“From what Viaka tells me, leaving’s not really an option. Ket’s defection has apparently caused a schism, and if Aketa gains
power, his supporters will wreak vengeance on Viaka and all his people. Blood sacrifice for offense to the true and sacred
king’s person…. Religion and politics! How could I of all men be so blind? I let my longings persuade me that we’d found a
rather primitive idyll. But what we’re in the middle of here is a factional and sexual competition among intelligent barbarians
who keep their pruning hooks and their swords extremely sharp.” Dalzul smiled suddenly, and his light eyes flashed. “They
are wonderful, these people. They are everything we lost with our literacy, our industry, our science. Directly sensual—utterly
passionate—primally real. I love them. If they want to make me their king, then by God I’ll put a basket of feathers on my
head and be their king! But before that, I’ve got to figure out how to handle Aketa and his crew. And the only key to Aketa
seems to be our moody Princess Ket. Whatever you can find out, tell me, Shan. I need your advice and your help.”
“You have it, sir,” Shan said, touched again. After Dalzul had left, he decided that what he should do was what Dalzul’s unexpected
male-heterosexual defensiveness
prevented him from doing: go ask advice and help of Forest and Riel.
He set off for their house. As he made his way through the marvelously noisy and aromatic market, he asked himself when he
had seen them last, and realized it had been several days. What had he been doing? He had been in the orchards. He had been
up on the mountain, on Iyananam, where there was a dynamo … where he had seen other cities…. The pruning hook was steel. How
did the Gaman make their steel? Did they have a foundry? Did they get it in trade? His mind was sluggishly, laboriously turning
over these matters as he came into the courtyard, where Forest sat on a cushion on the terrace, reading a book.
“Well,” she said. “A visitor from another planet!”
It had been quite a long time since he had been here—eight, ten days?
“Where’ve you been?” he asked, confused.
“Right here. Riel!” Forest called up to the balcony. Several heads looked over the carved railing, and the one with curly
hair said, “Shan! I’ll be right down!”
Riel arrived with a pot of tipu seeds, the ubiquitous munchy of Ganam. The three of them sat around on the terrace, half in
the sun and half out of it, and cracked seeds; typical anthropoids, Riel remarked. She greeted Shan with real warmth, and
yet she and Forest were unmistakably cautious: they watched him, they asked nothing, they waited to see … what? How long had
it been, then, since he had seen them? He felt a sudden tremor of unease, a missed beat so profound that he put his hands
flat on the warm sandstone, bracing himself. Was it an earthquake? Built between two sleepy volcanoes, the city shuddered
a little now and then, bits of clay fell off the walls, little orange tiles off the roofs…. Forest and Riel watched him. Nothing
was shaking, nothing was falling.
“Dalzul has run into some kind of problem in the palace,” he said.
“Has he,” said Forest in a perfectly neutral tone.
“A native claimant to the throne, a pretender or heir,
has turned up. And the princess is staying with him, now. But she still tells Dalzul that he’s to be king. If this pretender
gets power, apparently he threatens reprisals against all Viaka’s people, anybody who backed Dalzul. It’s just the kind of
sticky situation Dalzul was hoping to avoid.”
“And is matchless at resolving,” said Forest.
“I think he feels pretty much at an impasse. He doesn’t understand what role the princess is playing. I think that troubles
him most. I thought you might have some idea why, after more or less hurling herself into his arms, she’s gone off to stay
with his rival.”
“It’s Ket you’re talking about,” Riel said, cautious.
“Yes. He calls her the princess. That’s not what she is?”
“I don’t know what Dalzul means by the word. It has a lot of connotations. If the denotation is ‘a king’s daughter,’ then
it doesn’t fit. There is no king.”
“Not at present—”
“Not ever,” Forest said.
Shan suppressed a flash of anger. He was getting tired of being the half-wit child, and Forest could be abrasively gnomic.
“Look,” he said, “I—I’ve been sort of out of it. Bear with me. I thought their king was dead. And given Dalzul’s apparently
miraculous descent from heaven during the search for a new king, they saw him as divinely appointed, ‘the one who will hold
the scepter.’ Is that all wrong?”
“Divinely appointed seems to be right,” Riel said. “These are certainly sacred matters.” She hesitated and looked at Forest.
