The Call of Earth Page 0,87

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.

Chapter 6

SIX - WEDDINGS

THE DREAM OF THE RAVELER

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 J o , 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

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