Califia's Daughters (11 page)

“Come along, Miss Isaacs, enough beauty sleep. Time to prettify yourself for the ball.”

         

The prettification took somewhat longer than Dian had reckoned. They were late for the beginning speeches and missed Judith's invocation and half of Kirsten's talk. The acoustics in the big wooden hall were surprisingly good, even without a finished roof, and from her place on the stage Kirsten's thin voice carried to all corners. As Dian and Isaac came up on the porch, they could hear her clearly through the doors and the open windows.

“. . . a number of bad years, it is true. There were years without babies, years when we had to kill the milk cows for food and gather acorns for our bread. There were years when late frosts took the seeds and early frosts took the crops. One terrible year we had no wine whatsoever, except for medicinal use.” A light wave of laughter flickered through her listeners. “Come to think of it, even that was a blessing in disguise, because the wine tasted so bad nobody would admit to an illness that whole year.” Chuckles rippled through the hall, and the old woman smiled down at them. “We give thanks to God for the fine weather, for the blessings of healthy bodies and strong muscles and clever minds. We give thanks for another year of protection from enemies, from pestilence, from disease. We give thanks for this good land and its riches that give us life.” She held a moment of silence, broken only by baby noises from the back, and then her quavering voice began slowly to sing, to be joined quickly by over two hundred others:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,

Praise God all creatures here below,

Praise God above, ye heavenly host,

Praise Father, Mother, Holy Ghost, Amen.

Old Kirsten's face crinkled in a loving smile, touching each person with the love and approval of ages past. “You have worked hard, my children. Tonight you must play hard. You will excuse me if I don't join in all the dances?”

She moved to leave the stage, and cheers erupted. It took several minutes before Ling, the master of ceremonies, could be heard.

“Just a couple of things,” she shouted, repeating the phrase until relative silence fell. “Thank you. Just a couple of things. Dinner's nearly ready, and after everyone's been served we'll have music and the kids with their readings and this year's play. After that, it's dancing ‘til the cows come home, or go out, I suppose. Does the patient first want to work up an appetite? One dance before we eat?”

A roar of approval again smothered her voice but gradually submitted to her raised hand. “One more request, from your medical personnel. Please don't take off your shoes to dance—we haven't managed to finish the floors yet, and I for one don't want to spend the night in the infirmary digging out splinters.” The laughter was lost in hoots of appreciation as the musicians and dance caller climbed up onto the stage and arranged their chairs. The caller would use a megaphone later in the evening, but for now she stood up and bellowed.

“Take your partners for the Virginia reel!”

The “men,” some with carefully painted mustaches and all wearing something resembling a necktie, lined up facing the “women,” who were in a variety of flounces and frills. Isaac's furry, heavily muscled torso strained against a lacy pink maternity negligee, one of the few things Dian could find that he could breathe in without ripping the seams. Susanna had trapped him as he came in the door and attached several pink bows in his beard and hair, and as Dian looked down the line she saw that Judith's brother, Peter, had a beard carefully plaited and tied in a dozen delicate crimson ribbons, to match the lace on his skirt. Two years before he had also been a “woman” and appeared in a stunning emerald number, but this outfit had obviously come under Susanna's influence, because she was dressed as his twin. The loud voice from the stage called for the “ladies” to curtsy to their partners, and the lines of dresses bobbed down and up, led by husky Peter's deep knee dip. Dian was not the only one to collapse onto the floor, holding her sides and risking splinters with the tears running down her face as the caller shouted for order.

The Virginia reel was a rout before it had begun, and in good-natured disgust the caller sent everyone out to the food.

The legs of the trestle tables pressed into the ground under their burden. Juicy roast pig, bloody beef, fried chicken, tamales, crepes, and cheese tarts, three kinds of egg, five vegetables (the ears of corn dripping with butter), eight kinds of salad, and more desserts than even eighteen-year-old Salvador could sample.

Afterward, those who had not cooked did the cleaning up, and Dian, up to her elbows in suds, listened to Ling's string quartet, the village band, and the smaller school band. She slipped in next to Teddy in time for the last of the recitations, and then came the annual school play, written each year on some classical theme or current event in the life of the village. Two ten-year-olds carried out the title board, turned it around, and Dian sank down slowly into her chair. It read:

THE BONDING OF ISAAC
A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS

The giggles and glances had just begun to subside when Teddy, beginning reader that he was, piped up.

“That's your name, Daddy!”

Dian glanced at Isaac and saw that he had gone bright red; they did not look at each other until it was over.

