Night Gate (9 page)

“Why do you keep doing that?” Rage asked.

Bear regarded her through tiny black eyes. “A thorn from the bramble gate got into me.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Rage asked, undoing a pin she kept in the hem of her coat and taking the huge paw firmly in her hand.

“A dog’s pain is a dog’s pain. Dogs don’t complain,” Bear said with melancholic poetry as Rage probed the swollen flesh.

When she found the shiny black top of a thorn driven deep into the pad, she looked at Bear with concern. “I am afraid I will have to hurt you to get it out.”

“It is in the nature of humans to hurt,” Bear said, staring bleakly into her eyes.

Rage swallowed and stuck the pin into the paw, forcing it under the thorn and levering it out. The breath hissed through Bear’s lips, but she did not growl or groan.

Rage drew out the long, sharp thorn with dismay.

The road wound along companionably with the river, sometimes going right along the edge of the bank, other times turning away to avoid a thick clump of trees. Late in the morning, they came upon a group of little stone houses between the road and the water, but they had clearly been abandoned long ago.

“We could stay a night here,” Mr. Walker said. Rage could see he was attracted to the smallness of the houses.

“We don’t want to stop again so soon,” Elle said firmly, striding ahead.

“Probably those little houses are so old they would fall on our heads and squash us flat,” Goaty said.

Rage glared at him, wondering if this was what came of being around Mr. Johnson, who always saw the worst side of things first. Mam used to say that you could show Mr. Johnson a pretty wisp of cloud and he would see the end of the world.

“Like Grandfather?” Rage had asked.

“Like Grandfather.” Mam’s eyes had grown sad.

Rage remembered that this conversation had happened on a train. Mam loved trains. “They’re so much gentler than cars. They don’t roar through cities; they wind politely around them. They stop to let people in and out. People exchange newspapers or talk or just sit together. People sleep in trains and walk in them. They drink cups of tea and eat scones in them. Trains are for sharing.”

“I like trains,” Rage had said earnestly.

Mam laughed. “Imagine a city where all of those roads were turned into green paths. People could stroll and eat their lunches. Imagine looking out of a high building and seeing paths with big trees growing along them, fruit trees with masses of blossoms and huge cedars. There’d be no car noise, no pollution from the engines. People could lie under trees or watch buskers or just read. You wouldn’t feel like you were in the city at all.”

Mam had been like that. She would have an idea about something, and suddenly it would turn into a much bigger idea. Everything would be sucked into her idea and turned into something better. After they came to Winnoway, they had taken few train trips. There were no more talks or sing-alongs, no more stories or laughing tumbles together. Mam had become silent and distracted. She went on long walks alone, or she sat for hours gazing out the window. Sometimes she had smiled at Rage without really seeming to see her.

Rage shivered, remembering what Mrs. Johnson had said about Grandmother Reny growing more and more silent until she had just faded away, and the cold seemed to go inside her bones.

She tried to think about something she and Mam had done together after they shifted to Winnoway, something that they had really enjoyed, but she could think of nothing except those wonderful train journeys before they had come to Winnoway. Rage was startled to discover that Winnoway Farm, and even her own bedroom with its lilac wallpaper, was hard to picture. The farm seemed as if it belonged in someone else’s world, in a story.

Did people in stories feel themselves to be real? How would she know if somebody had made her up? Then she wondered if maybe all that had happened was a story she was telling herself.

Thinking like this made her feel dizzy, as if she were turning round and round on the spot. She grinned, remembering how she had done that while holding Billy when he was a puppy. He had sprawled and lurched and sat down hard when she put him on the ground.

She looked at Billy and found him watching her.

“You were smiling,” he said.

“I was remembering how dizzy you were after I swung you round and round when you were a puppy.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “I thought the ground was jumping under me. I felt so sick in the stomach.”

It occurred to Rage that what she had done was cruel.

Seeing the look on her face, Billy said, “It was no worse than when a puppy bites his brother or sister too hard on the ear.”

“You weren’t angry at me?”

“I love you,” Billy said simply.

Rage opened her mouth to tell him that she loved him, too, but Elle interrupted to warn them that she could smell someone coming along the road behind them. They hurriedly decided that Billy would stay on the road with Rage while the rest of them got out of sight behind some bushes a little back from the road.

Before long, a gray donkey appeared. It was harnessed to a small open carriage bearing several very little girls in spotless white tunics and stockings and three women in long, colorful tubelike dresses. The women carried elaborately painted parasols to shade them from the sun. At first Rage thought the women were all deathly pale, but when they came closer, she could see that their faces were painted white, like those of Japanese ceremonial dancers. Their dresses even looked a bit like kimonos. The children had been laughing and chattering gaily, but they fell silent when they noticed Rage and Billy.

“Wild things!” piped one.

“Stop,” shouted another, and the donkey obeyed. “Ahoy there. Are you wild things?”

“I’m just a girl like you,” Rage said.

“You are almost a woman, yet you
are
like us, for you wear no bands,” the girl chirped, lifting both of her bare arms up for Rage’s inspection.

“Why don’t you come in the cart with us?” one of the other girls invited.

“Impossible!” the eldest of the women said sternly. She waved an arm in an imperious gesture, and Rage noticed that she was wearing heavy metal bracelets like the ones worn by the baker’s sister, Rue. Being banded must mean having to wear such bracelets, which seemed to mark the wearers as loyal keeper subjects.

“Why shouldn’t she come with us?” another of the children asked defiantly.

“Perhaps she does not go to be banded,” hissed the plumpest of the women. “Perhaps she is a witch woman.”

