Young Kaiel would begin to infiltrate toward the coast, recruiting constituencies. A Kaiel, taking on a member of some coastal clan, would assume a personal responsibility to protect that person and, if food became short, to bring in food for him or pull him out to the refugee camps that were being built along the road in the Valley of Ten Thousand Graves. In return the represented one would transfer his name from the kalothi rolls of the Temple at Sorrow to the kalothi rolls of Kaiel-hontokae and swear to uphold the laws of the Kaiel.
Oelita felt guilty that the first people to be protected would be her own, but Hoemei only laughed and said that a Kaiel’s first duty was to his own constituency — it was that obligation which gave Kaiel-ruled territories their vigor. When the people surrounding Sorrow found that the low in kalothi protected by the Kaiel were better off than the high in kalothi protected by the Stgal, the Stgal would find themselves deserted and suddenly powerless.
“Do you think many of my people will give Contribution in your Temple?” Oelita had been able to get no concessions about Ritual Suicide.
“We are better organized than you imagine. The first of our Kaiel to penetrate the coast will bring with them the deviant underjaw suppressor and it will first go to those farms who bond themselves to the Kaiel thus protecting their neighbors also. Taimera has herself decided to work with your Nonoep on the large scale processing of edible profane foodstuffs. It won’t be much at first, but it will help take the edge off the famine and your people will get the first of the production. I can guarantee you nothing, only that they will be better off with us than with the Stgal.”
“What of the Mnankrei?” asked Oelita.
Hoemei smiled. “It is convenient to be brother to a killer.”
“You’re sending Joesai to Soebo?”
“Aesoe is sending him to Soebo.” Hoemei’s smile broke into a grin. “Even Aesoe makes mistakes and I’m ever willing to take advantage of them.”
“I’m still afraid of Joesai.”
“He has his gentle side. He does not dislike you. He is a child of the creches and all of us have been challenged by some form of Death Rite. It marks the soul. He would that you were his equal.”
“Wouldn’t you like to abolish such cruelty?”
“Someday — when the land becomes water and the water, land.” Which meant never. “The Death Rite is fair; it gives your kalothi a chance, and thus prepares you for Life, which is seldom fair.”
Aesoe dropped by the maran-Kaiel mansion and took Oelita for a walk. He brought her to the botanical gardens where profane plants were bred for beauty. Many of them had strange symbiotic relationships with the insects. The flowers that attracted bugs by shape and color and smell had a similar effect on humans who bred them for ever more exotic show.
“Some bluenoses!” she exclaimed. They were darkly violet with the hugest flaring nostrils she had ever seen. Her mind drifted to the bluenose season when spots of violet covered the hills above the Njarae, thriving in the windy spray of sea.
Aesoe talked with her about the endlessly varied lives of the insects, a hobby of his, and he was genuinely glad to talk to someone as field-wise as she. He specialized in watching the eight-legged kaiel. He laughed when he told Oelita how lazy the kaiel were, how they always convinced the hogburrow to carve out their homes for them by stroking the backs of the hogburrow with scent that stimulated nesting behaviors.
There among the flowers he made her an honorary Kaiel. He bestowed an arbitrary voting weight of 200 on her and told her that she would be allowed to vote on any issues involving the coast. He was not going to require her to identify the members of her constituency until she felt sure that the Kaiel had not betrayed her trust.
Then he walked her back to the maran mansion, a long but interesting way over hills of stately homes. He flirted with her, patting her behind and telling her how voluptuous it was.
“You’ll have to try kaiel smells,” she said, taking his arm, “flattery doesn’t seduce me.”
The Prime Predictor left her at the door, saying he had urgent business elsewhere, perhaps because he remembered that Joesai was home. When she entered the inner court of the maran household, feeling stronger than she ever had before in her life, she met Joesai standing alone in the high ritual garb of priest. Even that did not daunt her.
“Aesoe just made me an honorary Kaiel. I have a voting weight of 200,” she announced proudly.
“Ho! The madman is at it again, flaunting tradition. You think yourself worthy of such honor?”
“Yes!” she flung at his insult and felt gay. “Will you be voting on the coastal treaty?”
“I’m voting yes. But with some reservations.”
Teenae had appeared on the balcony overlooking the inner court. “You leave Oelita alone, you big bully!”
“What are you filing with the Archives?” Oelita persisted, watching Joesai for every flicker of his expression.
“I think the program will be difficult to implement. It needs you, and I’m predicting that you won’t be there.”
Teenae sensed Oelita’s shock and vaulted off the balcony to attack Joesai with her fists. He simply reached out and snatched his wife by the wrist and jerked her up into the air, while his other hand lazily reached around and took her by the roundness of her buttocks, tossing her casually, clothes and all, into the central pool. She made a huge splash, accompanied by Joesai’s laugh resonating from his massive bones.
Suddenly, Oelita was very afraid again.
37
And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the javelin, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. So Joshua burned Ai, and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day. And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took the body down from the tree, and cast it at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised over it a great heap of stones, which stands there to this day.
THE RUMORS ABOUT Oelita’s crystal ran through Kaiel-hontokae like quickfire through desert thorns.
It was an eye into God’s Heart! It was an eye into Hell! The God of the Sky had broken His Silence! More sober talk simply puzzled upon a game called War.
Oelita had heard Teenae whispering to Hoemei about violence that consumed cities in flashes of light and thunder. She had heard voices in the streets talking excitedly of killer clans who faced each other by the thousands, in orderly rows, hacking at arms and legs and heads and bodies with heavy long knives while they hid behind shields.
No matter how she blocked off the rumors, they seeped through to Oelita like water through cracks in a retaining wall. She shrugged. For all their sophistication the Kaiel remained a superstitious clan.
Defiantly she took up Joesai’s challenge on the eve of the great party. She was tired of his teasing her as if she were still a child believing in grumpmugs who lived in fei flowers and bit off thumbs. Thus she arrived at Kathein’s physics shop in party finery. Teenae, insisting on being her bodyguard, was dressed in trousers stitched together out of radiant saloptera bellies and wide belt of her grandfather’s hide, a linear crown of jewels paving the shaved streak through her black hair. Behind her, Joesai loomed in ebony and silver and leather.
They entered. Joesai led them to a vaulted chamber of bulky magician’s mysteries, tended by three sweating sorcerers. Oelita peered at shelves of tiny red insect eyes caught in glass cages. A fan whirled like the wings of a beetle migration. Kathein, moving as if she dared not generate shock with her feet, took Oelita to the Frozen Voice of God held by metal fingers that sprouted tentacles of wire. There were lights and glass lenses and the crystal was mounted in front of the great bellows of the silvergraph image maker.