Listening at the Gate Read online

  Father was often gone. He preferred to be gone. Our house stood far from the rest, near cliffs that fell in steep steps almost to the water, and though the weather was seldom cold enough for snow, the winter surf burst so high that white spume spattered the windows. I lay alone in the black box bed that had been my mother’s, listening to the wind sob in the chimney, the sea crash on the rocks far below. I curled tight and tried not to think of Mother’s bones chill in the garden, or of fat old Olashya’s chant about the Rigi.

  But when I was twelve, I learned another song about the Rigi.

  It was in Downshore that I heard it. I had gone to market with my aunt and cousins. I had just started my monthly bleeding. My aunt, with disgust (for her own daughters all started late), had instructed me on what to do, but not why or what it meant; my girl-cousins said it was my native nastiness leaking out. In the middle of the Downshore plaza I was struck by such bad cramps that I could hardly stand. My aunt scolded me in a furious undertone. She left me to sit miserably on a bench, trying not to touch anything.

  Among the busy stalls with their striped awnings half-naked native stevedores ogled and joked, fishwives cried their wares, bare-bottomed children in colored shirts laughed and sang. Roadsoul mountebanks rollicked in dirty silks, and lazy dogs slept in the shade.

  The sun shone warm on my drab clothes. Like a hand lifted away, the pain ceased, and for a moment the world was holy with relief.

  I heard a drum, and a man’s voice singing.

  I am a man upon the land,

  I am a beast upon the deep,

  I am the fin that hides the hand,

  I am the dream that riddles sleep.

  I am the wind that breaks the door,

  I am the pulse that fans the pain,

  I am the wave that grinds the shore,

  I am the rock that turns the rain.

  I am the flesh that loves the flame,

  I am the fur that loves the wave,

  I am the cloak, I am the name,

  I am the bright blood and the grave.

  I am the skin that sleeks the bone,

  I am the sun on the black sea,

  I am the heart that heals the stone.

  Come to me! Come to me!

  I never saw the singer. Yet in that song I saw everything: a mystery glimpsed in a lightning flash, then lost. But for an instant I had seen it.

  A plump old woman sat next to me on the bench. I laid my hand on her arm and said, “What is he singing?”

  “The Rigi’s song, for the dance at Long Night.”

  The Rigi were not monsters, she said. They were people: a tribe that lived west-away at the world’s end, on islands in the sea. “They are seals,” she said.

  “Truly seals?”

  “They’re people like you and me, dearie, but when they dance, they’re seals.”

  I knew what seals looked like from the carcasses and hides my father bought. In my mind I saw a creature like a man, but with a cat’s face; its skin split, and it slid forth wet and human, coming toward me.

  I did not know what the song meant, but I carried it home with me. I never sang it aloud. I sang it in my heart. While I scrubbed the hearth, stirred the porridge, milked the cow, I sang it. Carrying water from the cistern, mending socks, wringing laundry, I sang it.

  Near our house there was a path down the sea cliff. Maybe goats had made it. To go there was forbidden, for Leaguemen are terrified of the sea. But because our house stood apart and Father was so often gone, there was no one to see me steal down that path, singing inwardly, to the little cove that lay below.

  There I watched the waves. They hurled among the rocks and sea-stacks, white and rioting as far as I could see; or they rose as long, slow darkenings, each one pinching into a green shadow that crisped and curled along its length, then fell with a thump. Retreating, they left little rivers and fan patterns on the sand. Their hoarse hush echoed from rock and cliff. I smelled salt and iodine and the tide-line odor of creatures spawning and dying. But I never touched the water.

  Like any sinner, I needed to justify my sin, so I gathered bundles of driftwood for Ab Drem’s thrifty fire and carried them up the goat path on my back—heavy bundles, to punish myself. As I carried them, I sang the Rigi’s song, but not aloud. At home sometimes I even let my lips move, singing with no sound, and Father thought I was at prayer.

  Come to me! Come to me!

