Courtship Rite

7

THE OIL LAMP GASPED to stay alive like an old bee buzzing its wings erratically along the ground. Teenae lay beside Joesai, watching him pass into sleep by this flicker. He looked so peacefully evil. So much she didn’t know about him. He had been a professional provocateur, a veteran of many successful missions into non-Kaiel lands. Was it fair to launch him and fifteen of his chosen against one woman who had no warning of his coming?

Alien rocky slopes had been guiding them to the coast. She smiled her love for this man, feeling protected by his experience and by the agile massiveness of him. No desire to thwart him was in her breast but still, fresh with the warmth of his love in her loins, she began to formulate her own plans.

She was sure she was a better strategist, even given the handicap of no experience. Didn’t she always beat him at kolgame?

And not only could she beat Joesai, she could also beat Aesoe. What did those two know of human emotions? It should be possible to enlist the heretic woman as an ally without marrying her. Then Aesoe would have what he wanted and they could have Kathein, and nobody would have to die. Why couldn’t non-mathematicians ever understand optimization? She kissed Joesai’s nipple just the same.

Sleep did not come as she weighed plan against alternate plan. They were so close to Sorrow that she had little time. Eventually intense thinking made her sweaty and hungry and too nervous to lie still. She sneaked out of the tent, naked, to rummage through the supplies for hard-bread by the light of Scowlmoon, now nearly full because of the lateness of the night.

As they crawled down into the Valley of Ten Thousand Graves, the moon had been swallowed by the mountains, but had suddenly reappeared in the sky again, dominating it, higher than a Kaiel-hontokae. The river in front of them meandered to the coast, long ago eroding away all obstacles between here and the Njarae Sea.

Dull red moonglow shone on the shaved centerline of her skull, dyeing her cascading hair blacker than it really was, etching soft shadows into the carved designs that covered her body so that she seemed almost clothed while she stood there tearing the bread with her teeth. Fierce was her pleasure in the cold mountain breeze. The wind moaned the old song of the Wailing Mountains.

One of the Ivieth porters, as tall as Joesai but heavier and longer of leg, noticed her and rose from his pad. “Is all well?”

Her teeth flashed. “Hunger.”

“Soon we have warm starting broth. See, the eclipse has already begun.” He gestured at the moon. “It is almost dawn. Go back to your man’s flesh.”

She shrugged, smiling. The Ivieth were humble — except when they were being responsible for you on a journey. The roads they built and guarded were safe. “I slept all last night in the palanquin.” That had been high night when it was not the custom to sleep. “You return to your pad. You need the rest.”

“An Ivieth needs no rest.”

It was almost true. The Ivieth clan had been bred, by their own standards, to keep moving no matter what the barriers — mountains or heat or fatigue. It was not uncommon for an Ivieth to pull his wagon seven days and nights without sleep.

“A kolgame then, by the dark of the eclipse!” she challenged.

The rules of this game are known by every child, every clan. A kolgame begins with the creation of the board out of wooden pieces that fit together like a jig-saw puzzle with many solutions, the particular form being determined by the tossing of dice.

Then the territory is peopled by tenants and their Sacred Eight crops. The bees are distributed by chance and swarm when the crops are good. Each tenant belongs to a clan. The clan has its own moves and breeding ritual. Each move costs a vegetation piece which must be regrown.

The game leads to frequent impasse conditions which can only be broken if a tenant violates the rules of his clan. To do so he loses kalothi. At the onset of each Culling Condition the tenant with the lowest kalothi is removed from the territory. A player must violate rules, but he must not do so often, and he must be careful about which rules he chooses to violate.

Strategically any clan may achieve domination over another clan or free itself from domination. A clan which is not the subject of control by any other clan is called a priest clan. The object of the game is to unite the board under the command of one priest clan.

Legend attributed the origin of kol to the need for an intelligence test to select those worthy enough to feed their brethren. In starvation times, where temple kalothi records were unavailable, kolgame tournaments were still held, losers donating their bodies for the survival of the others.

The dawn found Teenae crouched with her chin on one knee, in the shadow of the naked Ivieth, playing with such intensity that she scarcely noticed the waking of the camp, or the fires that heated the broth, or Joesai when he came up behind her, soaping the centerline of her scalp and shaving it so that she would be presentable for their entrance into Sorrow that day.

