Califia's Daughters (30 page)

The bed had been neatly made. (By one of the lowly Ds, she wondered?) There was a chest of drawers, whose handles looked beyond her abilities at the moment, but a closet door piqued her interest. She got her hand around the knob, but tightening the fingers sent shooting pains up into her shoulders and across her back and made her break out in sweat. She gritted her teeth—figuratively if not literally—shifted the position of her palm, and by moving her entire body finally succeeded in rotating the knob the necessary distance to free the latch. The door opened, she loosed her hand and leaned against the wall to catch her breath.

“Minor victories,” mocked Margaret's voice behind her. “Hardly worth the effort, considering what's in there.”

Dian pushed the door open with a hand inserted in the opening, found a light switch, and surveyed her new, hard-won possessions. One black robe such as the one she was wearing, one black allover jumpsuit, one black shirt, one pair of black trousers, one black padded jacket. And one stunning, brilliant blue jumpsuit of heavy silk that practically leapt out of the shadowy space at her.

“They should all be close to a fit. Their previous owner is about twenty pounds heavier than you but about the same height. She was happy enough to trade toward some new things, so you'd have something without having to wait.”

“I'm surprised at the blue.”

“Wear what you like in your rooms, honey. Anything or nothing, just so you put on your blacks when you go out. Breakfast?”

Dian followed Margaret into the kitchen and lowered herself onto one of the chairs. On the tray in front of her lay two bowls and a mug, all ceramic and all lidded, and to the side a curious object, a twist of what looked like aluminum, incorporating a kind of cuff from which came a wide strip with a convex curve, which in turn ended in a truncated spoon.

“That's an elaborate contraption,” she commented. It also looked well used.

“You've never seen one before?”

“No, but I can guess.” Margaret watched while Dian threaded her hand into the object. The bowl of the spoon was cupped in the palm, and the whole was very light and quite secure. Margaret lifted off the lids for her, and she dipped the spoon carefully into the bowl that was steaming, a puree of cooked apples and some grain. The motion put strain on her tender muscles from elbow to shoulder blade, but freedom was not a thing to be spurned, and she managed eight spoonfuls before the tremors became uncontrollable. Margaret fed her the rest of the puree and the egg custard and helped her cup the mug in her bandaged hands, then took the tray away. The self-feeder she left on the table, and Dian studied it with distaste. How many damaged hands would it take before such an instrument became a necessary part of the Center's equipment? It did not look terribly old; it was certainly not an Artifact. Nonetheless, it was scratched and bent, reshaped and mended twice.

Margaret had not said when she was coming back, though Dian remembered that there was “business,” then Tomas. Thinking about it, Dian decided that she could as easily await whatever the business was reclining on the sofa as sitting here, with considerably more dignity and comfort than if she had to pick herself from the floor, which is where she'd end up if she remained on the kitchen chair much longer. By more or less lying across the table, she eased herself upright and scuffled into the living room, cursing the stiffness that came back whenever she remained still, collected some pillows and dropped two, and edged her way onto the long, wide sofa with great relief. She couldn't get her right foot up onto the cushions, but half was better than nothing. Slowly and deliberately she relaxed all her muscles, one at a time, and gradually she dozed, and ached, and tried to visualize a process of rapid healing, with no particular success.

It was the first time outside the pink bath she'd been able to relax and let her mind go free and, free of all the other pulls, it riveted, straight as a needle snapping to magnetic north, to the thought that had lain beneath everything else the last two days, to Robin. How to get him out of here? And, perhaps even more urgent, how to let him know she was here, for if he knew of her presence, at least he would be reassured and be less inclined to slit his wrists—assuming he hadn't already. The sooner she was active
(Heal, legs!),
the better would be her chances of finding the men's quarters, and its weaknesses. Would a closely confined and tightly suppressed community of males be more or less likely to help one individual? Certainly they would if it meant an improvement in the status of them all, but a single man, when it involved an escape for which they might be punished (Were men beaten here? Or was a more sophisticated punishment reserved for them?), and a newcomer at that . . . She had to know more about them before she could decide, which would mean at least one visit to the men's quarters, and that, she was certain, depended on her active assumption of duty. Eggs and milk might come free, but she rather doubted that access to men was on the same scale.

