Courtship Rite

21

TEENAE AWOKE AT DAWN. Blood-red Getasun bathed her from its perch above the mountains with hands that rippled redly over the bay. She examined the pain of her wounds with her mind. “I would drink blood for my strength,” she said, meaning the blood of her assailant.

Joesai was brooding out across the bay and was not aware that she had finally roused from her delirious sleep. He did not hear her faint voice.

She rolled her head toward him and raised her voice. “I would drink blood for my strength!” she repeated angrily.

“Is that wise?” counseled Joesai, still deep in his reverie. “He is one of Oelita’s people. She showed us mercy. I am in her debt. We can return mercy. Tae ran-Kaiel once said that you can only hold a land where you have three times as many friends as enemies.”

“I do not forgive a man who tries to kill me. I have contempt for a man who tries to kill me and is captured. I wish to see his generous offering to the Race so that the Race may be purified.”

“Revenge should wait until your pain has healed.”

“No.”

Joesai shrugged. “It will be dangerous to bring him on deck and to give him a knife he might throw at you.”

“The obvious continually eludes you,” she said impatiently. “Strap the knife to a mat so that it cannot be thrown. Leave one arm of my assailant free to rub his wrist against the blade.”

And so they carried to her the youth bound upon an iron-reed frame. Joesai, in his role as priest, invoked the ceremony in the expected musical monotone. His bearing changed. He spoke for the Race.

“We did not have kalothi. We died of the Unknown Danger.” The pain of the Race was in his voice. Then his voice became resonant until it challenged even the sea. “And God in His mercy took pity and carried us from the Unknown Place across His Sky so that we might find kalothi. We wept when He gave us Geta. We moaned when He cast us out. But God’s Heart was stone to our tears. Only in a harsh place beneath His Sky might we find kalothi. And only with kalothi shall we dare to laugh our laugh in the face of the Unknown Danger.”

Joesai brought out the priest’s Black Hand and White Hand, each with special scars, each carved from wood and mounted on short rods. He held them above his head so that he became long-armed. “Two Hands build kalothi.” With a vibrating sound that was half formal laughter, half formal grief, he meshed the wooden fingers together. “Life is the Test. Death is the Change. Life gives us the Strength. Death takes from us the Weakness. For the Race to find kalothi the Foot of Life follows the Road of Death.” The small ship heaved upon the waves. No land, no sea on Geta was immune from this ritual.

Joesai’s voice was implacable. “All of us contribute to God’s Purpose. All of us help distill the racial kalothi. Some of us are here to give Life. Some of us are here to give Death. Of these the greatest honor is to contribute Death for we all love Life.” He paused for only a moment but in that moment spliced irony into his monotone. His gaze was upon the youth. “It is with awe that I accept the offering of your defective genes.”

“It is against the Code to kill,” said the youth serenely.

“Oelita’s code, not mine!” snarled Teenae with such a thrust of hatred that her wounds stabbed her again.

“It is against the Kaiel Code to kill,” he sneered.

Joesai silenced Teenae with a piercing glance before she could reply a second time and returned his eyes to the youth. The Black Hand and the White Hand slightly askew, he answered in a voice that was more vengeful than priestly, “Of course. And we shall not kill. We are only here to receive your offering.”

“I have no offering for you.”

Joesai continued the ritual, unperturbed by such blasphemy, bringing forth from his robe certain sensual delights which were the Receiver’s obligation to the Giver. They were simple delights, for this was only a ship, not a temple. There was pure water, the touch of smooth glass, a shave, the taste of a berry. Each was refused.

Then came the time for the Cutting of the Wrists. But the youth defiantly held his fist away from the knife. Joesai placed the blood bowl. His men began the Chant of the Blood Flow, harmonizing like a giant heart in vigorous pulse, a heart whose beat began to slow and fade until it drifted away in silence. The youth laughed, proving he was still alive, but no man noticed because to them he was already dead.

Carefully, as if the Cutting of the Wrists had indeed been performed, as one would if he were planning to tan and shape and sew a fine leather coat from the hide of a corpse, Joesai began to skin the boy, unmindful of the surprised and then terrified screams that carried across the water and into the hills of Sorrow. The skinning was hardly begun before the boy’s pain and fear took his wrist against the knife that had been bound into the mat. He cried out for mercy, for the skinning to stop until he had had time to die, but Joesai did not stop.

The butchering went quickly. No part was wasted. The meat was salted or hung in strips to dry, glands were set aside for medicines, tendon and gut preserved, the bones went into a soup. A bowl of blood was presented to Teenae as her due.

Eiemeni, who had come to admire Oelita, expressed his regret as he washed the blood from his body in the sea with Joesai beside the wooden bulk of their ship. Joesai was unmoved as he sudsed his hair. “He chose to approach Teenae by my rules while he expected Oelita’s rules to protect him from reproach. Oelita lives by her rules and is protected by them. For her I have sympathy.”

They showed Teenae the hide as they stretched it for drying. She fingered the especially well-cut wheat stem cicatrice of the heresy. It would make a fine design on a leather binding for her copy of Oelita’s book.

Oelita!

A thought startled her, causing her pain because her whole body reacted. “Joesai! I forgot! In all the excitement I forgot to tell you that Oelita owns a Frozen Voice of God!”