Citadels of Darkover

by Deborah J. Ross

  “The widows,” he said under his breath. “You’ll see more on the wharf. Fishing is dangerous business and men are often lost at sea. And the tradition here is that women do not remarry. They put on black and watch the sea. Some of them make the bobbin lace, those who need the money. We try to make sure that none starve.” He had run out of breath.

  Leonie turned her gaze from them and noticed the forge and a second pub at the other end of the street. From there they turned the corner onto the wharf, where the fishing vessels that were in port bobbed, tied up at the pier. Most had been painted brilliant white with trims that matched the women’s stripes, and bore fanciful names.

  She might have found it all very pretty except that everything smelled of fish. Women, many of them dressed all in black, sat on low stools as they gutted fish and discarded the viscera into buckets. Fish crowded drying racks in the sun and other, fresher specimens sat in cold water baths as merchants picked through the catch. Men mended nets on their laps and children, some as young as eight, carried buckets of entrails away and scrubbed out the great wooden trays that held the different varieties caught in the sea.

  Leonie had never seen so many kinds of fish. Indeed, she had rarely eaten fish at all, only the small ones that came from the high hill lakes. Those they saved for special celebrations. She had never imagined so many fish existed, and she could never have conceived they smelled so awful.

  No one here stopped working to offer a bow or curtsey. The men and women, and even the children working on the wharf looked up as she and Kieran passed and noted their presence, but returned immediately to their tasks.

  And again, the women in black, with their severe hairstyles and their complete lack of jewelry, gave her hard looks. From the back she noticed that these women did not wear the butterfly clasps at the nape of their necks that all the women on Darkover wore for modesty, but instead covered their entire heads and hair past their shoulders with an unadorned veil to match their mourning. Leonie assumed it was held in place with hairpins but she dared get no closer to inspect.

  She did notice that a number of the widows were not old, and some as young as she. Kieran said fishing took a great toll on the community, but Leonie thought it cruel that these young women, many of them lovely if one looked past their hard expressions and their unrelieved mourning, should remain alone. Surely after a year they should be able to remarry, at least as a freemate.

  Then she scolded herself. Commoners did not marry di catenas as she had. Only Comyn, concerned with heirs and inheritance and genetics, locked on bracelets for life.

  Still, these young women should have some hope in life instead of being imprisoned forever to a life of drudgery and mourning, poverty and hopelessness.

  If Kieran died, would they expect her to don black forever, wear a veil, and walk the wharf?

  If Kieran died, would she want to leave this place, this sea? Would she want to remarry? She had never considered those questions, but she had never heard of such a cruel custom before.

  Now she resolved to put those questions aside for the moment. She needed to see this town. But something underlying the sea salt and sand added bitterness to the taste of Hannoth and chilled her even under the warm southern sun.

  ~o0o~

  Spring became summer and Leonie found much good in her new life. She found that she liked Rian when he and Kieran were not fishing, and the three of them spent many pleasant evenings singing. Rian had a fine voice and Leonie played the rryl well enough, and often she could feel Kieran weaving them together as a Keeper would in a circle, so that their telepathic bond became natural and easy to access.

  After three tendays she had to give instructions to the cook that they must have something other than fish every other day. Which drove Irmelin, the black-veiled widow who ran the kitchen like a captain ran a company of cadets, to a fury Leonie had never expected. “And what else do you think we should eat, vai domna? Seaweed? I have a recipe for that somewhere.” The spindly cook waved a giant ladle, which looked suspiciously like a Renunciate’s knife, in her face and backed her out the door.

  True to her word, the next evening Irmelin slammed a bowl of slimy green—to call it stew would be to give it far too much credit—on the table and left. Leonie went to the kitchen the next morning and apologized. Abjectly. They went back to eating fish and Leonie, properly chastened, dared not enter the kitchen again.

  When the heat had become nearly unbearable and Leonie saw the benefit of her sleeveless bodices, one of the women from the wharf came to the manor with a message for her. No one from the village would enter the house even if invited; they stayed on the porch to speak to Dom Kieran.

  But this time the petitioner wanted her. She went out from the cooler corner deep in the cavern recess the house into the heat of the porch to speak to a young woman who yet wore colors, a yellow, tan and green striped skirt and green bodice. Still, she had the beginnings of the hard look of the widows, expecting bad news at every turn.

