“So eat more,” Magda suggested. “Calories are heat, as well as nourishment.” Cholayna was tolerating the pace, the cold and the altitude better than Magda had hoped; she must have been one hell of a field agent. Though as the passes grew steeper, more like chervine trails to climb, and they were forced to dismount and walk or climb up the steeper slopes—past Nevarsin they might have to abandon the horses altogether, and ride chervines—the Terran woman’s face seemed pinched, her eyes daily deeper sunken in her head. Camilla was hardened to rough travel, and Vanessa sometimes acted as if the whole trip was something she had organized for the fun of it, her own special climbing holiday. This attitude sometimes got on Magda’s nerves, but since Vanessa’s mountaincraft had helped them over some of the worst stretches, she supposed Vanessa was entitled to enjoy herself.
Ahead of them lay the Pass of Scaravel, more than seven thousand meters high. On the fifth day past the Kadarin, they camped on the lower slope of the road up into Scaravel, after daylong travel in thin flurrying snow that cut visibility to a few horse-lengths ahead. Camilla and Vanessa had grumbled about this, but Magda was just as well pleased; she could keep her eyes on the trail and was not confronted at every turn with the sight of bottomless chasms and dizzying drops off sheer cliffs. The path was slippery in the snow, but not really dangerous, she thought, only dimly realizing how hardened she had grown to roads that would have had her sweating blood only a few tendays ago.
“There’s still light,” Vanessa argued, “it’s less than three or four kilometers to the top. We could still get across.”
“With luck. And I’m not trusting to luck any more,” Jaelle said testily. “There are banshees above the treeline here, as I have good cause to remember. Want me to introduce you to one in the dark? It’s easier to get over in daylight. And we could all do with some rest and hot food.”
Vanessa glared and for a moment Magda was sure she would continue the argument, but finally she turned away and began to unsaddle her horse.
“You’re the boss.”
“I want all the loads unpacked and redistributed before we start out tomorrow,” Jaelle ordered. “We’ve used up a considerable amount of supplies; and the less weight the animals have to carry, the easier to get across Scaravel—and through the mountains beyond. There are passes beyond Nevarsin which make Scaravel look like a hole in the ground.”
Magda came to help with the loads, while Camilla started a fire in the camp stove and Cholayna began unpacking rations. They had fallen into a regular camp routine by this time. Soon a good smell of cooking began to steal through the camp.
“Snowing harder,” Camilla said, surveying the dark sky. “We’ll need the tents. Come and help me set them up, breda.”
They had made it a habit that whenever they set up tents they should alternate, changing tentmates every camp; Magda would have preferred sharing quarters permanently with either Camilla or Jaelle, but she understood Jaelle’s insistence that they should not divide themselves into cliques or teams; that this had been the ruin of many expeditions. Tonight Magda was sharing the smaller tent with Vanessa, while Camilla, Cholayna and Jaelle were in the larger one. Vanessa, changing her socks before dinner, dug into her personal pack and began to attack her hair with a brush.
“I think I’d face bandits again for a chance at a bath,” she said. “My hair feels filthy and I’m grubby all over.”
Magda agreed with her that this was one of the greatest hardships of the trail. “There will be a women’s bath-house in Nevarsin, though,” she said, “and perhaps we can find a washerwoman for some clean clothes.”
“Ready to eat, you two?”
“Just brushing my hair,” Vanessa said, tying a cotton scarf over her head. Camilla was ladling stew onto plates and handing it round; they sheltered under the tent flaps, sitting on saddlebags, to eat. Magda was hungry, and cleaned up her stew quickly, but Cholayna was simply pushing the food around on her plate.
“Cholayna, you are going to have to eat more than that,” Camilla said. “Really, you must—”
Cholayna exploded. “Damnation, Camilla, I am not a child; I have been looking after myself for the best part of sixty years, and I simply will not be badgered this way! I know you mean well, but I am sick and tired of being endlessly ordered about!”
“Then you should act as if you knew how to look after yourself as a grown woman,” Camilla snarled. “You are behaving like a girl of fifteen on her first excursion from the Guild-house! I don’t care how old you are or how experienced in other climates or among the Terrans, here you do not know how to care for yourself—or you would be doing it. And if you cannot be trusted to eat properly, then someone must make sure that you do it—”
“Hold it, Camilla—” Jaelle began, and Camilla turned on her.
