And Melein had not objected.
The she’pan herself had put an end to that quarrel—abler in those days six years gone—had descended the tower stairs and intervened. Had called him eshai’i, lack-honor, and tsi’daith’, un-son, and because then he had loved her, it had crushed him.
But not a word, never a word of rebuke to Medai.
And for Medai within a hand of days came the honor of service to the bai of the regul, an honor that might have gone to one of the Husbands; and for Melein came the chastity of the Sen.
And for Niun s’Intel came nothing, only a return to study, a long, long waiting, crushed to the Mother’s side and held from any hope of leaving Kesrith.
There had never been a way to undo that one evil day. Intel would not let him go. He had hoped for peace with Medai, for a change in the affairs of the People.
But Medai had robbed him of that too. It was on nun alone, the service of homeworld, and there had never been any justice in it.
When you have made up your mind what it is the People owe you, Eddan had said, come and tell me. He would have settled for half of what Medai had had.
But then, beginning with Eddan, the Kel spoke of Medai, each praising him: ritual, the lij’alia, beginning the Watch of the Dead; and the voices of the old kel’ein shook in the telling of it.
“It is hardest,” said Liran, “that the old bury the young.”
And last of all but himself, Pasev: “It is certain,” she said, touching the medallions, the j’tai that glittered in the lamps’ golden light, the honors that Medai had won in his services, “that though he was young, he has travelled very far and seen a great deal of war. I see here the service of Shoa, of Elag, of Soghrune, of Gezen and Segur and Hadriu; and it is certain that he has served the People. Surely, surely he has done enough, this brother of ours, this child of our house; I think that surely he was very tired. I think he must have been very weary of service to the regul, and he would have come home as best he could, with what of his strength he had left. I understand this. I am also very tired of the service of regul; and if I knew my service was at an end, I would go the road he took.”
And then it should have been Niun’s time to speak, praising Medai, his cousin. He had gathered angry words, but he could not, after that, speak them or contradict the feelings of Pasev, whom he loved with a deep love. He sank down and lowered his head into his crossed arms, shaking with reaction.
And the Kel allowed him this, which they seemed to take for a kinsman’s grief. But theirs was a true, unselfish sorrow for a child they had loved. His was for himself.
In this he found the measure of himself, that he was capable of meanness and great selfishness, and that he was not, even now, the equal of Medai.
The others talked around him, whispering, after such a time as it became clear that he would not choose to speak in the ritual. They began finally to speak of the high hills, the burial that they must accomplish, and woven into their speech and their plans was a quiet desperation, a shame, for they were old and the hills were very far and the trail very steep. They wondered unhappily among themselves whether the regul might not, at their request, give them motorized transport; but they felt at heart that they dishonored Medai by asking such help of the regul. They would not, therefore, ask. They began to consider how they might contrive to carry him.
“Do not worry,” said Niun, breaking his long silence. “I can manage it myself.”
And he saw in their faces doubt, and when he thought of the steep trails and the high desert he himself doubted it.
“The she’pan will not allow it,” said Eddan. “Niun, we might bury him close at hand.”
“No,” said Niun, and again, thinking of the she’pan, “no.” And after that there were no more suggestions to him. Eddan quietly signed at the others to let be.
And they left him, when he asked of them quietly and with propriety to be left alone. They filed out with robes rustling and the measured ring of honors on their garments. The tiny high sound of it drew at Niun’s heart. He considered his own selfishness, lately measured, and the courage of his elders, who had done so much in their lives, and was mortally ashamed.
But he began to think, in the long beginning of his nightlong watch, in the silences of the edun, where elsewhere others were in private mourning—and knew that he was not willing to die, whatever the traditions of his caste, that he did not want to die as Medai had died, above all else; and this ate at him, for it was contrary to all that he was supposed to be.
Medai had been able to accept such things, and the she’pan had accepted Medai. And this was what it had won him.
It was blasphemy to entertain such thoughts before the Shrine, in the presence of the gods and of the dead. For himself he was ashamed, and he longed to run away, as he had done when he was a child, going into the hills to think alone, to try himself against the elements until he could forget again the pettinesses of men, and of himself.
But he was reckoned a man now, and it had been long since he had had that freedom. Dangerous times were on the edun, hard times, and it was not an hour that Niun s’Intel could afford to play the child.
There was a matter of duty, of decencies. Medai had lived and died by that law. He could not manage the inner part of him, but he could at the least see to it that the outer man did what was dutiful to those who had to depend on him.
Even if it were totally a lie.
“Niun.”
The stir, the whisper from beyond the screen he had taken for the wind that blew constantly through the shrine. He looked up now and saw a hazed golden figure through the intricate design, and knew his sister’s voice. She crossed the floor as far as the screen that divided them, religiously, though they could meet face-to-face elsewhere in the edun and outside its limits.
“Go back,” he wished Melein, for she violated the law of her caste by being in the presence of the dead, even a dead kinsman. Her caste had no debts of kinship; they renounced them, and all such obligations. But she did not leave. He rose up, stiff from kneeling on the cold floor, and came to the grillwork. He could not see her distinctly. He saw only the shadow of her hand on the lacery of the screen and matched it with his own larger one in sympathy, unable to touch her. He was unclean and in the presence of the dead, and would remain unapproachable until he had buried his kinsman.