This circular and unfruitful logic was interrupted by the door being flung open (did no one knock in this place?). Margaret stepped in, but Dian's greeting was cut off when the woman stood back stiffly and faced the doorway in an attitude of attention. Dian struggled painfully to rise and had accomplished—with great internal cursing and greater trepidation—both feet on the floor and an upright back against the soft cushions when the Captain entered, followed by a middle-age Angel carrying a leather bag similar to the one Ling used for her medical kit. The Captain's eyes swept over the room and the very furnishings snapped to attention, but she waved a commanding hand at Dian.

“Sit.”

She continued across to the window, this taut, muscular woman a head shorter than Dian who wore her simple black uniform as if it were armor, who moved with the arrogance of command and the constant readiness to fend off attack, who looked out of the curtains with an air of automatic but preoccupied reconnaissance while behind her Margaret closed the door and the strange Angel took up a position in front of it. Dian was distracted from the Captain by the vibrations of apprehension, of fear, coming from Margaret, but the woman would not meet her eyes, and Dian looked back at the Captain, who had let the curtains fall closed and was circling the room. She ended up in front of Dian, practically on Dian's toes, and when she sat on the edge of the low table before the sofa, their knees almost touched.

The Captain's face was, as Dian had thought in the
Strangers
entranceway, undistinguished—oval face, hair so short as to lack texture, ears flat. A slight gap between her two front teeth lent her an incongruous air of congeniality, rather like the woolly face of a lamb concealing a wolf's fangs, for no one who saw this woman's eyes could ever think her simple and congenial. Set beneath nicely arched brows and between full lashes, her irises were a peculiar light orange-brown darkening to black-brown at the edges. They drew a person. They invited confidences. They were the eyes of a fanatic, of a mesmerist, of a woman to love and to hate and to kill and to die for, and for several long seconds Dian forgot the grinding aches in her limbs and head, and saw only the Captain's eyes.

The amber gaze blinked, finally, slowly, like a reptile, and the Captain tipped her head slightly toward the closed curtains.

“Eyes hurt?”

“Head,” Dian admitted.

“I told Margaret to give you painkillers.”

“She did. I stopped it. I don't like what they do to my brain.”

“The hell with what you don't like, I want you next week.”

For a startled instant Dian heard the words as a lover's assignation, but on the heels of this came the awareness of the Captain's flat disinterest—this was only a command to report for duty.

“You can have me today, what there is of me.”

A very slight sharpening of the orange gaze was the only outward sign that she had heard the words, but Dian was in no doubt that she was pleased. The feelings this woman gave off, even in Dian's present low state of sensitivity, were unmistakable, great waves, powerful and primitive that shifted now to a humorous approval that made her paradoxically even more dangerous.

“That's true” was all she said, and broke her gaze to nod at the women near the door. The strange Angel brought the medical bag and put it on the table, then knelt on the floor, opened its mouth, and reached inside with the attitude of a person putting her hand into a nest of snakes. However, she merely drew out a piece of paper and a stained and battered metal ink pad, laying both on the table next to the bag. She took a pen from an invisible pocket inside the neck of her shirt, uncapped it, and looked up.

“Name?” the Captain asked Dian.

“Dian.”

“Family name.”

“MacCauley.” Rarely used, nonetheless it had belonged to Judith's mother, so it was Dian's.

“Birth name.”

“Why?” Dian started to ask, but before the syllable was even out of her mouth the Captain's hand flashed out, unbelievably fast and with absolutely no warning. Dian grunted involuntarily at the pain that reverberated up and down her extremities until her fingernails ached; after a long minute she eased herself back upright. The face in front of her was neither less nor more friendly than before.

“Birth name,” the Captain repeated.

“Elizabeth. My birth name was Elizabeth MacCauley. Middle name Escobar.”

