Courtship Rite

48

IT IS SAID that the hermits arose before God stopped speaking. Geta is a vast land populated by fewer than 200 million people and there are valleys and corners and mountaintops and whole deserts where men never go. Along the borders of these lands a wayward traveller might find the ruins of a hermit’s stone hut, his altar to God, and perhaps even a stairway.

A conical stairway is the sure signature that a hermit once lived among the surrounding barrens. Sometimes they are very tall. Sometimes a later hermit will repair the work of a long-dead hermit’s hand and begin to add to the spiral hill built cone by layered cone, stone by stone for a purpose without reason. Why a hermit’s invariable goal was to build stairways, no one knew. A hermit worked alone, never bothering to train an acolyte to carry on his ritual. It did not matter.

How did the stairway tradition continue? Perhaps it was the wonder these bizarre objects caused, the whispers of puzzlement which, reaching mad ears, inspired the next generation of hermits who then went forth. They were all mad. It was known that they were mad.

Was that not Joesai among the shadows?

Oelita’s father had shown her this ravine when she was adult enough to follow him into the desert. He noted such places carefully because they always meant water, never easy water, but a cup or two at the bottom of a sand-clogged well or a trickle from some stone’s crack.

Her boy from Sorrow, whom she brought with her from Kaiel-hontokae, helped her at first. They cleaned out the pulpy stalks of the man-high Godstorch and fitted them together, thin top into thick base, to make a pipe that led dripping water from the fault-cave to the hermit’s hut. Once the water was in and the roof rebuilt, she drove the boy away. He did not want to leave her alone but she raved and beat him with a broken Godstorch stalk, forcing his retreat to a ridge. From there he watched her until the second setting of the red arched sun beyond the badlands — reluctantly fading into the west as the sun faded, vowing he would be back someday with supplies and messages from those who loved her.

She rationed her motions on a pattern of cyclic flow that was unconscious of weeks or time, content to mark the passage of sun, then stars; day, then night. Food and water had priority. She always spent some effort ranging over the desert wilderness, gathering. Few knew that job as well as she did — what part of the seeds to cast aside, how to boil and then sun-dry the pith of the running cactus, how to eat the tiny orange and magenta-striped fruits of the low beiera tree.

It was sneaky how she moved so that Joesai would never see her.

Profane food would not be enough, or even satisfying to the secret hungers. Every day she worked a little on her sacred garden. She knew where the wheat would grow and how to set the squash and how to keep the beans alive. She often spent the night in the well cleaning it out, cutting it down another layer. The spring gave her enough water for herself but not for her garden.

Other nights were set aside to prepare cloth or to hammer fiber for mats. While she broke soft stems into pieces for soaking so that the fiber might be pounded free, images of God came to her, thrust up from her childhood where they had been left in dungeon by her righteous atheism. A suddenly emergent girl rose from her place, superstitious, to set a glowing coal on the holy stone altar lest when God passed overhead, looking down, watching His people, He might miss her for the lack of a red glow upon her face.

She settled back on her haunches and began to chat to Hoemei about her pregnancy. She knew he was behind her, motionless in one of his silent moods. In the old days when man was new to Geta’s refuge, and the planet had been killing them all so ruthlessly, she explained, twin-bearing had been a premium survival trait looked upon favorably by God. Many women still bore twins. She would probably have twins again, she assured Hoemei. She wanted to be well stocked before her twins came so they might never suffer.

“It’s all right,” he said clearly in a voice that resonated in her mind, and she felt comfortable with his concern.

Her memories of Kaiel-hontokae still frightened her. It was a city of ten thousand Joesais, immense beyond anything she had imagined a city could be in all her dreaming — streets, buildings, richly gardened temple after temple fed by ethereal aqueducts that passed over the city like multiple Streaks of God, bare-breasted women, fine cloth, shops where you could haggle over the price of the flesh of a child who had failed some creche trial. And machines whose overpowering presence whispered of the distant strength of God.

Here in the desert the red and orange and ochre plateaus rolled away, eroded where sparse vegetation could not hold back the rare flash rains and God was almost invisible unless one looked for His passage at night, believing. He was quiet like the stars, but in more of a hurry.

“Teenae!” she cried, suddenly rigid, alert. She had seen the city beyond the cliffs of the ravine.

There, in the city, God was no Invisible Abstraction. God stood in front of you sternly with the face of Joesai, holding your wrist in iron shackles, arguing, and all your return arguments were met with bulbous glass insects, glowing from an internal red hue, who molested your crystal-from-the-sea and laughed out the resonant words of God telling of the Terror He has saved you from, saved us all from, until there was nowhere to turn but to believe. God had made her ashamed through Joesai. God had appeared to her through Joesai in all the personality of that man’s violence let loose with sunfire devouring great Hiroshima in a moment which charred her own beliefs like a bug zapped in a temple’s night row of torches.

Only Teenae understood her.

Could God, who came from a world of Terror, ever love a gentle woman? She hid from Him in the desert, yet left coals on the hermit-carved altar so that He might find her in His passage. Was this Savior God also the God of the temples who took the weaker children so that His mankind might become strong enough to face the horrors of the Sky? How could He do that and be a Savior, too?

