Three women sat silently on a bench. She beckoned the first into a small inner room.
“In the name of the Mother Avarra, how may I help you, my sister?”
“In the name of Avarra,” said the woman—she was a small, pretty, rather faded-looking woman—“I have been married for seven years and have never once conceived a child. My husband loves me, and he would have accepted this as the will of the gods, but his mother and father—we live on their land—have threatened to make him divorce me and take a fertile wife. I—I—” she broke down, stammering. “I have offered to foster and adopt any child he might father by another woman, but his family want him married to a woman who will give him many children. And I—I love him,” she said, and was silent
Carlina asked quietly, “Do you truly want children? Or do you look on them as your duty to your husband, a way to keep his love and attention?”
“Both,” said the woman, furtively wiping her eyes on the edge of her veil. Carlina, her laran awareness tuned high enough to hear the overtones in the answer, could feel the woman’s sincerity as she said, weeping, “I told him that I would foster his sons by any other woman he chose. We have his sister’s baby to foster, and I have found that I love little children… I see the other women with their children at their breasts and I want my own, oh, I want my own. You who are vowed to chastity, you can’t know what it is like to see other women with their babies and know you will never have one of your own—I have my fosterling to love, but I want to bear one too, and I want to stay with Mikhail…”
Carlina considered for a moment, then said, “I will see what I can do to help you.” She made the woman lie on a long table. The woman looked at her apprehensively, and Carlina, still attuned to her, was aware that she had suffered the painful ministrations of midwives who had tried to help her.
“I will not hurt you,” Carlina said, “nor even touch you; but you must be very quiet and calm or I can do nothing.” Taking her starstone from about her neck, she let the awareness sink deep into the body, finding after a time the blockage which had prevented conception; and she let herself descend, in that consciousness, into nerves, tissues, almost cell by cell unblocking the damage.
Then she gestured to the woman to sit up.
“I can promise nothing,” she said, “but there is now no reason you should not bear a child. You say your husband has fathered children for others? Then, within a year, you should have conceived yours.” The woman began to pour out thanks, but Carlina stopped her.
“Give no thanks to me, but to the Mother Avarra,” she said, “and when you are an old woman, never speak cruel words to a barren woman, or punish her for her barrenness. It may not be her fault.”
She was glad, as she saw the woman go away, that she had actually found a physical blockage. When there was nothing to be found she must assume either that the woman did not really want a child and, with laran she was not aware she had, was blocking conception—or that the woman’s husband was sterile. Few women—and fewer men—could believe that a virile man could be sterile. A few generations ago, when marriage had been a group affair and women as a matter of course bore children to different men, it had been simple; a matter of simply encouraging a shy or timid woman to lie with two or three other than her own husband, perhaps at Festival, so that the woman could sincerely believe that the child was fathered by the one she had chosen. But now, when inheritance of property rested so firmly on literal fatherhood, she had the unpalatable choice of counseling a woman to accept her barrenness, or take a lover and risk her husband’s anger. The old way, she thought, had made more sense.
The second woman, also, was concerned with fertility— which did not surprise Carlina, for it was to the Goddess that women usually came for this.
“We have three daughters, but all our sons died except the last,” the woman said, “and my husband is angry with me, for I have had no children for five years, and he calls me worthless…”
The old story, Carlina thought, and asked her, “Tell me, do you really want another child?”
“If my husband were content, I would be content too,” said the woman, shakily, “for I have borne eight children, and four still live, and our son is healthy and well and already six years old. And our eldest daughter is already old enough to marry. But I cannot bear his anger…”
Carlina said sternly, “You must say to him that it is the will of Avarra; and he must thank her mercy that a single son was spared to you. He must rejoice in the children he has, for it is not you who denies him children, but the Mother herself who has said to you that you have done your part in bearing so many children.”
