The Saga of the Renunciates (76 page)

Camilla yawned, covering her mouth with a narrow hand. “We must be away to the Guild House,” she said. “The moons are setting, and you and Keitha, child, must be indoors by dawn.”

She chuckled. “I could stay out as late as I wished—but by now my only desire is for my comfortable bed.”

The owners of the wineshop were now unobtrusively removing every bench as soon as it was vacant, stacking them, eager to call it a night. The Guardsmen who had been dancing, finding their seats gone, wandered away down the street. The group of women were still sharing a final pitcher of wine. Rafaella came back to where Magda sat with Camilla and Keitha—Marisela was exchanging a final word with a young man, and ended by kissing him in a motherly way on the cheek, so Magda supposed he must be a nephew or something of that kind. Rafaella’s face was flushed, her hair mussed, the laces of her tunic undone; she bent over Camilla and whispered to her, and Camilla reached up and patted her cheek.

“Enjoy yourself,
breda
. But take care.”

Rafaella smiled—she was a little drunk too, Magda realized— and went away, arms enlaced with the man who had been holding her. Keitha’s eyes were as wide as saucers. Janetta leaned over from the next bench and said, “Bold creature! Such indecent ways cast shame on all Renunciates; they will come to think us no better than harlots! I wish we were still in the ancient days when no Renunciate might lie with a man, or her sisters would cast her out!”

“Oh, hush,” said Marisela, coming back to the table. “Then we were denounced as lovers of women, seducers of decent wives and daughters, luring their children astray because we had none of our own! All women cannot live as you do, Janetta, and no one has appointed you keeper of Rafi’s conscience.”

“At least she could do such things in decent privacy, not before half the city of Thendara,” Janetta complained, and Marisela laughed, glancing around the all-but-deserted square.

“I think they are trying to get us to leave. But we have paid for the wine, and I for one will sit here and finish it.” She raised her glass. “It is easy for you to talk, Janetta, you have never been tempted in that way, and for the love of Evanda spare me your next speech, the one about the woman who lies with a man being a traitor to her sisters, I have heard it all too often, and I believe it no more than I did when first I heard it. I care not whether you, or anyone else, lies down with men, women, or consenting
cralmacs
, so that I need not hear them argue about it when I am trying to sleep—or finish my drink!” She raised her glass and drank.

But I agree with Janetta now more than I ever did
, Magda thought.
Yet here I sit beside a woman who has been my lover, and for whose sake I refused a man this night
. For that matter, Camilla had laughed and blessed Rafaella, and why not? She picked up her own glass, then heard a voice say, “Margali—” and looked up into the eyes of Peter Haldane.

He was wearing Darkovan clothing; no one but herself, surely, would have known him for the young Terran among the delegation at Festival ball in Comyn Castle this night.

Camilla said to Magda, “Finish your drink, child, I shall be back at once,” and with Marisela and Mother Lauria, wandered away to the latrines at the back of the wineshop garden. Peter sank down across from Magda. She had never seen him so drunk.

She said in the language of Caer Donn, “Piedro, is this wise?”

“Wise be damned,” he said. “I’ve been fighting for my life. Montray was so damned determined I’d be on that ship pulling out just about now for the Alpha Colony, up for discipline before Head Center Intelligence. I finally went over his head, got Alessandro Li to pull rank on him, and Cholayna—where the hell were you, Mag? It was your problem, too. And what were you up to with Monty?”

She said, “I’m sorry you were having trouble, Peter.” She was not, definitely not going to discuss her relationship with Monty here, nor with him. “But it is all right, then?”

“Till he starts in on me again. God, I’d give ten years of my life to get that man shipped off Darkover; I swear, if I live, I’ll do it. Even his own son knows—” he broke off. “But what are you doing here, Mag? In
this
place?” His horrified eyes fell on the last remaining table except for theirs, where a couple of the men were still drunkenly pawing one another and the effeminate who had danced with Marisela was asleep with his head on the table. Magda noted, with sadness and some pity, that he wore a woman’s butterfly-clasp in his long hair.

