Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  The joy of killing was on her.

  Carefully she folded away the black robe and its contents, keeping only the ring that ’t’Fosal had given to Radiance, which she wore on her index finger, and a perfumed garter for her right leg where she could reach it with one touch of her fingers. She rememorized the room, checking over possible emergencies, and then crawled into bed and went to sleep, setting her mind so that she would be suddenly wide awake when her victim returned from his party.

  She dreamed she was a courtesan in some exotic Tower of Contribution set in a black city on the outer reaches of the Sky where the stars were dim, tendering a man who would die tomorrow.

  Alertness. It was already light. Fosal must have stayed for the dawn display at the Palace of Morning. She watched him lock his massive door, waiting for him to notice her. He was already half way to the bed before the shock of her appearance registered. She chose exactly that moment to emerge from the covers.

  “My lover.” The toes of her gartered leg reached over the pillows and a happy breath moved her body as she held her ring hand toward him, telling him with her smile that no other man on Geta was as powerful as her master. She watched Nie struggle with this vibrant image of a dead woman.

  “I didn’t invite you here!” he said coldly.

  She bowed her head contritely. “I had such a headache after that antidote. What was in it? Liethe bodies are immune to just about everything.” She watched his amazement as he calculated the number of grains of poison she must have survived. Was she killable? She let him think about that, then apologized with a voice that evoked forgiveness. “I’m sorry I missed your party. It was all I could do to drag myself up here. But you’re pleased that I destroyed your enemies? Have I done something wrong?”

  “How did you get in?”

  She smiled coyly. “I don’t remember. I had a headache. Liethe can walk through walls when they really want to be with their lovers. We’re a magical clan.”

  “It’s my private place!”

  The better for killing you, thought the Queen. “Oh,” Radiance cried pitiably. “I’ve angered you and all I wanted to do was please you. Punish me! But don’t make me go! I don’t mind when you punish me because you are so just. There’s a cane over there,” she said, pointing with her ring finger to a rod heavy enough to kill her, tempting him. She crawled from the bed and began to grovel toward him on her hands and knees. “Punish me. I want you to feel better. Beat me till you feel better!”

  At the moment he reached for the rod, she was close enough to spring with her dancer’s legs. He reacted instantly to the shock of hitting the floor by rolling away from her but she was already disconnecting the motor nerves between his brain and body with a tiny syringe she had pulled from her garter. A heartbeat later she whacked him in the throat to stifle his scream. With a stabbing thrust, her thin knife cut his vocal cords. She disconnected his tongue next, and with other quick probes eliminated all sensation from his body. He still breathed. His heart beat rapidly.

  “Look at me and see my hate!” she sneered as she slipped a tool behind his eyeball and destroyed the vision in one eye. She turned his good eye toward her. “I am the face of hatred!” And he saw a valley of black hair that led to eyes of blue cremating fire. “I am the Vengeance of Geta come for you. I am the sibyl of the Silent God!” It astonished her to be talking to a man while she was killing him. The force of her hatred was overwhelming. Her hand started to shake and she stared at it while the helpless one-eyed man stared back.

  Was it because she knew why he had to die that her hate was like fire? My God, I’m ruined as an assassin! Nevertheless she disconnected his other eye.

  “Die, knowing that you have failed,” she raved in a whisper to two hearing ears. “The Kaiel could never have destroyed you. But when the clans of Soebo desert you, your priests will become a mind severed from its body. I’ve seen one of the women in whose body you grow your disease. Does that make me, a woman, loyal to you? You have stupidly thought to poison a Liethe who knows poisons, and the whole clan rises against you. Are we the only clan so offended? Winning command of a ship is not the same as sailing her!” Humility’s rage was building; she wanted to hoard this pair of captive ears and berate them with the contempt that Radiance could never show.

