The very thought that an Obelisk could fall was shaking. Added to the starry sky of nine months past, it meant nothing was going to be as it had been. But how many more disasters would hit them?
Kiril had known things were awry for two and a half years, ever since Elena had been changed. It was a matter of escalation, not beginnings.
The Trident needed repairs which would take at least two months. In that time those who weren't directly involved with the work were given leave to help on the island. Shoreline communities had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and in some cases repopulated.
In the wake of the disaster the island no longer mourned. Rather a mood of frenetic work prevailed. By some fluke there were more men on the island than women now, by about two to one. This didn't conflict with the past at all, as polyandry had been an accepted practice. But it created a host of problems for the men.
Kiril spent his last days of recovery touring the island, walking or riding on the half-repaired roads, and visiting the sites where the Trident's crew was helping rebuild.
He stayed for two days in Mappu as a consultant in reshelving the religious library. The second day he sat in the tumble of stone shelves and scrolls with a group of priest-initiates and explained the practice of setting up a card catalog, stumbling between Teutan and rudimentary Golumbine.
A black-haired, umber-skinned woman entered the library and snapped her fingers commandingly. They all looked up, Kiril frowning. She wore a sari-like dress that covered her from ankle to shoulder. Her expression was mild and gentle, and when she spoke she used the proper words of apology, but she obviously expected their complete attention.
A formal choosing of husbands would begin at dusk in Mappu's ritual plaza. All unchosen males were required to be there. She added, with a neutral glance at Kiril, that foreigners were also invited. "The obligations, in any case, will be temporary," she explained to him in Teutan. Then she smiled, turned delicately, and walked out.
It was the last thing Kiril wanted to be involved in. The initiates buzzed with interest and speculation. It took him some minutes to bring the discussion back to the catalog.
Bar-Woten and Barthel walked across the half-finished bund and hired a taxi to take them to the ritual plaza. They were passing through a side street in Mappu, their driver hissing his animal on and flapping the reins, when they saw Kiril. They ordered the taxi to stop and invited him to join them. He was too tired to think much about where they were going. He assumed they were on their way to supper. He climbed into the carriage, and the taxi picked up speed.
The ritual plaza was a broad, open square paved in ochre stone bricks, with a deep communal cistern at its center and a rise of stone seats at one end. Thousands of years ago the plaza had been the scene of sacrifices, whether animal or human the Golumbines were reluctant to say. Now it served as a civic center when the island council met.
The seats were filled with bustling and chattering women, dressed in ceremonious red and green wrappings, their hair flowing over their shoulders and their eyes bright with interest. The plaza was empty, but crowds of men clustered at both sides looking anxious and nervous. The taxi let the three out at the edge of the plaza. Kiril realized they weren't going to dinner.
"What are we doing here?" he asked quietly. Bar-Woten grinned and said nothing. Too tired to put up any fuss, he stood with them, willing to watch the proceedings but not to participate. His ribs still ached a little.
The late afternoon was still warm and sultry. Birds squawked in the jungle beyond the plaza's boundary. A tall priest dressed in green walked to the top of the wall around the well and called for order in a loud, clear voice. When he had everybody's attention he told the crowd on all three sides that the choosing could begin.
Kiril wearily tried to find a hint of moral fault with what was going on, but couldn't. He'd seen too much grief and misery in the streets of Mappu in the last few weeks to grudge this organic respite. There was anxiety in the crowd, but also joy and anticipation. He couldn't visualize what the result would be—a series of ritual marriages? Or arranged orgies to stimulate a new, fresh tide of children? It all seemed very remote. He watched with objective interest.
The men at the opposite side of the plaza stepped forward and arranged themselves in front of the stone seats, each standing two steps from his neighbor to be seen clearly. The first row of women went among the men and looked over them sharply, haggling with each other. For a spectator it wasn't entrancing. All together about six thousand people filled the plaza, with twice as many men as there were women.
