Flesh had become intense. “I am consumed with curiosity. How can the o’Tghalie have allowed their women to be used thusly? A sale is not an open contract.”
“They know nothing of what has happened to her, and you will tell them nothing. We have determined in our quiet way that she was sold in faraway Osairin and her clan believes her to be perished of a desert dust storm while she was being carried to the Njarae.” The old woman added ominously, “Fosal has used Liethe, too!”
“Mother! And you’ve given me to him!” exclaimed Flesh.
A hundred thousand wrinkles chuckled. “Humility will share your burden.”
Black pupils, embedded in blue and flecked irises, probed each other over the whites of the sterile masks.
“How has she been harmed?” asked Humility.
“You have been taught of the micro-life that sometimes rages in stinging scourge of death among the profane? Nie’t’Fosal has found ways to bring such profane ills into the sacred world.”
“She is diseased!” Both se-Tufi spoke with astonishment.
“We are not able to decode the mechanism. We have sampled this girl’s brain and all appears normal except that axionic and dendritic neural growth is unusually prolific. We believe a double process is involved. Viral constructs, hosted in free invading cells, have been used to play with genetic controllers. Mouth contact can transmit the disease.”
Suddenly Humility found herself in the middle of a huge attack of loyalty for the Kaiel. How could she have pretended to forget Hoemei! She was his abject servant! “The Kaiel are right to call a Gathering!”
The crone swiveled in contempt, gesturing at the demented o’Tghalie. “The Kaiel will be destroyed before they reach Soebo — by that!”
“We must warn them!” cried Humility. “We have our rayvoice contacts!”
“We will not warn them,” retorted the nas-Veda crone angrily. “With such a frightening thing loose do you think they will spare us? They will deliver a holocaust of flame to this city to roast us all — all of us — in a purifying total fire. All clans will be consumed to char as were the people destroyed when the Kaiel chastised the Arant! Would they see a way to mercy? Would you be merciful if you were they and knew of this horror that might spread from here like poison spores on the wind to every man-inhabited region of Geta? No, Liethe child, you will not warn the Kaiel. I bind you under penalty of death!”
46
Lay a man at your back to listen to the whispering of the wind.
THE REEKING SMELL of drying weed drifted down from the racks on the cliffs across the beach. The simple docks were busy. A boatload of refugees from Soebo — perhaps eight all told — had arrived this morning, the third such group Noe had heard of, fearful ones who were afraid of the Gathering and rich enough to flee. They haggled with traders and she watched them from afar, wondering how she might question them. She coveted every bit of information she could glean, but was suspicious of spies.
How much did the enemy know? She expected an imminent Mnankrei sweep of the coast to clean out these carefully placed supply nodes of hers which were putting boats across the upper Njarae to Mnank loaded with goods and, now, with priests from distant clans.
The rumors that disturbed her proved nothing. Such hints were no stronger than the flicker across a game player’s face, the slight holding of cards closer to the chest. It was Joesai’s vulnerability that cast sinister reflections upon every rumor. There stood Joesai, fretting amidst the enemy, barely beyond the outer reaches of their city, and he was allowed to do nothing while the Mnankrei day by day readied whatever counterstrike they intended. The sea priests were not ones to test and probe. They struck.
The prescience of the Kaiel mind told her what it meant. Joesai was doomed, however this adventure might turn out for the Kaiel. Joesai had always carried the aura of death with him. He dared it, lived with it, mocked it, because he could not escape it. He was born to be a tragic hero; his time was now but Noe did not want to lose him. Of all her husbands only he shared her thrill at the touch of danger.
Noe remembered, almost tearfully, that she had once thought of him as the husband she did not like, who coldly had taken her in hand, when the first paling of her love for Gaet had left her depressed, to teach her the best of the Kaiel tricks of genetic surgery because he had been disappointed by her ignorance, and resentful of Gaet that he should pick for them so soft a wife. A full orbit of Geta she had hated him, wanting to play and despising hard work, and then one day she had wandered among the hills above Kaiel-hontokae, searching out Joesai she knew not why, to find him glooming over a wrecked sailplane.
He put wings on her and risked her life above the valleys, and she had discovered from Joesai that she loved danger and could not live without it. Gliding had bonded them, and for some reason after that his faults had never bothered her. Strange that once she had wished him dead so that she might have Gaet and Hoemei to herself.
After Noe questioned the refugees — and learned nothing except that fears and speculation raged in the city — she was approached by a sturdy man while she was eating bread and honey pudding in the plaza of the village.
“He’s Geiniera,” whispered her second companion.
“You know for sure?”
“Yes. He’s been sulking around the village for days, keeping to himself, asking few questions.”
The man bowed to Noe. He was ragged but well washed. His eyes shifted suspiciously yet without fear. Deferentially he waited for Noe to speak first.
“May I help you?”
“Now tha’ would be pleasant but no’ likely. You be Kaiel?”
“We’re all Kaiel, guests of the Twbuni who rule Tai.”
“You Gather’t’ shake Soebo?”
“Only that we may know the truth,” she replied formally.
“I see the dune, but each grain o’ sand is truth.” His reply was the gentle rebuff of a practical man who did not believe in such nonsense as truth. Shoulders shrugged that had lifted sails and fought the lashings of the sea. “You question th’ folk wha’ flee? Did they carry tales as woeful as th’ tale on this heart?”
“Are your woes of your own making or cast upon you by the evil deeds of others?”
The Geiniera laughed and slapped his rags. “No’ a question I could answer!”
“Share our bread.”
“Thank ’e, kind priest. You Gather’t’ shake Soebo. Go with God’s blessing and avenge me my daughter”
Thereupon he told a story that fitted his mad state. He had shared a wife with his brother. They were poor but perhaps could have afforded another woman if they had been able to find her. The wife bore her sailors a daughter and died, leaving the baby to neighbors, while they were both at sea. That tragedy changed their lives. One would go forth on a Mnankrei merchantman and the other would stay home to care for the daughter, and perhaps to pick up work in the shipyards or mending sails. The daughter grew to be beautiful and proud, a soul to scorn her Geiniera roots and to love the wealth of her betters. She set her mind to becoming Mnankrei and in time found her man who took her as a lover but, when she was with child, abandoned her to her grief and poverty.
The agitated girl had taken her baby to the Temple of the Raging Seas, into the presence of the father, and murdered his child for him to watch. She had been seized, and no one had ever seen her again. The story told to the Geiniera fathers had been of her invitation to Ritual Suicide and one father believed and one father did not, for should not their daughter have been delivered to them for their rightful Funeral Feast?