The Beginning Place Read online

  She went forward squinting and suspicious, walking as if the ground might get pulled out from under her like a rug. Then she dropped down on all fours and kissed the dirt, pressing her face against it like a suckling baby. “So,” she whispered, “so.” She stood up and reached up at full stretch toward the sky, then went to the water’s edge, knelt, washed her face and hands and arms noisily, drank, answered the water’s loud, continual singing, “So you are, so I am, so.” She sat down crosslegged on the shelving rock, sat still, shut her eyes to contain her joy.

  It had been so long, but nothing was changed, nothing ever changed. Here was always. She should do what she always did when she was a kid, thirteen, when she first found the beginning place, before she had even crossed the river; she could do the things she used to do, the fire worship and the endless dance, the time she had buried the four stones in the place under the grey tree upriver. They would still be there. Nothing would move them here. Four stones in a square, black, blue-grey, yellow, white, and the ashes of her burnt offering, the wooden figure she had carved, in the center. That had all been silly, kid stuff. The things people did in church were silly too. There were reasons for doing them. She would dance the endless dance if she felt like it; keep it going; that was the thing about it, it didn’t end. This was the place where she did what she felt like. This was the place where she was her self, her own. She was home, home—No, but on the way home, on the way at last again, now she could go, now she would go, across the triple river and on to the dark mountain, home.

  She stood up on the shelf-rock, and with arms stretched out wide and hands held hollowed as if they bore bells or bowls of flame or water, danced on the rock, quick swaying sweeping movements, danced to the beach, to the crossing—and stopped short.

  In a circle of stones on the sand a few yards downriver from the crossing lay the ashes of a fire.

  Nearby, utensils and packets, half hidden under the drooping branches of an elder. Plastic, steel, paper.

  Noiseless, she took one step forward. The ashes were still hot: she caught the tang of burning.

  No one came here. No one ever. Her place alone. The gateway for her, the path for her, alone. Who, hiding, had watched her dance, and laughed? She turned, searching, rigid, to defy the enemy, “Come on, come out, then!” when, with a shock of pure fear that took all breath, she saw the pale enormous arm grope out towards her across the grass—

  seeing even as she saw the monstrous reaching thing what it was, a dun-colored sleeping bag, somebody in a sleeping bag on the grass there by the bushes. But the shock had been so hard that she sank down now, squatting, rocking her body a little, till her breath came back and the whiteness left the edges of her vision. Then, cautiously, she stood up once more and peered across the bushy edge of the riverbed. She could tell only that the sleeping bag was motionless. If she took another step here she must step on soft sand and leave a footprint. She drew back to the shelf-rock, stepped up from it to the grass, and circled back behind the elder bushes till she got a clear view of the intruder. A white heavy face blanked out by sleep, jaw slack, light hair loose, the long mound of the bag like a sack of garbage, like a dog turd lying on the ground of the beloved place, the ground she had kissed, her own, the ain country.

  She stood there as motionless as the sleeper. Then she turned suddenly and went quick and light, noiseless in tennis shoes, to the crossing and across in the familiar pattern of rock to rock above the merry water, up the far bank, and off on the south road; going a traveler’s pace, not a run or trot but a fast, even, lightfoot walk that put the distances behind her. As she went she gazed straight ahead and for a long way, a long time there was no clear thought in her mind, only the backwash of terror and anger and, that gone, the dry emptiness she knew too well, whatever one called it, maybe it was grief.

  There was nowhere, nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Even here no peace or place.

  But the way she went itself said you are going home. Her skin touched the air of the ain country, her eyes looked into the dusk forests. The rhythm of walking, of the up-slopes, the downslopes, the rivers, the long rhythms of the land quieted grief, filled emptiness at last. The farther she went into the twilight the more wholly she belonged to it, till all thought of the daylight world was gone and even the memory of the intruder at the beginning place was dulled, her mind tuned to what was about her as she walked and to the goal of her walking. The forests darkened, the way grew steep. It was a long time since she had come to Mountain Town.