The haggling continued until dusk. Torches set in stands along the plaza lighted the proceedings. The women made their choices from the first group. About three hundred men went away unchosen.
Golumbine priests then urged the second group to take its position. Kiril was caught up in the crowd, something he hadn't bargained for, and was pushed forward despite his protests. "I'm not supposed to be here," he said, but the men surrounding him thought he was only trying to find a better frontline position. Bar-Woten was lost in the press, and he couldn't see them.
He shrugged his coat back onto his shoulders. It was useless. No one would choose him anyway. The men fell quiet as the women started to pass among them. Most of the women smiled at Kiril, but paid little attention—he was from the Trident, not a native. It wasn't wise to get involved with a sailor.
He felt depressed after an hour under the dark sky. Few fire doves were visible. Brighter ones would blink into view in a few minutes, and others would rise, but for the moment it was dark with only torchlight to guide the women.
One girl a few years younger than Kiril stopped and tried to talk to him. It was no good. He knew very little dialect, and she knew nothing in Teutan beyond amenities. She looked him over frostily and moved on.
Irritated and nervous he shifted on his feet and wondered when it would be over. His legs were aching and his chest itched beneath his bandages.
Another woman stepped up to examine him. He held out his arm when asked, then blinked and looked at her more closely. She was the woman who'd made the announcement in the library and spoke excellent Teutan. She asked how he was feeling.
"Fine," he said, his mouth dry. She inspected him like a doctor, but with less coarseness than the other women. Finally she took his hand and put it on her waist, the signal she had chosen him.
"But I'm not in the—the competition," he said.
"Come with me."
He passed Bar-Woten, who raised an eyebrow, then grinned broadly and grunted deep in his throat.
"Damn you!" Kiril whispered. "Get me out of this!"
"I am Ual," the woman said. "I like you because I think you're probably pretty smart. You smart?"
"Dumb as an ox," Kiril said.
"I don't think so!" she said, her voice rising to a pretty peak.
"I'll have to go back on the ship, so this is all useless."
She shook her head, no, and he suddenly found himself willing. Something simply snapped and he caught the spirit, and his body grew warm and he liked the touch of her hand.
"You'll be excused for a while," she said. "You work here now anyway."
They left the plaza and followed a twisting, dark road through Mappu. Hundreds of fire doves were out like glowing insects now. He wanted to take her then and there, with an insane pressure he could hardly control. But she kept his hand loosely in hers and led him through a gate into a courtyard.
"I don't feel too well," something made him say. She smiled back, and he knew he was lying.
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Fourteen
The inside of the courtyard was paved with tile and had a fountain in the middle, a bronze dish supported by stone lions so old they were almost shapeless. Lamplight came through the upper windows of the house at the end of the yard. A jagged crack ran from the rounded top of the door frame to a window above. It all looked as old as the fountain. Next to it, Ual was as fresh and young as a flowe
r.
They went through the door and stood in a hallway across the front of the house, doors at either end. He asked why the hall had no door in the middle, and she said that was to keep the gingerii out—demons. Demons could only travel in a straight line. She quickly demonstrated that there was no way a demon could get from the door to the end of the hall in a straight line in either direction. Kiril nodded. She led him to the right and opened the door with an iron key tied around her waist.
She left him standing alone in a small, bare room with a window at eye level in the outer wall. He sat on a smooth wooden bench, crossing his legs. Elena came to mind, and he frowned. Something feral was working in him. He turned his guilt into a kind of anger at Elena; she had no right to expect him to be inhumanly chaste.
"This is the household of my brother, Hualao," she told him when she returned. "He died in the waves." Kiril apologized, and she looked at him curiously.
"You had nothing to do with it."
"But I'm sorry he's dead."
"If he wasn't dead, you wouldn't be here. Your ship would have sailed away, and I'd have never even thought about choosing you."
Kiril nodded, though he didn't understand. He followed her into a high-ceilinged room filled with a stone hearth, a heavy plush rug, and comfortably padded rattan furniture.
