Courtship Rite

23

THE SMALL SHIP and its one-masted companion were anchored near an ancient breakwater that was smashed by wave action. Someone had tried basing a small fleet here long ago and had given up, defeated by a rocky coast, harborless and inhospitable to ships. Joesai chose this refuge only because of an o’Tghalie clan-home in the mountains near the sea. Teenae had been carried on a stretcher up through the foggy woods and left with relatives to recuperate.

The sweet moments he spent with Teenae soothed his brooding turmoil. Restlessly he wandered through the woods, once finding a red flower of an intricate design he had never seen before, bringing it back to Teenae knowing that his little gift would please her. His anguish was forgotten.

“It is like a little temple,” she said and smiled at him.

“I was up on the peak looking to see if our ships were still there.”

“In this mild weather you expect them to blow away?”

“I expect the Mnankrei to sweep down upon us.”

“We’ll run away together. We can fly before the wind faster than they can. Haven’t I had experience as a sail?” she teased, laughing, and taking his hand.

The o’Tghalie observatory fascinated Joesai, for he had always been interested in the stars. He often brought a bottle and a loaf of bread along the trail at dusk to spend the night there with one of Teenae’s uncles who told stories about that imp’s stubborn youth. “You can see why they sold her!” And he’d roar with laughter.

This uncle was not a very conventional man. He had a love of instruments, which was unusual among the o’Tghalie. He was the renegade who had taught Teenae things she shouldn’t have known. O’Tghalie brains were peculiar in that if they did not learn to perform complicated additions and multiplications in their heads as a child, they never learned to do these operations well. Thus o’Tghalie women, denied school as young girls, became servants rather than mathematicians.

Joesai was awed when he watched “uncle” o’Tghalie take measurements and transform the numbers by elaborate computation during a mere pause and holding of the breath. But uncle was not a man who rested happy with mysteries, and one cloudy night he showed Joesai how to “throw the bones”, a system he had devised so that a non-mathematician might calculate with reasonable accuracy. It was based on the weird principle that multiplications could magically be transformed into additions and back again. Joesai was so delighted by this trick that one morning he brought the bones with him and set them up behind Teenae’s head so that she wouldn’t see what he was doing. He had her give him multiplications to perform which he was able to do correctly, to her amazement.

Joesai learned some facts about astronomy that he had never known before. Once he was speculating with Teenae’s uncle about a philosophical point Oelita had made in a pamphlet. God behaved like a stone. Joesai was convinced that, since God wasn’t a stone, there should be some way of pointing up the difference.

Uncle brightened perceptibly and dragged Joesai down to the library to pore over soiled books of calculations. God’s orbit was indeed predictable to a high degree of accuracy, but there had been two anomalies. The orbit had changed twice with no known cause since it had been under observation. No other celestial objects ever did that.

Joesai remembered Oelita’s crystal and what Teenae had said about it. He was sure that it was only a piece of glass, but what if it really was one of Kathein’s crystals? The enigma of the Silent God was the most fascinating of Geta’s puzzles and it might well be worth a major effort to look into this piece of the riddle. He hadn’t thought about Oelita for a while. He had been preoccupied with the astonishing revelation of Mnankrei intentions the night of the silo firebombing. He was now planning a probe into northern waters. But perhaps while the men took the ship north, he could make a quick return expedition to the south and find out more about that crystal.

He rounded up two little o’Tghalie girls who were pestering their mothers at the paper mill and took them out so that they might show him the source of the mill’s clay. That became a pleasant high day spent molding clay models of the houses around Oelita’s residence from memory and telling tales to his wide-eyed companions.

Oelita’s house, he recalled, was perched on a hill with an easily defended back and no access to the front at all, or so it seemed — except to a man like Joesai, to whom the scaling of sheer stone walls was a minor climbing trick that required only a hammer and iron-reed spikes. He could station two spies with flags on two select rooftops and break in with a very low probability of discovery. Teenae he had already quizzed in detail about the interior. She knew exactly where the crystal was kept. The foray into Sorrow should be a quick in-and-out affair. After his disasters there, he wasn’t really willing to linger.

Simultaneously he planned a cautious reconnaissance up north while his two tiny o’Tghalie counselors climbed his shoulders and pulled at his ears and hair with clay-slick hands.

“I’ll feed you to the Mnankrei,” he said nasally as one of the girls pinched his nose and held on.

