Courtship Rite

36

THE ALLIANCE DOCUMENT had come in from the printers. Oelita lay curled by the window of her room on the second floor of the maran-Kaiel mansion re-reading its lucid phrases, smelling the inked paper, and feeling smug. The prolog was all hers. She hadn’t let them change a word of it. Some of the free poetry was hers — she liked images — but the contract was mostly the word-smithing of Hoemei’s students, edited by the iron hand of Hoemei himself.

How could Hoemei of the hairy chest and tender smiles love Joesai? They were so different!

The writing of the agreement had been an awesome experience unlike any group work she had ever undertaken. Her confrontations with the Stgal had taught her that priestly councils were ponderous affairs where hidden decisions were made in a guise to appease and lull opponents. Her own heretical group was scarcely better and many had been the time she had been forced to castigate and cajole. In contrast, the Kaiel mongered their wares with open enthusiasm and the precision of practiced survivors.

The group assigned to bargain with Oelita consisted of six men and five women, nine of them offspring of the creches. Three might take her for a game of kol at the temple, proposing, while they played, outrageous and often conflicting deals which they would bamboozle her into buying. The others would be off studying, creating new proposals, testing for flaws.

When she finally agreed to a deal — she smiled remembering her gullibility — they would start to bicker among themselves about why they thought she might later be unhappy with that deal. Sometimes some old teacher of Hoemei would sit with them mediating, teaching, guiding their efforts. They would be radiantly excited one day and dour the next after having dreamed upon the consequences. They were obsessed with consequences.

Oelita was familiar with Stgal organizational architecture which tried for no high structures. The Stgal governed by patchwork and emergency repairs. They were always having to redo what they had just done. Policies were reversed and amended. Failed policies were frequently reintroduced after the failures were forgotten.

With a lifetime of such experiences Oelita was amazed to discover these intense young Kaiel feverishly designing an edifice built on piles driven into the past, able to support whole future generations. Each paragraph was placed in the document like it was a foundation stone under a temple whose upper stories would give solid floor to an eyrie for beloved, if chimeric, grandchildren.

Of the eleven, Oelita became closest to Taimera, a studious hedonist, almost a child, taken only recently from her creche by Hoemei, her breasts, neck, shoulders as yet unscarred. She was a mischievous girl who had a sharp eye for which threads of the past a weaver must grasp to splice strength into any future design. She was the one who probed Oelita deepest for reservations, always sensitive to conflict between Kaiel ambition and heretic morality. One time when Oelita was giving Taimera a lesson on coastal clan relationships, Taimera os-Kaiel explained why her co-workers were so thorough.

Those groupings of Kaiel who created effective laws gained power, money, influence — and the release of their genes to the breeding rooms of the creches. Predictions accurate over the immediate future were rewarded, but the big stake was in being able to control distant consequences.

The young group that Hoemei had assembled around Oelita knew that Kaiel auditors, armed with hindsight, would still be checking over the effects of this document when its authors were well into their political prime. If by then the coastal peoples were prospering in their relationship with the Kaiel, the votes of each author of such success would be enormously magnified, but if the document failed to do what they were predicting for it, then they would find themselves relegated to some petty job in the bureaucracy.

It was a matter of honor to Taimera, and some anxiety, to have the kind of record which spoke of continuous good judgment. She was ambitious. She had been driven to excellence to escape her creche, and was driven now to reach the top councils. As yet, she confessed to Oelita, she had managed a constituency of only five people, and so her voting weight was low, but she knew that the power of a Kaiel was not based on constituency size alone. In the end it was based on the craftsmanship of one’s work.

The document had already been through the financial council to insure that, if it became law, funds would be available for its implementation. There had been no trouble. It had been written with a full knowledge of the funding criteria it would have to meet. Now it was on the voting roll.

Any Kaiel in good standing was allowed to vote before the cutoff date, but few would because the Kaiel had a peculiar system. A mere yes or no was not sufficient. The Kaiel maintained that a yes/no vote did not require careful thought and so encouraged sloppy lawmaking. A Kaiel who voted, and they were constantly taking the trouble to vote on something, made a deposition in the Archives stating in detail what he believed to be the consequences of his choice. The archivist did not accept the vote unless the consequences were stated in measurable terms.

The voting on any issue was sparse, but indicated the decision of Kaiel who had taken the trouble to inform themselves and were willing to gamble their political future on their estimate of the outcome. There was no central lawmaking council. A Kaiel was trained from childhood to make laws in the areas where he felt a personal responsibility. He soon learned that, to get a law passed, he had to contact a representative number of Kaiel who were likely to vote on the issue and to work out a consensus with them before he put his suggestion on the voting roll.

Oelita was told by Taimera that there was an unwritten custom requiring twenty committed yes votes and a statistical analysis of the opposition before a bill would be accepted. Since every Kaiel prided himself on his ability to predict, little legislation was put forward that was not passed.

