The Call of Earth: 2 (Homecoming) (38 page)

As for Eiadh, well, with luck she’ll bear me a son before we’re through. But would that truly be luck? Should my eldest son, my heir, be a boy with such a shallow woman for his mother? In all likelihood, it will be the sons of my later marriages, my mature marriages, who will be the worthiest to take my place.

Then, like a sudden attack of indigestion, there came the realization that Father, too, might feel that way. After all, Lady Rasa was
his
marriage of maturity, and Issib and Nafai the sons of that marriage. Wasn’t Mebbekew walking, talking proof of the unfortunate results of early marriages?

But not me, thought Elemak. I was not the son of some frivolous early marriage. I was a son he couldn’t have dared to ask for—his Auntie’s son, Hosni’s son, born only because she so admired the boy Volemak as she introduced him to the pleasures of the bed. Hosni was a woman of substance, and Father trusts and admires me above his other children. Or
did,
anyway, until
he started having visions from the Oversoul and Nafai was able to parlay that into an advantage by pretending to have visions, too.

Elemak was filled with rage—old, deep-burning rage and hot new jealousy because of Eiadh’s admiration for Nafai. Yet what burned hottest and deepest was his fear that Nafai was not pretending, that for some unknowable reason the Oversoul had chosen Father’s youngest instead of his eldest to be his true heir. When Issib’s chair was taken over by the Oversoul and stopped Elemak from beating Nafai in that ravine outside the city, hadn’t the Oversoul as much as said so? That Nafai would one day lead his brothers, or something to that effect?

Well, dear Oversoul, not if Nafai is dead. Ever think of that? If you can speak to
him
then you can speak to me, and it’s about time you started.

I gave you the dream of wives.

The sentence came into Elemak’s mind as clearly as speech. Elemak laughed.

“What are you laughing at, Elya, dear?” asked Eiadh.

“At how easily a person can deceive himself,” said Elemak.

“People always talk about how a person can lie to himself, but I’ve never understood that,” said Eiadh. “If you tell yourself a lie, then you know you’re lying, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Elemak. “You know you’re lying, and you know what the truth is. But some people fall in love with the lie and let go of the truth completely.”

As you’re doing now, said the voice in his head. You prefer to believe the lie that I cannot speak to you or anyone else, and so you will deny me.

“Kiss me,” said Elemak.

“We’re in the middle of the Orchestra, Elya!” she said, but he knew she wanted to.

“All the better,” he said. “We were married last night—people expect us to be oblivious to everything but each other.”

So she kissed him, and he let himself fall into the kiss, blanking his mind to everything but desire. When at last the kiss ended, there was a smattering of applause—they had been noticed, and Eiadh was delighted.

Of course, Mebbekew immediately proposed an identical kiss to Dol, who had the good sense to decline. Still, Mebbekew persisted, until Elemak leaned across Eiadh and said, “Meb. Anticlimax is always bad theatre—didn’t you tell me that yourself?”

Meb glowered and dropped the idea.

I am still in control of things, Elemak thought. And I am
not
about to start believing voices that pop into my mind just because I wish for them. I’m not like Father and Nafai and Issib, determined to believe in a fantasy because it feels so warm and cuddly to think that some superior being is in charge of things. I can deal with the cold hard truth. That’s always enough for a
real
man.

The horns began. From all the minarets around the amphitheatre, the homers began their wailing cries. These were ancient instruments, not the finely-tuned horns of theatre or concert, and there was no attempt to create harmony between them. Each horn produced one note at a time, held long and loud, then fading as the horner lost breath. The notes overlaid each other, sometimes with winsome dissonance, sometimes with astonishing harmonies; always it was a haunting, beautiful sound.

It silenced the citizens gathered in the benches, and it filled Elemak with a trembling anticipation, as he knew
it did with every other person in the Orchestra. The wedding was about to begin.

