“I want to be a good girl.” She ran a finger along his nose, then withdrew in fear. He pulled her back to his body and took her. She had expected him to be impotent. He was not known as a womanizer. He had children but no wives, no permanent female companionship. The Liethe had tried to reach him many times before and had never broken through his aloofness, his lack of interest, his active dislike of women. But he was not impotent. His power was prolonged and stable and he even seemed to enjoy his clumsily unself-conscious thrusting.
“I like your dancing,” he said to make conversation.
“Thank you.”
When he was through with her he would not let her go but set her upon a pillow where he could touch her and watch her. “I don’t understand why you like me,” he said.
“I don’t like you; I love you.”
Impulsively he carried her through the curtains into the game room and ordered all the games to stop. He ordered some music, which was quick to arrive, and then ordered her to dance, which she did. He stared at her, smiling, clapping his hands, drinking whisky when he wasn’t clapping. He was too big ever to get drunk. Still, his mind began to wander.
She waved the musicians into a subsiding quietness, a sea calming after a storm. She stopped dancing. He was lost in some aspect of his own world.
“I have to go now,” she said quietly.
That roused him. “No, no. You’re coming with me. I’m not through with you.”
For a while they simply walked in the city streets, bundled against the wind. Then he led her to a tower apartment where Radiance had never been. “I work here. The thinking work. It’s lonely overseeing a city, planning a clan’s next move in a wild game for our rightful place. I cook for myself. I do everything myself here,” he said proudly, showing her. He took out bread and carved off two big slices and laid a brown spread over them, giving one slice to Humility. That, she supposed, was probably what he meant by “cooking”.
“I could move up here. I could help you.”
“It’s no place for a woman. I don’t even have men here. I like to work alone.”
“Am I here because you like me?”
“Very much.”
“May I stay here?”
He ate his slice of bread in one bite. That prevented him from answering her immediately. “You can stay for one more sexing; then you have to go. I have too many worries. I have to be alone.”
“Couldn’t I help?”
“What could you do for me!” he protested, and she knew he had a favor to ask. He was being too mild. She could almost see his muscles tense while he held in his abrasiveness, pleased at her love for it gave him control, but unwilling to test it with further brutality.
“I can do anything you want. I’m that kind of woman. I can at least try.”
“There are things a woman can’t do.”
“What?” she challenged.
“Chase the Kaiel away.”
“You’re worried about the Gathering, aren’t you?”
“No, but I’m thinking about it. They’re coming here to burn us all alive.”
“That’s horrible. I’m frightened. I hear they’ve been murdering folk all across northern Mnank.”
He had undressed and was pouring whisky from a cut glass bottle by a hexagonal window that beamed reddish sunlight over his illustrated body. “The Liethe are priest’s women. Am I correct?” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
“Kaiel?”
“We’ve always avoided the Kaiel,” she said truthfully. She paused just long enough for him to tense. She watched the pressure on his whisky glass. “But yes. Our code would allow us to service the Kaiel.”
“They must be bored to starvation after such walking and their seasick journey across the Njarae. A spice of entertainment might cheer them. They could use a roll on the ground with an affectionate wench.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that.”
He laughed. “For me you would. If I wanted it.”
“They’re the enemy,” she said with revulsion.
Absently he went to his evaporation cooler and lifted out a small vial, sturdily blown from blue cobalt glass, padded in a basket wrap. “If this was secretly added to the common meal, they’d all die. It is a poison that grows and can be transmitted from man to man. They’d all die. They’d take it from each other and die.”
“That’s not my work.” She was masking her refusal with tones of irresolution while she spoke but, at the same time, was thinking, My God, the crones have told me to obey this man.
“The Kaiel will not admit me to their camp,” he continued. “They will welcome you.”
She reached for the vial curiously, holding it by the tips of her fingernails.
“You’ll save us all,” he insisted. “A whiff of my powder turns a man into an idiot.”
Joesai would be out there, beyond the city, waiting impatiently but only because of Hoemei’s orders. I’ll see him again. It was a disturbing thought.
“I’ll give your Liethe the Palace of Morning as a reward. It’s beautiful. Have you ever been in the cupola at dawn?” He knew the Liethe were for hire.
She smiled wistfully.
“You’re a delightful woman today.”
“A thrashing mellows me.”
“Will you do it?”
So that was what he wanted and why he had been almost solicitous. “Let me think.”
Joesai! Humility remembered how Hoemei had given her to Joesai for the evening, not like’t’Fosal had given her to his son, but like a man shares a wife with his beloved husband. She remembered Hoemei’s trust. She remembered Joesai’s suspicion. He had been funny to love, unused to affection from women and so easily pleased, easily bamboozled, but never wholly willing to forget his mistrust. He told her that his mistrust kept him alive in those few times when trust was fatal. He had known nothing about the transient pleasures of life. He was not used to courtesans. He treated her like a wife, like some beloved. Of all the men she had ever known, that experience had been the most painful. Even Hoemei, who held her in great respect, saw her as a sybarite. Perhaps she had been so touched by Joesai only because she had been so in love with his brother-husband.
“I’ll go,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
“Just be what you are. I’ll show you how to use the vial and how to protect yourself.”
It was a naked grin that he fixed upon her.
48
My dreams were the color of my family quilt washed in the mountain stream until it was as faded as the dawn of the late morning, smelling of rock and tree spore, moist as the hand of fear. Yet children’s eyes remember the colors my grandmother wove like laughter stained by slippery grass. Today I finger that quilt, imagining the sudden reds of the mountain’s ember flower, and the boiled blue dye of pfeina bark in the buckets. So are dreams remended into worn fabric that once warmed my sisters from the snowing flakes.
IT IS SAID that the hermits arose before God stopped speaking. Geta is a vast land populated by fewer than 200 million people and there are valleys and corners and mountaintops and whole deserts where men never go. Along the borders of these lands a wayward traveller might find the ruins of a hermit’s stone hut, his altar to God, and perhaps even a stairway.
A conical stairway is the sure signature that a hermit once lived among the surrounding barrens. Sometimes they are very tall. Sometimes a later hermit will repair the work of a long-dead hermit’s hand and begin to add to the spiral hill built cone by layered cone, stone by stone for a purpose without reason. Why a hermit’s invariable goal was to build stairways, no one knew. A hermit worked alone, never bothering to train an acolyte to carry on his ritual. It did not matter.
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.