Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  “All talk is of the Gathering. We hear only that the pretenders have camped well beyond the robe-hem of the city and seem loath to come closer where there might be danger to their skins.”

  “I think the Kaiel will be soundly chastised,” Humility said, casting for nibbles.

  “I don’t think they’ll come close enough to get scratched,” the woman replied scornfully.

  “I once listened to Ivieth songs about the bravery of the Kaiel,” teased the passenger.

  “We have songs about the bravery of everyone. We sing them when flattery is appropriate. We even have songs to warn our children about idle conversation within ear’s range of the Liethe who wear the ears of our Masters for necklaces.”

  Sunset found Humility in the Plaza of the Temple of the Wind soaking up the gossiping and the chess and the excited antics of a group of iron-ball players. She ate fruit at a table above the crowds, careful to leave untouched the poisonous yellow peel. She chatted, provoked, probed. The sea clan was thought to be invincible, yet there was an undercurrent of hatred; even the Ivieth female had been wary of her, thinking her to be a tool of the Mnankrei.

  Against the Plaza and the seething power of this city, Hoemei seemed like such a village priest. Because Humility was bewildered by her feelings of love — alternately rejecting them and rediscovering them — she wanted Hoemei to be wrong so that she could laugh at him and right so that she could love him all the more fiercely. He was probably wrong. Soebo was too solid.

  She spotted a Liethe holding the arm of a white-haired Storm Master as he led her across the Plaza. Now there was a powerful man! The slight girl hurried to keep up, and once touched her head to his arm affectionately. Would she want him to be right? Would she connive ruthlessly to make her man right? or would she drift with whomever was strongest?

  Humility’s baggage arrived at the Liethe hive long before she did. The hive in Soebo was an old building that had been in Liethe hands since before the first of the se-Tufi line had ever died. Even then it had been old, a stately derelict of the bawdy entertainment district. Now the whores and the theaters and the gaming houses were gone, washed away by shiftings of money that had not left even the hive untouched. Prospering Liethe had built onto their ancient mansion a wing of high towers around a walled garden where once had passed a street alive with drunken sailors. Perhaps the ghosts of Vlak seamen still bought orphaned women at auction in the brick theater-of-the-round that was itself a ghost, having been replaced by a public fountain.

  Humility was given a tiny tower room and a mat. Three crones questioned her at length. One, a high mother of the nas-Veda line which had been discontinued because of immunological irregularities that appeared in old age, took her down to a sealed, sterile room of the hive’s genetic workshop where she met the se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh, a youth older than herself but who did not look older. They bowed slightly, giving their recognition gestures.

  “You will be sharing Flesh’s two men. She carries the persona of the schemer Comfort, who is consort to High Wave Ogar tu’Ama, and the servile persona of Radiance for Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal’s use. She will be drilling you through the Nine Tier Matrix of Understanding immediately so that you will be ready as her back-up in either role by sunrise of the Knave’s Oneday. Please strip and don these sterile clothes. The mask, too.”

  The nas-Veda guided her charges through sealed doors to a hall adjoining a small resin-coated room which she did not let them enter. There were windows. Inside, a young o’Tghalie woman sat, seemingly without control of her eyes or neck or hands.

  “Is she mindless, too?” asked Humility sharply.

  “Quite. Mnankrei records show she has died and been cremated. We collected her covertly out of curiosity. We have been wondering what the Mnankrei have been doing with these women. They do not use men for this kind of experiment.” The nas-Veda crone turned her face toward Flesh. “Now perhaps you can understand why we have assigned you to Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal?”

  Humility’s memory tripped a file. “He is the designer of the deviant underjaw!”

  The se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh was pondering the movements of the idiot o’Tghalie girl. They fit nowhere in the intricate map of political intrigue she had been trained to perceive. “Will she recover?”

  “No.”

  “That’s horrible. Fosal creates such monsters?” This would be the reason that High Wave Ogar tu’Ama had opposed Fosal at such great cost to himself.