  An old discipline watched her lack of control with dismay. What was served by striking at a victim’s ego? Would he then jump away from his crimes? Was this need to hurt him a defiance of someone seen to be stronger? Boasting gives an opponent time to react, echoed the voices of her teachers. Boasting tells your opponent that you fear him.

  Humility breathed. The White Mind took over. Then, silently, she destroyed his hearing. Whoever might come now would be unable to communicate with Nie to discover what had happened and whom to blame. She rose from the once most powerful man of Soebo to redress in her black robe. She coiled the rope about her waist while she checked escape routes.

  The se-Tufi Who Finds Pebbles, her crone mother in Kaiel-hontokae, had said that the Liethe ruled Geta. Perhaps it was true. She looked down at the priest she had forcibly imprisoned in his own skull, her killer instincts still at full alert for he was not the only danger. How alone it was to have power. She could never share this triumph even with Hoemei who understood power.

  Quietly she set up an apparatus to drip poison into ’t’Fosal through a tube connected to the blood vessels of his wrist. She had given much thought to the choice of the poison. It was temperature-resistant and not affected by roasting. It was slow-acting even in huge doses but still lethal in minute quantity. And it was known only to the Liethe who had developed it accidentally while trying to eliminate some of the common side-effects of a drug used to retard senility.

  Afterwards, she lifted Nie to the bed, laying him out in a pillowed comfort he could not feel. All day he marinated in the poison, but before it killed him she slashed his wrists and let him bleed to death. She left a knife in his hand in the normal position for Ritual Suicide, though the simplest autopsy would discover that he had been murdered. No routine autopsy known to the Mnankrei would indicate that he was poisoned bait.

  The long shadows across the room faded into the dimness of twilight while Humility cleaned out every clue of her presence. When the nocturnal stars opened their eyes she left by the window whose lock had been repaired. It clicked shut and she became a rooftop shadow again.

  54

  If a man has been tamed, The woman is never blamed.

  From the Liethe Veil of Chants

  IN THE DAYS that followed her execution of Nie’t’Fosal, Humility stayed with moody High Wave Ogar tu’Ama, feeding him what little he could eat, listening to his self-recriminations, his foreboding, his wild plans. Her quiet sister, Flesh, who did not like to be beaten, loved this gentle man but Humility pitied him. She had been the companion of Aesoe the Prime Predictor and Hoemei the Thinker Who Could Act. She longed to teach white-haired Ogar of the slashed face the art of leadership, but he was too old. He could make fiery speeches and pinpoint moral issues but he could not delegate authority and somehow in his long life, with only one wife and no husbands to help him, he had never been simultaneously in all the places he had needed to be to block the Swift Wind.

  The murder of the Winterstorm Master had shaken him. At first he was elated and gave his Comfort a rousing speech on the new glories that now awaited the Mnankrei while he broke out a special bottle of whisky. Then drunk, he became obsessed that he would be blamed for the murder. Finally, with the empty bottle hugged in both hands, he gloomed that the murder meant nothing, that the young ones of the Swift Wind would simply take over and run a more ruthless ship.

  He snored away his stupor until sunrise, then contritely helped her fix the meal though Mnankrei men traditionally found kitchen work demeaning. They played game after game of chess. She could not beat him; he was a chess dobu. He refused a game of kol. Its strategy was too real.

  “I’m going for a stroll. You nap,” she said.

>   Humility chose a direction down the Grand Avenue and then over along the Blue Canal where there were few people. When the orange furnace of Getasun became a distorted red oval at sunset, the great gongs began to sound over Soebo in a dirge for ’t’Fosal. She listened quietly. The rollings of the bass vibrations were the echo of her deed reflected off the mountainous grief of hundreds of the Mnankrei who had allied themselves with his vision. She returned home to find Ogar dressing for the Funeral Feast.

  He had decided to drop overboard the grudges of the past. Death meant a new beginning. If he showed good will and partook of the body of their leader, perhaps they would show good will, too, and begin a program of reform.

