The Saga of the Renunciates (66 page)

“I’m sorry I woke you, love,” he said. “I would have come back sooner, I wouldn’t have wanted to leave you alone here, but I knew you were with Lady Rohana and she’d look after you. I felt obligated to take care of them.”

“Of course you had to,” she said warmly. It was one of the things she loved about him, his sense of duty.
Did that mean she had none of her own
? She shied away from this question.

“Have you had dinner? Rohana sent me in all kinds of lovely food, and I could hardly eat any of it,” she said, “There’s all kinds of cakes and cold fowl and wine there on the side table—

“I ate something with the others,” he said. “They don’t appreciate good food, except Monty. Sandro Li—what is it you call him, Aleki?—wouldn’t touch any of it, he said he didn’t trust natural foods, they weren’t as safe and couldn’t be as nourishing as the kind scientifically computed for vitamin and mineral content. Makes me want to be out in the field again.” He took up a leg of fowl in one hand and a slice of some kind of nut pastry in the other and came toward her, gnawing hungrily on the bone. “I come to stay in a place like this, I realize how—how alien the Terran Zone really is. Poor girl, you’ve been at your wits’ end there, haven’t you? Maybe in a few weeks when this Carr business is all settled we can get away for a few weeks, make a trip into the back country, the mountains—Daleruth maybe, I have always loved the seacoast and you haven’t been there at all, have you? Leave everything behind us and just make the trip down through the mountains by road—just the two of us, get back to each other again. Hey, hey—” he came and bent over her, dropping the roast meat in a clumsy haste to take her in his arms, “You’re crying, Jaelle—I’ve been a beast, haven’t I, getting all tied up in worrying about business and promotion and all that nonsense and never remembering what’s really important! It takes something like this to remind me that there are other things in life. I’m sorry I was so nasty to you earlier. It would serve me right if you hated me after all that, but I don’t know what I would do without you, Jaelle, I love you so much… I need you—”

She buried her face into his neck, sobbing. Why had they grown so far apart? And he did not even know any of this, did not know about Dom Gabriel’s death, or the demands Rohana had made, or their child—

“Listen, Peter,” she said earnestly, reaching up to pull his face against hers, “you do know that Rohana is my kinswoman, and she had so many things to tell me, so much I cannot decide it all alone.” In a rush, she told him everything, but as she had hoped, he paid little heed to what Rohana had said about her child being Heir to the Aillard Domain.

“The important thing,” he said, holding her close, “the one that’s important, that’s our baby, Jaelle. We’ve had a lot of trouble, but now it’s all going to be worthwhile, now we have someone other than ourselves to think about.” He kissed her so tenderly she wondered why she had ever doubted him.

“That comes first, Jaelle. Just you, and me—and the baby.”

Magda was beginning to feel restless, almost claustrophobic; the women were friendlier, even Rafaella, but she was so tired of being indoors; sometimes she would step into the garden just to breathe the air of freedom. Even, she thought wryly, if the air of freedom smells a little too much of the stables!

She was still wearing castoffs from the box of outworn clothing, but tradition demanded that she must make herself a full set of clothing before the end of her housebound half year. She understood, after a fashion, why this was so—women of the upper classes, coming to the Renunciates, were accustomed to wearing clothing made only by the labor of servants and others, and it was necessary that they should know the cost of their labor. Keitha, on the other hand, enjoyed a chance to sit and sew and was now covering the neck and sleeves of her new undertunic, with daintily embroidered butterflies. Magda envied the ease with which she did it.

“Oh, this is restful for me,” Keitha said. “At any moment Marisela may summon me out to attend a confinement, so I will rest and embroider while I can—”

“It is not restful for me,” Magda said, biting her lip as she stabbed her finger again with the needle. “I would rather muck out barns than sew a single seam!”

“That is obvious from your work,” said Keitha, examining the stitches with a critical eye. “What was your mother thinking of!”

“She was a musician,” Magda said, “and I do not think she could sew any better than I can; she was always busy with her lute, or with her translations.” Elizabeth Lorne had played nine instruments, and had collected over three hundred mountain folk-songs of Darkover. Magda, who had little musical talent, had not been close to her mother, though in these last months she had been more and more aware of how like her mother she was, absorbed in her work, craving something to do for herself. She wondered, now when it was too late to know, what her mother’s marriage had really been like. She had surely not let herself be consumed in David Lorne’s career among the Terrans but had always done her own work…

‘’ My mother said I must never ask a servant to do anything for me that I could not do for myself,“ Keitha said. ”Otherwise a lady is slave to her own servants. Now I am grateful for it, though I do not like to work with horses. But Marisela says I must learn to attend to my own horses and saddle and tack, because a midwife is required to go by law to any woman within a day’s journey who has need of her, and farther if she can. And Marisela says I may not always have serving men or women to look after my animals for me.“

Magda smiled a little;
Marisela says
had become the most important words in Keitha’s vocabulary. Magda had begun to suspect that one of the main points of Amazon training was to regress women to their adolescence, so that they could grow up again in a way that would not make them subservient to fathers, brothers, the men who ruled most Darkovan households. If it took them back to the stage of having crushes on other women, well, that was not a crime either, though it was surprising to see it in Keitha, who had been brought up as a
cristoforo
and had made some unkind remarks about lovers of women in the Guild House.

