The Saga of the Renunciates (58 page)

“But I am not,” Rafaella said harshly, “You were born to my sister; so I thought I could be—impersonal with you. But I cannot; I—in my pride, I have asked too much of you. You know that an Amazon who has a birth-daughter in her own House must sent her elsewhere for her training—”

Mother Lauria held up her hand. “One thing at a time! Doria, you know you must be silent here unless asked to speak! Rafi, we will talk of this later; for the moment, we have not done with Margali. Three have spoken for her, and by the laws of the Renunciates, her oath must stand. But we cannot have the house torn with dissension. I will have no more gossip and silent slander; if there is anything to be said against Margali, say it here and now, and thereafter be silent, or say it before her face.”

Mother Millea said, “I have no objection to allowing Margali to stay among us. I do not dislike her. But the truth is, she did bring indemnity and disgrace upon us, and I do not think she fully understands all the laws of our Charter. If Jaelle were living here, it would be Jaelle’s responsibility to instruct her oath-daughter in these things. Since she is not, we might consider extending the housebound time, so that she may complete her training—‘’

Oh, no
, Magda thought,
I couldn’t take it
…

Mother Lauria said, “There is precedent for that, too; the housebound period may be extended another half year if a woman has not sufficiently learned our ways to be trusted in the outside world. Still, I am reluctant to do this with a woman Margali’s age. If she were a girl of fifteen, I would certainly demand it, but surely there is a better way than this.”

Camilla said, “It is pure chance that it was Jaelle and not I who took her oath; we were both present. I will volunteer to instruct her myself, as Jaelle might do.”

“And I,” said Marisela, and Mother Lauria nodded. She said “If any of you has an unspoken grudge against Margali, speak it now, or be silent hereafter for all time.”

Magda, glancing hesitantly around the circle, seemed to hear unspoken fragments of thought. Marisela said quietly, “I can tell that your grudges are too petty to speak, in the light of this—is it true? I think Margali is an extraordinary woman, and one day we will all be proud to claim her as one of us.”

Janetta, one of the younger women who had not been allowed to speak for Margali—and Magda had not expected it, for Janetta was the lover of Cloris, who had created the crisis over the leftover dish at supper—said thoughtfully, “I think some of us have forgotten what it was like to go through training. Rafi is right; I couldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t asked of me. But I think maybe we expected too much of her, because she was Jaelle’s oath-daughter.”

The third of the Guild Mothers, who had sat silent through the entire proceeding—Magda remembered hearing that she was a judge in the Court of Arbitration, and wondered if that was why she had taken no part in the affair—said in her rusty old voice, “I think there is a lesson for all of us in the way we have been behaving; none of us is more than flesh and blood, and we must not ask more of a sister than we would be willing to endure for ourselves. That is true of Rafaella and Doria as well as Margali.”

Rafaella had been leaning against Jaelle’s shoulder; she turned around and held out her hand to Magda. She said, “Janetta is right; I had forgotten, and I was angry with you this afternoon because you made me see what I was doing to Doria. I—I don’t want to lose her. But for her own good, I see now that I must leave her training to others. Will you forgive me?”

Magda took the hand Rafaella gave her, feeling embarrassed. “I ought to have put it more tactfully. I was rude—”

“We were both rude,” said Rafaella, smiling. “Ask Camilla sometime what I am capable of—” she raised her face, laughing, to the old
emmasca
. “When we were both in training together, we drew our knives on one another! We could both have been sent away for that!”

“What did they do to you?” Magda asked, and Camilla chuckled, pressing Rafaella’s shoulder.

“Handcuffed us together for ten days. For the first days we did nothing but fight and scream at each other—then we discovered we could do nothing without the other’s help, and so we became friends. They do not do that any more, not in this House—”

“But then, we have not had any two trainees draw knives on one another since then,” Mother Lauria said, smiling as she overheard them. “But we have not yet learned all we can from this affair. It is still painful to speak of it; but we must speak of it
because
it is painful. Keitha, your oath has not been called into question, you are not here on trial, but tell us, Keitha, why, after Margali had wounded the surrendered swordsman, you were heard to declare that we should have killed them all?”

