Califia's Daughters (9 page)

Dian sat gaping at him, and then a bark of involuntary laughter pushed its way out, a sound that distorted her face like pain. Isaac's brown skin flushed with anger.

“What the fuck are you laughing at?”

“Oh, God, not at you, no.” She took a deep breath and scrubbed at her face with both hands, but it did not remove the twisted smile still pasted there—and really, there was undeniable humor in the situation, that the man would be so uncomfortable with the Valley's flirtatious women that he would come to her. “Isaac, you are . . . well, I would be very happy to go to bed with you, but surely you must have guessed that I'm not fertile. Ling doesn't know why—perhaps they could find out in Meijing—but I'm not.”

“Of course I guessed it,” he said dismissively. “In fact, I asked Ling, and she told me.”

“But . . . I'm sorry, I don't understand what you want.”

“To put it bluntly, it doesn't matter so much if you can't bear my children, not from the point of view of the Valley, because others will. Like I said, ‘once upon a time' doesn't do it anymore; we have to be realistic: you have fewer than twenty adult males here, and half of them are somehow related. Ling put it rather clinically when she said that the gene pool needs expanding, and I am, to use her words, ‘a resource that cannot be wasted.' A lot of men simply wander from one wife to another, or have several wives at a time, or just say the hell with it and let the healer do artificial insemination on whatever woman needs a baby, but I happen to be, basically, a strongly monogamous person. I badly need a home base. I am asking you to be my home base.”

The smile on her face was no longer cynical, but it was weary.

“You haven't done your homework very well, Isaac, or you'd have found out that I'm not really the person for the job. I live alone by choice, and I can't cook much better than Susanna—hell, I'm not even home very much. There are plenty of women better qualified to play wife while you stand at stud for the village.”

Isaac's face went instantly white, as if she had thrown a glass of ice water into it. He abruptly rose and started for the door, but she leaped up and got there first, jamming her boot hard against the base.

“Isaac, wait, stop—I'm sorry. I didn't understand, I am a stupid bitch with the sensitivity of a log, please don't go. No, look, I am really so very sorry, utterly, completely sorry. Please, forgive me?” She did not really know what she was apologizing for; she just knew that she could not let him leave like this. She reached out to touch his arm lightly, finding a surprising amount of muscle there, all of it rigid as a board. “Come back and sit down. Please?”

She thought that he would not and was stabbed by a sharp and unexpected sense of loss, but after a long minute, his shoulders sagged, and he turned away from her to drop back into his sun-washed chair. Dian picked up the carafe of coffee and went into the kitchen to rewarm it over the embers of the fire. She returned with it in a saucepan, to divide it between their cups, then settled back with hers into the chair facing him.

“Forgive me,” she repeated. “I . . . Oh, Christ. Look, I'm sure you'll understand that I'm not exactly happy about being sterile. I mean, granted, I'm not a very maternal sort of person, but it would be nice to have had a choice in the matter. It was hard, when I realized that I'll never have children and therefore I have no real right to a husband. And unfortunately I'm not much of a lesbian—more by default than anything else, and that's hardly fair to a partner.” One of whom had been, briefly, Laine, a moment of lunacy three years before that further complicated Dian's increasingly difficult relationship with her second-in-command. But perhaps it wasn't necessary to go into detail with Isaac. “So I live my own life, with my dogs and my friends and a night of sex now and then when I get hungry. I am . . . okay, I'm lonely sometimes, but that's life. And now out of the blue you come here and offer me the impossible.”

She looked at him, and when her blue eyes met his, Isaac was rocked by three simultaneous revelations: Dian was younger than he'd realized, younger than he by a good ten years. She was also more vulnerable beneath her strength than he'd suspected. And third, he liked her, far more than he'd intended; that might make things easier in the short run, but it promised a load of hurt down the line. His simple plan threatened to become a lot more difficult. But it was too late to back away now, and Dian was already going on.

