Courtship Rite

12

WHAT DID YOU DO to her?” Teenae raged.

“I’m pleased not to have been there for the attack. She nearly killed Eiemeni.”

Teenae was impatient with such chit-chat. “Is she alive?”

“For a person as tough as her, death comes slowly. She’s fast, too. Her surprise lasted a mere half wink. She’s a deadly killer.”

“She’s all gentleness!”

“I’m glad I didn’t make the mistake of believing she is what she writes when I planned the ambush. I learned respect. She’s quite capable of killing a whole Kaiel family with her bare hands.”

“You did not answer my question!”

“Whether she is alive?” Joesai mused.

“Yes.”

“I thought to be cleverly misleading and use the Mnankrei Death Rite opener. We fastened her to an iron-reed basket through her wrists and floated her in a cove.”

“What a horrible way to die,” said Teenae acidly. “You don’t dare bleed to death so you drown yourself. She died?” Teenae felt helpless.

“The Mnankrei prescribe seven ways to escape from the first trap, each more difficult to perceive but each easier than the last. She could hardly have failed.”

“She’s alive?”

Joesai laughed and lay down against the pillows, facing the bay. “I escorted her home. I have an ironical sense of humor. It pleases me to know the enemy from the start.”

“Then she’s alive. Thank God. Tell me where she is!”

“Even knowing where she is would be cheating. I let her vanish.”

“You’ll hunt her down again?”

“The next time there will be six ways for her to escape.”

“You’ll kill her in the end.”

“She’ll go at least to the fifth level, that hurricane. I like her.”

Teenae took a wrap, a crocheted lace of marching and flying insects, and left the inn for a walk along the stone quay of the harbor so that she might be away from Joesai. The wind from the sea this day was cold and she held the wrap tightly to her body, while the brisk air flapped her black hair and froze the shaved centerline of her scalp.

The Joesai of Sorrow was different than the husband she knew in Kaiel-hontokae and she was not pleased. Her anger came, she thought, from the frightening coolness with which he faced someone else’s death, but she was not aware of how much of her rage derived from the mere fact that he was winning the game to which she had secretly challenged him. Real life walked on more legs than a kolgame. Joesai had the experience while she had only wisdom. It was intolerable.

She stopped at a fisherman’s stall along the quay and bargained with an old grandmother for five swimmers. These swimmers were eight-legged armored creatures as big as a man’s fist. They were tasty but almost more trouble than they were worth. They could not be cooked in their shells because then the poisons diffused throughout the body of the meat; they had to be cracked and carefully dissected. Only the brain and gills were edible, perhaps two fingers worth of morsel, a modest mouthful. The remaining muscular flesh might safely be eaten if it was carefully sealed with a special bacterium and left to rot until it reeked. There were recipes to disguise or boil out the oily ripeness. Some people preferred such dishes to human flesh. Teenae did not.

She wandered far beyond the quay, slogging through the sand, puzzling out Joesai’s mental process. Such an analysis was difficult because he did not reason with logic. Sometimes she doubted that he reasoned at all. He was tradition-bound to a fault, though never imprisoned by a tradition that did not suit him. He acted out old formulas, not as if he believed in them, but in a kind of jovially absent-minded way, as if being traditional saved his mind the bother of thinking while it was occupied elsewhere at more important tasks.

He had his men and she had none; that was the problem. He had the eyes of a bee, and she had merely two. To win, she must first establish a balance. Was she here alone to flatter Joesai or to counterbalance his weight with her own vitality? She needed mass. She needed allies.

Up ahead a dancing child played with a decaying length of sea vine, snapping it like a whip. To avoid the soft beach, Teenae was now walking along the border between the endless battle of sea and continent that had pounded out a lifeless curve of wet black sand. The attacking foam seized her hurried feet and the counterattacking sand left behind heel-deep pools of water.

“Hi,” said the boy, whacking the surf with his vine. Its rotten stalk broke. Because Oelita was on her mind, she scrutinized the four wheat kernels on the boy’s back — the Scar of the Heresy. The first underlay of the design, she noted, had been executed by a traditional craftsman of the n’Orap clan. There were few so skilled in Kaiel-hontokae. When the boy reached his full growth the final delicate details of the cicatrice would be cut in or embossed and colored. “You got some swimmers,” he said to her. “Yeech. I throw them back when I catch one of those.”

“Do you lay traps, or do you dive?” she asked.

“I mostly bait, but I’m a good diver.”

“Who decorated you? I notice that your scars were all done by the same artist. He’s very good.”

“My two-father. You should see my mothers! He is not yet finished with my body.”

