Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  How did the stairway tradition continue? Perhaps it was the wonder these bizarre objects caused, the whispers of puzzlement which, reaching mad ears, inspired the next generation of hermits who then went forth. They were all mad. It was known that they were mad.

  Was that not Joesai among the shadows?

  Oelita’s father had shown her this ravine when she was adult enough to follow him into the desert. He noted such places carefully because they always meant water, never easy water, but a cup or two at the bottom of a sand-clogged well or a trickle from some stone’s crack.

  Her boy from Sorrow, whom she brought with her from Kaiel-hontokae, helped her at first. They cleaned out the pulpy stalks of the man-high Godstorch and fitted them together, thin top into thick base, to make a pipe that led dripping water from the fault-cave to the hermit’s hut. Once the water was in and the roof rebuilt, she drove the boy away. He did not want to leave her alone but she raved and beat him with a broken Godstorch stalk, forcing his retreat to a ridge. From there he watched her until the second setting of the red arched sun beyond the badlands — reluctantly fading into the west as the sun faded, vowing he would be back someday with supplies and messages from those who loved her.

  She rationed her motions on a pattern of cyclic flow that was unconscious of weeks or time, content to mark the passage of sun, then stars; day, then night. Food and water had priority. She always spent some effort ranging over the desert wilderness, gathering. Few knew that job as well as she did — what part of the seeds to cast aside, how to boil and then sun-dry the pith of the running cactus, how to eat the tiny orange and magenta-striped fruits of the low beiera tree.

  It was sneaky how she moved so that Joesai would never see her.

  Profane food would not be enough, or even satisfying to the secret hungers. Every day she worked a little on her sacred garden. She knew where the wheat would grow and how to set the squash and how to keep the beans alive. She often spent the night in the well cleaning it out, cutting it down another layer. The spring gave her enough water for herself but not for her garden.

  Other nights were set aside to prepare cloth or to hammer fiber for mats. While she broke soft stems into pieces for soaking so that the fiber might be pounded free, images of God came to her, thrust up from her childhood where they had been left in dungeon by her righteous atheism. A suddenly emergent girl rose from her place, superstitious, to set a glowing coal on the holy stone altar lest when God passed overhead, looking down, watching His people, He might miss her for the lack of a red glow upon her face.

  She settled back on her haunches and began to chat to Hoemei about her pregnancy. She knew he was behind her, motionless in one of his silent moods. In the old days when man was new to Geta’s refuge, and the planet had been killing them all so ruthlessly, she explained, twin-bearing had been a premium survival trait looked upon favorably by God. Many women still bore twins. She would probably have twins again, she assured Hoemei. She wanted to be well stocked before her twins came so they might never suffer.

  “It’s all right,” he said clearly in a voice that resonated in her mind, and she felt comfortable with his concern.

  Her memories of Kaiel-hontokae still frightened her. It was a city of ten thousand Joesais, immense beyond anything she had imagined a city could be in all her dreaming — streets, buildings, richly gardened temple after temple fed by ethereal aqueducts that passed over the city like multiple Streaks of God, bare-breasted women, fine cloth, shops where you could haggle over the price of the flesh of a child who had failed some creche trial. And machines whose overpowering presence whispered of the distant strength of God.

  Here in the desert the red and orange and ochre plateaus rolled away, eroded where sparse vegetation could not hold back the rare flash rains and God was almost invisible unless one looked for His passage at night, believing. He was quiet like the stars, but in more of a hurry.

  “Teenae!” she cried, suddenly rigid, alert. She had seen the city beyond the cliffs of the ravine.

  There, in the city, God was no Invisible Abstraction. God stood in front of you sternly with the face of Joesai, holding your wrist in iron shackles, arguing, and all your return arguments were met with bulbous glass insects, glowing from an internal red hue, who molested your crystal-from-the-sea and laughed out the resonant words of God telling of the Terror He has saved you from, saved us all from, until there was nowhere to turn but to believe. God had made her ashamed through Joesai. God had appeared to her through Joesai in all the personality of that man’s violence let loose with sunfire devouring great Hiroshima in a moment which charred her own beliefs like a bug zapped in a temple’s night row of torches.