  And a long way. She always forgot how long, how hard. When she had first found the way she used to break the journey with a sleep at Third River, at the foot of the mountain. Since she was sixteen she had been able to get to Tembreabrezi all in one pull, but a tough one, up the steep, dark slopes and up and on, always farther than she remembered. She was footsore, legweary, and very hungry when she came at last to the clear road and the long turning. But that was the joy of it, to come there worn out, craving food and warmth and rest, glad to the heart to see the lighted windows in the cold sweep of mountainside and sky, and smell the woodsmoke of the fires, the smell that from the ancient beginnings whispers, You are coming out of the wilderness, coming home. And to hear the voices speak her name.

  “Irena!” cried little Aduvan, in the street in front of the inn yard, startled at first, then breaking into a smile and a shout to her playmates, “Irena tialohadji!”—Irena has come back!

  Irene hugged and swung the child till she squealed, and the troop of four little ones all shrieked in their sweet, thin voices to be hugged and swung, dancing about her till Palizot looked out of the courtyard to see what the commotion was, and came forward wiping her hands on her apron, calm, saying, “Come in, come in, Irena. You’ve come a long way, you’ll be tired.” So she had welcomed Irene the first time she ever came to Mountain Town, fourteen years old, hungry, dirty, tired, frightened. She had not known the language then but she had understood what Palizot said to her: Come in, child, come home.

  The fire was burning in the big hearth of the inn. An excellent perfume of onion, cabbage, and spices pervaded the rooms. Everything was as it had been, as it ought to be, with a couple of improvements to be admired: the floors were covered with a reddish straw matting, instead of sand scattered on the bare wood. “That’s nice, it’s warmer,” Irene said, and Palizot, pleased but judicious, “I don’t know yet how it will wear. Let’s have some light in here beside the fire. Sofir! Irena has come! Will you stay a while with us, levadja?”

  Child, the word meant, dear child; they added the ‘adja’ onto names too, making them endearments. It pleased her deeply when Palizot called her that. She nodded, having already resolved to spend twelve days here, overnight on the other side of the gate. She was trying to arrange the words for a question, and they did not come at once, for it had been months since she spoke the language. “Palizot. Tell me. Since I was here—has anyone come, on the south road?”

  “No one has come on any road,” Palizot said, a strange answer, her voice calm and grave. Then Sofir came up from the cellars with cobwebs in his thick black hair, a baritone man the same size from chest to hip so you could have made round sections of him like a treetrunk; he hugged Irene, shook both her hands, rumbling joyfully, “A long while, Irenadja, a long while, but you’ve come!”

  They gave her her favorite room, and she helped Sofir carry up wood for the hearthfire there. He laid and lit the fire at once to warm and air the room, which felt as if it had not been used for a long time. There were no other guests staying at the inn. In itself that was nothing unusual, but she began to notice other indications that few travelers and little trade had been coming to the inn. The big pewter beer cans hung in a row along the wall had not been taken down and used lately, from the look of them, for a boisterous tradesmen’s evening or to welcome a party of cloth buyers up from the plains. She went to see what beasts were in the inn stable, but there were none, the stalls and mangers empty. Despite Sofir’s excellent cooking
the food at supper was coarse, and there was none of his fine wheat bread with it, only the stiff dark porridge made of the grains they grew here on the mountain. About Sofir and Palizot there was some air of trouble or constraint, but they said nothing directly about the lack of business, and Irene found she could not ask them. With them she was “the child” still, welcomed and cherished because she had no part in their adversities and cares. So it had always been heart’s holiday for her with them; and she did not know how to change that if she wanted to. As always, then, they talked of nothing important, the important thing being their love.