The woman could not conceal the relief in her eyes. “But he will be very angry and perhaps he will beat me—”
“If he does,” said Carlina, and she could not conceal a smile, “I tell you in the name of Avarra to pick up a log of wood from the fire and hit him over the head with it; and while you are at it, hit him for me too.” She added, more seriously, “And remind him, too, that the gods punish impiety. He must accept the blessings he has been given and not be greedy for more.”
The woman thanked her, and Carlina thought, dazed, Merciful Mother of All! Eight children, and she was willing to consider having more?
The last woman was in her fifties, and when she was summoned into the little room told Carlina timidly that she had begun to bleed again when the time for such things was many years past. She was thin and sallow and had a bad color, and for the first time, Carlina, after asking many questions, examined her physically as well as with the starstone. Then she said, “I have not the skill to treat this myself; you must come again in a tenday to speak with one of the Mothers. Meanwhile, drink this tea—” she gave her a packet. “It will ease the pain and lessen the bleeding. Try to eat well and put on some flesh so you will have the strength to endure any treatment which she may feel is needed.”
The woman went away, clutching her packet of herb tea, and Carlina sat sighing, thinking of what probably lay ahead. Neutering might save the woman; only the most skilled could decide whether it was worth it, or would only prolong suffering. If not, the Chief Priestess would give her another packet of tea, but this one would contain a slow poison which would give her death before the pain robbed her of humanity and dignity. She hated this sentence; but Avarra’s mercy included easing the death of those for whom death was, in any case, inevitable. All the afternoon, while she labored at Anya’s side with the tough grass and twisted thorns which had dislodged the stones of the pathway to the temple, she thought of them, the women she had sent away, content, the one she could not help. Shortly before the service at sunset, she was sent for again by the Mother Ellinen.
“Mother Amalie has had a seeing,” she told Carlina, “that we shall need more protection. We will be invaded again. And I foresee it will be for your sake that they will come against us.” She patted Carlina’s hand. “I know it is not your fault, Sister Liriel. Evil dwells in the world, by the will of the gods, but the Mother will protect us.”
I hope so, Carlina thought, trembling. I hope so, indeed.
But it seemed, in the far distance, that she could hear Bard speak her name, and hear the threat he had made.
Wherever you go, wherever you may try to hide from me, Carlina, I will have you, whether you will or no…
“Carlina,” Bard repeated, “my wife. And I cannot reach the Isle of Silence. But you can, you are immune to illusions, unless you pick them up from another mind you can read, and there are not many you can read. You can reach the Island of Silence and bring Carlina back to me. But make no mistake,” he warned, “I know that we want the same women, and I have given you Melisendra. But I swear to you, if you lay so much as the tip of your finger upon Carlina, I will kill you. Carlina is mine, and wherever she may be hiding I will have her!”
And now Paul stood, surveying the quiet waters of the Lake of Silence. Hidden in the reeds, he had studied the ferryboat on a rope by which it could be hauled ove
r from either side, even though it took, laden, some rowing to steer it across. He could kill the old ferrywoman; but he had observed that two women rowed over, morning and night, to bring her food and a jug of wine. And they might notice her absence. After much thought, when she rowed the priestesses back to the isle, he sneaked into her hut and spiked the wine with a powerful, strong, colorless spirit. It would make her far too drunk to know what was going on, and if the priestesses found her drunk, she could say no more than that she had drunk her usual ration of wine and it had for some reason affected her. By the time they suspected she had been drugged it would be too late to do anything about it. Whereas if they should find her dead, or even unconscious, or bound and gagged, the first thing they would suspect was that there was an intruder on the island.
So he waited until she came back from returning the two priestesses, and sat down in front of her little dwelling to eat and drink. She ate heartily of the bread and fruit they had left, washing it down with thirsty draughts of the wine, and as he had foreseen, she quickly grew dizzy and staggered inside to lie down on her bed. Soon she was snoring in a heavy drunken stupor. Paul nodded, approving. Now, even if they sensed, psychically, that she was stupidly drunk, they could not be alarmed. She was, after all, an elderly woman who could not be expected to carry her wine like a young person.