  Only Teenae understood her.

  Could God, who came from a world of Terror, ever love a gentle woman? She hid from Him in the desert, yet left coals on the hermit-carved altar so that He might find her in His passage. Was this Savior God also the God of the temples who took the weaker children so that His mankind might become strong enough to face the horrors of the Sky? How could He do that and be a Savior, too?

  Oelita’s pregnancy dominated her. Nothing had been more unshakable than her refusal to bear children after her genetically crippled twins had been condemned to death for lack of kalothi. But when a woman loses her purpose, does she not hark back to an older purpose? The pregnancy had been premeditated. The city of Kaiel-hontokae was within her womb now, growing with arrogant power, its men the fathers of her second brood. The maran-Kaiel were formidable in her memory, worthy fathers, but also slaves of God. Men seeded their women but they did God’s bidding and not the mother’s.

  Gaet still warmed her dreams. She had to be half asleep, in a pleasant mood, perhaps leaning against the wall before he could come and joke with her and play his noble charm. Hoemei was more reliable. He came to her while she was awake. Gaet had an emotional gentleness that attracted her, stirred her very genes; Hoemei was of the mind’s gentleness — once he had shown her how to clarify a thought of hers with which she knew he strongly disagreed. How easy he was to reach.

  “Hoemei? Are you there?”

  “I’m reading,” he said from the shadows at her back.

  “You don’t remember the pillow play when you gave me child,” she laughed. Her one clear memory of tender infatuation for Hoemei came from that afternoon. She was using his chest as pillow and he had an arm on her far shoulder and the other hand in her forest while she stared somewhat obliviously at his chin knowing that she had made him a father. Why would she remember that moment so clearly? She had intended, then, to wash away the pregnancy with her blood.

  Sleepily she put away her work, gestured a final benediction before the altar, and crawled to her mat. She put her hand out for Hoemei. “Hoemei!” He was gone. He works too hard, she thought sadly.

  Joesai was with her always. He was the dream man behind the bush or door who would appear in costume and shatter any plot. Awake, she often startled to see him as a speck on a distant ridge or he would be the shadow that had sneaked into her hut at twilight. In dreams he never ran after her when she fled but he always caught her and she would wake up gasping at the memory of his strength as he tied her into yet another death puzzle.

  He tracked her in her dreams. He waited. If her leg was sore, he attacked her physically. If she grieved, he smiled and attacked her emotionally. She would turn a corner and find him reading from some prized handwritten manuscript with a sarcastic sneer on his face. She would brace herself and then he would look up — and deliver a one-sentence riposte that would undercut the very substance of her words. Sometimes Oelita would waken in her hut sure that a faint outside noise was the prowling of Joesai.

  Once she had a dream about Noe buying lifeless twins at a temple butchery.

  Days passed. Oelita made an uneasy peace with God, praying ever more frequently on her knees at the altar. While she worked, while she rested, she had been scanning every Chant she knew for hidden wisdom. It was like her that she discover
ed a God of the Sky who differed from the God of the temples. The orange sun rose and fell. Her belly became filled with kickings and so she came to know for sure that she was with twins. Long-range foraging became impossible. She began to spend whole days inside the hut preparing the profane foods to rid them of the poisons.

  She enjoyed her conversations with Nonoep who sometimes came to visit when she was deep in thought.

  It rained. The shower lasted only during the twilight but days later a glory of flowers had popped up all over the barren hills, seducing the insects into mad excess. She could not resist a long waddle down the ravine, picking blue desert-lips for her hair. The restless wandering did not tire her. There were rocks she had removed from her garden and she began to carry them over to the stairway, a few at a time, placing them in the stairway so that they were solidly secured against weather, against age, against the force of roots. The previous hermit, dead before her father was born, had placed his rocks with exquisite care. She honored him with as much care.

