The Saga of the Renunciates (44 page)

She had long finished the reporting of her trip to Ardais and was working now in Magda’s old office in Communications, doing work she considered pointless, upgrading a standard dictionary—that was what Bethany called it—of Darkovan idioms. At least she wasn’t working with the damnable sleeplearner-tapes, though she imagined that the work would be transferred eventually to such a tape.

I wonder if the sleeplearner
—
what did Peter call it, D-alpha corticator
—
is what’s giving me these nightmares? Even he suggested that was a possibility! I’m never going to use it again
—
I’ll sleep on the floor if I have to
!

But she worked on conscientiously, upgrading outdated idioms and slang popular in her own childhood, recalling commonplace terms and vulgar language more common than the extremely polite ones. Well, this dictionary had been compiled—she remembered—by Magda’s father, years ago in Caer Donn. No one would have used vulgar idiom in front of a learned scholar who was, moreover, an alien. But there were phrases she knew that she would blush to include on a language program to be used before men; furthermore, she was a little doubtful if these particular idioms were ever used among women, except in the Guild Houses.

The fact is
, she thought, and wondered why it depressed her,
I do not really know how ordinary women talk, except for Lady Rohana. I went so young to the Guild House as Kindra’s fosterling
!

Well, she would do what she could, as well as she could, and that was all they could rationally expect of her. She was not fully aware that she was stiff with resentment at the unaccustomed uniform, the collar-tab which held the throat-microphone so that she was, for all practical purposes, wired into their machines, the tights which made her legs feel naked. Nakedness would not have bothered her at all, inside the Guild House with her sisters, but in an office where men came through now and again—though, admittedly, not very often—she felt exposed, and tried to pretend that her desk and consoles could conceal her from them. Once a man walked past her desk—not anyone she knew, an anonymous technician who had come to do something mysterious at Bethany’s terminal, pulling out wires and odd-looking slats and peculiar things.

So that’s Haldane’s Darkovan squaw. Lucky man. What legs…

She looked up and gave the man a blistering glare before she realized that he had said nothing aloud. Her face burning, she lowered her eyes and pretended that he wasn’t there at all. All her life she had been plagued with this intermittent
laran
that came and went with no control, forcing itself into her consciousness when she had no wish or will to know what was in another’s mind, and often as not, failing her when it would have been priceless. An unwelcome thought intruded on her now, but it was one of her own:

Was I truly reading Peter’s mind this morning, is that how he sees me?

No. I was sick, hallucinating. I promised him I’d see the Medic. I’d better go now and arrange it
. When the technician had gone, she asked Bethany:

“How do I arrange to see someone in Medic?”

“Just go up there, on your meal break, or after work,” Bethany told her. “Someone will make time to see you. What’s the matter? Sick?”

“I’m not sure,” Jaelle said, “Maybe it’s the—the corticator; Peter said it could give me nightmares like that.”

Bethany nodded without interest. “If it’s not adjusted properly it can do that. Don’t bother Medic with it; take the unit up to Psych and they’ll adjust it. But if the headaches or nightmares keep up, you probably ought to see a Medic. Or if you’re pregnant or something like that.”

“Oh, no,” said Jaelle promptly, then wondered,
how did she know, why was she so sure
? Maybe she had better check out the Medic after all. She would go on her meal break—she wasn’t hungry and the kind of food she could get at the cafeteria at lunchtime wasn’t the kind she would regret missing.

But shortly before the time when they left their desks for the meal, there was a curious beeping noise from her desk console.

She stared, wondering if she had broken something, if she would have to summon back that technician who had looked at her so offensively.

“Bethany—”

“Answer your page call, Jaelle—” she saw that Jaelle did not understand, and said, “My fault, I forgot to show you. Push that button there—that round white thing that’s blinking.”

Wondering why they called it a button—it would certainly be hard to sew it on a coat or tunic—Jaelle gingerly touched the pulsing light.

“Mrs. Haldane?” The voice was unfamiliar and quite formal. “Cholayna Ares, Intelligence. Could you come up to my office? Perhaps you would be willing to have lunch with me; I would like to talk with you.”

Jaelle already knew enough about Terran speech patterns to know that the words, framed as a polite request, were actually a command, and that there was no question of refusal. She was in Magda’s place; the woman she had met last night in Peter’s company was Magda’s superior officer—at least that was one way of describing it—and therefore Jaelle’s as well. She said, trying to tailor her words to Terran forms of politeness, “I should be pleased; I’ll be there at once.”

“Thank you,” said Cholayna’s voice, and the light blinked off.

Bethany raised her eyebrows.

