Two to Conquer (42 page)

it is terrible! First he has incurred the enmity of the Sisterhood, who are under the protection of the Goddess, and now this.”

Paul watched her, troubled. All his life he had believed that women really wished to be mastered, that in their deepest womanhood they wished to be taken, and if they did not know it, then a man was doing them no harm by showing them what they really wanted. Watching Melisendra, he had no doubt that

she was capable of knowing what she wanted, and it was a new and rather disturbing idea to him. Yet Bard had taken her against her will… he found he did not want to follow that thought through, or he would find himself ready to kill Bard.

I don’t want to kill Bard, he has somehow become a part of myself
…

“But what about the Sisterhood, Melisendra? They go among men; have they any right to display their womanhood and say, yes, I am here, but you can’t touch? I agree that women who stay at home,

protected by their men, should never be touched, but these women have forfeited this protection—”

“Do you think all women are alike? I do not know the Sisters of the Sword, although I have spoken now and again with one of them. I know very little of their ways, but if they choose to take up their swords, I do not see why they should not do so in peace—” Realizing what she had said, she giggled.

“No, of course I don’t mean that. But they should do so undisturbed; why should an accident of birth deprive them of the right to make war, if they prefer it to sewing cloaks and embroidering cushions and making cheese?”

“Next,” Paul said, smiling at her vehemence, “you will be saying that men should have the right to spend their lives embroidering tablecloths and washing babies’ breechclouts!”

“Do you doubt that some men are more fitted for it than for war?” she demanded. “Even if they wish to put skirts about their knees, and keep at home boiling porridge for dinner! A woman, at least can marry, or be a
leronis
, or pledge to the Sisterhood and pierce her ears and take up the sword, but God help the man who wishes to be other than a soldier or a plowman or a
laranzu
! Why should a woman who takes up the sword have to fear rape, if she is defeated? I am a woman—would you see me used so?”

“No,” said Paul, “I would kill any man who tried, and I would not let him die easy; but you are a woman, and they—”

“And they are women too,” she interrupted him angrily. “Men do not think women are unwomanly, or subject them to rape and disasters if they must follow the plow to scratch a living for their orphaned children or herd animals in the wild. The man who rapes a solitary herdwoman or fisher-woman is

everywhere scorned as a man who cannot get a woman willing! Why should only swordswomen be

subject to this? When you capture a foeman, you take his weapons and force him to ransom them, in the evil old days you could keep him as your servant for a year’s space, but you did not force him to lie down for you!”

“That’s what Bard said,” said Paul. “He said that his men should use them honorably as prisoners of war, and would have them whipped otherwise.”

She said, “Truly? That is the best thing you have ever told me about Bard di Asturien. He may, as he grows older, be changing, becoming more of a man, and less of a wild wolf—”

Paul looked at her sharply. “You don’t really hate him, do you, Melisendra? Even though he raped
you

—”

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “that was not rape; I was willing enough, though it was true he threw a glamour over me. But I have come to know that many women lie with a man under a glamour, and

sometimes they do not even know it. I hope the Goddess Avarra may forgive Bard as readily as I have forgiven him.” She put her arms around him and said, “But why are we talking of him? We are

together, and it is not likely that he will disturb us this night.”

“No,” Paul said, “I think Bard will have a great deal else to think of. Between the Lady Carlina and the wrath of Avarra, I do not think he will spare much thought for us.”

Carlina had been crying for a long time; now her sobs had subsided at last, and she lay with tears just slipping down her cheeks, running out from under the swollen eyelids and soaking into the damp

pillow.

“Carlina,” Bard said at last, “I beg you, don’t cry any more. The thing is done. I am sorry I had to hurt you, but now it will be better, and I give you my word I will never lay a rough hand on you again. For the rest of our lives, Carlie, we can live happily together, now that you can no longer refuse me.”

She turned over and stared at him. Her eyes were so swollen with crying that she could hardly see him.

She said, in a hoarse little voice, “Do you still believe that?”

“Of course, my beloved, my wife,” he saia, and reached out to take her slender hand in his, but she pulled it away.

“Avarra’s mercy,” he exploded, “why are women so unreasonable?”