They worked as a team, Shan thought, but not, at the moment, a team that included him. What had become of the wonderful oneness?
“Who is this rival, this claimant?” Forest asked him.
“A man named Aketa.”
“Aketa!”
“You know him?”
Again the glance between the two; then Forest turned to face him and looked directly into his eyes. “Shan,” she said, “we
are seriously out of sync. I wonder
if we’re having the churten problem. The chaos experience you had on the
Shoby.”
“Here, now? When we’ve been here for days, weeks—”
“Where’s here?” Forest asked, serious and intent.
Shan slapped his hand on the flagstone. “Here! Now! In this courtyard of your house in Ganam! This is nothing like the chaos
experience. We’re sharing this—it’s coherent, it’s consonant, we’re here together! Eating tipu seeds!”
“I think so too,” Forest said, so gently that Shan realized she was trying to calm him, reassure him. “But we may be … reading
the experience quite differently.”
“People always do, everywhere,” he said rather desperately.
She had moved so that he could see more clearly the book she had been reading when he came. It was an ordinary bound book,
but they had brought no books with them on the
Galba,
a thick book on some kind of heavy brownish paper, hand-lettered, a Terran antique book from New Cairo Library, it was not
a book but a pillow, a brick, a basket, not a book, it was a book. In a strange writing. In a strange language. A book with
covers of carved wood, hinged with gold.
“What is that?” he asked almost inaudibly.
“The sacred history of the Cities Under Iyananam, we think,” Forest said.
“A book,” Riel said.
“They’re illiterate,” Shan said.
“Some of them are,” said Forest.
“Quite a lot of them are, actually,” said Riel. “But some of the merchants and the priests can read. Aketa gave us this. We’ve
been studying with him. He’s a marvelous teacher.”
“He’s a kind of scholar priest, we think,” said Forest. “There are these positions, we’re calling them priesthoods because
they’re basically sacred, but they’re really more like jobs, or vocations, callings. Very important to the Gaman, to the whole
structure of society, we think. They have to be filled; things go out of whack if they aren’t. And if you have the vocation,
the talent, you
go out of whack if you don’t do it, too. A lot of them are kind of occasional, like a person that officiates at an annual
festival, but some of them seem to be really demanding, and very prestigious. Most of them are for men. Our feeling is that
probably the way a man gets prestige is to fill one of the priesthoods.”
“But men run the whole city,” Shan protested.
“I don’t know,” Forest said, still with the uncharacteristic gentleness that told Shan he was not in full control. “We’d describe
it as a non-gender-dominant society. Not much division of labor on sexual lines. All kinds of marriages—polyandry may be the
most common, two or three husbands. A good many women are out of heterosexual circulation because they have homosexual group
marriages, the iyeha, three or four or more women. We haven’t found a male equivalent yet—”
“Anyhow,” said Riel, “Aketa is one of Ket’s husbands. His name means something like Ket’s-kin-first-husband. Kin, meaning
they’re in the same volcano lineage. He was down the valley in Sponta when we first arrived.”
“And he’s a priest, a high one, we think. Maybe because he’s Ket’s husband, and she’s certainly an important one. But most
of the really prestigious priesthoods seem to be for men. Probably to compensate for lack of childbearing.”
The anger rose up again in Shan. Who were these women to lecture him on gender and womb envy? Like a sea wave the hatred filled
him with salt bitterness, and sank away, and was gone. He sat with his fragile sisters in the sunlight on the stone, and looked
at the heavy, impossible book open on Forest’s lap.
After a long time he said, “What does it say?”
“I only know a word here and there. Aketa wanted me to have it for a while. He’s been teaching us. Mostly I look at the pictures.
Like a baby.” She showed him the small, brightly painted, gilded picture on the open page: men in wonderful robes and headdresses,
dancing, under the purple slopes of Iyananam.
“Dalzul thought they were preliterate,” he said. “He has to see this.”
“He has seen it,” Riel said.
“But—” Shan began, and was silent.