Thirsty stood at the gate of Basilica and wondered why the Oversoul had failed her now. Hadn’t she been helped every step of the way from Potokgavan? She had come upon a canal boat and asked them to let her ride, and they had taken her aboard without question, though she could give them no fare. At the great port, she had boldly told the captain of the corsair that the Oversoul required her to have the fastest passage to Redcoast ever achieved, and he had laughed and boasted that as long as he took no cargo, he could make it in a day, with such a fair wind. In Redcoast a fine lady had dismounted from her horse and offered it to Thirsty on the street.

It was on that horse that Thirsty arrived at the Low Gate, expecting to be admitted easily, as all women always were, citizens or not. Instead she found the gate tended by Gorayni soldiers, and they were turning everyone away.

“There’s a great wedding going on inside,” a soldier explained to her. “General Moozh is marrying some Basilican lady.”

Without knowing how, Thirsty knew at once that this wedding was the reason she had come.

“Then you must let me in,” she said, “because I am an invited guest.”

“Only the citizens of Basilica are invited to attend, and only those who were already inside the walls. Our orders allow no exceptions, not even for nursing mothers whose babes are inside the walls, not even for physicians whose dying patients are within.”

“I am invited by the Oversoul,” said Thirsty, “and by
that authority I revoke any orders you were given by a mortal man.”

The soldier laughed, but only a little, for her voice had carried, and the crowd at the gate was watching, listening. They had also been turned away, and were liable to turn surly at the slightest provocation.

“Let her in,” said one of the soldiers, “if only to keep the crowd from turning.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said another. “If we let her in we’ll have to let them all in.”

“They all want me to enter,” said Thirsty.

The crowd murmured their assent. Thirsty wondered at this—that the crowd of Basilicans should heed the Oversoul so readily, while the Gorayni soldiers were deaf to her influence. Perhaps this was why the Gorayni were such an evil race, as she had heard in Potokgavan: because they could not hear the voice of the Oversoul.

“My husband is waiting for me inside,” said Thirsty, though not until she heard herself say the words did she realize it was true.

“Your husband will have to wait,” said a soldier.

“Or take a lover,” said another, and they laughed.

“Or satisfy himself,” said the first, and they hooted.

“We should let her in,” said one of the soldiers. “What if God has chosen her?”

Immediately one of the other soldiers drew his lefthand knife and put it to the throat of the one who had spoken. “You know the warning we were given— that it’s the very one that we
want
to allow inside who must be prevented!”

“But she needs to be there,” said the soldier who was sensitive to the Oversoul.

“Say another word and I’ll kill you.”

“No!” cried Thirsty. “I’ll go. This is not the gate for me.”

Inside her she felt the urgency to enter the city increase; but she would not have this man be killed when it would not get her through the gate in any case. Instead she wheeled the horse and made her way back through the crowd, which parted for her. Quickly she made her way up the steep trail that led to the Caravan Road, but she did not bother trying the Market Gate; she made her way along the High Road, but she did not try to enter at High Gate or Funnel Gate, either. She hurried her mount along the Dark Path, which wound among deep ravines sloping upward into the forested hills north of the city until she reached the Forest Road—but she did not follow it down to Back Gate, either.

Instead she dismounted and plunged into the dense underbrush of Trackless Wood, heading for the private gate that only women knew of, that only women used. It had taken an hour for her to go around the city, and she had gone the long way, too—but there was no horsepath around the east wall, which dropped straight down to crags and precipices, and to clamber that route on foot would have taken far longer. Now the wood itself seemed to snag at her, to hold her back, though she knew that the Oversoul was guiding every step she took, to find the quickest path to the private gate. Even when she entered there, however, it would take time to make her way up into the city, and already she could hear the horns beginning their plaintive serenade. The ceremony would begin in moments, and Thirsty would not be there.

Luet moved and spoke as slowly as she could, but as she stepped and spoke her way through the ceremony, she did not have the option of doing what she desired in her heart—to stop the wedding and denounce Moozh
to the gathered citizens. At best she would merely be hustled from the platform before she could say a word, as a more responsible priestess took over; at worst, she might actually speak, might be stopped by an arrow, and then riot and bloodshed would ensue and Basilica could easily be destroyed before another morning came. What would that accomplish?

So she walked through the ceremony—with deliberation, with long pauses, but never stopping altogether, never ignoring the whispered promptings of the priestesses who were with her at every turning, at every speech.

