The Saga of the Renunciates (113 page)

“Now,
that
one—I would willingly believe
her
a
leronis
,” Camilla said, cutting the boot away to reveal a foot dreadfully swollen, with purplish blood-colored blisters and patches of white. Magda glanced up and saw it, shocked; she wanted to go to her, but at the moment Cholayna was even worse, semi-conscious, her forehead, when Magda touched it, burning hot. As Magda touched her she muttered, “I’m all right. Just let me rest a little. It’s so cold in here,” and she shivered, deep down.

“We’ll have you warm in a few minutes,” Magda said gently. “Here, let me pull off your coat—”

“No, I want it on, I’m cold,” Cholayna said, resisting.

“Keep it, then, but let’s get out of those boots,” Magda said, easing Cholayna down on her sleeping bag and bending to help her pull them from her feet. Cholayna tried to protest, but her weakness overcame her; she sank back, only half conscious, and let Magda take off her boots and her outer clothes and wrap her in blankets.

“Hot soup and some of that blackthorn tea will help her, if we can’t get anything better,” Magda said. She did not confess her real fear, which was that Cholayna was in the early stages of pneumonia. “What other injuries do we have? Jaelle, that leg you hurt when Dancer fell on you; you’ve been walking on it. How bad is it? No, let me see it, at once.”

Jaelle’s shin was bruised and bloody, but nothing seemed to be broken. It was, however, unlikely that she would walk in comfort for several days; she had already overstrained the damaged muscles and tendons. In addition, there were Vanessa’s frozen feet, and patches of white on her hands as well. Camilla’s foot was swollen and painful; Magda suspected that one or two of the small bones in the foot were broken.

Magda herself had a patch or two of frostbite on her face, but, although her nose was streaming and her sinuses ached, and she felt she would like to lie down and sleep for at least three days, she seemed to be the only one who had no serious illness or injury at the moment.

Presently the old doors creaked open. Snow and wind blew distantly into the room as a pair of women came in, carrying a couple of great cauldrons of water, with basins and kettles and bandages, and a third followed them with a great pot of steaming soup, which she promptly hung over the fireplace. They smiled shyly at the strangers but did not speak and went away at once, ignoring Magda’s attempt to thank them in what she knew of the mountain dialect.

Magda, who was the only one who could walk properly, set herself to get into their saddlebags and ladle hot soup into mugs—first Jaelle and Camilla and Vanessa. Then she got Vanessa’s feet into a basin of steaming water—at this altitude, she remembered, water boiled at a temperature quite tolerable to frostbitten or frozen skin.

“This is going to hurt. But keep on with it, otherwise you could—”

“Could lose toes or even fingers. I spent three years learning about altitude injuries and sickness on Alpha, Margali, I know what’s at stake here. Believe me.” She sipped soup, holding the mug in her uninjured hand— the other was in the hot water—and Magda saw her jaw tighten with pain, but she said with assumed nonchalance, “Damned good soup. What’s in it, I wonder?”

“Might be better not to ask,” Camilla said. “Ice-rabbit, probably; that’s about the only game you find at this altitude, unless somebody’s figured out how to cook a banshee.”

Magda propped Cholayna’s head up and tried to get her to swallow some of the hot soup, but the older woman was unconscious now, her breath rattling through her throat so loudly that Magda had a panicky moment of wondering if Cholayna was really dying.

“If she does have pneumonia,” Vanessa said, so quickly that Magda wondered if Vanessa was reading her thoughts, “there are some wide-spectrum antibiotics in the medikit. Hand it here—I’m a little tied down at the minute.” She rummaged in the tubes and vials. “Here. This ought to do. I don’t think she can swallow, but there’s a force-injection dispenser which you can give without any special medical knowledge—”

But before Magda could get the injection device loaded, the door opened again, and, warded by two reverential young women, the old woman who had welcomed them in the entrance chamber came in.

By the flickering firelight she seemed anyone’s idea of a witch. But, Magda thought, not the ordinary Terran notion of a witch; something older, more archaic and benevolent, a primitive cave-mother of the human race, the ancient sorceress, priestess, clan-ruler in the days when “mother” meant at once grandmother, ancestress, queen, goddess. The wrinkles in her face, the gleam of the deep-sunken eyes beneath the witchlike disorder of her white hair, seemed wise, and her smile comforting.

She went with ponderous deliberation to Cholayna and squatted down on the dais beside her. Peripherally Magda noted that she was the first person on all their travels who had not shown the faintest surprise at Cholayna’s black skin. She touched Cholayna’s burning forehead, bent to listen again to her breathing, and then looked up at Magda, bent anxiously beside them. Her smile was wide and almost, Magda noticed, toothless, but when she spoke her voice was so gentle it made Magda want to cry.

