Courtship Rite

57

ONCE HE KNEW she was alive, he had been able to find her. That was the legend of Joesai. The clues were minor and unrelated but indicated that the Gentle Heretic was re-establishing tenuous contact with the coast.

A group of trackers followed one of her messengers over the hills to the south and east into a land that grew progressively more desolate, the gray and red rock surfaces harsher, bolder. Scrub retreated to shelter, then fought desperately to defend the shabby havens that chance provided. So much of Geta was like this, so much was far worse, yet who dared the really uninhabitable regions? Even the hermits stopped short of total barrenness. The messenger was taken prisoner just before he reached Oelita.

Joesai sat rooted behind a boulder, caught between the dried branches of a dead bush, watching her through the hand spy-eye made for him by his students at the observatory. He had her. The joy welled in him.

“She seems healthy,” he said to Eiemeni and the woman Riea.

“We observed children yesterday before you came up.”

“There can’t be children here!” Joesai exclaimed.

“Two of them. Very young.”

Joesai continued to watch patiently. She was bringing water to her garden patch. Where did she get it? Presently two little figures joined her. “My God, you’re right! Two! Wait until this evening. Kidnap them when it is darkest. She won’t know you are here. I’ll take care of her.”

He moved in silently, avoiding the line of sight. He was standing by her well, admiring it, before she noticed him. When he turned to look at her, she was frozen.

“You found me.” A stricken anguish filled her voice. He remembered that he had felt like that the moment he saw the dead body of his brother Sanan.

“I persist in my goals,” he said.

“Stay in the hut!” she shouted at the twins who were rushing to her for protection.

“The children will not be harmed,” he said.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“The Death Rite is a test, not an execution.”

“You have two more chances at me. That’s an execution,” she replied bitterly.

“One more chance. I read your last book. You believe in God now. You handled the challenge to your mind quite well. I admire you, Oelita.”

“What will happen to my children?” She was crying.

“Who is the father?”

“Hoemei.”

“My brother-husband’s children are safe.” He said that sharply.

“No they aren’t. You’ll take them to a butchery after you’ve killed me. They have Ainokie’s Curse.”

“No they don’t. I’ve seen them.”

“As a recessive.”

He shrugged. “That hardly bothers their kalothi. There’s a half and half chance that they don’t even carry it. When they are grown and wish children, if they have their children at a creche, that gene can be eliminated. The procedure is becoming standard among the Kaiel.” He glanced at the hut. “Go reassure them. They are frightened. They feel your fear.”

She went and he wandered through the small garden, marvelling.

When she returned the twins were quiet. Children who are afraid whine, but once they have felt the strength of their mother they can understand the necessity of silence. “Are you going to destroy my garden and see if we can survive that?”

“No,” he said.

“Tell me why you are here!”

He ignored her. “I’d forget how to talk if I lived in such a bleached place.”

“You learn its beauties. I’ve seen it when there were flowers.”

“Show me the cone. I’ve never climbed one of those.”

“So you can throw me off and see if I bounce?”

“Peace,” he said softly. “Peace, for now.” He found a stone and carried it with him to the hermit’s stairway. She followed him. He fitted it tightly into the new layer among the other stones aud mounted to the top. She climbed behind him but stayed out of pushing range.

“It’s quite a domain you have here.” His eyes swept the desolate hills and the distant mountains and the high whiffs of cloud. Scowlmoon was a broken orange rock on the horizon and Getasun blazed harshly. “I wouldn’t have lasted out here. I would have jumped into the well head first to drown myself.”

“You’d stick before you reached bottom,” she commented acidly. “Your hair wouldn’t even get wet.”

“If I lived out here, I’d be skinny.”

“My children are very good company. I don’t mind this desert, I love it.”

“How long do you plan to stay?”

“I don’t want my girl and boy ever to go near a temple.”

He worked his way down the spiral of the cone. “Do you think your children will ever have any trouble with the temples? With you as a mother and Hoemei as a father? Kalothi is hereditary, more or less.”

“How long are you going to stay? I want you to leave. This is my place.”

“I’m leaving when you come with me.”

“I’m not crazy!”

He laughed. “Yes, you are.”

“Crazy people are sent to the temples for their Contribution.”

“We humor them first.” Joesai let himself smile.

He walked to the hut that was built out from a tiny cave. She followed him, agitated because he was going toward the twins, but he made no move to get close and the little boy and little girl latched onto Oelita’s legs silently. He noticed a weakness in the roof and went to his backpack for materials and repaired the roof so that it might last another generation, barring an earthquake.

