The Call of Earth: 2 (Homecoming) (28 page)

“Won’t you look at me, Nafai?” she asked. “I know you never looked at me before, not with hope or longing, anyway, but now that the Oversoul has given us to each other, can’t you look at me with—with kindness, anyway?”

How could he lift his face to her now, with his eyes full of tears; and yet, since she asked him, since it would mean disappointment to her if he did not, how could he refuse? He looked at her, and even though his eyes swam with tears—of joy, of relief, of emotions even stronger that he didn’t understand—he saw her as if for the first time, as if her soul had been made transparent to him. He saw the purity of her heart. He saw how fully she had given herself to the Oversoul, and to Basilica, and to her sister, and to him. He saw that in her heart she longed only to build something fine and beautiful, and how readily she was willing to try to do that with this boy who sat before her.

“What do you see, when you look at me like that?” asked Luet, her voice timid, yet daring to ask.

“I see what a great and glorious woman you are,” he said, “and how little reason I have to fear you, because you’d never harm me or any other soul.”

“Is that all you see?” she asked.

“I see that the Oversoul has found in you the most perfect example of what the human race must all become,
if we are to be whole, and not destroy ourselves again.”

“Nothing more?” she asked.

“What can be more wonderful than the things I’ve told you that I see?”

By now his eyes had cleared enough to see that
she
was now on the verge of crying—but not for joy.

“Nafai, you poor fool, you blind man,” said Hushidh, “don’t you know what she’s hoping that you see?”

No, I don’t know, thought Nafai. I don’t know any of the right things to say. I’m not like Mebbekew, I’m not clever or tactful, I give offense to everybody when I speak, and somehow I’ve done it again, even though everything I said was what I honestly feel.

He looked at her, feeling helpless; what could he do? She looked at him so hungrily, aching for him to give her—what? He had praised her honestly, with the sort of praise that he could have spoken to no other woman in the world, and it was nothing to her, because she wanted something more from him, and he didn’t know what it was. He was hurting her with his very silence, stabbing her to the heart, he could see that—and yet was powerless to stop doing it.

She was so frail, so young—even younger than he. He had never realized that before. She had always been so sure of herself, and, because she was the waterseer, he had always been in awe. He had never realized how . . . how
breakable
she was. How thinly her luminous skin covered her, how small her bones were. A tiny stone could bruise her, and now I find her battered with stones that I cast without knowing. Forgive me, Luet, tender child, gentle girl. I was so afraid for myself, but I turned out not to be breakable at all, even when I thought you and Hushidh had scorned me. While you, whom I had thought to be strong . . .

Impulsively he knelt up and gathered her into his arms and held her close, the way he might hold a weeping child. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Don’t be sorry, please,” she said. But her voice was high, the voice of a child who is trying not to be caught crying, and he could feel her tears soaking into his shirt, and her body trembling with silent weeping.

“I’m sorry that it’s only me you get as a husband,” he said.

“And I’m sorry that it’s only me you get as a wife,” she said. “Not the waterseer, not the glorious being you imagined that you saw. Only me.”

Finally he understood what she had been asking for all along, and couldn’t help but laugh, because without knowing it he had just now given it to her. “Did you think that I said those things to the
waterseer?
” he asked. “No, you poor thing, I said those things to
you,
to Luet, to the girl I met in my mother’s school, to the girl who sassed me and anybody else when she felt like it, to the girl I’m holding in my arms right now.”

She laughed then—or sobbed harder, he wasn’t sure. But he knew that whatever she was doing now, it was better. That was all she had needed—was for him to tell her that he didn’t expect her to be the waterseer all the time, that he was marrying the fragile, imperfect human being, and not the overpowering image that she inadvertently wore.

He moved his hands across her back, to comfort her; but he also felt the curve of her body, the geometry of ribs and spine, the texture and softness of skin stretched taut over muscles. His hands explored, memorizing her, discovering for the first time how a woman’s back felt to a man’s hands. She was real and not a dream.

“The Oversoul didn’t give you to me,” he said softly. “You are giving yourself to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

“And I give myself to you,” he said. “Even though I, too, belong to the Oversoul.”