“Wonder what
she
wants? I’d surely like to know how she wangled this post out of Head Center! Intelligence, for heaven’s sake, when she couldn’t go into the field anywhere on this planet! Of course, all she has to do is sit in her office and boss everybody around like a spider in the middle of her web, but an Intelligence officer ought to be able to blend into the scenery, and she’ll never be able to do that here! Of course, Head Center may have forgotten what a freak this planet is, and I’ll bet anything Cholayna didn’t know when she put in for transfer here—”

“I don’t think I quite understand,” Jaelle said, wondering if she ought to be offended, “Why is this planet such a freak?”

“It’s one of the half-dozen or so Empire planets which were settled entirely by a homogeneous group, colonists from one ethnic area,” Bethany said. “And though there may have been a few blacks, orientals or what have you on the original ship’s crew, genetic drift and interbreeding lost those traits a thousand years before the Empire rediscovered you. A planet with 100 percent white population is rarer than a hen hatched out with teeth!”

Jaelle thought about that for a moment. Yes, she had noticed Cholayna’s bark-brown skin and bright brown eyes, but she had simply believed that perhaps the woman had nonhuman blood; there were tales in the mountain of crossbreeds with trailmen or even catmen now and then, though the
kyrri
and
cralmacs
did not, of course, interbreed with humans. “But in the Ages of Chaos,” she added, explaining this, “humans were often artificially interbred with
cralmacs;
I simply thought she was only part human, that’s all.”

“Don’t let Cholayna hear you say that,” Bethany said, with a shocked grimace. “In the Empire, calling someone half-human is the dirtiest—not the second dirtiest—thing you can say to them, believe me.”

Jaelle started to express her shock—what disgusting prejudice! —but then she remembered that among ignorant peoples, even here, there were certain prejudices against nonhumans, and there was no accounting for custom and taboo.
Don’t try to buy fish in the Dry Towns
. She held her peace, wondering why, with the vaunted Empire medical technology, they had not discovered or rediscovered this technique and why they did not make use of it.

She said “I had better go up to the Intelligence Office. No, thank you, I can find the way myself.”

Cholayna made Jaelle comfortable in a soft chair, and ordered up lunch for her from the console, which seemed to have more choices than the lunch cafeteria.

“I haven’t had much chance to talk to anyone Darkovan,” she said frankly, “and I know that on this planet I won’t be able to do field work; so I have to depend on my field agents. I’m here to organize an Intelligence department, not to work in it. I’ll have to depend on you, and on anyone else here who knows the planet and grew up in the field. I didn’t want to lose Magda Lorne, but I wasn’t given the choice. I want to feel I can rely on you, Mrs Haldane, as I would have relied on Magda. I hope we can be friends.”

Jaelle put a fork into her food before replying. She had never known a woman who was neither the property of some man, nor yet a Renunciate. At last she said, “If you want to be my friend, you can start by not calling me
Mrs. Haldane
. Peter and I are not married
di catenas
and the Renunciate’s Oath forbids that I shall wear any man’s name—though I can’t seem to make Records understand that.”

“I’ll try and have it fixed,” Cholayna said, and Jaelle could see the woman’s lively brown eyes absorbing the information. “What should I call you, then?”

“I am Jaelle n’ha Melora. Should we truly come to be friends, my sisters in the Guild House call me
Shaya
.”

“Jaelle, then, for the moment,” said Cholayna, and Jaelle noted with appreciation that she did not hurry to use the intimate name. “I was Magda’s friend as well as her teacher, I think. And there is a good deal you can do for us here; I am sure you know that we have agreed to train a group of young women in Medic; perhaps you can make it easier for them among us. You are the first, you know.”

Jaelle smiled. “But I am not, of course. Two of my Guild sisters worked on the Spaceport when you were building it.”

Cholayna said, surprised, “Our employment rolls show no sign of Darkovan women employed—‘

Jaelle laughed. “They were both
emmasca
—neutered; you probably thought them men, and of course they would have taken men’s names. They wished to see what your people were like, who had come from beyond the stars,” Jaelle said. She forbore to add that what they had told, in the Guild House, had been the subject of many jokes, some vulgar.

Cholayna laughed softly. “I should have known that while we were studying you, you would be studying us in return. I will not ask you what you thought of us. Neither of us knows the other well enough for that, not yet.”

Jaelle was pleasantly surprised. This was truly the first Empire subject she had met who did not jump to unjustified conclusions about Darkovan culture. Perhaps Cholayna was the first truly educated Terran she had met, except for Magda, who was more Darkovan than Terran.

“Are you sure you have had enough to eat? More coffee? You are sure?” Cholayna asked, and at Jaelle’s refusal, shoved the dishes into the disposal unit, and took up a cassette from her desk. Jaelle recognized her own writing on the label; it was the report she had made up about Peter’s ransom and their winter at Ardais. One with Peter’s familiar label was beside it.