“I am permitted to come,” she said. “The she’pan gave me leave.”
“We have done everything,” he assured her, struck to the heart remembering that there had been affection between Melein and Medai, cousinwise, and at the last, perhaps more than cousinly. “We are going to take him to Sil’athen—everything that we can do we will do.”
“I had not thought you would watch here,” she said. And then, with an edge of utter bitterness. “Or is it only because you were directly ordered not to?”
Her attack confused him. He took a moment to answer, not knowing clearly against what manner of assumption he was answering. “He is kin to me,” he said. “Whatever else—is no matter now.”
“You would have killed him yourself once.”
It was the truth. He tried to see Melein’s face through the screen; he could only see the outline, golden shadow behind gold metal. He did not know how to answer her. “That was long ago,” he said. “And I would have made my peace with him if he were alive. I had wanted that. I had wanted that very much.”
“I believe you,” she said finally.
She left silence then. He felt it on him, an awkward weight. “It was jealousy,” he admitted to her. The thing that he had pondered took shape and had birth, painfully, but it was not as painful as he had thought it would be, brought to light. Melein was his other self. He had been as close as thought to her once, could still imagine that closeness between them. “Melein, when there are only two young men within a Kel, it is impossible that they not compare themselves and be compared by others. He had first all the things I wanted to excel in. And I was jealous and resentful. I in
terfered between you. It was the most petty thing I have ever done. I have paid for it, for six years.”
She did not speak for a moment. He became sure that she had loved Medai; only daughter of an edun otherwise fading into old age, it was inevitable that she and Medai should once have seemed a natural pairing, kel’en and kel’e’en, in those days when she had also been of the Kel.
Perhaps—it was a thought that had long tormented him—she would have been happier had she remained in the Kel.
“The she’pan sent me,” she said finally, without answering his offering to her. “She has heard of the intention of the Kel. She does not want you to go. There is disturbance in the city. There is uncertainty. This is her firmest wish, Niun: stay. Others will see to Medai.”
‘“No.”
“I cannot give her that answer.”
“Tell her that I did not listen. Tell her that she owes Medai better than a hole in the sand and that these old men cannot get him to Sil’athen without killing themselves in the effort.”
“I cannot say that to her!” Melein hissed back, fear in her voice, and that fear made him certain in his intentions.
It made no more rational sense than the other desires of Intel, this she’pan that could gamble with the lives of the People, that could bend and break the lives of her children in such utter disregard of their desires and hopes. She has given me her virtues, he thought, with a sudden and bitter insight: jealousy, selfishness, possessiveness, . . . ah, possessive, of myself, of Melein, the children of Zain. She sent Melein to the Sen and Medai to the regul when she saw how things were drifting with them. She has ruined us. A great she’pan, a great one, but flawed, and she is strangling us, clenching us against her until she breaks our bones and melts our flesh and breathes her breath into us.
Until there is nothing left of us.
“Do as you have to do,” he said. “As for me, I will do him a kinsman’s duty, truesister. But then you are sen’e’en and you do not have kinsmen anymore. Go back and say what you like to the she’pan.”
He had hoped, desperately, to anger her, to pierce through her dread of Intel. He had meant it to sting, just enough. But her hand withdrew from the screen and her shadow moved away from him, becoming one with the light on the other side.
“Melein,” he whispered. And aloud: “Melein!”
“Do not reproach me with lack of duty,” her voice came back to him, distant, disembodied. “While he lived, I was a kinswoman to him and you were grudging of everything he had. Now I have other obligations. Say over him that the she’pan is well pleased with his death. That is her word on the matter. As for me, I have no control over what you do. Bury him. Do as you choose.”
“Melein,” he said. “Melein, come back.”
But he heard her footsteps retreat up hidden stairs, heard doors close one after another. He stayed as he was, one hand against the screen, thinking until the last that she would change her mind and come back, denying that answer she had made him; but she left. He could not even be angry, for it was what he had challenged her to do.
Intel’s creation. His too.
He hoped that somewhere in Sen-tower Melein would lay down her pride and weep over Medai; but he doubted it. The coldness, the careful coldness that had been in her voice was beyond all repentance, the schooled detachment of the Sen.
He left the screen finally, and sat down by the corpse of Medai. He locked his hands behind his neck, head bowed on his knees, twice desolate.
The lamps snapped and the fires leaped, the door of the edun having been left open this night, an ancient tradition, a respect to the dead. Shadows leaped and made the writings on the walls seem to writhe with independent life, writings that the she’pan said contained the history and wisdom of the People. All his life he had been surrounded by such things: writings covered every wall of the main hall and the Shrine and the she’pan’s tower, and the accesses of Kath and Kel—writings that the she’pan said were duplicated in every edun of the People that had ever existed, exact and unvaried. Through such writings the sen’ein learned. The Kel’ein could not. He knew only what had happened within his own life and within his sight, or those things he heard his elders recall.
