Courtship Rite

22

OELITA CRUMPLED THE NOTE that had been penned in high script on fine blue paper and delivered anonymously. She threw it across the room at the four advisors she had convened for a council. “Manyar!” she raged, “the Mnankrei and the Kaiel are crushing us like a nut between the arms of a nutcracker! We have to fight! It is too soon!”

“It is always too soon,” said Manyar, pulling his robes closer to his body.

“And you, Eisanti, is that all you have to contribute, bland homilies that serve no further purpose than to keep the high day conversation sparkling? The Mnankrei offer us food while the Kaiel improve the road through the mountains. The famine isn’t even here yet and the beetles are already laying their eggs to feast off our death. The famine will come and then it will go, but will we ever rid ourselves of the Mnankrei priests who will take our men and women daily to that slaughterhouse in the Temple? Will we ever rid ourselves of the Kaiel priests who salivate after our tender children? We must resist them!”

Eisanti played nervously with his bracelets. “We will have to compromise until we are in a stronger position. Manyar is right; we cannot take an unyielding stand as yet. The tree bends until it is thick enough to resist the wind.”

“Tomorrow the Stgal are calling for the first of the Ritual Suicides. We have food! We don’t know how much of the new crop the underjaws will devour! We don’t know how much food we can buy. We don’t know that it will be impossible to rely on our other sacred sources!”

Old Neri interrupted. “O’Tghalie Sameese has calculated that there will be less death if the Stgal begin now.”

Oelita flared. “Of what use are the numbers the o’Tghalie manipulate? If you have measured the breadth of your field wrong it does not matter that you have the length correct for you will not be able to calculate your acreage!”

“Perhaps she is right,” said Taimon from the back of the room. “Perhaps the Stgal find this the opportune time to eliminate their opposition. Who will be able to say that they move with wrong motives?”

“It is our weakness,” added Manyar, cleaning his nails, “that we attract the low in kalothi.”

“That is our strength,” retorted Oelita.

In the end, as she always did, she made her own decision. She waited until her council had dispersed inconclusively. Her fists were clenched. It was a shock to her to discover that because they all had high kalothi they weren’t motivated enough to oppose the priests. But how could she form a council of the low in kalothi? She’d have to do all the thinking and she’d be constantly handling mistakes like that fool attempt to meet the Kaiel threat by murdering Teenae. I suppose it was always thus, she thought bitterly, a society stays stable by preying on those least able to defend themselves.

Her final decision was impulsive. She walked out into the town of Sorrow with only two bodyguards, down where the old buildings began, and pulled together a fearful crowd of those who had the most to lose, melding them into a group large enough so that they might find courage in each other while she led this mob toward the Temple.

All the Village of Sorrow above the waterfront was temple grounds. The Path of Trial wandered tortuously about the Temple itself and up over the hill above the Temple, twisting between the garden settings, each of its obstacles crafted to challenge the swiftness and strength and flexibility of some part of the body. Here the Stgal tested the physical kalothi of those who came under their jurisdiction. The Temple itself, built like a crescendo in this serpentine garden, began as a modest star that grew until the points of the star became halls dedicated to the Eight Sacred Foods and, continuing inward, transformed themselves into massive stone buttresses that rose majestically to support the tower that held at its pinnacle the rooms of Ritual Suicide. Nothing in Sorrow was taller than that tower. Whether the village was obscured by hill or haze, the tower could still be seen. Ships used it as a beacon. Of all the glories of the Stgal, the Temple of Sorrow was their greatest.

Inside the tower the gaming rooms spiralled around a shaft of air, seemingly supported by the light that laced through the colored glasses of the tall, narrow windows. There a Getan might play kol and chess and games that could not be won without sharp eyesight or steady hand or creative mind or color sense or ability to leap the obvious. Unobtrusively the Stgal priests kept score so that one’s kalothi rating could be updated, while supporting the Temple by collecting coin for food and drink and the company of male or female courtesans.

Getans were addicted to games, and they flocked to their temples to meet and laugh and compete. Outside the temple they might gamble for money or favors; inside a temple the games were free. There a Getan was gambling with his life and loving it.

To the imposing Temple at Sorrow, Oelita brought her motley group of losers who were not even sure that they had a right to life, much less sure that they had the ability to fight for it and win. Nearing the immense facade of this place where they had been defeated so often, some of the bawdy spirit that Oelita had infused in them began to vaporize. Here was the focus of their lost self-esteem. One man tripped and another made a loud joke about his friend’s clumsiness. Oelita posted them in front of the main portal with instructions to be vocal about their protest but when she was gone they hung back and took on the nature of a crumbling wall of bricks that busy people pass without a glance.

Oelita was welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Temple as an honored guest by the highest of the Stgal priests. They had been expecting her and received her with outward warmth. She was given cushions and drink and encouraged to talk. She spoke eloquently of opposition to both the Mnankrei and the Kaiel, and urged restraint in calling a condition of famine. There were other ways. There were other foods. Vaguely she had some of Nonoep’s profane triumphs in mind. Oelita built her strategy on an appeal to Stgal vanity — they were as good as the Mnankrei and as good as the Kaiel, and cleverness could defeat their opponents.

The Stgal listened, drew her out, laughed with her, and finally, without explanation, had guards take her up to a room high in the tower. It was said of the Stgal that they would feast you with great camaraderie, waiting until the dessert to poison you. She could see her people down below. No one dispersed them, even noticed them. She shouted to them through the bars, but she was too high. No one heard. Till dusk she watched, and with the setting of the sun they just melted away.

Her tower room was more than comfortable. Here the kalothi-weak were pampered to honor the sacrifice they were to make for the Race. The Lowest on the List spent his last night with everything a Getan valued — clear water for the throat and incense for the nose and tastes for the tongue from the stamen of the hug flower and the chanting of a choir of friends and a mate to please the body. Here was gold to feel and the finest cloth to lie upon. Still, the window was barred with iron. From this window, they said, no more exalting sight ever met a human’s eyes than that last transit of the God of the Sky across the stars.

She couldn’t believe she was here. Was it a mirage, that fervent group of people she had commanded? They were ghosts. She was alone. Was it illusion to think that words would ever raise people to action? The first crisis, and my words collapse like a sand city cut down by a single wave. What was loyalty? What made men stick together in good and in bad? I thought I knew.

She was trying to understand why she was here. It was against the rules. She had the highest kalothi rating in all of Sorrow. And then she laughed through the bars at the night sky. The rules were to be broken, as every kol master knew — if you could have the consequences of the broken rule. And what was her death to them? She would slash her wrists and die. I’ll have no choice. No one would care. Life would go on as if she never was.

She found herself staring through the bars vacantly, thoughtlessly, waiting, waiting for God. And when God passed overhead, she laughed and cried. God was a stone. When you were brought up among a whole people who believed in God the Person, some of His Morality remained a part of your soul. God the Stone had no morality. Even knowing that, she had never really felt it before. She was here because there was no morality. God was a stone. That’s all there had ever been. And Oelita wept.