“Maggie, don’t you know what this place is?”

She shook her head. He told her. His outrage seemed misplaced.

“At least no one will trouble women alone here. And anyhow,
you’re
here.”

“Looking for you,” he said. “They told me some women from the Guild House were still here drinking, dancing—wanted to talk to you,” he said with drunken earnestness. He saw Camilla’s drink on the table and absentmindedly picked it up and drank it. It seemed to thicken his speech immediately. “Need you,” he said “Need you to talk to Jaelle. You’re her friend. My friend too. Good friends. Both need you, both of us. Need you to talk to her, tell her what it means. Be a good Terran wife. Back us up. She’s having a baby.” he informed Magda with drunken seriousness. “My baby, got to get her straightened out so she can help me instead of fighting me all the time. Got to get in good with all the higher-ups so we can bring up our baby here. My son. Only she won’t help me the right way. She doesn’t know how to handle Terran bureaucrats. You always handled old Montray just fine. Maggie, you talk to her, you tell her—”

She stared at him, not believing what she had heard him say.

“You,” she said, “have got to be right out of your mind. Peter! You want me—
me
!—to talk to Jaelle, and tell her how you want her to act as your wife? I never heard such a thing in my life!”

“But you know the kind of trap I’m in, how I need it—”

“Handle it the way I did,” she said sharply. “Tell them all to go to hell. If you want to let them push you around, don’t come crying to me!”

He grabbed her hand, held it, staring into her eyes with drunken intensity.

“Never should have let you go,” he said thickly. “Mistake of a lifetime Nobody like you, Maggie. You—you got to be the best there is. Only now there’s Jaelle. I love her, if only she’d settle down and put her weight behind me, do what she ought to do. And now there’s our kid. My kid. F’the sake of that kid, I got to stick to her. Can’t quit. Can’t bring the kid up like some damned native, out in the outback of nowhere—wish
you’d
had our kid, Maggie, you’d have done it right… you got to help us, Mag. My friend. Jaelle’s friend. Talk to her, Maggie.”

“Peter,” she said helplessly, “you’re drunk; you don’t know how outrageous that sounds. Go home, Peter, and sober up. Things will look different when you’re sober, when you’ve had some sleep—”

“But you’ve got to
listen
to me!” He grabbed her, pulled her close to him. “I got to make you understand just what a bind I’m in—”

“
Bredhiya
,” said Camilla’s gentle voice behind her, “is this man annoying you?”

Camilla, tall and somehow formidable, was towering over the slightly built Peter, who was swaying on his feet. Of course Camilla had spoken in the intimate mode which gave the words only one possible meaning. Camilla, too, was more than a little drunk. Peter looked at them both with horror and sudden dismay.

“Damn,” he said, “now I understand. Never saw it before. No wonder you wouldn’t stay with me, no wonder… and I thought you’d come here because you didn’t understand. Of course you wouldn’t be the one to talk to Jaelle. What the hell would you know about it?” He made a gesture of disgust and revulsion. “So
that
was why you left me, went into the Guild House. Of course you couldn’t be a decent wife to me, to any man—”

She said angrily, “How dare you speak to me that way?”

“How dare
you
speak to any decent person? You?” He wrinkled his nose in wrath. “If I catch you anywhere near Jaelle,” he said in drunken wrath, “I’ll—I’ll break your neck. You stay away from my wife, hear me, I don’t want you corrupting her!”

Camilla, of course, had not understood a word of all this, but she could tell perfectly well that he was being offensive. She said, not knowing that Peter could understand—he had, after all, been speaking the last few sentences in Terran Standard— “
Bredhiya
, shall I get rid of him for you?”

“You—” Peter snarled. It was a gutter insult, and Camilla’s hand closed on her knife-hilt. It flashed.

