Her final decision was impulsive. She walked out into the town of Sorrow with only two bodyguards, down where the old buildings began, and pulled together a fearful crowd of those who had the most to lose, melding them into a group large enough so that they might find courage in each other while she led this mob toward the Temple.
All the Village of Sorrow above the waterfront was temple grounds. The Path of Trial wandered tortuously about the Temple itself and up over the hill above the Temple, twisting between the garden settings, each of its obstacles crafted to challenge the swiftness and strength and flexibility of some part of the body. Here the Stgal tested the physical kalothi of those who came under their jurisdiction. The Temple itself, built like a crescendo in this serpentine garden, began as a modest star that grew until the points of the star became halls dedicated to the Eight Sacred Foods and, continuing inward, transformed themselves into massive stone buttresses that rose majestically to support the tower that held at its pinnacle the rooms of Ritual Suicide. Nothing in Sorrow was taller than that tower. Whether the village was obscured by hill or haze, the tower could still be seen. Ships used it as a beacon. Of all the glories of the Stgal, the Temple of Sorrow was their greatest.
Inside the tower the gaming rooms spiralled around a shaft of air, seemingly supported by the light that laced through the colored glasses of the tall, narrow windows. There a Getan might play kol and chess and games that could not be won without sharp eyesight or steady hand or creative mind or color sense or ability to leap the obvious. Unobtrusively the Stgal priests kept score so that one’s kalothi rating could be updated, while supporting the Temple by collecting coin for food and drink and the company of male or female courtesans.
Getans were addicted to games, and they flocked to their temples to meet and laugh and compete. Outside the temple they might gamble for money or favors; inside a temple the games were free. There a Getan was gambling with his life and loving it.
To the imposing Temple at Sorrow, Oelita brought her motley group of losers who were not even sure that they had a right to life, much less sure that they had the ability to fight for it and win. Nearing the immense facade of this place where they had been defeated so often, some of the bawdy spirit that Oelita had infused in them began to vaporize. Here was the focus of their lost self-esteem. One man tripped and another made a loud joke about his friend’s clumsiness. Oelita posted them in front of the main portal with instructions to be vocal about their protest but when she was gone they hung back and took on the nature of a crumbling wall of bricks that busy people pass without a glance.
Oelita was welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Temple as an honored guest by the highest of the Stgal priests. They had been expecting her and received her with outward warmth. She was given cushions and drink and encouraged to talk. She spoke eloquently of opposition to both the Mnankrei and the Kaiel, and urged restraint in calling a condition of famine. There were other ways. There were other foods. Vaguely she had some of Nonoep’s profane triumphs in mind. Oelita built her strategy on an appeal to Stgal vanity — they were as good as the Mnankrei and as good as the Kaiel, and cleverness could defeat their opponents.
The Stgal listened, drew her out, laughed with her, and finally, without explanation, had guards take her up to a room high in the tower. It was said of the Stgal that they would feast you with great camaraderie, waiting until the dessert to poison you. She could see her people down below. No one dispersed them, even noticed them. She shouted to them through the bars, but she was too high. No one heard. Till dusk she watched, and with the setting of the sun they just melted away.
Her tower room was more than comfortable. Here the kalothi-weak were pampered to honor the sacrifice they were to make for the Race. The Lowest on the List spent his last night with everything a Getan valued — clear water for the throat and incense for the nose and tastes for the tongue from the stamen of the hug flower and the chanting of a choir of friends and a mate to please the body. Here was gold to feel and the finest cloth to lie upon. Still, the window was barred with iron. From this window, they said, no more exalting sight ever met a human’s eyes than that last transit of the God of the Sky across the stars.
She couldn’t believe she was here. Was it a mirage, that fervent group of people she had commanded? They were ghosts. She was alone. Was it illusion to think that words would ever raise people to action? The first crisis, and my words collapse like a sand city cut down by a single wave. What was loyalty? What made men stick together in good and in bad? I thought I knew.
She was trying to understand why she was here. It was against the rules. She had the highest kalothi rating in all of Sorrow. And then she laughed through the bars at the night sky. The rules were to be broken, as every kol master knew — if you could have the consequences of the broken rule. And what was her death to them? She would slash her wrists and die. I’ll have no choice. No one would care. Life would go on as if she never was.
She found herself staring through the bars vacantly, thoughtlessly, waiting, waiting for God. And when God passed overhead, she laughed and cried. God was a stone. When you were brought up among a whole people who believed in God the Person, some of His Morality remained a part of your soul. God the Stone had no morality. Even knowing that, she had never really felt it before. She was here because there was no morality. God was a stone. That’s all there had ever been. And Oelita wept.
23
A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.
THE SMALL SHIP and its one-masted companion were anchored near an ancient breakwater that was smashed by wave action. Someone had tried basing a small fleet here long ago and had given up, defeated by a rocky coast, harborless and inhospitable to ships. Joesai chose this refuge only because of an o’Tghalie clan-home in the mountains near the sea. Teenae had been carried on a stretcher up through the foggy woods and left with relatives to recuperate.
The sweet moments he spent with Teenae soothed his brooding turmoil. Restlessly he wandered through the woods, once finding a red flower of an intricate design he had never seen before, bringing it back to Teenae knowing that his little gift would please her. His anguish was forgotten.
“It is like a little temple,” she said and smiled at him.
“I was up on the peak looking to see if our ships were still there.”
“In this mild weather you expect them to blow away?”
“I expect the Mnankrei to sweep down upon us.”
“We’ll run away together. We can fly before the wind faster than they can. Haven’t I had experience as a sail?” she teased, laughing, and taking his hand.
The o’Tghalie observatory fascinated Joesai, for he had always been interested in the stars. He often brought a bottle and a loaf of bread along the trail at dusk to spend the night there with one of Teenae’s uncles who told stories about that imp’s stubborn youth. “You can see why they sold her!” And he’d roar with laughter.
This uncle was not a very conventional man. He had a love of instruments, which was unusual among the o’Tghalie. He was the renegade who had taught Teenae things she shouldn’t have known. O’Tghalie brains were peculiar in that if they did not learn to perform complicated additions and multiplications in their heads as a child, they never learned to do these operations well. Thus o’Tghalie women, denied school as young girls, became servants rather than mathematicians.