He drew back a little, enough to cup the back of her head in his right hand as she looked up at him, enough to touch her cheek with the fingers of his left.

Then, suddenly, as if they both had the same thought at the same moment—which, quite certainly, they did— they looked away from each other, and toward the spot where Hushidh had been sitting through this whole conversation.

But Hushidh wasn’t there. They turned back to each other then, and Luet, dismayed, said, “I shouldn’t have made her come with me to—”

She never finished the sentence, because at that moment Nafai began to learn how to kiss a woman, and she, though she had never kissed a man before, became his tutor.

Hushidh saw nothing joyful about the wedding. Not that anything went wrong. Aunt Rasa had a way with rituals. Her ceremony was simple and sweet, without a hint of the false portentousness that so many other women resorted to in their desperate desire to seem holy or important. Aunt Rasa had never needed to pretend. And yet she still took great care that when the public passages of life—weddings, comings-of-age, graduations, embarkations, divinations, deathwatches, burials—were under her care, they took place with an easy grace, a gentleness that kept people’s minds focused on the occasion, and not on the machinery of celebration. There was never a hint of anyone hurrying or bustling; never a hint that everything had to be
just so,
and therefore you’d better watch your step so you don’t do anything wrong . . .

No, Rasa’s wedding for her son Nafai and his two
brothers—or, if you looked at it the other way, Rasa’s wedding for her three nieces, Luet, Dol, and Eiadh—was a lovely affair on the portico of her house, bright and aromatic with flowers from her greenhouse and the blossoms that grew on the portico. Eiadh and Dol were astonishingly beautiful, their gowns clinging to them with the elegant illusion of simplicity, their facepaint so artfully applied that they seemed not to be painted at all. Or
would
have seemed so, had it not been for Luet.

Sweet Luet, who had refused to be painted at all, and whose dress really
was
simple. Where Eiadh and Dol had all the elegance of women trying—very successfully—to seem bright and young and gay, Luet really
was
young, her gown artlessly covering a body that was still more the promise than the reality of womanhood, her face bright with a grave and timid sort of joy that made Eiadh and Dol look older and far too experienced. In a way, it was almost cruel to make the older girls have their weddings in the presence of this girl who rebuked them by her very naivete. Eiadh had actually noticed, before the ceremony began—Hushidh overheard her urging Aunt Rasa to “send somebody up with Luet to help her choose a dress and to do something with her face and hair” but Aunt Rasa had only laughed and said, “No art will help that child.” Eiadh took that, of course, to mean that Aunt Rasa thought Luet to be too plain to be helped by costume and makeup; but Hushidh caught Aunt Rasa’s eye the moment afterward, and Aunt Rasa winked at her and rolled her eyes to let her know that
they
both understood that poor Eiadh hadn’t a clue about what would happen at the wedding.

And it did happen, though fortunately Eiadh and Dol had no idea that when the watching servants and students and teachers whispered, “Ah, she is so lovely”;
“Ah, so sweet”; “Look, who knew she was so beautiful,” they were all speaking of Luet, only of Luet. When Nafai, as the youngest man, came forward to be claimed by his bride, the sighs were like a song from the congregation, an improvised hymn to the Oversoul, for having brought this boy of fourteen, who had the stature and strength of a man and the bright fire of the Oversoul in his eyes, to marry the Oversoul’s chosen daughter, the waterseer, whose pure beauty grew from the soul outward. He was the bright gold ring in which this jewel of a girl would glow with unreflected luster.

Hushidh saw better than anyone how the people belonged to Luet in their hearts. She saw the threads between them, sparkling like the dew-covered strands of a spider’s web in the first sunlight of morning; how they love the waterseer! But most of all Hushidh saw the firming bonds between the husbands and wives as the ceremony progressed. Unconsciously she took note of each gesture, each glance, each facial expression, and in her mind she was able to understand the connection.

Between Elemak and Eiadh, it would be a strange sort of unequal partnership, in which the less Eiadh loved Elemak, the more he would desire her; and the more he treated her gently and lovingly, the more she would despise him. It would be a painful thing to watch, this marriage, in which the agony of coming apart was the very thing that would hold them together. But she could say nothing of this—neither one would understand this about themselves, and would only be furious if she tried to explain it.

