The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 Read online

  “The Lady Rasa speaks about experience,” said Zdorab, “but I must point out that I am a man of no experience whatsoever when it comes to women, and I fear that I will offend with every word I say.”

  Shedemei gave one hoot of derisive laughter.

  “What Shedemei meant, with her simple eloquence,” said Rasa, “is that she cannot conceive of your having less experience of women than she has of men. She, too, is quite certain of her ability to offend you with every word, which is why she chose to respond to you without using any.”

  The absurdity of the whole situation combined with Shedemei’s gracelessness and Zdorab’s awkward courtesy was too much for Hushidh. She burst out laughing, and soon the others joined in.

  “There’s no hurry,” said Volemak. “Take your time to become acquainted.”

  “I’d rather just get it over with,” said Shedemei.

  “Marriage is not something you get over with,” said Rasa. “It’s something you begin. So as Volemak was saying, take your time. When you’re ready, come to either me or my husband, and we can arrange new tent assignments, along with the appropriate ceremonies.”

  “And if we’re never ready?” asked Issib.

  “None of us will live long enough to see never,” said Volemak. “And for the present, it will be enough if you try to know and like each other.”

  That was it, except for a few pleasant words about the supper Zdorab had prepared. They quickly divided, and Hushidh followed Shedemei to the tent they would share for now.

  “Well, that was reassuring,” said Shedemei.

  It took a moment for Hushidh to realize that Shedya was being ironic; it always did. “I’m not much reassured,” Hushidh answered.

  “Oh, you didn’t think it was sweet of them to let us take our time about deciding whether to do the inevitable? Rather like giving a condemned murderer the lever of the gallows trap and telling him, ‘Whenever you’re ready.’ ”

  It was a surprise to realize that Shedemei seemed far angrier about this than Hushidh was. But then, Shedemei was not a willing participant in the journey, the way Hushidh had been. Shedemei had not thought of herself as belonging to the Oversoul, not the way Hushidh had ever since she realized she was a raveler, or Luet, ever since she discovered she was a waterseer. So of course everything seemed out of kilter to her; all her plans were in disarray.

  Hushidh thought to help her by saying, “Zdorab is as much a captive on this journey as you are—he never asked for this, and you at least had your dream.” But she saw at once—for Hushidh always saw the connections between people—that her words, far from giving comfort, were driving a wedge between her and Shedemei, and so she fell silent.

  Fell silent and suffered, for she well remembered that it was Issib who had asked, What if we’re never ready? That was a terrible thing to hear your future husband say, a terrible thing, for it meant that he did not think he could ever love her.

  Then a thought came abruptly into her mind: What if Issib said that, not because he thought he could never desire her, but because he was certain that she could never be ready to marry him? Now that she thought about it, she was certain that was what he meant, for she knew Issib to be a kind young man who was not likely to say something that he thought might hurt someone else. She suddenly found a floodgate of memory opened inside her mind, and saw all the images she had of Issib. He was quiet, and bore his infirmity without complaint. He had great courage, in his own way, and his mind was bright indeed—he had always been quick in class, the times they had been together, and his ideas were never the obvious ones, but always showed him thinking a step or two beyond the immediate question.

  His body may be limited, she thought, but his mind is at least a match for mine. And plain as I am, I can’t possibly be as worried about my own body as he is about his. Nafai may have assured me that Issib is physically capable of fathering children, but that doesn’t mean he has any notion of lovemaking—indeed, he’s probably terrified that I will be disgusted by him, or at least frustrated at how little he imagines he can give me in the way of pleasure. I am not the one who needs reassurance, he is, and it would only be destructive if I entered into our courtship with the idea that he must somehow reassure my self-doubting heart. No, I must make him confident of my acceptance of him, if we’re to build a friendship and a marriage.

  This insight filled Hushidh with such great relief that she almost wept with the joy of it. Only then did she realize that ideas that came to her so suddenly, with such great clarity, might not be her ideas at all. Indeed, she noticed now that she had been imagining a picture of Issib’s body as it appeared to him, only it hadn’t been imagination at all, had it? The Oversoul had shown her the thoughts and fears inside Issib’s mind.

  As so many times before, Hushidh wished she had the same easy communication with the Oversoul that Luet and Nafai had. Occasionally the Oversoul was able to put thoughts as words inside her mind, as always happened with them, but it was never a comfortable dialogue for her, never easy for her to sort out which were her own thoughts and which were the Oversoul’s. So she had to make do with her gift of raveling, and then sometimes these clear insights that always felt like her own ideas when they came, and only afterward seemed to be too clear to be anything but visions from the Oversoul.

  Still, she was certain that what she had seen was not her imagination, but the truth: The Oversoul had shown her what she needed to see if she was to get past her own fears.

  Thank you, she thought, as clearly as she could, though she had no way of knowing if the Oversoul heard her thoughts, or was even listening at the moment. I needed to see through his eyes, at least for a moment.

  Another thought came to her: Is he also seeing through my eyes at this moment? It disturbed her, to think that Issib might be seeing her body as she saw it, complete with her fears and dissatisfactions.