“Don’t you start! I have been holding back from saying this for a tenday now. It is not fair; if Cholayna neglects herself and gets sick, she can endanger us all—”
“Even if this is true, it is not your place to say it—” Jaelle began, but now Camilla was in a rage.
“At this point I care nothing whose place it may be! If the leader says nothing, then I will. I have been waiting for days for you to do your duty and speak to her about this, but because this Terran woman was once your employer you have not had the courage or the common sense to speak a single word. If that is how you see your duty as head of this expedition—”
“I do my duty as I see it,” Jaelle said, at white heat, “and I am not a girl to be lessoned by you—”
“Listen to me, both of you,” Cholayna interrupted. “Settle your places in the pecking order somewhere else, and don’t use me as your excuse! I am trying to eat as much as I can of your damned filthy food, but it’s not easy for me, and I don’t need reminding all the time! I will do the best I can; leave it at that, will you?”
“Just the same,” Vanessa said, “what they said is true, Cholayna. You act as if they had no right to say it. But on an expedition like this, politeness is not as important as the truth. If you get sick, the rest of us will have to look after you. I have told you before that at these altitudes you simply must force fluids and calories.”
“I am trying, Vanessa, but—”
Magda joined in for the first time. “Even if what you say is true, Vanessa—and you too, Camilla—do you have to be so hard on her? Remember, this is Cholayna’s first trip into the field in many years, and her first experience with this kind of climate—”
“All the more reason, then, that she should be guided by those of us with experience—” Camilla said, but Jaelle interrupted her:
“Do you think it is going to do her any good if you simply stand there and scream at her like a banshee? I don’t think I could eat a bite with you standing over me and yelling at the top of your voice!”
Magda held out her hand in a conciliating gesture.
“Shaya, please—”
“Damnation, Margali, will you at least keep out of this? Every time I try to settle something, you want to get into it. If Camilla and I cannot talk without you trying to jump into the gap, as if you were afraid something would slip by without your having a hand in it—”
Magda shut her mouth with an effort. It was so much like what Lexie had said: Hellfire, Lorne, is there any pie on this planet you don’t have your fingers in? Was this truly how she appeared to people? She started to say, I was only trying to help, and realized, if it wasn’t obvious, that she wasn’t.
Cholayna had picked up her plate and was making an effort to force down the cold, greasy meat stew.
Can’t they even see that if she tries to eat that, and she’s already half sick, it’s going to make her worse? Jaelle at least should be able to see that. She opened her mouth again, knowing that she risked another set-down for interfering, but Camilla reached for the plate.
“Let me heat that up for you, Cholayna, or if you’d rather, we still have plenty of the dried porridge-powder, which may be easier for you to eat.
I’ll mix it with plenty of sugar and raisins. There’s no sense wasting good meat on anyone who doesn’t appreciate it and probably can’t digest it properly anyhow. Does anyone want to share the rest of the stew with me while I make up some porridge for Cholayna?”
“And I’ve been thinking,” Vanessa volunteered, “it might be a good thing to save the special Terran high-altitude rations for her. They’re almost entirely synthetics, but they’re very high-calorie, high-fat, high-carbohydrate, and they won’t upset her; the rest of us can make do on the dried meat and fruit from natural sources. Here,” she added, handing over the porridge-powder into which Camilla had stirred sugar and raisins, and Cholayna accepted the mixture gratefully.
Magda could see that she had to force herself to eat, but at least it was simpler to force herself when it was simply disinclination to the effort of chewing and swallowing, not an attempt to overcome decades of training, both in custom and ethical preference.
It frightened her to be so aware of what Cholayna was thinking. There had been times, in her early training in the Forbidden Tower, when she had found herself unable to cut out the thoughts and emotions of her colleagues. But they had all been strong telepaths. Cholayna was head-blind and a Terran, and there should be no such involuntary spillage of emotions.