The children stared at Rage solemnly.

“Don’t frighten them with foolish talk, Ramis,” the older woman said in a no-nonsense voice. “Witch women do not venture from Wildwood. This girl is clearly from one of the outer villages and is traveling with her escort to Fork to be banded. They often come in somewhat older. It was so with you, was it not, Ania?” she asked the youngest of the women.

Ania nodded meekly, but when she spoke, it was to the children. “Even if the girl is a wild thing, you have nothing to fear. You will see many wild things in the city.”

Rage heard this with puzzlement. Hadn’t the baker said that wild things were not supposed to enter keeper territory? To her delight, one of the children voiced this very question.

“The High Keeper has given wild things leave to enter Fork,” the plump woman said piously.

“But why? They’re so strange,” the girl complained.

“I do not know why, but they do no harm with their strangeness,” Ania said. The other two women stared at her askance. She shrugged. “Well, it is not as if they can draw magic from the earth without a witch woman’s help, and witch women are forbidden to cross the river.”

“They cannot be permitted to drain the other side of the river of magic as well,” said the older woman icily.

Rage blinked, wondering if she had heard correctly. The woman seemed to be saying that there was still magic on the other side of the river, although it had almost died on this side. Was it possible that magic could be in one part of a land and not another? Did it form in the ground like gold or silver? And how could the witch women have used it all up?

“I think wild things should be stopped from coming over the river,” said the plump woman. “It is so depressing to see them drifting about looking sick and starved.”

“More depressing for them to be starving, don’t you think?” Ania asked.

“The wild things are only dreams the witch folk brought into being. We should rather pity them than fear them,” said the little girl who had invited Rage to ride in the cart.

“I should not voice such opinions when you are in Fork,” advised the severe woman dryly. “Now, let us continue. I’m sorry we cannot take you and your friend,” she added to Rage. “But you ought to go along as quickly as possible.”

“There really isn’t room,” Rage pointed out when the little girl looked as if she might argue. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she was wasting a perfectly good chance to get more information. “Uh, before you go, we met another traveler who spoke of the Endless Sea. Do you know where that is?”

The plump woman snickered rather meanly. “She is from the outermost village in Valley, surely, to ask about a child’s myth as if it were a real place.”

“I heard that the wizard who made Valley had gone to the shore of the Endless Sea,” Rage persisted.

Ania opened her mouth as if to speak, then seemed to think better of it.

“I do not know where the wizard has gone, but it is said he will return when things are properly in Order again.” The severe woman spoke these words as a chant, then bid the donkey continue.

“The wild things must eat magic,” Billy said when the cart had drawn out of sight. “They’re starving because it has run out on this side of the river.”

“It’s horrible being hungry,” Elle said. “Why don’t the keepers let the witch women give them some magic from the other side of the river?”

“They’re probably afraid it will all be used up,” Billy said.

“How do you eat magic?” Goaty asked.

“How do you get it out of the ground?” Mr. Walker muttered.

Billy’s mind had been going along a different line. “I wonder what that woman meant by saying the wizard will come back when there is Order here. What is Order?”

Rage could see Billy was enjoying his new ability to think complex thoughts, but she was sick of questions with no answers. The women in the cart had laughed at her for asking about the Endless Sea, calling it a child’s myth. Rage wondered if they were going to find the answers they needed, even in Fork. She was beginning to be afraid they would never get back home and that she would never see Mam again, asleep or awake. That thought made her throat ache.

“I wonder what is over the river besides the city of Fork,” Mr. Walker said.

“A dangerous, wet land, probably,” Goaty said.

Rage lost her temper and rounded on him. “Why do you always have to imagine the worst?”

Goaty hung his head and looked so pathetic that her anger drained away. After all, she was really angry at herself for getting them into such a mess. “I’m sorry I shouted at you, but all those bad things you keep saying are like stones we have to carry. They just make everything harder.”

“I know,” Goaty mumbled. “That’s why no one wants me around. I make everyone feel bad and sad. It is because of the hole in me that comes from never having a name.”

“But you have a name.”

He looked up at her. “Would it be a name if you were called ‘girly,’ or Elle were called ‘doggy’? Goaty is not a name. It is the name given to a thing no one cares about enough to name.”

Rage swallowed hard, remembering that her grandfather had always called her “the girl.”

“We will give you a name,” Elle said enthusiastically. “What shall it be?” She looked at the rest of them.

“A name can’t be decided just like that,” Billy said admonishingly. “Naming is a serious business.” He sounded so like Mam that Rage felt perilously near to tears again.

“We will think of the right name for you,” she told Goaty thickly.

“What I want to know is how we are supposed to cross the river,” Mr. Walker muttered, for they had reached a part of the road that ran right along the very edge of the swift-flowing water.

Rage was carrying him because his little legs could no longer keep up.

“I’m sure there will be a bridge,” she said, and she was sure, for how else would the women and children in the cart get to the other side?

“There will be guards on it,” Mr. Walker said. “Rulers always have soldiers to make people obey them. The more rules, the more soldiers are needed to keep them.”

“Maybe the keepers keep their own rules,” Rage said.

But Mr. Walker shook his head authoritatively. “In stories, the makers of rules are never the ones to force people to obey them.”

“No one said anything about soldiers,” Rage said.

“Where there are rules, there are soldiers,” Mr. Walker insisted.

“I’m afraid Mr. Walker is probably right,” Billy said. “Humans are fond of rules and even fonder of giving people the power to make sure they are obeyed. Besides, there are bound to be guards at the bridge, if only to stop witch women from going over.”