The Saga of the Renunciates (31 page)

When she said this to Jaelle, the younger woman laughed. "And so it is, much of the time! Last night in the hall, when Rohana invited us to join her women at the tapestry they were making for the hall chair cushions, I thought I should go mad! I love to embroider," she added, "but how Rohana can endure it, I cannot imagine! I myself should go mad, to sit there night after night, surrounded by those fools of sewing-women... stitch, stitch, stitch, gossip, gossip, gossip! Rohana runs the whole estate of Ardais, and does it better than dom Gabriel could do, and she sits in Council and gives advice to Hastur, yet there she sits among those foolish girls
_,
and chatters with them as if she had never had a thought in her head more serious than whether to embroider the next cushion with a rainfish or a star-flower! As if it mattered to anyone's backside what was embroidered on a cushion, as long as it was well stuffed!" But even as she spoke, she was setting small neat stitches in the torn fingers of her glove.

Magda, watching her, thought that it made good sense to learn an art of this kind, on a world like Darkover, where warm and durable clothing was a necessity of life. She said ruefully, looking at the mess she had made of the torn tunic, "I am even less skillful with a needle than a sword!"

Jaelle laughed. "My skill with a dagger is incidental," she said. "I told you I was no fighter, but for my first year or two among the Amazons I used to work at Kindra's side. She was my foster-mother and had been a mercenary soldier. And when there was peace in the Domains, she hired herself out as a bodyguard to escort travelers through the Kilghard Hills and the Hellers, and protect them against bandits, catmen and what-have-you. For a few years I worked with her; but I did not really like it, and gradually I discovered my real skill."

"What is that, Jaelle?" Magda remembered Rohana saying that the Amazons worked at any honest trade; but she was curious to know which of them Jaelle had made her own.

"I am a travel-organizer," Jaelle said. "People who intend to travel in the hills come and consult me. I can tell them precisely how many pack animals they will need for supplies for any number of men, for the length of their trip, and where to hire or buy them, and where to hire drivers for them, and precisely how much equipment they must buy-or I can buy it for them, on commission. Then I can advise them about how much of the different kinds of food they must buy to keep the men healthy, and provide them with guides and bodyguards, tell them what roads to take, how long the journey will last at the specific season of the year, what passes might be closed or what rivers in flood, and anything else they might wish to know. It is not a business to make anyone rich, but I make a good living at it. Some people only wish for an hour or two of advice, and I give it to them for a fee; others put all the preparations for the trip in my hands, and I do everything from buying pack saddles to choosing meals and equipment they can use at midwinter in the high passes."

"Tell me," Magda said hesitantly. "From what I have seen of Thendara-are there many men willing to turn such responsibility over to a woman?"

"More than you might think," Jaelle said. "Rafaella, who started this business, told me that in the first year or two, her business was almost limited to providing escort service for ladies whose kinsmen had no leisure to escort them and would not trust them to strange men. Amazon bodyguards for women were much in demand because they knew the ladies would arrive unraped! But as it became known that the caravans we organized could take quicker routes, and arrive without running out of fodder, or having to live on porridge-powder for the last four or five days, the ladies themselves began to insist that we be allowed to make plans for their husbands' business journeyings, and so it had grown to a point where we have as much business as we can do."

"It still seems a strange business for a woman-here," Magda said. "I have grown used to thinking that a woman's life on Darkover was always so limited. Oh,
damn
this thing!" She broke off, sucking the finger she had pricked with an incautious stitch.

Jaelle laughed, saying, "Don't bother; give it to one of Rohana's sewing-women. They will be glad to have something to do, and it will give them pleasure to think there is something,
anything
they can do better than a Free Amazon."

Jaelle, Magda thought, was a puzzle; she was devoted to her sisters in the Guild of Free Amazons-and yet she could be so contemptuous of other women! She said, "Do you really think all women would be happier as Amazons, Jaelle?"

