The Shattered Chain (21 page)

What’s the matter with me?
She felt him take her shoulder, twisting it cruelly; she could not keep back a cry of pain.

“Now let’s not have any more nonsense, precious. Just be a good little girl and we won’t hurt you, no, we won’t hurt you at all,” he muttered, running his hot hands down across her breasts. She backhanded him, hard, across the mouth; rearing back in drunken rage, he struck her a blow that flung her, half stunned, to the floor. “Damn it, you bitch, none of that! Hold her, Rannar—”

She fought and struggled, gasping, silent, afraid if she opened her mouth that some word of Terran Standard would escape her. The men clustered around, shouting encouragement to the men who held her. Magda had been trained in unarmed combat since her sixteenth year; she tried to catch her breath, to find the strength to strike effectively, but she found herself held too hard.

Why can’t I defend myself? How did I get this far?
Suddenly, as a drowning man’s whole life is said to flash before his eyes, Magda knew the answer.
I’ve psyched myself, for years, into behaving like a normal Darkovan girl. And they’re too timid to fight
—
they expect men to protect them. I’m conditioned to that, and it canceled out my Terran agent’s training. …

She hardly knew it when she started to scream. …

Chapter

NINE

Suddenly a light flared in Magda’s eyes; a torch came down, blinding the man who held her. He reared back, yelling. Then there were half a dozen knives, it seemed, bared and leveled at Magda’s captors.

“Let her go,” said a low, level voice; Magda saw Jaelle’s face above the torch. The man who held her backed away; Magda pushed the other man aside, pulled herself free and scrambled to her feet, clutching her torn tunic around her. The mustachioed man yelled something obscene, rushed forward, grabbing up his sword; there was a blur of blades, a clash, a howl, and the man fell, clutching at a slash across his thighs. Magda saw blood on Jaelle’s knife. One of the women helped Magda to gather her torn clothing around her, while the men clustered together, muttering.

“Look out,” Gwennis said sharply; the women fell back, braced, knives like a wall in front of them. Magda, thrust unregarded to one side, watched the slow, grim advance of the bandits, the unflinching barricade of the women’s knives. Everything seemed sharply focused as she stood there waiting for the clash: the rough, menacing faces of the men, the equally unyielding faces of the women; the torchlight, the dark shadowed beams, even the patterns of the stone-flagged floor, seemed etched forever on her memory. Later she never knew how long that taut, sharply focused
waiting
lasted—it felt like hours, days—for the inevitable rush, clash of swords, tension drawn tighter, tighter. She felt like shrieking,
Oh, don’t, don’t, I didn’t mean …
and physically raised her hands to cover her mouth so that’ she would
not
cry out.

Then one of the men swore roughly, dropped the point of his sword. “The hell with all this. Not worth it. Put your knives down, girls. Truce?”

None of the women moved, but the bandit leader—the big, black-bearded man who had held Magda down—gestured to his men, and one by one they lowered their swords. When the last one was down, the women slowly relaxed, letting the points of their knives drop toward the stone floor.

Jaelle said, “You have broken shelter-truce by laying hands on one of ours. If I reported this at a patrol station you could all be outlawed, with any hand free to kill you for three years.” The strange beauty of her face in the torchlight, copper hair haloed around her pale features, made a strange contrast to her hard words. The leader said drunkenly, “You wouldn’t do that, would you, mestra
?
We weren’t hurting her none.”

“We could all see how much pleasure she took in your advances,” Jaelle said dryly.

The mustachioed man said thickly, “Aft; hell, she came to
us;
how’d we know she wasn’t looking for a bit of fun?” The wound across his thighs still oozed blood, but Magda could see now that it was no more than half an inch deep: painful perhaps, and humiliating, but not disabling or dangerous. Jaelle wasn’t even trying to kill him.

Jaelle swung around to Magda; her eyes glinted like green fire by torchlight, and Magda felt sick with shame and dread.
I am responsible for all this.

“Did you come to them of your free will? Were you looking, as he says, for a bit of fun?”

Magda whispered, “No. No, I didn’t.” She could hardly hear herself speak.

“Then”—the Amazon leader’s voice was a whiplash that cut—”what were you doing that they could think so?”

Magda opened her mouth to say, “I wanted to hear what they were talking about,” but stopped before a single word could get out. Camilla had warned her: spying on men was not proper behavior for an Amazon. She could not disgrace these women, who had protected her without any obligation to do so, by bringing shame or contempt on them. They had welcomed her to their meal and fireside; dressed as an Amazon, she had violated one of their strictest codes of behavior. Now she knew she must lie, quickly and well, a lie that would not involve the Amazons in her misbehavior. She said shakily, “I—I had a cramp, and I turned the wrong way in the darkness, looking for the privy. When I saw I was wrong I tried to get away before they saw me, and I slipped and fell.”

“You see?” said Jaelle to the men. Her eyes flicked Magda’s face like the blow of a whip.

She knows I’m lying, of course. But she knows why.
It was all the amends she could make.

Jaelle said, “You have broken shelter-truce, for which the penalty is three years’ outlawry. And you have attempted to rape a woman here, for which
our
penalty is castration. Think yourselves lucky that your man did not succeed. And now gather up all that is yours, and be gone. By law we need not share shelter with outlaws and rapists.”

Blackbeard said, and the drunken dismay in his voice was actually comical, “In this storm,
mestra?”