  On a night near midwinter—I was fifteen by then—Father was on the road with his paidmen, and Dai was at the pub. I lay alone as always, behind the locked door of my box bed, listening to the sobbing wind. I thought I would die with longing—but for what, I did not know. The wind beat in the chimney like a drum. In that close darkness I sat up, and for the first time in my life I sang the Rigi’s song out loud.

  Come to me!

  I opened the doors of the box bed, and climbed out. It was long past midnight. I dressed and went out into the night, to stand on the cliff above the sea. The wind was cold but not icy; it blew my kerchief off, blew my short curls straight. I shouted my name to the dark west: “Kat! I’m Kat!”

  Singing, I crept down the cliff path to the sea.

  On the beach the wind was less. Soft waves burst among the starlit driftwood, the seaweed and scoured tree trunks. I found a stick to poke things with and wandered the damp sand in the fading starlight. The little cove was all my own.

  There was a dead seal at the tide line. I went close to look, singing the Rigi’s song that was wide and limber, now that it was free and not all crushed up in my heart.

  It was not a seal, but a man.

  A young man shining with water, naked as water. He lay on his face. His back jumped with breathing.

  I did not move. Could not think or run. Then I saw how the surf had battered him on the rocks; his arm was broken, his foot was smashed, he bled from thigh and shoulder as if he had been scoured. I crept close. I could see the shape of his face, his mouth open against the sand. Then, in the first dawn light, he looked up at me. His eyes were gray as rain. In the Plain tongue that all peoples can speak, he said, “You sang that?”

  As if I had called him.

  He was a Rig—one of the Rigi. But he was an outcast: His people had “killed” him, his own father had cut off his braid and torn the earrings from his ears, had burned the sealskin that he, like every Rig, had been given at birth. The Rigi had bound him and laid him with their dead. But he had broken his bonds and come swimming, swimming east across the water from the world’s end.

  To me.

  He was lean and broad-shouldered, not much taller than I was myself, and he shook with cold as a cat shakes with purring. I did not know what to do.

  I pulled my gray sweater over my head. Held it out. He shook too much to put it on himself; I had to touch him. He was clean and cold, like an apple. He was too spent to rise. He closed his eyes and fell back onto the sand. But I grappled him onto my back like a load of driftwood and carried him up the cliff to Father’s house.

  That was a mistake. Father came home.

  He found the naked, bleeding man sprawled on his white hearth. He might as well have found a viper there, or a demon. “Get it out!” he cried, trembling with rage. “I will have no more natives in my house!” He thought Dai had brought the man up from the sea. Why should he imagine that of me, his little daughter?

  Dai carried the Rig out to the cowshed. He wrapped him in an old blanket and laid him in the straw against the flank of his good cow, Moss. But the man would not warm, and he would not wake, and I could not win away from Father’s task-making to see to him.

  I knew he would die. And he could not die, I would not have it. I had called him.

  At last, come evening, it was time to milk the cow. I wrested myself from Father’s fussing and ran to the shed.

  The Rig was cold, he was slipping away like a wave. I snugged my knee against him. He opened his eyes.

  “What is your name?” I said. Names are magic; maybe I thought if I kne
w his name, I could hold him.

  In a whisper, he said, “They burned my name with my sealskin. But maybe a new one will come.”

  Well, that was no use. In the League it is your father who names you. Yet I held his hand tight and said, “You’re like a long wave, it comes up onto the shore for a moment, and then sighs back. Don’t, don’t go back!”

  In the dusty lantern light he smiled. “Nall is my new name,” he said. “In the Rigi’s tongue nall means ‘long wave.’ ”

  It seemed I had named him. “Nall, Nall,” I said. But his eyes had closed.

  When Father slept and it was dark enough to hide us on the cattle paths, Dai and I carried Nall to Downshore.

  There was a healer there, Mailin the herb woman. Her house was on the beach, you could hear the surf there like a great voice. She spread a striped pallet on her hearth for him.