  “You will not go to that man’s Feast!” Humility was astonished by this new tack. “Where is your morality? How could you face your people with his flesh as part of you?” She knew of no other way to handle Ogar’s sudden rationalization than rage, but her rage was real enough.

  She had to argue. She had to threaten to leave him. She called in his friends and juggled the chaos of their conflicting positions until she won. She made them write down a manifesto. Those who disapproved of the policies of ’t’Fosal would absent themselves from the Feast as a. declaration of what they stood for. It was dangerous to make a public show of opposition to the Swift Wind, and they debated the dangers interminably as they composed their manifesto, muting this phrase, and padding that one with double meanings. They were accepting the danger, with prodding, but Humility was internally enraged that they did not make the gesture spontaneously.

  Thus it went.

  Ogar was an old man but his vacillations carried with them the energy of the sea, sometimes calm, sometimes cresting and troughing with sickening speed. She was appalled. This was the man the crones would place as the Master of the Mnankrei? Controlling him was exhausting and she called for Flesh to spell her while she took an earned rest walking the heart of Soebo as Sugarpie.

  It was as Sugarpie that she first heard the rumors telling of the sickness and death of the powerful men of the Swift Wind who had attended the somber Funeral Feast. A relieved and then gleeful Queen of Life-before-Death skipped over a puddle and began to play Miss the Crack on the cobblestones and managed twenty-seven hops before she slipped. Sugarpie wandered from bakery to n’Orap skin shop to stall to bazaar to park, her curiosity aflame, listening and provoking response and adding her own black comment now and then to the wild rumors.

  Her wagging tongue was of the opinion that the virulent disease the Mnankrei priests had launched against the Gathering had got loose and been caught by the creators and it served them right for mixing the sacred and profane in ways God had never intended and God only knew but that this horrible disease which made your eyes bulge and your head wobble might break out all over the city soon enough.

  Soebo was terrified by nightfall.

  In the morning the rumors were even worse. Over one hundred Mnankrei had died in the night and they were being cremated in secret! It was horrifying! They had become unclean! The best of the Swift Wind were unfit to eat! And the Kaiel! The ghosts of the defeated Kaiel were advancing on the city and they were coming with the vengeful fury of the sinister winterstorm, piling the waves before them like a wall moved by the wind.

  Humility had spent the night as Comfort describing to Ogar in rich detail the dying agonies of those who had been foolish enough to pay homage to the great ’t’Fosal at his Final Feast. A long night it had been, and the rumors were well into their late morning form before she heard them. Unbelievable! The judges were coming! She rushed from tu’Ama’s residence to the hive, striding, sometimes running.

  “Is it Bendaein or Joesai?” she asked, breathless.

  “It is Joesai the Scythe,” said the crone.

  Humility turned her face because tears had burst upon her cheeks. Without dressing for the journey, she hired an Ivieth palanquin to carry her toward the Gathering as far as those giants would take her and then continued impatiently on foot, still wearing Comfort’s flighty morning dress which had been chosen to please the High Wave to make up for her teasing.

  She saw them before they saw her. They were hardly the storm wave that the morning gossip described. She recognized them because each of the distant figures carried a rifle. They moved with no great speed. A small group would take some high point, whether it be hill or roof, from which to cover the flow of their fellow judges. Behind that point she assumed was the main body of Kaiel youth. She pressed on, cursing herself for not bringing walking shoes. She was captured by one of the girls she had taught to dance.

  The three female riflemen handled her more roughly than any men would have. They tied her hands behind her back so tightly her fingers went numb and they dragged her along the road through the Gathering on a long leash about her neck that nearly choked the breath from her. Those they met gave her a wide detour. Even Joesai, walking with the two-wheeled supply wagons, would not come closer to her than several man-lengths.

  She bowed to him, kneeling and touching her head to the ground, graceful even though her hands were tied.

  “Just the woman I want to skin alive.” He was scowling.

