The Saga of the Renunciates (34 page)

"When we are alone, beloved, I shall be so fragile and demanding that you will sometimes think I am Lady Rohana herself, who is not by law permitted to move as much as a day's ride without her maid and her lady companion and half a dozen guards! But you must not expect me to be anything other than I am, my love." She stood on tiptoe, pulled his head down and kissed him quickly. "Enough for now. Rohana and her women are coming back, and tomorrow we will be in Thendara."

"And tomorrow night..." Peter said, smiling at her, and for a moment she held herself against him, not at all unwilling to let him know she shared his eagerness. Then, sighing, they moved apart as Rohana with her ladies returned to their fire.

They rode down into Thendara a little after noon. Rohana said as they came through the gates, "What will you do now? Jaelle, you must go to the Guild-house, I know, with Margali."

Magda felt a small clutch of fear.
It's here. There's no more delaying. Oh, God, I'm frightened!

Certainly, within my lifetime, Darkover will be a part of the Empire, and it will make no difference. The usual time from first contact to affiliation is about fifty years, and that's almost half over. But will that come too late to do me any good? Must I be exiled from one world to the other?

She thought this, not knowing that Darkover was to prove unique in the history of the Empire, and that not only her own lifetime but many lifetimes would pass before Darkover and the Empire were reconciled. Just the same, the curious little flash of precognition iced her blood again, and she pulled her fur-trimmed riding-cloak-Rohana'‌s midwinter gift-about her shoulders.

"This is idiotic!" Peter said, looking back to make certain they were out of earshot of Rohana's women and the guardsmen. "You can't possibly do that, Magda. Somehow or other, we've got to get you out of that nonsense of spending half a year in the Guild-house. I'm sure you'd find it interesting, but we can't possibly afford to lose our only resident female expert. Come back with me now to the HQ, and let the people there think of some way to get you out of it."

Magda said, in exasperation, "Peter, you don't understand. I am oath-bound, and I will honor my oath. I will try, after, to make it right with the Empire authorities; but the obligation must be met nevertheless!"

"Oh, that," he said in contempt. "You know as well as I do that an oath taken under duress is not valid!"

Jaelle looked at him in shock and dismay; and Magda, with that new, devastating sensitivity to thoughts, knew that Peter had just shocked Jaelle to speechlessness.
An oath is sacred. What kind of man could ignore it?
And if he had no awareness of what the oath meant to Magda, how could he possibly know what it meant to Jaelle?

Can he ever know,
Jaelle thought with desolation,
that it is the very mainspring of my being?
It was only a moment, then her love began to make excuses for him; soon, soon he would understand. She smiled gaily at Peter and said to Magda, "We shall have to teach him better than that, will we not, sister?"

Rohana interrupted, sensing the strain: "The best way is for you, all three of you, to be my guests at Comyn Castle tonight. There is room in the Ardais suite for a dozen or more; and you, Piedro, can send word to your Terran supervisor that tomorrow we will all meet with Lorill Hastur. Both of them will be eager to know how this affair has ended."

They agreed to that compromise, and an hour later were all settled in comfortable quarters in the Ardais suite. Magda was tired from the long journey, and lay down for a nap, but she knew that sleep was simply another way of avoiding, for a time, the unendurable conflicts. Tomorrow, at whatever cost, they must be faced.

Peter stood for a few moments at the door of the room the women shared. He said, hurt, "Jaelle, you are avoiding me again!"

"No, my love. In a day or two we shall declare ourselves as freemates, before witnesses," she promised, standing on tiptoe to kiss him with a passion that swept away his doubts. "But just now I am Rohana's guest in Comyn Castle and for her good name I must abide, under this roof, by her laws and rules of conduct rather than my own. But I love you. Never doubt it, promise me, Piedro, promise."

"I promise," he assured her, then, in surprise, bent to wipe the tears from her eyes. "My love, my darling, why are you crying?"

"I-I don't know," she stammered, and although he knew she was evading him, there was nothing he could say. "Even though I am a Free Amazon, Piedro, you must sometimes just let me be a woman, and not always reasonable..."