  “Fosal is gifted. The horror is not that such men exist, it is that others have allowed such men to rise to power.”

  Flesh had become intense. “I am consumed with curiosity. How can the o’Tghalie have allowed their women to be used thusly? A sale is not an open contract.”

  “They know nothing of what has happened to her, and you will tell them nothing. We have determined in our quiet way that she was sold in faraway Osairin and her clan believes her to be perished of a desert dust storm while she was being carried to the Njarae.” The old woman added ominously, “Fosal has used Liethe, too!”

  “Mother! And you’ve given me to him!” exclaimed Flesh.

  A hundred thousand wrinkles chuckled. “Humility will share your burden.”

  Black pupils, embedded in blue and flecked irises, probed each other over the whites of the sterile masks.

  “How has she been harmed?” asked Humility.

  “You have been taught of the micro-life that sometimes rages in stinging scourge of death among the profane? Nie’t’Fosal has found ways to bring such profane ills into the sacred world.”

  “She is diseased!” Both se-Tufi spoke with astonishment.

  “We are not able to decode the mechanism. We have sampled this girl’s brain and all appears normal except that axionic and dendritic neural growth is unusually prolific. We believe a double process is involved. Viral constructs, hosted in free invading cells, have been used to play with genetic controllers. Mouth contact can transmit the disease.”

  Suddenly Humility found herself in the middle of a huge attack of loyalty for the Kaiel. How could she have pretended to forget Hoemei! She was his abject servant! “The Kaiel are right to call a Gathering!”

  The crone swiveled in contempt, gesturing at the demented o’Tghalie. “The Kaiel will be destroyed before they reach Soebo — by that!”

  “We must warn them!” cried Humility. “We have our rayvoice contacts!”

  “We will not warn them,” retorted the nas-Veda crone angrily. “With such a frightening thing loose do you think they will spare us? They will deliver a holocaust of flame to this city to roast us all — all of us — in a purifying total fire. All clans will be consumed to char as were the people destroyed when the Kaiel chastised the Arant! Would they see a way to mercy? Would you be merciful if you were they and knew of this horror that might spread from here like poison spores on the wind to every man-inhabited region of Geta? No, Liethe child, you will not warn the Kaiel. I bind you under penalty of death!”

  46

  Lay a man at your back to listen to the whispering of the wind.

  Private poem of Noe maran-Kaiel

  THE REEKING SMELL of drying weed drifted down from the racks on the cliffs across the beach. The simple docks were busy. A boatload of refugees from Soebo — perhaps eight all told — had arrived this morning, the third such group Noe had heard of, fearful ones who were afraid of the Gathering and rich enough to flee. They haggled with traders and she watched them from afar, wondering how she might question them. She coveted every bit of information she could glean, but was suspicious of spies.

  How much did the enemy know? She expected an imminent Mnankrei sweep of the coast to clean out these carefully placed supply nodes of hers which were putting boats across the upper Njarae to Mnank loaded with goods and, now, with priests from distant clans.

  The rumors that disturbed her proved nothing. Such hints were no stronger than the flicker across a game player’s face, the slight holding of cards clo
ser to the chest. It was Joesai’s vulnerability that cast sinister reflections upon every rumor. There stood Joesai, fretting amidst the enemy, barely beyond the outer reaches of their city, and he was allowed to do nothing while the Mnankrei day by day readied whatever counterstrike they intended. The sea priests were not ones to test and probe. They struck.

  The prescience of the Kaiel mind told her what it meant. Joesai was doomed, however this adventure might turn out for the Kaiel. Joesai had always carried the aura of death with him. He dared it, lived with it, mocked it, because he could not escape it. He was born to be a tragic hero; his time was now but Noe did not want to lose him. Of all her husbands only he shared her thrill at the touch of danger.

