Once she had a dream about Noe buying lifeless twins at a temple butchery.
Days passed. Oelita made an uneasy peace with God, praying ever more frequently on her knees at the altar. While she worked, while she rested, she had been scanning every Chant she knew for hidden wisdom. It was like her that she discovered a God of the Sky who differed from the God of the temples. The orange sun rose and fell. Her belly became filled with kickings and so she came to know for sure that she was with twins. Long-range foraging became impossible. She began to spend whole days inside the hut preparing the profane foods to rid them of the poisons.
She enjoyed her conversations with Nonoep who sometimes came to visit when she was deep in thought.
It rained. The shower lasted only during the twilight but days later a glory of flowers had popped up all over the barren hills, seducing the insects into mad excess. She could not resist a long waddle down the ravine, picking blue desert-lips for her hair. The restless wandering did not tire her. There were rocks she had removed from her garden and she began to carry them over to the stairway, a few at a time, placing them in the stairway so that they were solidly secured against weather, against age, against the force of roots. The previous hermit, dead before her father was born, had placed his rocks with exquisite care. She honored him with as much care.
Nightfall caught her at the apex of her stairway to the stars. Flowers had folded while insects began a nocturnal chatter, seeking mates. It was a clear desert solitude for star watching. The Mist River flowed above the horizon bringing with it the constellations of the Moth and the Knave.
I am alone with beauty.
Darkness and distance hid whatever treachery might roil beyond that doomed excellence. In a way, we are all hermits, she thought. God is a recluse like me. What gods had driven Him to this secluded edge of space to meditate while others destroyed? She felt a sudden kinship with Him, and, as if in sympathetic response, He began His rise above the ragged black horizon to steer across the starfield.
Is it true that kindness is only the first symptom of a weak will? Did gentle people have to retreat into total isolation to survive? Perhaps God was no fierce protector; perhaps He was only a kind soul who had run from stellar warriors as Oelita had run from Joesai. Such ideas stimulated anger. She would not believe such heresy! Gentleness was the noblest of virtues! Kindness would make the world whole! Caring for the weak took a deeper strength!
Vicious images out of The Forge of War flooded her vision from every blazing star. Atop her stairway she began to curse this collage of armies with all the might of her raging lungs. Her acrimony shattered the darkened desert, reflecting from every arroyo, amplifying up the cliffs to throw its wrath at the sky of twinkling hiroshimas and baghdad-massacres and subtle tortures and avenging hordes of red armor that tracked over the stars, explosively punishing peasants and old women, selecting the occasional child for target practice.
“STOP!” she screamed at the avalanche of image.
A nefarious universe turned evil eyes her way — curiously. The combined assault of that attention hit like a clap of silence. Insects chirped to their mates in tiny voices. Oelita stood frozen on her cairn, searching, ears alert, aware that she was bathed in star-light. Had Joesai heard? She shrank down out of sight, listening for breathing, the crack of a twig. She dared not go back to the hut. She spent the night alone, trembling, hidden in the brash on the ledge above her wheat.
49
He who judges shall be judged in kind, but whosoever fails to judge for fear of being judged himself shall suffer tyranny.
THE COBALT BLUE vial was cradled by a miniature cushion in a brass goblet that squatted upon the room’s side table. The se-Tufi Who Rings the Soul’s Bell was smiling at the tiny coal on the end of an incense stick she had just ignited. Humility stood stiffly, formally before her. “You have done well,” the old crone said, turning to finger the vial. “This is a poison to delight an assassin’s soul.”
“It does not give the subtle unobtrusiveness that is desirable. It is not clean — for when does the blow stop throbbing?”
“You are reluctant to deliver this death to the Kaiel?”
“I kill one at a time,” said Humility frigidly.
Soul’s Bell peeled a fruit, carefully cutting away the poisonous parts, and offered a slice to her guest. “You may relax. Please recite the Lattice of Evidence.”
Humility did so, by now flawlessly.
“Good. It means nothing to you, of course, but it is like a seed crystal and you will find that much will grow around it in the years that follow. The pressure of events forces us to hurry you. Every Liethe lives out the Code of her stage. For you it is not the Time of Changes, but nevertheless we need you. The hoiela larva pretends to fly before it builds its cocoon. For the day that follows you shall be a crone. Please undress.”
Humility obeyed, not understanding the order, her arms and body moving to remove her garments with their usual grace.
Soul’s Bell watched critically. “That is not good enough. Move as if you were old. Move as if the mere act of walking were a Trial of the Spirit.” She noted Humility’s hesitation without impatience. “Walk as you will during the twilight of your life.”
Humility remembered her mentor of the Kaiel-hontokae hive. She became like the se-Tufi Who Finds Pebbles, slow, dignified, every movement painful but each too proud to ask for help. Soul’s Bell watched her, then gave her a plantinum-headed cane. “You are a crone now.” She took a thin pencil and other tools and began to draw lines upon Humility’s face, shading her jowls, peppering her hair, shading her breasts so that they seemed to sag, aging her as if these flying fingers were the abrasive sands of some time-storm.
Then she dressed Humility in the eccentric luxury of an elder Liethe. “Be as the crones are. Think as we do. Every action must be seen first in ghost thought that reverberates through the future until it rebounds off its own peculiar distant consequence. Only then make your action real. You are slow. You are deliberate. Your mind is cunning and never in a hurry. You have forgotten nothing of a full life.”
And so it was that this young girl, in the mask of wisdom, hobbled into the Deliberation Chamber of the Liethe hive at Soebo in her first initiation to the world of the crone. An old woman, jeweled in nose ring, chanted the nodes of the Lattice of Evidence. Humility first knew then that Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal was up against the knife. Each monotonous invocation of a question from the Lattice prompted one or another of eight crones to answer with an accusation and a line of evidence, coded in poetic meter so that every detail of the judgment might be remembered with error-correcting exactness. Question and poem were repeated, flowing back and forth among the crones, fixing the memory of an event no Liethe dared commit to paper.
The details of the judgment impressed themselves upon Humility, passing through her mind and finally across her lips until the poetry of’t’Fosal’s guilt was tied to the Lattice cues like the flowers that give meaning to the trellis.
There were questions upon which no poem budded. Then the discussion ceased to be formal and debate raged. It was said that no clear poem could be composed unless the evidence itself was clear. However long it took, the crones were faithful to the Lattice which methodically exposed the world of sin, event at a time, through the multi-faceted eye of the squat Night Seer, the insect who had become the Getan symbol of justice.
Humility contributed her knowledge of the Kaiel analysis of the underjaw. She told of the blue vial and connected it to the o’Tghalie idiot being studied by the Liethe biologists. The flow of words became formalized, condensed, blunt, then slowly, in a back and forth ritual, were forged into poetry.