Califia's Daughters (28 page)

“Lady, you'll have to get in line,” she told Dian rudely.

“I am in line,” said Dian. She gestured with the gnawed rabbit leg past the woman's nose at Simon and Tomas, chewed, swallowed, and smiled. “Do I just go in?”

“Of course not. You'll have to wait until the attendant returns.” She moved to look around Dian at the woman in wolf skin. “Now, your pass says you'd be back by—”

Her voice ended in a squeak of pain and astonishment as Dian's greasy fingers shot out to dig into her jaw, forcing her head around. Dian continued to smile into the woman's frightened eyes.

“And how long will that be, please?”

“I—I don't know. Twenty minutes?”

“Good.” She let go of the woman's face and patted her cheek affectionately. “Twenty minutes. If they're not here by then I'll come back and join your line. Right?” The bureaucrat swallowed and swiveled to look for her two black-clad guards. One of them had her gun, the other was still fumbling. Dian faced them: dead silence, two guns aimed at her, the surreptitious noises of people behind her moving briskly away. She held out both hands, empty but for the half-stripped leg, and shrugged at the two guards. “Just asking a question,” she said mildly. She raised the meat to her teeth again, sucked off the last shreds, chewed, swallowed, and gave the guards a wide smile.

Then she tossed the bone over her shoulder and walked off, unarmed and covered in freezing sweat, walking up the row of stalls as if to investigate their few offerings, leaving horse, rifle, and possessions under Tomas's watchful eye.

A Meijing copper bought a cup of hot broth, and a small silver gained her two meat pies. She strolled back at a leisurely pace that belied the pounding in her veins, ignoring the eyes on her and the ice in her guts. She gave one of the pies to Tomas, nodded politely at the black guards and their ready weapons, nodded again and smiled to the suddenly nervous bureaucrat, and settled her back into a comfortable squat against the logs of the wall to eat her own pie.

She nearly laughed at the absurdity of it, the ease with which one person can terrify another merely by ignoring her sacred symbols of power. She ate the last of the pie, pleased that she could swallow around the dryness in her throat, washed it down with the dregs of the broth, stood up (seemingly oblivious of the jittery reaction her movements set off on the other side of the entrance), and walked back down to return the cup to the vendor. All the way down she felt the eyes of the crowd on her; on the way back she felt like a wolf strolling past a flock of penned sheep. Dee and Maryanne, standing at the rear of the
Residents
line, would not meet her eyes, but she nodded at them anyway, and smiled, and smiled.

She stopped halfway between the portals, pulled up her sleeve and peered elaborately at her bare wrist, and, grinning merrily, looked over at the uniformed official, who dropped her papers on the muddy stones. Dian walked over and squatted to help the woman gather them up.

“How stupid of me,” said Dian, and held out a sheaf of papers. “I don't have a watch. Has it been twenty minutes?” The woman gulped, reached for the papers, and backed away from Dian, who followed her with a look of polite expectation arranged on her face. The woman stopped and cast an appeal at the guards.

“I suppose, uh, that is, she doesn't seem to be there yet. . . .”

“No, she doesn't, does she?” agreed Dian. “Ah, well, that's all right. I'll just come through your side.”

“But I don't have the forms,” the woman squeaked, “the authority—”

With that, the blunt barrel of a shotgun came up to rest on Dian's chest.

Dark, dead eyes, rotten teeth, an ill-healed knife scar on her face, an inch taller than Dian and thirty pounds heavier. Dian looked over to where Tomas crouched, quivering, and pointed a commanding forefinger at him until he subsided. She glanced over at the other guard, down at the gun barrel, into the eyes, and smiled.

“It's just that I had some business inside, and I'd rather not wait out here all night. I need to see somebody, and there's obviously no one of any importance out here. But if you insist that I should wait . . .” She took a step back and caught the look the second guard threw up at the overhanging wall, a look of triumph consulting authority. The moment's lapse, the gloating relaxation of the closer guard, and the knowledge that the person she needed to see was watching from above coalesced into movement. Dian's arm came up under the gun, which boomed past her ear and sent the remaining onlookers diving for cover while her forearm continued up to slam the heavy double barrel upward and hard into the woman's face. Before the woman had staggered back, Dian's legs were already launching her at the other guard, whose gun was coming up but not fast enough. Dian tackled the guard at knee level and her gun, too, fired, a window high above them tinkling into fragments. They rolled, and Dian drove the base of her hand up into the woman's chin. The guard's eyes fluttered.