“I see from this,” she said, “that you were born in the Dry Towns, and lived there until you were almost twelve years old.”

Jaelle wondered suddenly if the lunch she had eaten had contained something poisonous to her; her stomach heaved, reminding her that she had intended to go and see the Medic. She said curtly, “I left Shainsa when I was twelve and have never returned. I know very little of the Dry Towns: I have even forgotten the dialect of Shainsa and speak it like any stranger.”

Cholayna looked at her silently for a long moment. Then she said, “Twelve years is long enough. At twelve, a child is formed—socially, sexually, the personality is fully created and cannot really be changed thereafter. You are far more a product of the Dry Towns than you are, for instance, a product of the Renunciate’s Guild House.”

Jaelle caught her breath, not knowing whether the flooding emotion was rage, dismay or simple disbelief. She found herself actually on her feet, every muscle tensed.

“How dare you?” she almost spat the words at Cholayna, “You have no right to say that!”

Cholayna blinked, but did not give ground before the flood of fury. “Jaelle, my dear, I wasn’t speaking of you personally, of course; I was simply restating one of the best established facts of human psychology; if you took it as a personal attack, I am sorry. Whether we like it or not, it’s a fact; the earliest impressions made on our minds are the lasting ones. Why should it trouble you so much to think that you might be basically a product of Dry-Town culture? Remember, I know very little about it, and there is very little about it in the HQ files; I must rely on you to tell me. What did I say to make you so angry?”

Jaelle drew a long breath and discovered that her jaw was aching behind her clenched teeth. At last she said “I—I did not mean to attack you personally, either. I—” and she had to stop again and swallow and unclench her teeth; if she had been wearing a dagger, she realized, she would have drawn it, and perhaps, before she thought, used it, too.
Why did I explode like that
? The rage slowly drained from her, leaving bewilderment behind.

“You must be mistaken, in this case at least. If I were a product of the Dry Towns, I should be a—a chattel, as women are there; chained, some man’s property; a woman unchained is a scandal—she must bear the mark of some man’s ownership. I swore the Renunciate’s oath as soon as I was old enough, and I have—have forgotten—everything I have done since I left the Dry Towns has been a way of—”

She stopped, her voice trailing into silence, completing in her mind,
a way of proving to myself that I would never wear chains for any man… Kindra said once to me that most women, and most men too. believe themselves free and weight themselves with invisible chains
…

Cholayna brushed her hand absently over her silver-white hair.

“If everything you have done since you left the Dry Towns has been a way of proving that you were not one of them, then, whether you live by their precepts or no, they have formed everything you have done. If they had left no influence on you, you would have chosen your way without thinking whether it was their way or the reverse—wouldn’t you?”

Jaelle muttered “I suppose so.” She was still carefully breathing, forcing herself to relax, to unclench her fists.

Cholayna added, casually, “I know little of the Renunciates, either. You spoke of the Oath, and so did Magda, but I know nothing of it. Is it a secret, or can you tell me what a Renunciate, a Free Amazon, swears?”

Jaelle said tiredly, “The oath is not secret. I will gladly tell you.” She began “From this day henceforth I swear—”

“Wait—” Cholayna lifted a hand. “May I turn on a recording device for the records?”

There was that word again
! But what was the point in arguing? It was, perhaps, the only way to make the Guild House comprehensible to an outsider. She said, “Certainly,” and waited.

“From this day I renounce the right to marry save as a freemate; no man shall bind me
di catenas
and I will dwell in no man’s house as a
barragana
,” she began, and steadily recited the Oath from beginning to end. How could Cholayna believe that she, if she were truly, as the woman said, a product formed by the Dry-Town culture, without hope of change in personality or sexuality or will, could have freely chosen the Oath? Ridiculous, on the face of it!

Cholayna listened quietly, nodding once or twice at some provision or other.

“This is, of course, not strange to me,” she said, “for in the Empire, and particularly on the Alpha planet where I grew up, it was taken for granted that women had these rights and responsibilities; although we also admit,” she said with a faint smile, “that the father of a child also has rights and responsibilities in determining care and upbringing. Some day, if you wish, I should like to discuss this with you at length. Also, I can see why it was that the Free Amazons—forgive me, the Renunciates— were the first Darkovan women to seek to learn from the Terrans. I have two things to ask of you. The first is that you should visit Magda in the Guild House and talk with her about choosing suitable women as candidates for Medic training—or whatever else seems suitable.”

“That will be my pleasure,” Jaelle said formally, but her mind ran counterpoint,
If she thinks I will help to persuade our women to act as Intelligence spies, she may think again
.

“Jaelle, what was your work among the—the Renunciates? What sort of work do they do?”