"I'm a virgin," she said. He nodded agreeably until he realized what she'd said. He felt stupid and clumsy. This was a sensuous ocean island—weren't all girls soon experienced here? His nervousness trebled.
"But you won't be able—" he began to say.
"Hm?"
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You're sorry all the time."
"I'll be sleeping out here," he said. In Mediweva husbands always spent the first few nights sleeping separately from their wives. It supposedly built up friendship and confidence and confirmed the relationship in the eyes of God.
"You'll be cold. You don't want to sleep out here."
"Why did you choose me? I can't stay in Golumbine. I'd make a very poor husband."
"You don't like me?" she asked. "I'm very likable. Lots of men want me."
"I like you—I want you very much."
"You don't sound sure."
"How old are you, Ual?"
"Marriage age."
"I mean, how many years?"
"That is one word I've never been able to understand."
They took seats next to each other on a divan with cotton cushions. Kiril told her what a year was, and she laughed. Without Obelisk texts to influence a person, Hegira was virtually timeless, divided only into night and day. Seasons weren't important when the prevailing winds were warm and the currents brought a tropical surge day in, day out.
"I am many, many days old," she said. "I must be many years old, maybe fifty."
"No," he said. "You can't be fifty. I'd say you're about twenty. Maybe twenty-two."
"That must be your age."
"About," he said. "I'm twenty-one, very young."
"Marriage age."
"But I can't stay."
"That's okay. I will have many other husbands, perhaps before you leave."
He held his hands together between his knees and swallowed. He'd almost forgotten. Something ached inside him, and it wasn't his healing rib cage.
"I'm not used to that, Ual," he said. "Where I come from, a man can only have one wife."
"Same here, sometimes," she said.
"But a woman can only have one husband."
"Oh." She looked at his hands and put her hand on them. "Listen. I am an important woman here. Lots of men want to marry me. But I am important enough I won't need to have more husbands until after you go. Ship will stay here another … " she paused. "Thirty or forty days. Part of a year. I can wait. I like you enough to wait."
He didn't know what to do. But someone inside of him did. He held her hand up to his and kissed it. It reminded him of kissing Elena's hand, but not in an unpleasant way. It was as if all women were wonderfully the same, with the same ability to soothe and attract … and to hurt terribly if he didn't handle things right. If he did something wrong. He felt very mixed up, but wonderful. "I'm honored," he whispered.
"That's the way," she said. "Now I know why I picked you. You're a virgin too!"
Kiril opened and closed his mouth like a fish. He resented her implication all the more because it was true. He looked at her steadfastly. "Why would you want to choose a virgin? Both of us will be stumbling in the dark."
"There will be no advantages … Both will learn."
She had moved no closer to him, but the heat of her body and her subtle perfume were already bothering him. There were many texts on the Obelisks that gave intimate details of the love habits of the First-born. There was no reason to think things were any different on the far island of Golumbine. But did they kiss with their lips?
It was necessary for him to find out.
They did, and apparently by long tradition.
He was still nervous as she stroked the back of his neck and nibbled at his nose. But he noted with some pride that it wasn't a debilitating anxiety. He knew little about disrobing a young woman, but Golumbine's fashions weren't nearly as difficult to remove as Mediweva's had been. He ruefully remembered having tried several times with Elena. If the stays and girdles had been less restraining she might have given in. But he had been ham-handed and both had retreated in discouragement.
Ual did not retreat. She helped. He grew accustomed to her willingness, but it took some time to get used to her unnerving familiarity with his own clothing and his own person.
He thought of Elena, not with guilt, but with a sharp, grieving pain. By rights this should have been her night, her privilege—their privilege—and not the smiling, willing joy of an umber-skinned woman in a land Elena had never heard of. Knowing this, and feeling the stab, he understood with more than his mind that he had no choice.