  Noe remembered, almost tearfully, that she had once thought of him as the husband she did not like, who coldly had taken her in hand, when the first paling of her love for Gaet had left her depressed, to teach her the best of the Kaiel tricks of genetic surgery because he had been disappointed by her ignorance, and resentful of Gaet that he should pick for them so soft a wife. A full orbit of Geta she had hated him, wanting to play and despising hard work, and then one day she had wandered among the hills above Kaiel-hontokae, searching out Joesai she knew not why, to find him glooming over a wrecked sailplane.

  He put wings on her and risked her life above the valleys, and she had discovered from Joesai that she loved danger and could not live without it. Gliding had bonded them, and for some reason after that his faults had never bothered her. Strange that once she had wished him dead so that she might have Gaet and Hoemei to herself.

  After Noe questioned the refugees — and learned nothing except that fears and speculation raged in the city — she was approached by a sturdy man while she was eating bread and honey pudding in the plaza of the village.

  “He’s Geiniera,” whispered her second companion.

  “You know for sure?”

  “Yes. He’s been sulking around the village for days, keeping to himself, asking few questions.”

  The man bowed to Noe. He was ragged but well washed. His eyes shifted suspiciously yet without fear. Deferentially he waited for Noe to speak first.

  “May I help you?”

  “Now tha’ would be pleasant but no’ likely. You be Kaiel?”

  “We’re all Kaiel, guests of the Twbuni who rule Tai.”

  “You Gather’t’ shake Soebo?”

  “Only that we may know the truth,” she replied formally.

  “I see the dune, but each grain o’ sand is truth.” His reply was the gentle rebuff of a practical man who did not believe in such nonsense as truth. Shoulders shrugged that had lifted sails and fought the lashings of the sea. “You question th’ folk wha’ flee? Did they carry tales as woeful as th’ tale on this heart?”

  “Are your woes of your own making or cast upon you by the evil deeds of others?”

  The Geiniera laughed and slapped his rags. “No’ a question I could answer!”

  “Share our bread.”

  “Thank ’e, kind priest. You Gather’t’ shake Soebo. Go with God’s blessing and avenge me my daughter”

  Thereupon he told a story that fitted his mad state. He had shared a wife with his brother. They were poor but perhaps could have afforded another woman if they had been able to find her. The wife bore her sailors a daughter and died, leaving the baby to neighbors, while they were both at sea. That tragedy changed their lives. One would go forth on a Mnankrei merchantman and the other would stay home to care for the daughter, and perhaps to pick up work in the shipyards or mending sails. The daughter grew to be beautiful and proud, a soul to scorn her Geiniera roots and to love the wealth of her betters. She set her mind to becoming Mnankrei and in time found her man who took her as a lover but, when she was with child, abandoned her to her grief and poverty.

  The agitated girl had taken her baby to the Temple of the Raging Seas, into the presence of the father, and murdered his child for him to watch. She had been seized, and no one had ever seen her again. The story told to the Geiniera fathers had been of her invitation to Ritual Suicide and one father believed and one father did not, for should not their daughter have been delivered to them for their rightful Funeral Feast?

  He was a persistent man. Made wild by the loss of his daughter, never believing that she had died — for had he known her death by eating her? — he sought to find her fate and found memories of things his daughter had said about her man and dark rumors instead. No wall or door kept him out for he was a ship’s smith, and one day, sure that he had found her, he came across a room sealed by glass that he could not enter. Beyond the glass were mindless women whose husks alone had been spared the bliss of death.

  Afraid of being found, he retreated. Enraged and broken and deranged by grief he had gone to the house of his daughter’s lover to kill him and had found instead a woman of the Liethe who had soothed him and taken his story from him like hair that falls against the smooth run of a honed blade. She asked him urgently to take her to see the husk women and yet when he was there at the appointed meeting place, ready for such risky venture, he had been betrayed to her lover who had also been his daughter’s lover. The man had taken him to the deepest cells of the Temple, laughing at him that he could have trusted a Liethe. Walls did not keep him and he escaped but watched the low side entrances for weeks, seeing coffins being brought forth and carried away secretly to be burned. He saw Liethe at work there, too.