  After supper a few townsfolk came in to spend the evening. Sofir tended bar in the big front room for the men. The women joined Palizot by the fire in the snug room off the kitchen. They drank the local beer and chatted; old Kadit knocked back a quarter pint or so of apple brandy. Irene had a very small mug of the beer, which was powerful stuff, and helped Palizot sew patchwork. She detested sewing, but this work with Palizot was an old pleasure, one of the things she thought of with yearning from the other side of the gate: the scraps of soft colored wool, the firelight and lamplight, Palizot’s long, grave, mild face, the women’s quiet voices and Kadit’s huffing laugh, the buzz and grumble of the men talking in the other room, her own sleepiness, the stillness of the great old house overhead and the quietness of the streets of the town, of the forests beyond the streets.

  When the lamps were lighted and the curtains and shutters closed it always seemed that it was night outside. She did not open the shutters of her bedroom window till she got up after the night’s sleep, when the unchanging twilight looked like the dusk of a winter morning. So the townspeople spoke of it, saying morning, midday, night. Learning their language Irene had learned those words, but they did not always come unquestioned to her tongue. What meaning could they have, here? But she could not ask Palizot or Sofir, or Aduvan’s mother Trijiat, or the other women she was fond of; her questions did not come clear; they laughed and said, “Morning comes before midday and evening after it, child!”—always entertained by her difficulties with the language, and ready to help her, but not to question their own certainties. There was no one in Mountain Town who might be able to speak of such matters but the Master. So she used to plan to ask him why there was no day and night here, why the sun never rose and yet you never saw the stars, how this could be. But she had never asked him a word of it. What were the words in his language for sun, for star? And if she said, “Why is it never day or night here?” it would sound stupid, since day meant waking and night meant sleeping, and they waked and worked and slept like anybody on the other side. She could begin to explain, “Where I came from there is a round fire in the sky,” but it would sound like a Hollywood caveman in the first place, and in the second and larger place she never talked about where she came from. From the start, from the first time she went through the gate, the first time she crossed First River, the first time she came to Mountain Town, she had known that you did not talk of one place in the other place. You did not tell them where you came from, unless they asked. No one, in either country, ever asked.

  She was convinced that the Master knew something of the existence of the gate. Perhaps he knew much more than that; though she did not admit it quite clearly to herself she believed that in fact he knew much more than she did and would, when he chose, explain it all to her. But she dared not ask him. It was not yet time. She knew so little, even yet, of the ain country, except for the south road, and the town itself, the people of the town and their trades and feuds and jokes and crafts and gossip and manners, which she never tired of learning, and their language, which she could chatter away in and yet sometimes did not understand at all. Always outside the benign hearth-center lay the twilight and the silence, the unexplained, the unexplored. She had been content that it was so. She had wished that nothing here be changed. But this time, even the first night, at the first hearthfire, she felt the circle broken. It was no longer safe. Though she might wish it, and they might wish it, she was not a child any more.

  After breakfast she went for a visit with Trijiat, and then walked Aduvan and her little brother to the cobbler’s, at the other end of town, to leave their mother’s good shoes to be resoled. The little girl talked all the way and the little boy chirped like a cricket. Their heads were full of some ghost story or tall tale they had been told, and they kept asking Irene if she wasn’t scared when she walked on the mountain. Virti ran ahead, hid behind a porch, leapt out at her making terrifying roars like a cricket gone hysterical, and she performed suitable cries of terror and dismay. “You have to fall down!” Virti said, but she declined to fall down. The errand done, she left the children with their grandmother, and turned from the town’s main street to the steepest of the narrow cobbled ways going up the hillside, so steep that at intervals the street broke into steps, like a person breaking into giggles or hiccups, and then resumed its sober climb, until it had another fit of steps. At the top of it stood the wall of the garden of the manor, the arched stone gate beautiful against the clear sky. Turning to the right before she reached that gate Irene halted for a moment, and looked up at the Master’s house.

  A dozen gables and dormers broke dark, sharp angles on the sky; the windows, bay and bow, many-paned, lay no two on one level, so that there was no counting the stories of the house except on the evidence of three great beams across the front. The door was massive, twelve-paneled. As she lifted the brass knocker ring and struck it on the polished disc of brass, it came into Irene’s mind that she had dreamed of this door many times, on the other side.