“Are you planning to stay?”

“We build for those who come after us so it is wise to build well,” he replied formally.

Joesai offered her his food but she refused, recalling Kaiel wizardry at drugs and potions. Oelita offered him flat cakes but he refused, politely noting the abundance of poisons in the surrounding vegetation. They laughed.

He noticed eyes watching his smile and directed it to the boy who buried his head in Oelita’s arms. The girl began to compete with her brother. Her gestures were wild and she set up a chatter which her mother seemed to understand — but when she succeeded in attracting Joesai away from her small rival, she, too, fell silent and held her hands over her eyes. Only when he ignored her, did she begin to flirt again.

Oelita saw to their urination and put them on their mats for sleeping. They found all manner of excuses to stay awake to observe the stranger but lost the battle with exhaustion and cried themselves to sleep.

As Joesai prepared to leave, he turned, attacking for the first time. “Your children are not as healthy as you think they are. It is a harsh life here. One day it will kill them quickly. Even if you broke a leg, they would die.”

She followed him out of the hut. “I will not allow you to go unwatched,” she said.

“I intend to make camp far enough away so that you can sleep peacefully.”

“You think I’m going to sleep with you here!”

He stood silently, bulking against the starry desert sky. God began to pass overhead. God’s Streak was always a spectacular sight, a pinsized glow of sun-orange light visibly moving across the void, brighter than any star. Oelita folded to her knees and with the traditional gesture of supplication, arms raised and crossed, head lifted back, made one fervent prayer: “Let this man be gone!”

Joesai ambled away across the ravine. She followed. He kept his promise to make camp far from her abode. She hunched down to watch him, something panicky in the glow of her eyes. “You’ll need some sleep,” he said.

“I’m not going to let you sleep,” she replied.

He curled up on his mat. She poked a stick at him. He played the game, stoically ignoring her. At intervals she poked him or threw a rock. When he heard the faintest insect signal from Eiemeni, Joesai decided it was time to be annoyed. He sat up and began to curse her the way a man desperate for sleep might curse his torturer. She hurled his invective back at him, and he learned the subtleties of Sorrow’s gutter language that had defended the Clanless One long ago. He shifted tactics and began to plead for her to be reasonable.

She never heard the cries when her children were being silenced. He gave up the argument and tried to go back to sleep again. She prodded him with irregular mercilessness. Only when the sudden distant wailing of babies caught her ear, to the west of her hut, did she startle and pass into terror. She began to run. He followed her. She flew out of the hut, wild murder in her eyes. “Have you killed them?”

“They are very safe, and probably very frightened because you are not with them.”

“You machine-made bastard!”

He could see her wavering. Should she stagger toward the west into the impossible night? She’d never find them. She’d have to be equipped to survive out there, and that would take time. Should she plead with Joesai? Should she risk everything and try to kill him so that he wouldn’t follow her?

“I will take you to them,” he said.

She slumped in anguish. “So you’ve laid your trap.”

“No. I’m taking you out of this Death’s Jaw. The Seventh Trial is over. You survived it and I’m impressed.”

“You didn’t cause me to come here!” Contempt and wild hope and suspicion were all in her voice.

“Who knows the workings of the Death Rite? It seems to affect the challenger as much as the one on trial. I’ve changed.”

“You haven’t changed! What you’ve done now just demonstrates that! You’re taking me away from my home to kill me and I have to go in blind hope for my children. You deceive me that my little haven here is the Seventh Trial. It has cherished me, protected me! My well, the abode of Death? I love this place. You will lead me from here in chains to the Seventh Trial and that will kill me.”

“The Seventh Trial though the most difficult of the trials, cannot be a death but by law must be a measure of your kalothi. This ravine could be harsher, yes, but then it would be a simple assassin. What would it tell us of your kalothi? To have settled in this place and lived is possible but not probable. You have great kalothi, Oelita, and I am bonded to you by my own foolishness in casting such a Rite of Trial upon you. I owe you a Great Favor.”

“Then you must return my children and leave me here in peace,” she said bitterly.

“The bond of kalothi does not require me to humor my friend’s madness.” He loaded her packsack. “Your twins are waiting. They have never before been separated from you. They will be suffering.”

She had no choice but to follow him. For the most part she did so silently, but sometimes she would stab invective at his back. “You’re the same long-tailed monster I’ve always known!”

“I’m a mellowed monster.”

“To sip you is to quaff the burning taste of raw whisky!”

