Thendara House

  Keitha looked pale but peaceful, though Magda could see that she had been crying. “I should have been terrified, if my sisters had not been there. As it was, I told him that I should die before I ever came back to him, and laid my hand on my knife, saying that I would turn it either on myself or him, as he chose. So he took himself off, swearing and cursing me and vowing I should wait forever for the return of my dowry; and I told him to keep it for the boys when they were grown. I do not think he will trouble me again. He said at the last, as if it would make me wish to come back, that now he had found a decent woman who would not run away, so if I ever changed my mind—” she smiled faintly, “it was too late. I think he was shocked when I wished him happiness with her. I did not tell him how sorry I was for her, whoever she is.”

  Camilla hugged Keitha and said “We are all proud of you, breda. So now we can drink to his downfall as well. And you will really have something to tell Marisela when she comes back,” she added with a sly grin, and Keitha blushed crimson.

  The wine was brought and poured, and they all drank, laughing and toasting each other.

  “So now we are all here from that night in the travel-shelter except Jaelle,” said Sherna, coming over and hugging Camilla and Magda together, “Where is Shaya? Is she out with Rafaella on her travel-business? Did not one of you say she had taken a freemate, of all things?”

  “Ah, Goddess! How stupid I am,” exclaimed Rezi. “Jaelle was here, and asking for you, Margali—it was hours ago! But you were closeted with Mother in her office and I could not interrupt, and then there was all the hullabaloo about Keitha, and it went right out of my head!”

  Magda swung toward her, and suddenly the awareness she had been keeping at bay, all this long day, crashed over her again.

  Something is very wrong. Something terrible has happened to Jaelle… there was nothing specific about it, she simply knew, with a knowledge that went deeper than words, that Jaelle needed her, that Jaelle was in deep trouble; and yet when she should have kept herself open to Jaelle, she had barricaded herself and refused to accept the knowledge because she was afraid of it. She looked at Camilla in dismay, knowing that the older woman’s superb barriers had kept her locked tight against Jaelle’s need.

  Danger. Danger, closing in on Jaelle from every direction. Red blood spilled on the sand. The dream and the bond they had shared. She had wakened in Jaelle’s arms, her friend needed her. but she had fled from it, and now Jaelle was gone, running away… Peter was dead, and now Jaelle was gone…

  She could hardly hear her own voice.

  “Quick, Rezi! Tell me what happened!”

  “Shaya—she came for her horse, and for travel-food, and her boots—I loaned her my own riding boots; I do not know what had happened to her own. She had been crying, but she would not tell me what was wrong, and then she rode away. It was before the rain started.”

  Magda’s throat felt tight. It was not Rezi’s fault. She should have known that Jaelle needed her, and she was shut up in Mother Lauria’s office discussing things that could have been settled in a moment, playing diplomacy games! But that was not fair either. Cholayna could not possibly have known. She looked at the women, still laughing and joking and drinking wine with the three who had returned from Nevarsin. They were Jaelle’s friends, too. Camilla was her oath-sister…

  Outsiders. They were outsiders. None of them understood. Jaelle had crossed over some invisible line and she was an outsider just as Magda had always been an outsider here. Even Camilla had been able to shut it out, cut away Jaelle’s trouble lest it remind her of her own. Quietly, knowing that no one would pay the slightest attention, she slipped out of the dining hall, hurried up the stairs. Before Jaelle was too far out of the city, she could find her. Quickly she rolled warm stockings, extra warm underwear, her warmest trousers and tunic, into a bundle, changed her shoes for her riding boots. She ran down the back stairs, into the kitchen and made up a package of hard journey-bread from the barrel, some cheese and cold meat and a scoop of dried fruit from the bin. She hurried to the stable, quickly saddled her horse. It was the one she had ridden into the mountains when she went to rescue Peter Haldane; the one she had ridden to the fire lines. She was breaking her housebound oath but she hardly thought of that.

  She was about to swing into the saddle when she saw that Camilla was standing at the stable door, watching her.