“It was a stupid joke; I didn't mean to hurt you. Although, I have to tell you, I really am a lousy cook.” She was gratified to see, after a moment, the corner of his bearded mouth give a brief quirk. “Can we just start all over with this conversation? Pax?” She held out her hand, and after a moment he took it, holding it an instant longer than was necessary. She sat back with her cup and cast around for a topic that might be safe.

“Would you tell me about your wife? Did you grow up together?”

It was the right approach this time, for both of them. The conversation that followed, a time of gradual exploration, laid out the first tentative threads of friendship. He told her about his beginnings, in the town where the adult males were kept in a pool, with the more powerful women getting the greater access and choice. When he was twelve, the last year he would be allowed to live with his family before being shut into the men's quarter, he was in the market with his sister Miriam. There they met some people from a distant village, come to sell their furs and dried fish; one of them was thirteen-year-old Emma. The three new friends ate lunch under the watchful eye of his guard, and talked. They talked for hours, and that night he and Miriam went through a back window of the house, over the rooftops, and down the city wall, to meet up with Emma's people on the road. Brother and sister were hiding in a hollow behind a waterfall when the town guards caught up with the wagons; from that niche they had watched the fruitless search.

“Ever since then, the sound of falling water has made me feel incredibly free. To tell you the truth, I think that's what decided me on this crazy trip, when old Isaiah said there was a waterfall at the foot of the Valley, above where they want to make their town. I took it as an omen.” He smiled somewhat tentatively at Dian. She smiled back.

“I'm glad you came.” She paused, studying his sunburned face, the short black curls, and the work-roughened hands, ending up by looking straight into his dark eyes with their frame of laugh lines. “If I'm to be your, er, ‘home base,' does that mean you want to move in? I don't think there's really room for you and Teddy, although I suppose we could add on a room or two.”

He laughed, and with that sound, the painful misunderstandings were set aside. “No, we're not about to move in on you. Teddy has adopted Susanna as mother/sister—she's made up a bed in the corner of her room where he sleeps sometimes. And I have my room in the big house, so I wouldn't actually move in here. I'll come here as little or as much as you wish, just so it's clear to the village that, for the time being at least, we are husband and wife, that I'm not free to move in elsewhere. Does that suit you?”

She looked at her hands, and answered him quietly. “It suits me very well.”

“Shall I come tonight?”

“I think . . . All right.”

He put down his cup and stood up, absurdly formal. “Thank you for the coffee.”

“I enjoyed making it. Um, would you like to come for dinner tonight? I can actually cook, a little. Basic stuff, but you won't starve.”

“I'd like that.”

“Bring Teddy.”

“Good. See you tonight, then.”

“Isaac?” It was difficult to push aside this bizarre formality, but surely there ought to be more than this to what amounted to a marriage proposal.

“Yes?” His eyes were so dark, she felt herself falling into them.

“Isaac, I . . .”

“Yes, I know. It will be all right, Dian. It will.”

His chest was broader than she had realized, his hard arms gentler, his mouth cool and teasing. When the school bell rang, Isaac gradually pulled away, without reluctance. Dian stood at the door with a foolish expression on her face and watched his back until he disappeared. Then, whistling softly one of Kirsten's old songs, she turned toward the kennel door and went to teach her young dog Tomas how to fetch a horse.

. . . SHE SPENT THE WHOLE NIGHT TRYING TO DECIDE WHETHER SHE WOULD UNDERTAKE THE VISIT WEARING HER ARMOR OR NOT. IN THE END, SHE DECIDED ON FEMININE APPAREL.

S
EVEN

T
HE
V
ALLEY
'
S
H
ARVEST
D
AY REVELS TRADITIONALLY
began around the first of October, two weeks before the day itself, when Judith went from house to house with a piece of paper and an ancient United States silver dollar, worn nearly faceless now but somehow more ritually potent than a coin minted in Meijing. When she got to the kennels, she found roof repairs under way, with Dian's feet and the bottom half of a ladder descending from a hole in the ceiling, accompanied by the sound of hammer and muttered curses. A cloud of dust and desiccated spiders had settled over Dian's boots, the rungs of the ladder, and the floor beneath.