Oelita’s pregnancy dominated her. Nothing had been more unshakable than her refusal to bear children after her genetically crippled twins had been condemned to death for lack of kalothi. But when a woman loses her purpose, does she not hark back to an older purpose? The pregnancy had been premeditated. The city of Kaiel-hontokae was within her womb now, growing with arrogant power, its men the fathers of her second brood. The maran-Kaiel were formidable in her memory, worthy fathers, but also slaves of God. Men seeded their women but they did God’s bidding and not the mother’s.

Gaet still warmed her dreams. She had to be half asleep, in a pleasant mood, perhaps leaning against the wall before he could come and joke with her and play his noble charm. Hoemei was more reliable. He came to her while she was awake. Gaet had an emotional gentleness that attracted her, stirred her very genes; Hoemei was of the mind’s gentleness — once he had shown her how to clarify a thought of hers with which she knew he strongly disagreed. How easy he was to reach.

“Hoemei? Are you there?”

“I’m reading,” he said from the shadows at her back.

“You don’t remember the pillow play when you gave me child,” she laughed. Her one clear memory of tender infatuation for Hoemei came from that afternoon. She was using his chest as pillow and he had an arm on her far shoulder and the other hand in her forest while she stared somewhat obliviously at his chin knowing that she had made him a father. Why would she remember that moment so clearly? She had intended, then, to wash away the pregnancy with her blood.

Sleepily she put away her work, gestured a final benediction before the altar, and crawled to her mat. She put her hand out for Hoemei. “Hoemei!” He was gone. He works too hard, she thought sadly.

Joesai was with her always. He was the dream man behind the bush or door who would appear in costume and shatter any plot. Awake, she often startled to see him as a speck on a distant ridge or he would be the shadow that had sneaked into her hut at twilight. In dreams he never ran after her when she fled but he always caught her and she would wake up gasping at the memory of his strength as he tied her into yet another death puzzle.

He tracked her in her dreams. He waited. If her leg was sore, he attacked her physically. If she grieved, he smiled and attacked her emotionally. She would turn a corner and find him reading from some prized handwritten manuscript with a sarcastic sneer on his face. She would brace herself and then he would look up — and deliver a one-sentence riposte that would undercut the very substance of her words. Sometimes Oelita would waken in her hut sure that a faint outside noise was the prowling of Joesai.

Once she had a dream about Noe buying lifeless twins at a temple butchery.

Days passed. Oelita made an uneasy peace with God, praying ever more frequently on her knees at the altar. While she worked, while she rested, she had been scanning every Chant she knew for hidden wisdom. It was like her that she discovered a God of the Sky who differed from the God of the temples. The orange sun rose and fell. Her belly became filled with kickings and so she came to know for sure that she was with twins. Long-range foraging became impossible. She began to spend whole days inside the hut preparing the profane foods to rid them of the poisons.

She enjoyed her conversations with Nonoep who sometimes came to visit when she was deep in thought.

It rained. The shower lasted only during the twilight but days later a glory of flowers had popped up all over the barren hills, seducing the insects into mad excess. She could not resist a long waddle down the ravine, picking blue desert-lips for her hair. The restless wandering did not tire her. There were rocks she had removed from her garden and she began to carry them over to the stairway, a few at a time, placing them in the stairway so that they were solidly secured against weather, against age, against the force of roots. The previous hermit, dead before her father was born, had placed his rocks with exquisite care. She honored him with as much care.

Nightfall caught her at the apex of her stairway to the stars. Flowers had folded while insects began a nocturnal chatter, seeking mates. It was a clear desert solitude for star watching. The Mist River flowed above the horizon bringing with it the constellations of the Moth and the Knave.

I am alone with beauty.

Darkness and distance hid whatever treachery might roil beyond that doomed excellence. In a way, we are all hermits, she thought. God is a recluse like me. What gods had driven Him to this secluded edge of space to meditate while others destroyed? She felt a sudden kinship with Him, and, as if in sympathetic response, He began His rise above the ragged black horizon to steer across the starfield.

Is it true that kindness is only the first symptom of a weak will? Did gentle people have to retreat into total isolation to survive? Perhaps God was no fierce protector; perhaps He was only a kind soul who had run from stellar warriors as Oelita had run from Joesai. Such ideas stimulated anger. She would not believe such heresy! Gentleness was the noblest of virtues! Kindness would make the world whole! Caring for the weak took a deeper strength!

Vicious images out of The Forge of War flooded her vision from every blazing star. Atop her stairway she began to curse this collage of armies with all the might of her raging lungs. Her acrimony shattered the darkened desert, reflecting from every arroyo, amplifying up the cliffs to throw its wrath at the sky of twinkling hiroshimas and baghdad-massacres and subtle tortures and avenging hordes of red armor that tracked over the stars, explosively punishing peasants and old women, selecting the occasional child for target practice.

“STOP!” she screamed at the avalanche of image.

A nefarious universe turned evil eyes her way — curiously. The combined assault of that attention hit like a clap of silence. Insects chirped to their mates in tiny voices. Oelita stood frozen on her cairn, searching, ears alert, aware that she was bathed in star-light. Had Joesai heard? She shrank down out of sight, listening for breathing, the crack of a twig. She dared not go back to the hut. She spent the night alone, trembling, hidden in the brash on the ledge above her wheat.