Donald Kingsbury - Courtship Rite

With the tumblers gone, men with casks moved among the crowd pouring a free sweet punch touched by the flavor of whisky while the Chanters began a light melody that pranced through the party almost unheard above the laughter. The sun was setting.

A Liethe woman slipped out of the Temple unnoticed, shifting in happy steps, dressed in a luminous sun orange and white with a bridal crown. Hers was the hesitant motion of a blithe woman unused to such happiness. She ran and stopped. She skipped. She leaped — and had the full attention of the audience who wondered where she had come from.

Her suppleness was the merry frolic of a girl recalling moments with the husbands she loved, a blush, a touch, a tryst. She bounced in a way that made her audience gasp, as if she were free of gravity. Gradually, she moved out among the people, dancing for an awed child, or she would take an old man for a partner and prance with him until he was young again, or climb mischievously to the shoulders of an Ivieth. All the while, as the twilight deepened, she spread her magical cheer over the wedding guests. Then, at the very moment God appeared in the purple sky at the horizon, she vanished.

This was the first ascension of God in the week of the Reaper in the year of the Spider. Weddings were always timed to begin with God on high so that He might witness the ceremony. The crowd began to hush as God rose into His Darkening Sky. The Chanters became silent. A few stars peeked through the cobalt-blue vault of the heavens. A woman pointed out Stgi and Toe to her young son. The insects clicked and rustled even here in the middle of the town. A baby cried and was hushed. An old woman coughed. God moved, His Tiny Beacon brighter than any star. All eyes were on the Streak. Suddenly, at the very moment of high-node, the Wedding Chant resonated from fifty masks.

Fifty right hands which had been raised beside the masks came down and drew the sign of loyalty between the Chanters and God.

The seven Kaiel who were making Union were now in the center of the plaza and dropped their eyes from God to themselves. They were silent, motionless.

Each of the maran, and the maran to be, raised their right hands, fashioning the gesture of loyalty that bound them to each other. Teenae’s eyes flicked to Oelita and Oelita looked from Kathein to every maran in turn. Noe thought about loyalty and thought she was beginning to understand it. Joesai was thirsty and his coat was uncomfortable. Gaet admired the beauty of his women. Hoemei was at one with God, at peace with himself, and in love with his family. Kathein wondered if she would make a good wife this time. The masks resonated again.

The crowd, as one, raised their right hands and made the sign of loyalty in the air before their scarred faces. The chanting took on a new timbre, a moaning ecstasy.

The moral message on the virtues of a large marriage done, the chanting changed again to the Call of the Bonds. Each of the brides and grooms were given a colored twine and they began their stately weaving dance that let each of them touch and smile and bow at each other and twist and turn and jump and duck in such a way that they braided the Cord of Seven Strands that was the legal evidence of their marriage. They smiled and teased each other as they went through the elaborate maneuvers. No one was quite sure that they knew how to weave a Seven Cord. “It better not unravel!” whispered Kathein to Oelita.

It had become dark enough for the newly installed electron torches to be switched on. The people of Sorrow, who were not used to such marvels, gasped when the yellowish light turned the plaza into a cloudy day and left all else in shadow.

Next came the giving of the Five Gifts. The already married maran each had a token gift for their newly wed wives. Oelita was given a platinum ring, an ebony spoon, a tiny carved spice box, a golden pen, and a comb. Kathein received a tiny mirror so curved that it showed her a miniature of her whole face, an anklet chain, a polished fossil, a bone of her grandmother carved into an ikon by one of Sorrow’s best artists, and sapphire earrings.

The brides returned these favors with food, grail for the men, a kind of hard pastry built up in alternate sacred and profane layers and cooked the night before the wedding, and honeycake for the wives.

Joesai was grinning as he eyed Oelita’s grail offering skeptically. “I remember you threatening to poison my grail if we ever married!”

Oelita blushed. “You would remember that! How can you remember things like that at a time like this!”

The Temple was opened up for the wedding feast. In concession to Oelita, there was no meat. At Noe’s wedding the three brothers had served roast leg of criminal and for Teenae’s wedding a whole roast baby. Meat wasn’t really practical for such a large crowd. There were tables of salads and baked beans, cakes and breads, honeycomb and pastes, and some very strange but aromatic stews concocted by Nonoep almost totally from a profane base.

The central floor of Sorrow’s Temple was cleared for dancing as a string quartet arrived to play for the dancers. There were formal reels for ten, squares for eight, tricates for six, intricate weaves for four, and fast-paced yabas for two.

Humility stood by herself thinking that she might be bold enough to take Hoemei for the next yaba, but a bright young Kaiel woman took him instead, so she asked Joesai to dance, but he only laughed at the idea of them whirling together, and picked her up by the waist and set her on a ledge where she was tall enough to talk to him. She had never really become used to his size. She remembered riding into Soebo on his shoulders.

Oelita took Joesai away. She wanted to go into the tower and see the room from which she had escaped the Stgal. “Come with us,” she urged, but Humility declined.

She watched Kathein from across the dance floor.

Then Gaet started to invite her to dance but three pretty women from Sorrow stole him away for the complicated weave. He was enjoying himself gluttonously.

She moved over to eavesdrop on Teenae who was with a group of her o’Tghalie clan, laughing. Teenae puzzled Humility, for she had no convenient place to put two-wife in the Liethe spectrum of women — perhaps because Teenae wasn’t really Kaiel and she wasn’t really o’Tghalie. She was having fun insulting her male relatives. No matter what they said, she topped them with a grin. They couldn’t even make a crack with a hidden mathematical meaning without her catching it. They seemed to like her — though this was the family that had sold her to Gaet.