Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  Oelita’s general contract with the Kaiel was explained carefully to the giant by the pale light of a bioluminous globe hanging from the tent poles. Teenae fed the glowing bacteria of the globe and listened, learning.

  Gaet was meeting representatives of each coastal clan and setting up committees, loyal to the underclans, to monitor the contract, to spot violations and inevitable flaws. First he had been concentrating on wooing the farmers near his lines of supply but was now swinging his attention to the Ivieth who were the most mobile clan of Geta and the people most accustomed to shifting loyalties. Ivieth from Kaiel-hontokae were to be brought in and Ivieth from Sorrow, first those who were Low on the List, were to be sent back along the newly refurbished road.

  As a matter of tactics, Gaet was not signing up people faster than he could build the apparatus to serve them. Consequently Kaiel protection remained scarce and in demand, thus allowing him to negotiate conditions easier for the Kaiel to meet.

  The Stgal were showing no real unity of command in their response. Later that day, rifle over her shoulder, Teenae brought in a delegation of four young Stgal to meet with Gaet. Obliquely they tried to bribe him. Without showing any expression, Gaet replied by offering a counter-bribe. He left the priests wondering whether he was serious or whether he was just roasting their legs.

  In the evening, on the tent cushions, Teenae told Gaet of another Stgal group — she already had a network of spies in Sorrow — who argued in their councils for delaying actions that would suffice until the arrival of Mnankrei wheat and barley. Nevertheless, whatever internal dissent existed among the Stgal, they had agreed internally to postpone the Culling — which meant that they were feeding people from their reserves and thus alleviating present miseries by decreasing future options. They were gambling that the Mnankrei would come to their rescue.

  Gaet laughed. He was enjoying this real-life kolgame. Teenae let him laugh but she busied herself cleaning her rifle, sitting by the brazier, deep in thought.

  43

  Whosoever insists on winning must play at trivial games; no interesting victory is ever assured.

  Dobu of the kembri, Arimasie ban-Itraiel in Rewards

  AFTER A ROLLING journey in a small single-masted vessel that took her to three tiny harbor villages, the se-Tufi Who Walks in Humility found passage as High Deck Sensual on a large merchantman of the Mnankrei. It was not an ideal berth. The captain, whom she expected to be in charge, had been moved out of his cabin into the quarters of his mates by a certain Summerstorm Master Krak — a weighty official of Soebo on a tour of inspection — who was disinclined to share his appropriated luxuries with a mere woman.

  Instead of being mistress of the High Room, as she had contracted, Humility found herself being shifted between two small bunks, three mates, and a captain who was in a foul mood for being ordered about at every change of tack by his finicky superior. Nor were all the seamen drafted from the Vlak or Geiniera clans as was usual. She had signed on to service the sea priests, unaware that the ship’s crew contained fifteen virile Mnankrei doing their sailing apprenticeship.

  Paraded before them along the deck she paled and somehow the youths noticed. They were in awe to have a Liethe at their disposal and, among themselves, overruled their captain, deciding that their collective lust would be too much for her. They fixed up a private bed among the oily smells of the dark rope room so that she might have a place of respite from the fetid mate’s quarters. They gave her candles and smuggled special foods for which her smile was enough reward. Such unanimous gallantry warmed Humility and she responded by being free with her touches. Often she sang for them and once spent an evening by the light of Scowlmoon helping the crew mend ratlines.

  One gray morning, while an easy rain was dropping upon the sea, a small ship hailed them and a wounded man was brought aboard. The patrol had tried to stop a boat smuggling the false judges of the Kaiel across to Mnank. Explosions had thrown pellets at them and one of the men had taken a lead ball into his stomach. Humility tended the man that she might hear him speak of this wonder. The rifle! How would these men of the sea respond to this awesome Kaiel magic?

  “We couldna come close,” said the sailor in his pain. The wound was days old, but movement to the larger ship had opened the hole and his suffering was fresh.

  “At what distance were you taken?” asked Krak.

