Courtship Rite

34

BENDAEIN HOSA-KAIEL was old enough to be wise yet young enough to be willing to partake in an arduous crusade. He had long been known as a man of action whose cautious strategy had extended Kaiel influence eastward around the Itraiel almost to the Sea of Tears. He was a scholar and a prime voice of the Expansionists. The full ten fingermen of his Hand Council argued with him in the den of his mansion, only Joesai remaining stoically silent.

Bendaein’s face design was asymmetrical, built around knife wounds he had received during the gruesome subjugation of the lower Itraiel as a precocious youth. The marred face, layered with experience, gave this Event Mover authority in the eyes of his fellows but to Joesai it looked like the slashed face of a loser. The younger man had heard over mead that Bendaein had been skinned during the opening play of the Itraiel campaign and had been forced to borrow a coat to survive.

Joesai broke a toothpick with casual force. Bendaein did have a reputation as a fast learner. However, from his pedantic words, Joesai suspected that he was not so much of a fast learner as he was a fast reader. He had even minted a name for their foolhardy venture: the Gathering of Outrage — useful if they should survive long enough to be written into history.

Bendaein planned to execute his Gathering with a meticulous respect for the formalities established by previous Gatherings. Such was Geta’s meager transworld law. Joesai found himself displeased with this sensible approach. A Gathering was by its nature an aberration, a response to something the Chants could not anticipate. Who would have predicted human genes in profane bugs? What could any past Gathering say about that crime?

Joesai grunted objections, mainly to himself, while others talked. Tradition was for the everyday: marriage and food and love and death. He felt in his ribcage the danger in patterning actions upon the rituals of past Gatherings. What did any of them have in common? If you really studied them you found that Gatherings had a predisposition to disperse in the desert from hunger and thirst. The underclans had a name for the phenomenon — a Gathering of Bones.

Joesai had contempt for the self-righteous indignation he was hearing. The Kaiel must know what a Gathering could become! They were a Gathering’s wardens who had stayed to feel its consequences! When the whisky was flowing did not Kaiel jokes hint that Mi’Holoie’s crusaders had sacked wealthy d’go-Vanieta — from whose ashes Kaiel-hontokae was to rise — more from the hunger of the trek than from piety?

His mind wandered to thoughts of Kathein as his eyes wandered from Bendaein to the wall tapestries. The weaving was of Orthei craftsmanship, a rich scene of mass Ritual Suicide, common enough as a theme, save that Joesai could not locate its source. The rite was not as it was in these parts of the world. The man and the woman making their Contribution had slit their throats rather than their wrists and blood ran down their bodies in crimson dye, their eyes vacant. Temple courtesans and luxury abounded, the excuse for the tapestry. A particularly voluptuous courtesan, life-size, caught him with the enticing look of her threads.

She had forgotten the one she had just brought to the Last Pleasure and seemed to stare at Joesai intently, hoping for more. The woven carvings of her body were tight geometrical designs that flowed along her curves. She reminded him of Kathein and he smelled Kathein’s perfume, his loins stirring while he half returned the courtesan’s glance and would have faded into the tapestry to that couch and his dreams of Kathein had his startled ears not caught talk of a great land march.

Getans were a land-oriented people on a world of eleven disjoint seas. They tended to think in terms of mountain and plain, since every sea could be bypassed if necessary. No Gathering had ever had to challenge an island rule and that in itself made tradition worthless in the present case.

“Taking Soebo by land we’re more liable to drown than set table for Judgment Feast,” Joesai lashed dryly, speaking for the first time.

Bendaein was not troubled by sarcasm. “There is also land between here and Soebo. Would you have us row it or sail?”

Joesai grunted noncommittally. He was soured by the role he had been awarded. His mission was to set up an undefended Advance Inquest in the Plaza at Soebo. Such effrontery in Mnankrei territory would be Ritual Suicide without the trappings of temple decor. Prime Predictor Aesoe, acting through Bendaein, was brazenly asking him to make his Contribution to the Race, a sacrifice move in some larger strategy.

Of course there were advantages to heading the advance suicide party. He would be beyond Bendaein’s communication lines. Then he could create his own campaign. What infuriated Joesai was knowing Aesoe knew he would disobey orders. Thus the master plan must call for a man to kill himself flouting clan discipline.

Aesoe can see my death and why such a death will be useful to him — may those who love him vomit at his funeral!

Joesai broke another toothpick and cleaned his nails. He was not listening to the Grand Strategy. I’ll need Noe, he thought. One-wife was related to the sea-going peoples of the northern Njarae who were not pleased with Mnankrei rule. She will have access to ships. He thanked God for his family. They were loyal, come gain or sorrow.

A conference with brother-husbands Gaet and Hoemei was in order. He felt the old wild pressure in him, the need to strike without thinking — which was his asset in an emergency but which he had learned was deadly if there was time for thought. The creche was closing in again. Gaet and Hoemei could calm him. There was a way out. There had always been a way out. Hoemei could think through any trap.