“No!” Magda cried out. “He’s drunk—he doesn’t know—”

One of the men at the other table lurched over, closing his hand on Peter’s shoulder He said with thick earnestness, “No, no, no sense picking a fight here at Festival, brother, no sense talking to the likes of them.” He gestured at Camilla and added, “I’m the one you came down here to find, brother. Come on over here with us, we’re all friends over here.” He put his arms around Peter, breathing heavy camaraderie, wine-laden, into his face. “C’mon, brother, it’s late and I’m still all alone, come on, leave all them bitches out of it. Let them go off by themselves if they want to, who needs
them
?” he shoved his own tankard in Peter’s face. “Drink up, little brother, drink up.”

Peter could not push the man’s hand away; he swallowed, coughed on the strong liquor, sank down at the other table, staring up in bewilderment at the man.

“Look, I didn’ come down here lookin’ for you— ” he muttered.

“Aw, come on,” said the man, staring down intensely into Peter’s flushed face, “what else you come down here for? I know you Terrans, you can’t find what you’re lookin” for on
your
side of the wall, can you? None of our brothers over there, got to come down here in the city, we get a lot of you fellows… I know all about it, here, have another drink—”

Oh, poor Peter
! Magda thought, but somehow she could not resist an unholy glee. Camilla said in an undertone, gathering up their possessions, “Come along, Margali, it’s better than a duel at this hour.”

Magda stared in dismay at Peter, who had sunk down, semiconscious, too drunk even to express his anger. He slid down, slowly, under the table, and the man who had urged him to drink knelt over him.

“Ah,” he urged drunkenly, “don’t go passing out on me now, little brother, thats no way to treat a pal…”

Magda did not know whether to laugh or cry, but Camilla urged her gently away. She could not help wondering what would happen to Peter when he woke up there… would he get back to the Terran Zone with his virtue intact?

Camilla put her arm around Magda’s waist as they walked down the street. “I shall be glad to get home to our bed,” she said, yawning, “I am sorry I am too drunk and weary to end the night as is fitting for Midsummer… that is no way to treat you at Festival,
bredhiya
. …”

Magda flushed, snuggling against Camilla’s arm round her waist. Through all the aggravations of this evening she remembered the lovemaking of this afternoon, amazed at herself. In Camilla’s arms she had discovered another whole new self, a Magda previously unknown to her. She remembered, with a wave of heat, how she had cried out to Camilla in surprise and wonder and delight. Body and mind were all alive with a sudden hunger to know that delight and that wonder again. Why had she never guessed?

“That Terranan… how did you come to know him?” Camilla demanded, suddenly suspicious.

“He is—Jaelle’s freemate,” Magda said, then fell silent before the dawning suspicion in Camilla’s eye:; but the older woman said no more. The streets were already filled with greyish-pink light. At the door of the Guild House she stopped, touched Camilla’s hand.

“I swear you shall know everything some day, oath-sister.” she said, using the word in the most intimate form. “Not now, Camilla, I beg you, give me a little time.”

Camilla stopped in the street and put her arms around Magda, holding her close. “You are my sister, and my beloved,” she said. “You are sworn to me and I to you. Tell me what you wish, whenever you wish, and in your own time, my precious. I trust you.” She kissed Magda, and suddenly leaned forward and picked her up.

“Come love,” she said, “we must be inside before the last moon sets, that is our law.” She carried her up the steps and inside the house.

What a bitch I am, Magda thought. I’ve played hell with two men today—three if you count Peter—and now I’m using Camilla’s love and devotion to give myself time—time to think what I can say to her.

But she was overcome with such a wave of fatigue that she could hardly stand on her feet. Without protest she let Camilla lead her up the stairs.