  No, fair is fair. If he is to have confidence in himself, and if he is to be a kind husband to me, he must know that I am as fearful and uncertain as he is. So do, if you haven’t already, do show him who I am, help him to see that even though I am no beauty, I’m still a woman, I still long to love, to be loved, to make a family with a man who is bound into my heart and I into his as tightly as Rasa and Volemak are woven through each other’s souls. Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self that we will become together.

  To Hushidh’s surprise, she was sleepy now—she had feared that she’d get no sleep at all tonight. And from Shedemei’s slow and heavy breathing, she must already be asleep.

  I hope you showed her what she needed to see, too, Oversoul. I only wonder how other men and women manage to love each other when they don’t have your help to show them what is in the other’s heart.

  Rasa woke up angry, and it took her a while to figure out why. At first she thought it was because when Volemak had joined her in bed last night he offered her no more than an affectionate embrace, as if her long fast did not deserve to be broken with a feast of love. He was not blind; he knew that she was angry, and he explained, “You’re wearier than you think, after such a journey. There’d be little pleasure in it for either of us.” His very calmness had made her angry beyond reason, and she curled up to sleep apart from his arms; but this morning she knew that her pique last night had been clear proof that he was right. She had been too tired for anything but sleep, like a fussy little child.

  Almost no light got into the tent from outside. It could be high noon or even later, and from the stiffness of her body and the lack of a wind outside the tent, she could well have slept late into the morning. Still, to lie abed was delicious; no need to rise in a hurry, eat a scant breakfast in the predawn light, strike the tents, pack the beasts and be underway by sunrise. The journey was over; she had come home to her husband.

>   With that thought she realized why she had come awake this morning with so much anger in her. Coming home was not supposed to be to a tent, even one with double walls that stayed fairly cool through the day. And it was not she who ought to come home to him, but rather her husband who should come home to her. That’s how it had always been. The house had been hers, which she had kept ready for him, and offered to him as a gift of shade in the summer, shelter in the storm, refuge from the tumult of the city. Instead he was the one who had prepared this place, and the more comfortable it was the angrier it made her, for in this place she would have no idea how to prepare anything. She was helpless, a child, a student, and her husband would be her teacher and her guardian.

  No one had directed her in her own affairs since she first came into her own house, which she had done young, using money she inherited from her mother to buy the house that her great-grandmother had made famous, then as a music conservatory; Rasa had made it still more famous as a school, and from that foundation she had risen to prominence in the City of Women, surrounded by students and admirers and envious competitors—and now here she was in the desert where she did not even know how to cook a meal or how toileting was handled in a semi-permanent encampment like this. No doubt it would be Elemak who explained it to her, in his oh-so-offhanded way, the elaborate pretense that he was telling you what you already knew—which would have been gracious except that there was already the undertone of studiedness that made it plain that both you and he knew that you did not already know and in fact you depended on him to teach you how to pee properly.

  Elemak. She remembered that terrible morning when he stood there with a pulse pointed at Nafai’s head and thought: I must tell Volemak. He must be warned about the murder in Elemak’s heart.

  Except that the Oversoul had clearly shown that murder would not be tolerated, and Elemak and Mebbekew both had begged forgiveness. The whole issue of going back to Basilica was closed now, surely. Why bring it up again? What would Volemak do about it now, anyway? Either he’d repudiate Elemak, which would make the young man useless through the rest of the journey, or Volemak would uphold him in his right to make such a vile decision, in which case there’d be no living with Elemak from then on, and Nafai would shrink to nothing in this company. Elemak would never let Nafai rise to his natural position of leadership. That would be unbearable, for Rasa knew that of her own children, only Nafai was suited to lead well, for only he of the men of his generation had both the wit to make wise decisions and the close communication with the Oversoul to make informed ones.

  Of course, Luet was every bit as well qualified, but they were now in a primitive, nomadic setting, and it was almost inevitable that males would take the lead. Rasa hadn’t needed Shedemei’s instruction about primate community formation to know that in a wandering tribe, the males ruled. Soon enough the women would all be pregnant, and then they would turn inward; when the children were born, their circle would enlarge only enough to include the little ones. Food and safety and teaching would be their concern then, in such a fearful, hostile place as the desert. There would be neither reason nor possibility of challenging the leadership of men here.

  Except that if the leader were a man like Nafai, he would be compassionate to the women and listen to good counsel. While Elemak would be what he had already shown himself to be—a jealous tyrant, slow to listen to advice and quick to twist things to his own advantage, unfair and conniving . . .

  I can’t let myself hate him. Elemak is a man of many fine gifts. Much like his half-brother, Gaballufix, who was once my husband. I loved Gabya for those gifts; but, alas, he passed few of them to our daughters, Sevet and Kokor. Instead they got his self-centeredness, his inability to bridle his hunger to possess everything that seemed even faintly desirable. And I see that in Elemak also, and so I hate and fear him as I came to hate and fear Gaballufix.

