Courtship Rite

46

THE REEKING SMELL of drying weed drifted down from the racks on the cliffs across the beach. The simple docks were busy. A boatload of refugees from Soebo — perhaps eight all told — had arrived this morning, the third such group Noe had heard of, fearful ones who were afraid of the Gathering and rich enough to flee. They haggled with traders and she watched them from afar, wondering how she might question them. She coveted every bit of information she could glean, but was suspicious of spies.

How much did the enemy know? She expected an imminent Mnankrei sweep of the coast to clean out these carefully placed supply nodes of hers which were putting boats across the upper Njarae to Mnank loaded with goods and, now, with priests from distant clans.

The rumors that disturbed her proved nothing. Such hints were no stronger than the flicker across a game player’s face, the slight holding of cards closer to the chest. It was Joesai’s vulnerability that cast sinister reflections upon every rumor. There stood Joesai, fretting amidst the enemy, barely beyond the outer reaches of their city, and he was allowed to do nothing while the Mnankrei day by day readied whatever counterstrike they intended. The sea priests were not ones to test and probe. They struck.

The prescience of the Kaiel mind told her what it meant. Joesai was doomed, however this adventure might turn out for the Kaiel. Joesai had always carried the aura of death with him. He dared it, lived with it, mocked it, because he could not escape it. He was born to be a tragic hero; his time was now but Noe did not want to lose him. Of all her husbands only he shared her thrill at the touch of danger.

Noe remembered, almost tearfully, that she had once thought of him as the husband she did not like, who coldly had taken her in hand, when the first paling of her love for Gaet had left her depressed, to teach her the best of the Kaiel tricks of genetic surgery because he had been disappointed by her ignorance, and resentful of Gaet that he should pick for them so soft a wife. A full orbit of Geta she had hated him, wanting to play and despising hard work, and then one day she had wandered among the hills above Kaiel-hontokae, searching out Joesai she knew not why, to find him glooming over a wrecked sailplane.

He put wings on her and risked her life above the valleys, and she had discovered from Joesai that she loved danger and could not live without it. Gliding had bonded them, and for some reason after that his faults had never bothered her. Strange that once she had wished him dead so that she might have Gaet and Hoemei to herself.

After Noe questioned the refugees — and learned nothing except that fears and speculation raged in the city — she was approached by a sturdy man while she was eating bread and honey pudding in the plaza of the village.

“He’s Geiniera,” whispered her second companion.

“You know for sure?”

“Yes. He’s been sulking around the village for days, keeping to himself, asking few questions.”

The man bowed to Noe. He was ragged but well washed. His eyes shifted suspiciously yet without fear. Deferentially he waited for Noe to speak first.

“May I help you?”

“Now tha’ would be pleasant but no’ likely. You be Kaiel?”

“We’re all Kaiel, guests of the Twbuni who rule Tai.”

“You Gather’t’ shake Soebo?”

“Only that we may know the truth,” she replied formally.

“I see the dune, but each grain o’ sand is truth.” His reply was the gentle rebuff of a practical man who did not believe in such nonsense as truth. Shoulders shrugged that had lifted sails and fought the lashings of the sea. “You question th’ folk wha’ flee? Did they carry tales as woeful as th’ tale on this heart?”

“Are your woes of your own making or cast upon you by the evil deeds of others?”

The Geiniera laughed and slapped his rags. “No’ a question I could answer!”

“Share our bread.”

“Thank ’e, kind priest. You Gather’t’ shake Soebo. Go with God’s blessing and avenge me my daughter”

Thereupon he told a story that fitted his mad state. He had shared a wife with his brother. They were poor but perhaps could have afforded another woman if they had been able to find her. The wife bore her sailors a daughter and died, leaving the baby to neighbors, while they were both at sea. That tragedy changed their lives. One would go forth on a Mnankrei merchantman and the other would stay home to care for the daughter, and perhaps to pick up work in the shipyards or mending sails. The daughter grew to be beautiful and proud, a soul to scorn her Geiniera roots and to love the wealth of her betters. She set her mind to becoming Mnankrei and in time found her man who took her as a lover but, when she was with child, abandoned her to her grief and poverty.

The agitated girl had taken her baby to the Temple of the Raging Seas, into the presence of the father, and murdered his child for him to watch. She had been seized, and no one had ever seen her again. The story told to the Geiniera fathers had been of her invitation to Ritual Suicide and one father believed and one father did not, for should not their daughter have been delivered to them for their rightful Funeral Feast?