Toward morning, Magda began to dream. She was living in Married Personnel Quarters in the HQ skyscraper, but somehow all the showers and bath sections had been redesigned, and women from the Guild House were living in little doorless cubicles all along the corridors, so that she wandered in them for hours trying to find a place for a shower unobserved; and through all this she could not allow them to know that she was pregnant nor that she had had a mark tattooed on her back. She was not sure what it said, but it was something like the “Product of the Terran Empire” mark which went on goods imported to fully developed planets and prohibited on Class B Undeveloped ones like Darkover. She kept trying to find Jaelle in the confusing quarters, because Jaelle knew Terran writing and could read it to her. It had been done while she was asleep and somehow they had made a mistake while she slept, and tattooed Jaelle with the mark too. And she was pregnant, and she kept thinking how pleased Peter would be, but what would Jaelle think? If she could only find Peter, they could all straighten it out, but he was nowhere to be found in the miles and miles of tiled corridor, because all the Quarters had been redesigned for Darkovan living on the HQ base and he was out somewhere redesigning the Guild House for Terrans who wanted to explore living on Darkover in native style. “But that would make it no better than a hotel,” she heard someone say querulously in her mind, and then she and Jaelle were trying to hold up the roof of the Guild House while Marisela and someone else whose face she could not see… was it the small freckled Amazon who had bandaged her feet on the fire lines?… could search through a long telescope for
Dom
Ann’dra Carr. Only, though she could see the ground lenses clearly, sparkling blue like Lady Rohana’s matrix, the telescope was invisible and kept slipping out of their hands as if it had been greased with glycerine. Then someone was calling her, and Bethany from the Coordinator’s office was saying, “Margali? Oh, I think she slept last night in Camilla’s room…” and she woke, to hear those very words spoken aloud, followed by a knock on the door.

“Margali? Margali? Camilla, is she there?”

Magda woke, blinking, grasping at absurd troubled remnants of the dream. Camilla, sitting up in bed, was swearing under her breath as she hunted for her stockings.

“What is it? Who wants me?”

“Mother Lauria, downstairs,” said Irmelin. “There is a visitor and only you can talk to her, for some reason or other—a woman who has had some terrible skin disease and is all discolored, dark as a cralmac’s hide…”

Cholayna
, Magda thought, and jumped up, grabbing some clothes and running to splash her face with the icy water.
What in the devil can she want here? And is Jaelle with her
?

Jaelle was not; Cholayna had come alone, and was talking amiably with Mother Lauria in the Stranger’s Room. When Magda came in, Mother Lauria said, “I will leave you alone for a moment; but I hope you will both join me in my office in a little while. Margali, you have not breakfasted; shall I send for tea and rolls in my office? Mestra, may I offer you breakfast?”

Cholayna smiled and nodded. “I had forgotten it was a holiday here and that some of you would still be sleeping,” she said, as Mother Lauria went away, “and they told me they could not find you in your room, they thought for a minute that you were sleeping out; some of the women slept out of the House on Festival Night.” Abruptly and with a flash of memory Magda remembered Rafaella with her hair mussed and her tunic open, showing her breasts, going off with the Guardsman. How was she better than that? She had spent yesterday morning in Monty’s arms and this morning they had had to look for her in Camilla’s bed. Nonsense; she was a grown woman, it was nothing to Cholayna where she spent her night, or with whom. Magda braced herself, remembering that she had resigned last night. She said bluntly, “Why have you come here? None of it is anything to do with me any more. No, I mean it this time, Cholayna, you can’t talk me out of it the way you did when you first came here. What do I owe you now?”

“Not to me,” Cholayna said, “but to your sisters, and perhaps to yourself. You have a very rare opportunity, Margali.” She said the name in Darkovan, and Magda was astonished. But still distrustful.

“You tell me that, Cholayna? I have heard it all before, and it has brought me nothing but grief—always between two worlds and never at home in either—” Astonished, Magda discovered that her eyes were prickling as if she were about to cry, and she stopped herself, appalled, wondering, what on earth do I have to cry about? I’m
mad
, not unhappy! And then such a surge of misery flooded up within her that she clamped her teeth over the pain, knowing that if she shed a single tear she would cry and cry until she melted like Alice into a pool of tears. She said, tightly, against it, “Everyone who has told me that has wanted to use me one way or the other. When can I be simply myself, do what is good for myself and not for a hundred other people?”

