Donald Kingsbury - Courtship Rite

“You’re my one friend who isn’t afraid of that ladder!” greeted Redflies.

“Did you ever find out from anyone the population of the Itraiel plains?”

The girl smiled in a way that was going to bewitch many male bodies. “I don’t think we ever will. We don’t even have a rayvoice in the Itraiel. I’ll keep trying.”

“No,” Humility decided, “you have better ways to discipline your time.”

“My table is a mess, isn’t it?”

Humility smiled in wonder. “I used to understand rayvoices.”

“This is a web I think will give better sensitivity for less antenna length. I think.”

“Can it wait on a party at the Palace tonight?”

Redflies turned with anxious grace. “I’ll have to ask permission of my crone.”

“I have permission to take you whenever I need you. Your crone tells me you are ready.”

“But men are different!”

“In a week you’ll be making as good dong soup as the rest of us.” They both laughed.

“Do I get to serve drinks and make witty sayings?”

“You are very good at the Fire Dance. I had that in mind.”

Redflies turned her head in modesty. “I have only been practicing. The Fire Dance is for a woman of great passion.”

“Or a girl whose passion is just igniting. You will be dancing for an audience of two hundred but your eyes will be for one man.”

“Two hundred! I’ll be embarrassed!”

“The White Mind will banish all trepidation and the Circling Focus of Seduction will pull Kasi mon-Kaiel to you like he was iron from sand.”

“Does it really work that well?”

“Yes, but to make sure, I’ll pass by at just the right time and whisper to him that you are a virgin. He is a middle-aged romantic. See that his foolishness is not in vain. I want his nose in the pocket of a woman I trust.”

“A girl,” she corrected.

“Not after you meet him.”

Redflies turned, stricken, to her component-scattered table. “What of my web?”

Humility grinned. “Think about its copper and glass intricacies while you make soup between his crotch and he will be awed by the intensity of your interest in him.”

“You’re not very romantic.”

“Sometimes I am.” A wistful smile.

“Is he like Hoemei?” asked Redflies coyly.

Stabs of sadness passed through Humility. Hoemei’s affair with Honey had languished while Humility had been in Soebo and had never recovered. The other Honeys hadn’t cared. With Noe gone and Teenae on the coast, he had concentrated on the hopeless courtship of Kathein the Slut. Damn the pain of the soul! Unrequited love could dismember one’s sanity. “There are few such as Hoemei.”

“I’d like to sleep with him .”

Standing, Humility wrapped her arms, from behind, around her sitting friend. “You would, would you!”

“When you’re a crone, of course.”

“You’ll make less mistakes on an older man. They’re good for practice. Kasi is handsome and so gentle that he imagines only a virgin girl could appreciate his tenderness.”

“My crone says all Kaiel men are handsome. That’s what makes them so arrogant. What does he look like naked? With his girdle off?”

“Like the stars thrown into the firmament, like stones thrown into a lake. Maybe to you he would look like a dozen transmitting rayvoice stations.”

“In less flowing language that means his body is scarred in spirals or circles.”

“Circles.”

“Why do you want to use me in such a hurry? I always thought it would come slowly. First a man would see me nude and I would not look at him. The second time I would undress and lock eyes with his. He would not be allowed to touch me until the third time and only after he had dreamed about me for weeks and was wild with desire would our bodies join.”

“With such cynical crones to raise us, where do girls like you come from?” wondered Humility.

“I was born for love.”

“Then listen to the romance of politics. Kasi is the Auditor of Predictions. He has been lax in his duties. There is a sudden necessity for him to meet a pure love, unsullied by a lifetime of crass bargaining, who has such high ideals that she could not love a man who has not demonstrated his integrity. Kasi is the man who will make Hoemei maran-Kaiel the new Prime Predictor.”

“I’m frightened. Just a little bit. Have you ever been in the pay of Kasi mon-Kaiel?”

“Once Aesoe gave me to Kasi as his reward for cleverly delaying the audits.”

“That’s why you are so cynical! Aesoe knows and he’s trying to block the full play of kalothi!”

“Come. Your crone will dress you for the evening. She will cry to lose one so sweet as you.” Humility kissed the girl who was to become her sacrificial card.

THE PARTY FLOWED from Aesoe’s seething energy, pulsing with his pulse, beating at the skull’s temples to the music of God. And Aesoe took the stage of his celebration to reveal in compact speech his newest Racial Future, every word arranged for the cymbals of oratory so that Vision seemed to blend with the dancing.

At his side was the faithful Liethe woman known to the Palace as Sieen. His friends were glad she was there to fill the void of Kathein’s abandonment. Sieen was the symbol of the continuity of loyalty. She praised her man. She defended him. She advised him. Tonight when the whisky was poured, she added color to his Vision by describing troop carriers, longer than planets, stuffed with loyal kembri scarred-men as they slipped across nebulae to bar the reaching Riethe. Aesoe smiled at this dream, vaster than any thoughts of Hoemei.

The Fire Dance came late in the evening when the party was building to a sensual throb and enough barrels of whisky had been emptied so that even a sky lit up by the stellar explosion of Getan seed did not seem preposterous. Redflies, under the persona of Star, modified her dance to the constraints of the Circling Focus of Seduction. The elemental flame of her motion darted through the audience or warmed the fire watchers with licking undulations but always her eyes found a moment’s heartbeat to settle upon the radiating cicatrice of Kasi, to flit away, to be pulled again into his aura. He drifted closer like a convection current drawn to a temple torch.

Her arms rose, her head flashed and stilled while her hair continued its sweeping caress of her shoulders. One smile flew from her face and did not return. Humility, as Sieen, was in place and on tiptoes whispering, “She is a virgin,” to the ears of a heart caught admiring the smile, now disappearing on downcast eyelashes as the fire burnt to ash.

Kasi turned to Sieen urgently. “Introduce me to her.”

“She makes you feel young again, does she?” said Sieen, pulling him off to the dressing rooms. “Star, this is a friend of mine. I think he liked your dancing.”

The dancer, in a clever reversal of her own dream of seduction, would not look at her guest at all, but dressed slowly so that he could be warmed by the ember glow of her body. “I’m pleased that you like me. I’m new in Kaiel-hontokae. I have no friends here.”

Later, much later, he would be allowed to touch her body and then Kaiel and Liethe would slip out for a long walk in the park or maybe along the raceway of the aqueduct where there was danger and he could protect her. Only when the dawn was red on the clouds and his desire properly fanned would she let him enter her body.

Humility, pleased with an underhanded job well done, made the sign of the Chopped Nose as she left the dressing room. That wanton will go far . She met the ghost image of her own first man. He had loved her as a farmer loves his fields and she had murdered him. Orders. Love had been the only way to get to him through his wall of guards. But where was Aesoe?