56 - Klaimera's calling

One can barely tell it is winter in Laka, and spring planting comes before the snow is even thinking of melting in Vae Arahi; I would be there long enough to see the Festival of Planting, the greatest of the Lakan year.

I’d loved Klaimera for a moon. In a letter home I wrote my thought of marriage, to see what answer it would get. My aunt wrote back:

Chevenga, I did not even bring this to Assembly, so as not to damage your good name. How set you are on this? Answer carefully, considering that I will take your answer as a measure of how far you’ve taken leave of your senses. Have you forgotten, the actions of those hot young loins of yours will have consequences? Would you have a half-Lakan semanakraseye succeed you? A brown-skinned person with his mother’s barbaric customs instilled in him and polluting those of his father?

You already have some name for being willful. People already worry that you could succumb to foreign corruption, staying in Laka. I do not exaggerate, Fourth Chevenga: you must abandon this notion or put your own approval at risk.

I’m the only person in all Yeola-e, I thought, slapping down the letter, who can be told whom to marry. I did not answer; that is to say, I wrote but mentioned nothing of this. Nor did I speak of it to Klaimera or Astalaz; they would only be offended. Family considerations they would have understood; but Lakan royalty having to be judged worthy by the riff-raff of Yeola-e? It was an affront. I put it out of mind, and went on living my dream-life.

Then it came into my knowledge, I am not quite sure when, that the Festival of Planting is the one at which they do the human sacrifice. It was a certain sense, almost a taste, in the air and on the faces of the Palace, bright and dark at once, strengthening as the day came nearer, not entirely unlike the feeling that comes before the Kiss of the Lake, but less austere and more visceral.

I asked Klaimera how they got the victim, who, I had learned, was always a boy of my own age; only one in the flower of youth, and male, of course, is seen as a gift fit for the gods.

“What do you mean, got?” she said. “If we gave all who wished to be given, the streets would run with blood, and the gods would see our life as cheap indeed.” It is the highest honor, they believe, ensuring an afterlife of eternal pleasure instead of the misery of more lives on earth. The candidates must vie at all manner of contests; then the chosen one undergoes a year’s training, to sufficiently purify his soul. I did learn, though, he tends to be a poor boy, noble sons being reserved for more important things such as inheriting holdings. I suppose the poor of Laka are harder driven, as well, to escape this life.

How he would be killed, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her.

On the seven days before, I ceased seeing Klaimera, as custom required she be genuinely as well as officially virginal then. The halls were decorated with flowers and ribbons in a different color each day: pink, violet, blue, white, yellow, orange, and on the day itself, red. I waited through that night—the ceremony is done soon after dawn—with a stomach full of emptiness; it being a public function, I would have to attend. I reminded myself how much gore I’d seen on the field, one death nothing to that; our Kiss of the Lake was not so different.

The Chosen is king for a day, covered with flowers, showered in wine, kissed by women, bowed to just as they bow to the real king all other days. As Astalaz’s foster son, I got to meet him: a handsome youth, a little smaller than me, fine-boned and slender in the way of the poor, and burning with the glow my father had had, perhaps harder. Near him the wings of Shininao sang their song of too-deep silence; seeing his wide smile and feeling his hands warm in mine, I thought, he and I have something in common: foreknowledge. But so much sooner for him.

“Don’t grieve for me, Honored Yeoli,” he said. “I’m having a wonderful time, and it will just get better.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Far better than all you hoity-toities, for once.” The nobles near just laughed; he could get away with such words, now. At this price.

As dawn paled the sky from blue to purple, the square by the Palace filled with people, singing and chanting and raising scarlet flowers. Gongs clanged; the sustained metallic notes of the zinarh, the Lakan stringed instrument, hummed. The great idol of Kaili had been brought out, four man-lengths high and carven out of black stone, its many arms and one face oiled to shining.