Magda had to admire the old woman’s skill as a psychologist. She felt the pressure lifted from her shoulders, yet she did not feel Keitha was being attacked in her stead; only challenged, as usual during training sessions.

Keitha took time to frame a reply, knowing it would be torn to shreds before the words were well out of her mouth. Finally she said, “He had no right to follow me here—he would have killed some of you, killed Camilla certainly, dragged me back unwilling, raped me—by the Goddess,” she burst out, and Magda could see that she was trembling, “I wished then that I had Margali’s skill with a sword, so that I could have killed him myself and not put my oath-sisters to the trouble!”

“But,” Camilla said gently, “the men with him were only hired swords, and they followed the code of the sword; when he was himself felled, they surrendered at once. What is your quarrel with them, oath-daughter?”

“A man who hires out his sword to such an immoral purpose— does he not then forfeit protection? If not of men’s laws, at least of ours?”

Rezl said angrily, “I think Keitha is right! Those men who fought alongside her husband agreed to what he was doing, they would have served their own wives the same—how do they deserve to be treated better than he?”

Camilla’s soft voice—so feminine, Magda suddenly realized, in spite of her lean angular body and abrupt manners—came quietly out of the dimness in the shadow of the room. “Surely, if men see that we women cannot abide by civilized rules of behavior, they will turn all the more quickly against us?”

“Civilized rules!
Their
rules!” Janetta sounded furious, but Mother Lauria ignored her.

“Keitha, was it those men you hated? Or was it all men you wished to see punished in them?”

“It is Shann I hate,” she said in a low voice, “I want to see him dead before me—I wake from dreams of killing him! Is there no one here who has ever hated a man?”

“I think there is no one here who has not,” said Rafaella, but Mother Lauria went on as if she had not heard. “Hate can be a shackle stronger than love. While you hate, you are still bound to him.”

Camilla said quietly, “Hate can lead you, if you cannot harm the one yourself, to turn upon yourself. I sacrificed my very womanhood so that no man could ever desire me again. It was hate cost me this.”

Magda remembered the grim story Camilla had told, and wondered how the old woman’s voice could sound so calm. Keitha flared, “And is that such a price? You don’t know what you have been spared!”

Camilla’s voice was hard. “And you don’t know what you are talking about, oath-daughter.”

“Is that not why you became a mercenary? To kill men in revenge for the choice they cost you?” Keitha asked.

Jaelle said into the silence, “I have known Camilla since my twelfth year; never have I known her to kill any man needless, or for revenge.”

“I fight often at the sides of men,” Camilla said, “and I have learned to call them comrades and companions. I hate no man living; I have learned to blame no man for the evil done by another. I have fought, yes, and killed, but I can admire, and respect, and even, yes, sometimes, love where love is due.”

“But, you,” Keitha said, “
you
are not a woman anymore.”

Camilla shrugged slightly. “You think not?” she said, and Magda wondered if she only fancied the pain in the woman’s eyes.

And behind her it seemed that Jaelle had spoken aloud, then Magda realized with dismay that somehow she was reading Jaelle’s thoughts, that no one except herself could hear;
Camilla was no less foster mother to me than Kindra—perhaps more, since she had no child and knew she would have none. I love Camilla, but it is so different from the way I love Piedro. I love him… sometimes… at other times I cannot imagine why I ever even liked him. Never, never could I turn against one of my sisters that way
…

And Magda was thinking, in a desperate attempt to distance the subject by intellectualizing it, they talked a lot about the differences between men and women, but none of their answers ever satisfied her. She could get pregnant and Peter could not, that was the only difference she could see in the world of the Terrans, they did not share the most dangerous of vulnerabilities. And then somehow she felt as if her whole sense of values had done a flipflop, he had been dependent on her, and now on Jaelle, to give him the son he so desperately desired… before, she had always seen herself as taking all the risks, but now Jaelle could bear him a son, if she would,
if she would
… now he was at Jaelle’s mercy as he had been at hers; she saw it almost with a flash of pity. Poor Peter. And then, in a flash,
was Jaelle pregnant
? Then the sudden linkage broke and slammed shut and Magda was alone in her mind again, confused, not knowing which were her thoughts and which came from elsewhere. She had missed some of what Camilla was saying.