  Fimol the housekeeper, erect and imperturbable in high-necked, long-sleeved, long-skirted grey, opened the heavy door and greeted the visitor to the Master’s house. Fimol never smiled, and Irene had always been in awe of her. She noticed with a sense almost of disloyalty, as she followed her, that Fimol’s hair had gone white and that her stiff figure was thin, the body of a frail, aging woman. They came into the hall of the house.

  This was the center of it all, this high room. Facing the long wall of paneled oak were twelve high, leaded windows looking out upon the terraced garden. The sparse furniture was carved oak, the carpets of local weave, crimson, orange, and brown, warming the room even when the candles were not lit and there was only the clear constant twilight from the windows. In each end wall was a huge stone chimney-piece, and on each of these, high over the wide hearth and the mantel, hung a portrait: a stiff, melancholy lady stared with round black eyes down the length of the room at her lord, who concealed the hand of a crippled right arm inside his coat and scowled blackly back at her.

  To the right of that farther hearth, near the door to his offices, the Master stood in conversation with the stonecutter Gahiar. Seeing Irene enter with the housekeeper he stared with that black ancestral scowl; then his face changed; he turned from Gahiar and strode down the long room to her, his hands held out. “Irena! You have come!”—such welcome as she had imagined from him, in daydream, often, but not in expectation, and not wondering what came next.

  The Master or mayor of Tembreabrezi was a spare, swarthy man with a hawk nose and dark eyes. He wore black, rusty, neatly-mended, homespun black trousers, vest, and jacket. A harsh man, a dark man. She had loved him since she first saw his face.

  He brought her out of the hall into his offices, where a fire burned and the curtains were drawn as if against the grey of a day of winter. He set her a chair, and aided by the dignity of her clothing, the dark-red skirt and homespun blouse that Palizot kept for her, she sat down without awkwardness. He stood beside the high desk where he worked standing—he was a man one seldom saw sitting down—and turned his intense look on her. She drew a deep breath and held herself quiet, her hands in her lap.

  “It has been a long time, Irena.”

  “I could not come.”

  “The way—?”

  “I could not—find—” Nor could she find the words she needed. “The place,” she said, and then remembering what
they called the stone arch in the wall of the manor, “The gateway. It was shut.”

  “You could not walk on the road,” he said, not impatient with her stumbling, but dauntingly intent.

  “When I—when I could come to the road, I could walk on it. But at the beginning—” She stuck again.

  “You were afraid.”

  His voice was gentle; she had never heard him speak so gently.

  “When I came through the gateway. It had been so long. And there, at the beginning place, beside the river, there was—”

  He said a word, almost in a whisper. It was the word little Virti had shouted when he was playing monster and she would not fall down, and Aduvan had scolded him, Shut up, don’t say that, both children over-excited, near tears. A huge, pale, deformed arm groping out across the grass—

  “A man,” she said. “A stranger.”

  The Master listened, intent, alert.

  “A stranger, like me. Not like me, but—” She knew no other way to say it. The Master, evidently understanding, nodded once.

  “Did you speak with him?”

  “No. He was asleep. I came on. I didn’t want—I was afraid—” She stuck again. She could not explain her first panic. Surely he would see why a woman alone might have reason to be afraid of a strange man. But she could not express the rage she felt now recalling her fear and recalling the stranger, the gross sleeper, the litter of plastic trash: the sense of desecration and of danger. She clasped her hands hard in her lap and struggled again for the words she wanted, forcing herself to speak. “If he found the gateway, maybe others will find it. There are—there are so many, many people there—”

  If the Master understood what she meant by “there,” his only response was a black frown.

  “You must guard your walls, Master!” she said desperately. She would have said “borders” but knew no such word in his language, nor any word for boundary or fence but the word that meant a wall of wood or stone.