He led her over a bridge that showed them the whole dome of the stars under the desert night. “Every life is a whisky cask with a man inside,” he said, “and the man struggles to break through the charcoal barrier of his prison but never gets out. He only grows mellower.”

“Don’t compare my life with that wooden barrel you wear for a head!”

A long pause mediated the altercation as they negotiated a razorback outcropping. On the other side he spoke to the stones in front of his feet. “I remember when I started this thing. I was going to deliver to God an inferior upstart. One of my wives asked me how we might be reconciled if, at the conclusion, you were to prove pleasing to God. I said this was no concern of mine because the only way you could survive was to kill me first — there was room in this world for only one of us. Thus I have created a problem for myself. Such is the way of life.” He chuckled.

“And I remember that you were enjoying yourself! I remember drowning in the Njarae while you watched as you might have delighted in watching a pinned spider in a carnivorous feiri hive!”

“Ho! You accuse me of enjoying your pain? It is true that every time I set a trap the grins were upon me, but every time you survived I found within myself this cancerous traitor growing in happiness. You ran from me, but in the end I, too, ran from you. I have never felt such joy as when first I saw you in my spy-eye tending your hermit’s garden.”

Oelita cried when her children were brought to her from Joesai’s tent. At her reappearance, the twins were too stunned to speak but clung to her. The three slept bundled together in the tent. When Oelita woke, she found Joesai stretched beside her, watching her, one young guard outside, and the noises of the eight-man camp. The sense of danger was gone. “What are you going to do with me?”

“I have carefully considered that. I am bonded to you.”

“That could be a nuisance to me!”

“We will be married.”

She rose to her elbows, waking sleeping infants. She breathed. “We will not!”

“Don’t say I wasn’t generous,” he said with Noe’s straight face. “I gave you seven chances to decline the offer.”

She stared at him, amazed. He was teasing her! She groped for words, intrigued by the game. How did one tickle a friendly monster who was known to have a bad temper? “Is this your Seventh Trial: marriage? I think I’ve been very good at avoiding that one.” Suddenly she laughed.

“There was an ominous ring of no in that laugh,” he said.

“Joesai, you’re mad! Of course I shall say no!”

“The Kaiel are bargainers. I will suggest a bargain. You wish kalothi for your children. Some of that mighty stuff is beyond bargain, for part of your children’s kalothi is your own. Some of it comes from their father, and with Hoemei you have made a wise choice, for who is greater? Some of a child’s kalothi comes from within and that, too, is beyond the help of family or clan. But some of this elixir of life is the gift of strength grown under wise protection and that we can give. You saw how vulnerable you were alone? The maran-Kaiel are not alone. And we need a three-wife. Your children will thrive.”

“What of Kathein?”

“She has sold her body and her soul to Aesoe,” he said blackly.

“I was not wanted.”

“Mine was the greatest objection. We maran have a free will. We revolted at imposition from above. Aesoe’s order soured us. But Teenae always loved you, first with calm logic and then with her heart. And Gaet was at least willing to try you out on the pillows.”

“My little ones will piss all over me if I do not take them out to water the flowers.”

At the tent flap, she paused, her backside to Joesai. “I have grown old in the wilderness. I have wrinkles.”

“I have grown old waiting for you.”

“My will crumbles before your words. Have you become so used to seducing women?”

“I have been introduced to women, and women have seduced me, but I think it can be said that I have borne the brunt of this courtship. I have been clumsy.”

“Yes,” she said and was gone. He wondered if she meant yes-I-will-marry-you or yes-you-are-clumsy.

She let Reia play with the twins and returned to Joesai. “It is nice to have a giant slave. I’m already enjoying it. Will you do anything for me?”

“Within reason.”

Her desert-etched lines wrinkled into a smile. “Already you are trying to back out! Cut your nose off for me!”

“I like my nose.”

“Something a little less drastic, then. Kiss me.”

He reached for her and she countered. “Not now!” In fending him off the fingers of her nearest hand closed with his fingers. Male and female hand held the other tightly. “Once when I was a little girl I was at an engagement ruckus in the hills. I had to stand in my father’s lap to see the drunks. I still remember one of the songs. The famine was over and the crops were in. A skinny boy and girl had decided to risk leaving their families. It was an excuse for people to be happy again — to laugh, to make fools of themselves.”

“I use it as a lullabye for my babies.”

“I brought along a bag of whisky,” said Joesai.

She sneaked a glance at the face of the man whose fingers she wouldn’t let go. “Could we have a ruckus and make fools of ourselves? There are ten of us and two babies. Then I’ll kiss you!”