Dian reached up through the tangle of woman lying on top of her, found a wrist, and struggled to her feet with the woman's arm pushed high behind the dark back. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of women diving behind walls, horses rearing and slipping, but she was only concerned with Tomas, standing teeth bared over the guard with the bloody face.

“Tomas, enough. Fetch the gun,” she ordered quietly. Reluctantly, one hundred fifty pounds of dog wrapped its lips back over its teeth and went, stiff-legged and huge of ruff, to bring his mistress the heavy metal stick with the foul smell. She took it from him, broke it to knock out the remaining shell, and tossed it next to the other one.

“Guard the guns, Tomas.” He stalked over to the weapons and placed himself over them.

The forecourt was now so silent, even above the ringing in her ear Dian could hear the wet snuffling and outraged curses of the guard with the crushed nose, the raised shouts down the road, the nervous jangle and snort of the horses, and—and a voice from within the walls. She searched for its source, found the narrow slit fifteen feet up the wall, saw someone behind it, and forced her mouth into what felt like a rictus of death but she hoped looked like an insouciant smile.

Show no fear, not any,
she thought incoherently:
only confidence—spark curiosity—put on a mask.
But what if I'm wrong, what if there is no authority behind the wall—or if there is, what if it's just as brutal as these two, no brains, the fear that unseen figure inspires nothing more subtle than the fear of a mad giant with a stick, what if I'm wrong, she'll cut me down and I've failed them all, Robin and Judith and Isaac and Culum and—

Stop. No fear.
The guard she was using to block her body from a potential shot out of the window had recovered from the stunning blow to her chin and was tense under Dian's hands, spoiling for a fight but not willing to sacrifice her arm for the pleasure. The other guard was getting to her feet, and Dian knew that in seconds she would no longer control the courtyard. Unless . . . She let go of the guard's wrist and held out her hands.

The guard stumbled away, leaving Dian completely exposed, unarmed, her hands spread open away from her sides. She was gambling all on the ability of an unseen presence to control her troops; she did not hear the low command from above, she simply stood, for an endless string of seconds, twisting her palms up now in a gesture of waiting, ever smiling at the hole in the wall, eyebrows lifted in a secret amusement, smiling. The bullets did not come. Ten, eleven, twenty seconds, and she started to lower her hands when it came, a crack that hit the stones ten feet behind her, and even as her body was trying to react, her mind was furiously countermanding the movement, so that she twitched violently but did not actually move from her place.

“Leave it, Bernie,” said the voice from above, and a moment later snarled, “I said leave it!” Dian turned her head slightly to look at Bernie with the broken nose, the red blood covering the lower half of her face to glisten against the flat black of her garment. There was rage in her eyes and in her stance, and the black forearm tube was now in her hand, held in precisely the same stance Dian had last seen during the fight on Harvest Day between Laine and Sonja. A weapon, then, but not a gun.

With great deliberation Dian turned away from her, wiped her palms off on her coat, and walked over to her frightened horse. She wanted nothing but to sit down and shake for a while, or to sprint for the hills, but forced herself to gather up Simon's reins, talk soothing nonsense to him, and stroke his flaring nose.

The
Strangers
door opened and out came two more black-clad women, these with rifles over their shoulders. They marched past her without so much as a glance, over to where the two failed guards sat, both of them cursing and packing the one woman's broken nose with snow. The
Residents
line formed up again hesitantly, its first member a good fifty feet away and ready to leap for cover.

These new guards did not look the type to leave their weapons out of reach, Dian thought. Bernie and her friend apparently knew they were outclassed, or outranked, because they followed the newcomers' curt orders to leave without much argument. Dian watched in amusement as the two tried to decide what to do about their shotguns, still straddled by Tomas's legs, then tensed as one of them took a step forward with the black weapon tube in her hand—whatever those things were, Tomas would not know how to deal with them. However, the older of the new guards shouted at them to leave the guns and, cursing with great violence and little eloquence, they both spat imprecations in Dian's direction and went through
Strangers
. She smiled, and the door shut behind them.

The guards got the line moving again, and the uniformed woman began briskly to funnel her charges through their gate. Dian leaned against Simon's reassuring flank, and picked her teeth, and wondered what the hell to do now. It was cold, it was getting dark, it was beginning to snow in earnest, and her leg ached from knee to waist. In ten minutes the last of the travelers had gone through and the first of the stall-holders was being passed, and although the two guards were including Dian in their watch, nothing else happened.