As for poor Dolya and her precious new lover, Mebbekew, it was an ill-considered marriage indeed— and yet there was no reason to suppose it would be less viable than Elemak’s and Eiadh’s. At the moment, flushed with the glory of being, as they supposed, the
center of attention, they were happy with the new bonds between them. But soon enough the reality would setde in. If they stayed in the city, they would hate each other within weeks—Dol because of Mebbekew’s betrayals and unfaithfulness, Mebbekew because of Dol’s clinging, possessive need for him. Hushidh imagined their domestic life. Dol would be forever throwing her arms around him in wonderfully enthusiastic hugs, thinking she was showing her love when really she was asserting her ownership; and Meb, shuddering under her profuse embraces, slipping away at every opportunity to find new bodies to possess, new hearts to ravish. But in the desert, it would be very different. Meb would find no woman who desired him except Dolya, and so his own lusts would throw him back into her arms again and again; and the very fact that he
could
not betray her would ease Dol’s lonely fears, and she would not oppress him so much with her need for him. In the desert, they could make a marriage of it, though Mebbekew would never be happy with the boredom of making love with the same woman, night after night, week after week, year after year.

Hushidh imagined, with a pleasure she wasn’t proud of, what Elemak would do the first time Meb made some flirting advance toward Eiadh. It would be discreet, so as to avoid weakening Elemak’s public position by hinting that he feared being cuckolded. But Meb would never so much as look at Eiadh again afterward . . .

The bonds between Elemak and Eiadh, between Dol and Mebbekew, they were the sort of links that Hushidh saw every day in the city. These were Basilican marriages, made more poignant—and perhaps more viable—by the fact that soon the Oversoul would bring
them out into the desert where they would need each other more and have fewer alternatives than in the city.

The marriage between Luet and Nafai, however, was not Basilican. For one thing, they were too young. Luet was only thirteen. It was almost barbaric, really—like the forest tribes of the Northern Shore, where a girl was bought as a bride before her first blood had stopped trickling. Only Hushidh’s sure knowledge that the Oversoul had brought them together kept her from recoiling from the ceremony. Even at that, she felt a deep anger that she did not fully understand as she watched them join hands, make their vows, kiss so sweetly with Aunt Rasa’s hands on their shoulders. Why do I hate this marriage so much, she wondered. For she could see that Luet was full of hope and joy, that Nafai was in awe of her and eager to please her—what more could Hushidh have hoped for, for her dear sister, her only kin in this world?

Yet when the wedding ended, when the newly married couples made their laughing, flower-strewn procession back into the house and up the stairways to their balcony rooms, Hushidh could not contain herself long enough even to watch her sister out of sight. She fled into a servants’ corridor, and ran, not to her room, but to the rooftop where she and Luet had so often retreated together.

Even here, though, it was as if she could still see, in the gathering dark of evening, the shadow of Luet’s and Nafai’s first embrace, their first kiss. It filled her with rage, and she threw herself down onto the rug, beating on the thick fabric with her fists, weeping bitterly and sobbing, “No, no, no, no.”

To what was she saying no? She didn’t understand it herself. There she lay and there she wept until, weary with knowing too much and understanding not
enough, she fell asleep in the cooling air of a Basilican night. Late in spring the breezes blew moist and cool from the sea, dry and warm from the desert, and met to do their turbulent dance in the streets and on the rooftops of the city. Hushidh’s hair was caught in these breezes, and swirled and played as if it had a life of its own, and longed for freedom. But she did not wake.

Instead she dreamed, and in her dreams her unconscious mind brought forth the questions of fear and rage that she could not voice when she was awake. She dreamed of her own wedding. On a desert pinnacle, herself standing on the very tip of a high spire of rock, with no room for anyone else; yet there was her husband, floating in the air beside her: Issib, the cripple, blithely flying as she had seen him fly through the halls of Rasa’s house during all his student years. In her dream she screamed the question that she had not dared to voice aloud: Why am I the one who must marry the cripple! How did you come up with my name for that life, Oversoul! How have I offended you, that I will never stand as Luet stood, sweet and young and blossoming with love, with a man beside me who is strong and holy, capable and good?