Two to Conquer (38 page)

midwives report children being born without arms or legs or eyes, cleft palates, backbone sticking through the skin at their butts, things you don’t see twice in a year and there are
dozens
of them—got to be some connection! And men and women dying of thinned blood—and the worst of it is, it’s
still
dangerous to ride there. I suspect the land will be blasted for years, maybe a generation or two! There’s too much sorcery about!”

How, Paul wondered, had they managed, by mind-power, to make radioactive dust? For what Bard had described was certainly some kind of radiation product. Well, if
laran
could do the other things he knew it could do, it should be no very great trick to break down molecules into their component atoms, or to combine them into heavy radioactive elements.

He said wryly, “And to
that
kind of
laran
I should certainly not be immune!”

“No, I shouldn’t think so. Your mind may be immune, but your body’s no different from anyone else’s.

But there are kinds of
laran
to which you would be immune and I’m not; and so I have a task for you.

Serrais’s main strength is broken. I heard today that the Aillards, after the bombing of Hali, have sworn to the Compact, which means that all those lands down south on the plains of Valeron, twelve or

thirteen kingdoms in all, will be ready for the taking. And so I have a task for you.” He frowned, staring at the floor. “I want you to go to the Lake of Silence and bring back Carlina. It is guarded by sorcery, but you won’t mind that. You can get through their defenses and ignore their illusions, and kidnap her, and bring her here.”

Paul asked, “Who is Carlina?” But he knew the answer before Bard spoke it.

“My wife.”

Chapter Four

Dawn was breaking over the Lake of Silence, and on the Holy Isle a long procession of women, each robed in black, each with a dark mantle covering her head and the sickle-shaped knife of the priestess hanging from her girdle, wound slowly down along the shore, from the beehive-shaped temple toward the houses where they dwelt.

The priestess Liriel, who had, in the world, been known as Carlina, daughter of King Ardrin, walked silently among them, a part of her mind still hearing the morning prayer;

“Thy night, Mother Avarra, gives way unto dawn and brightness of day. But unto thy darkness, O

Mother, all things must one day return. As we do thy works of mercy in the light let us never forget that all light must vanish and only thy darkness remain at last…”

But as they turned into the large wattle-and-daub building which was the dining hall of the priestesses, Carlina’s mind turned to other things; for it was her turn to help in the hall. She hung her heavy dark mantle on a hook in the hallway and went into the big dark kitchen, where she wrapped herself in a big white pinafore apron, covering her black skirt and tunic, tied up her head in a white towel and fell to dishing up the porridge which had simmered all night in a big kettle over the fire. When all the porridge had been ladled into wooden bowls, she sliced long loaves of bread and set them out on a wooden tray, filled the small crocks with butter and honey which were placed at intervals along the breakfast table, and as the benches filled with black-clad forms, passed among them, pouring from pitchers of cold milk or hot bark tea. At breakfast talking was permitted, though the other meals were taken in the silence of meditation. The tables were loud with chattering and cheerful laughter, a daily respite from the solemnity imposed at most times upon the priestesses. They giggled and gossiped as any group of women might do anywhere in the kingdoms. Carlina finally finished serving and took her appointed place.

“—But there is a new king in Marenji now,” said one of the sisters at her left, speaking to a third, “—

and it is not enough that they have to pay tribute to the king, but they have summoned every able-bodied man who can bear arms to fight against the Hasturs in the Lord General’s army. King Alaric is only a boy, they say, but the commander of his armies was once a famous bandit they called the

Kilghard Wolf, and now he’s the Lord General. They say he’s a terror; he’s conquered Hammerfell and Sain Scarp, and the woman who came to bring leather for shoe soles,
she
told me that Serrais has fallen to him too. And now that he’s marching on the plains of Valeron, he’ll have all the Hundred Kingdoms raised against the Hasturs—”

“That seems to me impiety,” said Mother Luciella, who was—they said—old enough to remember the

reign of the old Hastur kings. “Who is this Lord General? Is he not of the Hastur kindred at all?”

