Courtship Rite

6

THE DAY WAS BEAUTIFUL for herb-hunting. Getasun, as usual, rose quickly through the sky, carrying its forge orange bulk out to sea where it would set beside the stationary Scowlmoon before Oelita could reach home. She kept to the ridges along the shore and whenever she walked over a sandy crest, she stopped to drop her packsack so that she could look down upon the sea she loved. She saw a sleek Mnankrei trader blooming with sails and a small fleet of local craft dredging for rope fibers and iron-reed. Scowlmoon held steady two diameters above the waves, half full, telling her that it was noon.

The vegetation rose waist high, thick and spiny, taller here than in the interior. She wore thick leggings to protect herself from poisonous scratches. It was a striped flower she hunted, good for stimulating babies who had the sleeping sickness.

Her packsack was already bulging. Once across the river bed, she planned to circle around to Nonoep’s farm. He was a renegade Stgal who lived alone, a marvelous soul, and one of her favorite lovers. Having been trained as a priest he knew a great deal of biochemistry and was always willing to use his skill to extract from his boiling bottles any medicine she might need. Sometimes he gave her seeds for the farmers.

In return she would cook for him one of her special meals, or bake bread, and later enjoy love with him on his mat. He liked to hear her gossip about the village and he liked to argue with her about religion. He told her that she was the most sensual woman he knew. Whether his artful teasing was flattery or not, she enjoyed the soft warmth of the words.

Nonoep was a breeder of plants. He didn’t breed varieties of the Sacred Eight but concentrated on wild plants. Many of the profane plants were known to yield edible fractions if they were crushed and dissolved and treated and filtered — but were often too expensive to treat. Nonoep grew different varieties and tested them for nourishment and poison content, and bred the varieties that were easiest to process.

When Getasun had floated three quarters of the way toward the sea’s horizon Oelita came across a small hill farm hidden below a wind-sheltering ridge — Nolar clan for sure once she noticed how they cleared their land and built their hut. Spread below wasn’t enough cultivated land for five, though there would be at least fifteen of them. She put down her packsack, securing it against children’s fingers. The hut was tall — thick baked clay walls supporting a superstructure of woven rushes.

Oelita entered their home without being invited. The family was seated, pounding the stringy branches of a plant that provided fibers of cloth. She sat crosslegged with them and took a stone and began to pound her share of the fibers, emptying them into the vat for soaking. They stared at her shyly while she chatted.

The women were all pregnant and old of the poison. They lived barely long enough to reproduce themselves. The family didn’t clear enough land to raise an adequate crop of the Sacred Eight and insisted on eating too much of the palatable wild vegetation that surrounded their farm.

Oelita never tried to change these people’s diet. Religion was too strong. They knew their diet killed them but the Nolar clan had an extraordinarily high kalothi rating only because of their high tolerance of the natural poisons of Geta. Without that they would be nothing — so they clung to the foods that killed them. All priest clans encouraged them and bought their women for breeding purposes. It disgusted Oelita.

In this region the Nolar clan had a peculiar social structure. They weren’t content with normal group marriage. At puberty the children were either traded to another family or were ceremoniously married into their own family. All the male adults were co-husbands and all the female adults were co-wives. The eldest, and most poison-immune male, had first choice of the newly menstruating female. Inbreeding was thought to be desirable because it was quick to bring out lethal recessives. The children who died were eaten.

These Nolar chanted while they pounded, the old Chants of Knowledge as simple as a baby’s mind. Oelita did not believe the myth that spoke of an Age of Innocence when only the children had kalothi — but certainly the oldest songs were childlike.

The Chants told how to clear the land and how to plant the Sacred Eight and how to breed for kalothi to keep the Race alive. Some were simply counting rituals. The most famous was a mnemonic that related the shapes of the alphabet’s letters to their sounds. Some told of duty and honor. Some praised kalothi. The Outpacing Chant, so lengthy it was known in countless versions, told of the journey of the God of the Sky. Some Chants were as meaningless as the Chant to the Horse Piece of the chess game. Its monotonous inanity was good for pounding rocks against fiber.