Teenae won. Yelping, she hugged the Ivieth warmly. If you wanted Teenae to hug you, you had to lose to her at kolgame. She was a sore loser. Joesai had her robes out and patiently dressed her, trying this and that for effect, aided by the good-hearted comments of the company. And so the expedition, which had been waiting, got under way.

The salty sea wind was breathtaking as it blew in from the ocean below the hills. She was awed. She had never seen the sea before. The village clustered small about one crooked inlet. Its magnificent temple seemed to be a she-magician who had shrunk the village spires and buildings into a dull city about herself. Teenae was pleased to ride into town beautifully robed in a decorated palanquin carried across the shoulders of a superbly muscled Ivieth couple, Joesai on foot beside her.

“Stay by me,” she whispered. She glanced around curiously for danger but found none, only seamen and merchants and Ivieth pulling wagons of farm produce.

The “goldsmith” and his wife were elaborately welcomed at an inn overlooking the pier and provided rooms with a view of the village. The stone walls of their apartment were hung with old tapestries of men laughing at family Funeral Feasts. Once their belongings were hung away, the innkeeper personally bathed them in the scented waters of his public bath and insisted on serving them their first meal in his kitchen. They ate well, for it was not a famine year — breads and brown sea rice and okra croquettes flavored with profane spices. He brought them the most delicious honeyed bee crisps Teenae had ever tasted.

Fifteen of Joesai’s band trickled in, one this day, two the next, some by land, some by sea, busying themselves learning about the village of Sorrow. A “tailor” talked with tailors. A young “Clei” woman took on writing contracts. A “stone mason” asked after the new road work. A “merchant” hurried through town looking for a house to rent. A “sailor” gossiped among the import-export traders. The “goldsmith” and his woman studied pencrafted copies of books by the Gentle Heretic, seeking contradictions in her reasoning by which she might be trapped. He sold gold and brought the gossip back to his wife.

Unobtrusive, but everywhere, was the Scar of the Heresy — a stem with its four wheat kernels each ending in a long fiber. A woman would have it tattooed between her breasts or it would be formed into the margin of a tailor’s sign or be embroidered upon a tattered coat. Once Teenae saw a child carving it slowly into another child’s arm, his lip tight in concentration. Its message was constant: do not eat those weaker than yourself, do not eat the malformed child, the noseless criminal, the cripple, the feeble minded, the wandering madman, the blind, the incompetent.

“It’s always been that way,” Joesai grumbled. “We’re a generous people. We’ve always been willing to fatten the feeble minded — when the harvest is good.” He quoted a cynical proverb, “A prosperous Getan will fill you with joy; in hard times, he will suck the joy from your marrow.”

“Why are we so harsh?” asked Teenae, moved by some of the things Oelita had written.

“It’s a harsh world.”

“It’s our duty to make it a less harsh world. We’re Kaiel!”

“Yes, my little o’Tghalie imp!” He roared with laughter. And then added as an afterthought, thinking of his childhood, “Only the harsh survive.”

“This Oelita is not harsh. She is strong. She believes that teams working together can make harshness unnecessary through the power of cooperation.”

Joesai strode across the room to the tankard in dismissal. Ferment refilled his blown-glass cup. For a while he stared at the feasting mourners on the tapestry. A child, crouched in a corner, was gnawing the meat off his grandfather’s ribs. A son had his hand on the buttocks of a red-cheeked young flirt. Two men in animated conversation were stuffing themselves with bread pie and sausage, discussing… philosophy? the price of bricks? Joesai peered through the liquid to the bottom of the green cup. “God has gone to great lengths to tell us that there is no escape from harshness.” He turned to Teenae, almost savagely. “Why did He bring us here if not to teach us that?”

“Maybe to teach us that no matter where we are, there is hope!”

“Hope. Ah, yes. Hope is the irrepressible heresy.”

“This woman will bring hope; even to you, Joesai.”

“Soon, then. My boy Eiemeni has found her.”

Teenae’s breath froze. “Is she dead?”

He laughed. “Ho. The Death Rite does not start with death. And it does not always end with death. If it always ended with death, the Rite would be pointless.”

“What have you done to her?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. We have not yet set the trap.”