Now Hoemei was left with a breach in his plans. It was like having a route set to ascend a craggy mountain and finding the chosen path suddenly rendered impassable by landslide. He would have to send Gaet into Sorrow sooner than he had anticipated. Who else could convince Oelita’s people that she had not been murdered in some treacherous deal? A delicate mission.
Shifts, shifts. Quickly he would have to find others to do Gaet’s work here in the city. The inconvenience annoyed him. He cursed Joesai for the stubborn pressure he had kept on Oelita, then sighed. That was the price a Predictor paid. The future did not happen. People created the future with moment-to-moment action and decision, always adjusting to the unexpected. More than one route led to the same peak.
Hoemei bowed, dropping all the way to one knee. He had delivered his dreadful message. The Liethe creature stirred and stretched, smiling gaily at him behind Aesoe’s naked haunches. Instantly he recognized Honey’s special sweetness. She was here!
The unnatural smoothness of her back launching itself into the summer hills of her buttocks sent a shiver through him more fearsome than Aesoe’s anger.
“Come here,” she said.
He did not dare move lest he further provoke Aesoe. Nor could he find words.
Lazily she brought herself upright, amused at the silence, aware that her movements suspended even the Prime Predictor in mid-emotion. The chain with its tiny amulet swung between her breasts. “My lover is afraid of my lover.” She was watching them both so that neither knew whom she meant. “Come here.”
Hoemei remained frozen.
Her eyes, as blue and flecked as Assassin’s Delight, remained fixed on him. “Aesoe, tell him that you are not afraid to have him touch me, so that he will come here.”
“By God’s Balls, Hoemei,” roared Aesoe, his mind completely distracted from its train of thought, “don’t just squat there on your knees playing her game! Crap and wipe yourself!” He nudged Hoemei impatiently with his foot, sending his councilman sprawling. “They send me leftovers from the creche tables! I need men! Men!” he raved.
“My nice man,” said the Liethe called Honey, suddenly at Hoemei’s side, “I won’t be with you before the first sunset of Reaper so you must give this to Joesai.” She slipped the golden amulet from around her neck and pressed its tiny eurythmic form into Hoemei’s hand. “I was pleased to serve your husband and brother. Give him this to wear. No man comes to harm wearing a Liethe charm.” She rose gracefully to face Aesoe while Hoemei quietly recovered his dignity. “You see,” she said innocently, “I protect your man upon his mission. I am with your Gathering. Liethe overcraft will guard him.”
“Nothing will save that imbecile!” snarled Aesoe, remembering what had moved him to anger.
Hoemei carried the amulet to Joesai with Aesoe’s wrathful instructions. Joesai remained stoic about Oelita’s disappearance in the face of all anger — as if she were merely a promising student of his who had gone bad. Teenae returned from her search and lambasted Joesai, out of worn frustration, blaming him. He took it all like the desert drinks a cloudburst. “She did not have kalothi,” he said, genuinely saddened, for he too had grown fond of Oelita.
Hoemei knew his brother’s mind. Joesai suspected that Oelita had slit her wrists somewhere, and worse, slit them in hiding, denying even friends the nourishment of a Funeral Feast. She had found the Awesome God and been shattered by the magnitude of the concept. Those would be the silent thoughts of Joesai. He would pity her without ever being able to say so. What was a woman if she could not let awe run through her veins without being destroyed by the power of it?
Oelita had failed at the Sixth Trial. Hoemei remembered their brother Sanan. The eve of every victory, it seemed, was married to pain. Sanan would have loved Oelita at another time and another place. He dreamed of Sanan as a Roman senator and Oelita as a barbarian druid princess from Gaul.
39
Your enemy wins once you begin to take his strategy as your own strategy, and his means as your means — for then you have become your enemy. Do not be deceived that you use mellow words to describe your imitation and harsh words to describe your enemy. An infinity of words may be used to speak of the same action.
NOE WATCHED JOESAI leave the city with eighty men — only ten of them experienced — her heart filled with foreboding. She had climbed by herself to the tallest raceway of the Northern Aqueduct so that she could keep her husband in sight as long as possible, a climb she had not attempted since a distant day as an adventurous child. Its arches and levels had seemed easy then to a mind unused to assessing danger but had seemed deadly to two-father who whipped her with a cane for the climb. Now, the daring in her still unquenched, Noe held herself by the brickwork and looked out over the first column of the Gathering, ignoring the icy splashes of water that ripped by her hand.
Joesai was taking his column by the eastern route around the Wailing Mountains to avoid Mnankrei spies, planning to cut through to the coast at a point far north along the Barrier Pass. Hoemei’s original scheme was a shambles. Aesoe had forced the departure of the Advance Court so prematurely that they carried only thirty rifles and were missing some supplies altogether. Maybe Aesoe had done that deliberately to derange Hoemei’s plans since his prediction of the outcome was already registered with the Archives.
Noe was furious at Joesai for the trouble he had caused them, but she also remembered that the family had sent him to Sorrow with Death Rite in mind and only little Teenae by his side to restrain his hand. It was, in the end, a mutual decision that had caused the trouble. Even Oelita had contributed. One’s life was not a dead chip on a roiling spring river. As a consequence, Joesai had been isolated, dressed for the spit fire, and banished from Kaiel-hontokae for the rest of his (short?) life. Was it for him alone to carry the ire of the Expansionists? Of the maran, he was the most vulnerable — and so her first duty was to him.
Noe waited impatiently the few days it took the og’Sieth to assemble twenty more tested rifles of the new quick reload design and then followed her husband with her own party at a forced pace, ruthlessly wearing out her Ivieth so that she might catch up with Joesai. Karval ngo-Ivieth, her lead porter, found fresh clansmen where he could and the pace never slackened. Sometimes when she was ready to drop, he carried her, without complaint, like a scarf about his neck.
“Karval,” she once asked him, “what is your opinion of this Gathering?”
“It is a matter between the priests.”
“How are we to rule wisely if we know not the feelings of the underclans? Come! If your resistance hides disagreement, I must hear! The Kaiel do not fear dissent, nor do we harm dissenters.”
Karval considered. “The Mnankrei interfere with our breeding rights,” was his only comment, but those words were weighted with disapproval.
Ah, so Hoemei may really have the scent! If Mnankrei fingers no longer touched the soul of the underclans of Soebo, then, given forbearance by Joesai, it might be possible, as Hoemei thought, for Joesai to inspire a revolt and to survive by taking its leadership. Aesoe anticipated no such resentment in Soebo. His plans were built around the death of a martyr. The Mnankrei were Noe’s enemy, but Aesoe was also her enemy.
Noe’s studies of The Forge of War had left her wondering that Getan clans had not invented the game of war themselves. The intrigue, the conflict, the hatred, the rivalry, the clash of ambition was there, the raw material of Riethian war. Perhaps her Ivieth’s answer was the clue. On Riethe the clans were organized vertically. They had fierce up and down loyalty but only the weakest lateral loyalty. One priest clan of Riethe could set their under-clansmen to killing fellow underclansmen of another priest realm, something inconceivable on Geta where horizontal loyalty was unbreakable and enforced by swift death.