“No. They say he’s sworn to take the kingdom right out of Hastur hands,” said the first speaker, “and all the Hundred Kingdoms. He’s the king’s half-brother, and he’s the real ruler, whoever sits on the throne! Sister Liriel,” appealed the priestess, “didn’t you come from the court of Asturias? Do you know who this man could be, the one they call the Kilghard Wolf?”

Carlina was surprised into an unwary “yes,” before she recalled herself and said severely, “You know better than that, Sister Anya. Whatever I was before this, now I am only Sister Liriel, priestess of the Dark Mother.”

“Don’t be that way,” sulked Anya. “I thought you would be interested in news of your homeland, that perhaps you knew this general!”

It must be Bard
, Carlina thought.
There is no one else it could be
. Aloud she said fiercely, “I have now no homeland but the Holy Isle,” and dug her spoon fiercely into her porridge.

… No. She had now no interest in what went on in the world beyond the Lake of Silence. She was no more, now, than priestess of Avarra, content to remain so for life.

“You may say so,” said Sister Anya, “but when those armed men came against the island half a year ago, it was for you they asked, and by your old name. Do you think Mother Ellinen did not know that once you were called Carlina?”

The sound of the name rubbed raw on already lacerated nerves. Carlina, Sister Liriel, rose angrily. “You know well that it is forbidden to speak the worldly name of anyone who has sought refuge here and been accepted under the mantle of the Mother! You have broken a rule of the temple. Now, as your senior, I command you to do appropriate penance!”

Anya stared at her, round-eyed. Before Carlina’s anger she dropped her head, then got out of her seat, kneeling on the cobblestone floor. “I humbly ask your pardon before us all, my sister. And I sentence myself to a half-day digging out the grass around the stones on the temple pathway, with no noon meal but bread and water. Will this suffice?”

Carlina knelt beside her. She said, “It is too harsh. Eat your proper food, little sister, and I will myself help you in digging the stones when I have done with my duties in the House of the Sick, for I was guilty, too, of losing my temper. But in the name of the Goddess, dear sister, I implore you, let the past be hidden under her mantle, and speak that name never again.”

“Be it so,” said Anya, rising, and she gathered up her porridge bowl and cup, carrying them to the kitchen.

Carlina, following with her own, tried self-consciously to smooth away the frown she could feel

between her brows. The sound of the name she had laid aside—forever, she had hoped—had disturbed her more than she wanted to say, aroused emotions long since put aside. She had found peace here, companionship, useful work. Here she was happy. She had not, really, been troubled or frightened when Bard had come here with armed men; she had trusted in Avarra to protect her, and she was

confident that the protection would hold true as it had done then. Her sisters would protect her; and the spells they had laid on the waters of the lake.

No, she had not been afraid. Let Bard seize all Asturias, all the Hundred Kingdoms, it was nothing to her, he was gone from her mind and from any meaning he might ever have had for her. She had been a young girl then; now she was a woman, a priestess of Avarra, and she was safe within the walls of her chosen place.

Sister Anya had gone to do the hard work on the stones of the path, which must be done but which could not be assigned to anyone and must wait until such time as someone saw fit to volunteer as penance for a broken rule or some real or fancied imperfection of conduct. Or, occasionally, as an outlet for superfluous energies. Carlina knew that she would welcome the hard physical work of pulling out the tightly knotted grass which was shifting the stones of the path, losing her anxieties in the strenuous and sweaty task of lifting and changing the stones and clearing the grass and thorns. But she was not yet free to seek that mind-soothing monotony; it was her day to tend the sick. She took off the pinafore and towel, laid her crockery for the young novices to wash, and went to her allotted work.

In the years since she had come to the Island of Silence, she had learned much of healing, and now was ranked as one of the most skillful healer-priestesses of the second rank. One day, she knew, she would be among the best, those entrusted with the training of others. It was only her youth which kept her, now, from that post. This was not vanity, it was merely a realistic awareness of the skills she had learned since she had come here, skills of which she had had no idea at home in Asturias, for no one at the court had ever troubled to coax them forth and teach their use.

