“It is against the Kaiel Code to kill,” he sneered.

Joesai silenced Teenae with a piercing glance before she could reply a second time and returned his eyes to the youth. The Black Hand and the White Hand slightly askew, he answered in a voice that was more vengeful than priestly, “Of course. And we shall not kill. We are only here to receive your offering.”

“I have no offering for you.”

Joesai continued the ritual, unperturbed by such blasphemy, bringing forth from his robe certain sensual delights which were the Receiver’s obligation to the Giver. They were simple delights, for this was only a ship, not a temple. There was pure water, the touch of smooth glass, a shave, the taste of a berry. Each was refused.

Then came the time for the Cutting of the Wrists. But the youth defiantly held his fist away from the knife. Joesai placed the blood bowl. His men began the Chant of the Blood Flow, harmonizing like a giant heart in vigorous pulse, a heart whose beat began to slow and fade until it drifted away in silence. The youth laughed, proving he was still alive, but no man noticed because to them he was already dead.

Carefully, as if the Cutting of the Wrists had indeed been performed, as one would if he were planning to tan and shape and sew a fine leather coat from the hide of a corpse, Joesai began to skin the boy, unmindful of the surprised and then terrified screams that carried across the water and into the hills of Sorrow. The skinning was hardly begun before the boy’s pain and fear took his wrist against the knife that had been bound into the mat. He cried out for mercy, for the skinning to stop until he had had time to die, but Joesai did not stop.

The butchering went quickly. No part was wasted. The meat was salted or hung in strips to dry, glands were set aside for medicines, tendon and gut preserved, the bones went into a soup. A bowl of blood was presented to Teenae as her due.

Eiemeni, who had come to admire Oelita, expressed his regret as he washed the blood from his body in the sea with Joesai beside the wooden bulk of their ship. Joesai was unmoved as he sudsed his hair. “He chose to approach Teenae by my rules while he expected Oelita’s rules to protect him from reproach. Oelita lives by her rules and is protected by them. For her I have sympathy.”

They showed Teenae the hide as they stretched it for drying. She fingered the especially well-cut wheat stem cicatrice of the heresy. It would make a fine design on a leather binding for her copy of Oelita’s book.

Oelita!

A thought startled her, causing her pain because her whole body reacted. “Joesai! I forgot! In all the excitement I forgot to tell you that Oelita owns a Frozen Voice of God!”

22

I was impressed by the style in which you faced the Mnankrei Tonpa while being true to the code you have forged for yourself. You gamed with Death and won. How could I not count that as the Second Trial of seven? You have earned my respect. Someday, if you live long enough, perhaps I shall earn yours.

OELITA CRUMPLED THE NOTE that had been penned in high script on fine blue paper and delivered anonymously. She threw it across the room at the four advisors she had convened for a council. “Manyar!” she raged, “the Mnankrei and the Kaiel are crushing us like a nut between the arms of a nutcracker! We have to fight! It is too soon!”

“It is always too soon,” said Manyar, pulling his robes closer to his body.

“And you, Eisanti, is that all you have to contribute, bland homilies that serve no further purpose than to keep the high day conversation sparkling? The Mnankrei offer us food while the Kaiel improve the road through the mountains. The famine isn’t even here yet and the beetles are already laying their eggs to feast off our death. The famine will come and then it will go, but will we ever rid ourselves of the Mnankrei priests who will take our men and women daily to that slaughterhouse in the Temple? Will we ever rid ourselves of the Kaiel priests who salivate after our tender children? We must resist them!”

Eisanti played nervously with his bracelets. “We will have to compromise until we are in a stronger position. Manyar is right; we cannot take an unyielding stand as yet. The tree bends until it is thick enough to resist the wind.”

“Tomorrow the Stgal are calling for the first of the Ritual Suicides. We have food! We don’t know how much of the new crop the underjaws will devour! We don’t know how much food we can buy. We don’t know that it will be impossible to rely on our other sacred sources!”

Old Neri interrupted. “O’Tghalie Sameese has calculated that there will be less death if the Stgal begin now.”

Oelita flared. “Of what use are the numbers the o’Tghalie manipulate? If you have measured the breadth of your field wrong it does not matter that you have the length correct for you will not be able to calculate your acreage!”

“Perhaps she is right,” said Taimon from the back of the room. “Perhaps the Stgal find this the opportune time to eliminate their opposition. Who will be able to say that they move with wrong motives?”

“It is our weakness,” added Manyar, cleaning his nails, “that we attract the low in kalothi.”

“That is our strength,” retorted Oelita.

In the end, as she always did, she made her own decision. She waited until her council had dispersed inconclusively. Her fists were clenched. It was a shock to her to discover that because they all had high kalothi they weren’t motivated enough to oppose the priests. But how could she form a council of the low in kalothi? She’d have to do all the thinking and she’d be constantly handling mistakes like that fool attempt to meet the Kaiel threat by murdering Teenae. I suppose it was always thus, she thought bitterly, a society stays stable by preying on those least able to defend themselves.

Her final decision was impulsive. She walked out into the town of Sorrow with only two bodyguards, down where the old buildings began, and pulled together a fearful crowd of those who had the most to lose, melding them into a group large enough so that they might find courage in each other while she led this mob toward the Temple.

All the Village of Sorrow above the waterfront was temple grounds. The Path of Trial wandered tortuously about the Temple itself and up over the hill above the Temple, twisting between the garden settings, each of its obstacles crafted to challenge the swiftness and strength and flexibility of some part of the body. Here the Stgal tested the physical kalothi of those who came under their jurisdiction. The Temple itself, built like a crescendo in this serpentine garden, began as a modest star that grew until the points of the star became halls dedicated to the Eight Sacred Foods and, continuing inward, transformed themselves into massive stone buttresses that rose majestically to support the tower that held at its pinnacle the rooms of Ritual Suicide. Nothing in Sorrow was taller than that tower. Whether the village was obscured by hill or haze, the tower could still be seen. Ships used it as a beacon. Of all the glories of the Stgal, the Temple of Sorrow was their greatest.

Inside the tower the gaming rooms spiralled around a shaft of air, seemingly supported by the light that laced through the colored glasses of the tall, narrow windows. There a Getan might play kol and chess and games that could not be won without sharp eyesight or steady hand or creative mind or color sense or ability to leap the obvious. Unobtrusively the Stgal priests kept score so that one’s kalothi rating could be updated, while supporting the Temple by collecting coin for food and drink and the company of male or female courtesans.