The young Kaiel woman on the tavern balcony thought she saw him turning her way and threw him her bouquet of desert flowers. He was only signaling Oelita, and her heart sank, but Teenae was watching and caught the bee-loved blossoms with a smile, kissed them, and tossed her kiss to the balcony with her other arm.
Teenae wore an elaborate headdress that began with a green jeweled insect crawling down the shaved centerline of her skull on a hundred silver comb-like legs that wrapped her black hair in happy coils. Her neckpiece, in black and white lace, rose to her chin. Her blouse was white and close-fitting with sleeves slit from the back of the shoulder to the wrist and held at the elbow with silver chains. The valleys of her facial cicatrice were dyed black. Her pantaloons were black and flaring around her hips. They, too, were split at the back, from waist to ankle, to emphasize her feminine walk. Silver chains held the pantaloons together. The valleys of the designs on her buttocks and legs were painted in white.
“That giant with her must be Joesai,” said the older Kaiel to his youthful friend. “He looks like he had an Ivieth for a mother and a fei flower for a father!”
Joesai was dressed in what he thought was the court finery of an Imperial Chinese Warrior of the Han Dynasty. It was immaterial that the colored insects embroidered into his blue coat were Getan and not Riethe.
Noe’s hair was wound into a silver cage like a nest for the insect that sat there with lustrous blue-green wings and eight silver legs and four green eyes. The silver motif was repeated in the filigree of the wings. They reached down to rest on her shoulders and rebounded to stretch a hand’s length beyond them, acting as the perch for two more grinning insects. A bolt of the finest white silk hung from the wing’s framework and down between her legs and up along her back to leave her sides bare to show off the exquisite skin carvings along her ribs and hips. Metallic insects, holding hands across her waist and clinging to her legs, held the garment together. She gripped Gaet by the arm.
He wore top hat and tails, a costume he had copied from a picture of Abraham Lincoln. To enliven the effect he had added tassels to the top hat and wore a rubied platinum nose ring and platinum wire, set with tiny rubies, in the valleys of his facial scars. On the ridges of his cicatrice he had let the beard grow to fingernail length and dyed it green. He thought he made an elegant Amerikan groom, a Mormon perhaps.
Behind them came two male Ivieth in their finery, carrying a colored palanquin with Jokain, who watched the crowds with every awareness of his destiny. Teenae’s Gatee clutched the railing of another gaudy palanquin, wide-eyed at the pageantry. Another transported the twins. A tall female Ivieth, bare-breasted and in elaborate skirt, carried Teenae’s new baby who ignored everything in her contentment with the milk of the bosom at which she suckled.
When the procession had passed, the young creche-Kaiel affectionately took the arm of her male companion. “Let’s get married so we’ll have a broader range of topics to fight about!”
He gave her a hug. “I think bachelor Aesoe had the right idea! Once you start this wedding business, where does it end?”
“Seven!” snorted the old man.
66
WEDDINGS HAD SERIOUS moments but mostly they were times for fun. Six tumblers, three men and three women, slipped into the great plaza of the Temple of Sorrow in mock wedding finery, one malevolently tripping another to be caught by a third to be tripped himself and caught in a cycle of marital quarrel and assistance that accelerated into a dazzling display of body-throwing.
A rustle of attention fell over the audience as the members of the real procession found their seats. Behind the maran and the new brides, the Chanters were grouped on the stairway with the wall behind them to reflect their voices into the crowd. They wore the resonant facemasks that changed the trained human voice into a vibrant instrument able to handle the deepest rumbles or highest trills. Now they sang for the tumbler-contortionists.
These buffoons never stopped their torrent of jokes. Three-husband would flirt with two-wife, and becoming lecherous, would back up to run at her for an embrace, only to crash into two-husband while two-wife stepped aside into the embrace of one-husband while two-husband had to throw three-husband at one-wife to save his robe from the intended fate of the robe of two-wife. Everything they tried ended as a miscalculation but miraculously every disaster landed them on their feet or in some astonished rescuing arms. Their lovemaking was a breathtaking vortex of contortion. Sweet flirtations ended in mayhem. A sly husband ran off with Teenae, followed by three irate wives who tumbled over each other in pursuit, not quite catching him before he managed to kiss her… and so it went, to the audience’s delight.
With the tumblers gone, men with casks moved among the crowd pouring a free sweet punch touched by the flavor of whisky while the Chanters began a light melody that pranced through the party almost unheard above the laughter. The sun was setting.
A Liethe woman slipped out of the Temple unnoticed, shifting in happy steps, dressed in a luminous sun orange and white with a bridal crown. Hers was the hesitant motion of a blithe woman unused to such happiness. She ran and stopped. She skipped. She leaped — and had the full attention of the audience who wondered where she had come from.
Her suppleness was the merry frolic of a girl recalling moments with the husbands she loved, a blush, a touch, a tryst. She bounced in a way that made her audience gasp, as if she were free of gravity. Gradually, she moved out among the people, dancing for an awed child, or she would take an old man for a partner and prance with him until he was young again, or climb mischievously to the shoulders of an Ivieth. All the while, as the twilight deepened, she spread her magical cheer over the wedding guests. Then, at the very moment God appeared in the purple sky at the horizon, she vanished.
This was the first ascension of God in the week of the Reaper in the year of the Spider. Weddings were always timed to begin with God on high so that He might witness the ceremony. The crowd began to hush as God rose into His Darkening Sky. The Chanters became silent. A few stars peeked through the cobalt-blue vault of the heavens. A woman pointed out Stgi and Toe to her young son. The insects clicked and rustled even here in the middle of the town. A baby cried and was hushed. An old woman coughed. God moved, His Tiny Beacon brighter than any star. All eyes were on the Streak. Suddenly, at the very moment of high-node, the Wedding Chant resonated from fifty masks.