Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  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.

  7

  To play kolgame is our sacred duty. How else can the Race remember to struggle for the total Union of Geta under the One Sky of God? How else can the Race remember that Union can only be achieved through relentless allegiance to the priest clans? How else can the Race remember that, to win, a man must break the rules, but that to break the rules is the worst risk a man can take?

  From the Temple of Human Destiny’s Games Manual

  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.”

  8

  Always expect the unexpected. But if you are sure that the sun will not rise because it has always risen, then expect the sun to rise. The day you have learned to trust your friend, expect betrayal without wavering from your trust. A wind waits beside every tent. Even your enemy may befriend you.

  “I expected my son to love me,” said the father.

  “I expected my crops to grow in this fertile ground,” said the farmer.

  “I expected happiness,” said the puzzled maiden.

  Look behind that bush for it is not a bush. Contradictions do not perplex the logician. They arise because there are more rules to an open game than can be known. Even God expected man to be good.

  Dobu of the kembri, Arimasie ban-Itraiel in Sight

  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.