She looked up, and a strange small smile played around the corner of her mouth. She said, “
You
, to call upon the mercy of Avarra? A day will come, Bard, when I think you will not take that oath so lightly.

You have forfeited, I think, all claim to her mercy, when you had me taken from the island; and again, last night.”

“Last night—” Bard shrugged. “Avarra is Lady of Birth and Death—and of the hearth fire; surely she could not be angered at a man taking his wife, who had been pledged to him before ever you swore your traitor’s oath to the Goddess. And if she is a Goddess who will come between husband and wife, then I will swear to put down her worship everywhere within this kingdom.”

“The Goddess is the protectress of all women, Bard, and she will punish rape.”

“Do you still claim that you were raped?”

“Yes,” she said implacably.

“I didn’t think you minded too much. Your Goddess knows, you didn’t try to fight me—”

“No,” she said in a low voice, but he heard the unspoken part of that,
I was afraid
… He had taken her, a second time, and she had not struggled, nor tried to fight him away, but lay quiet and passive, letting him do what he would as if she were a rag doll.

He looked at her with contempt. “No woman has ever complained of me—afterward. You will come to

it too, Carlina, with time. Why can you not be honest about your feelings? All women are the same; in your hearts you desire a man who will take you, and master you, and you will one day stop fighting and acknowledge that you wanted me as much as I wanted you. But I had to make you admit it to yourself.

You were too proud, Carlie. I had to break through that pride of yours before you could admit that you wanted me.”

She sat up in the bed, reaching for the black cloak of Avarra.

He wrenched it away from her and threw it angrily into a corner. “Never let me see you wearing that damned thing again!”

She shrugged, standing in her torn chemise as straight and proud as if she were wearing court dress.

The tears were still flooding down her face with their own life, but she brushed them impatiently away.

Her voice was still and cold, even through the hoarseness of many tears. “Do you really believe that, Bard? Or is it your way to protect yourself from knowing what a cruel thing you have done, what a wretched, miserable excuse for a man you really are?”

“I am no different from any other man,” he defended himself, “and you, my dear lady, no different from any other woman, except for your pride. I have even known women to kill themselves before they can admit to the man that their desires are no different from men’s—but I had thought you were more honest than that, that you could admit to yourself, now that I have made it inevitable, that you had wanted me…”

“That,” she said, very low, “is a lie, Bard. A lie. And if you believe it, it is only because you do not dare to know what you are or what you have done.”

He shrugged. “At least I know women. I have known enough of them since my fourteenth year.”

She shook her head.

“You have never known anything about any woman, Bard. You have known only what you yourself

wished to believe about them, and that is a very long way from the truth.”

“And what is the truth?” His voice held scathing contempt.

“You ask me,” she said, “but you do not dare to know, do you? Have you ever even thought of trying to find out the truth—the real truth, Bard, not the soothing lies men tell themselves so that they can live with what they are and the things they do?”

“Do you suggest I ask a woman, and listen to the lies they tell
themselves
! I tell you, all of them—yes, and you too, lady—they want to be mastered, to have their pride overcome, so that they can admit to their real desires…”

She smiled, just a little. She said, “If you believe that, then, Bard, you will have no hesitation in knowing the real truth, mind to mind, so that neither can lie to the other.”

“I did not know you were a
leronis
,” Bard said, “but I am sure enough of myself, lady, that if you have courage to show me your inner mind I do not fear what I will see.”

Carlina touched her throat, where the starstone hung within its small leather pouch on a braided leather thong. She said, “Be it so, Bard. And Avarra have mercy on you; for I shall have no more pity than you had on me last night Know, then, what I am—and what you are.”

She unwrapped the stone, and Bard felt a faint sickness at the blueness, the little ribbons of light that curled inside.

“See,” she said in a low voice. “See from inside, if you will.”