He was a persistent man. Made wild by the loss of his daughter, never believing that she had died — for had he known her death by eating her? — he sought to find her fate and found memories of things his daughter had said about her man and dark rumors instead. No wall or door kept him out for he was a ship’s smith, and one day, sure that he had found her, he came across a room sealed by glass that he could not enter. Beyond the glass were mindless women whose husks alone had been spared the bliss of death.

Afraid of being found, he retreated. Enraged and broken and deranged by grief he had gone to the house of his daughter’s lover to kill him and had found instead a woman of the Liethe who had soothed him and taken his story from him like hair that falls against the smooth run of a honed blade. She asked him urgently to take her to see the husk women and yet when he was there at the appointed meeting place, ready for such risky venture, he had been betrayed to her lover who had also been his daughter’s lover. The man had taken him to the deepest cells of the Temple, laughing at him that he could have trusted a Liethe. Walls did not keep him and he escaped but watched the low side entrances for weeks, seeing coffins being brought forth and carried away secretly to be burned. He saw Liethe at work there, too.

His madness subsided and when he heard of the Gathering he set across the sea to bring vengeance for his daughter. He believed the stories told of Kaiel ruthlessness, but such stories did not make him cling to the master he knew, as was intended, instead they gave him courage that here were priests violent enough to bring death to the Mnankrei.

Noe pondered the story between all her errands up the coast in their small lugger. Usually she enjoyed the sea, commanding it, for her youth had been spent on the sea. She alone of the maran-Kaiel looked with pleasure to being stationed at Sorrow. She was not a mountain woman, or a desert woman. But now the flapping of the sails and the spray did not reach the storm in her mind.

It had been Kathein, with her sure knack of ferreting out the rule and law of nature from odd happenings, who had taught Noe the secret of a good intelligence procedure. Never meld the incoming data into a general overall summary. Always maintain two lines of report, the optimistic and the pessimistic. One report should weigh the data in terms of the best possible meaning, and the other report should squeeze out of the data the worst possible interpretation. If both reports agreed, the probability of error in the conclusion was small, but if both reports diverged wildly, then careful attention had to be given to the negative nuances that would have been lost in any general summary.

Pieces seemed to fit together, each piece so small that separately they should have been ignored. The Geiniera might be a spy planted here to mislead but then what about that other one-line story of masked Mnankrei burning coffins? It fitted. And Noe, who had worked long days on the genetic makeup of the deviant underjaw, had the final piece that made sense of it all. If the Mnankrei had spent so much time developing one deadly genetic weapon — she used that non-Getan word from The Forge of War — then it was possible that they had developed many such weapons.

Noe’s home base was a farmhouse rented from a family on pilgrimage to their ancestor’s Itraiel domain. Conveniently located near the sea, it was dug into the leeward side of a grassy hill, protected from Njarae storms and hidden from coastal scouts. It ran in three tiers down the slope, built over centuries, its thick walls molded of hillside fieldstone cemented with burned mortar carried in from the kilns of a local quarry. The roofs were of wood overlain by the thick sod of saw grass. On top of the hill was their rayvoice antenna.

She waited until the stars were out. The rayvoice worked best under such conditions. “Raise Joesai for me,” she told her operator. Should she tell Hoemei first? No. He was committed to a fixed plan and would try to hold fast. It was Joesai’s life which was on the blade.

They spoke in code. Dots and dashes and warbles because she owned only a portable rayvoice. The code wiped out the personal urgency she felt.

You must act now.

Are you… cackle, splat. Hoemei will kill me.

Evidence of sacred disease.

??? Repeat.

Genetically engineered micro-life that moves from man to man, killing.

Verified?

No. No time. Attack. Your whole camp may be destroyed overnight.

Not enough data.

This may be deadly. You may have no choice but to sack Soebo.

??? Repeat.

Burn the place! Raze it! Sterilize it!

Drastic.

Your choice. Concentrate on the Temple of the Raging Seas. Attack.

Who is involved?

Any member of the Swift Wind. The Liethe are suspect.

Who?

Your cuddly friends. I have three sources of information pointing to Liethe involvement. How much time do I have? Attack yesterday! May God be with us. May God be with you.