“I’ll stew you in ca-ca!” retorted the girl while the other giggled.

Joesai rose to his full height and tucked the girls under his arms. “Off to the sea we go.”

“Why the sea? I’m hungry.”

“The sea is where the cannibal sea priests are! They’re hungry!”

The girls began to squeal and wriggle, but he got them to the rocky ledge where swimmers went, tossed them into the water and gave them a bath so he wouldn’t have to return them to their mothers full of clay. “Let me show you my little sailboat.”

He had acquired a swift three-man vessel for the trip south, and so the larger ship would go north under the command of Raimin. Later they would reunite for a more daring raid against the Mnankrei. Joesai was anxious to bring back to Teenae her pair of boots but was wary of pitting his sailing skills against those of a seasoned Mnankrei priest. He watched the naked girls play in the tiny vessel. He was not yet sure of a strategy. Sinking wheat-laden boats headed south was appealing, but such a tactic was a double-bladed dagger since it meant starvation for those who did not receive the wheat. Judgmental errors of that magnitude tended to annoy Aesoe. How would Aesoe think? He would steal the wheat and reship it. Joesai laughed.

“Come along,” he said to his two clean girls.

“Catch us!”

A sudden storm nearly wrecked his too-small vessel on its way to Sorrow, delaying them a full day and smashing three of Eiemeni’s ribs. A much-sobered Joesai debarked for his brief mission. He wore a faint makeup that emphasized unnatural lines in his facial cicatrice so that recognition would be more difficult, but there was little chance of discovery in their covert route to Oelita’s residence. Strangely they found only one man guarding her place, at the rear. Breaking in via the frontal wall was easier than expected.

A quick search showed that much rearrangement had occurred since Teenae had been here. The crystal was gone. Nor was there time for a destructive search. Joesai had no intention of alerting the outside guard, and so when his flagmen signaled the all clear, he retreated down the wall leaving his iron-reed spikes in place.

The three men regrouped in the street, moving not as fast as they might have because of Eiemeni’s ribs. Stormwinds were still lashing them but they preferred the miserable weather because the clouds and rain and fog shrouded them and gave them an excuse to hide their faces behind wraps. Few villagers were abroad.

“We’ll have to find out where she is.”

“That’ll be days. We aren’t equipped.”

“She’s probably not in town or her place would be better guarded.”

“I’ll find out.” Joesai was thinking of several inns where he might pick up some information but one with a small wheat stalk carved into its door struck him as ideal. He reconnoitered the streets for the best escape paths, and entered, dripping, holding his cloak close about him. He ordered a hot mead and when it came spoke casually to the barkeep. “Any more news of Oelita?”

“She’s still in the tower.” The voice caught. It was upset.

Joesai allowed himself a quick sip of mead while he digested that. The Stgal had picked her up. They would kill her. Incredible. “A rough place to be,” he muttered.

By the time he was out on the street again, he had decided what they would do. He looked at Rae and Eiemeni. “Rae, you’re the strongest. Get back to that God’s bane of a boat of ours and bring the spy’s-eye. Eiemeni, I want you to lay out a path from the Temple tower that just fades into the town. Take your time. Learn every stone. I’ll have to go to the Temple for some information. We’ll meet at Five Cross, or if that gets too prickly, the Eighth Marker at the waterfront. I’ll try to be back by the third highnode of God. If I’m not, wait for highnode of the next Orbit.”

The Temple was lightly attended. Joesai had his choice of courtesans. He picked a small girl he knew was new to town, a pretty Nolar girl, probably a runaway. He asked for a quiet game of kol in one of the more expensive booths. Privacy was important after that silo-bombing fiasco. The girl played a creditable game. She was eager to please and he began a conversation with her, slowly.

Part of him was not comfortable trying to charm information out of such a lovely youth, but another part of him was long used to inducing people to tell him what he wanted to know. The secret was to start them talking about what interested them, then get their speech level up to a chatter and listen.

This girl was fascinated by the Temple. It was the most beautiful place she had ever worked, so he got her to talk about it. It wasn’t long before she touched the topic of the fabulous tower rooms. She knew he wouldn’t be touchy on the subject because she could sense instinctively his kalothi level, and the luxury of working with Ritual Suicides intrigued her.

“There’s going to be some consoling for you to do up there,” he said to keep her on the topic.

“A poor woman is in the north room already. I hear her crying every night. Why are they keeping her so long?”

“Have you served her?”

