Courtship Rite

8

OELITA WATCHED THE GLASSBLOWER. Lazily the glass flowed and grew on the end of his pipe. Suddenly he would attack it and pull or whack the slick mass to the shape he wanted. He peered into the blazing kiln and readjusted the band around his wet forehead. In three days he had nearly replenished Nonoep’s store of glassware and was ready to move on.

She was pumping him for gossip about the local temples so while he worked he told her of the young boy who had been carried in an iron-reed basket to Remiss to have his nose cut off. He recounted the tribulations of the wives of one Mirandie who supplied the lead oxide for his clear glass. “But the Stgal!” she insisted. “You must have timely stories of the Stgal! You work for them!”

The man laughed as sweat rolled down the valleys of his scars. “The Stgal do not talk to glassblowers! They plot behind brass doors. Now if I heard a tale, it would be a lie put out to titillate the masses.”

“I would hear their lies then, knowing the truth by printing the lie in white ink on black paper!”

He shrugged at her analogy and countered with his own. “Getasun seen through green glass is black.”

She mussed his hair affectionately. “Give me just one of their lies! Please.”

He grinned. “Yono has cuckolded her husbands by filling her bottle in the whisky cellar of Neimeri.”

“That’s her lie,” sulked Oelita.

Mirth roared out of the glassblower. “No. That’s a Stgal lie. Yono’s husbands have been refusing to pay their taxes and are now being slandered by Stgal Ropan who needs the money for a new wing of his temple.” The glassblower banked his kiln fire. “Soon I’m off to Kaiel-hontokae. I’ll bring you back better gossip!”

“Kaiel-hontokae is far!”

“So I dirty my feet. The better to learn new ways.”

“Come.” She took the man’s biceps with both hands. “You’re finished here. I’ll take you down for a bath.”

“I’m seduced by your gentle fingers but my enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge that I will have to endure a long lecture on religion with the bath!”

“I’ll clean behind the ears of your soul. They’re filthy.”

At the pool, which Nonoep maintained above his fields for irrigation, they stripped on the dock beside the great treadwheel that lifted water by a climber’s effort. They dunked their clothes, pounding them clean.

The glassblower dived into the pond and when he emerged Oelita pulled him up on the planks and began to soap him as she tried out new thoughts she was having on the important differences between human will and human strength. Finally he threw her off the dock to shut her up and jumped in after her for the double purpose of rinsing himself and keeping her head underwater.

She escaped onto the treadwheel and they chased each other with frenzied futility, lifting great buckets of well water that splashed into the pool. With the help of two small boys, working at the Nonoep farm to earn coin for a pilgrimage to Sorrow’s Temple, she was laid out on the dock where they gently massaged and soaped her. The glassblower, still in a mood for revenge, delivered a merciless lecture on the art of optical glass making.

“So! I thought I heard merriment!” Nonoep had appeared through the brambles on the rise above his pond. “I’m a proud father today. I have a wonder to show you, Oelita.”

“I’m all soapy!”

“Rinse her off.”

Oelita’s companions grabbed her by the feet and arms and pitched her into the water. She emerged, sputtering. “My clothes are wet. I can’t come. I’m naked and I’ll get scratched!”

“You can have my shoulders.”

“I’ll get dirty again, you stinking old farmer!”

“It is our fate to get dirty again.”

The small woman rode high on the shoulders of her lonepriest lover over the rise, down into the east field. “You’d make a great Ivieth,” she said, enjoying the jog.

“I may join them someday to see the world.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Remember the first day we met?”

“How could I forget such an overpowering event? You were sitting on a barrel of wheat and dribbling honey from your bread into your beard while pontificating about the stubbornness of profane botany.”

“About hair-weed in particular.”

The nodules of the hair-weed were relatively free of the poisons — however, because of their smallness, were hardly worth the pickings. To his frustration Nonoep had tried raising hair-weed with larger nodules and, in that grain store in Sorrow, had been complaining about his failures. Oelita then barged into the conversation with a detailed explanation of the symbiosis between hair-weed and certain insects. It had been a revelation to Nonoep, and he had courteously invited her to come and stay at his experimental farm whenever it pleased her and was rather surprised when she hung around and followed him on the long trek home and took him as one of her lovers that very sunset.

“That’s my latest patch over there,” he said.