Jaelle put her mended glove back with its mate and began to sort out some small things at the bottom of her saddlebag. She said, not looking up, "No, I don't. I used to think so, when I was younger. And I do truly look forward to a day on our world when all women will have the freedoms that we-the Guild-have seized and declared for ourselves; when they will have them by law, and not by revolt and renunciation. But I know now that there are many women who could not be happy living my kind of life." She sat in the windowseat, her legs folded up under her chin, her short hair tousled; she looked like an adolescent girl. She had a bit of ribbon in her hand and was absentmindedly twisting it about her wrists as she spoke. "Rohana's women. They think of nothing but marriage; they are shocked and troubled at the idea of any other life than they live. It seems dreadful to them, to think of hiring themselves out, as men do, at any work for which they have the strength and skills, instead of serving for a time as waiting-women in one of the Great Houses, and then going home, as Lanilla is doing at winter's end, to a marriage arranged by their families. I asked her what her husband was like and she said she did not know, and asked me, 'Does it matter?' It was enough for her that she would have a home of her own, and a husband. Did you ever want to marry, Margali?"

Magda reminded her softly, "I
was
married."

"But only for a time – "

"I did not know when I married that it was only for a time," Magda said, with a twinge of the old pain. They had made so many plans for permanence!

"Tell me: if you had had a child, would you have stayed with him? Do you think it can be a bond between you?"

"My mother found it so," Magda said slowly. "She followed my father to four different worlds; then we came here, and I was born, and she always seemed content."

"Content only-to make a home for him? Is that your way, in the Empire?"

"She was a musician," Magda said. "She played on several instruments, and she wrote many songs. She translated many of the mountain songs into the Empire's standard language; and she wrote music for some poems written in
casta.
But my father was always the center of her life; after he died, she seemed to lose all joy in living, and seldom touched her music again; and she did not live very long."

"Rohana married dom Gabriel when she had seen him only twice," Jaelle said reflectively. "To me that seemed frightful, to be given to a man I barely knew, to lie with him, to bear his children. It seemed no better than slavery or rape made lawful! But when I said as much to Rohana, she laughed at me, and said that any man and woman, with health and goodwill, can live together in kindness and make a good life for one another. She said she thought herself lucky that he was decent and kindly and eager to please her; not a drunkard or a gambler or a lover of men, as so many of the Ardais are. To me, that seemed like a man, who has received a cudgeling, rejoicing that he had not been horsewhipped as well..." She was still absently twisting the ribbon around her wrists, looping and uncoiling it. "And now he is truly the center of her life. I cannot understand it, though I find I like him better as I grow older. But there are times, too, when it seems to me that Rohana has as much freedom as any of us, that she does as she wishes and has given up little... "

She drew the loop of ribbon into a tight coil around her wrists, began to coil the loose end around her other arm. She said, "Margali, did you want a child at all? Why did you not have one? You are not barren, are you,
breda?"

"I did not want a child at once," Magda said. "We were traveling together; I did not want anything to separate us." It had been a bitter quarrel; she looked away from Jaelle, unwilling even now to relive that painful moment.

Jaelle reached out to touch her hand lightly, saying, "I did not mean to pry."

Magda shook her head. "Afterward, when we agreed to part, I was glad I had no child, to remind me always..."
But would we have separated, then?
The touch of Jaelle's hand suddenly heightened the awareness, the contact, and she found herself thinking,
Is she pregnant? Does she think she is, does she want to be?
But all she sensed from the touch of Jaelle's fingertips was... loneliness, fear.
I thought Jaelle was so happy.

Magda knew that from this touch she could use her awakened ESP-what Rohana had called
laran
-to find out if Jaelle were pregnant. The thought suddenly frightened her. She did not want to pry that way, to use this new skill to intrude. She let go of Jaelle's hand as if the narrow fingers had burned her, and found her hand caught in the ribbon Jaelle had been winding and unwinding about her wrists. Caught off guard, she demanded, "What in the world are you
doing
with that thing?"