All of Golumbine was demanding a rebirth. Who was he to resist? He went with her to a room illuminated by small oil lamps, where there was a thick, soft mattress woven of rattan and cotton yarn covered with a sheet of fine linen. The sheet was printed with blocks and circles of purple and brown. As she removed her final garment, a small pair of pants with a skirt around them, and turned to face him, he felt his entire chest alternately weakening and growing strong with the push-pull of his heart and lungs. It was a flutter he'd never felt before, a thick-running excitement that was a mixture of terror and pride.
He was afraid of hurting her. She pulled him down, her eyes so dark in the dim lamplight that he couldn't see their whites, just narrow gaps of brown, almost black.
Later, her hips and thighs crimsoned, she took his hand and moved him off the bed. She gathered up the cloth and cut it into small strips with a sharp knife. Then in the sitting room she soaked it in oil and put it in the fire. She squatted before it, an awesome, youthful idol, flames mirrored in her eyes.
She cleaned both of them off with a soft wet rag and spread another sheet like the first. Kiril found it hard to go to sleep quickly. He stayed awake an hour or more longer than Ual, staring into the dark.
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Fifteen
Birds rose from the lake, pink and white and midnight blue, as Bar-Woten plunged his paddle into the water and scooted the reed boat along. Jungle circled the lake and even extended onto it on long legs of twisted roots. Birds and aquatic lizards flocked across the roots in squawking conflict. The sky was a hot, pale blue. The north was no longer dark. Through a smoked glass a bright band of light could be seen extending from the western Obelisk and widening to form an ovoid where the northern Obelisk had been.
A head with glittering, opalescent eyes rose in the water where he was about to dip his paddle, making him jerk his arm back. The head vanished, and water sprayed with the swish of a tail. This was no lake for unaided swimmers. Insects as long as a finger scurried over it and dipped below to pierce small fish and tadpoles with wicked mandible
s. They could just as easily bite through an unwary hand. White snakes—a delicate side dish for the Golumbines—gathered in floating lacework colonies to swim and bask.
The lake was a soup of life. It was tepid and brackish at one end, clogged with leech-infested reeds and matted algae. It did not smell too offensive because the wind was fresh and strong. The wind dried off the sweat of his paddling and made the jungle hum and whistle. Drifts of spider web floated from the trees.
He brought the boat up onto a dirt embankment and pulled it out of the water. Then he sat on a mossy rock to think. His foot found a hold in the spotted gray stone, and he bent to examine the niche. It was more than a rock—it was a head. Worn gray eyes peered at him, eyebrows cracked and covered with lichen. The stone nose was half-buried in thick damp soil. Ageless idols were not rare here, but the head still fascinated him. He had often dreamed of exploring long-deserted cities. Perhaps temples existed in the jungle that could begin to slake that thirst. But the deep jungle wasn't recommended for inexpert visitors.
He had borrowed the boat and crossed the lake to find a place to sit and think alone and in relative silence. But now that he was alone, he couldn't concentrate. His mind kept drifting off into the past, but that way led to blood and cruelty and mind-blanked hatred. It also reminded him of a great love for Sulay.
He still felt sad for Sulay. The memories welled up, and he couldn't put them aside: The day he had fought with the bear and lost his eye, and that evening as the surgeons had bandaged him … Sulay had stood over him in the dark and firelight with the dark forest all around, chuckling and reassuring. "You're Bear-killer now … Woten would be proud, and so would the Thunder-Bearer, Eloshim."
Years later, as an aide to the general, he had been given the pick of the captured Khemites to choose a servant from. Tired from the fighting and feeling dirty with blood and self-anger, Bar-Woten had recognized a face among the children. Barthel—"Servant of Bar," originally named Amma bin Akka—had been small, dark, and scrappy with more spirit and fear and hate than Bar-Woten had ever thought he could control. But the young Khemite had taken to Bar-Woten as if to a second father, imitating him and absorbing all he had to teach, although retaining his Momadan faith. For years Bar-Woten had trusted the Khemite not to plunge a knife into his back. There was good reason for him to try, Bar-Woten knew—but the Khemite didn't know.