Courtship Rite

56

ONCE KATHEIN HAD thought she could subdue Aesoe by draining his wealth to feed each of her vast projects, but he had always found more coin. She discovered to her horror that she could never break Aesoe; she could only bankrupt the Kaiel. In a desperate walk along the Hai aqueduct she was trying to figure out a way to leave him.

She could not deny that he had pleased her. He was good-natured and carried brilliance enough to match her own. She loved his parties. She loved the casual way he wielded power, bending rules, doing whatever had to be done. But she hated him.

God’s Mind, that man is awesome! Because of him, she had a clan of her own, destined, she thought, to be so dynamic that it would rule beside the Kaiel. Because of him she had been able to snap her fingers and create an instant family — in which she did not belong.

She had everything. She had a son she adored. Nobody believed her but he would be the Savior Who Speaks to God. She could feel it. He had Joesai’s strength and her mind. But his father was far away in exile.

She had intellectual adventure. The breaking of the code that had led to the revelations of The Forge of War was enough excitement for one lifetime. But more had followed. Hints from descriptions of military weapons had propelled her simultaneously into subatomic theory and cosmology and all the land between, from rayvoice instruments that could be etched into a thumbnail of silicon to rockets that could reach God.

And yet she was alone.

The happiest time in her life had been that brief courtship with the maran family. It seemed so long ago. When she first met Gaet, showing him one of the first primitive rayvoices, there had not been a wirevoice in all of Kaiel-hontokae; now they were everywhere, weaving their copper webs like an insect species gone wild at the discovery of a new prey. Men had walked; now they rode their skrei-wheels. The Kaiel had been a clan confined to the mountain steppes; now they ranged over half the Njarae and in the northeast were pressing against the Itraiel. Life had become a maelstrom.

How does one refuse a man of power?

Sometimes, at the height of her hatred for Aesoe, in those rare times when she had taken Hoemei to the pillows out of a kind of nostalgia for lost love, the tenderness she met was almost too much to bear. Gaet still courted her but with the genteel formality of the compulsive flirt. It was a duty he felt toward all women. Joesai’s love had turned to anger and that puzzled her. She kept track of them all. Noe had been to Soebo, a logistics coordinator for the Gathering. Teenae was still trying to organize the world into logical categories — contracts were to be met, secrets were to be kept, and betrayal was to be answered with a lead pebble between the eyes.

An Ivieth found Kathein on the road. He gave her water and watched her skeptically when she told him that she was all right. He made the decision that she should come back with him to the city. The Ivieth were keepers of the road and none defied them there, not even priests.

So she arrived at the Kaiel Palace anyway, her revolt short-lived. She was half a day late and Aesoe was distraught. He was not pleased with her leggings or the dust in her hair or the dirt clogging her toenails. He sent her with his servant, one of his budding creche daughters, to be bathed and dressed. After an interval of sufficient length to have allowed a woman to wash off the first layer of grime, he arrived in the bathhouse himself to hold court as was the custom among the Kaiel when they had lost time and matters were pressing. Such was Aesoe’s way of telling Kathein that he was displeased with her tardiness.

He brought with him two priests of the Itraiel, both formally attired in headdresses of iridescent insect wings and in black suits fronted by scarf-like collars of brass mail. Each wore large brass buckles inlaid with erotic platinum figures that hooked down to protect the genitals. Black leggings of iron cloth hugged the skin, their interwoven platinum tracery describing the same lethal flower that scarred the faces of the priests.

They bowed to her in the tub, and if they were astonished by Kaiel custom, they did not show it. They did not bathe in water and bathhouses were not within the stricture of their rules. Kathein coldly extended her dripping hand and each man kissed it in turn.

“Kaesim of the kembri-Itraiel,” said one.

“Suesar of the kembri-Itraiel,” said the other.

Aesoe brought his mistress a bowl of rinse water. “Our honored friends travelled with the Gathering to Soebo and served as administrators there and are now returning home. They offer us a proposition we must take seriously. I wish you to discuss with them the weapons of The Forge of War.”

Kathein wiped the foaming suds from her hair with several backstrokes of her hands. The weapons of the Riethe madmen were not her favorite subject. “Why?”

“Kaesim and Suesar have been observing our rule in Soebo and have decided that there are advantages to ceding their land to the Kaiel. This is, of course, a bargain, and our end of the bargain must have substance.”

Kathein poured the warm rinse water over her head. Her reply was sarcastic. “In exchange we give them weapons to fry whole towns, cities even, and machine rifles to murder more women and children than can be eaten before they rot?”

Suesar bowed. He was not insulted. “You impugn our morality,” he said formally.