“Long long ago on Terra,” Riel said, “one of the first anthropologists took a man from a tiny, remote, isolated Arctic tribe
to a huge city, New York City. The thing that most impressed this very intelligent tribesman about New York City were the
knobs on the bottom posts of staircases. He studied them with deep interest. He wasn’t interested in the vast buildings, the
streets full of crowds, the machines.…”
“We wonder if the churten problem centers not on impressions only, but expectations,” Forest said. “We make sense of the world
intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it;
we filter out most of what our senses report. We’re conscious only of what we need to be or want to be conscious of. In churten,
the universe dissolves. As we come out, we reconstruct it—frantically. Grabbing at things we recognize. And once one part
of it is there, the rest gets built on that.”
“I say ‘I,’“ said Riel, “and an infinite number of sentences could follow. But the next word begins to build the immutable
syntax. ‘I want—’ By the last word of the sentence, there may be no choice at all. And also, you can only use words you know.”
“That’s how we came out of the chaos experience on the
Shoby,”
Shan said. His head had begun suddenly to ache, a painful, irregular throb at the temples. “We talked. We constructed the
syntax of the experience. We told our story.”
“And tried very hard to tell it truly,” Forest said.
After a pause, pressing the pressure points on his temples, Shan said, “You’re saying that Dalzul has been lying?”
“No. But is he telling the Ganam story or the Dalzul story? The childlike, simple people acclaiming him king, the beautiful
princess offering herself… “
“But she did—”
“It’s her job. Her vocation. She’s one of these priests, an important one. Her title is Anam. Dalzul translated it princess.
We think it means earth. The earth, the ground, the world. She is Ganam’s earth, receiving the stranger in honor. But there’s
more to it—this reciprocal function, which Dalzul interprets as kingship. They simply don’t have kings. It must be some kind
of priesthood role as Anam’s mate. Not Ket’s husband, but her mate when she’s Anam. But we don’t know. We don’t know what
responsibility he’s taken on.”
“And we may be inventing just as much of it as Dalzul is,” Riel said. “How can we be sure?”
“If we have you back to compare notes with, it’ll be a big relief,” said Forest. “We need you.”
So does he, Shan thought. He needs my help, they need my help. What help have I to give? I don’t know where I am. I know nothing
about this place. I know the stone is warm and rough under the palm of my hand.
I know these two women are sympathetic, intelligent, trying to be honest.
I know Dalzul is a great man, not a foolish egoist, not a liar.
I know the stone is rough, the sun is warm, the shadow cool. I know the slight, sweet taste of tipu seeds, the crunch between
the teeth.
I know that when he was thirty, Dalzul was worshiped as God. No matter how he disavowed that worship, it must have changed
him. Growing old, he would remember what it was to be a king….
“Do we know anything at all about this priesthood he’s supposed to fill, then?” he asked harshly.
“The key word seems to be ‘todok,’ stick or staff or scepter. Todoghay, the one who holds the scepter, is the title. Dalzul
got that right. It does sound like a king. But we don’t think it means ruling people.”
“Day-to-day decisions are made by the councils,” Riel said. “The priests educate and lead ceremony and—keep the city in spiritual
balance?”
“Sometimes, possibly, by blood sacrifice,” Forest
said. “We don’t know what they’ve asked him to do! But it does seem he’d better find out.”
After a while Shan sighed. “I feel like a fool,” he said.
“Because you fell in love with Dalzul?” Forest’s black eyes gazed straight into his. “I honor you for it. But I think he needs
your help.”
When he left, walking slowly, he felt Forest and Riel watch him go, felt their affectionate concern following him, staying
with him.
He headed back for the big market square. We must tell our story together, he told himself. But the words were hollow.
I must listen, he thought. Not talk, not tell. Be still.
He listened as he walked in the streets of Ganam. He tried to look, to see with his eyes, to feel, to be in his own skin in
this world, in this world, itself. Not his world, not Dalzul’s, or Forest’s or Riel’s, but this world as it was in its recalcitrant
and irreducible earth and stone and clay, its dry bright air, its breathing bodies and thinking minds. A vendor was calling
wares in a brief musical phrase, five beats, tataBANaba, and an equal pause, and the call again, sweet and endless. A woman
passed him and Shan saw her, saw her absolutely for a moment: short, with muscular arms and hands, a preoccupied look on her
wide face with its thousand tiny wrinkles etched by the sun on the pottery smoothness of the skin. She strode past him, purposeful,
not noticing him, and was gone. She left behind her an indubitable sense of being. Of being herself. Unconstructed, unreadable,
unreachable. The other. Not his to understand.