There were prayers and benedictions and so forth for a time, all in old liturgical Lakan which I could not understand, even one word. The sun sent its first shafts of red light across the square, giving the thousand flowers petals of scarlet flame. The crowd’s voice buzzed, then leapt to a roar; the gate of the Palace had opened, and the Chosen appeared, on a carrying-chair with red satin trains. He smiled still, his bearing the picture of perfect courage.

All through the crowd he was carried; it is considered a blessing to touch, or better still kiss him. Then the greatest of the gongs, which, as Lakans say, like a mother calls him home, sounded. One of the idol’s hands lay palm up before her, big as a table; that was the altar, I saw, as they bound him to it, limbs spread, his face to the sky; whatever death they gave him, he’d see it coming. I wondered, Does he ever change his mind at this point? But he lay with his head thrown back, as if awaiting the touch of love. I remembered he’d had all that preparation, just as I would have. If you expect something, you can work to accept it.

The gong, and then the crowd, went silent, so that I could hear only the wind, and the beating of my heart.

“The Chosen awaits, his seed and his life to give life to the land!” One death, I told myself again; why am I so afraid? “The Goddess comes, to exact her price!” To a cry from the crowd, half whoops, half screams of fright, the belly of the idol opened.

The first thing one saw was the knife, straight and double-edged, as the sunlight, now golden, caught it. Then the Goddess in her earthly form, as I had been told she would appear, enrobed all in scarlet, her hair hanging unbound, her face full of light and her arms of grace, stepped into sight, the knife in her two hands.

Some sluggish, sensible voice spoke in my mind. “Of course they didn’t tell me; they assumed I had more sense than an imbecile, and so knew. She’s High Priestess.”

That was the last coherent thought. In my balcony seat, near Astalaz, I could not move, nor speak, nor do anything of my own will, only watch.

I learned what the Chosen had meant, when he had said it would only get better. In his year of training he is kept celibate too, a youth my age, in the flower of his passion. On the altar the Goddess strips naked and makes love to him, for his seed spurting as an offering to the Gods brings the blessing of fertility. I knew, as I watched, what those hands and those lips, could do, as if I felt them on my own body.

The crowd had quieted, listening; now, as his ecstasy-moans grew more intense, they joined in with their own as if they were in his place. When he was close, writhing, his eyes clenched shut, and she touched the knife to the place over his heart; as he felt it, his joy increased. I knew as if I were feeling it myself what he felt.

Then his back was arching, the muscles turning to rope all over him, his voice rising even above the crowd’s; the first white spurt came shooting up, a thousand brown hands reaching as if they could catch a drop. In that moment she drove the knife into his heart, with the ease of skill.

He went on coming for much longer than I had imagined he could. All his life was expressing itself through his seed now, I saw. She pulled the knife out gently, and the spurting stream the hands strained to touch was scarlet. In time he went still and limp, his eyes closing, but his face still full of ecstasy.

“It is accomplished,” the herald said, with a striking of the gong, and the crowd went mad. Klaimera faded backwards into the belly of the Goddess again, having taken; the husk of the Chosen is left for the people, and anyone who gets a scrap or a drop of him is blessed. I didn’t have to turn away; I could see nothing, for people fighting to get to him. Next they would feast, and celebrate all day.

Astalaz went in, and I should follow, but I had to will myself up as if I were rooted to my seat. When I could move, I put one foot before the other. “No diplomatic gaffes,” the stolid voice intoned in my head, over and over. “She’s High Priestess. It’s one of her duties, traditional and proper and natural to them.”

Even so, I excused myself, saying I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. “You see,” I heard someone whisper as I went, “atheist or not, he has a bone of spirituality in him, look how moved he is.” I staggered to my bedchamber and buried myself in the bed, like a child seeking comfort in the covers and pillows, burying myself in them.

After a short while, a pair of arms I knew very slid around me, and a familiar tongue flicked hot in my ear. With a pillow over my head I hadn’t heard her come in.

“Ah, my love,” she whispered. “It’s the Chosen who gets all the pleasure, in public. But we’re in private now, and I can satisfy myself. Are you mine?”