  Nightfall caught her at the apex of her stairway to the stars. Flowers had folded while insects began a nocturnal chatter, seeking mates. It was a clear desert solitude for star watching. The Mist River flowed above the horizon bringing with it the constellations of the Moth and the Knave.

  I am alone with beauty.

  Darkness and distance hid whatever treachery might roil beyond that doomed excellence. In a way, we are all hermits, she thought. God is a recluse like me. What gods had driven Him to this secluded edge of space to meditate while others destroyed? She felt a sudden kinship with Him, and, as if in sympathetic response, He began His rise above the ragged black horizon to steer across the starfield.

  Is it true that kindness is only the first symptom of a weak will? Did gentle people have to retreat into total isolation to survive? Perhaps God was no fierce protector; perhaps He was only a kind soul who had run from stellar warriors as Oelita had run from Joesai. Such ideas stimulated anger. She would not believe such heresy! Gentleness was the noblest of virtues! Kindness would make the world whole! Caring for the weak took a deeper strength!

  Vicious images out of The Forge of War flooded her vision from every blazing star. Atop her stairway she began to curse this collage of armies with all the might of her raging lungs. Her acrimony shattered the darkened desert, reflecting from every arroyo, amplifying up the cliffs to throw its wrath at the sky of twinkling hiroshimas and baghdad-massacres and subtle tortures and avenging hordes of red armor that tracked over the stars, explosively punishing peasants and old women, selecting the occasional child for target practice.

  “STOP!” she screamed at the avalanche of image.

  A nefarious universe turned evil eyes her way — curiously. The combined assault of that attention hit like a clap of silence. Insects chirped to their mates in tiny voices. Oelita stood frozen on her cairn, searching, ears alert, aware that she was bathed in star-light. Had Joesai heard? She shrank down out of sight, listening for breathing, the crack of a twig. She dared not go back to the hut. She spent the night alone, trembling, hidden in the brash on the ledge above her wheat.

  49

  He who judges shall be judged in kind, but whosoever fails to judge for fear of being judged himself shall suffer tyranny.

  Prolog to the Lattice of Evidence

  THE COBALT BLUE vial was cradled by a miniature cushion in a brass goblet that squatted upon the room’s side table. The se-Tufi Who Rings the Soul’s Bell was smiling at the tiny coal on the end of an incense stick she had just ignited. Humility stood stiffly, formally before her. “You have done well,” the old crone said, turning to finger the vial. “This is a poison to delight an assassin’s soul.”

  “It does not give the subtle unobtrusiveness that is desirable. It is not clean — for when does the blow stop throbbing?”

  “You are reluctant to deliver this death to the Kaiel?”

  “I kill one at a time,” said Humility frigidly.

  Soul’s Bell peeled a fruit, carefully cutting away the poisonous parts, and offered a slice to her guest. “You may relax. Please recite the Lattice of Evidence.”

  Humility did so, by now flawlessly.

  “Good. It means nothing to you, of course, but it is like a seed crystal and you will find that much will grow around it in the years that follow. The pressure of events forces us to hurry you. Every Liethe lives out the Code of her stage. For you it is not the Time of Changes, but nevertheless we need you. The hoiela larva pretends to fly before it builds its cocoon. For the day that follows you shall be a crone. Please undress.”

  Humility obeyed, not understanding the order, her arms and body moving to remove her garments with their usual grace.

  Soul’s Bell watched critically. “That is not good enough. Move as if you were old. Move as if the mere act of walking were a Trial of the Spirit.” She noted Humility’s hesitation without impatience. “Walk as you will during the twilight of your life.”

  Humility remembered her mentor of the Kaiel-hontokae hive. She became like the se-Tufi Who Finds Pebbles, slow, dignified, every movement painful but each too proud to ask for help. Soul’s Bell watched her, then gave her a plantinum-headed cane. “You are a crone now.” She took a thin pencil and other tools and began to draw lines upon Humility’s face, shading her jowls, peppering her hair, shading her breasts so that they seemed to sag, aging her as if these flying fingers were the abrasive sands of some time-storm.

