The Golden Door

And so it proved. The next morning, with his mother’s blessing, Dirk marched away from Southwall, his father’s skimmer hook over his shoulder and the cheers of his neighbors ringing in his ears. Joliffe, Crell, and a handful of other brave men went with him.

The volunteers were singing as they swung along the broad, straight road that led west to the Keep. Those they had left behind stood watching until they were out of sight.

“We should feel very proud,” said Lisbeth, putting her arm around Rye’s shoulders. “Dirk is doing what must be done, to save us all.”

But watching the small band of marchers disappearing into the distance, Rye felt only terrible fear, and an aching sense of loss.

A few days later, Crell slunk back into Southwall with a rag tied around his leg. He said he had hurt his ankle at the Keep, so had been forced to come home. He was certainly limping, sometimes more and sometimes less, but he refused to see Tallus the healer. Few believed in his injury, though no one said so aloud.

Shamed and sullen, Crell said little in answer to the townspeople’s eager questions. The Keep had been crowded with volunteers from every part of the city. The group from Northwall had been the largest and noisiest of all. Crell had lost sight of Dirk, Joliffe, and the others from Southwall. He had not been shown the secret way out of Weld.

He retreated to his home and stayed out of sight for days. His mother, who was Lisbeth’s friend, clearly felt disgraced. But Rye could see, deep in her shadowed eyes, a flicker of relief.

The house seemed very empty without Dirk. His cheerful whistling no longer brightened the early mornings. Dinners around the table were dull without his whispered talk, teasing, and laughter. And at night, Rye lay listening to the sounds of the skimmers with only the silent Sholto for company. Dirk’s empty, neatly made bed seemed to dominate the hot, still room.

Lisbeth and Sholto went on with their lives just as they had before Dirk left. Lisbeth tended her bees and sold the honey at her market stall. Sholto continued grinding powders and mixing potions for Tallus the healer, examining dead skimmers in Tallus’s workroom, and studying his books in every spare moment.

Rye did not understand how they could. He missed Dirk so much! He dreamed of him every night, and every morning woke to the misery of his brother’s absence. It was as if a great hole had been torn in his world, and it changed everything.

School lessons seemed pointless. Games seemed pointless. His friends talked constantly about the adventures Dirk, Joliffe, and the others must be having beyond the Wall. Their chatter seemed to rasp on Rye’s nerves like sandpaper, and he began to spend more time alone.

“You must have courage, Rye,” Lisbeth murmured to her youngest son when she found him moping in the shade of the bell tree one afternoon. “We all miss Dirk, my dear, but what must be, must be.”

Rye looked up into her face and saw how pale she was. He saw the shadows beneath her eyes, and a line between her brows that he had never noticed before. With a pang, he at last understood that Lisbeth was suffering even more than he was, but was bearing her pain bravely, for all their sakes.

He nodded and forced a smile, suddenly feeling much older.

“There will be news of Dirk very soon, I am sure of it,” his mother told him.

“I am sure of it, too,” Rye replied as firmly as he could.

But the weeks slipped by, and no news came.

The fruit on the bell tree ripened. Rye picked the juicy yellow bells, Lisbeth preserved them, and the pantry filled with jars of golden sweetness.

Usually, Lisbeth kept some jars for the family’s use, and took the rest to the market. This year, all the jars would have to be sold. Sholto earned very little from Tallus because he was still learning the healer’s art, and now that Dirk’s wages were no longer flowing in, the family needed every coin it could get.

The skimmers kept coming. More crops were lost, more beasts perished, and more people died.

Then, as the heat slowly became less, the attacks became fewer, and at last, stopped altogether. In Lisbeth’s garden, the leaves of the bell tree colored and fell, and the bare, pruned branches were stubby and stark against the white of the beehives.

And still Dirk did not return. Nor did any of the other men who had marched, singing, away from Southwall. Lisbeth’s eyes grew more shadowed. Sholto became more silent than ever.

The Warden’s notice remained on the wall of the meetinghouse in the square like a memorial to those who had gone, growing more faded with every passing day.

At last, the air began to warm once more, and the sun shone strongly in the misty skies of Weld. The bell tree sprouted and became a glorious umbrella of yellow blossoms, humming with bees. Then the blossoms fell to form a perfect golden circle on the ground and tiny green fruit began to form.

And as the fruit swelled and ripened, the skimmer invasions began again.

Just over a year after Dirk left, Rye and Sholto came home to find Lisbeth sitting in her chair by the fireplace, staring at the cold ashes in the grate.

Her hands were on her lap. In one, she held a gold brooch in the shape of a flower. The other clutched a small scroll. Tight-lipped, Sholto freed the scroll from her fingers. As he unrolled it, Rye pushed close so he, too, could read what was written upon it.

“Our precious Warden must have sent out many of these today,” Sholto muttered, looking down his nose at the scroll. “So many, indeed, that it would have taken too long for him to write each note individually. Most of this message was written for him. He has simply filled in the spaces and signed at the bottom!”

Lisbeth snatched the scroll back. With trembling fingers, she fastened the gold flower to the bodice of her plain brown dress.

“Dirk was a hero,” she said, her voice shaking. “He died like his father, doing what he thought was right. If you wish to sneer, Sholto, please sneer where I cannot hear you!”

Sholto turned away, his face expressionless. He began walking to the back of the house, where his supplies of skimmer repellent were kept.

“We had better begin locking up,” he said to Rye over his shoulder. “I will fetch the rags.”

Rye knelt by his mother’s chair and put his hand on her arm. A terrible ache was swelling in his throat and chest, but he made himself speak.

