“Now. You are my friends for you follow Oelita.”

“Son, hurry and fetch a maita leaf from my satchel to freshen our guest’s tea.” He turned to Teenae. “I prescribe only a mild narcotic since awareness of the pain brings faster healing. Fast healing gives an aura to the new tissue, a fineness of texture and color.”

“I have never used a narcotic, maita or otherwise. It is not logical to fear pain. It is only logical to fear the damage that generates pain. The symbol is not its referent. So the o’Tghalie teach.” She went to the mirror and disrobed. An infinity of golden Teenaes formed ranks in that geometric never world. “My lower back is smooth,” she said.

The boy re-emerged from the trapdoor with the large maita leaf, followed by an eruption of sisters and another brother. For these young ones it was an event to watch the master work his magic with brush and knife and flesh. Each child made his presence unobtrusive. None let their eyes stray from Teenae.

Zeilar swabbed and cleaned her back with alcohol and then began to sketch on the skin over her kidneys while she stood inside the mirrors and watched this new flattery take shape upon her crowded body. Sometimes he erased and began again. Sometimes her eyes wandered to the hides of these other humans who had all once stood naked like herself in a shop like this. The children stared.

Teenae’s logical mind was relishing the ironies all about her. She never really understood the way in which the non-o’Tghalie staggered blindly past, and over, the contradictions of their private worlds. They neither saw nor felt nor heard the storm. Zeilar worked in a room that was a showplace of cannibal feasting, creating the symbol of a philosophy that denied cannibalism upon the back of a woman who would one day be eaten. She smiled. Artists had a way of living with the cross-purposes that flowed through the soul of the Race.

Teenae wondered why she was here, why she was doing this. As yet the design was only ink. But it was not Oelita’s dietary laws that attracted her; it was the woman’s gentleness. Teenae had lived in a stern family that had not let her grow up to practice mathematics, and now she was part of a clan inexorably bent upon planetary conquest. Gentleness attracted her.

Slowly the essence of maita leaf saturated the tea. The boy brought it for her to drink, lifting the bowl to her lips. She sipped. For a moment the artist paused, then brushed on some finishing lines. He stood back for her approval and she saw a hundred golden Teenaes with their backs to her and their heads turned. All of them nodded.

The design had been modified to flow with the form of the prior cicatrices; the wheat stem was bent, as if caught by the wind while ripening on the round hills of her buttocks. Zeilar was satisfied; she was satisfied. He paraded her before his children who clapped, too, and began to josh each other for positions around the table, not so quiet as they had been. The master went for his tools and Teenae took her place on the table, stomach down, face resting in her arms, smiling at the littlest girl, winking.

“Is Oelita as warm as she sounds?”

He brought Teenae rods to hold in her fists and a strip of hardwood on a finger-high stand so that she might bite or leave it, as she wished. “Our Oelita has a golden kalothi. You and your husband are the ones who know gold. Life beats her in hammer strokes but she never breaks. A little bit of her is enough to gild everything with luster.” He selected a knife, and adjusted a minor to get a better light from the window. “Are you ready?”

“So many people seem to worship her.”

“Oh yes,” said the artist making his first swift cut.

Teenae gasped and clamped her teeth on the hardwood, breathing with deep breaths as the knife opened up more lines of blood. “Wait! God, wait!”

He indulged her but used the time to expose the design again by washing away the blood with a light solution of numbing maita tea. “I’ll be trimming next. The pain will be intermittent but sharp.”

“Has she been here long? Did you notice her as a child?”

“This will hurt.” Snip. “She came and went with her father.” Snip, snip. “Those times when he brought her to the village she would run far ahead of him.” Stab, snip, stab. “I remember the time when she crawled upstairs and sat down to supper with us.” Slice, snip, stab. “She chattered our ears off. How’s it going?”

“Just get it over with!”

He laughed. “We can’t hurry or I’ll slip. I’m going to cauterize some points and put a mashed beetle salve on other spots. That gives a different texturing effect. The salve will sting worse than the fire.”

Teenae’s body was trembling. “All right.” She breathed deeply to stay out of shock, smelling her own flesh burning from the hot needle.

“’S all right,” said the naked little sister crawling over to pat her on the head.

“Was Oelita a temple-goer?”

“Oh, she was at our temple all the time!” He began to cut again and Teenae’s body shuddered once. His male voice dominated her senses, flooding over the pain like maita. Concentrate on the voice. The voice droned in and out as if the speaker were not in one place. “She competed in everything. She raced.” An endless scream traced its path down to the hump of Teenae’s buttocks. “Oelita played chess. Her eyes were the quickest, her hand the fastest. She’d spend days with a puzzle. She’s the village kol-game master, though you’d never know it…”

Teenae took her teeth off the hardwood strip long enough to interrupt. “I love kolgame!”

“… because no matter whom she plays, she only wins half the time!” Zeilar’s hand sought a new knife and that brief moment of relief was spring and summer and autumn. “Nobody ever earned a higher kalothi rating in this village.” The new knife began the quick maneuverings again. “She does not need to be merciful,” he said proudly, “but she is.”

“Wait! I have to wait!”

“We are almost done. I think it will be beautiful.” Tenderly he mopped up the blood and applied more stinging beetle mash.

“When did she become a lonepriest?”

“Doesn’t wisdom come on us in hard times? Life was full for her. She had a great father, may he still nourish us, and all the friends a human could hope for. She could have married into a great clan. She could have had any clan, except perhaps your o’Tghalie.”

“Our men would have loved her!” Teenae laughed.

“Are you ready yet? Shall we continue?”

“Yes, but keep talking. The knife is bearable when you talk and I can concentrate on your voice.”

“She could have joined a Stgal family!” The knife began again with a torturing zigzag walk. “Even the Kaiel would have had her, I’m sure of it. The Kaiel! She was beautiful. No woman ever took more care in decorating her body! But it was not to be.” The knife paused while he shrugged.

“She took a lover. A great traveller. He came overland from the Aramap Sea. Imagine that. The Aramap Sea. Handsome. Powerful kalothi. She was young then. Very young, and wished to prove to the world her worth as a bride by bearing the most beautiful children in the village. She had twins, both of them genetic cripples, nothing wrong in their minds — they were both alert and intelligent children like their mother — but crippled in the legs. You know the disease, Ainokie’s curse. She’s a carrier and never would have known had she picked another lover.”

“She didn’t eat them at birth?” asked Teenae, so appalled that for a moment her pain vanished.

“No. She has a gentle soul. She raised and protected them but would not marry. They had kalothi. She always said that. They had kalothi. But the famine came.” The thought seemed to disturb him and he began to carve the kernels of the wheat in silence.

Teenae cried in gasps, “Go on with your story. Don’t stop!”

“It was a bad famine here; I don’t know how it was where you came from. The Culling began. First the criminals. The famine gnawed at our bellies. The low in kalothi went to the temple to give us life. Even the old went to the temple to give the young life — that’s how bad it was. One out of every ten became part of the living. We were decimated. The village shared Oelita’s children. That was when she stopped Chanting to the God of the Sky, our rock of superstition, and when she began to show us a better way.”