Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 (31 page)

 
          
"A
calculated risk," she said to Cendri. "She is
persuasive,
she might after all have persuaded the Council to see matters her way. But if
she had done so I could have gained nothing by staying there." Again the
weary sigh. "I must think what to do." She leaned her head against
the cushions and closed her eyes, and no one spoke on the ride back to the
Residence.

 
          
As
they alighted from the vehicle, Lialla put her arm around her mother.

 
          
"Vaniya,
dearest Mother," she entreated, "
will
you
not eat something and take some rest? We are all in your hands now; you must
preserve your strength for the difficult days which will come."

 
          
Vaniya
stroked her daughter's cheek indulgently, but she shook her head.

 
          
"No,
my dear, there are more serious things on my mind than food and sleep. I must
consult with those who are wiser than I. All of you, I beg you, go to
bed." But she stretched her hand to Cendri and said, "Stay with me
for a little while, Scholar Dame."

 
          
She
rarely used Cendri's title; that she had done so now indicated to Cendri—and,
Cendri thought, to the other women—that she was not rejecting her daughters, on
a personal level, for a stranger, but that she wished to speak with Cendri as
representative of the Unity, of University. Cendri followed her into the great,
deserted dining-hall. Vaniya lowered herself on to a cushion, sat with her head
leaning against another. After a time she said to Cendri, "Believe me,
Cendri, I am not ambitious. My sister and rival
is
a
good administrator and a worthy and honest woman; I say this in spite of her
clumsy attempt to befool us all today. She truly believes—and I feel this is
tragic, it bespeaks so much of the poverty of her mind and heart—that there is
nothing beyond what she can see and feel. I would willingly turn the mundane
administration of the government over to her. She is younger than I, and, I
think, stronger and
more fit
to rule in the secular
duties assigned to a High Matriarch. If it were only this, I would step down
today and spend my declining years surrounded by my granddaughters and
fosterlings. But I cannot sit by and say nothing while she robs our spiritual
life of its meaning. Fit she may be for Matriarch; as Priestess she has proven
herself unfit, not only by her actions of today, but by her attitude over all
the years. She seems not fully aware that without vision and awareness of the
things which are beyond material well-being, the soul and spirit of humanity
dies." A long silence, and for a moment Cendri thought the woman,
exhausted, had fallen into sleep. Then she said, "It is this, I think,
which has made so many of the worlds ruled by men intolerable to our society;
that they rested on material well-being, and gave no thought to the spirit and
the soul of their people. The Goddess knows, I am eager for their physical
well-being; I know there have been priesthoods where a pretended concern for
spiritual wealth has been used to defraud mankind—and I say mankind
deliberately, for no woman will allow such a spiritual death—to defraud mankind
of material comforts and allow riches to fall into the hands of the powerful.
And so one of the major precepts of the Matriarchate is that the spiritual and
the material well-being of our women go hand in hand, always, and this is why
the High Matriarch has also been High Priestess; to remind the woman who holds this
dual office that material comforts without spiritual riches are barren of
benefit, and that spiritual worth without due attention to the bodies of our
sisters is a lie and a sham. I fear that Mahala wishes to separate them, to
destroy the whole ethical basis of the Matriarchate, and I am afraid; but she
will not do it while I live, Cendri."

 
          
Cendri
said, "And you cannot produce the true ring and robe?" This time
Vaniya's sigh seemed ripped from the very depths of her being.

 
          
"I
cannot. Even Maret's far-seeing is silent on this. May the Goddess forgive
me,
I too have had doubts like Mahala's. Perhaps indeed once
Rezali had put off her suffering flesh she has no further thought for her
daughters left motherless in this world—or," she added with a ghost of her
old grin, "it is superstitious nonsense to believe the dead concern
themselves with the fate of the living. Perhaps the ancient foremothers in
their wisdom felt that the woman who could seek out and engage the finest
clairvoyants was best fitted to rule over us."

 
          
Cendri
had never believed in survival after death, but had seen extra-sensory
perception and clairvoyance proven again and again;
that
issue was no
longer in doubt, and so Vaniya's conjecture seemed a very likely idea.

 
          
Vaniya
rose, abruptly. "Will you come with me, Cendri, while I seek the council
of those who are wiser than I?"

 
          
Cendri
looked at her in blank astonishment.
"I, Vaniya?"

 
          
"Mahala
has accused me of ignorance and superstition, says that I am making our world
ridiculous before the scholars from University. I want you, who are one of
those, to see for yourself that it is no mere superstition which sends me to
seek the aid of those at We-were-guided; will you come with me, my alien
daughter?" She held out her hands to Cendri, and the younger woman,
astonished, yet touched by this appeal, clasped them.

 
          
"Of course, Vaniya."

 
          
Silently,
Vaniya went around the big room, taking up a warm cloak against the chill of
the damp night; gave one to Cendri. She took a torch in her hand, and they went
out through the damp garden.

 
          
A
thick sea-fog had drifted in, and the garden was thick with white mist. Cendri
could not see more than a few feet beyond her face, but Vaniya moved unerringly
along thefamiliar paths, toward the shore. As they followed the path, now
familiar to Cendri, and began slowly to ascend the long hill that led to the
ruins, Cendri recalled the first night in Vaniya's house, when she had stood at
her upper window, watching the procession winding into the ruins.