  Then she dressed Humility in the eccentric luxury of an elder Liethe. “Be as the crones are. Think as we do. Every action must be seen first in ghost thought that reverberates through the future until it rebounds off its own peculiar distant consequence. Only then make your action real. You are slow. You are deliberate. Your mind is cunning and never in a hurry. You have forgotten nothing of a full life.”

  And so it was that this young girl, in the mask of wisdom, hobbled into the Deliberation Chamber of the Liethe hive at Soebo in her first initiation to the world of the crone. An old woman, jeweled in nose ring, chanted the nodes of the Lattice of Evidence. Humility first knew then that Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal was up against the knife. Each monotonous invocation of a question from the Lattice prompted one or another of eight crones to answer with an accusation and a line of evidence, coded in poetic meter so that every detail of the judgment might be remembered with error-correcting exactness. Question and poem were repeated, flowing back and forth among the crones, fixing the memory of an event no Liethe dared commit to paper.

  The details of the judgment impressed themselves upon Humility, passing through her mind and finally across her lips until the poetry of’t’Fosal’s guilt was tied to the Lattice cues like the flowers that give meaning to the trellis.

  There were questions upon which no poem budded. Then the discussion ceased to be formal and debate raged. It was said that no clear poem could be composed unless the evidence itself was clear. However long it took, the crones were faithful to the Lattice which methodically exposed the world of sin, event at a time, through the multi-faceted eye of the squat Night Seer, the insect who had become the Getan symbol of justice.

  Humility contributed her knowledge of the Kaiel analysis of the underjaw. She told of the blue vial and connected it to the o’Tghalie idiot being studied by the Liethe biologists. The flow of words became formalized, condensed, blunt, then slowly, in a back and forth ritual, were forged into poetry.

  His crime was against kalothi, the worst of all crimes. He had taken Death as a slave to feed him power but should not Death serve only the rituals of kalothi? Who can safely keep Death as his personal slave? Thus the Liethe poem ended. The most omnipotent of Storm Masters was condemned to death by execution.

  The beams of sunlight from the high windows of the Deliberation Chamber had turned through many angles and hues before the decision was composed. There had been a sunset and lanterns and the pastels of dawn and the direct rays of highnode and another sunset. Humility felt aged with tiredness, st
umbling from the chamber with her platinum-headed cane.

  She could be old, she could think and move with the cunning slowness of age, for she was a trained actress, but the process of the deliberation itself had aged her. She alone had had flashes of impatient need to pass through the tedious process. The Winter-storm Master’s crimes were monstrous. The decision could be made in the time it took for a nod of a head, and yet none of the crones had shown impatience. Only later was she thankful for their stern example.

  It was easy to kill on command. A hand was only an instrument. A hand made no life and death decisions, weighed no moral issues, deliberated no consequences. She had once felt superior to the crones who ordered her to kill, and now the killing seemed the simplest of it.

  The se-Tufi Who Rings the Soul’s Bell guided her with an arm around her shoulders to the crone’s quarters. “First a bath for you. Then you can be young again.”

  Humility said nothing until she was in the tub, waited on by giggling Liethe children, each naked but for a belt and bead skirt, who poured pitchers of warm water over her and ran for more. Soul’s Bell was scrubbing her. Sometimes the crones were harsh, and sometimes they were kind to their charges. “Am I to assassinate’t’Fosal?”

  “If you wish. There is no hurry. Whoever will do it, will do it. You would do it best.”

  “I don’t think I could.” She shuddered. “Knowing why he dies, having condemned him, could I strike? Yes I could strike — but swiftly and cleanly?”

  “Bear this in mind, little One-Who-Sometimes-Has-Humility: the Storm Master’s death will be no ordinary execution. He is the foundation stone of a large building, and does not a building fall when its foundation stone is removed? Perhaps on us. There is an art to such things so that the building falls into a heap and not out into the street. Knowing the nature of the building he supports will guide you. Remember that we do not wish to destroy ourselves.”