“Sister mine,” Judith called, and was answered by a sharp thud accompanied by a loud curse. The woman in the attic slowly extricated herself and came halfway down the ladder, where she stood rubbing her skull, the disturbed dust of half a century plastered to her sweaty skin and shirt. Dian swiped at her forehead with the back of one filthy hand and blinked at Judith from a black and now streaked face.

“Man or woman, heads or tails?” Judith chirped sweetly.

“Christ, Jude, you always cheat anyway,” Dian said sourly. She hooked the claws of the hammer over the top rung and pulled her hand down into the sleeve of her shirt to wipe off the sweat from her forehead more thoroughly. “Why do you bother to pretend we have any choice at all?”

“Such accusations,” said Judith indignantly. “It's completely random, entirely up to the coin toss. Come on, now: man or woman, heads or—”

“Man,” said Dian. “And tails.” It was the same call she made every year, since she generally preferred to take male costume and role in the Harvest Day dances. For the last four years, however, she'd drawn the woman's role; this year, all things considered, she would actually like to play a woman, so she chose the opposite to what she really wanted in an attempt to throw her sister off—that the dollar was actually given the power to choose was not a probability Dian put much store in. But Judith was not fooled.

The dollar flew glittering through the dusty air. Judith caught it and slapped it onto the back of her left hand, gave it a quick glance, and slipped it rapidly into her pocket.

“Sorry, sir, you're a man this year.” She gave an evil chuckle as she wrote the result down on her paper. “Is Isaac here?”

“He's out back,” said Dian, taking up the hammer again. “Look, next year I get to do the coin toss. You cheat.”

“I never,” Judith protested, all hurt innocence with a gleam of mischief in her eyes. Dian climbed back up into the hole and a few minutes later looked down to see Isaac's puzzled face staring up at her through the rungs.

“What was that all about?” he asked. “What does she mean, I'll make a lovely woman?”

Dian swore an oath and scrambled up into the attic to stick her head out of the hole in the shingles.

“Cheat!” she shouted at Judith's back, but she was answered only by a demure wave over her sister's shoulder.

         

Harvest Day was the highest point on the Valley's calendar of events. Even in a bad year, when the prayers were fervent and anxiety lay beneath the feasting, the day was more joyous than Christmas, more intense than Planting Day, wilder even than the Midsummers-night celebrations held on the Fourth of July. Food, games, and dance were the order of the day, and the coin toss to determine each person's gender—men and women alike, everyone over the age of ten—contributed its own mad hilarity to the proceedings: costumes were required, with the half designated “men” wearing vestigial neckties and sturdy trousers while the other half, the “women,” wore dresses. A pregnant “man” partnering a bearded “woman” was a commonplace Harvest Day sight.

For Dian, the day was a time when she could both see and demonstrate the growing skill of her pupils in the martial arts, to show off the Valley's strength and, in a more practical vein, to lay bare the areas in need of work during the winter months. Bullets were, unfortunately, too expensive for a marksmanship competition, but archery and hand combat filled the day. So, as harvest slowed and hours became free, she increased the time spent with her students, in preparation.

The first sign of trouble came like a distant rumor of thunder from a clear blue sky, on the Wednesday following the coin toss. Dian and Jeri were on the green in front of the growing Great Hall with five senior girls, age fifteen to nineteen. Around them lounged half a dozen mostly somnolent dogs and a handful of younger competitors hanging about, ostensibly to pick up tips but actually to admire their seniors and root for them. Jeri, slow, good-natured, a born second-in-command and of incalculable value to Dian, was fending off the attacks of three girls with deceptive ease and teasing them into a state of red-faced, half-laughing fury. Dian was with the other two girls, both of whom wore padded helmets, demonstrating in careful movements the potential in seven feet of oaken staff. In a deliberate, formalized dance she swung and met, whirled and showed the use of the end and the power in its length.