A wooden wagon pulled onto the stage, and from it appeared an immensely hairy figure at least eight feet tall (she had seen the children practicing hard with stilts over the last month, but had thought nothing of it) who pounded his chest (to the accompaniment of a drum offstage), flung his immense horse-tail beard over his shoulder, and shouted gruffly at the assembled womenfolk (one of whom appeared to be pregnant with quintuplets), “Take me to your she-der!” In act two he proceeded to eat everything in sight and carry entire (papier-mâché) trees in one hand, followed about by an equally hairy and rather bewildered toddler. (As the child was being led across the stage by his elder sister for the third time, Teddy finally got the joke and tugged at Isaac's pink skirt with an excited, “Is that me, Daddy? Is that me?”) In the third act, a last-minute addition had the hairy giant splitting three arrows in a bull's-eye before pounding his chest and carrying off a fainting female with a puzzled but amiable Culum on a rope. Dian and Isaac laughed politely and clapped, and wished fervently for the dancing to begin.

“ON ACCOUNT OF YOU,
THE ISLAND WILL CHANGE THE STYLE OF LIVING IT HAS OBSERVED FOR A VERY LONG TIME.”

N
INE

M
IDNIGHT CAME, AND WENT.
M
OUNDS OF BLANKET-DRAPED
children lay like so many uneven boulders set down against the walls. The original beer kegs were long gone, the current one was running low, and about an hour ago jugs of a remarkably powerful spirit had begun to circulate. The band had got its second wind a short while before, no small thanks to the jug beneath the fiddler's chair, and those men and women who were still upright and coordinating were being whipped into a positive frenzy of sweating activity.

It was a polka at the moment, and Dian was steering Isaac through the thinning crowd. The pink ribbons had long since fallen from his hair, the seams of his dress were giving way, and neither of them was entirely sober. It took Dian a moment to grasp that the second, beardless Isaac hanging on her arm was in fact Susanna, urgent and intense. Dian stopped, and the odd trio promptly became the stationary target for careering pairs. She hustled her two partners into a quieter corner.

“What's the matter, Suze? Is your mother—”

“No, there's a fight going on outside. I think you should stop it.”

Dian strode out of the Hall with Susanna and Isaac on her heels, in their wake a handful of others who had about reached their fill of the dance. It was immediately apparent what Susanna had meant: under half a dozen lamps hung from a tree, a fight circle had been set up. It held, almost inevitably, Sonja and Laine. Dian pushed her way through the excited onlookers. The fight had obviously been under way for a good few minutes, and although neither of the women was drunk enough to have it affect her coordination, both were sufficiently anesthetized that they had no inclination to pull their punches.

They were using the dowel “knives,” Dian saw, but the dark stain on the tips was not entirely paint, and both women, stripped to the waist, were bruised and bleeding and grinning ferociously at each other in the uneven light.

“All right, that's enough for tonight,” Dian said firmly. Neither Sonja nor Laine seemed to hear her but continued circling each other until Laine feinted left and then rushed right. Sonja dodged and kicked out, and Laine's roll was awkward. She staggered to her feet and turned toward Sonja, dowel held out.

“That's all,” Dian ordered more loudly. Laine's eyes flicked to her, then back to her opponent.

“Oh, back off, Dian. Harvest Day's supposed to be fun, isn't it?” She jabbed at Sonja playfully, a blow that would have ruptured something had it connected. “One day in the year you can enjoy yourself.” Another jab, easily avoided. “Old stick-in-the-mud Dian (jab), let's-keep-things-tidy Dian (jab), never-take-a-risk Dian (jab).” Her tongue flicked out, savoring the taste of the blood on her split lip, her eyes locked on Sonja's, and she bared her teeth again. “First time I find me a girl doesn't mind playing rough, old Mama Dian comes along. ‘Time to put your toys away, children, before you get yourselves dirty (jab).' Why don't you just piss off, Dian? Go play with your doggies (jab). Your new pretty boy (jab). Just leave me for Christ sakes alone.”

Throughout this speech Sonja's guard had dropped more and more, as none of the jabs were seriously meant, and when she glanced up on this last word to see how Dian was taking it, Laine hurled herself forward. It might have succeeded had not Sonja's hand, stick firmly grasped, come around with the full force of her body behind it and met Laine's forehead with a solid crack. Laine collapsed as instantly as a scissored marionette, tumbling into a limp and sprawling tangle on the grass.