  “You cannot go, Margali,” said Camilla in an undertone. “Love, you must not. This is oath-breaking.”

  Magda let her foot slip from the stirrup. She came to Camilla and laid her hands on the woman’s shoulders.

  “Camilla, it is a matter of honor,” she pleaded, and then, swallowing hard, used the weapon she had told herself she would not use.

  “We swore an oath in the mountains, before ever I came here to Thendara House,” she said, her voice trembling. They had not, not in words, but she knew now that in the truest sense they had sworn their very lives to one another, when Jaelle lay dying with a bandit’s blow, and Magda had chosen to abandon her mission that Jaelle might live. Peter Haldane had never mattered to either of them, against that bond, only Magda had not known it till then.

  If I had known, if I had known what Jaelle truly meant to me, she would never have married Peter; only I did not know. It was Camilla who taught me what Jaelle truly meant to me, that the love of sisters means more than any man living in this world…

  “We are bredhyini, Camilla,” she said. “I beg you—if you love me, Camilla—let me go after her.”

  Camilla’s face was white. “I should have known,” she said, “and this was why you would not swear to me. I—” she drew a long breath. “It does not matter that we have been lovers,” she said after a moment. “What is important is that we shall always be friends and sisters. If it is a matter of honor to you—” she hesitated a moment and said at last, “You are oath-bound not to leave the House save at the command of one of the Guild Mothers. I am an Elder here, Margali. I may command you lawfully to go.” She drew Magda to her and kissed her fiercely. “Jaelle is my Oath-sister too,” she said, “and has been like a daughter to me. Go, Margali n’ha Ysabet, without oath-breaking. I will make it all right with Mother Lauria.”

  “Oh, Camilla—Camilla, I do love you—”

  Camilla kissed her again. “I love you too,” she said gently, “in more ways than you know. Go now. Give my love to Jaelle, and the Goddess grant you come through this safely. I do not know when we will meet again, my darling; be it as the Goddess wills, and may She ride with you.”

  Then Magda was in her saddle, her face blindly streaming tears as she rode past Camilla, and into the cobbled street. She did not know where she was going. Only that she was going after Jaelle, and that they had been moving inevitably toward this very moment, since that night in the travel-shelter in the Hellers.

  I have not broken my Oath, Camilla has set me free. Yet she knew that she would have broken her Oath without question and without compunction, as if the Oath were a pair of old shoes that had grown too small and she had burst out of them.

  Camilla does not know it, but I am no longer bound by the Guild, even as I am no longer simply a Terran. I have outgrown all these things. I do not know what I am now. Perhaps, when I find Jaelle, when I overtake her where she has gone, she will show me.

  She was a Terran. She was a Renunciate. She was Darkovan. She had become a lover of women. She was a leronis, for surely what she had been fighting away all this day was laran. And now she must use it to follow where Jaelle had gone. But she was no longer simply any one of these things. All her life she had believed she must choose between being Terran and Darkovan, Magda or Margali. Intelligence Agent or Renunciate, lover of men or lover of women, head-blind or leronis, and now she knew that she could never describe herself as either one thing or the other, she knew that she was all of these things and that the sum of them all was more than any or all of them.

  I do not know who or what I am. I only know that I do what I
must, no more and no less.

  She rode through the gates of the city, without looking back.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  « ^ »

  Jaelle did not even remember, as she went down the long corridor that led from Married Personnel Quarters, why she had such a shuddering disgust for drunkenness; she only knew that at this moment. Peter was loathsome to her. Well, she need not return, except once and briefly. Once their marriage had been formally dissolved—and she knew now that it must be dissolved, that it was as far in her past as the Great House of Jalak of Shainsa—they might let her live off base, as the Renunciate Medic Technicians were allowed to do. But if they insisted that she must continue to fill Magda’s place—as if she could, as if one person could ever be an exact equivalent for another, they had been mad ever to suggest it—they would have to allow her quarters in Unmarried Personnel. Magda, after all, had lived there.