  “Why? Have I committed some crime?” She spoke up to Joesai, from her knees, defiantly.

  “To some, I won’t say who, the murder of a Kaiel is no crime.”

  “You are a ghost then, as the rumors in Soebo say?”

  “Ho! You tease me. But three of my judges died.”

  She bowed her head. “For that I am sorry. Eight Liethe also died, and more horribly.”

  “The Liethe die, too? For that I am sorry,” he mocked.

  “I have come for my reward,” she said brazenly.

  He grunted. “I am willing to reward you with a knife to your wrists.”

  “I would prefer that you transfer into the name of the Liethe the deeds to the Soebo Palace of Morning. That was to have been my present from ’t’Fosal and I want it! You, too, promised that if I helped you, the Palace of the Morning would be my gift!”

  Joesai laughed a genuine laugh of amazement. “Is it usual in Soebo to reward treachery so lavishly?”

  “Are you not all alive? Most of you? For that you may kiss my feet.” Her voice trembled. “I was afraid that I had miscalculated and you were all dead. But you are more than alive! You have become invulnerable! Liethe gifts are not given freely. I have earned my reward!”

  He went to his haunches so that their conversation might be less awkward. “You speak like a madwoman.” He loosened her collar. “Perhaps your brain has been deprived of oxygen? I am to reward you for bringing ’t’Fosal’s sacred disease to my camp?”

  Humility smiled insolently. “I did not bring the disease. I brought the antidote developed at great expense in life by the Liethe of Soebo. If I had brought you the disease you would all be mindless. The Liethe antidote mocks the disease and grants immunity but the micro-life carrier does not contain the genes that cripple.”

  “What?”

  “You have been immunized. We call the potion you received a tocaein.”

  “The honored tocaeins of our temples are the teachers of games — not the givers of pain.”

  She mocked Joesai’s seriousness. “The tocaein is indeed a teacher of games. But does he play to win? Does not the tocaein deliberately handicap his moves so that the novice grows strong by winning? So it is with our potion. It attacks you only to challenge your body to great efforts so that when the real attack comes, you are ready. Your body has matched wits with a tocaein who has taught you how to resist the deadliest of Mnankrei ploys.”

  Joesai softened as one of his major worries evaporated. “You could have told us,” he said gruffly.

  She watched him with a mischievous glint. “And would you have permitted me to poison your entire camp? What if I had told you that you would be vomiting and shaking in your weakness and also delirious with sunfever? You did not even trust me!”

  “I trusted you because you helped me free my me
n from the Temple of Raging Seas.”

  “You shouldn’t have. Besides I didn’t even know if the Liethe antidote would work. It was very hastily concocted.”

  Joesai yowled as if stung by an angry bee. “Women like you make bitter soup.”

  “Untie me, please.”

  He cut her bonds. “And what news from the city?”

  “The greatest minds of the Swift Wind have been murdered. Mobs are already out, shouting, gaining courage from the visible reassurance of other like minds.”

  “Murdered? By who?”

  “It is not known.”

  “And those I left behind?”

  “I know that one of your Kaiel will be leading a mob to the Temple of Raging Seas. They will find the mindless women in whom ’t’Fosal’s disease is grown and that will feed the rage and fear. The city is headless. It is yours.”

  “It is not my hope to frighten the city.”

  “I will introduce you to the High Wave tu’Ama. He is a just man. If you deal with him and no others, he will become leader of the Mnankrei and salvage what is left of that clan.” She paused. Studying Joesai’s mood, she took his arm affectionately as if she were about to ask for another Palace of the Morning. “Take from them their priesthood, but leave them their ships and the city will be soothed by your mercy.”

  “It is a strange scene you paint. I will send men forward to confirm. If true we will move in today.”

  “Strike today,” she said.

  He kicked a stone. “Will the children bring me flowers?”

  “Of course. And tu’Ama, the coward, will offer me to you as a present and pay the coin I cost from his vaults.”