  But he did not warm. He did not wake. I could feel him sinking back into darkness, like the wave he was named for.

  I said to Mailin. “Heal him!”

  She shook her head. That task was not hers, she said, but mine.

  “Mine?”

  “He has come,” she said. “What does he need, now, to stay?”

  I had no answer, only grief. But maybe grief was the answer; I held Nall and wept until I had no tears left, and when I raised my face at last, his eyes were open, looking at me. Warm, worn out, he moved his face on my wrist.

  “What is your name?” he said.

  That night on Mailin’s hearth, with all my clothes on, I fell asleep under the weight of his arm.

  In the morning I had to go home to my duties before Father woke. But the world was changed. I had called him, I had named him; Mailin said he had called me too. He was mine.

  Father, of course, knew nothing about this. So it was not difficult for me, two days later, to go to Downshore as if to market. I ran straight to Mailin’s house instead. There—battered, waking, hungry as an otter—was Nall.

  I sat with him on Mailin’s veranda. I loved him so much that I could hardly look at him. I asked why his people had cast him out.

  “I sang,” he said. “I listened and sang.”

  “What did you listen to?”

  “I just listened. I am a listener. I hear new words for old songs.”

  He could have told me he listened to the dreams in my heart, they spoke so loud; he could have told me anything. He said that when he had listened, he had heard new words for the Rigi’s song, different from the words I knew. He had sung them out loud. To his father and the other Rigi that singing was a profanation and a sin, so they killed him.

  I began to think that his father must be much like my own, and I loved him even more.

  But, unknown to me, something else had happened: Father had sold me, like a pig at the fair. To redeem his position in the League, he had struck a bargain with Ab Harlan, the chief Leagueman of Upslope, and had given me to be the bride of his youngest son.

  With his face lit by joy and pride he had never shown for me before, he summoned me to him. “You are to be married!” he said.

  I was a Leagueman’s daughter. To say no to my father was unthinkable.

  I said no.

  I knew who I loved. I stood on the hearth I had scrubbed so many times and said, “No!” to Ab Drern, my father. I told him the man I loved was the dirty native he had ordered off that very hearth.

  Father hit me across the mouth.

  But I had carried a man out of the sea on my back. When my father raised his hand to hit me again, I caught his wrists and held them—and I was stronger than he.

  My strength shocked us both. He wrenched his wrists out of my grip, and did not try to stop me as I left him in the ruin of his hopes, snatched my mother’s wedding clothes from the chest, and ran away.

  But I did not know how to be that strong, or how to be a woman—only how to be a man’s pig for sale. So I ran to Downshore, to Nall, and offered him the only thing I had: myself. I wanted to be safe, owned by Nall as I had been owned by my father.

  Nall would not have me. He did not want a slave.

  I did not know what to do then, who to be. Alone, I ran to the beach, thinking to drown myself from self-pity and spite.

  But I did not do that. Instead, as I paddled and splashed at the edge of the great sea, the thought rose in me that if I did not find out who I was first, I would lose myself in Nall like a water drop in the ocean, and never be anything but a servant.

  I did not go back to him. I put on my mother’s wedding clothes and went to the Downshore festival grounds. It was midwinter solstice, Long Night, the great dance which all the tribes attend. I searched in the crowds until I found Hillwomen, and among them, by pure chance, was my mother’s sister, Bian. I arranged to go with the women at the festival’s end, far away to the mountains where my mother had been born. That way, I thought, I would find out who in the world I might be, besides my father’s daughter.

  I knew I would come back. Once my departure was sure, I went to Nall.

  We sat together on the beach, huddled beneath an old blanket. I held his fist hard against my chest. I told him where I was going and why. He said—

  But that story comes later. That is the real story. For now only this: If you call what you long for out of the sea, your life will change. I left Nall and my father and my brother and went away from everything I knew, nine days’ rough journey east to my mother’s mountains.

  It was there, in the red-tiled Hill village of Creek, that I was eaten by the bear: something quickly told, but hard to understand.