“Thy friend be hot wi’ the lung-sick,” she said, “but fear none,
chiya
, this we can help. Get thee some soup for thysen’, thee is so busy with thy friends’ ills thee has not tended tha’ own. This one is wi’ her now; go thee and eat.”

Her eyes were stinging; but Magda said, “I was about to give her some medicine, old mother—” she used the title in the most respectful mode—“then I will go and eat.”

“Na. Na,” said the old woman, “this be better for her than thy outland medicine; strangers here come wi’ the lung-sick, but this will help her more.” She pulled, from somewhere about her wrapped garments, a small vial and an ancient wooden spoon. Swiftly, she raised Cholayna’s head on her arm, pried her mouth open and poured a dose between her lips. “Eat,” she said to Magda, gently but with such definiteness that Magda reacted like a child scolded; she went quickly to the big pot and dipped herself a mug of soup. She sat on the bench beside Vanessa and raised it to her lips. It tasted wonderful, hot and rich and comforting, though she had no idea what was in it.

“I don’t care if it
is
stewed banshee,” she said in an undertone.

Vanessa whispered, “Magda, should we just let that old tribeswoman pour God-knows-what-kind of folk remedies down Cholayna without even asking what they are?”

“They couldn’t survive in a place like this without knowing what they’re doing,” Magda whispered back. “Anyway, I trust her.”

She turned to watch what the old woman was doing now; with her two attendants, they were raising Cholayna, piling thick bolsters behind her so that she was half-sitting, and spreading blankets over her for a crude sort of tent, under which they introduced one of the steaming kettles, while one of their number moved a burning brazier under the kettle, so that it was an improvised steam tent. Already, or so it seemed to Magda, between the steam and the old woman’s unknown drug, Cholayna’s breathing was easier.

The woman took a stick from the fire and with the burning tip lighted a curiously colored candle; it had a strong, astringently pungent smell as its smoke stole into the room.

Then she went to where Magda sat beside Vanessa, checked the hot-water basin where the latter was soaking her feet, and nodded.

“The daughters ha’ brought thee bandages and medicine; when the skin is all pink again, bandage wi’ this ointment. Use it also for thy bruises,” she added, stopping beside Jaelle and Camilla. “It will help the skin heal clean. As for thy friend—” she gestured toward Cholayna—“while that candle burns, keep the pot on a hard boil, that she may breathe hot steam, and here be herbs to strew in the water. The candle will make thy breathing easier as well. When candle burns down, gi’ her one more spoon of this—” she produced the small bottle and spoon ”—and let her sleep covered warm. Sleep thee also; she will do well enough now.”

For a brief moment she bent and peered into Magda’s face, as if something she saw there puzzled her; then she straightened up and said, to all of them, somehow even including the semi-conscious Cholayna, “ ’Varra bless ’ee all, the night an’ ever,” and went away.

Vanessa turned the little bottle in her hand, studying it. It was lumpy greenish glass, hand-blown, with many flaws. She worked out the stone stopper and breathed the strong herbal smell.

“Obviously, a powerful decongestant,” she ventured. “Listen; already Cholayna’s breathing easier. And the steam tent is more of the same. About the candle, I couldn’t say, but it does seem to make it easier to breathe.”

“How are your feet?” Magda asked.

Vanessa grimaced, but passed it off lightly. “Hot water does miracles. I was lucky. This time.” Magda, who had experienced frostbite in the Kilghard Hills many times during her travels and knew the agony of returning circulation, took that for what it was worth.

“Don’t forget the ointment she gave you, when you bandage them.”

“Thanks. But I think I’ll stick to the antibiotics in the medikit.”

“I’ve had experience of both,” Jaelle said, reaching out for the small jar the old woman had left, “and I think I’ll use this. Magda, you’re up, will you get me another mug of soup?” And as Magda complied, she added, “The priestesses of Avarra are legendary; according to Kindra, they have been healers for centuries and have a long tradition in healing arts. Some of them have
laran
, too.”

And as if that reminded her of that surprising first interview with the old woman, Jaelle turned to Camilla, who was trying to wrap her foot in bandages. She took the foot into her own lap and took over the bandaging.

“So, you are my kinswoman, Camilla?”

Camilla said, very softly—and to Magda’s astonishment she spoke in almost the identical mountain dialect— “Truly, did thee not know,
chiya
?”

Jaelle shook her head mutely. “Rohana said something once which made me suspect; though I do not think she knew it was you. Just that a daughter of Aillard had—had disappeared, under mysterious circumstances—”

“Oh, yes,” Camilla said grimly, “the fate of Elorie Lindir was a scandal for at least half a year in the Kilghard Hills, till they had something else to wonder at, some other poor girl raped and forgotten, or some Hastur lord acknowledging some other bastard—why, think you, did I live so long as a man, save that I sickened at the gossip of housebound ladies—? Rohana is not so bad as most, but those snows were melted twenty winters past. Leave it, Shaya.”