But Melein could read the writings, and knew what truth was, as did the she’pan, and grew cold and strange in that knowledge. He had asked once, when Melein was taken into the Sen, if he could not be taken too they had never in their lives been separated. But the she’pan had only taken his hands into hers, and turned the calloused palms upward. Not the hands of a scholar, she had said, and dismissed his appeal.
Something stirred out in the hall, a slow shuffling, a click of claws on stone—one of the dusei that had strayed from the Kel-tower. They generally went where they chose, none forbidding them, even when they were inconvenient or destructive. It was not even certain that one could forbid them, for they were so strong that there could be no coercion. They sensed, in the peculiar way of dusei, when they were wanted and when not, and rarely would they stay where they were not desired.
They understood the kel’ein, the belief was whose thoughts were unfearing and uncomplex, and for this reason each dus chose a kel’en or kel’e’en and stayed lifelong. One had never set affection on Niun s’Intel, though once he had tried—shamefully desperate—to trap a young one and to coerce it. It had fled his childish scheme, smashing the trap, knocking him unconscious.
And never after that had he found any skill to draw one after him, as if that one, betrayed, had warned all its kind of nature of Niun s’Intel.
The elder kel’ein said that it was because he had never truly opened his heart to one, that he was too sealed up in himself.
He thought this false, for he had tried; but he also thought that the sensitive dusei had found him bitter and discontent and could not bear it.
He believed so, hoping that this would change; but in the depth of his heart he wondered if it were possibly because he was not a natural kel’en. For a woman of the People all castes were open; for a man, there were only Kel-caste and Sen; and he had been both deprived in one sense and overindulged in others, simply because he was the last son of the House. It had meant that he received the concentrated efforts of all his teachers, that they had worked with him until he had understood, until his skill was acceptable. But in an edun full of sons and daughters, he thought that he might have failed to survive; his stubbornness would have brought him early challenge, and the People might then have been rid of his irritance in the House. He thought that he might have been a better kel’en if not for the Mother’s interference; but then many things might have been different if he were not the last; and so might she.
Medai had pleased the Mother; and Medai was dead; but he sat here living, a rebel son to the Mother. She would have somewhat to say to him after Medai’s burying in the hills, when he must come back and face her. Thereafter would be bitter, bitter words, and himself without argument, and Melein on the she’pan’s side in it. He shrank from what the she’pan might say to him.
But she would have to say it. He would not unsay what he had said.
Again the scrape of claws. It was a dus. The explosive sough of breath and the heavy tread made it clear that the intruder was coming closer, and Niun willed it away from the Shrine, for dusei were not welcome here. Yet it came. He heard it enter the outer room, and turned and saw it in the dark, a great slope-shouldered shadow. It made that peculiar lost sound again, and slowly edged closer.
“Yai!” he said, turning on one knee, furiously willing it out.
And then he saw that the dus was dusty and that its coat was patched with crusted sores, and his heart froze in his chest and his breath caught, for he realized then that it was not one of their own tame beasts, but a stranger.
Sometimes wild dusei would come down off the high plains to hover round the lands of the edun and create havoc among the tame ones; in his own memory kel’ein had died, trying to approach such an animal, even armed. Dusei sensed intentions, unc
annily prescient: there were few animals more dangerous to stalk.
This one stood, head lowered, massive shoulders filling the doorway, and rocking back and forth, uttering that plaintive sound. It forced its way in, making the plaster crumble here and there, though the door was purposely made small and inconvenient for them, to protect the Mysteries from their mindless irreverence.
It came, irresistible, thinner than the well-fed dusei of the edun. Niun edged aside, one of the lamps crashing down as the dus shouldered it. It whined and whuffed and fortunately the spilled fire went out, though the hot oil stung its foot and made it shy aside. Then it approached the body of Medai and pawed at it with claws as long as a man’s hand—poisonous, the dew claw possessing venom ducts, the casual swipe of them capable of disemboweling mri or regul. Niun crouched in the shadow by the overturned lamp, as immobile as the furniture. The beast’s body filled much of the room and blocked the doorway. It had a fearsome, sickly stench that overrode even the incense; and when it turned its massive head to stare at the frail mri huddled in the corner, its eyes showed, running, dripping rheum onto the hallowed floor.
Miuk! The Madness was on him. The secretions of his body were out of balance and the miuk, the Madness of his kind, was to blame for his behavior, sending him into a mri dwelling. There was nothing Niun knew, neither beast nor man, more to be feared than this: if the dusei of the edun had not been locked upstairs this night, they would never have let a miuk’ko dus come near the edun; they would have died in defense of that outer doorway, rather than let that beast in.
And Niun s’Intel prepared himself to die, most horribly, in a space so small that the dus could not even cast his body from underfoot; his brothers would find him in shreds. It prodded at the body of Medai, as if in prelude to this, but it hesitated. Grotesque, horrid, the beast rocked to and fro, straddling the corpse, its eyes streaming fluid that blinded it. From some far place in the Kel-tower there was a deep moan, a dus fretting at its unaccustomed confinement, at the mood of the mourning Kel—or sensing invasion downstairs, trying desperately to get out. Others joined in, then fell abruptly silent, hushed perhaps by the order of the kel’ein.
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