For all the turmoil inside of Luet, though, she could not see that Hushidh felt anything but perfect calm. Was it possible that Hushidh actually welcomed this marriage, as a way of avoiding life as a cripple’s wife? No—Shuya had been sincere when she said that the Oversoul had reconciled her to that future. Her calm must come from utter trust in the Oversoul.

“She is right to trust,” said a voice—a whisper, really. For a moment she thought it was the Oversoul, but instead she realized that it was Nafai, who had spoken as she passed near him during the processional of flowers. How had he known what words he needed to say just then, to answer so perfectly her very thoughts? Was it the Oversoul, forging an ever-closer link between them? Or was it Nafai himself, seeing so deeply into her heart that he knew what she needed him to say?

Let it be true, that Shuya is right to trust the Oversoul. Let it be true that we will not have to leave her here when we make our journey to the desert, to another star. For I could not bear it to lose her, to leave her. Perhaps I would know joy again; perhaps my new husband could be a companion to me as Hushidh has been my dear companion. But there would always be an
ache, an empty place, a grief that would never die, for my sister, my only kin in the world, my raveler who when I was an infant tied the knot that will bind us to each other forever.

And then, at last, the moment came, the taking of the oaths, Luet’s hands on their shoulders—reaching up to Moozh’s shoulder, so hard and large and strange, and to Hushidh’s shoulder, so familiar, so frail by comparison to Moozh’s. “The Oversoul makes one soul from the woman and the man,” said Luet. A breath. An endless pause. And then the words she could not bear to say, yet had to say, and so said. “It is done.”

The people of Basilica rose from their seats as if they were one, and cheered and clapped and called out their names: Hushidh! Raveler! Moozh! General! Vozmuzhalnoy! Vozmozhno!

Moozh kissed Hushidh as a husband kisses a wife— but gently, Luet saw, kindly. Then he turned and led Hushidh down to the front of the platform. A hundred, a thousand flowers filled the air, flying forward; those thrown from the back of the amphitheatre were picked up and tossed again, until the flowers filled the space between the platform and the first row of benches.

Amid the tumult, Luet became aware that Moozh himself was shouting. She could not hear the words he said, but only the fact that he was saying something, for his back was toward her. Gradually the people on the front row realized what he was saying, and took up his words as a chant. Only then did Luet understand how he was turning his own wedding now to clear political advantage. For what he said was a single word, repeated over and over again, spreading through the crowd until they all shouted with the same impossibly loud voice.

“Basilica! Basilica! Basilica!”

It went on forever, forever.

Luet wept, for she knew now that the Oversoul had failed, that Hushidh was married to a man who would never love
her,
but only the city that he had taken as her dowry.

At last Moozh raised his hands—his left hand higher, palm out to silence them, his right still holding Hushidh’s hand. He had no intention of breaking his link to
her,
for this was his link to the city. Slowly the chanting died down, and at last a curtain of silence fell on the Orchestra.

His speech was simple but eloquent. A protestation of his love for this city, his gratitude at having been privileged to restore it to peace and safety, and now his joy at being welcomed as a citizen, the husband of the sweet and simple beauty of a true daughter of the Oversoul. He mentioned Luet, too, and Nafai, how honored he felt to be kinsmen of the best and bravest of Basilica’s children.

Luet knew what came next. Already the delegation of councilors had risen from their seats, ready to come forward and ask that the city accept Moozh as consul, to lead Basilica’s military and foreign relations. It was a foregone conclusion that the vast majority of the people, overwhelmed with the ecstasy and majesty of the moment, would acclaim the choice. Only later would they realize what they had done, and even then most would think it was a wise and good change.

Moozh’s speech was winding toward its end—and it would be a glorious end, well received by the people despite his northern accent, which in other times would have been ridiculed and despised.

He hesitated. In an unexpected place in his speech. An inappropriate place. The hesitation became a pause, and Luet could see that he was looking at something or someone that
she
could not see. So she stepped forward,
and Nafai was instantly beside her; together they took the few steps necessary for both of them to be on Moozh’s left, behind him still but able now to see whom he was looking at.