat, heavy shoes dangling. Her skin was starry with freckles, her lashes were red-gold, but she wore black and her hair was hidden by a black kerchief.

  Standing, his back to her, a tall man stared at his black boots and turned his broad-brimmed hat in his hands. Outside, the wind howled. A draft fanned ash across the hearth, and the gray cat that lay there tucked in its paws.

  The girl squirmed a little. “Father.”

  He jumped. His face was furious, miserable. “What?”

  “Is Mother in the fire?”

  He glared at the coals, at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Olashya says she isn’t in the good place,” the child said in a whisper, lisping a little; she had lost her first baby teeth. “Because she was bad.”

  “Why should you listen to trashy women’s gossip?” He slammed the table with the flat of his hand; it made the candle hop. “Your mother’s in the dirt, and that’s over!”

  She flinched.

  “Katyesha. You’ll go to your uncle Jerash until you’ve learned to keep house. Your brother, too, until he gets his sums and can join the League. I’ll hear of no trouble from either of you. Is that clear?”

  A tiny nod.

  “Where is your brother?”

  A boy a few years older sidled out of the shadows to stand by the chair.

  The man put his hat on backward. Clenched his teeth, took it off, and put it on right. “Mind your sister till your uncle fetches you both.”

  The children leaned toward each other. The boy said, “Where are you going? Please. Sir.”

  “Nowhere! I don’t know. To—to the warehouses, to see that the last delivery of sealskins is in order. Stay with your sister.”

  Striding in his black boots, he plucked a cloak from a peg, opened the inner door onto a rush of cold, slammed it behind him. The latch fell with a snick. The outside door opened and slammed in its turn.

  The children drew breaths, moved a little.

  The girl said, “Dai.”

  The boy scuffled with one shoe.

  “Dai, it will hurt her. To be in the fire.”

  “She’s not in any fire! That old fat Olashya with brains like—like a dog turd! Mother’s not in the fire, and she’s not in Olashya’s prissy old good place, either. Who wants to be there?”

  “Where is she?”

  “East. She told me once. She said, ‘When I die, do you know where my soul will go? East to my own sunny mountains, to walk there forever. I shall be a bear.’ ”

  The wind roared. The girl’s cold hand stole to her brother’s, and she said, “Something’s growling!”

  “Wind.”

  “No.”

  “The sea at the cliffs, then. Don’t be a ninny, Kat.” But he let her lean against him.

  Her eyes went to the dark window. “What’s out there?”

  “Nothing. The sea … and things.”

  “What things?”

  “Nothing! Don’t you believe—”

  “They grab you and pull you under, Olashya said. She said—”

  “Stupid baby song!” Mincing, mimicking, he chanted,

  Out of the dark place, out of the deep,

  The Rigi drag you from your sleep.

  Their hands are fur, their claws are bone,

  heir mouths are slime, their hearts are stone—

  “Don’t!” She covered her ears.

  “Pff! If one of those Rigi things tried to get you, I’d punch it in the eye. I’d punch it on its old nose.” He punched the air. “Anyway, she’s lying. There aren’t any Rigi.”

  “Does anybody not lie?”

  He shrugged.

  “Mother’s in the east,” she said. “Those Rigi things are in the west—”

  “I told you they’re not.”

  “—and we’re here in the middle, and everybody’s gone, even Father.”

  “I’m not gone. Small Gray isn’t.” He lifted the cat from the hearth and put it on her lap. It fidgeted, settled, and began to purr, kneading her thigh. “And I’m glad Father’s gone.”

  She bent her head, stroking the cat. Under her hands its purr grew to shaking, so vast and deep that it must have traveled from the world’s end, and she began to cry.

  Growing

  1

  East, light.

  West, night.

  North, freezing.

  South, easing.

  Up, free.

  Down, sea—

  deep, dark, beating heart,

  steady breath from birth to death.

  Here in the middle,

  Me.

  Seven Directions Hand Slap. Downshore (from an old Rig chant).

  I AM A WOMAN who sang a man out of the sea, and who was eaten by a bear.

