Courtship Rite

13

HOEMEI HAD LEFT a message and she had not replied. To meet him was forbidden by clan edict. Even to speak to him was forbidden. Why did he persist? Those maran-Kaiel were shamelessly bold! Did they not fear Aesoe? Was their love so small they would endanger her?

Yet how could she just forget them? She folded her arms crossly above a belly so large that it indicated a baby near term. Life was grief and anguish. Was a refusal morally correct? She had not refused Joesai. It had overwhelmed her with surprise the way Joesai had approached her after the interdiction, pushing through the social barricades so casually. Love that strong was difficult to resist. Since then duty and fear had hardened her. Being forewarned by Joesai’s behavior and no longer surprised, she had refused when Hoemei had first tried to see her. She had been cold, she had ignored him — and yet in his shy way he persisted. Her loneliness was weakening her resolve.

She wanted to see Hoemei. She desperately wanted news of Joesai — and Teenae, too. I will not see him! But what could Aesoe do if she spoke to him for a moment? Suppose the meeting was carefully clandestine, how could he even find out about it? The thought frightened her. Kathein was afraid of Aesoe.

I’m not brave. Her mind paused. I’m weak! she added furiously. It was their boldness that had attracted her to the maran-Kaiel when they had decided to court her. She was conventional. She stayed on the roads and only wondered about shortcuts. Gaet and his cavalier way with all that was sacred had fascinated her from the day they met. How did he survive? When he had brought her home she had expected a conservative family to balance his impulsiveness, but the whole family had turned out to be equally free of what seemed to Kathein to be the irreducible constraints. They were freer than Kathein had ever wanted to be.

She knew she talked boldly. She had a witty line. She knew she was charming. But there had never been boldness in her actions. At first Hoemei’s shyness seemed like tradition personified but when she coaxed from the man his deepest feelings, he was a catacomb of heresy. No safety there. Joesai talked of concepts so comfortably worn that they had the feel of a temple touchstone. He had seemed like a safe person. Then he had taken her and made love to her one day without so much as a token gesture to the rituals, a presumption so surprising she had been unable to find a way to say no. The whole family frightened her but their reckless ways had been a heady experience that had infused her personal life with the same thrill she got from physics.

And yet how like her life that they had been taken away. Here she was ready to bear her first child and there was no family to share her joy. She missed Joesai. If only she could cry out her grief with Noe. But now she was more afraid of them than she had been on that first wondrous evening.

Aesoe was watching.

She did not want to be another sweetmeat at the maran funeral. Yet how she loved to dive into the depths of Hoemei’s wariness and break surface having flushed a smile he had been hiding. How she loved to relax his worried frown. How she could use his smile right now!

There were friends who would be glad to celebrate the birth with her, and who would take care of her, but she wanted her family, and if she couldn’t have them she was going to bear the baby alone. The first contraction hit her, almost too faint to notice. The baby jerked. I’m all alone, she thought and closed and opened a hidden switch that triggered a chime in the servant’s quarters. It was a silly foible of hers. A rope and bell was just as adequate and didn’t need a fussy electron source.

Yar appeared in the stone archway. “You belled?” She stood awkwardly, a youth from the creches who was not yet accustomed to the strangeness of her good fortune. She lived with a boy whom Kathein had picked for her. They were lovers and the nucleus of a new family and they served Kathein while they studied physics.

“What could we do to make my hair beautiful?”

“You’ve decided to see him?” asked Yar excitedly, though she was more interested in the lectures on lightning and momentum that always went with the hairdressing.

“No. It’s for myself. If Hoemei comes it will be your duty to send him away.”

“I’d be so awed I wouldn’t be an obstacle at all!”

“You could tell him how wicked he was.”

Yar giggled. “I could hold out my skinny arms to block the way. I’d rather bake sweetworm cookies. How shall I do your hair?”

With a toss of her head, Kathein strode to the mirror and sat down but, suddenly gasping, clutched the arm of her chair.

“Mistress!” cried Yar.

“It’s all right. The labor is beginning. It will go away.”

“Lie down.”

“No. My hair is important,” she said stubbornly, as if ordering the world to follow the morning’s written plan.

But the contractions did not go away. Their intensity persisted, building for many hundreds of rapid heartbeats before fading. “They’re gone,” said Kathein. “We’ll do my hair now.”

“They’re not gone. I’ve seen the machines at the creches give birth. I’ll get the midwife. You go to bed.”

“No.”

“Please,” said Yar, tugging at her mistress.

Kathein considered. She sighed. So it had come. Now there was no way she could receive Hoemei, bless the God of the Sky for this interference. She took herself slowly down to the kitchen, waddling, Yar helping her on the stairs. “Get Reimone. Send him for a palanquin. Have the Ivieth bring it up the Bluethorn. I’ll meet them on the road.”

