Thendara House (9 page)

“Oh, merciful Goddess!”

“What is that, Doria? Not the dinner-bell already?”

“No” whispered Doria, “That bell is rung only when some woman comes to take refuge with us; sometimes it does not ring twice in a year, and now we have two newcomers in one day? Come, we must go down at once!”

She pulled Magda hastily toward the stairs and they ran down together. Magda, hurrying behind her, felt a curious little prickle which she had come to know as premonition;
this is something very important to me
… but dismissed it, as anxiety born of Doria’s excitement, and the stress of so many new things happening to her. Irmelin stood in the hallway, with Mother Lauria, and between them a frail-looking woman, bundled in heavy shawls and cumbered with heavy skirts. She stood swaying, clutching at the railing as if she were about to faint.

Mother Lauria looked about the women gathering quickly in the hall; many of the women Magda had seen last night at dinner, but she did not know their names. Then she turned to the fainting newcomer. “What do you ask here?” Somehow, Magda felt, the words had the force of ritual. “Have you come to seek refuge?‘’

The woman whispered faintly “Yes.”

“Do you ask only shelter, my sister? Or is your will to take the oath of a Renunciate?”

“The oath - ” the woman whispered. She swayed, and Mother Lauria gestured to her to sit down.

“You are ill; you need answer no questions at present, my sister.” She looked around at the women in the hallway, and her glance singled out Magda and Doria where they stood at the foot of the stairs.

“You two are new-come among us; you three will be together in training, should this woman take oath, so I choose you as her oath-sisters, and - ” She looked around, evidently searching for someone. At last she beckoned.

“Camilla n’ha Kyria,” she said, and Magda saw, with a curious sense of inevitability, the tall, thin
emmasca
who had witnessed her oath to Jaelle. “Camilla, you three take her away, cut her hair, make her ready to take the oath if she is able.”

Camilla came and put her arm around the strange woman, supporting the frail, swaying body. “Come with me, sister,” she said, “Here, lean on me - ” she spoke in the impersonal inflection, but her voice was kind. She suddenly saw Magda, and her face lighted. “Margali! Oath-sister, is it you? I thought you had gone to Neskaya! You must tell me all about it,” she said, “but later; for now we must help this woman. Here - ” she gestured, “put your arm under hers; she cannot walk - “

Magda put her arm around the apparently fainting woman, but the woman flinched and cried out, in a weak voice, drawing away from the touch. Camilla led her into a little room near Mother Lauria’s office, and lowered her into a soft chair.

“Have you been ill-used?” she asked, and took away the shawl, then cried out in dismay.

The woman’s dress - expensively cut, of richly dyed woolen cloth trimmed in fur - was cut to ribbons, and the blood had soaked through, turning the cloth to clotted black through which crimson still oozed.

Camilla whispered, “Avarra protect us! Who has done this to you?” But she did not wait for an answer. “Doria, run to the kitchen, bring wine and hot water and fresh towels! Then see if Marisela is in the house, or if she has gone out into the city to deliver a child somewhere. Margali, come here, help me get these things off her!”

Magda came, helping Camilla get off the cut and slashed tunic, gown, underlinen; they were all finely cut and embroidered with copper threads; she wore an expensive copper-filigree butterfly clasp in her fair hair. Magda stood by, helping and holding things, as Camilla bared the woman to the waist, sponged the dreadful cuts; what could possibly have inflicted them? The woman endured their ministrations without crying out, though they must have been hurting terribly; when they had done, Camilla put a light shift on her, tying the drawstrings loosely around her neck, and covered her with a warm robe. Doria came back, troubled, reporting that Marisela was not in the house.

“Then find Mother Millea,” Camilla ordered, “and Domna Fiona. She is a judge in the City Court, and we must make a sworn statement about this woman’s condition, so that we may legally give her shelter. She is not strong enough to take the oath; we must put her to bed, and have her nursed -

The woman struggled upright. “No,” she whispered, “I want to take the oath - to be here by right, not by charity - “

Magda whispered, more to herself than to anyone else, “But what has happened to her! What could have inflicted such wounds - ‘

Camilla’s face was like stone. “She has been beaten like an animal,” the
emmasca
said. “I have scars much like those. Child - ” she bent over the woman lying in the chair, “I know what it is to be ill-used. Margali - you will find scissors in the drawer of the table.” And as Magda put them into her hand, Camilla asked, “What is your name?”

“Keitha - ” the word was only a whisper.

“Keitha, the laws require that you must show your intent by cutting a single lock of your hair; if you have the strength to do this, I will do the rest for you.”

“Give me - the scissors.” She sounded resolute, but her fingers hardly had strength to grasp them. She struggled to get them into her hands. She grabbed a lock of her hair, which had been arranged in two braids, and fumbled to cut it; struggled hard with the scissors, but had not the strength to cut through the braid. She gestured, whispering “Please - “

At the gesture Camilla unraveled the braid, and Keitha snipped fiercely, chopping off two ragged handfuls of hair. “There!” she said wildly, tears starting from her eyes. “Now - let me take the oath - “

Camilla held a cup of wine to her lips. “As soon as you are strong enough, sister.”

“No!
Now
…” Keitha insisted; then her hands released the scissors, which slithered softly to the floor, and she fell back, unconscious, into Camilla’s arms.

Mother Lauria said quietly, “Take her upstairs,” and Magda, following Camilla’s soft command, helped Camilla to carry the unconscious woman up the stairway and into an empty room.

