Courtship Rite

10

OELITA WAS BLEEDING to death tied into the iron-reed basket by thongs through the center of her wrists, bobbing in a small cove, half drowning every time a large wave broke over her head. When she wasn’t struggling to breathe, the agony in her wrists throbbed with a heartbeat still in panic.

It wasn’t an actively threatening trap. If she kept her legs stretched out, she could stay afloat with her head above water indefinitely — except that blood loss would gradually weaken her. She had to act now. Yet there was nothing she could do! She could move her legs but, if she worked them forward, her head dipped back into the water and she began to drown. Worse, she could sense that if she pulled her feet up too far the trap would flip over and she would be held face underwater with no chance of righting the structure.

She tried to think, but the only thoughts that came were the useless “what if” thoughts of a mind that has given up the present as hopeless. What if she had moved faster when she first spotted the men? She had attacked two of them before the other two had a chance to close in. She had been fast enough to knock one down and swing a rock lethally toward the other’s skull, but he had been miraculously evasive, and there had been no time for a second swing.

Water sloshed over her face. She kicked dreamily. What if she had dumped her packsack sooner? What if she had climbed the bank and forced them to come up after her?

No use. The bobbing lulled her. She tried to be furious. How stupid to allow myself to be angered by Nonoep. What if I’d been reasonable?

A wave poured water into her nose and brought her coughing back to the present. But there was only twisted rock and iron-reed trap and pain. The Mnankrei, she thought. The Mnankrei would use the sea to initiate their Death Rite. But the pain was too great for thinking. She sank far back into the past, squatting with her father in the sand beside a lone gnarled tree that squatted, too, watching four executioner ants keeping an armored beetle at bay, patiently waiting for the beetle to weaken.

“I’m going to help him,” she had said. Now, in her mind, she picked up a straw to joust at the executioners.

“No, no,” the voice of her father was saying. “Watch him get away by himself. You won’t have help when you’re caught in a trap like that.”

“God will help me!” the child replied, defiantly.

“You’d better bet your sweet meat He will do no such thing.”

Oelita jerked. Her father was dead. She had to fight the trap. How does a Mnankrei think? She rode the sea. She was a boat. She was a sea captain. There had to be a way out. A Death Rite Trial was always a formal puzzle. She could pull her legs up and drown. But maybe she was only meant to think she would drown? Maybe the trap would fall apart once it had capsized?

Oelita was gripped by an irrational desire to try that sudden maneuver — what other choice did she have? — and if she drowned, what did it matter; certainly she was going to die if she did nothing. But a keen analytical mind did not allow her body impulsive gestures. She began to build the iron-reed trap in her mind, the way a master weaver would build it, imagining the pieces she could not see. If it were to fall apart, how would that come about? The question gave her a picture. She saw the two pieces, and then she saw the trick. If she merely flipped over, she would drown. But if she could move one of the reeds beside her foot up over the fork that had been cutting her ankle, then when she flipped, the cage would break.

She prodded with toes and craned her neck. She cursed her toes for not being fingers and gave up and watched a turbulent stream of red blood from her wrist drift away in the green water. She tried again. The reed caught against the fork — and slipped off. Again, desperately, she manipulated her toes and this time, while the reed held, she flipped, her lungs full.

Fright kept her eyes open to see the murky bottom rotate into view, almost touching the fine seaweed that released a darting eight legger and — nothing’s happening I’ll die here — but the trap slowly came apart under the shifting of weights and she staggered onto the pebble beach, nude, dragging the trap by the thongs through her wrists, unaware of the pain, until she sank to her knees, crying, wondering only how to rid herself of the thongs. Death no longer mattered; what had been a minor nuisance now reached her conscious mind with full priority… pain… pain. Blood began to paint her palms, merging with the sea wetness, to run down a finger or two.

She saw it then, the tiny ceremonial table holding a bronze knife whose handle was worked in the stylized wave design of the Mnankrei and set with stone fragments of blue and white, an ironic gift from someone who knew what she would need if she got this far. The knife she used with unwilling fingers to sever the thongs. Her attempts to bind the wounds failed — her fingers were too useless — and so she merely wrapped around her waist those thin pieces of leather that had been stripped from the back of some poor man of low kalothi, using them to hold the knife against her kidneys.

Oelita found her packsack upstream with her clothes neatly folded on top of it. So they expected her to live. That implied future terrors of a fiendishness that would grow more complicated with every new trial. She dressed in a rage, favoring her fingers, flinging defiance at the bushes which now held phantoms.

To flee or to dare? She chose audacity partly because she knew the rules never condoned a second trial on the same day. She returned to the iron-clad trap and built a bonfire with it on a rocky prominence facing the ocean. Let the Mnankrei see where she was!

“Ho!” came a voice from the night.

It sounded like the call of the chief priest of the clan of darkness. She looked for the voice but saw only a horde of hidden ghouls ready to attack. Slowly she reached for the knife. Her hand could only hold it loosely. “If you come closer I will kill you!”