Kathein laughed. “No. I was questioning the sanity of my bed-mate.”

“Sanity!” Aesoe snorted. “Even Hoemei believes that the Sky is full of enemies and that we survive only because we have not been found. God’s Sky is also full of other gods, and where one god has gone, so can another bring himself. And what is our defense? Shall we sit and beat these Sky Demons at kol? Shall we take them through the desert and covertly scratch their legs so that they sicken and pass away? Shall we pompously declare them of low kalothi and offer them the knife and a pretty courtesan in some temple tower? Who is to defend us, Kathein? The Race is not alone!”

“The fire that burns the son, burns the daughter!” Water cascaded from Kathein as she stood and stepped into the towel held by Aesoe’s daughter-servant.

“Geta needs a ‘military’ clan.” Aesoe used the word from The Forge of War for there was no such word in the Getan language. “They must know the game of the enemy so that when we meet him we can define the play. Such a role I propose for the Itraiel. We rule; they defend. It is a role that requires study, foresight, dedication, bravery, great game minds and great kalothi. I think the Itraiel are worthy of this trust and will be challenged by it.”

“Perhaps.” She considered.

“We think we are well suited to the role,” said Kaesim.

Kathein cut him short. “I know the Itraiel.”

They were fierce desert rovers, rulers of a nomadic domain. They had no knowledge of genetic manipulation and she doubted that they had a single genetics workroom. Their temples were tents. They were known for their strange gentleness. What clan made less fuss over physical handicaps? It was said of the Itraiel that they would hold up a legless man with their right hand while lopping off the legs of an enemy with their left. It was said that no man could attack a kembri-Itraiel with a dagger and live. It was said that none played games like the Itraiel. Their kalothi rituals were almost purely game-determined. At their annual competitions the big losers were expected to organize the joyful Dispersion Feast and by their Ritual Suicide provide sustenance for the long journey home. They demanded no less of the underclans who used their land.

Aesoe brought out several gowns he had ordered for Kathein, some in dubious taste. Politeness demanded that he offer the privilege of dressing her to his guests who were requested, after much bowing between the three men, to adorn her in such a way as to most please themselves. Kathein was amused. Suesar wanted no part of the ritual and stepped back a pace — a pace long enough to put Kaesim in command but short enough not to insult Kathein.

Kaesim examined the robes, absorbing yet another strange Kaiel custom with complete ease. Each perusal was accompanied by an unobtrusive glance at Kathein. Thus he was able to dress her in the attire which most pleased her. Kathein was willing to bet a gold piece that Kaesim was the finest diplomat of the kembri-Itraiel.

For one heartbeat she saw an image of him riding turret on a Second World War tank through the North African night with five Gurkhas hitching a ride behind him. Her soul was chilled.

She took this desert priest by the hand and led him through the Palace maze toward the aroma of Aesoe’s private dining quarters. Suesar and Aesoe followed to the feast which she knew had been kept waiting and warm past its time. She seated them and served Kaesim first in repayment for his service to her. Last she carved the tiny carcass and heaped their plates with meat and gravy. The foreign priests made some sign over their food and began to eat heartily while Kathein began her stories of war, emphasizing atrocity so that she might make these men so loathe the horror of it that they would reconsider the role of warrior clan.

She told of the total extermination of the Jews in Britain on orders of the Pope so that the British people never thereafter had a Jewish problem. She told of the massacre of the Persians at Thermopylae. She told of the mountain of skulls in India. She told the story of the Turks forever cursed with the blood of the Armenians. She told of the inefficiencies of Belsen and the efficiencies of Hiroshima. She told of the post First World War invasion of Poland by Russia, and the retaliatory invasion of Russia by Poland, and of the final solution to the Polish problem when the Russians, a generation later and allied with the Nazis, overran Poland and executed 15,000 members of the Polish military clan and buried them in a mass grave at Katyn.

She told of the great Amerikan Peace Movement whose theory of justice was that the brutal Amerikan Army should move out of Southeast Asia so that the Cambodians could fertilize their fields with the bodies of Cambodians so that the Vietnamese could prey on the corpse of a decimated nation so that the Chinese could punish the Vietnamese so that the Vietnamese could drown their own Chinese in the sea. She told of the sack of Rome.

The priests of Itraiel listened to her as one listens to an Ivieth chew the leg of a traveller with tales of distant places. They began to ask her questions about strategy, purpose, gain. She answered the difficult problems they posed as best she could. They tried to make sense of Hitler at Stalingrad and the perplexities so gripped them that, for a moment, they forgot their meat. They came to the tentative conclusion that the Riethe were not mad, just stupid.