First there was the minor routine of every day. A novice had burned her hand on the porridge kettle.

Carlina dressed the burn with oil and gauze and gave her a little lecture about being mindful of what she was doing when she handled hot things. “Meditation is all very well,” she said severely, “but when you are handling hot vessels over the fire, that is not the time for prayerful contemplation. Your body belongs to the Goddess; it is your business to care for it as her property. Do you understand, Lori?” She brewed tea for one of the Mothers who suffered from headache and a young novice who was suffering from cramps, went to pay a visit to one of the very old priestesses who was slipping away mindlessly into a calm, painless death—she could do little for her except to stroke her hand, for the old woman could no longer see or recognize her—and gave some liniment to a priestess who worked in the dairy and had been stepped on by the clumsy foot of a dairy animal.

“Rub it with this, sister, and in future remember, the beast is too foolish to keep from stepping on your foot, so you must be sensible enough to keep your feet out of her way. And do not go to the dairy again for a day or two. Mother Allida will probably die today; you may sit by her and hold her hand and speak to her if she seems restless. She may grow lucid if the end is near. If she should, send at once for Mother Ellinen.”

Then she went to the Stranger’s House, where, twice in a tenday, she had been given the task of first seeing the sick who came to ask help of the priestesses of Avarra, usually after the village healer-women had failed to help them.

Three women sat silently on a bench. She beckoned the first into a small inner room.

“In the name of the Mother Avarra, how may I help you, my sister?”

“In the name of Avarra,” said the woman—she was a small, pretty, rather faded-looking woman—“I

have been married for seven years and have never once conceived a child. My husband loves me, and he would have accepted this as the will of the gods, but his mother and father—we live on their land—

have threatened to make him divorce me and take a fertile wife. I—I—” she broke down, stammering.

“I have offered to foster and adopt any child he might father by another woman, but his family want him married to a woman who will give him many children. And I—I love him,” she said, and was silent Carlina asked quietly, “Do you truly want children? Or do you look on them as your duty to your

husband, a way to keep his love and attention?”

“Both,” said the woman, furtively wiping her eyes on the edge of her veil. Carlina, her
laran
awareness tuned high enough to hear the overtones in the answer, could
feel
the woman’s sincerity as she said, weeping, “I told him that I would foster his sons by any other woman he chose. We have his sister’s baby to foster, and I have found that I love little children… I see the other women with their children at their breasts and I want my own, oh, I want my own. You who are vowed to chastity, you can’t know what it is like to see other women with their babies and know you will never have one of your own—I have my fosterling to love, but I want to bear one too, and I want to stay with Mikhail…”

Carlina considered for a moment, then said, “I will see what I can do to help you.” She made the woman lie on a long table. The woman looked at her apprehensively, and Carlina, still attuned to her, was aware that she had suffered the painful ministrations of midwives who had tried to help her.

“I will not hurt you,” Carlina said, “nor even touch you; but you must be very quiet and calm or I can do nothing.” Taking her starstone from about her neck, she let the awareness sink deep into the body, finding after a time the blockage which had prevented conception; and she let herself descend, in that consciousness, into nerves, tissues, almost cell by cell unblocking the damage.

Then she gestured to the woman to sit up.

“I can promise nothing,” she said, “but there is now no reason you should
not
bear a child. You say your husband has fathered children for others? Then, within a year, you should have conceived yours.”

The woman began to pour out thanks, but Carlina stopped her.

“Give no thanks to me, but to the Mother Avarra,” she said, “and when you are an old woman, never speak cruel words to a barren woman, or punish her for her barrenness. It may not be her fault.”

She was glad, as she saw the woman go away, that she had actually found a physical blockage. When there was nothing to be found she must assume either that the woman did not really want a child and, with
laran
she was not aware she had, was blocking conception—or that the woman’s husband was sterile. Few women—and fewer men—could believe that a virile man could be sterile. A few