For a moment nothing except distance, strangeness, and then Bard knew he was seeing himself, in

memory, as Carlina had seen him when he first came to court as their foster brother; big, loutish, a clumsy boy who could not dance, overgrown, stumbling over his own feet…
Did she pity me, then? No
more than pity
? No, he saw himself in her eyes, handsome, frightening, even a little glamorous, the big boy who fetched down her kitten from the tree—and suddenly, when she was most grateful, threatened to wring its neck, so that her gratitude was swallowed up in sudden fear,
if he would do that to a kitten,
what would he do to me
? To Carlina, Bard knew, he had seemed huge, terrifying, big as the world, and when they were to be handfasted, and she had first thought of Bard as a possible husband, he felt, with her, the terrifying revulsion, big arms that would crush her, rough hands touching her, the kiss he had given her there before all, shamed and shrinking; and her anger at him when she had held Lisarda weeping in her arms, the girl not even knowing what Bard had done or why, only that she had been used, shamed, humiliated, and that she could not resist him, even through her hate and sickness at what had been done to her body and how he had made her compliant in her own rape…

And then the Festival, where he had led her into the gallery and she knew that he meant to have from her, willing or unwilling, what he had had from Lisarda; only it was worse for her, because she
knew
what he wanted and why…

Bard does not want me, only, in his pride, he wants to lie with the king’s daughter so that he will be the
king’s son-in-law; he has no identity or pride of his own, so he must have the king’s daughter for wife,
to give him legitimacy
… .
And he wants my body… as he wants every woman’s body he sees
… Bard felt with Carlina her physical sickness at his touch, the revulsion of his tongue thrusting into her mouth, his hands on her, the dizzying relief when Geremy had interrupted. Through her eyes he watched

himself draw that accursed dagger on Geremy, and heard Geremy’s screams and the convulsion of

agony—

“No more—” he begged aloud, but the matrix held him, pitiless, dragging him into Carlina’s shame that at one time she had admired him, that at one time she had felt the first stirrings of desire for him… It was as if he had crushed them out with his own hands, so that she felt nothing when she stood and watched him, outlawed, going forth into exile; and it was as if his hands on her had crushed out any desire ever to marry. When Geremy’s hand was offered, she had fled to the safety of the Island of Silence, and there the peace had wiped out the memory… or almost wiped it out. Bard felt he would swoon in terror as he felt with Carlina the mortal dread of being alone, bound and gagged…
helpless,
wholly helpless
… in a horse-litter, going in the hands of she knew not whom, toward she knew not where. Every emotion of Carlina’s thrust itself agonizingly into him, the fear of strange hands, the dread when she had seen Bard’s face—as she thought—peering hatefully into her litter—and knew that she could expect no mercy from his pride and ambition. He lived through the gasping struggle when, freed for a moment to relieve herself, she had run like a horned
chervine
, only to be caught and snatched up, fighting and scratching, (in the midst of terror the momentary satisfaction as she felt her nails draw blood from Paul’s cheek) and dumped back in the litter. The humiliation of lying there hour after hour, bound and gagged, the shame of lying in a dress soaked with her own urine. The knowledge, when she had been brought and carried to her own apartments, that she was beaten, that there was no escape; hearing herself, shamed, but too exhausted to do otherwise, give her parole just for the ease of the bonds knifing her flesh, for food and care and a bath and clean garments.
After that, I will never
again be able to think myself brave
…

When Bard came to her she was already half beaten. Bard felt with Carlina the staccato terror of her frantic prayers,
Mother Avarra, help me now, save me, protect me who is sworn to you, don’t let this
happen… why, why must this happen, why do you abandon me, I have done all that I vowed, I have
served you faithfully as your priestess
… and the awful sense of abandonment as she realized that the Goddess would not help her, that no one would help her, that she was alone with Bard and he was

stronger than she…

Mortal terror, and awful humiliation, as she lay with her clothes torn off, impaled, tearing pain, but worse than the pain, the horror of knowing herself only a thing to be used. The battering of his body inside her deepest and most secret parts, and a sense of worthlessness, a shamed self-disgust that she could let herself be used like this, self-hatred and horror that she had not forced him to kill her first, that she had not fought to the death; certainly nothing, nothing he could have done would have been worse than this… and as his seed spurted into her the fear and knowledge of her own vulnerability, that she would be no more than a womb for his child,
his
… a horrid, hateful parasite that could grow in her and take over her clean body… but she had let him do this, she could have fought harder, she deserved no better…