The first thought that flashed through Dian's mind was,
That's both of my right-hand women down,
and the second was,
I'm going to have to shoot her like a mad dog,
before the necessities of action brought her to attention, made her stop the crowd's
(crowd
?
Where did all these people come from
?
)
automatic surge forward and fill her lungs to bellow hugely for “LING!”

“I'm here,” said the voice practically at her elbow, and the healer bent over Laine, pulling back her eyelids, feeling at her wrist. “Will somebody get the stretcher and a blanket from the Hall? We seem to be making a habit of this,” she commented emotionlessly.

“Keep her here,” Dian ordered, to no one in particular but everyone in general, and helped carry the stretcher down the hill. No one needed to ask which “her” she meant.

In half an hour Dian was back, Culum locked securely away, Ling's phrases “mild concussion” and “hell of a headache” ringing in her ears. Sonja had regained the sleek black suit she'd been wearing and stood leaning against the tree, ignoring the people around her as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do at half past one in the morning. She did look up at Dian's reappearance on the scene.

“Is she . . . ?”

“No thanks to you. Why are you doing this to us? It wasn't enough to break Jeri's leg? Won't you be satisfied until you kill off all my best women? What do you want?” she demanded ferociously, and Sonja, whose face had grown more closed with every word, stood silently with her chin up and a half sneer on her lips, as superior and unreachable as a resentful teenager and every bit as infuriating.

At the sight of that incongruously adolescent expression, Dian's hot anger suddenly shifted, becoming cold as the water under ice. Her blue eyes narrowed, but her shoulders and fists relaxed and her mouth slid into a grin of her own—but where Sonja's expression was a shout of rebellion, Dian's bore the lazy pleasure of a hungry shark.

Without taking her eyes off Sonja, Dian shrugged off her tweed jacket, tugged the absurd scrap of orange silk from her collar, and thrust both garments at the nearest bystander. “Come on, girl,” she coaxed in a voice that trickled fear down many of the nearby spines, “you've been picking fights for two weeks. Well, now you've got one. Why settle for second best when you can have me?” She took two steps forward, that ominous grin plastered on her face, then shot out one swift hand to slap a stinging and contemptuous blow onto Sonja's cheek.

It was no fight; Sonja was no match for a roused Dian. She tried, but Dian was her better in skill and experience and had two inches' reach on her. For every blow that Dian failed to dodge or block, three or four hit Sonja, all of them slaps, all to the face, and increasingly hard. Sonja's nose was soon bleeding, her lips broken, her cheeks flaming even in the lamplight, her eyes watering from the blows and from tears of frustration and rage at the scornful precision of Dian's blows and her refusal to fight properly, and every time Sonja tried to rush forward and seize hold, Dian either faded away or tripped her, and always there came the contemptuous slaps, the pleased shark's grin.

Dian found no relief in the violence, no satisfaction in the blood that had begun to flow freely down Sonja's chin and into her mouth. Each sting across her open palm served only to deepen her fury, each jolt along her arm fed the frustration and rage she hadn't known was there; by the time Sonja had been rendered to a swaying figure trying only to keep her arms in front of her face, all Dian wanted was to reduce her to a pulp. One final, brutal backhand dumped the woman to the ground, and Dian stepped forward.

“Dian!”

The shocked exclamation hit her like a bucket of cold water, and the half-begun movement of Dian's foot stuttered to a halt. She pivoted, and there stood Judith in her night robe, huge of belly, huger of eyes, her mouth pulled back in a grimace of disbelief, her head shaking a slow and jerky denial: disapproval personified. She held Dian with her eyes for a long and breathless minute, Dian slowly becoming aware of others looking on as well. She closed her eyes briefly and a hard shudder ran through her; when her eyes opened she had regained control. Chest heaving with exertion, she drew her hunting knife from its sheath and dropped to one knee beside the half-stunned Sonja.

“Dian,” Judith demanded, but this time Dian ignored her sister. She placed the honed point of her knife under Sonja's chin and forced the woman to raise her head, to meet Dian's eyes through her own single unswollen one. A new rivulet of blood started down the woman's rigid throat. Neither of them noticed.

“Do I have your attention now, you stupid bitch?” said Dian in a voice like Culum's growl, low, focused, and crawling with threat. Sonja blinked her white-surrounded eye in affirmative, did not move her head. “It's decision time. Not next week, not tomorrow, now. What will it be: go, or stay?”

A faint motion of the lower lip bared Sonja's teeth a fraction, but even without this slight movement Dian could read the answer in the woman's eye. She was taken aback but hesitated only an instant before bringing her face down so close she could feel Sonja's breath.