She thought about a man who would commit his son to a heresy in a way that could not be erased. He was a believer. Joesai would not have approved. Since a child he had been adamant that no one’s symbol should ever be carved into his body. The designs he wore were meaningless. And so Teenae conceived her plan for telling Joesai of her opposition to his actions.

“I have some work for your two-father. Would he be home?”

The boy’s family lived on one of the crooked dead-end streets at the bottom of the hill below Sorrow’s Temple, a street wealthy enough to afford paving. Its houses and shops were a motley mixture of yellow and red brick, of field stone and mortar, of cut stone and elegant arches, all with slanting slate roofs and tiny windows. Stairways disappeared into common courtyards or to second floors or meandered up the hill to the next street.

Three children were carefully daring footholds in the stones of the aqueduct that passed overhead to feed the eight public fountains from which the townfolk drew their water. Other children pestered shoppers to carry their bags for a coin. An Ivieth couple, the female far taller than her mate, pushed a smelly sewer wagon as they made their rounds to collect fertilizer for the fields. Coming in the opposite direction a father and his daughter hurried past the wagon, laden with water tanks on their backs, bringing in the evening supply from the nearest fountain.

At the shop entrance Teenae removed her sandals and washed her feet in the small footbath. Watching her intently was a little girl with naked skin as smooth as freshly bleached fine paper, who, upon deciding that the visitor was safe, ran over to her half brother and climbed to his shoulders for a ride. From that perch, arrogant but silent, she looked Teenae straight in the eyes and simultaneously steered her brother by the ears. Down the hall another girl, older, hauled a jug of water upstairs, smiling broadly at Teenae when their eyes touched.

A sloe-eyed woman with elaborate spirals radiating from her eyes greeted them in a shop filled with imported fabrics, tapestries, rugs, fine porcelain, brass kitchen utensils, even clocks from Kaiel-hontokae. The family obviously dealt in luxury imports.

“I have never seen such fine porcelain!” exclaimed Teenae.

“This is only our display room. It would please me to show you the ceramic collection down below. We have more from the o’ca kilns than we can show here. A new shipment has hardly been unpacked.”

“This is o’ca?” Teenae was impressed by their enterprise in importing from such a distance.

“She’s here to see Zeilar,” said the boy.

“Ah. You are interested in the skins. We have a small but superior stock. My husband Zeilar only collects them as art so that he shall remain inspired by the masterpieces of others. He saves the best of the leather that passes through the hands of my husband Meikam.”

She led Teenae upstairs and then up another flight on an almost vertical wooden ladder to a large room that was the only room on the third floor. It was spacious and better lighted than the apartments below. Zeilar sat upon several of the larger pillows that littered the floor, reading a handwritten book beside a window three times as tall as any other in the building. Through the window the peaked roofs of the village thrust upward to obscure the sea. The hides of perhaps a dozen men hung about the room as partitions or in place of tapestries. Surfacing the low table that dominated the whole space was a quilt of leather designs and behind this table stood a multijointed mirror, man high, with almost golden reflectivity, which was built to give one an image of oneself from many viewpoints.

Zeilar set his book aside and she saw that his face was carved in an abstract symmetry that would make the effort to decode his current expression an almost impossible task. “Look around,” he said comfortably.

The most enormous hide was perhaps the strangest for it carried unconventionally representational scenes of mountains and cities and ships connected by a wild looping of roads. “Do you know the stories of these men?” she asked.

“Harar ram-Ivieth,” Zeilar replied. “He was an accomplished songwriter and one of the few men ever to have rounded Geta on foot. I never met him for he died before I was born but many Ivieth know his stories and more than once an Ivieth has passed through Sorrow called to Harar’s Pilgrimage. I have a copy of his book, Folio-wing God.”

The smaller hide of a woman attracted Teenae’s attention when she recognized its delicate workmanship. That’s what she wanted. The cuts, the fine work, the control of the scar-tissue texture, the embossing, and the final tattooing were unbelievable.

“Not for sale,” said Zeilar noting her interest. “She’s my oldest niece. I had her skin to work with since she was a child and she inspired me, the saucy wench. She was drowned by the Njarae. I’m not sure she wasn’t murdered. Her death left a knife in my heart.”

“I’m not here for leather.” Teenae dismissed the notion, saddened that a woman had lost her life to the sea in the fullness of her youth. She smiled at the artist. “It’s for me.”

Was it consternation or joy that crossed his indecipherable face? “Ah yes.” But the voice carried pleasure. “What design do you wish? Choose any one that catches your spirit or I can give you an original sketch. The work cannot all be done in one day, you understand. Many healings are required to control the texture.”

“I wish some form of the four wheat kernels.”