“They understood weapons,” said Kaesim.

“But they did not understand strategy,” said Suesar.

Both began to question Kathein about weapons. She told them of axe and sword and crossbow and rifle and cannon and tank and fighter aircraft and helicopter gungods and long-range bombers and ICBMs and spy satellites.

Kaesim grinned through the fei flower scars upon his face. “Maybe God is a spy satellite for the Riethe.” He laughed. They all laughed the great laugh till tears came to their eyes, for that was too terrifying a joke to take seriously.

Kathein told of the weapons cycles that passed through Riethe history. First the bows and arrows and the staffs and slings made the individual supreme. Then the invention of the two-wheeled cart was taken over by nomads who lightened and perfected the design for rapid control of their herds. (Herds, Kathein explained, were small clans of people kept for their meat and hides and milk.) The chariot was pulled by a Horse.

“The Horse piece of chess?”

“The Horse is historical? Not mythical?”

“The Horse of The Forge of War,” explained Aesoe, “is a very large humanoid creature with a long face and four legs and no arms.”

The Itraiel priests grinned hugely and clinked shot glasses of whisky to this image of a four-footed Ivieth trying to pull a wagon.

“Horses were expensive and hard to train. Chariots were costly, so a select military clan grew up around them and swept down over Mesopotamia and India and as far east as China, killing all the priests who were not afraid of them.” She smiled at Aesoe.

“The confusion of weapon with strategy,“ commented Kaesim.

Kathein told of the next wave of weapons: long daggers of cheap iron, wielded like staffs, that made the individual soldier supreme again. An untrained man with an iron sword was a match for a highly trained and wealthy aristocrat in his chariot. So aristocracies died.

Then came the light Horse mounted by an archer. The foot soldier with iron sword and spear and shield was no longer effective. The only defense was an armored Horse and an armored rider who took years to train and the wealth of a village to support. Central governments collapsed. The man whose sword no longer defended his family lost power to the armored warrior of his village who became a hereditary priest.

But exploding powder of char and sulfur and nitrate was invented. A man with no training and a musket became the equal of the armored lord. The lords were swept away in revolutions that gave power to the common man.

Weapons grew more sophisticated. Machine rifles, aircraft, tanks, artillery, seagoing battlegods. Clans with industrial power learned to sweep away the riflemen. ICBMs that held ransom over cities were manned by an elite corps trained at great expense. The common man ceased to be a soldier. He refused to be drafted. Professional armies rose to power. Democracies crumbled. Socialist aristocracies took their place, exploiting the now impotent common man.

Then in the everlasting search for more sophisticated weapons the insect-sized machine-mind came as cheap iron had come at the end of the bronze age. With a basket of wheat any man could buy a demon missile that would fell a huge airplane or roast a tank or peel open an armored car. Industrial peoples could no longer control poor peoples. The new socialist aristocracies, no longer able to frighten the common man, withered away.

And the message was always the same. When the priest clans of Riethe dominated with their expensive weapons, their world was ruled by massacre, and when the underclans dominated with their cheap weapons, Riethe turned red with blood.

Kathein finished her analysis with an accusing glance at Aesoe as if to say: you would inflict that on us?

“The military lords of the Riethe would nourish us at our Dispersion Feast,” boasted Kaesim, unimpressed.

“The Riethe pose no absolute threat,” mused Suesar. “They have no sense of strategy. But we will need the weapons. Even a genius is flattened by the mindless boulder rolling down the mountain.”

She was furious at them for the casual way they had taken her stories. “You would want the responsibility of holding in your hands a machine that would make sunfire to devour a whole city?”

“We would welcome it.”

Aesoe called for entertainment. His Liethe women entered. Honey played her instrument while Cairnem and Sieen danced. The dark guests shouted their encouragement and pleasure, and clapped their hands for it was that type of fast light dance. Then the priests begged to demonstrate their own skill.

They stripped so that they were only wearing their brass belts and genital protectors. Cries erupted from their lips as they began to circle each other on the dance floor, hissing. Suesar snarled and attacked and through the magic of swiftness and leverage was thrown high where it appeared he would crash into the floor. But he pulled and twisted in midair and landed on his feet.

Of the three Liethe only the Queen of Life-before-Death stayed to watch the combat, rapt with fascination, wearing the persona of Cairnem.

The play of kembri wills continued, where a gesture might rescue one from a smashed skull, or an attack might seem to pass right through an opponent. They bowed to Aesoe’s foot stamping. Caimem grinned.