“I have gone to some lengths to prove myself the equal, or more, of any man, but I am past that now; I can admit my own womanhood and I need not prove it to you. Why does it distress you to think of me as a woman, Keitha?”

Keitha cried out, “I cannot understand you! You are free of the burden none of us can endure, and yet you choose to be woman, you
insist
upon it… does not even neutering free you?”

Camilla’s face was very serious now. “It is not the freedom you think it, oath-daughter,” she said, holding out her hand to Keitha, but Keitha ignored it.

“It is easy for you to be sentimental about womanhood,” Keitha cried, tears running angrily down her face, “You have nothing more to lose, you are free from the desire of men and from their cruelty, you can be a man among men or a woman among women as you choose, and have it all your own way—”

“Does it seem so to you, child?” Camilla took Keitha’s hand gently in hers, but the younger woman wrenched it away in angry revulsion. Camilla’s face twisted a little, as if in pain.

“Can I really be a woman among women? You are not the first who has refused to accept me as one of you, though it does not often happen in my own house. Perhaps men are a little kinder; they accept me as a comrade even when they know I have nothing to offer them as a woman, they defend my back and offer their lives for mine by the code of the sword. My sisters here could do no more. Yet I am all too aware that I am not one of them.”

Keitha, savage in aroused hatred, said viciously, “Yet you sit here and dare to boast of your comradeship with our tormentors and oppressers!”

“I was not boasting,” Camilla said quietly, “but it is true that I have come to know men as few women have the chance to know them. I no longer want to kill them all for the vileness of a few.”

“But doesn’t everyone here have a tale to tell, of men worth nothing but our hate? I am filled with it—I will never be free of it—I want to kill them, to go on killing them, but I would be more merciful than they, I could kill them cleanly with the sword where they kill and torture, enslaving the body and the soul—I will never be free of it until I have struck down a man and seen him die—”

“Is that why you came here, Keitha?” asked Marisela gently, “to learn to kill men?”

Mother Lauria said “A man? And any man will do?”

“Are they not all the same in their treatment of women?” Keitha demanded.

Mother Lauria looked round the circle. “Here sits one,” she said, and her eyes came to rest on Jaelle, “who has said the same thing so many times that their sound is a permanent echo within this room; yet she has taken a freemate and dwells with him outside the Guild House. Jaelle, can you talk to Keitha about men, and whether they are all the same?”

Magda could feel Jaelle’s agitation, like a living presence, though Jaelle was silent and did not move. Finally she said “I do not know what to say, Mother, I would prefer not to speak yet—”

“Is that because you need it, perhaps, more than the rest of us? You know the rules; none of us may spare ourselves, nor ask our sisters to speak of what we will not share—”

But Jaelle looked steadily down at the rug, and Mother Lauria shrugged. “Doria?”

The girl giggled nervously. She said, “I have never known any man well enough to love him—or hate him either. What can I say?” She turned to Jaelle and said, “You were the last woman I would ever expect to take a freemate! You had said so often that you wanted nothing of men—”

Mother Lauria looked at Jaelle so long and intently that the younger woman said, “Don’t—I will speak.” But then she was silent for a long time, so long that Magda actually turned to look at her, to see if she was still physically present there. At last she said, “Men—are all the same—just as, in a way, women are all the same. Each man is different, yet they all have something in common which makes them different from women, I don’t know what it is—”

There was a round of giggles and laughs all round the circle, and the tension slackened a little, but Jaelle said, distracted, “I don’t think that was what I meant. I have lain with only this one man. I like it—I suppose he is not much different from Keitha’s husband—better mannered, perhaps, they have laws in the Terran Zone, no man may lay violent hands on his wife, no more freely than on any other citizen. But I would have to ask some woman who has had many lovers whether they are all the same in this way—”

Rafaella said with a faint laugh, “It is a common illusion of young women that men are all different from one another,” but then she said into the laughter from the rest, “No, seriously; no man is like another, but they are not so different, either.”