  “Five hundred man-lengths.”

  Krak was surprised and asked for more details to confirm the estimate. Finally he shrugged. “Are you frightened?” he asked sarcastically of a young Mnankrei who seemed most awed by this report of metal flung through the air like seed popping from the ripened pod of a hurler.

  “The game has changed,” came the reply, revealing neither fear nor foolhardiness.

  “The sand is stirred but the beach remains,” quoted Krak, calling upon a common Mnankrei proverb. “Let me instruct you. In the blood of this poor man’s belly you see demonstrated a mastery of metal — a tinkerer’s skill, worthy of the og’Sieth perhaps. But I ask you, why do the priests rule and not the og’Sieth? God gave the priestly clan no special privilege. Is it that we rule because priestly skills have proven their seniority? Knowledge of the sacred and the profane dominates all else. Lo! This lead ball flies across 500 man-lengths to attack us. Shall we tremble as we contemplate the vastness of 500 man-lengths? I tell you that the sacred skill of the Mnankrei can extend a Black Hand across 500 thousand man-lengths and clean a city bare. To what avail is a lead ball against the forces we command? Will not the Kaiel die even before they have seen as specks those they presume to judge? Will not they die while thinking they are safe because they are beyond the range of flying stones!” He laughed. “The mite, on guard against the carnivorous flea, flies into the maw of the maelot.”

  Krak dismissed the litter bearers, indicating that they should carry the wounded man below decks. He was happy with some secret knowledge. Humility, her assassin’s mind alert to allusions of death, was left to wonder at a perishing over which riflemen could not prevail.

  The ship rode out a storm with furled sails. Continuous heavy winds brought them into Soebo harbor, a long extension of the river. The sea’s violence still grumbled as a cold drizzle but Humility braved the wetness to catch her first sight of the waterfront.

  Ancient stone structures of the uniquely massive Mnankrei design reached into the bay, crusted at the waterline, some of them built on the ruins of older structures. Ships cluttered the wharves and canals. Flotsam floated and bobbed on the water, carrying with it the slight smell of sewage. Endlessly the city rose over the hills of the river valley.

  Humility had never imagined that she would be so happy to see land again. One of the young Mnankrei, sensing her mood, pulled out a small flute and began to play to her from his seat on the wet ropes. She turned and listened. She picked up the melody. For a while she hummed along, then began to sing in her high voice of a city that waited for sailors to return from the sea. Soon she had an audience.

  A tall Geiniera, stooped from the low ceilings of the ship, brought out a flask of whisky, brewed from the somber barley of Mnank, and passed it around to the beardless Mnankrei he had been training in the lore of the sea. They drank. They clapped. The captain stepped from the warmth of the High Room onto the cold of the upper deck to watch. Soon she was dancing for these men who were her friends, Liethe in every movement and flirting gesture, thriving on their attention.

  She had arrived at the greatest city on all of Geta, a city of rumor and fame and debauchery, that nurtured a Liethe settlement unequaled in size except for Hivehome on the islands of the Drowned Hope. This was civilization and she could dance to its glory on the deck of one of its magnificent vessels. Kaiel-hontokae was but a desert village grim in its determination, a waystation in her past. Kaiel-hontokae had only Hoemei, her lover, whom she still remembered a little, a man so deliciously arrogant that he was foretelling the imminent fall of this great city which would crumble, he said, on the day he
chose to touch it.

  She laughed. Did all lovers seem so foolish once they had been abandoned?

  44

  The Society will use all of its resources and energy toward increasing and intensifying the evils and miseries of the people until at last their patience is exhausted and they are driven to a general uprising.

  Nechayev, teacher of Lenin in The Forge of War

  TEENAE TOOK UPON herself the duties of working in the forward organization, duties requiring her to slip in and out of Sorrow in her mediations with the people of the Gentle Heresy. Her best friend came to be an old weaver of the o’Maie who had grown enamored of scholarship when he was crippled as a boy and could not work the looms or dye. He was poor, always in the same ragged trousers and sweat-soaked leather jerkin, always at home in his insect-ridden attic room, always smiling with his rotten teeth. His grasp of Getan history was great and he helped her translate portions of The Forge of War which she brought with her.