After running through the motions several times, she called Jeri over, tossed her a helmet and buckled one on herself, and the two women squared off. Jeri was well suited to the staff, placid and deliberate and instantly unforgiving of error, and Dian rarely came away from a bout unbruised. Today it seemed particularly difficult to pay attention, and Dian attributed the first hard crack across her leg to the distraction of the hammers nearby (although those seemed to taper off after a few minutes), and the second one she put down to the lack of sleep engendered by taking Isaac to her bed, or perhaps the anxiety about Judith, or—and, whack, came a third bruise, on her shoulder—to the upcoming trip, when suddenly all the alarms in her head burst out as if she'd heard the bolt slide on a rifle, and she dove and rolled and came up with the staff ready, a huge surge of adrenaline jangling her nerves. And there was nothing there, nothing but the startled dogs, on their feet and growling questions at one another, and Jeri lowering her own staff in puzzlement, and the astonished pupils and the audience drawn by the impromptu bout. Dian searched wildly for the source of those internal alarms, as startled as the others and nearly as bewildered—then abruptly she whirled around and found herself looking into the brown eyes of Miriam's wounded guard, Sonja.

Sonja was not armed. She was just leaning casually against one corner of the Hall with her arms crossed. The intense warning bells lessened somewhat, now that the object was in sight; in the stillness Dian straightened, loosed the buckles on the helmet, and let it drop to the grass. She leaned deliberately on her staff, facing the newcomer.

“Afternoon,” she said.

Sonja did not respond, merely stayed holding up the wall as she ran her eyes over the students, the dogs, Jeri, then back to Dian. Finally she spoke.

“Are you practicing a folk dance with those things, or would you like to learn how to fight with them?”

Jeri shot an apprehensive look at Dian, who was trying hard to control the wave of anger brought on by the taunt lashing her already charged nerves.

“You being something of an expert, I take it,” she said, politely scornful. She knew immediately that she wasn't handling this at all correctly, but she could not seem to regain her balance, could only react and bristle like some untrained and brainless dog.

“Around here, I suppose I am,” said Sonja flatly.

“Then it's too bad about the head injury. Otherwise we might have to ask you to demonstrate your skill.”

The barb hit home. Sonja stood away from the wall, her hands dropping to her sides.

“There's nothing wrong with my head. Let me have one of your staves.”

“Oh, no, not without an okay from Ling,” Dian said firmly.

“She'll pass me. Ask her.” Sonja stared at Dian, daring her.

“Right,” said Dian. “I'll talk to her about it.”

“When?”

“When I see her.”

“You're afraid. You know I can beat you.”

“You had a bad injury,” said Dian, trying for reason, struggling to keep a lid on the temper this woman seemed intent on setting off. “Nobody comes back into competition without the healer's approval.”

“Won't hurt to ask her.” A breath of interest ran through the onlookers, and Dian decided to end it.

“I'll ask her. Okay, girls, we're wasting time here. I want you to practice your rolls, as long as we're here on the nice soft grass. Jeri, hold your stick out at about hip level. Now, I want you each to go over it, land at a roll, and rise in one movement. Fifteen times should do it. And, yes,” she held up her hand to Sonja, “I'll go find Ling and see what she says.” It was the best job of defusing she could manage at the moment, and if Sonja was unsatisfied, or if she suspected that Dian might have some say in the healer's decision, she had no chance to protest, for Dian turned her back and walked off.

The hammers had started up again before she reached the infirmary. The healer was not there, but Dian traced her to Judith's house and waited on the veranda until Ling came through the door. Dian explained the situation to her, but the healer was shaking her head before Dian had finished.

“Absolutely not. After a bang like that she shouldn't do anything strenuous for at least a couple more weeks, and certainly not something that could mean another crack on—” She stopped, cut short by Dian's upraised hand and expression of alarm. “What's wrong?”

“The hammers,” Dian said, and then she was running, slamming out the fragile screen door and pounding toward the silent Hall.