When I came to myself I realized I was pressed back against the wall; it didn’t seem entirely odd that I had no notion of how I’d got from the bed to there. It’s something diplomatic I should say now, my sensible part thought, but my tongue wouldn’t move.

“J’vengka!” She sat up straight, her nakedness shining. “Love, what is it? Is something wrong?”

“Wrong?” I gasped. Now I found my voice, but my tongue tripped over my beginning Lakan and switched of its own will to Enchian. “Wrong? The woman’s just done—what she’s just done, and she asks me is something wrong! Oh, no, not at all, I see my lover eviscerate people every day, it’s no trouble!”

“What?” She rose out of the bed; I put a pillar between us. “Do you take me for a fool? You’re a warrior! Don’t tell me you’ve never had a roll with someone who’s just killed many more than I have, which is only one a year since I was fourteen!”

“They weren’t bound!”

“But you yourself heard him say he went to it happily! You saw how he felt! You sweet fool—you’re jealous. Of the Chosen, merciful Kazh! How I love you—come here and I’ll show you who is everything to me!”

Fleeing I blundered into the curtains, letting a blaze of sunlight into the room for a moment; I caught sight of her hand, and the blood still clinging in the edges of her fingernails. The sense in me spoke again: she and I could never be. Then, perhaps out of anger for my loss, I was seized by idiocy.

I can’t remember precisely everything I said, forgetting out of shame, perhaps. But it was quite a long diatribe, about how they were barbaric savages, to kill a youth for nothing but the prurient joy of a crowd, to tear people away from their homes in chains to slave and suffer under the whip for the rest of their lives, to force by threat of death nine-tenths of their own people to struggle in poverty so the other tenth can indulge in unimaginable luxury, to start wars to get rid of people because they won’t control how much they breed, to kill each other in their dining hall or keep eating while someone else did, and so on.

When I couldn’t think of one more recrimination and so stopped speaking, she was standing rigid like a doll, hands on hips but half-clenched like claws, her eyes black stones, her hair dark flame. Anger drained out of me and dread flooded in. I could see Astalaz’s face blackening, when she told him, the black horses marching, and war, again.

“Klaimera, my foolish heart ran away with my tongue,” I said, my heart pounding. How many lives might depend on this? “I mean no offense, in truth, for—”

“You,” she spat, “and your oh-so-superior-we-Yeolis-are all the time, every cursed moment! What do you call it when you put your babies in those mountain streams? Can they fight back? Do they choose? And it’s hardly just one per year is it? And when you do call it sacrifice, that supposed drowning in the lake, you fake it, you hypocrites, what you pretend to offer your God-that-isn’t, you take back at the last moment! What kind of sacrifice is that? How does that face the truth, that for life there must be death? And what sort of God wouldn’t notice? It’s true! You are thoughtless, heartless, soulless atheists! You have no god! Why They save you all from starving I can’t begin to imagine, but I doubt They’ll forbear for much longer!”

No, I thought, she and I really can never be. That cut through both the fear and the anger her words had raised. I saw the best thing to do. I slipped through the curtains onto the balcony and into daylight almost too bright to bear, and sat on the rail. After a while, she slowly sat down beside me, robed now, but did not touch me.

Perhaps it was having invoked the God-In-Her for the rite that brought clear-sightedness. “I know what you are thinking,” she said. “And, though my heart weeps, you are right.”

We seized each other, of course; like all who have done this, we clung for a time, wept for how we would miss each other, vowed never to forget each other, swore eternal friendship. To make it more bearable, we reminded ourselves how one or the other would have had to give up their calling, the dearest thing to our hearts, to be together. We did not make love again, agreeing without words that doing so would just worsen our pain.

I wrote my aunt to say she need not worry. The women in my bed began changing again, but I didn’t make love to another. “Just share warmth, and you’ll have done your duty by me,” I told them. Of the rest of my stay, which was only a few days, there is little more to say. I crossed the field, clasping hands with Astazand and his two little brothers, who’d all grown like weeds, again.