Gentle with her body, he set Oelita down beside some of his cultivated hair-weed, new in its vigorous growth. Stooping, he showed her the gorged nodules along the stem.

“Ah,” she said, her eyes bright. “You found the right kind of burrowers!”

“No. That proved to be impossible. I bred them.”

“Your ways have changed since you met me!”

“Perhaps,” he said, lifting her up again to ride on his shoulders while he headed down toward the buildings, “but I’m just as lecherous as ever.”

“And you’re still willing to eat meat,” she reprimanded, pulling his ears.

“Have I had so much as a morsel since I met you?”

“There hasn’t been a famine since you met me!”

He seemed to sag under more than her weight. “There will be another one soon.”

“You can’t be serious!” She tried peering over his head to see his face. “The wheat crop is spectacular this year!”

“Have you forgotten the deviant underjaws you brought me? The first batch of eggs have hatched. They do eat wheat and aren’t affected. I was amazed. The local underjaws that I collected die on the same diet.”

“Will the deviants multiply?”

“Yes.”

They reached the house. “What can we do?”

He was puzzled by something that fit nowhere in his priestly knowledge. “An underjaw doesn’t have the enzymes to digest wheat. I need advice. I’m going to send some eggs to Kaiel-hontokae with my glassblower.”

“You wouldn’t!” Oelita beat on his head and jumped down. “I don’t want to deal with the Kaiel!” She was enraged at the mention of that name.

He laughed and followed her through the curtains. “They are the best geneticists within walking distance. Or on Geta.”

“They breed babies to eat! You can buy meat in the markets at Kaiel-hontokae! You cope with the underjaws! You know genetics. You are Stgal!”

“I’m a farmer. The Kaiel are the magicians.”

Furious, she disappeared into their room and began packing. When he saw that she was going to leave, he argued. She fought back. In the middle of his careful defense, she left for the kitchen to assemble provisions. When she reappeared he was somewhat subdued and put his arm around her.

“Don’t touch me!”

She dressed in leggings, swung the full packsack onto her back, and marched out toward the pool to pick up her wet clothes. Nonoep followed her, smoking in angry defense of himself like a huffing steam machine on wheels. She had assumed the tactic of not replying, so he alternately invented arguments for her and answered them. Unreached, she stuffed her wet clothes into the packsack and headed toward the northern trail that branched up to Sorrow. By now, sulking at her intransigence, he walked silently behind her.

On the edge of his land, Oelita turned. “You insist on dealing with the Kaiel?”

“There is no other way!”

She wheeled and left him.

He watched her little figure disappear through the brush, loving her. Damn fool woman! he thought.

And she listened to hear if he was still following. When she was sure that he was not, tears came to her eyes and she stomped on at the quick pace of the agitated, flinging branches out of her way and ignoring the vegetable claws that tried to rip her boots and clothing.

Anger is quickly burned in active legs. By afternoon she was only thoughtful. Her frustration again flared briefly when, hungry and ready to eat, she remembered that she had left her packed food pouch sitting on Nonoep’s kitchen table. Her stomach cursed her. No matter. There was no way she could recoup that loss. She resigned herself to scrounging for edible roots and building a fire to roast them. The effort took more time than her plans allowed and she was not ready to move again until the stars were out.

She endured an additional wait for the crescent of Scowlmoon to grow thick enough to illuminate the landscape. Then, thoroughly rested but still famished, she set an impulsive course toward Gold Creek. That meander would make an easy night journey to the sea from where she could work her way along the beaches to Sorrow. It was not her usual route and she was not quite sure where she was until she crossed the old gold camp. The sluice runs had created dozens of tailing fans of sand that had not yet succumbed to the crawl of life. She perked up her ears. Yes, she could hear the low rumble of the sea through the gorge.

The path narrowed. She listened to the gurgling call of a river maelot enticing his female and was caught for a brief moment in a swarm of gliding issen whose finger-long wings imprisoned the moonglow in their veins. The trail narrowed still more and disappeared in a landslide, so she edged down into the water and began to wade. The water was low and sluggish and offered her little resistance. There was no reason to look for a better path until she saw two rocks ahead transmogrify into shapes of men.

Travellers, she thought gratefully. They’ll lend me food. But instinctively she peered back and around her for an escape route should that prove necessary — and found two other silent men moving in on her from behind.