“When you are in your grave,” Cholayna said gently, “No one alive lives only for herself. We are all part of one another, one way or another, and anyone who does any action which is not for the common good is little more than a murderer.”

“I am not interested in your religion!” Magda almost shouted.

“That is not religion.” The other woman’s dark face held an eerie calm. “Philosophy perhaps. It is a simple fact; no one can do anything without either helping or harming everyone with whom she has any contact of any kind. Only an animal does not take that into account.” Her face softened. “You are very dear to me, Magda. I have never had children; I decided many years ago that they were not for me since I could not rear them among my own people and I would not bring them up haphazardly, crammed into the niches and crannies of a life roving around from world to world. I hoped I had found in you something that women find in their daughters—a sense of continuity—” She stopped, and Magda, ready to throw a rude or angry voice back into the woman’s face, was silenced.

She thought,
If I betray Cholayna, then I am false to the real spirit of the Amazon Oath
, and wondered what in the world had brought that into her mind.

She asked sullenly, “What do you want of me, Cholayna?”

Cholayna reached for her hand, then sighed and did not touch her. “At the moment? Only to take no irrevocable decisions. I could have killed Montray; I am not sure it would not have been a good thing if I did, but alas, the habit of non-violence is too strong—and he is not even good to eat!” The joke was not a good one, but she laughed nervously anyway.

“If you feel you must go out of our reach for a time, at least help me to settle, with Lauria, which of your sisters shall work with the Headquarters, learning our ways for the benefit of both worlds.”

Part of Magda was angry at Cholayna for presuming to use the special speech of the Amazons, for speaking about her sisters and her duty to them, but there was a curious feel in the room, as if Cholayna were not speaking only in words but somehow communicating with her on a deeper level. She knew things which the older woman had not told her, would never dream of telling her, had probably never told anyone alive, things of which Cholayna was not fully aware herself, and it terrified Magda to know this much about any human being. She thought, she is wide open, without knowing clearly what she meant by the words, and so am I. She sensed the weariness in the long, lean face and body, the pain from the alien sun, the sense that it was very dark here, the longing for the brighter warmth and light of her own world; Cholayna was living in what to her was an eerie half-light. She knew that Cholayna was potentially a lover of women, as much or more than Camilla, but because of the worlds where her life had been spent, it had never surfaced into her consciousness. But this was why she had spent her life in the teaching and training of younger women, in a half-formed hope that one day some one of them would give her, she hardly knew what herself, some returned warmth which she identified with the warmth of her own sun which had been so long denied her. And she did not clearly know this herself, and yet Magda knew it, and her scalp crinkled and icy fingers of dread ran down her back one by one, she did not know what this meant and could not guess. It was like the night she had wakened in Jaelle’s arms and the other woman, drawn perhaps by that flooding awareness between them, had kissed her; only this time it could not be dismissed as a random sexual impulse, it was deeper than that. A thing of the spirit? Magda was not comfortable with such ideas and she suspected that Cholayna would be appalled by them.

Yet the emotion was there and she could neither identify nor restrain it. As for rebuffing it, it would have been as unthinkable to slap Camilla when she proffered her love and devotion. Magda lowered her head so that Choiayna would not see the tears in her eyes and said ungraciously, fighting whatever it was that was making her want to cry, “Well, I will do that, of course, I don’t want to leave any loose ends. Mother Lauria is waiting for us.”

In Mother Lauria’s office the older woman had sent for breakfast; there was a platter of hot bread, smoking and sliced, another plate of the cold sliced Festival cake, raisins studded all through it, left over from the day before; and a huge steaming pitcher of the roasted-grain drink the Amazons drank in lieu of wine or beer. There was also a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a dish of soft curd cheese. Impelled by a feeling she would never have considered until this morning, Magda said quickly, “You will not want to eat the eggs, Cholayna, since they once had life, but everything else you can eat freely.”