“You should stay here! The midwife can come here!”

“Child,” she said with annoyance, “I’m having the baby alone! Now do as I say.”

Yar looked at her, appalled, then rushed away. Kathein collected a sack of water, some food, some flannel swaddling, matches and a torch with refills, a knife, twine, some yellow chalk and the incense of kaiel bellies. She rolled them in a mat, which she placed inside a harness that hung from her forehead. Yar followed her, carrying the load until they met Reimone returning with the Ivieth bearers. “Speak to no one of this,” she cautioned from the window of the palanquin. The vehicle bobbed slightly as the Ivieth adjusted their loads. With her finger, she made the circle that was the sign of God while Yar and Reimone returned the sign.

“May God be overhead at the first cry of the birth!” said Yar as her mistress disappeared down the road in a light that was already dusk.

When the two Ivieth porters arrived at their destination, Geta’s brightest stars, Stgi and Toe, were rising and Kathein, gripping the poles of her decorated chair, had completed another series of contractions. Bioluminous globes glowed in the windows of the unbroken ring of buildings that surrounded the sacred hill. In some windows, lamps flickered. Trembling, she wasn’t sure she could walk, but her body, inured to obedience, followed her will. She rose from the chair and lifted the strap of her burden to her forehead and dismissed the huge Ivieth bearers with a coin.

Only when Kathein was alone again did she find strength to approach the pointed arch that was a gateway through the wall of houses circling the hill. Once she had passed through the perimeter there was no light and no life save for the stars and the odd flying glowsting. The City of Kaiel-hontokae had abruptly disappeared.

She was unafraid. She knew the catacombs of the Graves of the Losers by heart and did not quail at their evil reputation. In some way they were her life’s work for the sacred instrument that occupied her obsessively had been found sealed into these walls with the crystal that she had always believed somehow held the secret of the Voice of God.

There were four oval entrances to the catacombs themselves, and one jagged hole where a tunnel roof had collapsed. Clumsily she made her way to the black opening that the Chants had named the Mouth of the Southern Death. She needed a torch and had to lay down her burden to pull it out. That effort precipitated the return of labor. She paused, kneeling on the ground, her legs spread apart, keening her lonely cries, begging the child to wait.

God rose over the wall to the south while she moaned, and she watched Him between gasps, the sight of Him streaking across His Sky stirring her with the awe that Getans had always felt in the presence of their God. Her contractions became more prolonged, relinquishing only as He set in the west beside the dark but thinly crescented Scowlmoon.

Kathein lit her torch. She had to hurry. She forced her cumbersome body down through the macabre tunnels. No older architectural structure was known. Kathein herself thought of this maze of passages, not as a work of man, but as a work of God at a time when God still spoke to man. She knew that the caverns had been carved by a knife of heat hotter than any fire her best potters had been able to duplicate. A finger-thick scar tissue of solidified melt lined the walls. There was excellent evidence that rock had been gasified.

The Chants spoke of riches here, of metal coffins, and fine machines, but looters had long since stripped away whatever the rooms had held. Later clans had etched designs upon the walls and built crude chapels. Long before written history a children’s temple had existed on the lowest level, sorting kalothi and supplying a local village with meat and bone and leather and perhaps sacred relics. No place was farther from modern man; no place was closer to God. Here the Race had failed and here the Race would rise again.

So it had been prophesied.

Eventually Kathein could bear the pain no longer and selected an arched room at a level one stairwell higher than the low dungeon she had hoped to reach. Dank water seeped from cracks in the stone. She laid out her mat upon the floor. The torch flickered, relit, and died. She screamed her long breaths in the darkness in tune with the contractions until she had taken the child from herself, holding him, Joesai’s child.

Fingers crept along the floor, patting for the knife. She cut the umbilical cord in the dark. Still in the dark, she thanked the sky-spark that was God and held the bloody infant to her breast, warming his fury, while she recovered her strength. Only following the afterbirth did her unsteady hands light another torch. Monsters carved into the walls balefully bared flickering fangs at madonna and child. Over the torch she heated kaiel bellies for their incense. The prophesy said that kaiel incense would greet the Savior Who Speaks To God when he was born in the Graves of the Losers.

Carefully she swaddled the baby in soft long strips of flannel until he was soothed. Like God, I’ve brought you from an easy world to a harsh one. He was so tiny. She cried a little. This was the only gift she had left that she could offer her beloved Joesai — to make him father of the Savior. When she walked back into the light she was proud and her weakness did not overwhelm her.