Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  “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.

  9

  If one man says whore and another hears hoar, of what use is it? Speech, no matter how eloquent, is not communication. If one man draws a star and another sees a cross, of what use is it? Pictures, even if they contain color, even if they move, are not communication. If a man caresses a woman and the woman feels the blade of a knife, of what use is it? Touch, no matter how deeply felt, is not communication. For a communication to happen, the construct in one mind must be duplicated by another mind.

  Foeti pno-Kaiel, creche teacher of the maran-Kaiel

  TRADITIONALLY GETAN MESSAGES were carried by travellers and, if speed was essential, by Ivieth runners or by the flags and lights of the towers. Over difficult terrain some of the modern towers were connected by wire. But fantastic change was upon the land.

  Kaiel neurophysiologists, curious about the electric field of the brain, had hit upon a trail that took them to mechanically induced electromagnetic radiation. Effects barely measurable by beetle-leg jerking first led to organized experiment and then to increasingly sophisticated instrument
ation. Suddenly the Kaiel leadership found itself with the beginnings of a message network several orders of magnitude swifter than the network of every rival.

  Hoemei was a member of the team assessing the most rapid way to exploit what they all knew would be a temporary advantage. He spent days at the communications command center in the Palace among the shelves of coils and electron jars puzzling over transcripts of rayvoice calls.

  His main center of interest was the Njarae coastline, listening for echoes of his brother.

  Hoemei’s electromagnetic eye took in the whole of the immense Njarae Sea. His agents were established at fourteen key points. Over the weeks as he attempted to shadow Joesai, using that problem to feel out the potential of this machine, he became increasingly fascinated by what he was seeing with his new toy. Joesai remained invisible — but the view!

  He found himself watching game players who thought they were hidden. They had no reason to suspect that their huge board had been connected by spies in instant communication. The Mnankrei were poising themselves for a lethal strike against the Stgal. In his notes it all came together.

  Even Aesoe would be hard-pressed to believe their boldness because such a plan broke too many rules. And Joesai; innocently Joesai had entered the focal center of their game, unaware of the fury rising distantly at sea.

  Hoemei stood at a circular window of the Kaiel Palace, his back to the electrons that leaped across hot wires through net to dock, his mind flickering with images of far places superimposed upon the image of his city. Kaiel-hontokae had been built on the ruins of the Arant to guard against the return of heresy but, instead, had been possessed by questions which led to newer heresies.

  Truly the Palace has magic eyes, he thought. Would those eyes deliver the power to rule the world they saw? Before he descended from this high room he spoke to each member of his staff so that they all tasted his joy in their competence. Hoemei wandered home through the walled maze of the city, deep in his own mental maze.

  Kaiel-hontokae had roving streets, paved in stone, which turned upon themselves or stopped abruptly in stairs or reached a deadend at the gate of some wall-building. The wall-buildings were enormous three-storied structures that completely enclosed areas where commercial activity was taboo. Each such palisade had its own name. There was the Bok of the Fountain of Two Women, the Bok of the Kaiel Palace, the Bok of Seven Mourners, the Bok of Sudden Joy, the Bok of Many Trees, the Bok of the River Rapids.

  His feet found a path home while his mind tested the passageways that power could open to a priest, leading him to light or to lightless labyrinths. These thoughts meandered along twists and turns until they returned to Noe where they were content to rest in comfort upon the shifting images created by his memories of an enigmatic woman.

  I will need Noe’s counsel, he thought. She knew the Mnankrei better than any other member of his family.

  Hoemei had been enjoying his days alone with Noe in the stone mansion on the hill. Gaet was away. Joesai and Teenae were far away. Their absence gave him time to explore this woman whom he had never understood, who was never in a hurry to be understood, who alone of the women he knew relished power.

  Noe possessed more useless skills than he had ever known existed — patter that pleased but meant nothing, sailplane gliding, flower arranging, rock reading, staig poetry, dream analysis. She had learned her sexuality as a temple courtesan honoring men who were preparing themselves for Ritual suicide. She indulged herself outrageously in things like the body sculpture that had given her those delicate folds of skin along her ribcage which Joesai teasingly referred to as her “handles”. There was no end to it.

  When Gaet first brought her home to their bed, Hoemei had thought of Noe as a scatterbrain. But she had her own direction. If she indulged in luxury, she was also a master of such stoic arts as cross-desert hiking. Was it style she craved? Her only consistency was style. Even hardship was raw material for her style.

  He shook his head. There was a gulf between them. He was the disciplined product of the creches where a child demonstrated his abilities quickly or was sent to the abattoir. Hoemei had never been given a second chance nor had he needed one. Noe was a pampered child of riches.