The kneeling Angel wrote the names on the paper and placed it in the Captain's hands. She in turn held it out to Dian and waited until Dian's recalcitrant fingers had closed against it before she let it go.

“Read the words.” Some vague shift in her voice lent the brief command weight, as if she were edging into liturgy. Dian looked at her sharply, then at Margaret, but received no clue. She ran her eyes down the page:

I, Dian Elizabeth Escobar MacCauley, do swear, by the strength in my hands and the blood in my veins, that I shall serve my Captain and my fellow members of the Ashtown Guard, that I shall obey her commands and dedicate myself to her happiness, and declare that from henceforth all the days of my life, if it be her pleasure, I shall lay me down and die for her.

Dian read it again, deciding against a mild jest based on the lack of strength in her hands, and commented lightly on the implications of a latter phrase. “Sounds pretty final.” She was unprepared for the response of her audience. The Captain sat up sharply, the guard twitched, Margaret almost cringed against the door when the yellow and brown eyes sought her out.

“You did not tell her?” the Captain began, her voice silky. “You did not prepare this woman for her vows? You were told—”

“Yes,” Dian interrupted rapidly. “I'm sorry, but, yes, she did tell me. I forgot.” The fanatic's eyes loosed Margaret and came back to stab at Dian.

“You would protect her?” she asked Dian.

“Only against unfair accusations,” Dian replied evenly, and added in a flat voice, “I am not in the habit of giving charity.”

She endured the Captain's hard scrutiny without giving way to the urge to squirm, until the Captain looked away at Margaret and then at the guard.

“The Hand,” she ordered. The guard opened the bag wide and gingerly drew out a heavy glove made of metal cloth, large of finger and thick across the palm, with a plate of metal embedded there. It was evil, Dian's mind whispered to her, it was death, and the Captain took it with a casual familiarity and began to draw it over her right hand.

“Speak the words,” she intoned. “Speak the words, that you may be bound by them.” Dian tore her eyes from the living machine into which the Captain's hand had been transformed, and looked at the words on the paper, and knew that she had no choice. She cleared her throat, suddenly tight and very dry.

“I, Dian Elizabeth Escobar MacCauley,” she began to read, and although she had no intention of keeping this promise extracted under duress, she could not keep herself from wondering, superstitiously, if she would ever see Judith again, “. . . and die for her.”

The assistant Angel flipped open the ink pad, took Dian's right thumb and wet it against the frayed surface, then positioned the thumb over the paper and pushed down, rocking it slightly. Then she held out the pen, saying, “Sign your name or a mark on the line.” Dian managed an
X
on the line beside her black thumbprint. Her hand was shaking badly, not only from the injuries already inflicted on it, but from the danger warnings that were pouring into her, from all three women and from the silver glove, and from the sure knowledge that there was not a thing she could do to protect herself from whatever was coming.

The Captain took the pen, signed on the line below Dian's mark, folded the paper, and dropped it into the bag. She flexed her hand lovingly inside the glove.

“Prepare her.”

The Angel and Margaret came around the back of the couch. Margaret undid the loop fasteners at the top of the robe Dian wore and opened it to expose Dian's upper torso, oddly pale and free from bruising below her breasts. The women each took one of her arms, firmly but not without gentleness, and stretched them out across the back of the sofa. The Captain shifted forward to wrap her knees around Dian's legs, hooking her feet under Dian's ankles. With her victim now completely immobilized in this intimate embrace, the Captain leaned forward to look into Dian's face. Dark, orange, gloating eyes, glowing with passion and terrible joy, met tight blue ones fighting fear, and losing. The Captain laid her gloved hand, cold and soft and alive, across the top of Dian's left breast, nestled its flexible mechanical weight into the burgeoning softness of early pregnancy.

“You are mine, Dian MacCauley. From this day forward you belong to the Captain of the Ashtown Guard, to have and to hold. When I and my successors say ‘breathe,' you will draw air into your lungs. When we say ‘die,' you will cease to live. You will honor and protect me, and in my turn I will give you all. From this day forward, Dian, I claim you as mine.”