  To find out who in the world I might be. How was I to do that?

  To anyone in Creek the answer was obvious: I must be eaten by a bear.

  Not eaten actually, the way a bear eats raspberries or a honeycomb, but ritually, in a ceremony. Every girl in Creek had to be eaten, in order to become a woman.

  The ceremony is like this. First the girl must fast for three days, drinking only water from the holy spring. While she fasts, the hunters go high into the mountains. They catch a bear, harness it, bring it to the Bear House, and tether it to a stake.

  Then, in front of the whole village, the girl goes to her bear. She sings holy chants to it, and it grows mild, they say; she kisses it, she strokes it with her hand. She offers it the spirit of her girlhood, and the bear eats it, they say; her girlhood is gone. There is great singing and shouts and eddies of blue smoke; the bear is let go, and from then on the girl is a woman, they say. She wears long skirts, and can marry.

  But I failed the ceremony. When they brought me before the red bear in harness, I panicked, thinking, I don’t want to be eaten!

  “I won’t!” I cried, and thrust the bear away. In front of the whole village it knocked me down and mauled me with its claws.

  I was ruined.

  I was already a Leagueman’s child, and Creek folk hated the League. They were suspicious of all foreigners; you may be sure I said nothing to anybody about a seal man! And after the bear attacked me, Creek thought I was cursed outright. When I walked down the street, people crossed to the other side. When I went to the Clay Court, where the unmarried girls learned to make pottery, no one would sit near me. Only my aunt Bian and her daughter, my cousin Jekka, stood up for me.

  But of what use was their loyalty? The claws of the bear had left four long, purple, puckered scars across my breasts. No man could want me now—not even the man I had left on Mailin’s hearth.

  Yet one man did.

  His name was Raím. He lived outside the village—and outside the village rules: a red, handsome, furious young man who had been a hunter and a dancer once. His eyes were blue as stone, and they saw what a stone sees, for Raím was blind.

  He could not see my scars, and like me, he was shunned as unlucky. He was uncanny, all right, for even blind he was the best weaver in Creek. He was arrogant and bitter and proud, he cursed like a stevedore, he had a blue serpent tattooed around his hips, and the only being he loved—not that he would a
dmit to loving anything!—was a little tabby cat.

  My aunt Bian disapproved of him. The only way to see him was to let loose somebody’s goat and then pretend to hunt for it in his direction; it was amazing how often those goats got out.

  We argued and fought. Little by little, Raím let me see the grubby stone hut he lived in. He let me see his Great Loom, which women are not supposed to look upon. He let me see his heart, and it was as scarred as my breasts.

  I did not mean to forget Nall. I did not mean, one day in springtime, to look into Raím’s freckled, angry face the way you look at the night sky full of stars, so deep you could fall into it. I did not mean to kiss him.

  But I did. And having opened that door, I did not know how to shut it, or what to do with the passions, his and mine, that came pouring out.

  I loved Nall; wasn’t that so? How, then, could my mouth rush to Raím’s, like a creek to another creek? My father had called me a slut; I saw that he was right. I was depraved, out of control.

  And if I could not control myself, then I must find something or somebody to control me; I did not care what or who, as long as the terror stopped. I ran to my aunt Bian and begged again for the bear ceremony, thinking to lock myself away safe in Creek’s tiny, lawful world the way I had used to lock myself into my black box bed.

  Bian was overjoyed. The hunters went out that very day; a bear was caught, brought, and penned at the Bear House. For three days I fasted, drinking the holy springwater and gabbling the chants.

  But I did not go to the bear. Not to that one.

  My mind did not decide this. My body did. Or maybe my heart decided—or my soul, which would not be penned in Creek’s narrow little vision of the world.

  At almost dawn on the day of the ceremony, as the bear waited for me in harness, I rose and left the fasting house. No one was there to stop me; no girl had left before. As the sky grew light, my feet, like a sleepwalker’s, carried me up the mountain by the animal trails.