Books : Listening at the Gate : Excerpts

Chapter One

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 warrenhouse of Selí, 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.