When he had gone away, and Magda had fallen into an exhausted sleep, Jaelle wandered, restlessly, around the Ardais suite. At this time of year it was deserted; Rohana and her guests seemed to rattle around the empty rooms and corridors like a few pods on a tree stripped by a storm. At last Rohana sought her out.

"Come and sit with me for a little while, Jaelle. It may be a long time before we can spend time together like this; at Council season I have little leisure to enjoy your company, and it may be many years before you can pay me another visit at Ardais."

They sat before the fire that had been kindled in Rohana's room. For a time they said little, but at last Jaelle got out of her chair and came and sat on the hearth-rug beside her kinswoman. She laid her head for a moment on Rohana's knee; hesitantly, Rohana stroked the soft hair. As a girl Jaelle had never permitted caresses and Rohana had quickly learned not to offer them, but for once she seemed to invite them.

At last Jaelle said, "I did not tell you this, but you probably have guessed. Piedro has asked me to remain in Thendara as his freemate; and I have consented."

Rohana looked down at Jaelle with a distant sadness.
She loves him so much; and I know I cannot really understand.
Rohana herself had been given in marriage very young, had obediently married the man chosen by her family, without question, and had never been touched by this kind of passion. At last she asked, with a hesitant tenderness, "Have you ever regretted your oath, Jaelle?"

"Never before this, never for a moment," Jaelle said. Then, forcing the words out, "Just the same, I think you were right, years ago, when you said I was too young for such a choice."

That struck to Rohana's heart, almost with physical pain.
Merciful Goddess, I gave her freedom, the freedom that had been denied to me. Was I so wrong?
For a moment time slipped out of focus, past and present blending together, and it seemed to Rohana that it was again the last day of Jaelle's long visit to Castle Ardais, in her fifteenth year. Rohana had known Jaelle was not happy there: she detested Kyril and had no great liking for Rohana's younger son and daughter; she thought Gabriel a petty tyrant; she had chafed at the need to wear skirts even for riding; and on the last day of her visit she had come to Rohana like this and told her, defiantly, that she would take the Amazon oath on the very day she was legally free to do so.

Rohana had foreseen this, but had still been dismayed by the actuality. She felt Jaelle had as yet no idea what she was renouncing.

She had said: "Be very sure, Jaelle; very sure. This is no game, it is your whole life. Don't throw it away like this!" And then she had begged: "Jaelle, will you give me three years, more time, as you gave Kindra, to prove to you that my life is no less happy than hers?"

She knew Jaelle was remembering, too (Or did the girl's awakening
laran
share her thoughts?), when Jaelle said softly, "Three years seemed a lifetime then; longer than I could bear to wait. And-forgive me, Rohana-you wanted to prove your life was happy; and yet I knew
you
were not happy. So it seemed-hypocrisy." Rohana bowed her head. No, she had not been happy then, but she thought she had concealed it more carefully from Jaelle. She had felt harried then, trapped by the life she led, after her brief taste of freedom. She had been much beset with her adolescent children, and with the three-year-old Valentine, who was at the most active and troublesome age. And at that time she had been pregnant again with a fourth child she did not want; that had been the price she paid for Gabriel's final forgiveness. And though she had not wanted the child, Rohana was too much a woman to bear a child for most of a year and see it die without anguish. So when it had been stillborn, she had grieved as bitterly as if she had longed for it. But she had carried the child, that year, in anger and desperate rebellion, feeling that perhaps she had paid too high a price for Gabriel's goodwill and peace in her home. Now, before Jaelle grown to womanhood, she bowed her head and said, almost inaudibly, "You were right; I was not happy then. Now I feel more guilty than ever that because of my unhappiness you rushed to take the Amazon oath."

Jaelle laid her cheek against Rohana's hand. "Don't blame yourself; I don't think it would have made any difference. Even Kindra said I was stubborn and headstrong; she, too, urged me to delay a little. Perhaps"-she smiled fleetingly-"I am my father's daughter, too, though I do not like to think so."

Never before this day had Jaelle spoken her father's name in Rohana's hearing. She had some idea of what it had cost Jaelle to say this. She was silent, asking after a long time, "Then you will stay with your Terran lover?"

"I-I think so."

But she is not sure.
"Is it fair to any man, Jaelle, to give him so little of yourself as a freemate gives?"