And Camilla, too, had seemed to know—and Magda stopped herself there. No one should know better than she herself that beneath Camilla’s rough-talking exterior was a singularly sensitive, even a motherly woman. There was surely no need to postulate that the stress of this trip, or something else she had no way of identifying, was bringing out latent laran in Camilla, or even in Cholayna.
Jaelle said sheepishly to all of them at large, “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what got into me. Camilla, forgive me, kinswoman. I meant what I said but I should have been more tactful about it. Margali—” She turned to Magda and held out her arms. “Forgive me, breda mea!”
“Of course!” Magda hugged her, and after a moment Camilla came to join them; then Vanessa and Cholayna were there and the five of them were joined in a group embrace that washed away all the anger.
“I can’t imagine why I started yelling,” Camilla said. “I didn’t mean to, truly, Cholayna. I don’t want you to get sick, but honestly, I didn’t mean to keep on at you about it.”
Vanessa said, “This kind of group tension on an expedition is to be expected. We should be on guard against it.”
“Maybe,” Camilla said wryly, “the Sisterhood is testing us for our worthiness to be admitted to that place?”
“Don’t laugh. We are—” Jaelle looked at them seriously. “The legend says that we will be tested ruthlessly, and—we—” she swallowed, searching for words, “Can’t you see? We are searching for Sisterhood, and if we cannot keep it among ourselves—” her voice trailed away into silence.
At least, Magda thought as she crept into the tent she shared with Vanessa, they were all speaking again. Magda rejoiced; it would be hard enough to cross Scaravel even with their utmost cooperation.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
« ^ »
Jaelle pointed through a light flurry of falling snow.
“The City of Snows: Nevarsin,” she said. And Magda picked up her thought—they were almost frighteningly open to one another now—Will we find Rafaella and Lexie there? And if we do not, what then? It was beyond belief that Jaelle, at least, would be willing to turn around and go home again. In her mind this journey took on unreal and dreamlike proportions, it would go on forever, farther and farther into the unknown, in pursuit of robed figures, the sound of crows calling, the shadow of the Goddess brooding over them with great dark wings…
Camilla’s horse bumped gently into hers. “Hey, there! Are you asleep on your feet like a farmer at spring market, gawking at the big city?”
Nevarsin rose above them, a city built on the side of a mountain, streets climbing steeply toward the peak, where the monastery rose, naked rock walls carved from the living stone of the peak. Above the monastery were only the eternal snows.
They entered the gates of Nevarsin late in the day, and found their way through snow-covered streets, which angled and climbed and sometimes were no more than flights of narrow steep steps, up which their horses had to be urged and their chervines led and sometimes manhandled upward. Everywhere there were statues of the cristoforo prophet or god— Magda knew little about the cristoforo sect—the Bearer of Burdens, a robed figure with the Holy Child on his shoulders surmounted by what could have been a sun or a world or perhaps merely a halo. Bells rang out at frequent intervals, and once as they climbed toward the top of a narrow street, they met a procession of monks, robed in austere garments of sacking, barefoot in the snow-covered streets. (But they seemed as comfortable, their feet as pink and healthy, as if they were dressed for a more amenable climate. )
The monks, chanting as they came—Magda could make out very little of the words of their hymn or canticle, which was in an obscure dialect of casta— looked neither to left nor to right, and the women had to move their horses and pull them to one side of the street, dismounting to hold the reins of the pack animals. The monk at the head of the procession, a balding old man with a hook nose and a fierce scowl, looked crossly at the women, and Magda supposed he did not approve of Renunciates.
So much the worse for him, then; she was going about her own business just as he was, and really with far less trouble to other people; at least their band were not expecting everybody to get out of the middle of what was, after all, a public thoroughfare.
There were a great many of the monks, and by the time they had all passed by, dusk was falling, and the snow was coming down heavily.
“Where are we going, Jaelle? I suppose you know?” Camilla asked.
“Nevarsin is a cristoforo city,” Jaelle said, “and as I think I told you, women are not welcome at public-houses or inns unless properly escorted by husbands or fathers. I told you about the place; Rafi and I used to make jokes about the Nevarsin Guild-House. They may be there waiting for us.”