  How alien they remained. When he entered the courtyard of the mansion she was placing a bowl of profane flowers called blooded-teeth. An excited bee had found the bouquet. Lovers were said to forget all quarrels near this aroma. Hoemei was touched. The gesture could only have been meant for him. She smiled. “My love.” And hurried on her way to the kitchen without kissing him.

  He lingered near the flowers, fragile white petals with red rims, guarded by a stem of poisoned spikes. He sniffed, then followed Noe’s scent, faintly grinning. She was like a flower, herself.

  She fixed him an appetizer of baby-liver pate on crunch bread. That was so like her. She always had delicacies around regardless of the expense. “I discharged all of our due-debts today,” she chatted.

  “You can slaughter a whole day that way.”

  “But I arranged it so that I visited half my constituency while I did the money rounds,” she said smugly.

  “What did they have to say?”

  “The usual problems. We’ll have to find a means to get more water up to the Kalkenie. And you?”

  “How would you kill an underjaw beetle?”

  She laughed. “Step on it.”

  “Millions of them. You know about such things. I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m about to make a fateful prediction and some policy decisions to be registered and witnessed for the Kaiel Archives. The outcome will drastically affect my kalothi rating one way or another. My unconceived children will live or die by this decision.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Gaet and Joesai and Teenae should be here!”

  “No. The decision has to be made tonight. And you are the perfect person to advise me. You know the rituals of genetic modification.”

  “Only what Joesai has taught me.”

  “But you are good at it. And your mother ran trading fleets against the Mnankrei. You have a feel for those wind riders.”

  “They dominate through trade.”

  “Exactly.”

  He took her by the wrist and pulled her into the study where he rolled out a map on the table, weighing down the corners with carved ancestral skulls from Noe’s and Teenae’s families. The largest of Geta’s eleven landbound seas, the Njarae Sea extended along a northeastern diagonal one-fourth of the way around Geta, fat to the north, narrow to the south like a poised club. Sorrow hugged the western shore formed by the Wailing Mountains. The Mnankrei islands lay to the north but the Mnankrei priests had generations ago spread from the islands to the northern plain. Hoemei moved his finger down from the Stgal mountain reaches, far south into the Stgal Plain, a distance covered by bad roads and controlled by six loosely confederated Stgal clans.

  “There’s famine here.”

  “I heard it was a good crop.”

  “It was. Plagues of underjaws are eating the wheat.”

  “But they die when they attack the Sacred Food!”

  “These don’t.”

  “Oh my God!” The idea was terrifying. It was a disorienting event, like God falling from His Sky. “A mutation?” She couldn’t imagine a mutation that drastic.

  “No. I’ve had my men on it. We’ve been in constant contact via rayvoice. They haven’t got the equipment they need but one of my women is of the creches and she’s a brilliant microbiologist. You wouldn’t believe the shortcuts and sidestepping she can do. The underjaws are manufacturing some human enzymes. And other such strangenesses.”

  “They are carrying human genes?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Now that is a Violation of the Rules,” she said, awed by someone’s audacity.

  “Could it be done? That’s what I want to know.”

  Noe retreated into a deep scan of her knowledge. “We made your mother.”

  �
�Yes, but she’s human in her way. I didn’t think it was possible for sacred and profane cells to operate together.”

  “I could think of ways. It would be difficult.”

  “Then it is the Mnankrei who have unleashed this plague.”

  “Not the Mnankrei I know.”

  “Look. The rayvoice has given me an immense vista.” He swept his hand up the map. “The port watchers are sending us data on every Mnankrei ship movement. Relief ships loaded with grain left the islands for Stgal Plain harbors before the plague even started. And now they are departing for the northern ports. A grain ship set sail for Sorrow even today. It is like carrying honey to a beehive. The harvest is due.”

  She picked up the skull of her great-grandfather, carved in swastikas and leaves. “What would you say, Pietri?” He said nothing. “Pietri died in defiance of the Mnankrei, so goes the family story. It was a famine. The Mnankrei offered food in exchange for control. My great-grandfather offered his body at the Temple to keep the Mnankrei away.” She smiled ruefully. “I think he was skinny.

  The Mnankrei came anyway. They come during famine. Food for control. Always, always, always. My grandfather wedded himself to the sea as a free merchant to take their hand from his wrist. That’s where the seamen on my mother’s side of the family come from.”

  “Food for control,” said Hoemei darkly, “and now famine to create the need for food.”

  “I can’t believe that of them. How could they face God?”

  “We have to believe it of them. They are moving in to take over the land we have been granted by the Council. Our children’s heritage. We’ll be disgraced.”

  “Joesai is there.”

  “It’s bad. Joesai will make it worse. It was a mistake to send him. We’re going to need this Oelita woman. Her position will be weak when the famine comes. It is easy to tolerate a Godless heresy when the crops are good but the day the famine hits, they’ll spit-roast the lot of them. Teenae can temper Joesai, maybe.”