Outside the Gates

1

A Song for Going On

THE BOY THOUGHT his heart would stop from the thunder sound the Gates made as they closed behind him. But he did not cry. He was more afraid than that. He only stood very still and small, and when the booming echo had slid down the pass into the forest, the boy still stood. He was alone and shut out. The high black doors of the Gates filled up the pass behind him, rising sheer and smooth to the rim of the plain.

There was a stream near where the boy stood. It ran out from under the edge of the Gates themselves, down between the rocks and finally out of sight in the darkness under the trees. The great forest, stretching out from there to the edges of the sky, was called the UnderReach.

The boy knew the ’Reach was the home of giants and monsters—other children had told him. If any people lived there, beneath the trees, they would be Shadowed, for the boy’s people had ever lived on the high, open plain, close to the sun, and only a man or a woman or a child who was found to be Shadowed was put out to live in the unknown darknesses of the UnderReach.

The boy was afraid to go down into the woodland where the giants and the Shadowed people lived. He stayed where he was, near the loud little river, among the rocks at the bottom of the Gates. He waited. At night he cried to be let in, but in the gray daylight he did not cry at all. He only lay there dully in the wind and cold, waiting, among the white bones of other people who had waited.

On the third day, two small rock sheep came up from the trees and watched him. Finally, boldly, they came to lick the salt from his skin. Their company and their brave faces gave him a little bravery. When they went back down to the woodland, he took his troublesack and slowly followed them.

He had not, before this, stood under the roof of a forest. There were, here and there, solitary whip-leaf trees that grew on the plain; and once, when he had been still a very small child, the boy had stood beneath the branches of one of those trees, holding onto his father’s hand and staring for comfort out to the wide grassland and the big sky and the far flat line of the horizon. In the forest of the UnderReach where the sheep now led him, there was no horizon. The sky, through the tops of the trees, became quickly distant, broken in pieces and scattered. But he could not stay among the rocks, among the bones. And the Gates, at least, stood up so high he could see them every time he looked back that whole day and the next. So he kept on, following the sheep at first, and later going on alone, into the forest.

It rained. Under the trees there was a slow, steady leaking. Slowly, steadily, the boy himself grew wet. The yellow dog’s-wool cape that had been in his troublesack let in the rain through its loose weave. There was a metal strike-fire in the sack, and a thin-bladed knife. With the knife he shaved little bits of tinder, but his small, stiff hands could not move quickly enough: Each time he struck a spark, the rain put it out. So he was cold, too, and after that, sick. He lay on the puddled ground, with the wet cape pulled close, and shook.

The Gatekeeper, as he had given the boy his troublesack, had seemed to say by the look on his face, You see, we are not pitiless. But afterward the boy had seen the rotted rags of troublesacks among the bones at the bottom of the Gates, and he thought he would die now, himself, holding the strike-fire and the knife in his fist. He thought perhaps all the Shadowed people shut outside the Gates had died thus, alone and cold and afraid, and that after all, there were only giants and monsters alive in the forest of the UnderReach.

So he cried out loud when he saw that someone had come silently to stand above him.

And still he cried when he saw it was a man, neither giant nor monstrous, who stood looking down on him. The man did not speak, he only stood and stared at the boy, but he had a bony, angry-looking face, eyes hidden below fierce brows, and wild red hair sticking out from beneath a pointed hat. And he was Shadowed, surely, for there were no other people known to live in the ’Reach.

The boy had still a child’s notion of the shapes a Shadow could take: He imagined the man might turn him into a calf or a goat and then kill and eat him. So he lay helplessly under the man’s steady stare, and he cried.

Rain dribbled from the wide cone of the man’s hat down onto the boy’s face. Then the man did make a small movement of anger—a shrugging of his shoulder, a pushing-away with one hand. But it was the rain, not the boy, that had annoyed him. The boy still heard its whispering sound, still saw it like a curtain in the far trees, but now the rain no longer fell where the man stood, nor where the boy lay. The man had simply, by moving his hand, made a dry place for them both, in the wet day.

In a while, when the boy’s tears had gone dry too, the man said slowly, They have put you out of the Gates, have they. The voice was unlike the frightening face. There was no anger in it. There was simply a heaviness, like sorrow. Then in a moment he said, Was put out young, myself, as if it were a surprise to him, something he had not thought of before now.

The boy began to cry again, but not this time from fear; and in a while, without saying anything more, the man squatted down and gathered the boy up gently in his arms as if he were not a lean-legged child, instead a baby with legs too wobbly for walking.

•  •  •

The man, Rusche, had a house that was made like a weaver-bird’s nest, of small sticks and grass and mud, with a rounded roof and slanted sides and a small low hole for a door. He had not put it high on a limb as a weaver-bird would, but instead had built it on a hillside, under big old teba trees, so the thick boughs of the trees would help to keep the rain off the roof. If the tebas could do the work of keeping the house dry, he was glad to let them.

Sometimes, though, in that first autumn Rusche and the boy were together, rain fell hard right through the arms of the trees. Sometimes a wind flapped the clouds like sheets of cloth. Then Rusche—with a look in his face that was both cross and ashamed—would set a warm little whirlwind by the doorhole to keep the cold from blowing in. Or he would thin the rain so it fell fine and dry as dust through the smokehole in their roof. And by such homely weather-working, Rusche—and now the boy, Vren—lived most of the time snug and dry.

They were sometimes hungry. In that fall when Vren first came, the ceiling and walls of the little house were lined with stores the weather-worker had put by for winter. He had bunches of dried chai and tea-moss, baskets of po nuts, long braids of elbec bulbs. And the stiff, dark bodies of tayfish and brush-rabbits, smoked until they were dry and hard.

The boy ate the chai, in a salty thin broth, and he liked a pudding the man made by crushing elbec with a stone and cooking it thick. But he could not eat the dead animals.

He had long ago learned to pretend, and he did that now, carefully. Yet each time Rusche ate of meat—and the boy pretended to eat of it—the man looked round at the boy silently. It was a look that stopped Vren’s breath. His own people had taken notice, slowly, of uneaten meat, and then more quickly afterward they had become aware of the grass snakes and the owl and the old mole Vren had secretly befriended. And though his father drove off the snakes and sealed every mole’s burrow with salt and stones, and though his mother held his chin and fed him the owl’s own flesh, someone by then had already whispered Shadowed, and he had been put out of the Gates. Now, the look in Rusche’s face made him remember the darkness that had been in the faces of his people, in the days before he was put out—and at night now he cried, with his fist against his mouth to keep the sound in.

The man, through those first days together, only watched the boy silently from under his fierce red brows. Then finally, straightforward, he said, You speak the languages of beasts, is it?

The boy ducked his head. No one inside the Gates had given a name to his Shadow, as the man did now. He had to think a little, to know what answer he could make.

No, he said in a low voice, without looking at Rusche. Then, because the man waited, and continued to watch him, he thought of something more to say. So much of their language is Smell, he said shyly.

Rusche, in a moment, made a wordless grunting sound. The boy could not tell whether it meant understanding, or doubt.

Afterward, though, the man put all of the meat out of the house. He buried or burned it, or perhaps he left it on the frosted ground for the hungry blue ravens and the spotted wolverines. The boy and the man ate carefully of what was left, growing thin together over the cold season. Vren slept, finally, without those dead animals in the darkness of the house