Courtship Rite

44

TEENAE TOOK UPON herself the duties of working in the forward organization, duties requiring her to slip in and out of Sorrow in her mediations with the people of the Gentle Heresy. Her best friend came to be an old weaver of the o’Maie who had grown enamored of scholarship when he was crippled as a boy and could not work the looms or dye. He was poor, always in the same ragged trousers and sweat-soaked leather jerkin, always at home in his insect-ridden attic room, always smiling with his rotten teeth. His grasp of Getan history was great and he helped her translate portions of The Forge of War which she brought with her.

Teenae had become fascinated by a fanatic she found in that vile history who was plagued by the Riethe madness. His grandiose visions of an impending conquest of Riethe by the Worker clan were conjured in color but proved, with the passage of time, to be delusional. By Kaiel measure his predictions were unimpressive. On the other hand, his ability to savage a wounded nation was awesome. The name was Lenin and he rode in a great steam-powered engine to take over the Russian socialist uprising so that he might destroy the embryonic Russian socialism with systematic Nechayevian terror to provide fertilizer for his own cardboard future.

The destruction of the very world he hoped to build began with the shooting of the demonstrators who were marching on the Tauride Palace in Petrograd in support of the first elected socialist Constituent Assembly. It was winter of the Riethe year 1918, full of cold snows. In the rage of Lenin’s own words, brought to Teenae by God across the depths of His Unimaginable Sky, she felt that mean man’s deathly fear of all power other than his own. She pitied him the loneliness it implied. To wield total power requires the destruction, everywhere, of all free wills. To need total power is to be totally insecure.

By the end of 1918 Lenin was calling for mass exterminations on a daily basis. “You must mobilize all forces, establish a troika of dictators, introduce immediately mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who ply soldiers and officers with vodka. Do not hesitate for a moment…” He never watched an execution squad at work and never saw the effects of the terror he had created. Thus to Teenae he was a coward. He killed more people than he could eat. Thus he was a fool.

In the isolation of his Kremlin office the fury of his decrees escalated. Chekist leaders and political commissars vied with one another in rounding up hostages and shooting them without trial. Fellow socialists were murdered. The peasants who had fought with Lenin against the hated landlord clan were themselves exterminated when they discovered, too late, that the land had passed, not from the landlords to them, but to the state. In Tambov province there was a massacre of 200,000 peasants…

Death to the old Tsar! Death to the Tsar who sold himself to the capitalists and quailed before the socialists! Long live the new Tsar! Long live the Worker’s Hero who destroys capitalist and socialist alike, who returns all land to the state, who cows the liberated peasantry back into slavery! Death to the old aristocracy, corrupted and weak! Hail to the new aristocracy, corrupted and strong!

It was a Kaiel maxim that terrible consequences inevitably arose when a priest brought simple solutions to complex problems of government. Teenae judged Lenin lacking in kalothi. When his solutions did not work he was content to let terror impose his visions upon reality, having neither the courage nor the intelligence to re-think his position. In the end, Lenin had nothing to offer but Restoration. He destroyed the Tsar by becoming Tsar.

The Bolshevik terror, she read with fascination, bred more terror, giving birth to the son of Lenin, Tsar Stalin, who mercilessly eliminated every remaining socialist in Russia. The nation was left so bereft of conscience that for five generations it puzzled over the simplest of ethical questions without finding answers, stubbornly seeking to dominate Riethe with no more than Lenin’s unimproved vision.

These People of the Sky had a strange definition of help. They forced you into helplessness so that you might be in a position to receive their help which was the only True Help. They lied to serve the Truth. They made themselves Right by killing all who disagreed with them. She thought of the Mnankrei. God’s History made it easier for her to understand such priests.

Gaet was not yet ready to understand. He had never met the Mnankrei, never faced death in combat with their ambition, never hung in terror from a yardarm of one of their ships. For a moment Teenae worshipped her contact with Joesai. His strength had become her strength. The plague of Lenin’s life gave her a resolve that frightened her.

She would see that Sorrow was ready to resist the Mnankrei when they sailed into the harbor in alliance with the Stgal. Gaet could not help her. The Stgal would not. She shrugged. A priest clan like the Stgal, foolish enough to try surviving by playing one great clan off against another, was dreaming its way to an ugly fate.

In her fragments of The Forge of War Teenae found descriptions of naval conflict. She played with the ideas like the kolgame master that she was. All warfare, she had discovered, was based on deception. A military commander had to have a bag of surprises and the ability to use them quickly. Every army had to have a disciplined set of rules — and know how to break one every time it wanted a victory.

She spoke to Hoemei over the rayvoice and he encouraged her. A day later she got a call that told her three ships had left Soebo for Sorrow under the command of Storm Master Tonpa. And Hoemei gave her news of Joesai. He was safe. He had halted a day’s march outside of Soebo and dug in and laid minefields waiting for the rest of the Gathering to reinforce him. He was receiving delegates from many clans. The Mnankrei’s only response had been to construct an impenetrable defense around Soebo.

“Teenae!” Hoemei shouted through the static.

“I hear you clearly!”

“The danger with war seems to be that too much force is used.”

“I understand the min-max concept perfectly!” There were many points where different levels of force could be applied to achieve victory, but only one point where minimum force worked to the same end.

“The value of the victory, so far as I can tell, is in inverse proportion to the applied force. Minimum force assures the longest victory and fades into bargaining which is always our first choice of conflict resolution.”

“But that doesn’t tell me what to do!” complained Teenae.

“You’re the one who delights in kol. What can I say? Train for an attack that is mild, quick, and decisive.”

For heartbeats after the exchange, the woman stared at the wooden box which brought her husband’s voice across the mountains. It was too plain. It needed decoration and polishing with fine oils. Few tools came that way anymore. She liked her rifle.

The Kaiel children under her command had given it to her shyly, the stock carved and inlaid in their spare time. No one else had a rifle so beautiful. They had fitted o’Tghalie and Kaiel symbols together perfectly. Touching that stock she had felt wholly Kaiel for the first time since she had been adopted. Her charges believed in her. They obeyed her. They supported her when she suggested that Gaet was not ready to meet Mnankrei violence, even to the point of stealing supplies for her and training with her when they could get away.

That evening she visited the old o’Maie weaver so that she might have someone to help her puzzle over the life of Lenin and draw morals from it. She brought whisky for him and a new coat.

“You worry that because you’ve learned to sling a lead pebble through a man’s eye, you’ve become like Lenin,” he said when the dawn stars were rising. “Lenin was a coward who hired men to murder for him.”

“There is violence in me. I talk of minimal force — but I’m not gentle.”

“ ‘Minimal force’ is not ‘no force’. Pacifism is for an idealist like Oelita. The concept of minimal force would appeal to a pragmatist like you, where maximal force would appeal to a megalomaniac like Lenin.”

“I’ll have to kill them,” Teenae said. Three ships. I see no other way.“ She began to cry.

His heart went out to this woman who had befriended him. “Killing a man puts a heavy burden on one’s back.”

She laughed through her tears. “That’s not why I cry. I’m afraid they’ll kill me first.”