Before they had finished their bows, she was hissing a challenge. The priests turned in astonishment because she had used the kembri form of major insult. While they stared, she repeated her insult and stripped to her belt, a tiny belt with a wooden buckle that matched her tiny size. The priests burst out laughing.

A flash of flesh moved at them and they had to react quickly to stop her. They made kembri noises and she hissed back. There was a rapid exchange of words and then she attacked again, first one, then the other. Kathein gripped her chair. She expected the girl to be killed, for she was often thrown, once with a cracking thud, but she always rolled and flipped to a standing position. Finally she stopped, exhausted, the sweat rolling off her unscarred body, still grinning happily. The men were grinning, too.

“Cairnem uses the kembri form ‘otaimi’,” Suesar explained, “which can be executed by small women but not by men as large as us. She is good.”

“But I lost three to one. And they gave me handicaps.”

“Two against one is hardly fair,” bowed Kaesim, “but your form of insult gave us no choice.” His grin had not left his face.

“My dance teacher was trained in the kembri arts by Niel of the kembri-Itraiel.”

“Ah, yes? Niel!”

Cairnem was all Liethe grace now and she had an arm for each of them. “I’m part of the hospitality. You may have me this evening.” She turned to Aesoe. “I lost to them after insulting their genitals and it is obligatory that I pleasure their egos. So give me permission.” She looked Aesoe straight in the eyes.

“And if they had been defeated?” Aesoe queried.

“Why, then they would have had to pleasure me.”

“I see that I have lost my warriors for the evening. The bargaining will continue tomorrow.”

Tonight I will tell him, thought Kathein.

But when they were alone in his bedchamber, she hesitated and found other things to talk about. He was light and witty, having chosen to forget her tardiness, and she found it easier to joke than to confront him. I’ll undress him — like she had seen Sieen do so many times — and when he is warmed by my fingers, then I will tell him. But she couldn’t go near him.

“I’ve made a major decision,” she said. She was huddled by the window.

“Yes, you want to start building that proton accelerator, or is it something less grandiose?”

“The maran-Kaiel are all in Sorrow.” She stopped. She couldn’t go on.

“I gave them the Valley of Ten Thousand Graves. Sorrow is where they should be.”

“I’m going to Sorrow.” She took a deep breath.

“I know you are fond of them. Is it necessary to keep telling me?”

“I’m going there to… marry them.”

He didn’t even react. It drove her crazy, the calmness of that man, except when it was something trivial. Then he would rage.

He pulled out a hair from his nose. “You are already married.”

“I intend to divorce.”

“Ah, so. Divorce,” he repeated. He flicked the hair onto the floor. “You are sure that the maran even like you anymore?”

The tears were running down her cheeks because she wasn’t sure.

“You’re leaving for Sorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I will stop you.”

“You can’t.”

“But I can.” His voice told her that he would say no more. He switched off the electric torch.

She began to imagine the things he could do because he wasn’t going to tell her what he would do. He could have them all killed and she would be to blame. “Aesoe,” she pleaded to the darkness with its phantoms.

“Come to the pillows,” he said.

He could cut off the money. He could destroy her fledgling clan. She went to the bed, ran a finger down his chest, played with the hairs there, gently. “I want you to love me,” she said.

He pulled her to him, misunderstanding what she meant. She let him. What was the use. He took her. Such drive for an old man! Hoemei. She saw Hoemei with his throat cut, lying there, his arm flopped lifelessly, dripping blood from the fingers. The thrusting began. She let it happen. Joesai. Joesai had gone to Soebo. Aesoe had intended for him to die. And the Mnankrei had reached out to kill him, and when they touched him, the electron river flowed back from him and lit all of Soebo by the spit fires of roasting Mnankrei. If Aesoe tried to kill Joesai, would it be the same? would the electrons flow back from the touch and crisp Aesoe? She rode his thrusts. He was alive. She was dreaming. Life did not have happy endings. She saw Joesai with a lead pebble in his skull sinking to the floor. Teenae. Teenae’s glazed eyes stared at a pool of her own blood. Gaet and Noe. Gaet was dead where he had tried to shield Noe and failed. Would these knifelike thrusts never stop? She moaned and her tears came in little sobs. How I hate you, she thought and clung to him.

She didn’t believe his stories about danger from God’s Sky. That was an excuse for his ambition. The armies of the kembri-Itraiel would march over Geta with their weapons, uniting the planet for the Kaiel — and Aesoe would say that it was for the best. There was danger from the stars and we must unite now, not tomorrow. Hoemei was going to try to stop him and Hoemei would dissolve in the flash of sunfire.

“My honeycomb,” murmured Aesoe.