WHAT DID YOU DO to her?” Teenae raged.
“I’m pleased not to have been there for the attack. She nearly killed Eiemeni.”
Teenae was impatient with such chit-chat. “Is she alive?”
“For a person as tough as her, death comes slowly. She’s fast, too. Her surprise lasted a mere half wink. She’s a deadly killer.”
“She’s all gentleness!”
“I’m glad I didn’t make the mistake of believing she is what she writes when I planned the ambush. I learned respect. She’s quite capable of killing a whole Kaiel family with her bare hands.”
“You did not answer my question!”
“Whether she is alive?” Joesai mused.
“Yes.”
“I thought to be cleverly misleading and use the Mnankrei Death Rite opener. We fastened her to an iron-reed basket through her wrists and floated her in a cove.”
“What a horrible way to die,” said Teenae acidly. “You don’t dare bleed to death so you drown yourself. She died?” Teenae felt helpless.
“The Mnankrei prescribe seven ways to escape from the first trap, each more difficult to perceive but each easier than the last. She could hardly have failed.”
“She’s alive?”
Joesai laughed and lay down against the pillows, facing the bay. “I escorted her home. I have an ironical sense of humor. It pleases me to know the enemy from the start.”
“Then she’s alive. Thank God. Tell me where she is!”
“Even knowing where she is would be cheating. I let her vanish.”
“You’ll hunt her down again?”
“The next time there will be six ways for her to escape.”
“You’ll kill her in the end.”
“She’ll go at least to the fifth level, that hurricane. I like her.”
Teenae took a wrap, a crocheted lace of marching and flying insects, and left the inn for a walk along the stone quay of the harbor so that she might be away from Joesai. The wind from the sea this day was cold and she held the wrap tightly to her body, while the brisk air flapped her black hair and froze the shaved centerline of her scalp.
The Joesai of Sorrow was different than the husband she knew in Kaiel-hontokae and she was not pleased. Her anger came, she thought, from the frightening coolness with which he faced someone else’s death, but she was not aware of how much of her rage derived from the mere fact that he was winning the game to which she had secretly challenged him. Real life walked on more legs than a kolgame. Joesai had the experience while she had only wisdom. It was intolerable.
She stopped at a fisherman’s stall along the quay and bargained with an old grandmother for five swimmers. These swimmers were eight-legged armored creatures as big as a man’s fist. They were tasty but almost more trouble than they were worth. They could not be cooked in their shells because then the poisons diffused throughout the body of the meat; they had to be cracked and carefully dissected. Only the brain and gills were edible, perhaps two fingers worth of morsel, a modest mouthful. The remaining muscular flesh might safely be eaten if it was carefully sealed with a special bacterium and left to rot until it reeked. There were recipes to disguise or boil out the oily ripeness. Some people preferred such dishes to human flesh. Teenae did not.
She wandered far beyond the quay, slogging through the sand, puzzling out Joesai’s mental process. Such an analysis was difficult because he did not reason with logic. Sometimes she doubted that he reasoned at all. He was tradition-bound to a fault, though never imprisoned by a tradition that did not suit him. He acted out old formulas, not as if he believed in them, but in a kind of jovially absent-minded way, as if being traditional saved his mind the bother of thinking while it was occupied elsewhere at more important tasks.
He had his men and she had none; that was the problem. He had the eyes of a bee, and she had merely two. To win, she must first establish a balance. Was she here alone to flatter Joesai or to counterbalance his weight with her own vitality? She needed mass. She needed allies.
Up ahead a dancing child played with a decaying length of sea vine, snapping it like a whip. To avoid the soft beach, Teenae was now walking along the border between the endless battle of sea and continent that had pounded out a lifeless curve of wet black sand. The attacking foam seized her hurried feet and the counterattacking sand left behind heel-deep pools of water.
“Hi,” said the boy, whacking the surf with his vine. Its rotten stalk broke. Because Oelita was on her mind, she scrutinized the four wheat kernels on the boy’s back — the Scar of the Heresy. The first underlay of the design, she noted, had been executed by a traditional craftsman of the n’Orap clan. There were few so skilled in Kaiel-hontokae. When the boy reached his full growth the final delicate details of the cicatrice would be cut in or embossed and colored. “You got some swimmers,” he said to her. “Yeech. I throw them back when I catch one of those.”
“Do you lay traps, or do you dive?” she asked.
“I mostly bait, but I’m a good diver.”
“Who decorated you? I notice that your scars were all done by the same artist. He’s very good.”
“My two-father. You should see my mothers! He is not yet finished with my body.”
She thought about a man who would commit his son to a heresy in a way that could not be erased. He was a believer. Joesai would not have approved. Since a child he had been adamant that no one’s symbol should ever be carved into his body. The designs he wore were meaningless. And so Teenae conceived her plan for telling Joesai of her opposition to his actions.
“I have some work for your two-father. Would he be home?”
The boy’s family lived on one of the crooked dead-end streets at the bottom of the hill below Sorrow’s Temple, a street wealthy enough to afford paving. Its houses and shops were a motley mixture of yellow and red brick, of field stone and mortar, of cut stone and elegant arches, all with slanting slate roofs and tiny windows. Stairways disappeared into common courtyards or to second floors or meandered up the hill to the next street.
Three children were carefully daring footholds in the stones of the aqueduct that passed overhead to feed the eight public fountains from which the townfolk drew their water. Other children pestered shoppers to carry their bags for a coin. An Ivieth couple, the female far taller than her mate, pushed a smelly sewer wagon as they made their rounds to collect fertilizer for the fields. Coming in the opposite direction a father and his daughter hurried past the wagon, laden with water tanks on their backs, bringing in the evening supply from the nearest fountain.
At the shop entrance Teenae removed her sandals and washed her feet in the small footbath. Watching her intently was a little girl with naked skin as smooth as freshly bleached fine paper, who, upon deciding that the visitor was safe, ran over to her half brother and climbed to his shoulders for a ride. From that perch, arrogant but silent, she looked Teenae straight in the eyes and simultaneously steered her brother by the ears. Down the hall another girl, older, hauled a jug of water upstairs, smiling broadly at Teenae when their eyes touched.
A sloe-eyed woman with elaborate spirals radiating from her eyes greeted them in a shop filled with imported fabrics, tapestries, rugs, fine porcelain, brass kitchen utensils, even clocks from Kaiel-hontokae. The family obviously dealt in luxury imports.
“I have never seen such fine porcelain!” exclaimed Teenae.
“This is only our display room. It would please me to show you the ceramic collection down below. We have more from the o’ca kilns than we can show here. A new shipment has hardly been unpacked.”