“You are
her
kinswoman too, Camilla.” She stretched her hand to Magda and said, “I hate to keep ordering you around like this, but you can walk and I can’t; can you get a couple of pins from my personal kit?”

“It’s all right,
breda
,” Magda said, found the pins and gave them to Jaelle, who pinned up Camilla’s bandages, then got her own bruised leg up on the bench. “One of you, bandage this, will you?”

Magda moved it into her lap and began smoothing the old woman’s herbal ointment on the torn and lacerated skin.

Camilla said, with a sudden undertone of fierceness, “I will claim kin with Lady Rohana when she claims kin to me!” She rose, tested her weight on the bandaged foot, wincing, and went to shake out her sleeping bag by the fire.

“Shall I stay awake to tend Cholayna’s steam kettle or will you?” The flat tone of her voice closed the subject completely.

“I will,” said Magda, but Jaelle shook her head.

“You’ve been looking after all of us all day. Go to bed, Magda, I’ll look after her now. When that candle burns out—it can only be an hour or two—I can sleep too. At least we needn’t keep watch all the time; here we are under Avarra’s protection, and all the Renunciates are under her wing.”

Magda wanted to protest, but her eyes seemed to be closing of their own accord. She nodded agreement and spread out her sleeping bag beside Camilla’s. The fire burned low; outside she could hear the hissing of the thick snow, the wind howling like ten thousand screaming demons around the old buildings.

At the very edge of sleep, Camilla’s head lying on her shoulder, she thought again how little she knew this woman she loved. The astonishing words rang in her mind.

My mother was of the Aillard clan, but I was born to the name Elorie Lindir.

And thee has
donas
of the Hasturs
? And Camilla’s even more astonishing words:
It may well be so
.

The blizzard lasted for three days.

For the first day Magda did little but sleep; after the exhaustion of the long journey, the stress and fear, her weary body and wearier mind demanded their toll, and for a night and a day and most of another night she spent the hours asleep or in a state of incomplete somnolence, rousing only to eat or drink. They were all in much the same state.

“We thought at first that you too had taken the lung-fever,” Camilla told her later, “but that old
leronis
said no, it was only weariness and cold. And, the Goddess be praised, she was right.”

This morning Magda had had the energy to wash (at an icy indoor pump where the water was a little above freezing) and to change her underclothing and socks, and to brush her hair.

“How is Cholayna this morning?” she asked.

“Better,” Camilla told her, “her fever is down, and she has eaten a little soup. She is still very sick, but her breathing is easier. And she spoke to me in
cahuenga
, which at least meant she knew who I was. What a relief after the last two days of her speaking only in some language none of us could understand, and not recognizing any of us!”

“How are the others?”

“Jaelle has climbed down the cliff—in this snowstorm!—to make sure the pack animals are all right. It is not that she does not trust the women here; but I think she wanted the exercise.” Camilla chuckled, and Magda laughed weakly with her. Jaelle always wearied quickly of inaction.

“And Vanessa?”

Camilla pointed; Vanessa was sleeping near the fire, only a few curls of dark hair showing above the top of her sleeping bag.

“Her feet are still very sore and painful, and two toenails came away last night when she changed the bandages, but it is fortunate it is no worse. My feet were almost as bad, but they are healing better. I think it is because Vanessa used only your Terran medicine, while Jaelle and I used what that old
leronis
gave us.”

Magda finished the coarse, burnt-tasting porridge, put the bowl away, and slid down wearily.

“I am not sleepy now. But my whole body feels as if I had been beaten with wooden cudgels.”

“Rest, then,
bredhiya
,” Camilla said. “No one is going anywhere in
that
.” The storm was still raging unabated outside; it seemed to Magda that it had raged through her sleep for the last hours and days.

Jaelle came in presently, her outer garments covered with snow, snowflakes clinging to her eyebrows and to her auburn curls.

“You’re awake, Margali? Good. I was beginning to worry about you. I climbed down the cliff this morning, and back up, though they said I could ride up in the basket with the grain sacks. It was wonderful even in the snow; when it is not snowing, they tell me, one can see all the way to Nevarsin Peak on the one side, and to the Wall Around the World on the other.”

Magda wondered at her freemate’s idea of fun. She remembered that only a few weeks before her daughter was born, Jaelle had insisted on accompanying Damon to the far ends of Armida for the horse-roundup, saying that she knew perfectly well that she had time enough to return before her child was born. She had been in the saddle again before Cleindori was forty days old. Magda herself had been tired and lethargic all during her pregnancy, content to stay indoors and allow Ellemir and Callista to cosset her.