Had it not been so damnably cold, with so much at stake, it would have been funny. Dian felt a sudden confirmation of respect for her opponent in the room above, but it had to end, one way or another. She pushed away from Simon's shoulder, pulled off her hat and slapped it against the saddle to free both of snow, put it back on, went around to put her foot in the stirrup, and mounted. She circled Simon around until she was facing the upper window, and though it was too dark to see inside, she knew the woman who commanded the guards was there, watching her. Dian could feel her. She raised her voice to carry through the ramshackle wall.

“I thought you might have need of someone with a bit of talent.” She showed her teeth in a grin, as if it mattered not at all. “Guess I was wrong. Tomas, heel,” she called and, pressing her boots into the horse's ribs, turned confidently out into the snow.

If the woman called, it would be within twenty yards, before Dian reached the stalls. The call did not come. Ten more seconds went by, seconds filled with the beginnings of bitter self-recrimination and her mind's angry demand for an alternative plan, when the voice followed her down the road. A single word: “Stop.” It was spoken in a low voice but a carrying one, and Dian did not think it a good risk to pretend she had not heard it. The owner of that voice would not repeat herself. She reined Simon in and circled him around to wait. In less than a minute, the
Strangers
door opened wide, and a woman stood within, darkly indistinct but surprisingly small in the gloom.

Dian took a final look up at the looming, ugly walls and wondered if she would be able to maintain the matching facade of cold brutality that the next weeks were going to require of her. Then she thought of Robin somewhere in there behind those walls and decided the attitude on her part would not be entirely a facade. She urged Simon forward, back to the city, to enter the city's gates.

. . . SHE DESIRED TO RULE OVER ALL MEN, NOT
BY MEANS OF SHARPNESS OF MIND,
BUT RATHER BY FORCE OF ARMS.

T
WENTY-THREE

I
T WAS A SMALL WOMAN WHO WAITED, A FULL HAND
shorter than the smallest of the four guards Dian had yet seen, but her body was hard under her closely fitted black clothes. She was a white woman in her late thirties with cropped brown hair and a look of patience on her face, and other than her odd amber eyes, at first glance she appeared nondescript. The tube on her forearm was silver, and she wore an automatic handgun at her hip. Dian swung off Simon, downed Tomas, and approached her. With every step, Dian's sense of the woman's power grew, and as she stood looking down into the older woman's face, she could feel the sweat trickling into her hair: nondescript was the last thing this woman was.

“Why did you damage my women?” the shorter woman asked after a minute. There was no threat in the low voice, but it was far from reassuring. Dian felt, rather, that behind the cool words lay a menace more terrible than any posturing or snarl. This woman had no need to assert herself to anyone.

It took a considerable effort to keep her own response equally calm, but a matter-of-fact answer was her only hope. “I only damaged the one,” she answered. “It seemed a better way of getting your attention than filling out forms.”

The amber eyes studied her, then went to Simon, and rested a long minute on Tomas before coming back to Dian. She tipped her head to speak to someone over her shoulder.

“Take her to Center. Give her a bath. Food if she wants it. Bring her to me in an hour.” She paused, and her eyes shifted. “She's not to be damaged.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The eyes came back to Dian. “My women will care for your horse. They will return your possessions after they've been through them, if it is decided that you still need them. And the dog is to stay behind when you're brought to me.”

“Very well.”

The Captain turned on her heel and swept away, two black figures at her back, and the bare inner courtyard suddenly gained ten degrees and a supply of oxygen. Dian drew a deep and shaky breath, surreptitiously wiped the sweat from her brow, and followed the guard into the city, through narrow passages and oddly vacant streets to a door in a solid, unmarked, unwindowed building, one in a solid block of similar buildings. Her two guards, one in front and one behind, silently marched her up a flight of stairs and down a passage that was much too long for one building, a passage that could only have been made by joining up all the buildings in the block. Up another stairway a door was opened, and Dian was escorted into a bleak, bare room lit by a dim electrical ceiling light covered by a wire cage, showing a rough mattress on the floorboards, no window, and two more doorways. The leading guard walked over to the left-hand door, a closet, and pulled out a stained, once-white robe, which she dropped on top of the mattress's two folded blankets as she passed to the other doorway. She went through it; Dian heard the screech of a tap turning, followed by the splash of water. The woman came back and looked at her partner, who had not moved out of the doorway.

“Strip,” ordered the woman at Dian's back.

Without hesitation Dian began to drop fur hat, fur parka, belt, knife, boots, sweaters, shirts, trousers, socks into a heap on the floor. The cold of the room bit at her flesh. The guard reached up to run her fingers carefully through Dian's hair, then stood back.