He stepped into the boat and rowed quietly across the Lake, struck by the eerie silence of the water and the dark reeds. Bard had told him—briefly—of the spell put on the boat. He found the Lake depressing, and once or twice, briefly, he felt dizzy, with the curious feeling that he was rowing the wrong way, but he looked at the shore and the low line of the island against the water and rowed on. Paul had read in Bard’s mind the terror he had known. Even for Carlina Bard had no wish to face it again, far less to set foot on the shores where, it was said, any man who set foot must die. He felt growing oppression, a mounting sense of doom, but he had been warned against that and it did not frighten him unduly. If he had been a man of this world, vulnerable to their spells and illusions, he supposed he would now have been gibbering in terror. Considering what he had read in Bard’s mind and Melisendra’s, Paul was glad for his own immunity.
The boat scraped on the island’s shore where, so Paul had been told, no man had set foot for more generations than could be counted. He had no sense of awe—what were their religious taboos to him? He himself had always considered religions something priests had invented to control others and support themselves in idleness. But accumulated custom could have its own force and Paul was not at all eager to face that.
A well-trodden path, lined with sparse shrubbery, led upward from the beach. Paul skirted it, keeping in the shadow of the trees, and hid behind the projecting curve of some building as a pair of women came down to the path. They wore dark dresses and had sharp, curved little knives hanging in their belts; and to Paul they looked formidable, hardly like women at all, with their gaunt, strong-chinned faces and big rough hands and shapeless garb that showed nothing of feminine curves. They scared him. He had no desire whatever to be seen by them, or to see any more of them than he had to, A scrap of memory flickered through his mind, that it had always been death to spy on women’s mysteries and for that reason all sensible societies had always outlawed women’s mysteries.
“I thought I heard the boat,” one of them said.
“Oh, no, Sister Casilda. Look, the boat is on the shore over there,” said the second, and Paul was glad that he had sent it back on the rope. The second woman was a hearty, double-chinned old matron and he wondered why she was here—he would have expected her to be somewhere terrifying her grown daughters and daughters-in-law and putting the fear of God into her grandchildren. He could imagine virgin priestesses as neurotic and beautiful young maidens, but solid, chunky, capable grandmother types? Somehow it caused his head to spin.
“But where is Gwennifer?” asked the scrawny Sister Casilda, and she reached up to the high pole anchoring the boat’s rope. She struck the bell, hard, with the handle of her little knife. But there was neither sound nor movement on the opposite shore. “It is not like her to sleep at her post. I wonder if she is ill?”
“More likely,” scoffed a third woman who had not spoken till now, “she has drunk all her two days’ ration of wine at once and is lying there sodden drunk!”
“And if she is, it is not a capital crime,” said the first woman. “Still, I feel I should pull the boat back and go over. She may be lying there ill and untended, or she has fallen and broken a bone as old women can do all too easily. She might lie there for days until the next pilgrims come!”
“If that should happen, indeed I would never forgive myself,” agreed the other, and they pulled down the rope and began to haul the boat ashore, got into it and began rowing across. Paul stole up the shore, glad that he had not injured the old ferrywoman. She would indeed be found lying there spectacularly drunk, but there was no evidence left that she had been harmed, or that anyone had come anywhere near her. In fact, he had not harmed the old lady—he had simply given her a pleasant drunk, and from the way the women talked, it was not the first time it had happened anyhow that she should get drunk and sleep at her post.
His spine prickled with dread—if he had followed his first impulse, to knock her down and tie her up before he got into the boat, an alarm would be out even now that an intruder was loose on the island.
He had assured himself that none of those women was the one he wanted. Bard had shown him a portrait of Carlina, first warning him that it was very much romanticized and had in any case been taken seven years ago; but he felt certain he would recognize Carlina when he saw her. And along with this he felt a certain grim dread. He and Bard had a bad habit of wanting the same women. But Bard had made it very clear: this one he could not have. He had read enough of Bard’s thoughts to know that Carlina could, for a time at least, drive all thoughts of any other woman from him. It was something Paul had never sensed in Bard before: he was obsessed with Carlina, not so much the physical woman, but the idea of her.