His motions froze. “You are a convert to the teachings of our Oelita?”

“Yes,” she lied with her gentlest voice.

The son appeared up the ladder again with tea, followed by his naked sister. The tea was poured into shallow o’ca bowls.

“Do you wish this sacrament done now or with friends?”

“Now. You are my friends for you follow Oelita.”

“Son, hurry and fetch a maita leaf from my satchel to freshen our guest’s tea.” He turned to Teenae. “I prescribe only a mild narcotic since awareness of the pain brings faster healing. Fast healing gives an aura to the new tissue, a fineness of texture and color.”

“I have never used a narcotic, maita or otherwise. It is not logical to fear pain. It is only logical to fear the damage that generates pain. The symbol is not its referent. So the o’Tghalie teach.” She went to the mirror and disrobed. An infinity of golden Teenaes formed ranks in that geometric never world. “My lower back is smooth,” she said.

The boy re-emerged from the trapdoor with the large maita leaf, followed by an eruption of sisters and another brother. For these young ones it was an event to watch the master work his magic with brush and knife and flesh. Each child made his presence unobtrusive. None let their eyes stray from Teenae.

Zeilar swabbed and cleaned her back with alcohol and then began to sketch on the skin over her kidneys while she stood inside the mirrors and watched this new flattery take shape upon her crowded body. Sometimes he erased and began again. Sometimes her eyes wandered to the hides of these other humans who had all once stood naked like herself in a shop like this. The children stared.

Teenae’s logical mind was relishing the ironies all about her. She never really understood the way in which the non-o’Tghalie staggered blindly past, and over, the contradictions of their private worlds. They neither saw nor felt nor heard the storm. Zeilar worked in a room that was a showplace of cannibal feasting, creating the symbol of a philosophy that denied cannibalism upon the back of a woman who would one day be eaten. She smiled. Artists had a way of living with the cross-purposes that flowed through the soul of the Race.

Teenae wondered why she was here, why she was doing this. As yet the design was only ink. But it was not Oelita’s dietary laws that attracted her; it was the woman’s gentleness. Teenae had lived in a stern family that had not let her grow up to practice mathematics, and now she was part of a clan inexorably bent upon planetary conquest. Gentleness attracted her.

Slowly the essence of maita leaf saturated the tea. The boy brought it for her to drink, lifting the bowl to her lips. She sipped. For a moment the artist paused, then brushed on some finishing lines. He stood back for her approval and she saw a hundred golden Teenaes with their backs to her and their heads turned. All of them nodded.

The design had been modified to flow with the form of the prior cicatrices; the wheat stem was bent, as if caught by the wind while ripening on the round hills of her buttocks. Zeilar was satisfied; she was satisfied. He paraded her before his children who clapped, too, and began to josh each other for positions around the table, not so quiet as they had been. The master went for his tools and Teenae took her place on the table, stomach down, face resting in her arms, smiling at the littlest girl, winking.

“Is Oelita as warm as she sounds?”

He brought Teenae rods to hold in her fists and a strip of hardwood on a finger-high stand so that she might bite or leave it, as she wished. “Our Oelita has a golden kalothi. You and your husband are the ones who know gold. Life beats her in hammer strokes but she never breaks. A little bit of her is enough to gild everything with luster.” He selected a knife, and adjusted a minor to get a better light from the window. “Are you ready?”

“So many people seem to worship her.”

“Oh yes,” said the artist making his first swift cut.

Teenae gasped and clamped her teeth on the hardwood, breathing with deep breaths as the knife opened up more lines of blood. “Wait! God, wait!”

He indulged her but used the time to expose the design again by washing away the blood with a light solution of numbing maita tea. “I’ll be trimming next. The pain will be intermittent but sharp.”

“Has she been here long? Did you notice her as a child?”

“This will hurt.” Snip. “She came and went with her father.” Snip, snip. “Those times when he brought her to the village she would run far ahead of him.” Stab, snip, stab. “I remember the time when she crawled upstairs and sat down to supper with us.” Slice, snip, stab. “She chattered our ears off. How’s it going?”

“Just get it over with!”

He laughed. “We can’t hurry or I’ll slip. I’m going to cauterize some points and put a mashed beetle salve on other spots. That gives a different texturing effect. The salve will sting worse than the fire.”

Teenae’s body was trembling. “All right.” She breathed deeply to stay out of shock, smelling her own flesh burning from the hot needle.

“’S all right,” said the naked little sister crawling over to pat her on the head.

“Was Oelita a temple-goer?”