“Any honest work,” Jaelle said, “Among us there are bakers, cheese-makers, midwives—oh, yes, we train midwives especially in the Guild House in Arilinn—herb sellers, confectioners, mercenary soldiers—” Abruptly she stopped, realizing where this line of questioning was leading.

“No, we are not all soldiers, Cholayna, nor mercenaries, nor sword-women: if I had to gain my porridge with the sword, I should have starved long ago. The outsiders think always of the more
visible
Free Amazons, the ones who hire out as soldiers and mercenaries. There was a time, long ao, when there was a Sisterhood of the Sword—in the Ages of Chaos—it was dissolved when the Guild, the Comhi-letzii, were formed. The Sisterhood were mercenaries and soldiers, then. You asked what I did? I am a travel-organizer; we provide escort for ladies traveling alone, at least that was how it started, because we could chaperone as well as guide and protect. Later, men also came to us, so that we could tell them how many pack-beasts to hire, what food to buy for them, and how much they would need for the journey—we also act as guides through the worst country and the mountain passes.” She smiled a little, forgetting her anger. “They say now that an Amazon guide will go where no man in the Hellers will dare to set his foot.”

“That would be invaluable to us,” Cholayna said quietly. “Mapping and Exploring can always use guides and personnel who can tell them how to outfit themselves for the weather and the terrain. Lives have been lost for lack of that knowledge. If the Renunciates will consent to work for us, we will be truly grateful.” She paused a moment. “I wish, too, that you would consent to talk with one of our agents about what you remember of the Dry Towns, however simple. I am not asking that you should spy upon your own people,” she added shrewdly, “only that you should help to prevent misunderstandings—to tell us what your people think
our
people should know about your world, forms of courtesy, ways to avoid giving offense by ignorance—”

“Yes, of course,” said Jaelle. She could not remember now why she felt so angry at the very thought of talking about the Dry Towns. She was an employee of the Empire, so employed with the consent of her Guild Mothers, and as such she should obey every lawful command of her employer.

“For instance, we have an agent—his name is Raymon Kadarin—who is willing to go into the Dry Towns and send back some information from there. I want you to meet him, to see if you think he could go into the Dry Towns without being immediately spotted as a spy. What we know of the Domains— she broke off as a light began to blink on her desk with repetitive insistence.

“I told those fellows not to disturb us,” Cholayna said, frowning slightly, “Just let me get rid of them, Jaelle, and we’ll go on. Yes?” she snapped, pressing the blinking stud.

“The Chief’s on a rampage,” said the disembodied voice. “He’s looking all over for that Darkovan—you know, Haldane’s girl? Finally Beth said she was in your office, and he made a scene. Can you send her down here double-quick and calm him down?”

Jaelle felt herself clench tight with wrath. She was not
Haldane’s girl
, she was not a
girl
at all, she was a woman and an Empire employee in her own right, and if they wanted her, they could have the courtesy to ask for her properly by name! She started to blurt out some of this, then saw Cholayna was frowning, and sensed that the woman was almost equally angry.

“Jaelle n’ha Melora is in my office, and I have not yet finished my conference,” said Cholayna coldly. “If Montray wishes to speak with her, he may request her to come to his office when I have finished.”

Jaelle had met the Legate at the Council and had not liked him. She knew that Magda, too, had small respect for the man who had been her immediate superior; that he knew far less of Darkover than Magda herself, or any of half a dozen agents who worked under him. Peter, too, had said something like that;
Granted, the man’s a career diplomat, not an Intelligence Agent, but he ought to know something about the world where he’s stationed
!

Cholayna pushed the button and it went dark. “That will hold him for a little while, but I can’t guarantee that he won’t send for you right away. I’ve done my best.” She smiled at Jaelle, in a sudden, conspiratorial way, and Jaelle realized she liked this woman, she had one friend here, at least.

“Now, how would you like to record what you know of the Dry Towns?” Cholayna asked. “You can put it into a tape for Records, or you can talk directly to the Agent…”

I’d rather not do either, Jaelle thought. She hated talking on tape, but she had not learned to relate to the men she found here in the Headquarters. The thought of talking to a strange Terran Agent, to any Terran man without at least the tacit protection of Peter’s presence, frightened her. Yet the words of the Amazon Oath tormented her.
I shall appeal to no man as of right, for protection
… what, she thought distractedly, has
happened
to me, since I have come to live here as Piedro’s freemate?

Cholayna was still expectantly looking at her and Jaelle realized that she had not answered. She stammered, “I’d—I’d like to think about it a little, before I make up my mind.”

What I really want, she thought, is to talk mostly to the women. I feel safe and comfortable with Cholayna, even with Bethany. I feel secure relating to Darkovan men, even those who detest everything the Free Amazons stand for, because I know how to disarm their suspicions, to work among them as one of themselves. She did not think she could learn to do that with Terran men, and she didn’t really want to try.