A cool wind was blowing in over the beaches near Sorrow at the back of a hardy native girl who ran toward the tall Kaiel priest through the sand that retarded her by sinking under her feet. “I want a ride on your shoulders! You gave Saiepa one last time and you didn’t give me one!”
She came up to about the height of his hips and her nakedness was undecorated except for scarred stripes that ran from her knees to her ankles, the universal symbol of the money-lending Barrash clan. “Ho!” glowered the giant called Joesai, “and who says priests are fair?”
“You have to be fair or they’ll send a Gathering after you to make themselves some shoes!”
“In that case, since you insist that I ride on your shoulders…” And he swung a foot over her head and pretended to ride her, marching along on tiptoes in the sand.
“I didn’t say that! You have sand in the wax in your ears! I said: give me a ride on your shoulders!” She tried to squirm her head out from between his legs.
He squeezed his legs.
“Hey, you’re pushing my ears into my brains!”
He reached down an arm and pulled her out from between his legs by the feet, hanging her upside down, one large hand around each ankle, her long hair sweeping the sand. “And now what, little beetle?”
“Put me on your shoulders or I’ll get a nosebleed,” she threatened.
He flipped her up and placed her carefully around his neck.
“That’s better! Run! I like it when you run!”
And Joesai, in lucent folds cut like the chitin cover of an insect, the hontokae emblazoned in blue on its front, was suddenly thrown back to that immortal day long gone when he had entered Soebo with his Advance Court. He smiled at the ridiculous image of himself staggering into the city at the height of the insurrection like a common Ivieth with a Liethe whore riding his shoulders, having just bought Soebo with a palace he did not own.
Those had been strange days compared with his exile now. He had been in control, not because he could have done anything with the mobs, but because the mobs did not want the power they had usurped — they were traditional folk, shocked by their own rage and fear. It had been a time of rushed juggling, marathon talks with every clan leader he could find, speeches at the flaming cremation for the diseased host women taken from the Temple of Raging Seas, and the consecration of 170 Ritual Suicides. The city came back to normal after six sunsets. Two weeks later Bendaein hosa-Kaiel arrived and took over. The life of the exile was very different.
Joesai often wondered about Comfort. Rumor said she had been given to Bendaein. If so he kept her out of sight at some country estate. She never wrote. The last he had ever seen of her was a surprise visit on the docks when he and Noe were leaving for Sorrow.
“Why do you live alone in that big house?” asked the girl on his back.
Joesai laughed. “I don’t live alone. You haven’t known me long enough. Two-wife comes tonight from Kaiel-hontokae to stay for the birth of her second child. And you can be our three-wife if you learn to bake cakes.”
“I’m not Kaiel; I’m Barrash. But you can be my eleven-grandfather.”
“I’m not old enough to be a grandfather.”
“You have gray hairs.” She pulled one out and showed it to Joesai.
“That’s because I owe your three-father so much coin.”
“One-mother says you are in prison. Are you a debtor?”
“My family visits me but I do not visit them in Kaiel-hontokae because I am in exile. Exile is not prison and my nose is firmly on my face.”
“How did you get to be a bad man?”
“I kidnap and eat little girls.”
There was a long pause from above. “That was a bad joke. You even scared me. Really why are you bad? I’m bad, too — sometimes — so don’t feel left out.”
“I fell in love with a woman who was also loved by a very powerful man. She had my child, and he does not want me around so he never forgives me.”
“That’s sad. A man who keeps a woman for himself is not polite. Do you miss her?”
He laughed. “But she comes into my life. We see each other to share our son, meeting at the sky-eye in the mountains. I brought some lens grinders back with me from Soebo. Did you know that Getasun is a double star? We share space with a distant midget sun that is red and hardly bigger than Nika. It was discovered by a Mnankrei girl not much older than you. I made shoes out of her fathers and she tried to kill me so I adopted her. She has great kalothi. She always wanted to be a navigator but Mnankrei women are not allowed on ships so I’m training her as an astronomer. If she passes her Trials I will make a Kaiel of her.”
“Did you kill her fathers?”
“No. They slit their own wrists.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a priest. They’re always killing people. You won’t kill my fathers, will you?”
“No, not unless they want their money back too soon.”
“There was a priest who was chasing the Gentle Heretic. He killed her.”
“No, he didn’t. I used to think he had, but today I bought a book that she wrote after she last saw him.”
“Are you a Follower? My mothers say it is all foolishness.”
“Oelita the Clanless One is human like us all. She is foolish and wise at the same time. She has passed the Sixth Trial of the Kaiel Death Rite and that means she has great kalothi which is better than wisdom.” Six out of seven.
“You sound like a Follower. They are all over.”
“No, I’m not a Follower. I’m the priest.”
“You’re him?” She squirmed and slipped off Joesai’s back. She turned and stopped at a distance of four man-lengths. “I’m not a Follower, either,” she said. Then she fled.
Joesai carried the title of Coastal Predictor. The de-priested Stgal had built his residence overlooking a curving beach that pointed out toward three rocks rising from the Njarae that, since olden times, had been called the Old Man, the Mother, and the Child of Death. Joesai loved his family’s new mansion and, though it was far from finished, it had the beauty of Life Incomplete. (Perhaps he didn’t like the wirevoice pole.) The Stgal spent at least one lifetime on a building they cared about, feeling how it was lived in before they added the next organic layer. When the Stgal had been broken as priests Teenae logically decreed their new role as architects. They were clumsy with chemistry and rule but, ah, the miracles they made with stone and wood and mortar!
He toured the rooms, seeing that all was ready for Teenae, his anticipation stirring his dormant loins. The cactus flower was blooming and he moved it to a prominent position in the light from the tall leaded window. The luster of the wooden table disappointed him and he found oil for a rubdown. The fruits and breads that Teenae liked were in stock.
He took special care with his room for that was where they would sleep. It was a kind of formalism they had developed over their marriage. When he arrived from a journey, he would spend his first evening in the bed chamber of one of his wives and when a wife had journeyed she became a guest of her husbands.
He poured his best whisky into a better bottle and washed the shot glasses a second time until they sparkled, remembering how Teenae hated to drink from spotted glass. He bathed and perfumed his underarms and put on his cleanest undergarments.
The wirevoice chimed. When he answered, disembodied male words from Sorrow’s switchery told him Teenae was on the way. God help us if the copper line ever reaches Kaiel-hontokae, he thought grumpily, but quickened the pace of his preparations.
From a balcony in the sloping roof he watched her arrive by four-wheeled skrei-wheel powered by a male and female Ivieth couple. He let them unload her iron-reed basket, then set off two rifle-powder bangers whose crack! crack! made the three of them look up in time to see his rocket rise on sparking tail to explode in a blue flash that spread across the sky while it burned to a dazzling white.