  My name is Kat. I grew up in the small League settlement of Upslope, high on the windy cliffs above the western sea. My father, Ab Drem, was a Leagueman: one of the wealthy traders who ply their pack trains and paidmen across the west country, trafficking wholesale in cinnamon and brandy and gold.

  But my father was not wealthy, for he had ruined his reputation. In youth and folly he had got a baby on a native woman, a fire-haired Hill girl from the village of Creek in the eastern mountains. Had he paid her for his pleasure and left, the League would have winked at it; but when she was big with his child, he set her up on his mule and brought her home with him.

  He lived in Rett then, the mill town where there are many Leaguemen, dressed in gray or black in spite of the sun. Rett has many gossips, and Father gave them plenty to gossip about, for that bastard child was born with a face like a bear’s, and lived only a day.

  That was the end of my father’s love for my mother, and—a worse thing, to him—of his standing in the League. To atone for his sin, he married her; she fell silent, she covered her bright hair and laid her Hill clothes—a wedding dress never worn—in a chest rarely opened. In time she bore my father two more children: my brother, Dai, and me.

  Did she sing, I wonder, before we two were born? To the League, singing and dancing are sinful. Sometimes, with Dai on one knee and me on the other, she sang soft lullabies—but never when Father was home.

  When I was five and Dai nine, we moved north, to Upslope on the windy coast. Father’s two brothers lived there and might find Father better work with Upslope’s chief Leagueman, Ab Harlan.

  When Father told us we were to go, I was sitting on my mother’s lap. She caught me to her and said, “Upslope? Above the village of Downshore, where they dance the Long Night?”

  Father told her to shut her mouth, she was not to interest herself in native wickedness. Nor did she, for we had not been in Upslope a month when my mother fell ill and died.

  She was a native; she could not be buried with the League, among the tombstones that stood in rows straight as ledger entries inside the Rulesward wall. Instead they laid her in the kale yard of my father’s house, which stood alone and lonely almost at the sea cliff’s edge, on a winter day when the wind blew the dirt right off the shovel.

  Dai and I were sent down the road to our aunt and uncle Jerash, to learn to be human beings, which was to say members of the League. That is, Dai would be a member;
I was a girl, and so must learn to be a wife.

  But Dai hated trade. He hated the League. He was clumsy and sweet and cautious, and he loved animals. He could cure a calf of the staggers or mend the split hoof of an ox.

  The son of a Leagueman a cowherd? said the gossips. Shame! But then, what would you expect? His mother was a native, you know. And his sister—

  This talk fell heavily on me because I looked like my mother: freckled, with red hair that coiled like a nest of snakes. My auntie Jerash could not in propriety shave me bald, but she kept my hair clipped close as a lamb’s fleece. Once I was out of mourning, she made sure that, besides my gray linen skirts and bodice and cloak, I covered my hair with a gray kerchief, always.

  Auntie Jerash had six daughters, all mean as geese. I shared their big box bed. They pinched, they slapped, they stole the coverlets and pillows and made me lie against the gap where the door of the bed did not quite close and the drafts came in. I pinched back, but secretly, because I was slight and small and because my aunt always took their part. I was grateful that I had not been sent to my aunt and uncle Seroy, whose children, all boys, called me “native pig” and twisted my arm behind my back.

  From my auntie Jerash I learned to cook, to scrub, to sew, but not to read or write—League girls are not taught, it makes them troublesome. I learned to shop for necessaries at the native market in merry, untidy Downshore—for indeed Upslope and Downshore were neighbors, as my mother had said.

  The latter was a native harbor town that sprawled around a central plaza. It was riddled with alleys overhung by two or three higgledy-piggledy stories of gray stone; outlying houses straggled across the narrow plain below the cliffs. I was not to speak to anybody in Downshore but the fishmongers, nor touch anything.

  As for Dai, he was sent to the accounting hall to learn his sums, and I saw little of him. But sometimes on Rulesday I could sidle near enough to lean on him unnoticed, and he would lean back.

  When I was ten, I was judged skilled enough to be sent back to Ab Drem, my father, to be his housekeeper. Dai came too, for he had failed at his sums—and in the League’s estimation. This did not trouble him; he traded work for a little heifer calf, he built a cowshed, and except for meals, he lived in the shed with the cow.