“You should have listened to the voice of the storm before you broke shelter-truce,” Jaelle said, and her face was like stone. “Outside, like the dirty animals you are! And if one of you sets foot over the threshold while we are still here, I swear, I will cut out his
cuyones
and roast them over the fire there!” She gestured with her knife. “Out! No more talk now! Out!”

Fumbling, drunken, muttering obscenely, they gathered up their belongings; grumbling and angry, but before the gleam of the women’s knives, their massed, indomitable
waiting,
they went. When the door had closed behind the last of them, Jaelle said, “Rayna, Gwennis, go and be sure they do not disturb our horses and gear.” She handed the torch to Sherna, and came slowly toward Magda. “You. Are you hurt? Did they do anything worse than tear your clothes and maul you?”

“No.” Magda’s teeth were chattering with shock and reaction.
I’ve been false to everything. To the Amazons, by behaving immodestly before men. To the mission I came on, by not finding out what I risked so much to know.
She felt sick, shamed, exhausted with the violence of her emotions.

Jaelle put an arm around Magda, supporting her. The action was not kind, but contemptuous. She said, “Give her some wine before she finishes this by falling in a faint at our feet!”

She shoved Magda down on a bench; Camilla held a cup to her lips. Magda pushed it away. “I don’t want—”

“Drink it, damn you!” Camilla forced the cup against her mouth; Magda gulped, choked, swallowed again. Camilla said viciously, “You! I warned you, you bitch! Who let you out of the Guild-house in this state, with no notion of how to behave? If they had not all been as drunk as monks at midwinter-feast, it would have come to a fight, and we could all have been raped, or killed. You deserve to be beaten and sent back to the Guild-house!”

Sherna had built up the fire again; the women came in from the barn, and Rayna said, “They have gone; good riddance. I hope they freeze in the storm.”

Jaelle was standing with her back to the fire, looking formidable. Camilla shoved Magda toward her.

“Jaelle, you are our chosen leader; it is for you to deal with her. If you say so, I will beat her bloody for you; it would be a pleasure!”

Jaelle said at last: “Let her go, Camilla; if I decide she should be beaten, I can do it myself. Well,” she said to Magda, “what have you to say for yourself?”

It’s not over yet. I’ve got to go on bluffing.
She said, with a spurt of defiance. “You are not
my
chosen leader. Do I owe
you
an explanation of my conduct?”

Jaelle said angrily, “You could have involved us all in your stupidity—or your wantonness, whatever it was! What is one of our first basic rules? Never get yourself
into
anything you can’t get yourself out of again! No one forces a woman into danger; but having taken a risk, you should be able to meet it. Now you have reinforced one of the old dirty stories about us, that we fight only in wolf packs and never meet our enemies fairly! Yes, damn you, I think you owe me an explanation; not me alone—all of us.”

That was fair enough. She said at last, truthfully, “I heard a part of what they were saying; and it seemed to me that it bore on the business that brought me into these hills. I felt I had to hear it.”

Jaelle considered that for a moment, frowning. Magda noticed, incongruously, something she had not seen until that very moment; Jaelle, standing there so secure and confident, was wearing nothing but her underwear. They all were. And somewhere at the back of her mind, the trained anthropologist, never off duty, was making notes:
So that’s what Free Amazons wear for underwear.

Old Camilla’s voice was sharp. “Don’t listen to a word she says, Jaelle. Men’s boots, with a knife in them? And who let her out of the Guild-house in this shape, to disgrace us all? Any girl from the Guild-house, even a girl of fifteen, would know how to defend herself against rape, even unweaponed. There is something wrong here!”

“Yes, very wrong,” said Jaelle. “Someone has behaved irresponsibly, allowing her to go about alone before she knew how to behave. You shame whoever took your oath,” she said to Magda. “Who was she? Name her to us; she is responsible for your conduct!”

God help me, now I’m in for it! Well, the woman is dead, so Rohana told me, and it won’t involve any living person in trouble.
She said, “I took the oath at the hands of Kindra n’ha Mhari.”

“You lie!” Jaelle raised her arm and struck Magda a blow that made her head ring. She slapped her again and again across the face. “You lie, you bitch,” she said, trembling. “Kindra n’ha Mhari was my foster-mother; I dwelt with her seven years before her death, and every one of her oath-daughters is known to me by face and name! How dare you slander a dead woman? You lie, lie,
lie!”

Magda’s head was pounding with the pain of the blows. What now?
What now?

Old Camilla thrust her face at Magda; she was white and shaking. She said, “If you were a man, I would call challenge upon you. Kindra n’ha Mhari took me in when I was alone and desperate; I have been a member of her band for thirty years, and I loved her as a twin sister! I don’t know who or what you are, that you think you can misuse her name, but you will not do so again! Rayna, Gwennis, get her saddlebags; we will see if there is something in them to give us a clue to this filthy bitch of an impostor!”

Rayna got down and started to go through Magda’s belongings by torchlight. Finally she pulled out the safe-conduct, handed it to Jaelle.

“It bears the Lady Rohana’s name and seal. A forgery, no doubt, but you had better see it, Jaelle.”

Jaelle turned it curiously in her hands, held it closer to the fire to see better. “Light the lantern, Rayna; we need light for whatever is going to happen,” she said. “I cannot read in this murk.” When the lantern was lighted she stood examining it for some time and finally said, “It is not a forgery; I know my kinswoman’s handwriting too well for that. And the seal is genuine.” She read aloud: “ … Call upon all those who owe loyalty to the Domain of Ardais to give such aid as is in their power …”