“Squat,” came another brusque command.

“No, I don't think so,” said Dian easily. “I don't think that's part of your orders, and I don't want your hands poking me. Nothing personal, you understand, but you'll not do it short of, er, ‘damaging' me. Sorry.” She hid her apprehension behind a taut smile, extended her hand out flat to keep Tomas in his place, and waited.

“We'll see what the Captain says,” the guard said finally, and the other began awkwardly to gather up Dian's shed clothing. They left, and a pair of bolts slid to on the other side of the heavy door.

Dian picked up the robe and went into the bathroom, where she found the lack of anything that could be fashioned into a weapon carried to an extreme. No mirror, a small wooden brush with soft bristles, but no comb, one small flat control knob and a faucet that would have required a crow bar to pry from the wall, and a toilet with neither seat, lid, nor tank, flushed by a knob in the floor.

“Nor iron bars a cage,” she commented aloud to Tomas and anyone else who might be listening, although as she climbed into the barely tepid bath she doubted that her mind was innocent or quiet enough to regard this place as a hermitage. As she sank gratefully into the water, she found herself wondering just when her mother had implanted that little snippet of poetry into her mind, and then wondered further what Mother would say at her daughter's current circumstances. There was no doubt about it, though: even a tepid bath was heaven after two weeks of scrubbing with melted snow. She soaped all over with a rough yellow bar that smelled of dead sheep, drained the gray water, then filled the tub again, lying back to study the ceiling. It was clean. Everything was clean, if minimal, and how the hell was she going to get out of this alive, and with Robin? Tomas came in after a while to drink from the water lapping around his mistress's knees. Dian held her fist in the water and squirted him playfully; he bit twice at the jets, then turned around and around next to the tub and flopped down on the tiles with a sigh.

The water became cold, and no more warmth could be coaxed from the tap. Dian left the wooden plug in the hole, in case Tomas wanted another drink, and dried herself with the towel that was threadbare but clean. The short bristles of the brush made no headway into her wiry hair, so long now that it brushed her shoulders, so she ran her fingers through it a few times, then dropped the sacklike robe over her head and went to sit in the cold room, legs crossed, on top of the blankets that she was no doubt meant to huddle under.

They came for her before the hour was up, the same two as before. She stood up smoothly, told Tomas to stay, and went with them. They bolted the door on Tomas and took her away without a word.

Down several different corridors and stairways they walked, passing numerous women, all dressed in dull black. Dian revised drastically upward her estimate of how many women it would take to guard Ashtown from itself. Two hundred? More elite guards here than there were adults in her Valley, apparently.

Her escort stopped in front of one of a series of undistinguished doors, knocked once, pushed it open, and stood back. Dian entered, and the woman shut the door and turned the lock from the outside.

Another windowless room, larger but no more luxurious than the one she had come from. It was nearly as cold as the cell, and although there was more furniture, the four wooden chairs looked less comfortable than the mattress had been. There was a table, and an electrical lamp to supplement the two ceiling bulbs, but other than those it was bare of bookshelves, cushions, rugs, or pictures on the wall. Dian chose a chair, tucked her bare feet underneath her, and resigned herself to a wait.

It was forty minutes before the inner door opened unceremoniously and the small Captain came in. She closed the door and walked across the boards to sit in the chair across from Dian. Dian dropped her feet to the floor, and as she waited for the woman to speak she knew she'd been right not to fuss about the rooms, not to break down doors to prove she could, but merely to wait by sitting, rocklike and patient. This woman might employ blusterers and bullies, but she led by the absolute rule of being the most dangerous animal in the jungle.

“Your name?”

“Dian.”

“Where are you from?”

“South.”

“Where?”

“South.”

“Do you have a reason you don't want me to know?”

“Not particularly.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I told you. I was looking for work.”

“Why here?”

“It's cold out there.”

“It's warmer in the South.”

“Too warm.”

The woman thought about this for a moment. “Why should I let you in? You're not here half an hour and I've got blood on the ground and lose two of my Guard. You're trouble.”

“I'm good.”

“I've got good people.”

“And I won't make trouble with them. Those two you put out in the snow, they were temporary gun-toters, taken on because they're tall and mean. Put their guns halfway across the yard and go stand near the fire—that's the work of rank amateurs. Real guards I can work with.”

“And if I put you to work with ‘gun-toters'?”

“Do you have many like that?”

“Answer the question.”

Dian shrugged. “If you told me to, I'd try.”

“Why are you here?”