 
          
Vaniya
seemed to know every step of the way. As they climbed, they came up above the
mist, and Cendri, looking down, saw it lying, like a thick white blanket, along
the shore, flowing and drifting in the moonlight. Above them, clear in the
light of the growing moons, lay the ruins; dark, massive, strange, and as she
moved silently along the canyons of the dead city, Cendri shivered.

 
          
Vaniya
looked at the moons, their pale gibbous faces floating silently above the dark
spires of the immeasurably old buildings. She said in a low voice, "The
highest of our festivals is upon us; it frightens me, sometimes, to think that
there might be no priestess to bless our rites." She turned to Cendri in
the dark, reaching for the younger woman's hand. She said, and her plump
fingers felt cold, "I am not an ignorant woman, Cendri; my mind knows as
well as yours that the rites are holy because the minds and hearts of our
women, and our men, make them so, and it would be no word of mine, nor of
Mahala's, which makes them sacred. Children would be conceived and born, the
crops would grow, all things would go on in order, no matter who performs the
rites, or even if they are not performed at all. I am not the superstitious
ninny Mahala thinks me—Cendri, my child, it was I who piloted the ship which
bore us from Persephone to this world! I was a young woman then, I had no
thought that I would ever hold any office, far less this highest of offices. It
was Mahala who always sought for the power of leadership, and I was content
that she should have it, so long as she bore in mind what our people needed.
But—Cendri—even though the world would go on without the blessing of the rites,
our people need them. We need all things done decently and in order, and a
people react as they have been taught. Every year since we came from
Persephone, our lives have been structured according to the world we found. As
on our mother world we were structured to the turn of the seasons, planting and
reaping and sowing, here we are structured to the turn of the tides, the rise
and fall of the sea. The priestesses do not make this happen. I do not believe
that even when the mass of folk were ignorant anyone believed that it was the
word of the priestesses which made all this happen, but it is their word which
gives license or restraint. I know what happens to a people
which
believes it is responsible to no one except themselves, and their own whim and
will. Yes, if we wished, we could change our society to one based not on the
will of the Goddess and the cycles of nature, but on our own will, strongly
enforced by laws which the women have made for themselves. Such laws are
tyranny, always; we live more content under the gentle hand of nature, by the
name of the Goddess, than under laws which we have devised by ourselves and
must enforce by fear and threat of punishments. I think Mahala feels this would
suffice, but I have seen how the laws made by man at last reach a point where
crime is not regarded except whether or not the appropriate punishment is
enforced."

 
          
Cendri
nodded, slowly. A government ruled by custom and tradition, without crime and
without rebellion, and without need of law or enforcement. She did not know if
she would care for such a world, but the problem of crime and enforcement was
an enormous one on every world in the Unity. The women of the Matriarchate had
solved it in their own way, which was, by and large, quite successful. They
had, at least, a right to complete their experiment without interference from
the Unity.

 
          
Vaniya
spread her cloak on the top of the flight of steps which led into the open
square leading down into the ruins of the spaceship which had brought them
there. She sat down, inviting Cendri to sit beside her. She said, "I
piloted the ship that brought us here to
Isis
, Cendri. I was a young woman then, I had no
children. I had been chosen for education by the Mother Rezali, and had learned
a good deal about the workings of the Universe. And so I, and half a dozen
others,
were
entrusted with the ship, while the others
were drugged to insensibility—you are too young to remember that in those days
the drives were less endurable by a person in waking state, and all except the
most necessary personnel were kept under sedation."

 
          
The
technical language sounded strange on Vaniya's lips. She went on, her voice
quiet and thoughtful in the moonlit darkness, her
face a pale
large blob rather like
the pale moons in the sky.

 
          
"I
was alone during much of
all that
long trip; I had a
great deal of time to think, about the world we had left, the world to which we
would go. And at last our ship—there it lies below us," she gestured,
"was floating in orbit around this world, and I looked down on the strange
planet below, wrapped in its clouds, its oceans moved by unknown storms and
quakes and tidal waves, and I was afraid. I was afraid, Cendri, for all I knew
of the mechanics of the Universe, and for all the education I had received, and
for all my belief in the society we had built on Persephone, against the
general trend of the Unity. I was filled with terror and with doubt. Would it
not be better for us to return and submit ourselves to the laws which the
people of the Unity had made for mankind? I even wondered, and doubted the
Matriarchate. Were men and women truly so different, that the laws made by men
could not be enforced for women too, and give women freedom enough to do as we
would? Should we not return, and work for more of a place for women
within
the
Unity, rather than removing ourselves so completely from its entire structure?
So I pondered, while I looked down at our new planet below us, and I prayed,
though I was not a religious woman then. I knew that we would need all the help
we could get, whether from ourselves, or from some force greater than we were.
And then, Cendri, I was answered."

 
          
"Answered,
Vaniya?"

 
          
"Answered, my child.
By those who
dwell here, whom you call Builders.
They spoke to me, as they still
speak to any woman who will come and kneel before them and seek their counsel.
They reassured me, and quieted my doubts. They guided the ship here, and they
proved to me—" her voice was shaking with intensity, "that our way of
life, the Matriarchate, was what we believed, ordained of old before men had
seized power from the women."

 
          
Cendri
felt a curious cold prickle running up and down her spine. She whispered,
"Proved to you, Vaniya? How did they prove such a thing to you?"