Thendara House (31 page)

“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.”

“In the Terran Zone, a woman is not her freemate’s property, not in law,” Jaelle said, “but there is something in a man which seems to drive him to
possess
… I never knew this existed before.” She shook her head, and her hair, the color of a new-minted copper coin, cascaded around her shoulders and her face, gleaming in the firelight. “In intimacy - the mind - it is raw - I don’t know - ” she said half aloud, running her fingers through her hair, shaking it into place with a gesture of pride and defiance.

And suddenly it seemed Jaelle was at one end of the room and all her sisters were at the far end; Magda knew it had never been there before between Jaelle and her sisters, but it was there, a gulf wider than the abysses between the stars; she thought,
I could get up now and proclaim myself a Terran and I would be less alien than Jaelle at this moment
. Jaelle was far away, alien, alone, with nothing save her pride and her flaming hair and the word,
Comyn
, which echoed softly in Magda’s mind, echoed from all over the room.
Comyn
. The very word was like a solid wall which separated Jaelle from the only family she had ever known.

They had known of her blood, of course, knew that Lady Rohana was her close kinswoman; but never in all these years had Jaelle spoken any word or given any hint that she cared for her Comyn blood; her red hair seemed no more than an accident of birth. Now it was in the room with them, and Magda, looking at the faces which were suddenly those of strangers - and she knew that she saw them through Jaelle’s eyes - sensed fear; a wary fear reserved for gods, not men; for Comyn, aliens, outsiders, rulers…

For this moment, Jaelle was an outsider, not a cherished sister, and they all knew it. Trying to break that frightening silence, Magda turned and took Jaelle’s hand in her own. She said, “I think it is a game they like to play with us; possession. They like to think they own us; they know they do not and it makes them insecure. Women do not - do not suffer so much from separation as men do. Perhaps we should not blame them so much for trying to pretend they own us. It is their nature. They have nothing else.”

“Their nature!” Felicia spoke from the shadows, her eyes still swollen, her voice husky. “Are we not to blame them for possessiveness, when I have seen my son torn from me, sobbing, screaming my name - ” she turned on Lauria, in shaking anger. “Their nature! Does their nature demand that they shall have command of the world, of their women and their sons, that they and they alone have a right to immortality through their children? What kind of world have they built, where a woman must give up her sons, to be taught to fight and kill as a sign of manliness, never to weep, never to show fear, to instill into his nature the need to
possess
… to possess his women and his children, to make him into the kind of man from which I fled - is it not in my nature, too, to desire my sons? And I am denied this here among you - ” She put her face in her hands and began to cry again, heartbrokenly.

Janetta flared, “Would you have your sons grow up among us, then, to turn on us and try to possess us when they are grown?”

Rafaella snarled, “There should be a better way than to return them to that very world, to be made into the kind of men we hate! Perhaps, if they were reared among us they would be different - “

“They would still grow to be
men
,” Janetta cried, “and they do not belong here in the Guild House!”

Mother Lauria raised her hands, trying to impose silence, but the clamor grew. Magda was thinking, almost in despair, not knowing whether the thoughts were hers or another’s,
We give up our sons because that is all men want of us, perhaps what they are trying to do here is hopeless and unnatural
…