Ling followed and arrived to see Dian kneeling beside Jeri, who lay crumpled, white-faced, and clutching one leg. Dian rose and took a single step toward Sonja, and a chorus of voices broke out, proclaiming that it was an accident, that Sonja didn't mean—that Jeri fell across—that she couldn't help—Ling ignored them all, crouching down beside the woman on the ground.

“Is it your leg or your knee?” she asked Jeri.

“The leg, I think,” Jeri said through gritted teeth. “It was my own damn fault.”

“Are you sure of that?” Dian's tight voice came from above Ling's shoulder. Jeri grimaced up at her.

“I'm sure it was, Dian. I was just clumsy, and she'd already started her swing—”

“There's time for this later,” interrupted Ling. “Consuela, run down and bring my bag, it's on the table just inside my front door.” The girl sprinted away, and Ling spoke to two of the women. “Get the stretcher from the back of the Hall, would you, and a blanket.”

Two hours later, with Jeri drugged and splinted and settled in the infirmary bed, Dian went looking for Sonja. She didn't have far to go. The woman was sitting right outside the healer's door and rose at Dian's stormy appearance.

“Is she going to be all right?” she asked immediately. “I'm really sorry, I misjudged her movement—I guess it's been so long since I went up against someone new that I forgot I didn't know how she was going to move. Is she okay?”

Dian was nonplussed. The woman seemed genuinely concerned, and her words of apology and explanation tumbled over one another in their haste and relief, yet she continued to radiate low, steady waves of threat. Could it be an act, this contrite face? If so, what kind of game was she playing?

“Okay,” Dian said finally. “We'll treat this as an accident. But I'll be watching you.” She walked off down the road, and a dozen steps away she whirled about and saw what might have been a look of amusement snatched off Sonja's face. The woman's expression remained open, even relieved, but a spark of disdain reached Dian, and the unmistakable sense of menace.

Over the course of the next two days, Dian talked with a number of people about the incident. Judith looked thoughtful and shook her head decisively at Dian's self-doubt. Isaac looked dubious, and said that Sonja was aggressive, but he didn't think she'd deliberately try to cripple someone. Kirsten pursed her lips and said she was not surprised, but would not elaborate. Ling looked worried, although whether her concern was with Sonja or Dian, the latter could not tell. Laine, who was present when Dian was closely questioning Jeri, kept her thoughts to herself, but then that was hardly unusual.

All in all, there was little Dian could do aside from keeping an eye on Sonja, which she did, in between the hours of drilling her students and preparing for her trip, and helping with the late harvest and the Hall, and being with Isaac. Sonja's compatriot, Jenn—the talker, as Miriam had called her—took Sonja aside for a long conversation, after which the newcomer seemed to make more of an effort to fit in. She began to build a clique for herself—true, among the more dissatisfied women—walking and working in innocent accord with her new neighbors.

Innocent but for the vague aura of threat that surrounded her, of which only Dian was aware.

         

Dian was aware of many things, those first weeks of October, intensely so, as if the tough outer layers of her skin had been stripped away. Had early fall ever smelled so sweet, the heady perfumes of earth and apples, the air heavy with cooking blackberries and the first fermentation of the wine vats, the soft aroma of sun-baked dust and the tang of newly cut firewood and the rich musk of human sweat? Why had she never noticed before how gently the wood smoke hung in the morning air, how all-pervasive was the flavor of the honey-scented candles as the evenings drew in? And the nights, the indescribable beauty of those nights, the odors of the cooling Valley through the open windows, the breath of cedar from the blankets newly taken from their chest, and the salt and the heat and the intoxicating maleness of the man in her bed.

Within a week Dian had discovered how troublingly addictive Isaac was. She had never before realized how powerful, emotionally and physically, the male of the species could be, since the only man in the Valley with a build similar to Isaac's, namely Peter, was forbidden to her as a brother. But Isaac—Isaac was big and solid, he could be pummeled and wrestled with, and sleeping with him was like sharing the covers with an affectionate bear. He was patient and intelligent and imaginative, he paid attention, and he cared. He cared.