And so they carried to her the youth bound upon an iron-reed frame. Joesai, in his role as priest, invoked the ceremony in the expected musical monotone. His bearing changed. He spoke for the Race.
“We did not have kalothi. We died of the Unknown Danger.” The pain of the Race was in his voice. Then his voice became resonant until it challenged even the sea. “And God in His mercy took pity and carried us from the Unknown Place across His Sky so that we might find kalothi. We wept when He gave us Geta. We moaned when He cast us out. But God’s Heart was stone to our tears. Only in a harsh place beneath His Sky might we find kalothi. And only with kalothi shall we dare to laugh our laugh in the face of the Unknown Danger.”
Joesai brought out the priest’s Black Hand and White Hand, each with special scars, each carved from wood and mounted on short rods. He held them above his head so that he became long-armed. “Two Hands build kalothi.” With a vibrating sound that was half formal laughter, half formal grief, he meshed the wooden fingers together. “Life is the Test. Death is the Change. Life gives us the Strength. Death takes from us the Weakness. For the Race to find kalothi the Foot of Life follows the Road of Death.” The small ship heaved upon the waves. No land, no sea on Geta was immune from this ritual.
Joesai’s voice was implacable. “All of us contribute to God’s Purpose. All of us help distill the racial kalothi. Some of us are here to give Life. Some of us are here to give Death. Of these the greatest honor is to contribute Death for we all love Life.” He paused for only a moment but in that moment spliced irony into his monotone. His gaze was upon the youth. “It is with awe that I accept the offering of your defective genes.”
“It is against the Code to kill,” said the youth serenely.
“Oelita’s code, not mine!” snarled Teenae with such a thrust of hatred that her wounds stabbed her again.
“It is against the Kaiel Code to kill,” he sneered.
Joesai silenced Teenae with a piercing glance before she could reply a second time and returned his eyes to the youth. The Black Hand and the White Hand slightly askew, he answered in a voice that was more vengeful than priestly, “Of course. And we shall not kill. We are only here to receive your offering.”
“I have no offering for you.”
Joesai continued the ritual, unperturbed by such blasphemy, bringing forth from his robe certain sensual delights which were the Receiver’s obligation to the Giver. They were simple delights, for this was only a ship, not a temple. There was pure water, the touch of smooth glass, a shave, the taste of a berry. Each was refused.
Then came the time for the Cutting of the Wrists. But the youth defiantly held his fist away from the knife. Joesai placed the blood bowl. His men began the Chant of the Blood Flow, harmonizing like a giant heart in vigorous pulse, a heart whose beat began to slow and fade until it drifted away in silence. The youth laughed, proving he was still alive, but no man noticed because to them he was already dead.
Carefully, as if the Cutting of the Wrists had indeed been performed, as one would if he were planning to tan and shape and sew a fine leather coat from the hide of a corpse, Joesai began to skin the boy, unmindful of the surprised and then terrified screams that carried across the water and into the hills of Sorrow. The skinning was hardly begun before the boy’s pain and fear took his wrist against the knife that had been bound into the mat. He cried out for mercy, for the skinning to stop until he had had time to die, but Joesai did not stop.
The butchering went quickly. No part was wasted. The meat was salted or hung in strips to dry, glands were set aside for medicines, tendon and gut preserved, the bones went into a soup. A bowl of blood was presented to Teenae as her due.
Eiemeni, who had come to admire Oelita, expressed his regret as he washed the blood from his body in the sea with Joesai beside the wooden bulk of their ship. Joesai was unmoved as he sudsed his hair. “He chose to approach Teenae by my rules while he expected Oelita’s rules to protect him from reproach. Oelita lives by her rules and is protected by them. For her I have sympathy.”
They showed Teenae the hide as they stretched it for drying. She fingered the especially well-cut wheat stem cicatrice of the heresy. It would make a fine design on a leather binding for her copy of Oelita’s book.
Oelita!
A thought startled her, causing her pain because her whole body reacted. “Joesai! I forgot! In all the excitement I forgot to tell you that Oelita owns a Frozen Voice of God!”
22
I was impressed by the style in which you faced the Mnankrei Tonpa while being true to the code you have forged for yourself. You gamed with Death and won. How could I not count that as the Second Trial of seven? You have earned my respect. Someday, if you live long enough, perhaps I shall earn yours.
OELITA CRUMPLED THE NOTE that had been penned in high script on fine blue paper and delivered anonymously. She threw it across the room at the four advisors she had convened for a council. “Manyar!” she raged, “the Mnankrei and the Kaiel are crushing us like a nut between the arms of a nutcracker! We have to fight! It is too soon!”
“It is always too soon,” said Manyar, pulling his robes closer to his body.
“And you, Eisanti, is that all you have to contribute, bland homilies that serve no further purpose than to keep the high day conversation sparkling? The Mnankrei offer us food while the Kaiel improve the road through the mountains. The famine isn’t even here yet and the beetles are already laying their eggs to feast off our death. The famine will come and then it will go, but will we ever rid ourselves of the Mnankrei priests who will take our men and women daily to that slaughterhouse in the Temple? Will we ever rid ourselves of the Kaiel priests who salivate after our tender children? We must resist them!”
Eisanti played nervously with his bracelets. “We will have to compromise until we are in a stronger position. Manyar is right; we cannot take an unyielding stand as yet. The tree bends until it is thick enough to resist the wind.”
“Tomorrow the Stgal are calling for the first of the Ritual Suicides. We have food! We don’t know how much of the new crop the underjaws will devour! We don’t know how much food we can buy. We don’t know that it will be impossible to rely on our other sacred sources!”
Old Neri interrupted. “O’Tghalie Sameese has calculated that there will be less death if the Stgal begin now.”
Oelita flared. “Of what use are the numbers the o’Tghalie manipulate? If you have measured the breadth of your field wrong it does not matter that you have the length correct for you will not be able to calculate your acreage!”
“Perhaps she is right,” said Taimon from the back of the room. “Perhaps the Stgal find this the opportune time to eliminate their opposition. Who will be able to say that they move with wrong motives?”
“It is our weakness,” added Manyar, cleaning his nails, “that we attract the low in kalothi.”
“That is our strength,” retorted Oelita.
In the end, as she always did, she made her own decision. She waited until her council had dispersed inconclusively. Her fists were clenched. It was a shock to her to discover that because they all had high kalothi they weren’t motivated enough to oppose the priests. But how could she form a council of the low in kalothi? She’d have to do all the thinking and she’d be constantly handling mistakes like that fool attempt to meet the Kaiel threat by murdering Teenae. I suppose it was always thus, she thought bitterly, a society stays stable by preying on those least able to defend themselves.