I wonder if Aesoe will ever turn on my shortest brother? I must be here if that happens. They need me. Now he needed them.

Joesai’s fierce longing for action pulled at him. Dreaming about Kathein, he sneaked away from the lifeless meeting. It was because of her that he had been marked for death. The sweet mystery of that woman had driven him to oppose Aesoe’s will with relentless abandon, until his persistent violation of official Kaiel strategy brought the final disfavor from a Council dominated by Aesoe’s ambition. In opposing Aesoe’s seduction of Kathein, he had opposed Aesoe’s drive upon distant Sorrow. Now he was expendable. He would be used to blunt the Mnankrei who also had designs upon the coast.

He remembered a happy Kathein splashing nude in the pool of their central courtyard, wearing a crown of love vine, pink with the first buds of flower. Gaet had failed to herd her with the rest of his family to the Founding Day clan dinner with its mock Arant pudding made of beans. Kathein slipped away, not wanting to go, and he had slipped out of Gael’s clutches, unwilling to leave her. Love vine was not flowering now, but he bought some anyway in the half hope it would touch her memory. How could a Six-love of such intensity ever have failed at the bonds?

Beside her door he debated whether to whack the knocker or throw the arm of the silly electron bell she maintained to elevate herself above the rest of humanity. Either way he would risk having the door shut in his face. It was easier to pick the lock and just enter.

“Joesai!” She found him on the second floor, staring at his baby.

“Ho! He’s a big one!” Casually he handed her the green love vine. “Remember when we made him?”

She threw the vine away. “I do not! You carry your arse between your eyes! Aesoe will kill you when he finds you’ve been here!”

Joesai grinned at her and she trembled between reach and withdrawal.

“I made something for you,” she said as if she’d just cooked up a special batch of poison. “Not because I like you, but because you’ll need it, you fool. I have better things to do with my time!”

She tricked him into a room with four of her people. That was a disappointment; he’d wanted them to be alone. “What is it?” he asked, looking at a box built into a packsack, cluttered with black knobs and a reel of wire.

“It’s a portable rayvoice. It doesn’t speak but it gives off powerful pulses that can be detected here in Kaiel-hontokae even if you are as far away as Soebo. Teenae helped me with the coding. It is slow but it is redundant. That means, stupid, that your message will have so much repetition in it that it can smash through heavy noise and still be decoded. Hoemei will have the code. You’ll have to learn it.”

“What use would I have for such a cumbersome contraption?” He was really quite pleased. Hoemei’s ability to locate his men in Soebo had made an immense impression. Better yet, Bendaein wouldn’t know what to make of it and the Mnankrei might never suspect worse than a soup pot.

“You’re a dunderhead. I don’t even like you. Am I to receive no thanks?”

He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Anytime. All you want.”

She stiffened under his arm. “Not that kind!”

He held onto her body, refusing to be rejected. “Kathein. We love you.”

She sneered. “That’s over. I have my own life and my own family, and my own lovers, if you please!”

Joesai was bewildered by her hostility. Few women had ever loved him. The ones who had still held him. He clenched his mind until the pain went away, then searched for some common ground. “Teenae spoke of the wonders of the new Voice of God.”

“… that you nearly lost for us!”

He grinned contritely.

“More of God’s words have appeared this high morning.” She sighed. “Joesai, I’m truly sorry if I’m irascible. I’m terrified. God is speaking to us; He has broken His Silence, and it’s not what I expected. I need your opinion. You. Your opinion. You’re the only person I know who cares enough about the heavens to understand what it might mean. I’ll show you the latest silvergraphs.”

There were only four clear pages of writings — in an alphabet that was almost familiar in a dialect that almost made sense. He puzzled over the script. “I don’t understand the key words. ‘Destroyer’ sounds like a grain mill. Pulverizer? But ‘cruiser’ and ‘battlegod’?”

“A god who plays games, I thought.”

“Twelve-inch guns?”

“There was a gungod in another fragment.”

“It is very obscure.”

“A form of the word ‘kill’ is used eighteen times in those four pages.”

“I noticed that. This is an ancient language. It speaks of the world of the Heroic Solo Chant.” Joesai was awed to the point of religious revelation. “He sets His tale in the World of the Sky.”

“What would ‘weapon’ mean? Here” — she pointed — “I thought it meant a knife because it is used to kill, but the other reference” — she pointed again — “refers to a cart. A knife with wheels?”

“Let’s make ritual to reveal more pages.”

“No. You have to go. Go now! Keep these pages. I have copies.”

“Kathein. I came to see you.”

“Out!” she flared. “Or I’ll have you thrown out! Can’t you see I’m busy? And take your rayvoice. Hoemei will assign a man to you to care for it.”

He gazed at her morosely, unwilling to leave. Her craftsmen were watching him.

“I know,” she said, scorning his open love. “You’d kill for me. Now get out!”