“A clan that thinks such thoughts is damned to a Gathering.”
“Drink your soup.”
“Make love to me.”
“Aw, it’s your favorite soup.”
“Now.”
“Finish your soup first.”
He took her on the patio under the stars with a driving desire that noticed she was somewhere else but that couldn’t stop to find out where. Her fingers absently caressed him, affectionately enough…
In the afterglow he stared at the face beneath her twining braids that he was never able to understand. Her head lay tilted, eyes fixed on some star but she wasn’t there, musician fingers finding a groove in one of his decorative scars and plucking it as if tuning an instrument, but she wasn’t there, either.
Finally she turned to him with a languorous smile. “I see how to kill your underjaws.” She moved a fingernail from the hontokae on her breast to his belly where she stabbed — and laughed.
10
The Death Rite shall be invoked only in the case of heresy and shall consist of never more than seven trials, for would not an endless trial become persecution? Though each trial conjures a more subtle death, each death, even to the seventh, shall leave open an escape that can be perceived by an adept of the common wisdom, for is not the common wisdom a memory of the Race’s escape from Death? And is it not the common wisdom we are protecting when we challenge a heretic?
OELITA WAS BLEEDING to death tied into the iron-reed basket by thongs through the center of her wrists, bobbing in a small cove, half drowning every time a large wave broke over her head. When she wasn’t struggling to breathe, the agony in her wrists throbbed with a heartbeat still in panic.
It wasn’t an actively threatening trap. If she kept her legs stretched out, she could stay afloat with her head above water indefinitely — except that blood loss would gradually weaken her. She had to act now. Yet there was nothing she could do! She could move her legs but, if she worked them forward, her head dipped back into the water and she began to drown. Worse, she could sense that if she pulled her feet up too far the trap would flip over and she would be held face underwater with no chance of righting the structure.
She tried to think, but the only thoughts that came were the useless “what if” thoughts of a mind that has given up the present as hopeless. What if she had moved faster when she first spotted the men? She had attacked two of them before the other two had a chance to close in. She had been fast enough to knock one down and swing a rock lethally toward the other’s skull, but he had been miraculously evasive, and there had been no time for a second swing.
Water sloshed over her face. She kicked dreamily. What if she had dumped her packsack sooner? What if she had climbed the bank and forced them to come up after her?
No use. The bobbing lulled her. She tried to be furious. How stupid to allow myself to be angered by Nonoep. What if I’d been reasonable?
A wave poured water into her nose and brought her coughing back to the present. But there was only twisted rock and iron-reed trap and pain. The Mnankrei, she thought. The Mnankrei would use the sea to initiate their Death Rite. But the pain was too great for thinking. She sank far back into the past, squatting with her father in the sand beside a lone gnarled tree that squatted, too, watching four executioner ants keeping an armored beetle at bay, patiently waiting for the beetle to weaken.
“I’m going to help him,” she had said. Now, in her mind, she picked up a straw to joust at the executioners.
“No, no,” the voice of her father was saying. “Watch him get away by himself. You won’t have help when you’re caught in a trap like that.”
“God will help me!” the child replied, defiantly.
“You’d better bet your sweet meat He will do no such thing.”
Oelita jerked. Her father was dead. She had to fight the trap. How does a Mnankrei think? She rode the sea. She was a boat. She was a sea captain. There had to be a way out. A Death Rite Trial was always a formal puzzle. She could pull her legs up and drown. But maybe she was only meant to think she would drown? Maybe the trap would fall apart once it had capsized?
Oelita was gripped by an irrational desire to try that sudden maneuver — what other choice did she have? — and if she drowned, what did it matter; certainly she was going to die if she did nothing. But a keen analytical mind did not allow her body impulsive gestures. She began to build the iron-reed trap in her mind, the way a master weaver would build it, imagining the pieces she could not see. If it were to fall apart, how would that come about? The question gave her a picture. She saw the two pieces, and then she saw the trick. If she merely flipped over, she would drown. But if she could move one of the reeds beside her foot up over the fork that had been cutting her ankle, then when she flipped, the cage would break.
She prodded with toes and craned her neck. She cursed her toes for not being fingers and gave up and watched a turbulent stream of red blood from her wrist drift away in the green water. She tried again. The reed caught against the fork — and slipped off. Again, desperately, she manipulated her toes and this time, while the reed held, she flipped, her lungs full.
Fright kept her eyes open to see the murky bottom rotate into view, almost touching the fine seaweed that released a darting eight legger and — nothing’s happening I’ll die here — but the trap slowly came apart under the shifting of weights and she staggered onto the pebble beach, nude, dragging the trap by the thongs through her wrists, unaware of the pain, until she sank to her knees, crying, wondering only how to rid herself of the thongs. Death no longer mattered; what had been a minor nuisance now reached her conscious mind with full priority… pain… pain. Blood began to paint her palms, merging with the sea wetness, to run down a finger or two.
She saw it then, the tiny ceremonial table holding a bronze knife whose handle was worked in the stylized wave design of the Mnankrei and set with stone fragments of blue and white, an ironic gift from someone who knew what she would need if she got this far. The knife she used with unwilling fingers to sever the thongs. Her attempts to bind the wounds failed — her fingers were too useless — and so she merely wrapped around her waist those thin pieces of leather that had been stripped from the back of some poor man of low kalothi, using them to hold the knife against her kidneys.
Oelita found her packsack upstream with her clothes neatly folded on top of it. So they expected her to live. That implied future terrors of a fiendishness that would grow more complicated with every new trial. She dressed in a rage, favoring her fingers, flinging defiance at the bushes which now held phantoms.
To flee or to dare? She chose audacity partly because she knew the rules never condoned a second trial on the same day. She returned to the iron-clad trap and built a bonfire with it on a rocky prominence facing the ocean. Let the Mnankrei see where she was!
“Ho!” came a voice from the night.
It sounded like the call of the chief priest of the clan of darkness. She looked for the voice but saw only a horde of hidden ghouls ready to attack. Slowly she reached for the knife. Her hand could only hold it loosely. “If you come closer I will kill you!”
“And why should I cause such fear?” the slightly foreign voice loomed.
“I’m hardly afraid of you!” Her arms were trembling. “It is just that I’m in a particularly foul mood!”