“And why should I cause such fear?” the slightly foreign voice loomed.

“I’m hardly afraid of you!” Her arms were trembling. “It is just that I’m in a particularly foul mood!”

“Did the ship that left a while ago leave you behind?”

“You saw a ship?”

“A small one.”

“They are no friends of mine! And who are you?”

“Joesai the Goldsmith. I’ve been looking over the gold diggings.”

“They are worked out.”

“Ho! You think that! I’ve already panned a spoonful of dust. I’ve found a source. Washing is not the only way to find gold. There is tunneling and there are no tunnels here.”

“Come into the light of my fire.”

Joesai walked down a slope and out of the underbrush. He had been farther away than she had guessed. He stopped, well out of range of her knife, a tall man, bigger than most who were not Ivieth. That softened Oelita. He could not have been one of her attackers. They were all a head shorter than he. Nor was he Mnankrei.

“You are injured,” he observed.

“A minor injury,” she replied defiantly.

“You could not use that knife.”

“My feet are deadly.”

“Are the wounds fresh?”

“Bleeding and painful.”

“Let me examine them. I’m a surgeon, better than most.” He did not move forward.

She looked at the smiling man. She knew he would go if she ordered him away. “Can you dress stabs? I can show you how. My own fingers are too swollen and weak.”

“I promise better than that.” He came forward and asked her to sit while he examined her wrists. “Let me take care of it now. I’m a master. The scar will blend with your cicatrice when I’ve finished.” He took out tools before she gave permission. “These are no ordinary wounds,” he pronounced.

“No.” She cringed as he began his work.

“You have enemies,” he said and his finger sent fire through her arm.

“All those who are loved fiercely have enemies.”

“You must be the Gentle Heretic.”

“Some call me that.”

“Cause for astonishment! My two-wife is a student of yours. She is not a great intellect. From overhearing her, I have concluded that your teachings make weak sense.”

Oelita laughed. “You may not be a flatterer, but you have a kind way. Kindness is what I preach.”

“I am ruthless when it suits me. Can you walk? We’ll do better at my camp. I have food. You need not use your hands and I’ll serve you a feast.”

“You adopt my enemies very easily.”

“Should a big man like me fear men who would attack a defenseless woman? I’ll walk you back to Sorrow. Perhaps you would grant two-wife an interview?”

“No. The Mnankrei Death Rite is upon me and I need hide. The ground has ears. No one should know my whereabouts.”

“Then I will show you where to contact her, and you may arrange a meeting whenever and however it suits you.”

They walked back up the stream, wading most of the way near the edge, jumping along rocks and boulders where the water was shallow. He showed her the outcropping that had borne gold, and where a tunnel should be carved. “Overlooked riches,” he said. “Some don’t have an eye that sees underground.”

“You trust me to know this?”

He laughed with amused force. “Hasn’t two-wife told me to trust the Gentle Heretic in all ways? But I do not need trust. I care not who digs the gold, as long as I am the one who buys it.”

Joesai’s camp was only a tent big enough to crowd two men. He built a fire and busied himself preparing cake and potatoes and a sauce he frequently insisted that she taste and judge. He was so oblivious of danger that she relaxed. Getasun rose, rouging the eastern hills, before the meal’s aroma was on the air from the bubbling pots. They ate with the full orb of Scowlmoon hanging over the thick-leaved brush trees to the west. When they stood up, they could see under the moon a faint horizon of purplish sea. He fed her and teased her as if she were a child.

“I’m beginning to see the source of your innocent philosophy. Now open your mouth like a good girl and have some potato.”

“Do your penetrating eyes also see my heart of gold?”

“There is no heart of gold in your bosom. I see a heart of flesh that pumps blood to your blushing cheeks.”

“Why do you take me as such an innocent?” She was curious. She had many lovers, old, young, high kalothi, and low kalothi. She thought it showed in the carelessly disheveled air she wore.

“The things you write about. Weren’t you the one who said we were a world of children who had never grown up after the poisons had claimed our parents?”

“I was only making a parable on that old myth! People understand myths!”

“It’s what you want us to believe — that you are the only adult.” He tossed a stone into the fire to make sparks. “I’m a living breathing adult, dead neither of the poisons nor of famine; for children look no farther than yourself.”

She had been opening her garment unobtrusively. She stopped, anger rising to lash at his incredible insult. She laughed instead, the great laugh. “Grandfather, I think it is your bedtime.”

They were tired and ready for rest. It took maneuvering for the tent to accept them both. She held him to her bosom, surprised that he merely took the warmth of her with his own arm without trying to take more of what she was willing to give. His presence made her feel safe, for the moment, from the Mnankrei. The panic was gone and somehow the pain in the wrists seemed less. Already she was able to plan how to hide and how to attack. Then they slept.