“Oh, she was at our temple all the time!” He began to cut again and Teenae’s body shuddered once. His male voice dominated her senses, flooding over the pain like maita. Concentrate on the voice. The voice droned in and out as if the speaker were not in one place. “She competed in everything. She raced.” An endless scream traced its path down to the hump of Teenae’s buttocks. “Oelita played chess. Her eyes were the quickest, her hand the fastest. She’d spend days with a puzzle. She’s the village kol-game master, though you’d never know it…”

Teenae took her teeth off the hardwood strip long enough to interrupt. “I love kolgame!”

“… because no matter whom she plays, she only wins half the time!” Zeilar’s hand sought a new knife and that brief moment of relief was spring and summer and autumn. “Nobody ever earned a higher kalothi rating in this village.” The new knife began the quick maneuverings again. “She does not need to be merciful,” he said proudly, “but she is.”

“Wait! I have to wait!”

“We are almost done. I think it will be beautiful.” Tenderly he mopped up the blood and applied more stinging beetle mash.

“When did she become a lonepriest?”

“Doesn’t wisdom come on us in hard times? Life was full for her. She had a great father, may he still nourish us, and all the friends a human could hope for. She could have married into a great clan. She could have had any clan, except perhaps your o’Tghalie.”

“Our men would have loved her!” Teenae laughed.

“Are you ready yet? Shall we continue?”

“Yes, but keep talking. The knife is bearable when you talk and I can concentrate on your voice.”

“She could have joined a Stgal family!” The knife began again with a torturing zigzag walk. “Even the Kaiel would have had her, I’m sure of it. The Kaiel! She was beautiful. No woman ever took more care in decorating her body! But it was not to be.” The knife paused while he shrugged.

“She took a lover. A great traveller. He came overland from the Aramap Sea. Imagine that. The Aramap Sea. Handsome. Powerful kalothi. She was young then. Very young, and wished to prove to the world her worth as a bride by bearing the most beautiful children in the village. She had twins, both of them genetic cripples, nothing wrong in their minds — they were both alert and intelligent children like their mother — but crippled in the legs. You know the disease, Ainokie’s curse. She’s a carrier and never would have known had she picked another lover.”

“She didn’t eat them at birth?” asked Teenae, so appalled that for a moment her pain vanished.

“No. She has a gentle soul. She raised and protected them but would not marry. They had kalothi. She always said that. They had kalothi. But the famine came.” The thought seemed to disturb him and he began to carve the kernels of the wheat in silence.

Teenae cried in gasps, “Go on with your story. Don’t stop!”

“It was a bad famine here; I don’t know how it was where you came from. The Culling began. First the criminals. The famine gnawed at our bellies. The low in kalothi went to the temple to give us life. Even the old went to the temple to give the young life — that’s how bad it was. One out of every ten became part of the living. We were decimated. The village shared Oelita’s children. That was when she stopped Chanting to the God of the Sky, our rock of superstition, and when she began to show us a better way.”

How cruel to keep monsters alive in the name of mercy, thought Teenae through her pain.

The artwork continued. The story continued. Teenae ceased to be aware of either. She endured the pain. She struggled to stay conscious. She breathed deeply. She tried to crush the rods in her fists. She left teethmarks on the hardwood bit. Sometimes she screamed through clenched teeth. She could not stop the tearless sobs. Somewhere in her mind she thanked the God of the Sky that she was a woman now, a full-grown woman because there was no more blankness upon her body. The littlest girl, who had all of this still to experience, kept patting her head compassionately and when it was over, she was there, directly in front of Teenae, smiling.

Zeilar swabbed the wounds gently and bandaged them. Two of his wives came up the ladder. They had been preparing Teenae’s swimmers. They fed her the raw brains and gills. Pain sharpened the taste buds, they said, and now was the time for delicacies. The remains of the swimmers they had packed to rot in little jars so that the meat would be ripe in a week.

“You’re spoiling me,” she said when the women began to sponge the sweat from her face and body.

“We welcome you to our bond,” said the younger woman.

Teenae had saved her most important question until exactly the logical moment. “Will I ever get to meet her?”

“Yes,” said one-wife.

“Of course,” said three-wife.

“She is in hiding now,” said Zeilar, “because the Mnankrei have challenged her by Death Rite.”

“I’d heard a rumor like that. It frightened me.”

“Her wondrous kalothi will protect her and so they cannot win, but still she must be careful. You will meet her.”

“Why can’t people just leave each other alone!” Teenae spoke with adamant anger against Joesai, though it seemed that her anger was directed against the sea priests.

“Oh, but she welcomes the challenge. When the Mnankrei lose they will owe her a Great Favor.”

Yes, you will owe her a Great Favor. Teenae savored the coming victory over Joesai. Logic was better than tradition.