He chose that moment to present her with Oelita’s bound book, done in the crude print of a secret print shop. “She’s alive.”
Teenae’s eyes widened and he could see her heart begin to pound. “How do you know?”
“They keep knowledge of her from me. This book was kept from me. If she is dead, why would they protect her? But that’s not the reason I am confident of her health — in this book she speaks of God. She has worked Him into the weft of her warp. That means she has recovered from the shock of discovering that God exists and so has passed safely through the Sixth Trial.”
Teenae burst into tears. “I’ve hoped so to hear that she was all right. So she believes in God now, does she? Do we?”
“Four weeks ago when I was last at the observatory there was a perturbation in His Orbit that can’t be accounted for by gravity. Whoever He is, He is not passive; He stirs in His Sleep.”
“We should have married Oelita. Our antagonism was immature.”
“I know where she is,” he said.
When a startled Teenae looked up at her husband she saw an old glint in his eyes. He was older, more, cunning, and no less stubborn than he had ever been. “No!” she said. “I forbid it! Leave her alone. That’s over! Six is enough!”
He smiled gently. “I only meant that she revealed her location in her book. There’s a touch of the hermit philosophy in the images she uses. She can’t be far from Kaiel-hontokae. There are records of the old hermit haunts.”
“Leave her be, Joesai. For God’s Sake!”
He would not answer his wife. He showed her the new clothes he had bought for her and dressed her and took her down to the tall leaded windows where he read to her from Oelita’s book.
56
Once there was a poor girl of the clan of oe’San whose family lived beside the river Toer making their way by pounding clothes on the rocks to free them of dirt and stiffness. Her riches were long eyelashes and a flirting smile and a body carved in the most intricate cicatrice forms by her father. She owned one ragged gown that often embarrassed her when it tore. She dreamed of mansions with pink glass and colored tapestries and cloud-like pillows in the bedchambers. She dreamed of travelling by carved palanquin with four mighty Ivieth as her servants. In her dreams she rode ships to the lands of hoiela cloth where tailors fitted her for weddings and tall men took her to the games in the high temple rooms. Her dream words spilled like poems from her mouth. She reddened the whitest pillow cloth with her love. Casually heaped food steamed on golden plates. There was no poverty anywhere in her dreams.
But when she pounded those robes in the Toer and wrung them dry for her basket, she knew that it was coin which bought such dreams. With every whack she vowed that she would never remain poor like her family. She would find the gold and platinum and the silver to live her dreams.
I passed an old woman of the clan of oe’San living by the river Toer. Her riches were long eyelashes and golden teeth and a body carved in the most intricate cicatrice forms. She owned one ragged gown held together by heavy thread that passed through pierced coins that weighted her every move and jingled. I showed her one silver coin and she reached for it with a flirting smile, but I held back, asking her for her dreams. “I dream of money,” she said, and stitched the coin into her rags.
ONCE KATHEIN HAD thought she could subdue Aesoe by draining his wealth to feed each of her vast projects, but he had always found more coin. She discovered to her horror that she could never break Aesoe; she could only bankrupt the Kaiel. In a desperate walk along the Hai aqueduct she was trying to figure out a way to leave him.
She could not deny that he had pleased her. He was good-natured and carried brilliance enough to match her own. She loved his parties. She loved the casual way he wielded power, bending rules, doing whatever had to be done. But she hated him.
God’s Mind, that man is awesome! Because of him, she had a clan of her own, destined, she thought, to be so dynamic that it would rule beside the Kaiel. Because of him she had been able to snap her fingers and create an instant family — in which she did not belong.
She had everything. She had a son she adored. Nobody believed her but he would be the Savior Who Speaks to God. She could feel it. He had Joesai’s strength and her mind. But his father was far away in exile.
She had intellectual adventure. The breaking of the code that had led to the revelations of The Forge of War was enough excitement for one lifetime. But more had followed. Hints from descriptions of military weapons had propelled her simultaneously into subatomic theory and cosmology and all the land between, from rayvoice instruments that could be etched into a thumbnail of silicon to rockets that could reach God.
And yet she was alone.
The happiest time in her life had been that brief courtship with the maran family. It seemed so long ago. When she first met Gaet, showing him one of the first primitive rayvoices, there had not been a wirevoice in all of Kaiel-hontokae; now they were everywhere, weaving their copper webs like an insect species gone wild at the discovery of a new prey. Men had walked; now they rode their skrei-wheels. The Kaiel had been a clan confined to the mountain steppes; now they ranged over half the Njarae and in the northeast were pressing against the Itraiel. Life had become a maelstrom.
How does one refuse a man of power?
Sometimes, at the height of her hatred for Aesoe, in those rare times when she had taken Hoemei to the pillows out of a kind of nostalgia for lost love, the tenderness she met was almost too much to bear. Gaet still courted her but with the genteel formality of the compulsive flirt. It was a duty he felt toward all women. Joesai’s love had turned to anger and that puzzled her. She kept track of them all. Noe had been to Soebo, a logistics coordinator for the Gathering. Teenae was still trying to organize the world into logical categories — contracts were to be met, secrets were to be kept, and betrayal was to be answered with a lead pebble between the eyes.
An Ivieth found Kathein on the road. He gave her water and watched her skeptically when she told him that she was all right. He made the decision that she should come back with him to the city. The Ivieth were keepers of the road and none defied them there, not even priests.
So she arrived at the Kaiel Palace anyway, her revolt short-lived. She was half a day late and Aesoe was distraught. He was not pleased with her leggings or the dust in her hair or the dirt clogging her toenails. He sent her with his servant, one of his budding creche daughters, to be bathed and dressed. After an interval of sufficient length to have allowed a woman to wash off the first layer of grime, he arrived in the bathhouse himself to hold court as was the custom among the Kaiel when they had lost time and matters were pressing. Such was Aesoe’s way of telling Kathein that he was displeased with her tardiness.
He brought with him two priests of the Itraiel, both formally attired in headdresses of iridescent insect wings and in black suits fronted by scarf-like collars of brass mail. Each wore large brass buckles inlaid with erotic platinum figures that hooked down to protect the genitals. Black leggings of iron cloth hugged the skin, their interwoven platinum tracery describing the same lethal flower that scarred the faces of the priests.
They bowed to her in the tub, and if they were astonished by Kaiel custom, they did not show it. They did not bathe in water and bathhouses were not within the stricture of their rules. Kathein coldly extended her dripping hand and each man kissed it in turn.
“Kaesim of the kembri-Itraiel,” said one.