The nature of the attack upon the Stgal was to be a simple one. Copies of the alliance document would be distributed covertly among Oelita’s supporters so that they would know she sought their support for a game play resembling the de-priesting play of kol.

Young Kaiel would begin to infiltrate toward the coast, recruiting constituencies. A Kaiel, taking on a member of some coastal clan, would assume a personal responsibility to protect that person and, if food became short, to bring in food for him or pull him out to the refugee camps that were being built along the road in the Valley of Ten Thousand Graves. In return the represented one would transfer his name from the kalothi rolls of the Temple at Sorrow to the kalothi rolls of Kaiel-hontokae and swear to uphold the laws of the Kaiel.

Oelita felt guilty that the first people to be protected would be her own, but Hoemei only laughed and said that a Kaiel’s first duty was to his own constituency — it was that obligation which gave Kaiel-ruled territories their vigor. When the people surrounding Sorrow found that the low in kalothi protected by the Kaiel were better off than the high in kalothi protected by the Stgal, the Stgal would find themselves deserted and suddenly powerless.

“Do you think many of my people will give Contribution in your Temple?” Oelita had been able to get no concessions about Ritual Suicide.

“We are better organized than you imagine. The first of our Kaiel to penetrate the coast will bring with them the deviant underjaw suppressor and it will first go to those farms who bond themselves to the Kaiel thus protecting their neighbors also. Taimera has herself decided to work with your Nonoep on the large scale processing of edible profane foodstuffs. It won’t be much at first, but it will help take the edge off the famine and your people will get the first of the production. I can guarantee you nothing, only that they will be better off with us than with the Stgal.”

“What of the Mnankrei?” asked Oelita.

Hoemei smiled. “It is convenient to be brother to a killer.”

“You’re sending Joesai to Soebo?”

“Aesoe is sending him to Soebo.” Hoemei’s smile broke into a grin. “Even Aesoe makes mistakes and I’m ever willing to take advantage of them.”

“I’m still afraid of Joesai.”

“He has his gentle side. He does not dislike you. He is a child of the creches and all of us have been challenged by some form of Death Rite. It marks the soul. He would that you were his equal.”

“Wouldn’t you like to abolish such cruelty?”

“Someday — when the land becomes water and the water, land.” Which meant never. “The Death Rite is fair; it gives your kalothi a chance, and thus prepares you for Life, which is seldom fair.”

Aesoe dropped by the maran-Kaiel mansion and took Oelita for a walk. He brought her to the botanical gardens where profane plants were bred for beauty. Many of them had strange symbiotic relationships with the insects. The flowers that attracted bugs by shape and color and smell had a similar effect on humans who bred them for ever more exotic show.

“Some bluenoses!” she exclaimed. They were darkly violet with the hugest flaring nostrils she had ever seen. Her mind drifted to the bluenose season when spots of violet covered the hills above the Njarae, thriving in the windy spray of sea.

Aesoe talked with her about the endlessly varied lives of the insects, a hobby of his, and he was genuinely glad to talk to someone as field-wise as she. He specialized in watching the eight-legged kaiel. He laughed when he told Oelita how lazy the kaiel were, how they always convinced the hogburrow to carve out their homes for them by stroking the backs of the hogburrow with scent that stimulated nesting behaviors.

There among the flowers he made her an honorary Kaiel. He bestowed an arbitrary voting weight of 200 on her and told her that she would be allowed to vote on any issues involving the coast. He was not going to require her to identify the members of her constituency until she felt sure that the Kaiel had not betrayed her trust.

Then he walked her back to the maran mansion, a long but interesting way over hills of stately homes. He flirted with her, patting her behind and telling her how voluptuous it was.

“You’ll have to try kaiel smells,” she said, taking his arm, “flattery doesn’t seduce me.”

The Prime Predictor left her at the door, saying he had urgent business elsewhere, perhaps because he remembered that Joesai was home. When she entered the inner court of the maran household, feeling stronger than she ever had before in her life, she met Joesai standing alone in the high ritual garb of priest. Even that did not daunt her.

“Aesoe just made me an honorary Kaiel. I have a voting weight of 200,” she announced proudly.

“Ho! The madman is at it again, flaunting tradition. You think yourself worthy of such honor?”

“Yes!” she flung at his insult and felt gay. “Will you be voting on the coastal treaty?”

“I’m voting yes. But with some reservations.”

Teenae had appeared on the balcony overlooking the inner court. “You leave Oelita alone, you big bully!”

“What are you filing with the Archives?” Oelita persisted, watching Joesai for every flicker of his expression.

“I think the program will be difficult to implement. It needs you, and I’m predicting that you won’t be there.”

Teenae sensed Oelita’s shock and vaulted off the balcony to attack Joesai with her fists. He simply reached out and snatched his wife by the wrist and jerked her up into the air, while his other hand lazily reached around and took her by the roundness of her buttocks, tossing her casually, clothes and all, into the central pool. She made a huge splash, accompanied by Joesai’s laugh resonating from his massive bones.

Suddenly, Oelita was very afraid again.