The house, a large one built from the local stone, was in the remotest corner of the city, and inside had the good smell of freshly worked leather. Inside, the great door opened on a huge courtyard (“Dry-town style,” Jaelle whispered to Magda as they were shown inside), where young women in heavy workman’s aprons and thick boots were running about. They stopped to greet the strangers with hospitable bows. The mistress of all these women, a small tough old woman with arms like a blacksmith’s, came out, looked at Jaelle with a huge grin, then wrapped her in a smothering embrace.
“Ah, Kindra’s fosterling!”
“Arlinda, you look no different than when I last saw you—can it have been seven years ago? More than that?”
“It was seven years; Betta had just died, Goddess give her rest, and left the place in my hands. How good to see you, there is always room here for Renunciates to lodge! Come in, come in! Suzel, Marissa, Shavanne, lead their horses into the stable, run and tell Lulie in the kitchen that there will be three, no, four, no, five guests for dinner! Give their horses hay and grain, and their chervines too, and haul all their packloads into the strongroom; I will give you a receipt, no, chiya? Just so there’s no question. You came across Scaravel? Mercy me, you look thin and tired, and no wonder, after such a trip! What can I do for you first? Hot wine and cakes? A bath? A meal within ten minutes, if you are famished?”
“A bath would be heaven,” Jaelle said, to enthusiastic seconding murmurs from all four of the others. “But I thought we would have to go out to the women’s bathhouse—”
“My dears, we are the women’s bathhouse now, it was going downhill, no towels, the attendants with their hands out for tips all the time, and pimps hanging around for so many of the women of the streets that the respectable family men wouldn’t let their respectable family women go to it anymore! So I bought it on the cheap, and let it be known that I wanted the street girls certified clean by one of the
women’s doctors here. And if I caught them making assignations here, out they went. And I chased off all the pimps for good and all. I let the good-time girls know in no uncertain terms that if they wanted baths here, they’d better behave on these premises like apprentice virgin Keepers! And do you know, I think they were glad of it, to be treated just like family women, no difference between them and the wives and daughters of gentlefolk.” She shouted. “Suzel, take these ladies to the best guest-chamber, and then straight to the baths, bath’s on the house, no charge, these are old friends!”
She drew Jaelle aside but they all heard her whisper, “And when you’re bathed and rested, deary, I have a message for you from your partner. Not now, not now, go and have your bath and I’ll send some hot wine for you in your guest room.”
Jaelle looked pale and strained. “I beg of you, Arlinda, if Rafi is here, send her to me at once. We have traveled from Thendara in the greatest haste we could manage, hoping to overtake her. Don’t play games with me, dear cousin.”
Arlinda wrinkled up her face, wrinkled and tanned like her own saddle leather. “Would I do that to you, deary? Oh, no, Rafi’s not here; they were here three days and went on only yesterday morning. The one who’d been sent to meet them from you-know-where came for them and they left with her.”
Jaelle slumped forward and for a minute Magda thought she would faint. She put her arm out and Jaelle leaned on it hard. Through the touch of her freemate’s hand Magda could feel misery and dismay.
To come so far, and to miss them by so little…
But she recovered herself swiftly. She said with gentle dignity, “You spoke of a message, but if they have gone on before us, it certainly can wait until my companions are bathed and rested. I thank you, cousin.”
Arlinda’s establishment was nothing if not efficient. In a few seconds, so it seemed to Magda, they had been shown to rooms, given receipts for their packloads and had their personal sacks brought to their assigned room, which was large and light and as clean as if it were a department of Terran Medic. There was a laundry on the premises too, and their soiled and travel-grubbied clothing was whisked away with the promise that it would be returned the next morning. All these things were accomplished by young, energetic, friendly girls, mostly between fifteen and twenty, who scurried around briskly, but with the utmost gaiety, and showed no sign whatever of being driven or intimidated. When Camilla was slow to change her garments (Camilla, because of the scars on her mutilated body, always hesitated to bare herself among strangers) they tactfully offered her a bathwrap to wear while her clothing was being washed, whisked away to fetch it for her, and had her clothes off and the fresh wrap on her body almost, it seemed, while Camilla was grumbling at them that she could manage perfectly well without it.