She pricked her finger again with the needle, swore as she tried to tie off a short end of thread. Camilla was not the only woman who had made such an offer to Magda, but she had always smiled and refused in such a way, she hoped, as not to give offense. It had been harder to refuse Camilla, who had been her friend when she so desperately needed friends.

But I am not a lesbian, I have no interest in other women
… and that brought her mind back to that unsettling episode with Jaelle. Well, that had been a dream, a shared nightmare, it had no real significance. But as she struggled with her thread, trying to poke the end through the eye of the needle, she remembered the night it had been brought up in training session…

… Cloris and Janetta had claimed that any Renunciate who had love affairs with men was a traitor to her Renunciate Oath. “It is men who oppress us and try to enslave us, like Keitha’s husband who beat her and tried to bring her back by hired mercenary soldiers… how can a free woman love men who live like that and would drag us back to them?”

“But all men are not like that,” Rafaella had insisted, “The fathers of my sons are not like that, they are content to leave me free. They might like it better if I would dwell with them and keep their house, but they allow my right to do as I will.”

And Keitha had cried out, at white heat, “We leave our husbands and come here for refuge, thinking ourselves safe from pursuit, and then we find we are not safe from our sisters either! Here in this house, no later than yesterday, one of my sisters made—made an unlawful request of me—”

Mother Millea said in her gentle, neutral voice, “I suppose you mean by that, Keitha, that someone asked you to go to bed with her. Who styled that request unlawful? Or did she not leave you free to refuse if you would?”

“I call it unlawful,” Keitha cried, and Rezi said, laughing, “You called it something worse than that, didn’t you? I confess that I am the vicious criminal involved, and she fled from me as if she thought I would rape her then and there, without even the courtesy to look me in the face and tell me, no thank you!”

Keitha was red as fire, tears dripping down her face. “I would not have named you,” she said angrily, “but you boast of it?”

“I will not let you make me ashamed of it,” Rezi said. “Among men, if two young boys swear to be friends all their lives and allow no woman to come between them, even if they marry and have children later, none denies their right to place their friendship first among all things!
Donas amizu
!” she said scornfully. “All the writers of songs have nothing but honor for a man who places his
bredu
higher than wife and children, but if two women so pledge one another, it is taken for granted that when the girl grows to womanhood, her oath means only…
I will be loyal to you until my duty to my husband and my children comes first
! My love and loyalty are all to my sisters, and I will not waste love on a man, who can never return it!”

Magda thought, confused,
but all men are not like that, Rafaella is right
, and lost track of what was being said. Now she thought,
I wonder if Keitha is intellectually honest enough to recognize what is happening between her and Marisela, or if Marisela will ever make her aware of it
?

Janetta put her head in at the door and said, “Margali, Keitha, Mother Lauria wants you both down in the hall.”

Magda gratefully bundled her sewing into an untidy ball and thrust it into the wooden cubbyhole bearing her name. Keitha stopped to fold her work more neatly, but Magda heard her steps behind her on the stairs and they ran down side by side.

Camilla was there, dressed for riding, and Rafaella and Felicia, with a little group of women Magda did not know; but on their sleeves they bore the red slashmark of Neskaya Guild House.

“Margali, Keitha, are you weary of being housebound? Are you willing to put yourself in some danger? There is fire in the Kilghard Hills, on Alton lands; the Guild women are not required by law to go, but we are permitted to share this obligation, when all able-bodied men are required to go. There is no law which says you
must
go,” she repeated carefully, “but you may go if you will.”

“I will go,” Magda said, and Keitha added more timidly, “I would be glad to go, but I do not know what use I should be.”

“Leave that to us,” said one of the strange women, “if you cannot fight the fire, you can help around the camp, but we can use every willing pair of hands.”

Mother Lauria looked at them one after the other, then said, “Good; I will send you, then.” Magda realized that they had in effect been ordered to go; the housebound time required that they remain indoors unless specifically ordered to go by a Guild Mother.

“You must learn to bear yourself properly among men, and to work with them as one of themselves, not with a woman’s special privilege. You are in the charge of Camilla and Rafaella; you are to obey them implicitly, and to speak to no one, and especially to no man, without their permission. Is that understood? Good; go and dress yourselves for riding, and wear your warmest clothes and cloaks, and strongest boots. Fetch clean linen for four days, and be down here before the clock strikes again.”

As she made ready to ride, and rolled her clean underlinen in the small canvas bag Rafaella had given her, Magda was shaking with excitement. She was a little frightened, too; but, she reminded herself, she was stronger than many men required by law to meet this obligation.
And I am a Renunciate
.