  If only the Oversoul had been just the teeniest bit fussier about whom she brought along on this journey.

  Then Rasa stopped in the middle of dressing herself and realized: I’m thinking of how selfish and controlling Elemak is, and yet I’m angry this morning because I’m not the one in charge here. Who is the controlling one! Perhaps if I had been deprived of real control as long as Elemak has, I’d be just as desperate to get it and keep it.

  But she knew that she would not. Rasa had never undercut her mother as long as she lived, and Elemak had already acted to thwart his father several times—to the point of almost killing Volemak’s youngest son.

  I must tell Volya what Elemak did, so that Volemak can make his decisions based on complete information. I would be a bad wife indeed if I didn’t give my husband good counsel, including telling him everything I know. He has always done the same for me.

  Rasa pushed aside the flap and stepped into the air trap, which was much hotter than the inside of the tent. Then, after closing the flap behind her, she parted the outer curtain and stepped out into the blazing sun. She felt herself immediately drenched in sweat.

  “Lady Rasa!” cried Dol in delight.

  “Dolya,” said Rasa. What, had Dol been waiting for Rasa to emerge? There was nothing productive for her to do? Rasa could not resist giving her a little dig. “Working hard?”

  “Oh, no, though I might as Well be, with this hot sun.”

  Well, at least Dol wasn’t a hypocrite ...

  “I volunteered to wait for you to come out of the tent, since Wetchik wouldn’t let anybody waken you, not even for breakfast.”

  It occurred to Rasa that she was a little hungry.

  “And Wetchik said that when you woke up you’d be starving, so I’m to take you to the kitchen tent. We keep everything locked up so the baboons don’t ever find it, or Elemak says we’d have no peace. They can’t ever learn to find food from us, or they’d probably follow us farther into the desert and then die.”

  So Dolya did absorb information from other people’s conversation. It was so hard to remember sometimes that she was quite a bright girl. It was the cuteness thing she did that made it almost impossible to give her credit for having any wit.

  “Well?” asked Dol.

  “Well what?”

  “You haven’t said a thing. Do you want to eat now, or shall I call everyone together to hear Wetchik’s dream?”

  “Dream?” asked Rasa.

  “He had a dream last night, from the Oversoul, and he wanted to tell us all together. But he didn’t want to waken you, so we all started doing other things, and I was supposed to watch for you.”

  Now Rasa was deeply embarrassed. It was a bad precedent for Volya to set, making everyone else get up and work while Rasa slept. She did not want to be the pampered wife of the ruler, she wanted to be a full participant in the community. Surely Volemak understood that.

  “Please, call everyone together. Point me to the kitchen tent first, of course. I’ll bring a little bread to the gathering.”

  She heard Dol as she wandered off, calling out at the top of her lungs—with full theatrical training in projecting her voice—“Aunt Rasa’s up now! Aunt Rasa’s up!”

  Rasa cringed inwardly. Why not announce to everybody exactly how late I slept in?

  She found the kitchen tent easily enough—it was the one with a stone oven outside, where Zdorab was baking bread.

  He looked up at her rather shamefacedly. “I must apologize, Lady Rasa. I never said I was a baker.”

  “But the bread smells wonderful,” said Rasa.

  “Smells, yes. I can do smells. You should catch a whiff of my favorite—I call it ‘burning fish.’”

  Rasa laughed. She liked this fellow. “You get fish from this stream?”

  “Your husband thought of doing some shore fishing down there.” He pointed toward where the stream flowed into the placid waters of the Scour Sea.

  “So you had some luck?”

  “Not really,” said Zdorab. “We caught fish, but they weren’t very good.”

  “Even the ones that didn’t g
et turned into your favorite smell . . .”

  “Even the ones we stewed. There just isn’t enough life on the land here. The fish would gather at the stream mouth if there were more organic material in the sediment being deposited by the stream.”

  “You’re a geologist?” asked Rasa, rather surprised.

  “A librarian, so I’m a little bit of everything, I guess,” said Zdorab. “I was trying to figure out why this place doesn’t have a permanent human settlement, and the reason came from the Index, some old maps from the last time there was a major culture in this area. They always grow up on the big river just over that mountain range.” He pointed east. “Right now there are still a couple of minor cities there. The reason they don’t use this spot is because there isn’t enough plantable land. And the river fails one year in five. That’s too often to maintain a steady population.”

  “What do the baboons do?” asked Rasa.

  “The Index doesn’t really track baboons,” said Zdorab.

  “I guess not,” said Rasa. “I guess the baboons will have to build their own Oversoul someday, eh?”

  “I guess.” He looked mildly puzzled. “It’d help if they’d just build their own latrine.”

  Rasa raised an eyebrow.

  “We have to keep an eye on them, so one of them doesn’t wander upstream of us and then foul our drinking water.”

  “Mm,” said Rasa. “That reminds me. I’m thirsty.”

  “And hungry too, I’ll bet,” said Zdorab. “Well, help yourself. Cool water and yesterday’s bread in the kitchen tent, locked up.”

  “Well, if it’s locked up ...”