  She passed the cafeteria level. She should eat something. The main cafeteria had food she could manage to eat, and all she could get later would be the tasteless synthetics of the small cafeteria up in Communications. She remembered Marisela telling pregnant women in the House that they must eat whether they felt like it or not… they were no longer the masters of their own destinies, they had chosen to carry their children and that was a year-long commitment to the welfare of the child’s body even before their own.

  So I have become no better than any of Jalak’s concubines, just a brood mare to bear the next generation. No better than Rohana, for all my gallant talk about personal freedom. Somewhere in the back of her mind she could hear Kindra saying that even becoming an Amazon did not exempt a woman from universal emotions, but she cut it off with vicious self-contempt. So now I must go into that nauseating cafeteria and stuff my disgusting body with food which revolts it, just because my wretched child, Peter’s child, which I did not want anyhow, is yelling at my body to feed it… Coldly she depersonalized the child into an it, a thing, not the daughter Rohana had told her she would bear… Welt, let her yell. Go ahead and cry, baby, nobody’s going to feed you now. She turned decisively away from the sickening smells of the cafeteria, feeling that for a day, at least, she was back in charge of herself.

  Upstairs in the Communications office—for, with maddening slowness, the Empire HQ Administration had not yet assigned the Intelligence Personnel to their new office space in Cholayna’s division—Bethany looked pink and chipper.

  “That’s right, it’s not a holiday today, is it? Yesterday was some kind of enormous Darkovan holiday, I remember,” she said, “and they told me that half of Montray’s staff was invited to some enormous affair across the City. Actually in Comyn Castle, wasn’t it?” She looked impressed, and Jaelle felt like snarling at her; the Comyn are not superhuman, they are just ordinary mortals with too much sense of their own damned importance. But she said glumly—after all, Bethany was not responsible for her bad mood—“It’s a damn shame you couldn’t have gone instead of me. You’re prettier than I am and you probably dance just as well, and you’d have enjoyed it. Festival is no treat for me.”

  Bethany chuckled.

  “Peter would have had something to say about that, wouldn’t he? Anyhow, I went to bed at a decent hour last night, and from the long faces I see all over the department, there are plenty of you who seem to have danced till dawn. There are a few advantages to being so low down in the scale of hierarchy that you never get invited out to a Royal Command and don’t have to stay up all night! Seriously, Jaelle, you look like something the cat wouldn’t bother dragging in… can I get you some coffee or something?”

  Jaelle thanked her and declined. She didn’t know what she needed, but coffee, which was not a Terran luxury she enjoyed, was certainly not that need.

  “Maybe you should have put yourself on sick report and gone up to Medic,” said Bethany solicitously. “After all, strictly speaking, you worked all night and should put in for overtime.” It was, Jaelle imagined, one way of looking at it—she hadn’t gone to Comyn Castle for her own pleasure, after all. But she only shook her head—the last thing she wanted was to be lectured by Medic about her responsibility to her unborn child— and took her place at the desk which had once been Magda’s and was now hers, until she could rid herself of the unwelcome responsibility, and surveyed the unfinished language tapes without enthusiasm.

  I still feel as if I ought to be doing something more important than this. But I don’t know what.

  She worked without stopping for more than an hour until Monty stormed in, swearing.

  “Where in the hell is Cholayna? She’s not up in Intelligence and I can’t find her anywhere.”

  “Maybe she put in for a day of sick leave,” said Bethany. “Didn’t she go to Comyn Castle last night?”

  Monty grinned humorlessly. “That’s right she did and so, unfortunately, did the old man. My father said that listening to barbarian music squawking till the wee hours of the morning wasn’t his idea of recreation and it wasn’t what he was being paid for, anyhow. Could you page her in Medic and see if she registered to take the day off, Beth?”

