That evening she visited the old o’Maie weaver so that she might have someone to help her puzzle over the life of Lenin and draw morals from it. She brought whisky for him and a new coat.
“You worry that because you’ve learned to sling a lead pebble through a man’s eye, you’ve become like Lenin,” he said when the dawn stars were rising. “Lenin was a coward who hired men to murder for him.”
“There is violence in me. I talk of minimal force — but I’m not gentle.”
“ ‘Minimal force’ is not ‘no force’. Pacifism is for an idealist like Oelita. The concept of minimal force would appeal to a pragmatist like you, where maximal force would appeal to a megalomaniac like Lenin.”
“I’ll have to kill them,” Teenae said. Three ships. I see no other way.“ She began to cry.
His heart went out to this woman who had befriended him. “Killing a man puts a heavy burden on one’s back.”
She laughed through her tears. “That’s not why I cry. I’m afraid they’ll kill me first.”
45
The covert man who plots your doom in secret cellars of the night while by the light of day does lavish all sweet service upon your self, mistrusts reflected love.
SURELY SOEBO WAS the most magnificent city on all of Geta! Casual sightseeing soon bewildered Humility. There were canals, cut at angles through what had once been river delta, distorting her sense of direction. By unfortunate choice she picked as landmarks two look-alike temples whose alternating appearance turned her around. Finally she worked her way down stone stairs, and hired a guide with a waiting flat-bottomed boat.
“Can we reach the Temple of the Wind from here?”
“It is at the junction of all the canals,” replied the tall female Ivieth while she poled her blue boat out toward the center of the waterway. “The Plaza of the Wind is the node for all Soebian gossip.”
Humility paid her fee and took her padded seat and would have cooled her hands in the diluted brine except for the drifting garbage. “I’m starved for gossip. I’ve been at sea.”
“All talk is of the Gathering. We hear only that the pretenders have camped well beyond the robe-hem of the city and seem loath to come closer where there might be danger to their skins.”
“I think the Kaiel will be soundly chastised,” Humility said, casting for nibbles.
“I don’t think they’ll come close enough to get scratched,” the woman replied scornfully.
“I once listened to Ivieth songs about the bravery of the Kaiel,” teased the passenger.
“We have songs about the bravery of everyone. We sing them when flattery is appropriate. We even have songs to warn our children about idle conversation within ear’s range of the Liethe who wear the ears of our Masters for necklaces.”
Sunset found Humility in the Plaza of the Temple of the Wind soaking up the gossiping and the chess and the excited antics of a group of iron-ball players. She ate fruit at a table above the crowds, careful to leave untouched the poisonous yellow peel. She chatted, provoked, probed. The sea clan was thought to be invincible, yet there was an undercurrent of hatred; even the Ivieth female had been wary of her, thinking her to be a tool of the Mnankrei.
Against the Plaza and the seething power of this city, Hoemei seemed like such a village priest. Because Humility was bewildered by her feelings of love — alternately rejecting them and rediscovering them — she wanted Hoemei to be wrong so that she could laugh at him and right so that she could love him all the more fiercely. He was probably wrong. Soebo was too solid.
She spotted a Liethe holding the arm of a white-haired Storm Master as he led her across the Plaza. Now there was a powerful man! The slight girl hurried to keep up, and once touched her head to his arm affectionately. Would she want him to be right? Would she connive ruthlessly to make her man right? or would she drift with whomever was strongest?
Humility’s baggage arrived at the Liethe hive long before she did. The hive in Soebo was an old building that had been in Liethe hands since before the first of the se-Tufi line had ever died. Even then it had been old, a stately derelict of the bawdy entertainment district. Now the whores and the theaters and the gaming houses were gone, washed away by shiftings of money that had not left even the hive untouched. Prospering Liethe had built onto their ancient mansion a wing of high towers around a walled garden where once had passed a street alive with drunken sailors. Perhaps the ghosts of Vlak seamen still bought orphaned women at auction in the brick theater-of-the-round that was itself a ghost, having been replaced by a public fountain.
Humility was given a tiny tower room and a mat. Three crones questioned her at length. One, a high mother of the nas-Veda line which had been discontinued because of immunological irregularities that appeared in old age, took her down to a sealed, sterile room of the hive’s genetic workshop where she met the se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh, a youth older than herself but who did not look older. They bowed slightly, giving their recognition gestures.
“You will be sharing Flesh’s two men. She carries the persona of the schemer Comfort, who is consort to High Wave Ogar tu’Ama, and the servile persona of Radiance for Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal’s use. She will be drilling you through the Nine Tier Matrix of Understanding immediately so that you will be ready as her back-up in either role by sunrise of the Knave’s Oneday. Please strip and don these sterile clothes. The mask, too.”
The nas-Veda guided her charges through sealed doors to a hall adjoining a small resin-coated room which she did not let them enter. There were windows. Inside, a young o’Tghalie woman sat, seemingly without control of her eyes or neck or hands.
“Is she mindless, too?” asked Humility sharply.
“Quite. Mnankrei records show she has died and been cremated. We collected her covertly out of curiosity. We have been wondering what the Mnankrei have been doing with these women. They do not use men for this kind of experiment.” The nas-Veda crone turned her face toward Flesh. “Now perhaps you can understand why we have assigned you to Winterstorm Master Nie’t’Fosal?”
Humility’s memory tripped a file. “He is the designer of the deviant underjaw!”
The se-Tufi Who Pats Flesh was pondering the movements of the idiot o’Tghalie girl. They fit nowhere in the intricate map of political intrigue she had been trained to perceive. “Will she recover?”
“No.”
“That’s horrible. Fosal creates such monsters?” This would be the reason that High Wave Ogar tu’Ama had opposed Fosal at such great cost to himself.
“Fosal is gifted. The horror is not that such men exist, it is that others have allowed such men to rise to power.”
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.”