  “It’s me Giley,” she started with no preamble, none of the careful honorifics and courtesies that even at Rockraven the locals began a request. “He’s been hurt bad with a fish knife through his hand. I washed it with sea water, but the knife was dirty, used all day with fish guts. It’s already blown up and he’s screaming, poor mite, and the old women say he’ll lose his hand or his life and I’d best choose now or it’ll be chosen for me. Widow Emelda is ready with her cleaver but I heard you were a healer and I asked her wait.”

  “Of course, let’s go,” Leonie responded without thinking.

  The woman, whose name she didn’t know, led her to one of the stone cottages at the edge of the town. In the one room with a loft above, the child lay on a bed against the wall across from the cook fire. His face was already ghastly pale and he held his hand and moaned. Leonie judged him seven or eight years old, one of the children she had seen running with buckets and ropes on her first day on the wharf.

  She went directly to the bed and touched his hand. Already swollen, she could see the dark purple lines starting to form. The widows were right, without a healer they would have to amputate immediately or the boy would die. But she was a healer and this was something she knew how to handle.

  Calling upon her laran, she sank deep into the cellular level of the boy’s hand and his fluid systems. She merged her own rhythms to his, the flow of the blood and lymph, the cells that came to fight against the bacteria that multiplied so quickly that they couldn’t possibly defeat it.

  But she could. She poured energy through her own channels into his, clearing away the invaders in great sweeps as one would clear dust from a kitchen floor. They were wrong, they did not belong, and she added her trained strength to his flailing force and pushed. And continued to push and wipe and clean until suddenly she found no resistance and the wound was clean.

  Exhausted, she sagged onto the beaten dirt floor. The boy’s breathing had calmed and his hand showed no sign of injury. He slept and all Leonie wanted was to sleep as well. To sleep, and then to eat every morsel she could find, more than this poor household held.

  She never quite remembered how she got back home and into her own bed. She had some vague impression of a cart. But when she woke she found the table laden with honeyed nuts and iced moon cakes and seed-paste candies she had never tasted before. And that night for dinner she and Kieran and Rian had duck stuffed with dried fruits on a bed of rice.

  And that night, for the first time, Kieran came to her bed. He tried to be gentle and was awkward, but then so was she. And somewhere inside the telepathic bonding that went with their bodies, she felt Rian join them and approve and they were all three together. And then she slept.

  After that, the widows in black no longer glowered when she passed. A tiny thing, but Leonie felt the tone of the town change. Others came to her for healing now and she could speak to a few people on the street, if only about their health.

  And then the warm season began to turn cooler.


  Excited and grateful by the coming cold, Leonie still noticed a new tension in the town. The women in black seemed almost to smirk at the women who wore colors. And the women in colors looked at the women in black in dread. The men seemed to fold in upon themselves and then stare out to sea, their eyes scanning the horizon as if it were not another perfectly clear, bright day. And the old men smoked their pipes and shook their heads and drank their pints outside the pub.

  Happy as Leonie was, she could feel growing tension in Hannoth. Finally she asked Kieran why everyone seemed so afraid.

  Kieran said nothing but Rian spoke instead. “Storm season is coming.”

  “Storm season?” Leonie felt as if all the ice in Nevarsin had pierced through her.

  Rian nodded. “Every year at summer’s end we have great storms. If we are lucky, only one or two and they are not too bad. In a bad year...”The man looked to the sea. “In a bad year we are lucky if anything is left standing. And when men are caught fishing when the storms come, many die.”

  So many women in black on the wharf, and many of them young enough to marry again. But they could never marry again if the men kept dying at sea.

  Storms. She could feel the storms.

  ~o0o~

  Day followed beautiful clear day and the fleet was out, Kieran and Rian with it in the boat that Rian had sailed with his father when he was a boy. The women and children worked on the wharf, drying fish and mending nets. Leonie stood on the cliff and studied the cloudless sky.

  Then one day, as perfect as all the others, her laran reached out and touched a few clouds gathering. She didn’t worry; clouds gathered and dispersed and she returned to the manor carved from rock to check with Irmelin on food supplies and then down to the stables on the animals. As she did every day, when she had finished her duties at the manor Leonie rode into Hannoth and told the women that she had spoken over the distance with Dom Kieran and the fleet was safe. She forgot the clouds.

