“There’s famine here.”

“I heard it was a good crop.”

“It was. Plagues of underjaws are eating the wheat.”

“But they die when they attack the Sacred Food!”

“These don’t.”

“Oh my God!” The idea was terrifying. It was a disorienting event, like God falling from His Sky. “A mutation?” She couldn’t imagine a mutation that drastic.

“No. I’ve had my men on it. We’ve been in constant contact via rayvoice. They haven’t got the equipment they need but one of my women is of the creches and she’s a brilliant microbiologist. You wouldn’t believe the shortcuts and sidestepping she can do. The underjaws are manufacturing some human enzymes. And other such strangenesses.”

“They are carrying human genes?”

“Exactly.”

“Now that is a Violation of the Rules,” she said, awed by someone’s audacity.

“Could it be done? That’s what I want to know.”

Noe retreated into a deep scan of her knowledge. “We made your mother.”

“Yes, but she’s human in her way. I didn’t think it was possible for sacred and profane cells to operate together.”

“I could think of ways. It would be difficult.”

“Then it is the Mnankrei who have unleashed this plague.”

“Not the Mnankrei I know.”

“Look. The rayvoice has given me an immense vista.” He swept his hand up the map. “The port watchers are sending us data on every Mnankrei ship movement. Relief ships loaded with grain left the islands for Stgal Plain harbors before the plague even started. And now they are departing for the northern ports. A grain ship set sail for Sorrow even today. It is like carrying honey to a beehive. The harvest is due.”

She picked up the skull of her great-grandfather, carved in swastikas and leaves. “What would you say, Pietri?” He said nothing. “Pietri died in defiance of the Mnankrei, so goes the family story. It was a famine. The Mnankrei offered food in exchange for control. My great-grandfather offered his body at the Temple to keep the Mnankrei away.” She smiled ruefully. “I think he was skinny.

The Mnankrei came anyway. They come during famine. Food for control. Always, always, always. My grandfather wedded himself to the sea as a free merchant to take their hand from his wrist. That’s where the seamen on my mother’s side of the family come from.”

“Food for control,” said Hoemei darkly, “and now famine to create the need for food.”

“I can’t believe that of them. How could they face God?”

“We have to believe it of them. They are moving in to take over the land we have been granted by the Council. Our children’s heritage. We’ll be disgraced.”

“Joesai is there.”

“It’s bad. Joesai will make it worse. It was a mistake to send him. We’re going to need this Oelita woman. Her position will be weak when the famine comes. It is easy to tolerate a Godless heresy when the crops are good but the day the famine hits, they’ll spit-roast the lot of them. Teenae can temper Joesai, maybe.”

“If you think Joesai shouldn’t be there taking care of our interests, go yourself!” Noe flared.

“With Kaiel-killing ogres lurking behind the bushes? No thank you. I intend to be a feast for my great-grandchildren. I respect people able to kill Kaiel with impunity. I show my respect by staying away.”

“You’re a coward!”

He laughed the great laugh. “Sometimes.” Then his shoulders sank in dejection. “Have you seen Kathein?”

“She won’t speak to me.” Noe’s voice was pain.

“I saw her today and it was as if I had absently walked into a wall.”

“Come eat with me. We’ve forgotten all about the meal I was making!” Her eyes flirted with him while she retreated from the study.

Noe was like a magician, he thought, changing a knife into a flower right before your eyes. And she always got him. Out of nowhere came this desire to bed her and forget the decisions he had to make. He watched her cook for a while, wondering what delicacy he would prepare for her when it was his turn. He couldn’t resist the lushness of her hips. He felt compelled to go over and hug her.

“Away from me, you insect!” she teased. “This is a very serious evening. I’m thinking how the Mnankrei would justify the creation of famines.” She turned her head and brushed his cheek sensuously before walking away with the soup. “You know what they say: ‘A Mnankrei always has meat on his table.’” That was a reference to the sea clan’s practice of continuous Culling. The more common Getan belief was that meat was a famine food.

Hoemei grinned. “The version I heard was, ‘A Kaiel always has meat on his table.’” The creches kept Kaiel-hontokae supplied with meat, a custom found nowhere else on Geta.

“That’s not the same,” she said petulantly. “Babies are only bodies.”

“You have a delicious body.”

“I don’t think you want my advice. Your blood has all gone to gorge your loins. I won’t say another word!”

“Yes, I want your advice,” he said, kissing her on the cheekbone.

“Well,” she went on, totally ignoring the kiss, “if I sent a man of low kalothi to the temple for Ritual Suicide when the silos were full, you’d call that murder — but the Mnankrei would only call it Culling. So why shouldn’t they create a famine? It would only be another form of Culling to them.”

“A clan that thinks such thoughts is damned to a Gathering.”

“Drink your soup.”

“Make love to me.”

“Aw, it’s your favorite soup.”

“Now.”

“Finish your soup first.”

He took her on the patio under the stars with a driving desire that noticed she was somewhere else but that couldn’t stop to find out where. Her fingers absently caressed him, affectionately enough…

In the afterglow he stared at the face beneath her twining braids that he was never able to understand. Her head lay tilted, eyes fixed on some star but she wasn’t there, musician fingers finding a groove in one of his decorative scars and plucking it as if tuning an instrument, but she wasn’t there, either.

Finally she turned to him with a languorous smile. “I see how to kill your underjaws.” She moved a fingernail from the hontokae on her breast to his belly where she stabbed — and laughed.

10

OELITA WAS BLEEDING to death tied into the iron-reed basket by thongs through the center of her wrists, bobbing in a small cove, half drowning every time a large wave broke over her head. When she wasn’t struggling to breathe, the agony in her wrists throbbed with a heartbeat still in panic.

It wasn’t an actively threatening trap. If she kept her legs stretched out, she could stay afloat with her head above water indefinitely — except that blood loss would gradually weaken her. She had to act now. Yet there was nothing she could do! She could move her legs but, if she worked them forward, her head dipped back into the water and she began to drown. Worse, she could sense that if she pulled her feet up too far the trap would flip over and she would be held face underwater with no chance of righting the structure.

She tried to think, but the only thoughts that came were the useless “what if” thoughts of a mind that has given up the present as hopeless. What if she had moved faster when she first spotted the men? She had attacked two of them before the other two had a chance to close in. She had been fast enough to knock one down and swing a rock lethally toward the other’s skull, but he had been miraculously evasive, and there had been no time for a second swing.