“Thank you for warning me, Magda,” said Cholayna imper-turbably. “I do not expect the world to be arranged for my convenience; I have, perhaps, become too dependent on man-made foods. Perhaps the Alphan scruples are foolish anyway. It was a wise sage who said that it is not what goes into our mouths that defiles us, but what comes forth from them; lies and cruelty and hatred…” She helped herself to the cheese, and took a piece of the cake, and Magda saw her turning it thoughtfully in her mouth.

“Have your people such a saying?” Mother Lauria asked. “Some women in this house make a point of eating only grains and fruits; yet their sage wrote that everything which shares this world with us has life, even to the rocks; and all things prey and feed upon one another and come at last to feed the lowest life of all. So that we should eat reverently of whatever comes to us, bearing in mind that some life was sacrificed that we might live and that one day we will feed life in our turn. Ah, well, another philosopher has written that the morning after Festival makes every drunkard a philosopher!”

She laughed and passed a jar of fruit conserve to Magda, who spread some on her bread, wishing she could explain her feelings in terms of a simple hangover!

“Well, we must decide,” said Lauria briskly, finishing the tea in her mug. “I feel that Marisela should be the first.”

“I agree, and I doubt not she will teach the Terrans as much as she learns from them,”said Cholayna, “but can she be spared here?”

“Probably not, but she must have this chance all the same,” said Mother Lauria. “Keitha can do her work, and later have her turn. I would like to send Janetta—Margali, are you as sleepy as that? Should I send you back to bed?”

“Oh, no,” Magda said quickly. It had seemed to her for a moment that Marisela was standing in a corner of the office listening to their deliberations and at the same time she knew Marisela was upstairs in her bed, still half asleep, wondering how long she could enjoy this delicious sleep before someone came in search of a midwife and roused her. She was not alone in bed, and Magda recoiled, not wanting to know this about Marisela either. She said hastily, “Janetta is too rigid, she could not, I think, accept Terran ways.”

“She is more intelligent than you think her,” Mother Lauria said. “There is little here to challenge her mind; I had hoped to send her to Arilinn, but she would never make a midwife, she’s not sympathetic enough to women. She herself has decided she wishes for no children, having a certain distaste for the preliminaries. Yet there is no other training available to her; Nevarsin will not train female healer-priests. She is extremely clever, too clever for most of the things ordinary women, even Amazons, are able to do. She has no interest in soldiering, nor has she the physical strength for it. I think she would be very valuable to you; and what she learns would be priceless to us as well.”

Magda still felt skeptical, and Mother Lauria continued “You do not know Janni’s story. She came from a village where her mother was left widowed with seven children, and had no other skills to keep them, so she became a harlot. She tried to train Janetta to her trade before the girl was twelve. For a year or two Janni was too young and timid to resist; then she ran away to us.”

Camilla had said it once; every Renunciate has her own story and every story is a tragedy.
How have I earned my place among them
?

“There is a young woman called Gwennis,” Mother Lauria said. “She is at Nevarsin now, working with some scrolls in the keeping of the brothers—you do not know her, Margali—”

“I do not know her well enough to recommend her for this,” Magda said, “but she is my oath-sister, after all—she was in the band led by Jaelle.”

“I think she would be a good choice,” Mother Lauria said. “The very fact that she volunteered for that work would perhaps make her good at this. And perhaps Byrna; she has an inquiring mind—not to mention that she is still pining tor her child and this would be a blessing, give her something new to think about. Cholayna—” she used the Terran woman’s name hesitantly, “have you any particular ideas about what age these women should be?”

“I do not think it matters,” Cholayna said. “They should, perhaps, not be too young. Your people, I have heard, are trusted with responsibility at an earlier age than ours; but if the Empire people thought them mere children, they might not take them seriously enough, as independent adults. Not younger than twenty, I should think.”