  Teenae had become fascinated by a fanatic she found in that vile history who was plagued by the Riethe madness. His grandiose visions of an impending conquest of Riethe by the Worker clan were conjured in color but proved, with the passage of time, to be delusional. By Kaiel measure his predictions were unimpressive. On the other hand, his ability to savage a wounded nation was awesome. The name was Lenin and he rode in a great steam-powered engine to take over the Russian socialist uprising so that he might destroy the embryonic Russian socialism with systematic Nechayevian terror to provide fertilizer for his own cardboard future.

  The destruction of the very world he hoped to build began with the shooting of the demonstrators who were marching on the Tauride Palace in Petrograd in support of the first elected socialist Constituent Assembly. It was winter of the Riethe year 1918, full of cold snows. In the rage of Lenin’s own words, brought to Teenae by God across the depths of His Unimaginable Sky, she felt that mean man’s deathly fear of all power other than his own. She pitied him the loneliness it implied. To wield total power requires the destruction, everywhere, of all free wills. To need total power is to be totally insecure.

  By the end of 1918 Lenin was calling for mass exterminations on a daily basis. “You must mobilize all forces, establish a troika of dictators, introduce immediately mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who ply soldiers and officers with vodka. Do not hesitate for a moment…” He never watched an execution squad at work and never saw the effects of the terror he had created. Thus to Teenae he was a coward. He killed more people than he could eat. Thus he was a fool.

  In the isolation of his Kremlin office the fury of his decrees escalated. Chekist leaders and political commissars vied with one another in rounding up hostages and shooting them without trial. Fellow socialists were murdered. The peasants who had fought with Lenin against the hated landlord clan were themselves exterminated when they discovered, too late, that the land had passed, not from the landlords to them, but to the state. In Tambov province there was a massacre of 200,000 peasants…

  Death to the old Tsar! Death to the Tsar who sold himself to the capitalists and quailed before the socialists! Long live the new Tsar! Long live the Worker’s Hero who destroys capitalist and socialist alike, who returns all land to the state, who cows the liberated peasantry back into slavery! Death to the old aristocracy, corrupted and weak! Hail to the new aristocracy, corrupted and strong!

  It was a Kaiel maxim that terrible consequences inevitably arose when a priest brought simple solutions to complex problems of government. Teenae judged Lenin lacking in kalothi. When his solutions did not work he was content to let terror impose his visions upon reality, having neither the courage nor the intelligence to re-think his position. In the end, Lenin had nothing to offer but Restoration. He destroyed the Tsar by becoming Tsar.

  The Bolshevik terror, she read with fascination, bred more terror, giving birth to the son of Lenin, Tsar Stalin, who mercilessly eliminated every remaining socialist in Russia. The nation was left so bereft of conscience that for five generations it puzzled over the simplest of ethical questions without finding answers, stubbornly seeking to dominate Riethe with no more than Lenin’s unimproved vision.

  These People of the Sky had a strange definition of help. They forced you into helplessness so that you might be in a position to receive their help which was the only True Help. They lied to serve the Truth. They made themselves Right by killing all who disagreed with them. She thought of the Mnankrei. God’s History made it easier for her to understand such priests.

  Gaet was not yet ready to understand. He had never met the Mnankrei, never faced death in combat with their ambition, never hung in terror from a yardarm of one of their ships. For a moment Teenae worshipped her contact with Joesai. His strength had become her strength. The plague of Lenin’s life gave her a resolve that frightened her.

  She would see that Sorrow was ready to resist the Mnankrei when they sailed into the harbor in alliance with the Stgal. Gaet could not help her. The Stgal would not. She shrugged. A priest clan like the Stgal, foolish enough to try surviving by playing one great clan off against another, was dreaming its way to an ugly fate.

