Listening, Honey pulled her black scarf around her face, like the sheathing of a beekeeper, but imperturbable eyes watched Noe. She did not rise. The Liethe woman’s very demeanor chastised Noe for her bad manners.
With a flicking gesture of impatience at Gaet, Noe turned to sit beside the woman who had been the mistress of her husbands, reaching into her pack for bread to feed both travellers. “I’m not myself. I welcome any guest of Gaet.” Her voice was briefly warm again. “You may have come in vain. There may be no wedding.”
“Eh?” Gaet queried.
“You,” Noe turned savagely to one-husband, “may not even find a family to greet you!”
Gaet was diplomatically inserting himself between the two women. “I see I’m behind on the gossip. Has Kathein changed her mind again?” He laughed.
“Sometimes I despise you!”
Gaet caught her bitter mood for the first time, and the fog clutched his heart. “Someone has died?”
She took his hand and kissed him on the cheek, then compulsively put spread on a slab of bread for the silent Honey. “Joesai is home.”
Gaet grunted. “Since when is that bad news?”
“He brought Oelita with him. He found her in the desert, mothering twins by Hoemei.”
“Ah,” said Gaet. “She’ll be welcome in Sorrow.” There was more to the story. He waited.
“Joesai expects us to marry his Heretic.”
Gaet laughed the great laugh. He could not restrain himself, even to match Noe’s mood. “Did Joesai bring her in tied to a pole and drugged?”
The answer carried deep puzzlement. “She loves him. There is a bond between them. I don’t understand it.”
“God’s Sky!” said Gaet.
“Joesai and Hoemei have been fighting. I’ve never seen rage like that. They’re brothers! I was frightened. Teenae was terrified. She and Oelita ran away to the village and left me and Kathein holding the pot. Kathein wants to return to Kaiel-hontokae and I’ve had to use persuasion to keep her here until you arrived.” Noe was crying.
“Shall I speak to Hoemei?” said Honey with great concern. She reached across Gaet to comfort the sobbing woman. “I have certain catalytic powers.”
“You stay out of this! You’d steal him from us!”
Gaet slipped his arm around one-wife. “Your foul mood staggers without reason. Our Liethe friend will steal no one. They are a gentle clan, and Honey is the gentlest of them. Their place is to serve. The man who thinks to abandon his family and elevate his Liethe always fails. The Liethe are known to be incorruptible in the purpose they have set for themselves.”
“Speaking to Hoemei would do no good,” said Noe, disconsolate. “My husbands have lost their reason.”
Gaet laughed. “Such is the price we pay for having women in our lives. I’d best end my rest and begin the peacemaking process.”
“There will be no peace! Don’t you think we’ve tried?”
Gaet was staring at the wind-shaped trees in the gully beside the road, trees older than any man alive, short trees which had fought off the violence of the sea a thousand times and stayed rooted. “I think it was Hoemei who taught me when we were still in the creches that when a problem is insoluble, then it is essential to change the problem.” He rose. “Noe, I’d best go on alone. Take care of Honey for me, and remember, she’s a little afraid of Kaiel women. Make her your friend.”
Honey rose, too. “I could go with you. I won’t get in the way.”
“No.”
“We could all go together,” Honey pleaded.
“No.”
“It is all right,” said Noe. “We’ll go back to the village and visit Teenae and Oelita. Gaet knows what he’s doing. If he’d been here none of this would have happened.”
Gaet pushed his way through the trail to the maran’s coastal mansion, cursing the bump that had put a wobble in his wheel. Another job, retensioning the spokes! For a moment he stopped to examine the damage, but also to give himself time to think out his attack on his brothers. He turned the skrei-wheel upside down.
The maran were a strange group, viable because of the different substance of their individual abilities. Gaet knew that most of the world saw him as the easygoing lackey of his family. If Noe wanted to go to the theater he would go. If Hoemei had a political deal to make, Gaet would negotiate a resolution of the conflicts. He was known for his pleasures. He was too pliable to be seen as a strong man. And yet this family was his creation and he valued it above all other things in his life.
He spun the damaged wheel and watched it wobble. That was his skill — retensioning the spokes.
Some of his weakness was an illusion of his magic. As a child he had learned to appear to be giving way while he was leading. He retreated into carefully constructed traps. It had been no easy job to weld together the bonds between Hoemei and Joesai. It had taken trickery. They still clashed. They were still rivals, Joesai envying Hoemei’s analytical skill and Hoemei envying Joesai his game with danger. From time to time they had to be played off against each other.
He could already surmise the forces behind this clash. Neither Joesai nor Hoemei had been particularly adept in their handling of women. Joesai had been clumsy and Hoemei had been shy. Yet it had been Hoemei who had persisted in the pursuit of Kathein, the only dangerous game he had ever deliberately dealt himself. And Joesai had plunged into his conflict with Oelita, sure that he did not want her, sure of the soundness of the tradition from which he worked — only to find himself in play with a woman who could manipulate the nuances of wisdom that could never be embedded in tradition. Oelita had forced him to be rational.
How could Hoemei ever give up the danger that he had survived without the aid of Joesai’s defending fist? He would be fundamentally attached to Kathein. How could Joesai ever give up the feeling for philosophy that he had found far from Hoemei’s mind? He would be fundamentally attached to Oelita.
When Gaet finally arrived at the Coastal Predictor’s mansion, and quietly hung up his skrei-wheel before slipping upstairs, he found Joesai reading in the upper room overlooking the Njarae. Of the three rocky islands that rose from the sea only the ghost of the Child of Death peered through the fog at them. Joesai inserted a cloth marker in the book and turned down the wick of the lamp, until the pallor of the room’s bioluminous globe provided the dominant light.
“I’m pleased that you located Oelita,” said Gaet.
His largest brother let the book sag and stared at Gaet, unspeaking. The design of his face looked like the carvings from a death urn.
Gaet began again. “I hear of troubles.”
“Hoemei pulled a knife on me.”
Like the squabbles of little boys accusing one another. “And to get even, no doubt, you whacked him over the head with the latest philosophy.”
Joesai smiled wanly, turning his head to the invisible horizon. Gaet wondered if his brother was remembering how accusations were handled at the creche — a boy was punished for whatever crime he had loudly thrown upon another.
“So the old reprobate is dead,” said Joesai, changing the subject.
“That’s good for you. Your exile will be lifted by the new Prime Predictor.”
Joesai laughed, half in amusement and half cynically. “Maybe not!”
“God’s Eyes, brother, don’t look so glum. We haven’t run out of alternatives yet. The plan is not the strategy.”
“Oelita is a good woman. I think Kathein has betrayed us.”
Gaet became cold. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say about that right now. I want you to think about compromises. I’ve never yet seen a compromise between two adversaries that didn’t give them both more than each would have taken from his original plan.”
Joesai wasn’t listening. The rug and the stone tiles of the floor had captured his restless eyes. “I’m paralyzed. Fighting my own brother…”
Gaet did not let him finish. “I’ll be busy in the next few days. You’ll be doing some baby watching for me.” He began to leave.