As they saddled their horses, Rafaella said quietly to Keitha and Magda, “Some of the men with whom we will travel will try to lure you into conversation; or they will make rude and suggestive remarks. Whatever they say to you, you may not reply to them, not a single word; pretend if you wish that you are deaf and dumb. If they lay hands upon you, you may defend yourself, but you must accustom yourself to the fact that they resent us, and learn to live with it, since there’s no helping it.”

The detachment of men waiting at the City gates was an ill-assorted crew. At their head were three dozen young Guardsmen in uniform, commanded by a smart young officer not yet out of his teens.

“Valentine Aillard,
para servirte, mestra
,” he said, giving Rafaella a cool and courteous nod. “Your women are welcome; we can use every pair of hands. Have you rations and tools?”

“They are on our pack-animals there,” Rafaella said, and gestured to the women to fall into line. The polite young officer had evidently made it clear to his Guardsmen how they were to behave, for, though the Guardsmen looked at them with some curiosity, there were no overt signs of resentment. It was otherwise with the other men, traveling to the firelines with the guardsmen but all too obviously not under military discipline. There were soft whistles, coos intended to attract attention, and leers; and as they took their place in the line, a murmured obscene phrase or two. Magda ignored them; Keitha was as red as a bellflower. She drew her hood over her head, and Magda thought she was crying under its shelter. The women from Neskaya House, all of whom were in their forties or older, rode by the men without a glance their way, while Camilla—Magda remembered that at one time she had been a mercenary soldier— rode ahead with the Guardsmen, chatting casually with them.

Keitha whispered, “Why is she allowed to speak with them when we are not?”

“Probably because they do not yet trust us to know how to behave,” Magda whispered back. “Do you
want
to talk with them?”

“No,” Keitha whispered vehemently. “But it seems to me strange that she will talk and be friendly with the same men who are treating us so badly.”

That had occurred to Magda too, but she supposed Camilla, who had been a Renunciate for many years, had managed somehow to make the distinction between men who accepted her as one of themselves and those who treated her as a woman to be cajoled. In any case Camilla was a law to herself.

All afternoon they rode, and well into the night; finally the officer at the head of the column called a halt and they camped in a meadow; the Amazons cooked over their own fire, and later laid their blankets in a circle. Rafaella said, “Keitha, you will sleep with me, and Margali, you with Camilla. Whenever we are among men this way, we always sleep two and two; just to make it abundantly clear to any men that we are not seeking company. And if anyone does get the wrong idea, you can protect one another.”

Magda could see the sense in this, although she was sure that the men around the other fire, if they did not get the idea that the women wanted their company, were sure to get another idea which might be almost equally mistaken. She reminded herself sternly that it was none of their business what the men thought. Still, it made her self-conscious when she spread her blankets with Camilla’s.

Rafaella asked one of the women from Naskaya, “Where is my daughter? I had hoped to see Doria with you.”

“I told her she could come if she wished,” the woman said, “and she was as eager to get out of the house as any of us; but it was the first day of her cycles, and hard work and hard riding at such a time are no pleasure, I could see she was really feeling ill, so I did not try to persuade her to go.”

Rafaella said angrily, “I do not like to think of my daughter shirking! I have ridden and worked hard when I was seven moons pregnant, and she let that stop her?”

The other woman shrugged. She said, “There is no law to say that all women must react alike to their bodies; because you do not mind hard work, would you force it on her? I am sure, if the fire was near and we really needed every available hand, she would have been right beside us—she does not strike me as lazy or slothful. There were enough of us who were willing and even eager to come. Don’t worry over her, Rafi; she is out of your hands now. If she really shows any sign of slacking—and so far I have seen no sign of it—let the Neskaya Guild Mothers deal with her.”

Rafaella sighed and said, “I suppose you are right,” and was silent. After a time the other woman said gently, “I think perhaps the children of Renunciates have a harder time than those who come to us from the outside world. We expect so much more of them, don’t we?” and Magda saw the strange woman stroke Rafaella’s hair gently. “I have a daughter who chose to leave the Guild and marry. She is happy, she has two children, and her husband treats her as well as even I could wish, but I still feel I failed with her. At least your daughter has taken oath, my sister, and is no man’s servant or slave.”

Camilla murmured into Magda’s ear, “And if I had said that to Rafaella, she would have slapped me. I am glad that someone else thought to do so.” She stood up and called the women around the fire. “Before we sleep,” she said, “Annelys will give you some instructions in firefighting.” Annelys was the woman from Neskaya Guild House; she gathered the women around their fire and gave them some rudimentary instructions about the theory of firefighting, what to do under various conditions, elementary safety precautions; although she emphasized that most of them would be put to doing ordinary manual work on the fire line and would not need to know what was going on, but only obey instructions precisely. Around the other fire, Magda could hear one of the young officers telling the men almost the same things; his voice was mostly a sound with no words distinguishable but now and then a chance silence or a gust of wind their way would bring them a few words.