  In her fragments of The Forge of War Teenae found descriptions of naval conflict. She played with the ideas like the kolgame master that she was. All warfare, she had discovered, was based on deception. A military commander had to have a bag of surprises and the ability to use them quickly. Every army had to have a disciplined set of rules — and know how to break one every time it wanted a victory.

  She spoke to Hoemei over the rayvoice and he encouraged her. A day later she got a call that told her three ships had left Soebo for Sorrow under the command of Storm Master Tonpa. And Hoemei gave her news of Joesai. He was safe. He had halted a day’s march outside of Soebo and dug in and laid minefields waiting for the rest of the Gathering to reinforce him. He was receiving delegates from many clans. The Mnankrei’s only response had been to construct an impenetrable defense around Soebo.

  “Teenae!” Hoemei shouted through the static.

  “I hear you clearly!”

  “The danger with war seems to be that too much force is used.”

  “I understand the min-max concept perfectly!” There were many points where different levels of force could be applied to achieve victory, but only one point where minimum force worked to the same end.

  “The value of the victory, so far as I can tell, is in inverse proportion to the applied force. Minimum force assures the longest victory and fades into bargaining which is always our first choice of conflict resolution.”

  “But that doesn’t tell me what to do!” complained Teenae.

  “You’re the one who delights in kol. What can I say? Train for an attack that is mild, quick, and decisive.”

  For heartbeats after the exchange, the woman stared at the wooden box which brought her husband’s voice across the mountains. It was too plain. It needed decoration and polishing with fine oils. Few tools came that way anymore. She liked her rifle.

  The Kaiel children under her command had given it to her shyly, the stock carved and inlaid in their spare time. No one else had a rifle so beautiful. They had fitted o’Tghalie and Kaiel symbols together perfectly. Touching that stock she had felt wholly Kaiel for the first time since she had been adopted. Her charges believed in her. They obeyed her. They supported her when she suggested that Gaet was not ready to meet Mnankrei violence, even to the point of stealing supplies for her and training with her when they could get away.

  That evening she visited the old o’Maie weaver so that she might have someone to help her puzzle over the life of Lenin and draw morals from it. She brought whisky for him and a new coat.

  “You worry that because you’ve learned to sling a lead pebble through a man’s eye, you’ve become like Lenin,” he said when the dawn stars were rising. “Lenin was a coward who hired men to murder for him.”

  “There is violence in me. I talk of minimal force — but I’m not g
entle.”

  “ ‘Minimal force’ is not ‘no force’. Pacifism is for an idealist like Oelita. The concept of minimal force would appeal to a pragmatist like you, where maximal force would appeal to a megalomaniac like Lenin.”

  “I’ll have to kill them,” Teenae said. Three ships. I see no other way.“ She began to cry.

  His heart went out to this woman who had befriended him. “Killing a man puts a heavy burden on one’s back.”

  She laughed through her tears. “That’s not why I cry. I’m afraid they’ll kill me first.”

  45

  The covert man who plots your doom in secret cellars of the night while by the light of day does lavish all sweet service upon your self, mistrusts reflected love.

  The Hermit Ki from Notes in a Bottle

  SURELY SOEBO WAS the most magnificent city on all of Geta! Casual sightseeing soon bewildered Humility. There were canals, cut at angles through what had once been river delta, distorting her sense of direction. By unfortunate choice she picked as landmarks two look-alike temples whose alternating appearance turned her around. Finally she worked her way down stone stairs, and hired a guide with a waiting flat-bottomed boat.

  “Can we reach the Temple of the Wind from here?”

  “It is at the junction of all the canals,” replied the tall female Ivieth while she poled her blue boat out toward the center of the waterway. “The Plaza of the Wind is the node for all Soebian gossip.”

  Humility paid her fee and took her padded seat and would have cooled her hands in the diluted brine except for the drifting garbage. “I’m starved for gossip. I’ve been at sea.”