“Mother, Dirk may come back to us yet, whatever the Warden says,” he whispered, trying to make himself believe it. “He has been away a long time, but there is no proof that — that he is lost.”

Lisbeth covered his hand with one of hers. Her fingers were very cold. With the other hand, she fingered the delicate brooch pinned to her dress.

“And — and Sholto was not sneering at Dirk, Mother,” Rye rushed on. “He was just … trying to shut out the pain.”

He had not planned what he was going to say, but as the words left his mouth, he knew that they were true.

“Yes,” Lisbeth murmured through dry lips. “I should not have spoken to poor Sholto so. But … oh, Dirk, my tall, laughing Dirk! My firstborn! How can I bear it?”

She began to weep bitterly. Rye stayed crouched beside her for a while, but at last, he crept away to help Sholto seal the shutters. By the time they had finished, Lisbeth had gone to her room.

As the sun went down, Sholto and Rye ate in silence.

No one sprinkled the salt before we sealed the house, Rye thought. No one chanted the spells of protection.

But he said nothing aloud. He knew that Sholto would scoff at the idea that magic did anything that the skimmer repellent did not do a hundred times better.

That night, Rye lay awake for many hours. He thought that Sholto did, too, though there was no sound at all from Sholto’s bed.

He was just drifting into an uneasy doze when he was jolted awake. Distant crashes and screams were mingling with the muffled beats of the skimmers’ wings. He gasped and sat up, his heart pounding.

“Be still, Rye!” he heard Sholto hiss in the darkness. “They are not attacking us. But it is somewhere very near.”

Rye sat rigidly, blinking in the dark, trying to resist the ghastly images of what must be happening just a few streets away.

After a few long minutes, the awful screams abruptly ceased. But the dry rasping of the skimmers’ wings went on and on and on….

In the morning, when Rye and Sholto went out together to hear the news, they found the streets of Southwall seething with a tale of horror. The mother, father, sister, and grandmother of Dirk’s friend Joliffe were all dead.

A back window of the family’s home had been found yawning open, each of its shutters ferociously clawed and dangling from one twisted hinge. Five dead skimmers lay among the ravaged bones in the main bedroom, showing how valiantly Joliffe’s parents had fought for their lives, and the lives of the others in the house.

The neighbors had heard it all and were numb with shock. They were also plainly filled with shame because they had not tried to save the doomed family, though no one blamed them for a moment. Everyone knew that to open one’s doors when skimmers were overhead meant certain death.

The neighbors said that on the day of the tragedy Joliffe’s parents had received a letter from the Warden. The letter, enclosing a gold badge in the shape of a flower, had declared that Joliffe was now officially believed to be dead.

Joliffe’s parents had never lost hope until that moment. Who could wonder that the family, distracted by grief, had failed to seal the shutters properly, so that the hunting skimmers found a gap through which to attack?

We would have suffered the same fate if it had not been for Sholto, Rye thought, glancing at his stony-faced brother. It was Sholto who thought to seal our doors and windows last night. It was Sholto who put aside his grief to do what had to be done. It is because of him that he, Mother, and I are alive today.

But he knew better than to try to thank or praise Sholto for what he had done.

Sholto was filled with rage. Rye could feel it. Not a muscle of Sholto’s face moved, but Rye knew that his mind was burning with thoughts of Dirk, his lost brother; of Joliffe, though Joliffe had never liked him; of Joliffe’s family, horribly dead.

“This must stop,” Sholto muttered as he and Rye turned for home. “There must be a way.”

Rye knew that he required no answer. He was speaking not to Rye, but to himself.

So Rye was grieved but not wholly surprised when, the next morning, he woke to find Sholto’s bed empty and a letter for Lisbeth lying on the table in the living room.

Rye stared at the note — at one line in particular.

As you will remember, I turned eighteen two weeks ago.

Sholto had turned eighteen! But there had been no party, with all the neighbors invited in to feast and celebrate, as there had been for Dirk when he came of age. In the fear for Dirk’s fate, and at the height of skimmer season, Sholto’s eighteenth birthday had passed almost unnoticed.

Except by Sholto himself, Rye thought.

The note seemed so cold. It said nothing of love, or regret at parting. For a moment, Rye was tempted to tear it up and throw the scraps into the cooking fire.

But of course he could not do that. The note was for Lisbeth, and Lisbeth had to read it.

He heard a sound behind him, and turned. His mother was standing in the doorway of her room, a shawl thrown over her nightgown, a long braid hanging down her back. Her tired eyes searched Rye’s face, then fell to the note in his hand.

“Sholto …” Rye managed to say.

He went to his mother and awkwardly held out the paper, but Lisbeth made no attempt to take it.

“He has gone, then,” she said dully.

Stunned, Rye nodded.

“I knew it would be so,” said Lisbeth. “But I had hoped it would not be so soon. Ah, Sholto …”

“They may not let him go, Mother,” Rye burst out, desperate to comfort her. “Sholto can fight in his way, but he is not very strong. They may send him home again, like Crell.”

To his surprise, the corners of Lisbeth’s mouth curved in a wry half smile. “Sholto is not Crell,” she said. “Sholto wants to go. And he will get what he wants, by trickery if he has to. It has always been the same, from the time he was a tiny child.”

She sighed. Her eyes were far away. “So quiet, he was, my dark, determined little Sholto. But in his way, he was more of a handful than Dirk. At least I always knew where Dirk was. He made noise enough for two children and could not keep still for a moment. But Sholto …”

The smile faded, and for the first time, her lips trembled.

“Sholto will get what he wants,” she repeated. “By fair means or foul, he will go beyond the Wall.”