“Oh no. The north room is not mine. I’m new and that’s the finest room. If I stay here long enough, maybe. I’d like that If I please enough men maybe they’ll let me.” She smiled ravishingly, and he could feel her embarrassment.

He let her please him. She started with a hot bath that did wonders for knotted muscles that had been through a howling night of near death on the sea. It was the best thing he could do before the coming ordeal. He paid his petite courtesan well so that there would be no lingering doubt in her mind about her ability to please.

He knew most of Oelita’s people by rote memory and picked from his mental files the man he wanted, a_tburly ironsmith who was as gentle as he was big. When Joesai entered his smithy, the man was at work, his forge fire challenging the cracks of its prison walls.

“You!” The man raised a red hot rod but Joesai knew he was harmless.

“I need your help.”

“My help!” the man choked.

Joesai had chosen to reach this man through a judicious mixture of falsehood, truth, and bamboozlement. “Ho! you believe every lie the Stgal tell?” He knew the Stgal were well known for their oily versions of the truth. “Why do you think I would harm the gentle Oelita? Would you? Ho!” he emphasized, moving right to the point, “it is the Stgal who have her in their prison, is that not so?”

“You tried to kill her!”

“Are you sure?” He lied by indirection. “It is the Stgal who wish her dead. Isn’t that self-evident now? And if the Stgal had tried to kill her, wouldn’t it be like them to direct the blame elsewhere? If there is a famine now, cannot they clean their streets of the infestation of heretics? Who knows who caused the silo fire? Who has better access to it than the Stgal?”

“Your woman confessed!”

“After being raped and abused and hung from a ship’s mast all night! Do you call that a confession?”

The ironsmith returned his rod to the fire. “You were seen at the site of the silo burning.” He waited with his hand on the rod.

“And why should I have been so clumsy!” snarled Joesai, releasing his emotions now that he was certain they would not betray the truth. “Would I do a thing like that in broad sight? For what gain? The Kaiel have wheat and cannot sell it to you because of the mountains. Recall that when the silo was bombed, the Mnankrei were negotiating with your Stgal to sell you wheat! Perhaps those two infamous clans plotted this together! By so doing the Stgal could rid themselves of your like, hoping to betray the Mnankrei later. The Mnankrei would see such a deal as an opening to betray the Stgal and so gain dominion over the coast. My wife overheard the Mnankrei scheming to burn your silo and we scoffed at her but prudently deployed ourselves to prevent such an atrocity, failing in a way that made us look both guilty and foolish.” He did not wait for a reply. “Do you wish your Oelita out of the tower? I’ll bring her out.”

The smith’s eyes were narrow with suspicion. “Why?”

“To clear my name,” he lied. “I have not enjoyed the way the Stgal have made a fool of me.”

“No one can escape from the tower.”

“Give me iron spikes and a rhomboid jack. Do you have that? I need nothing else.”

The smith’s mother appeared at the inner doorway, rag in hand, a feeble woman, half blind, half deaf, a candidate for the tower in times of famine. “Who is he? Why do you shout?”

“I will let you follow me,” implored Joesai, striding now more boldly toward the fire. “You will see for yourself that your Oelita remains safe. Her friends can help. If I’m lying and I remain here and she remains in the tower, how can I harm her? If I’m telling the truth, how can I harm her if I carry her down while all of you watch my every movement?”

“What’s he babbling about,” croaked the old woman hysterically.

“Old mother. The man needs a jack.” He returned his attention to Joesai. “Of what use is a jack?”

“And spikes. I’ll look at all the jacks you can find, and pick the best one.” He turned to the hag and spoke slowly and with directed volume, for she was evidently hard of hearing. “And you, kind woman, if you’ve got some hot soup, I have a long climb up the outside of the tower, and soup would do me good. Your son and I are going to rescue our beloved Oelita!”

The woman beamed, understanding at last.

Totally in control, Joesai approached the furnace and picked up a glowing rod with a pair of tongs he appropriated. “I’ll need spikes that fit between the stones of the tower. This is too thick. I’ll show you.” He began to hammer the metal until it was the shape he wanted. “Like this! Can we make them?”

“No one has ever climbed the tower without a scaffold,” said the ironsmith, taking the spike and quenching it.

Joesai grinned. His cloak was steaming and his diagrammed face had already begun to sweat. “Ho! That’s why we’ll get away with the preposterous feat of stealing our heretic away from the Stgal!”