“A Horse has feet, oh one, oh two, oh three, oh four; a Horse eats wheat, oh one, oh two, oh three, oh four; a Horse is meat, oh one, oh two, oh three, oh four; a Horse can snort, oh one, oh…”

Only after Oelita had smashed out enough fiber for a shirt and had made them laugh with her stories did she examine the children. Three out of four Nolar children died before puberty. One baby girl, who had forgotten how to walk from feebleness, was dying. Oelita tenderly breast fed the girl.

She kept her breasts full and productive. There was always a child to feed or a lover or a friend. It made her happy to be able to provide such a luxury. If she had no one to ease the ache she milked herself and made a delicate cheese.

Then she took a bag of medicinal food from her packsack and gave it to the mother with instructions for saving the life of the child. Someday she would come back to talk a disturbing form of religion.

One of the hovering children tugged on her arm. He had something special to show her. She had noticed how bright his eyes became whenever she spoke of the bugs her father collected. There out in the meager wheat field the boy showed her some beetles, common underjaws, as if they were a great mystery.

“They’re Horses?” he stated without conviction.

“Why would they be Horses?” she asked gently.

“They’re eating wheat!”

Indeed they were. The underjaw was a very stupid beetle — being known on occasion to eat the wheat which killed it. She humored the boy, remembering her own excitement at bringing common beetles to her father in the hope that somehow she might have found something unusual for his collection. But Oelita’s trained eye nagged her. After a moment she realized what was wrong. Dozens of the underjaws were eating — and no dead beetles lay on the ground.

How peculiar.

She collected some to show Nonoep, rewarding the boy with a present, and thought no more of the matter. It was dawn again and she had to leave. She planned to make Nonoep’s farm before low sunset so that her sleep would be in his arms, but suspected that she was too far. She walked and gathered, flooding her mind with ideas. When she rested she wrote up the resulting harvest of religious thoughts.

She had taught herself how to read and write — her father being illiterate, mostly because he was stubborn. But he had taught her how to think. He had been a brilliant man, devoted to the study of insects. His special fascination had been the eipa which spent its life in the sea and then metamorphosed into a form that flew inland where a variety of carnivorous plants ate it for its water and, in exchange, hatched its eggs. The infants flew back to the sea and transformed into their sea shape. How he deduced these things was Oelita’s introduction to logic.

Oelita had travelled far on foot with her father and knew the land from the sea to the desert. He had made the learning an adventure. She missed him. Strange that she was a vegetarian and spoke out fiercely against all forms of cannibalism but the moment the tower message came, recounting her father’s death, she had driven herself mercilessly — running much of the way for three dawns and sleeping in the sling of a hired Ivieth the remainder — so that she could be at his Funeral Feast. She had begrudged the others who ate of him, not knowing his strength and kindness and constant humor. She still carried dried and salted strips of his flesh that she only ate when she needed superhuman strength. She wore his hide as her best coat and it was his bone that was the handle of her knife.

Oelita wrote obsessively, never being without paper and ink. She often gave her disciples the task of copying what she had written as a form of burning her words into their minds. The Stgal she did not fear, but she was afraid that someday the Kaiel would come and put her on trial for heresy. She, being she, would not repent or recant. And they, being Kaiel, would eat her. Or if the Kaiel were slow to invade, might not the Mnankrei sea priests descend one week to seize the Priestdom of Stgal? They would cut her tongue out and chop off her hands.

She was afraid that her words would be forgotten. She wanted her letters and small books to be copied and sent everywhere so that it would never be possible for the priests to silence her by destroying them all. In her sleep-creepies she goaded people to copy faster. In her pleasant dreams she owned a printing press.

By sunset she hadn’t reached Nonoep’s farm and she was tired because she had been awake since two dawns past. She built a fire and heated soup and laid out her mat for sleep. The bloody sun died in Ritual Suicide, clotting to a deeper red as the stars, one by one appeared, creating their celestial Temple. Sometimes she was lonely sleeping in the open at night. She missed being traditionally religious. Geta had such a rich mythology about the stars. She still wrote the old heroes into her stories.

Swiftly, the God of the Sky appeared and drifted overhead. In a trance she followed His flowing path until He dropped over the horizon. Ah humans! she sighed. When life was so harsh that a man lost all hope for himself, then he raised his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation.