There among the flowers he made her an honorary Kaiel. He bestowed an arbitrary voting weight of 200 on her and told her that she would be allowed to vote on any issues involving the coast. He was not going to require her to identify the members of her constituency until she felt sure that the Kaiel had not betrayed her trust.
Then he walked her back to the maran mansion, a long but interesting way over hills of stately homes. He flirted with her, patting her behind and telling her how voluptuous it was.
“You’ll have to try kaiel smells,” she said, taking his arm, “flattery doesn’t seduce me.”
The Prime Predictor left her at the door, saying he had urgent business elsewhere, perhaps because he remembered that Joesai was home. When she entered the inner court of the maran household, feeling stronger than she ever had before in her life, she met Joesai standing alone in the high ritual garb of priest. Even that did not daunt her.
“Aesoe just made me an honorary Kaiel. I have a voting weight of 200,” she announced proudly.
“Ho! The madman is at it again, flaunting tradition. You think yourself worthy of such honor?”
“Yes!” she flung at his insult and felt gay. “Will you be voting on the coastal treaty?”
“I’m voting yes. But with some reservations.”
Teenae had appeared on the balcony overlooking the inner court. “You leave Oelita alone, you big bully!”
“What are you filing with the Archives?” Oelita persisted, watching Joesai for every flicker of his expression.
“I think the program will be difficult to implement. It needs you, and I’m predicting that you won’t be there.”
Teenae sensed Oelita’s shock and vaulted off the balcony to attack Joesai with her fists. He simply reached out and snatched his wife by the wrist and jerked her up into the air, while his other hand lazily reached around and took her by the roundness of her buttocks, tossing her casually, clothes and all, into the central pool. She made a huge splash, accompanied by Joesai’s laugh resonating from his massive bones.
Suddenly, Oelita was very afraid again.
37
And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the javelin, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. So Joshua burned Ai, and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day. And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took the body down from the tree, and cast it at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised over it a great heap of stones, which stands there to this day.
THE RUMORS ABOUT Oelita’s crystal ran through Kaiel-hontokae like quickfire through desert thorns.
It was an eye into God’s Heart! It was an eye into Hell! The God of the Sky had broken His Silence! More sober talk simply puzzled upon a game called War.
Oelita had heard Teenae whispering to Hoemei about violence that consumed cities in flashes of light and thunder. She had heard voices in the streets talking excitedly of killer clans who faced each other by the thousands, in orderly rows, hacking at arms and legs and heads and bodies with heavy long knives while they hid behind shields.
No matter how she blocked off the rumors, they seeped through to Oelita like water through cracks in a retaining wall. She shrugged. For all their sophistication the Kaiel remained a superstitious clan.
Defiantly she took up Joesai’s challenge on the eve of the great party. She was tired of his teasing her as if she were still a child believing in grumpmugs who lived in fei flowers and bit off thumbs. Thus she arrived at Kathein’s physics shop in party finery. Teenae, insisting on being her bodyguard, was dressed in trousers stitched together out of radiant saloptera bellies and wide belt of her grandfather’s hide, a linear crown of jewels paving the shaved streak through her black hair. Behind her, Joesai loomed in ebony and silver and leather.
They entered. Joesai led them to a vaulted chamber of bulky magician’s mysteries, tended by three sweating sorcerers. Oelita peered at shelves of tiny red insect eyes caught in glass cages. A fan whirled like the wings of a beetle migration. Kathein, moving as if she dared not generate shock with her feet, took Oelita to the Frozen Voice of God held by metal fingers that sprouted tentacles of wire. There were lights and glass lenses and the crystal was mounted in front of the great bellows of the silvergraph image maker.
Kathein hushed them while she fiddled with quick fingers. She waited and told them not to move, then pulled out a glass plate bound in black paper. “Parts of your crystal contain visions as well as words,” she said to Oelita. “Koienta!” she called to a servant, “develop this silvergraph. I’ll soon have to be leaving. I must dress for the party.”
Koienta bowed to Oelita. “Our thanks for preserving the crystal,” he said as he passed her, squeezing by the shelves of bottled red eyes, his attention devoted to the black-wrapped glass. His was the ritual of one who has to believe every scrap of dogma he has been taught. It made her uncomfortable.
While Kathein gestured and touched, preparing a new glass plate, she politely explained her obsecrations-to-God. Oelita listened without trying to understand something that could have no logic. Joesai grinned, thinking she was being impressed. It was the ignorant men who were always so sure they were right!
Much later, when Koienta brought the printed silvergraph to Kathein, the physicist stared for long heartbeats, flickers of horror crossing her face from the reflected light of the paper. Silently she handed the silvergraph to Oelita, while Teenae craned her neck to see and Joesai watched faces.
“What is it?” asked Teenae.
“God has been speaking to us this day!” exclaimed Kathein.
Oelita saw a still image of two rotting men hung up on thorned wire over mud. It was labeled at the bottom with readable numbers and almost readable words.
Two of 150,000 who died at Vimy Ridge, 1916.
Where could such a picture have come from? Oelita scanned her mind, her memories, her logic — and found nothing. It was like putting her foot on a familiar step in the darkness, ready for the pressure of the stone, and finding nothing. The fall was dizzying.
“There are a quarter of a billion words in your crystal and thousands of pictures. All like this,” said Kathein, leading them away. They waited while she dressed. Oelita did not speak. Joesai, smug, did not need to know what she thought. Teenae remained terrified by that one single peek through the Eyes of God. The silence broke only when the rustle of Kathein’s gown descended the stairs. She appeared in brilliant silken blues, bare breasted, the platinum filigree of mask inlaid upon the noble cicatrice carved into her face.
Together they went to the Palace. The ballroom was filled by excited Kaiel scarfaces who loved parties with themes. The Forge of War, what little was known of it, provided an awesome theme.
Musicians were dressed in garb copied from the silvergraphs, resplendent in painted papier-mâché helmets, gaudy uniforms and breastplates of brass. Baron von Richthofen played oboe in red uniform, black cross full upon his chest, red goggles obscuring half his serrated face. Achilles, in great plumes of desert fire, tuned the strings of his ellipsoidal gourd. Hitler and Stalin, in black and yellow pinstriped pantaloons, thumped the organ drums.
Through the main entrance, blazing green and red Vatican Guards protected the arrival of the whisky kegs with proud halberds. Then across the ballroom strode the armored and scowling samurai, Takeda Shingen, alias Aesoe, a dagger in his belt so comically long that its tip almost dragged upon the floor, carrying a yellow and pale blue banner atop a pole that read in vertical script: “fast as wind; quiet as forest; fierce as fire; firm as mountain.”