  Subtly, as something Magda might have noticed, Jaelle recognized that small matter of protocol. He would not, now that he knew her importance, ask Jaelle to do routine chores like this; while Bethany, whose whole employment was to do small routine errands which higher status employees could not be troubled to do, could be interrupted at any time. She had noticed one thing among Terran woman employees; the scramble to find a position where they were more than small-errand runners for the men. They jealously fought for these marks of status. But they also accepted this as part of the conditions of their employment. Magda was proud of being out of the main centralized office she called the madhouse; it was not a point of view Jaelle shared—if she had to work in an office at all she would rather be with the other women rather than isolated in lonely splendor with the higher-status males. She was beginning to get some vague inkling of Terran social and cultural layering and it seemed foolish to her, but she was also intelligent enough to know that social structuring was seldom rational. Just last night she had had to explain simple matters of protocol and had at least inwardly jeered at the elder Montray because he could not understand why a man who had once been his employee, the man Carr, could not be casually approached without creating the equivalent of a diplomatic incident.

  Bethany was using the Communication equipment which defined her job and which it seemed to be a matter of Terran etiquette to avoid using as you went up in the ranks of employment. At last she raised her head and said, “She’s not in Medic, Monty, and I even got them to page her in her quarters, in case she was taking a day but was willing to be interrupted on an overtime basis. I got a message saying she’d gone into the Old Town and would be at the Guild House of Renunciates.”

  Monty slammed his hand down on the desk, swearing. “Any way to reach her there?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Jaelle said. Now, she thought with an obscure sense of having been assaulted, I cannot even take refuge in the Guild House. Even there I find Terrans, Magda and now Cholayna have been welcomed there.

  “I’m being sent out into the field, and I need Intelligence briefing,” he explained quickly.

  “Lord Alderan, way up in the Hellers near Caer Donn—that’s where the old spaceport used to be, before it was moved down here to Thendara—”

  “I know where the Hellers are,” Bethany said waspishly. “Magda and Haldane both grew up there, didn’t they?”

  “Haldane could help me with this—” Monty began.

  “I wouldn’t ask him,” Jaelle said wryly, “He’s up in our quarters, dead drunk and sleeping it off.”

  Monty said, after a minute, “I heard that he and the Old Man had a flaming row last night and Peter stormed into the city. So he came in drunk, huh? Lucky bastard; I wish I could!”

  “What’s your problem, Monty?”

  “Going into the field,” he said. “I told y
ou a little about it—or was it Magda I told? I need to be sure I will not antagonize them, and—” he gave a deprecating smile, “I can’t afford to impress them as effeminate. I need to know precisely how to dress and what to do—and what not to do under any circumstances. Magda made a start, but—” he shrugged.

  For a moment a very clear picture of Magda and Monty in his quarters rushed over her… why am I suddenly picking up all this? Why can I not push it away as I have always done before… Magda, tying her Amazon knife to his waist, showing him how to move… she fought to barricade what she was picking up from Monty, including an overwhelmingly sexual awareness of Magda that filled her, for no reason at all, with bewildering rage. Why should I suddenly hate Monty because he has taken Magda to bed? Magda/Margali is not my lover… Fighting to be fair through the staggering wave of resentment that made her feel physically ill, she said, “Of course I can help you, Monty. Come on up to Intelligence and tell me all about your business at Aldaran, unless it’s really a secret mission.”

  “Not a bit of it,” Monty responded. “On the contrary, when Aleki heard about it, he was all smiles; he told the old Man he’d deal with it personally as a Senatorial Representative, and you can imagine, the Old Man would have loved that!” His voice was ironic. “For once, Darkover is predictable—or that’s how he saw it. Some bigwig back in Caer Donn—I’ll have to look up the details, but his name is—Aldaran of Aldaran and Sea—” his face wrinkled in a struggle. Jaelle, picked it up effortlessly from his mind. “Aldaran of Aldaran and Scathfell, the old Seventh Domain of the Comyn; they’re not Comyn any more.”

  “At war with Comyn?”

  “Oh, no. Too far away for wars to make any sense. But they were once the Seventh Domain, and broke away.”