“Stay it is. But you hear me, bitch, and I'm only saying this once. I'm here, I'm gone, it doesn't matter. I will always,
always,
” she repeated, poking the knife a fraction in emphasis so that the trickle of blood thickened, “be back. And if I find out that you've stepped one inch out of line—one inch—I'm going to cut off your fucking head.” She waited to see the
yes
in the woman's eyes before she withdrew the knife. She stood over Sonja, wiping the knife on her trousers and fighting the urge to kick the woman. Instead, she retrieved her jacket and necktie and walked away into the night.

Once away and safely hidden by the dark, she stopped by the horse trough, trembling. It seemed a very long time before the reaction passed, and when it did it left her feeling ill and so tired she wanted to weep. She bent down to wash the blood off her face, oozing from a blow to her eyebrow. She took out her handkerchief and pressed it to the cut and sat on the edge of the trough. After a few minutes she became aware that there was someone in the darkness behind her. Yes; she had expected her sister to come.

“I'm sorry they woke you up,” she said. There was no answer.

She turned and saw, not Judith, but Teddy, small and solitary behind a post of the Hall's porch. Half of his face was visible in the lamplight from the window behind; it looked as empty as a marble statue. As empty as it had the first days after his arrival. She turned back deliberately to the trough and washed her face again, ran her fingers through her hair, and went to sit on the other side of the post from where the child stood. Blood continued to seep down next to her eye, and she held the handkerchief back up to her face. She couldn't see him, hidden on the other side of the massive post, but a minute later a feather touch brushed across her damp hair, then retreated.

“Nobody got hurt, Teddy,” she said into the night. “Laine will be fine in a day or two, Sonja's bruises will be all gone in a week, and my cut barely hurts at all. Faces bleed easily, it's nothing to worry about. I'm afraid I spoiled the shirt, though.” She leaned back to look around the post at him, taking the cloth from her face for a minute to reassure him. “See?” He seemed to have lost his words, and Dian cursed herself furiously.

“You saw it all, didn't you?” He nodded. “It's scary when grown-ups get really angry, isn't it?”

Ah, yes, that was the crux of it. He looked away, looked back, studied the dark stains down her white shirtfront.

“Oh, Christ. Teddy, I'm sorry. You're right. I was mad at Sonja because she hurt two of my friends. They're two people the Valley depends on when I'm gone, but it was wrong of me to hurt her in return. Tomorrow I will go and apologize to her. I promise. Is that better?”

He nodded, and then to her astonishment he stepped around the post and put his arms around her. She folded herself about him and held him close. Many long minutes later, she looked up, and saw Judith and Isaac standing in a patch of light spilling from the Hall, watching. After a long moment, she nodded ruefully at their wordless comments, and stood up with Teddy in her arms to join them.

LAINE

The next day the Valley was restless and ill-humored and generally hung over, and chores were tackled with grim determination. Dian went to the clinic three times to check on Laine before she found her at the door, arguing with Ling, an argument Laine won by the simple expedient of walking down the steps and away. When Dian fell in beside her, Laine glanced down at Dian's knee, which looked naked without Culum attached to it.

“How's the head?” she asked Laine.

“It's been better.”

“Eyes focusing okay?”

“They've been better, too. What do you want, Dian?”

“We've got to have a little talk.”

“Last time we had a little talk, you ended up kicking me out of your bed.”

“I didn't kick you—”

“Di, my head feels like crap. What do you want to talk about that can't wait?”

“I wanted to say I was sorry.”

“For what?
You
didn't knock me silly.”

“For riding your ass like I do.”

Laine had no comeback for that.

“Laine, you're good, and you work like the devil, and I never tell you how much I appreciate that. Half the time I treat you like some raw beginner. You've got every right to stand up to me.”

“I know I do,” Laine replied, but the assertion was more automatic than heartfelt. “Was that all?”

“No. About Sonja.”

“What's left of her.” She bristled again.

“Oh, come on, Laine, I didn't hurt her that bad.”

“You would've, if it hadn't been for Judith.”

“Yeah, okay, I was pissed at her.”

“Hey, I'm the one she hit! I'm the one who should've been pissed.”

“So why weren't you?”

“Because I was unconscious, for shit's sake!”

The two woman stared at each other; Dian's eyebrows rose, making her look so remarkably like Culum that Laine began to laugh. Dian joined in, but Laine stopped, putting her hand to her forehead.