"Rohana, I give him what he wants of me! The Terrans do not make their women slaves to their will!"

"Just the same-don't be angry, Jaelle-it seems to me that a freemate gives little more than a prostitute." She used the coarse word
grezalis,
knowing that on her decorous lips it would shock Jaelle into listening. "It seems to me that it is no marriage unless you commit yourself to a man for all times: good and bad, in happiness or misery. You know that when I was wed, Gabriel was nothing to me but a burden I had to bear, because I had been born Comyn, and the laws of my caste required me to marry within my clan and bear him children with
laran."

"And you can call
me
whore? When you were sold like a slave for your family's pride of position, and I-choose to give myself freely to the man I love and desire?"

Rohana put out a hand to stop her. "Jaelle, Jaelle darling, I did not call you a whore, or anything like it! I said: this was how my marriage seemed at the beginning, a grave burden I must bear for my family's sake. Yet now Gabriel is the very center of the world we have built together. A freemate says to her lover, because of this storm of desire, I will remain with you while it suits my pleasure; but if we lose our happiness I will leave you, sacrificing the happiness we have had and the good times that may come in the future, all because of the unhappiness of a year or two. There is no obligation to remain together and work to turn the evil times into good again."

"How can you do that? Do you not live with constant regret for the years of unhappiness you had to share, with no possibility of escape?"

"Not really," Rohana said. "It has taken us a long time to outlive unhappiness, but we have forged a bond that will last till death. And beyond," she added, smiling, "if there is anything beyond."

"You say this bravely," said Jaelle, "but I think... oh, Rohana, I do not want to make you angry."

"The truth could not make me angry, Jaelle. Only remember, darling, that it is
your
truth, and not necessarily
my
truth."

"Then I think," said Jaelle, "that because it is too late for regrets, you tell yourself you have never had them. I think you simply would not give up your power and position as wife to the lord of the Domain of Ardais."

"Perhaps," said Rohana, unoffended, "a marriage is spun of many small threads. Gabriel is only a part of my life, but not a part I would willingly renounce now. I did not love him when we were wed, but it would rend my heart into a thousand fragments to be parted from him now."

Jaelle, remembering Rohana's face as she knelt beside the unconscious man, knew dimly that this was true; but it seemed to her that this was only slavery to an ideal, and nothing like the overwhelming passion that had caught her up, almost unwillingly, into Peter's life. She said, trembling, "That is not what I call love!"

"No, I suppose not, dear," said Rohana, taking the small cold hands in hers, "but it is real, and it has lasted."

"Then you think love-love as I know it-means nothing? It seems to me you think marriage can be made by any two, however they feel about one another, as if-for the first time in a dozen years, Jaelle spoke her mother's name-"as if Melora and Jalak... as if my mother, even in rape and captivity, could have built lasting happiness."

"Even that, under some circumstances, darling. But I went consenting to my marriage, with my family's support and blessing; Melora was torn by force from all her kin. But even then; had Jalak and Melora chosen one another, had she run away with him of her own will, or even, afterward, had he loved and cherished her for herself, and not as a pawn to his evil pride, and a memento to his hatred of her folk of the Domains-even then, perhaps, she could have found some peace; not happiness, perhaps, but content."

"Even in chains?"

"Even so, my darling. Had Melora loved Jalak, and willed to please him, she would have known that the chains were a game he played for his pride before all men, and she would have worn them to play the game with him, willingly... Jaelle, if your Amazons made up an army and marched to free the women of the Dry Towns from their chains, no doubt there are some who would hail you as their saviors; but there are others, I am sure, who would bid you turn around and march home again, and not meddle in their affairs. Would you not wear chains to please your lover, Jaelle?"

She said, "He would never ask," but dropped her eyes, remembering her play with the ribbon; the fantasy game she had played as a little girl in the Dry Towns. She said, angry at the memory, "Had you no pity for my mother?"

"Only the Gods know how much," Rohana said. "I risked the anger of Hastur, and came near to destroying what happiness I had found with Gabriel, to bring her away before she bore Jalak a son; and to set you free, because she said she would kill you rather than leave you chained in Jalak's Great House. Do you not remember that?" Her eyes flamed with the beginning of anger.