CHAPTER FOUR

The waterhole lay dark, oozing black mud and darker shadows; but behind the rocks, the crimson sun was rising. She was old enough to know what was happening on the other side of the fire, she was twelve years old, and in Shainsa a girl of twelve was old enough to be chained, old enough to be near at hand in the birthing rooms. But these women with unchained hands, these Amazons, they had sent her away as if she was only a child herself. Beyond the fire, in the growing sunrise, she could hear her mother’s voice, feel the pain thrusting through her own body like knives, see the carrion birds circling lower and lower as the sun rose; and now the sunlight was like the blood poured out on the sands, like the stabbing feel of knives and her mother’s anguish, pouring through her body and her mind…

Jaelle! Jaelle, it was worth it all, you are free, you are free… but her hands were chained, and she was struggling, screaming, crying out…

“Hush, love, hush…” and Peter was patiently untangling her flailing hands from the bedclothes, cradling her in his arms. “It’s only a nightmare, it’s all right - “

Only another nightmare. Another. God above, she’s been having them every night. I don’t know what to do for her.

Jaelle squirmed away from him, not quite sure why, only knowing that she did not want to be too close just now. She sought his face, frowning, troubled, for the hostility she could not find in his gentle voice.

“Kyril - ” she muttered. “No. For a moment I thought you - you were my cousin Kyril - “

He laughed softly. “That would give anybody nightmares, I guess. Here, count my fingers. Only five.” He pressed his hand against hers and she smiled faintly at the old joke between them. He was so like her cousin, Kyril Ardais, save for the six-fingered hands Kyril had inherited from his mother, Lady Rohana.

Kyril’s hands, fumbling about her all that summer, until she had finally, sobbing with wrath and humiliation, had to use on him the Amazon training which made a trained Renunciate almost impossible to dominate. A Renunciate, they used to say, can be killed, but never raped.

For Rohana’s sake she had not wanted to hurt him…

“Honey, are you all right?” Peter asked. “Should I go and get a Medic? You’ve been having these nightmares every night… how long is it now? Ten days, eleven?”

She tried to focus on his words. They seemed to have some strange echo that ached in the palms of her hands, reverberated in her sinuses. The edges of the room seemed to be outlined with fuzzy lights, swelling up and shrinking and swelling again to loom over her. Her eyes hurt, and she jumped up with a wavering surge of nausea, dashing for the bath. The retching spasms shattered the last remnants of dream; she could not remember now what she had been dreaming, except for a curious taste and smell of blood in her mouth. She swallowed the flat sickly water from the shower, trying in vain to rinse it away, and Peter, troubled, went into the refreshment console and dialled her some kind of cool drink. He held it to her lips.

“I
am
going to take you to a Medic tomorrow, love,” he said, watching her finish the drink, which bubbled and stung her lips; when she put it away he shook his head.

“Finish it, it will settle your stomach. Better?” He examined the headset on the pillow; somehow she had torn it loose in the dream. “There must be something wrong with the language program they gave you, or the D-alpha is out of synch - that can mess up your balance centers,” he mused, holding it. “Or maybe it just stirred up something in your subconscious. Take it up to Medic tomorrow, and ask them to adjust it on the EEC file they have for you.” He might, she thought distantly, just as well have been speaking in some language from another Galaxy; she didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t care. He held the earpiece to his temple, shrugged. “It sounds all right to me, but I’m no expert. Come on back to bed, sweetheart.”

“Oh, no,” she said, without thinking, “I’m not sleeping under that damned thing again!”

“But, love, it’s just a machine,” he said, “even if it is out of adjustment, it won’t really hurt you. Baby, don’t be unreasonable,” he added, his arm around her shoulders, “You’re not some ignorant native, from out in - oh, the Dry Towns - to get all shaky, just at a piece of machinery, are you?” He pulled her down on the pillow. “None of us could get along without the sleep-learner tapes.”

They lay down again, but Jaelle only dozed fitfully, trying to hear the soft words of the sleeplearner consciously, so that she would not sink again into the morass of nightmare. They had become constant; maybe there was something wrong with the machine? But the nightmares, she remembered, had started before she had brought home the tapes for the machine Piedro called a D-alpha corticator. She would have liked to blame it all on the machine, but she was afraid that was not possible.

Some time before the alarm was due to ring, he woke sleepily, moved it so it would not interrupt them, and began softly caressing her. Still more than half asleep, she yielded herself to this comfort which had become so central to her life and being; she let herself rise with him, as if flying above the world, soaring without gravity or bonds; held tightly in his arms, she shared the delight he knew in possessing her, binding her close with his passion. She had never been closer to him; she reached out blindly to be closer still, closer, seeking that last unknown which would actually merge them into one another’s mind and flesh…

My flesh. My woman. My son, immortality… mine, mine, mine…

It was not words. It was not feeling alone. It lay deeper than that, further into the base of the mind, at the very depths and foundation of the masculine self. Jaelle did not have the education to speak in the language of the Towers, about the layers of conscious and unconscious mind, masculine and feminine polarity; she could only sense it directly, deep in nerves long denied such awareness. She only knew that what was happening was making things come alive in her body and mind that were not sexual at all, and were quite at variance with what was going on. And some isolated, uncommitted fragment of herself rebelled, in words from the Amazon Oath:

I will give myself only in my own time and season… I will never earn my bread as the object of any man’s lust… I swear I will bear no child to any man for house or heritage, clan or inheritance, pride or posterity
…