“It's cold, and I heard of Ashtown.”

“Where?”

“Meijing.”

“Is that where you're from?”

“Most recently.”

“Doing what?”

“I was with their road guards, for a while.”

“The Meijing guards? You're not Chinese.”

“Wall guards are Chinese, the rest can be anything,” she said truthfully.

“Why are you here?”

“I got bored, for Christ sakes.”

“You're bored, you're probably in trouble in Meijing, and I should let you join up? You'd piss off as soon as I put some pressure on you.”

A fractional drop in the Captain's eyelids told Dian that they had suddenly reached the crux. There was more here than she could immediately identify, but she did not hesitate.

“Pressure I can take.”

“And . . . discipline?” There was a caress in the word, affection and anticipation that caused warning bells to start jangling in Dian's head, but the only indication of it was the brief twitch she felt along her jawline. She hoped the Captain had not noticed.

“I told you,” she answered, “I'd get along with the others.”

“That's not discipline, and you know it. Discipline here is putting up with anything—
anything
—that I say you put up with. I say you crawl, your chin is on the ground. I say you submit to a strip search, you spread ‘em before I finish the sentence. That's what discipline means in my guard, and frankly, I don't think you can cut it.”

“I thought those two were just throwing their weight around. If I'd realized the search was your order—” She made to stand up.

“Sit.” The captain leaned back and studied Dian. “So you can take discipline?”

“I understand discipline,” Dian replied evenly, but by God the room was cold, cold.

“Do you, now?” the woman drawled. After a minute she rose and went to open the door she had come through. Two large and eager women came in, all but rubbing their gloved hands together at the sight of Dian in the chair. They were followed by another, who bore a more than passing resemblance to Dian's interrogator, although her eyes were darker. This woman pulled a chair up next to the one the orange-eyed woman had occupied. The Captain came back and stood looking down at Dian while she addressed the two big, gloved women behind her.

“You know the rules. Blood I don't care about, but nothing more permanent than a week, and any bones broken, I break the same on you, and maybe another for good measure. You,” she addressed Dian. “Two of my guards are dead because of you.”

“
Dead?
But I didn't—”

The Captain's small, iron-hard palm shot out and cracked Dian's head around.

“You will not interrupt me,” she said mildly. “Two of my guards are dead, and that is not permitted. You will sit in that chair and you will make no move to protect yourself. If you do, or if you get up from the chair, you will be taken to the city gates and you will leave immediately and you will not come back, ever, on pain of death. Do you agree?”

“I told you,” Dian croaked, “I understand discipline.”

“Right,” she said, and turned to her chair.

“You . . . they called you the Captain?”

“They call me Captain, yes.”

“What is your name?”

“If you ever have reason to speak to me after this evening, you will be told my name. Now, are you finished delaying? Good. You may begin,” she told the two, and sat down in her chair to watch.

Her mind gibbering at the impossibility of sitting still while appalling things were being done to her body, Dian felt her arms gathered high behind her, and the shorter of the two women, the one with the much-broken nose and many scars, came to stand in front of her. She tugged at her sleek black gloves, studying Dian like a butcher about to fell a steer, and it was intolerable.

“No!”
Dian heard the sharp edge of terror in her own voice, and she modified the protest into a hoarse whisper. “No. You can't do that.”

Something in her attitude caused the gloved woman to hesitate and look to her frowning Captain for instruction.

“You want to leave?” the Captain asked. Dian jerked her head in a negative. “Then what is it?”

“I . . . you mustn't. Not there. I—” She gritted her teeth and pushed it out. “I'm pregnant.”

“Ah. That does change things a little. First time?” Dian nodded. “And you're what, twenty-eight, nine? Bit of a surprise, then?”

“God, yes,” she blurted, and then clamped down her jaws, hard. No weakness, none; never.

“That's the real reason you wanted to come in from the cold, isn't it? First time preggers and nervous with it. Yes?”

She took Dian's silence for a humiliated admission of weakness, which was not far from the truth. Dian wondered in despair what punishment the woman would devise as an alternative, and closed her eyes briefly and missed the Captain's nod.

Dian's leg exploded with agony and she screamed with the suddenness of it as the chair flew out from underneath her. She caught her breath on the floor, looked up at the two waiting, happy women and then at the two in the chairs, the orange eyes speculative, the dark eyes even darker and in a face that had taken on a faint flush. One of the women by her side reached down, set the chair upright, patted the seat; the other grinned through gaps in her teeth; but the decision had been made, and Dian would not unmake it now.