God Almighty, Paul thought, suppose when I set eyes on Carlina she has that effect on me and I can’t resist her!
Well, it would only mean that the inevitable confrontation with Bard would come a little sooner, that was all.
If he could deceive the girl into thinking that he was Bard—would that make it easier? Or did she hate and fear Bard as Melisendra had come to hate and fear him? The way Bard spoke, they had been childhood sweethearts, handfasted, separated by the old king’s cruelty. But if she were as eager to join him as that indicated, what was she doing hiding here among the priestesses of Avarra?
He could pass himself off as Bard except to someone like Melisendra, who knew every nuance of Bard’s behavior. But Carlina had no intimate experience of Bard. Paul knew from the mind of his double that the closest contact Bard had had with Carlina was a couple of chaste kisses—from which, in any case, the girl had shrunk away. If he could get Carlina to accept him as Bard, then the original of that name could be put quietly out of the way, and he would have freedom, and a kingdom…
But he would not have the one thing that had made this world worthwhile to him. If he played Melisendra false, she would have no reason not to expose him. And in any case, he must be more like Bard than he had thought. The business of ruling a kingdom seemed dull to him. Unlike Bard, he had no taste for war for its own sake, though he seemed to share Bard’s talent for it. War, to Paul, was simply the necessary prelude to an orderly state of affairs where things could be put in order, and he would be deadly bored with ruling over a kingdom once set in order. What did he want, then? Oddly enough, he’d never stopped to think about that, nor had Bard, sure that Paul, being his double, shared his goals, cared to ask him.
Well, he thought, if I were free I’d like to take Melisendra and go off somewhere exploring. There’s a lot to see here. Maybe, someday, settle down and have kids and raise them. And horses; I like horses. A place where thing
s would make sense to me, and I wouldn’t get into the kind of trouble that got me into the stasis box in the first place. A world where I wouldn’t always be running up against impossible rules and regulations.
It was a shame, really, that it couldn’t end that way. Bard was welcome to the damned kingdom. All hundred of them, for that matter. Maybe he could convince Bard that he meant it—hell, why shouldn’t he, they could read each other’s minds; Bard would have to believe him! And if he had Carlina, he wouldn’t want Melisendra. Erlend, maybe, but not Melisendra.
Only Bard would never believe that while Paul lived he could be safe. Perhaps he should make Carlina his ally at once; he’d never thought he’d stoop to making friends with a woman! Women were for one thing, and one thing only. But that wasn’t how he felt about Melisendra. Somehow she had become his friend, too.
A crackle of bushes and steps on the path recalled him to his danger, and he slid into the shadow of the shrubbery again. Three women were coming along the path, and Paul, peering out, saw that one of them was Carlina.
She was pale and thin, and so small that she came barely up to his chest. Her hair was tied back into a long braid. She moved with the same calm, detached walk as the other priestesses, and her shapeless dress made her look clumsy. Paul stared from concealment, in shock. This—this was the Princess Carlina, the woman with whom Bard was so obsessed that he could think of nothing and no one else? And for this he would give up the beautiful ripeness of Melisendra, who was, moreover, the mother of his son? Melisendra was also beautiful, witty, intelligent, schooled in laran, and possessed of all the graces to adorn a court and become a queen, or at least a general’s lady; and she had fought at Bard’s side in battle. Paul had thought that he knew Bard well, but now he was shaken to the core by the knowledge that the differences lay deeper than he could have imagined.
But Bard did not want her, Paul thought as he watched Carlina moving away. He couldn’t. He knew what Bard wanted. He had wanted Melisendra, till she had wounded his pride unendurably. He had wanted the round-bodied little wench they had shared after the battle. Want Carlina? Never.