But before she had much time to reflect on it, the door opened and the ancient wise-woman who had welcomed them and brought medicines for Cholayna, came in. She barely nodded to the women but went directly to Cholayna, knelt and felt her forehead; bent her head to listen to her heart and the sounds of her breathing.

“Thee is stronger this morning, daughter.”

Cholayna awoke, looked at the wild hair and ragged clothing of the ancient woman, and struggled to sit up. Magda came quickly to her side, so that Cholayna could see that she was not alone and at the mercy of a stranger.

Cholayna demanded weakly, “Where are we? What is happening?”

The old woman spoke a few soothing words but they were in the strange mountain dialect and Cholayna did not understand them.

“Who are you? What is going on?” As the old woman brought out the bottle of medicine and spoon, gesturing to Cholayna to open her mouth, she demanded shakily, “What’s this, what are you giving me?” She moved her head from side to side in panicky denial. “What is it? Magda, help me, tell me, isn’t anyone listening to me?”

There was real terror in her face, and Magda knelt quickly at her side, taking Cholayna’s hands in hers.

“It’s all right, Cholayna, you have been very ill, but she has been nursing you. I don’t know what she is giving you, but it has made you better. Take it.”

Cholayna opened her mouth docilely enough and swallowed the medicine, but she still looked confused. “Where are we? I don’t remember coming here.”

Questions flooded from her in Terran Standard as she struggled to sit upright, staring wildly about her.

Magda reassured her quickly in the same language.

“Cholayna, no one will hurt you. These people have been very good to us… we’re safe here—”

“Who is this strange woman? Is she one of Aquilara’s people, did they follow us here? I—I think I have been dreaming; I thought Aquilara had captured us, brought us here—”

“Tell un, must not talk, lie down, rest, be warm,” the old woman commanded. Magda laid her hand over Cholayna’s wrist, gently forcing her back on the pillows.

“You mustn’t talk. Lie still and rest, and I’ll explain.”

Coughing, Cholayna let herself sink back. Her eyes followed the attendants as they rigged again the improvised steam tent. She listened to Magda’s simplified explanations, without question; Magda suspected she was simply so weak that she took everything for granted.

At last she whispered, “Then these are not Aquilara’s servants? You are sure of that?”

“As sure as I have ever been of anything,” Camilla reassured her. “She has been coming in every few hours to make sure your fever was under control. But now you really must lie down and rest, don’t think of anything except getting well.”

Cholayna closed her eyes again weakly, and the old woman raised her head, glaring at Camilla.

“A name was spoken that is forbidden in ’Varra’s holy house. What ha’ ye to do wi’ that one?”

“Who? Acquilara?”

The old woman gestured angrily. “Silence! Speak not the names of evil omen! This one said, when thy sickness and weariness should be healed, thy story would be heard. Now perhaps is the very time for that hearing; what do ye in these wilds where no women come save in search of Her blessing?”

“Margali will tell thee, Grandmother,” said Camilla in the mountain dialect. Magda wondered when she had learned it, and saw in Camilla’s mind there was a flash of memory, a year spent as an abused and beaten child, enslaved in a bandit encampment…

“We come in search of Her blessing too.” Magda found in her memory the night when first she had seen the image of Avarra during the first meeting of the Sisterhood. “We seek a City said to be inhabited by the Sisterhood of the Wise. Two of our companions were seeking it, and had gone before. We thought, when we saw your lights in the wilderness, that perhaps we had found that place, and perhaps our comrades also.”

“This one has read thy mind and memory in thy weakness, granddaughter. We are only sheltering in the shadow of Her wings,
chiya
, and are not of Her sisterhood. Yet thy search does make thee sacred here, where thy companions have
not
come.”

The old woman’s hand fell on Magda’s shoulder. “Yet tell, what of that other name
she
spoke now twice?”

“She came to us by night, promised that she could lead us to our comrades.”

“And why did thee not follow her?”

“It seemed to us,” Camilla said slowly, “that truth was not to be found in her mouth, and that to follow such a guide was worse than to wander unguided.”

“Yet thy companion cried out to her in her unknown tongue—”

“Cholayna was afraid of her,” Magda corrected sharply. “Read
her
mind and memory if you can, Old Mother, and you will know I speak truth.”

Jaelle asked Magda in Standard, “What’s the trouble?”

“She says Rafi and Lexie haven’t been here. Which may mean they have fallen into—” she started to say, Aquilara’s hands, then looked at the old woman’s face and didn’t. “I fear, then, that the two we seek may have fallen into the hands of those we count as enemies.”

The old woman looked from one to another of them, then said slowly, “Thy friend is better, but still very sick. Watch thee by her a handful of days more,” and went away.

Camilla and Jaelle looked at Magda and demanded, “Now what was
that
all about?”