  His madness subsided and when he heard of the Gathering he set across the sea to bring vengeance for his daughter. He believed the stories told of Kaiel ruthlessness, but such stories did not make him cling to the master he knew, as was intended, instead they gave him courage that here were priests violent enough to bring death to the Mnankrei.

  Noe pondered the story between all her errands up the coast in their small lugger. Usually she enjoyed the sea, commanding it, for her youth had been spent on the sea. She alone of the maran-Kaiel looked with pleasure to being stationed at Sorrow. She was not a mountain woman, or a desert woman. But now the flapping of the sails and the spray did not reach the storm in her mind.

  It had been Kathein, with her sure knack of ferreting out the rule and law of nature from odd happenings, who had taught Noe the secret of a good intelligence procedure. Never meld the incoming data into a general overall summary. Always maintain two lines of report, the optimistic and the pessimistic. One report should weigh the data in terms of the best possible meaning, and the other report should squeeze out of the data the worst possible interpretation. If both reports agreed, the probability of error in the conclusion was small, but if both reports diverged wildly, then careful attention had to be given to the negative nuances that would have been lost in any general summary.

  Pieces seemed to fit together, each piece so small that separately they should have been ignored. The Geiniera might be a spy planted here to mislead but then what about that other one-line story of masked Mnankrei burning coffins? It fitted. And Noe, who had worked long days on the genetic makeup of the deviant underjaw, had the final piece that made sense of it all. If the Mnankrei had spent so much time developing one deadly genetic weapon — she used that non-Getan word from The Forge of War — then it was possible that they had developed many such weapons.

  Noe’s home base was a farmhouse rented from a family on pilgrimage to their ancestor’s Itraiel domain. Conveniently located near the sea, it was dug into the leeward side of a grassy hill, protected from Njarae storms and hidden from coastal scouts. It ran in three tiers down the slope, built over centuries, its thick walls molded of hillside fieldstone cemented with burned mortar carried in from the kilns of a local quarry. The roofs were of wood overlain by the thick sod of saw grass. On top of the hill was their rayvoice antenna.

  She waited until the stars were out. The rayvoice worked best under such conditions. “Raise Joesai for me,” she told her operator. Should she tell Hoemei first? No. He was committed to a fixed plan and would try to hold fast. It was Jo
esai’s life which was on the blade.

  They spoke in code. Dots and dashes and warbles because she owned only a portable rayvoice. The code wiped out the personal urgency she felt.

  You must act now.

  Are you… cackle, splat. Hoemei will kill me.

  Evidence of sacred disease.

  ??? Repeat.

  Genetically engineered micro-life that moves from man to man, killing.

  Verified?

  No. No time. Attack. Your whole camp may be destroyed overnight.

  Not enough data.

  This may be deadly. You may have no choice but to sack Soebo.

  ??? Repeat.

  Burn the place! Raze it! Sterilize it!

  Drastic.

  Your choice. Concentrate on the Temple of the Raging Seas. Attack.

  Who is involved?

  Any member of the Swift Wind. The Liethe are suspect.

  Who?

  Your cuddly friends. I have three sources of information pointing to Liethe involvement. How much time do I have? Attack yesterday! May God be with us. May God be with you.

  47

  A man who has been afraid all his life thinks that fear is the only winning strategy because he has been conquered by fear. Thus when an oppressed mind strikes in rebellion, he becomes the oppressor.

  Prime Predictor Tae ran-Kaiel in Government

  THE LIGHT-HEARTED se-Tufi Who Walks in Humility had been too long independent during the easy life of her lengthy journey between hives. The crones of Soebo were well aware of her loose behavior. They put her on a rigorous schedule to rebuild her discipline.

  Mind Control occupied her attention after waking — the Resting Power Positions rebalanced her body and the Oina Thought Frameworks rebalanced her mind. Then, after morning meal, whenever the se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh was available, Humility was drilled in the ways of High Wave Ogar tu’Ama so that she might know the persona of Comfort, a sympathetic woman sensitively aware of the peculiar nature of a widower who had loved only one woman for two-thirds of his life and still grieved.