Jaelle stared down at it, in sudden shock. She wrenched it loose, and flung the ribbon across the room, with a look of horror and loathing. As if, Magda thought, she had found a poisonous snake coiling about her wrists!

"Jaelle! What's wrong, sister?" The affectionate term came readily to her tongue now; but Jaelle's moment of vulnerability had vanished again behind a barricade of flippancy.

She said, "Old habits! A puppy you don't housebreak almost before his eyes are open will still be wetting the floor when he's an old dog. I've had this habit since I was a little girl; Kindra told me that it was just a nervous habit, and that I'd outgrow it. But I haven't, see?"

Magda knew, there was more to it than that, but she knew she could not ask questions; knew it with that indefinable inner knowledge she was beginning to trust. Instead she asked something she knew to be safer.

"Jaelle, are you pregnant?"

Jaelle's green eyes met hers, just a flash, and then looked away. She said, and sounded almost desolate, "I don't know. It's too soon to tell." Quickly she jumped off the windowseat, barricading herself again. "Come on, let's find one of those silly women of Rohana's and ask her if she can mend your outfit, and make her happy by thinking she is superior to a Free Amazon!"

Watching the girl as she bundled Magda's torn traveling clothes together, Magda thought,
She's so young and vulnerable! If Peter breaks her heart, I think I'll want to kill him!

What was going to happen to Jaelle? For that matter-if this involvement was serious and lasting, as Magda was beginning to guess-what would happen to Peter? Could he really sacrifice his career for a woman? And for one who was not, by oath, even free to marry?

It was easy to talk about the inevitability of liaisons, love affairs, even marriages between members of separate peoples on Empire worlds. Magda had thought of them as inevitable statistics, before this. But it was different-completely different-when you knew the people involved, and guessed what they meant in purely human and personal terms. No statistics could give you even a clue to that.

Is this my fault, too? By refusing Peter, did I bring this on both of them?

The winter drew on; the snow lay deep over Ardais. To Jaelle this was a precious interlude, a time separated from anything else in her life, before or after. For the first time since her thirteenth year, she lived surrounded by ordinary women; she wore women's clothes, shared in the life of the household, and spent her days with women who did not live by the terms of renunciation and freedom of the Amazon oath.

She had tasted this life-but briefly, and unwillingly-when she was fifteen. Rohana had insisted that she must know the life she was to renounce, before she made that renunciation irrevocable.

But I was too young; I could not see it clearly.

And now it is too late. All the smiths in Zandru's forges can't mend a broken egg, or put a hatched chick back into the shell. I can never, never be one of them, not now.

I do not think I want to be. But I am not sure, not now...

And there was the Terran, her lover...

Like any young woman in the grip of her first serious love affair, it seemed to her that he filled her whole sky. The Guild-house and the life there seemed very far away. She knew this was only an interlude, that it must end, but she tried to live entirely in the present, neither remembering the past nor thinking ahead to the future, but simply savoring each moment as it passed.

But there were times when she woke in the night, held close in her lover's arms, and realized that she no longer knew what she was doing, or who she was, or what lay ahead for either of them. None of the thousand uncertainties could be answered in words, or even asked; so she would turn to him in desperation, holding herself close to him, demanding the one thing she could be sure about, the one certainty they shared. She had ceased to be cautious. She no longer cared to conceal what was between them. She knew that sooner or later this would precipitate a crisis, but in some indefinable way she felt that even this would be a relief from the terrible uncertainty.

And then, one night, when she woke, she heard around the towers the soft dripping of rain and running of melting snow, and knew that the spring-thaw had begun. Now reality would close again over their enchanted isolation; and whether anything would remain, she could not even guess. She dared not even weep, for fear of waking him. She knew he would have only one comfort to offer, and now even that was no comfort at all, before the knowledge of the inevitable.

When I took the Amazon oath, I believed I had made it impossible for any man to enslave me. Yet here I lie, bound in chains of my own making! What can I do? Oh, merciful Goddess, what shall I do?