  When Kieran was out to sea Leonie went to the top of the manor every evening when the first moon rose (tonight it was Liriel) and reached out with her laran to touch her husband. Just a small reassurance, a quick smile, a flash of pleasure at his hard work on the lines and the nets and his joy with Rian was enough for her to bring back to Hannoth. All was well with the fleet.

  But tonight all was not well. Kieran seemed as always, but she sensed something far out to sea, well beyond their senses. Those clouds had moved and she felt the force of the lightning ripple through them, though it had not yet released far out to sea. On the high, rocky cliff above the strangely silent shore, she raised her arms with her spirit out to the gathering fury that matched the vast sea.

  Kieran, she did the telepathic equivalent of scream. Kieran, danger to the fleet. Storm, a big storm. Coming from...she wasn’t able to give words, but showed him the trajectory of the squall and let her own experience of the lightning rip through him as well.

  She had caught him at an intimate moment, not that she cared. Nor did he. Already he answered her. The fleet can hide. Let the people know. Take them to safety or many will die.

  Safety. But where would be safe? She had never seen such a thing, a hurricane they called it. She only knew of storms in the mountains, not one that came with the full power of the ocean behind it.

  And then she turned around in the dark and faced the silence. For as long as she had lived in Hannoth she had become accustomed to the constant sound of the waves slapping sand and gulls screaming overhead. An ocean breeze always blew, kissing her skin and gently tugging at her fine hair.

  Now there was nothing, nothing at all. The sea itself lay motionless and far, far out, well below the lowest tide Leonie had ever seen. No sounds, no flying things, not even any insects disturbed the deep silence. No breath stirred the immobile air.

  Like an indrawn breath before a scream, the whole of the world had withdrawn power to burst out in a moment. The coiled, waiting force slammed through her as if it would toss her aside like a blade of grass.

  Below, she could see a shadow where she knew the village of Hannoth should be, as still as the ocean, as dark as the sky. No one moved, no light shone from a single window. No one knew the horror that prepared to come among them.

  Safety. Where would anyone be safe from a thing far greater than any blizzard up in the hills? What would have stood so long?

  This manor, she realized. This rock, this face, so ancient as to be part of the forming of the world. It had caves, so many caves that the manor itself had been carved into them. And then she knew what she had to do.

  She raced toward the village barefoot in her night dress, completely unaware of both, as she thought of how to organize her people and get them to the caves in time.

  When Leonie arrived the wharf was deserted. Only two of the oldest widows came out of their doors, one waving a broom and the other telling the first that she must be a chieri. Leonie paused to catch her breath and saw the women look at her with confusion and disapproval.

  “A storm, a very great storm, is coming soon,” she said between gasps. “It will hit before morning I think.”

  “And how do you think you know that?” the woman with the broom asked, giving her no title of respect.

  “She is a leronis,” the other woman hissed. “She healed the Alban boy.”

  “Healing has nothing to do with storm saying, Mhari,” the broom woman replied. “She’s just a chit of a girl with city airs, if you ask me.”

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing no one did ask you, Camilla. Since you haven’t got the sense of a bird, not one of which is flying. And take a look at the sea, if you will.” A third woman joined them, this one wearing a striped skirt, though Leonie could not make out the colors in the dark.

  “You’re making a racket out there when honest people need their sleep,” an old man shouted and threw a large gourd vessel at the women, which bounced on the shell paved walk.

  “Good thing you’re up, Grandfather Gabriel, so you can help out. Vai domna says a big blow is on the way,” the woman in the striped skirt said. She had a loud voice that carried, and now more people joined them.

  Another widow looked out to the sea and then up to the moons. “Aye, the signs are here. We’d best get the windows battened and hunker down. Better wake everyone now and get to it.”

  “Wait,” Leonie stopped them. “What happens with these storms? Aren’t people hurt? There is space in the manor, in the caves around the cliff, which should be safer than these.” She gestured toward the flimsy homes thatched with sea grass.

  “And what of the fleet?” the old man asked.

  “They’re warned. Something about a place to hide from the wind. An island?” Leonie didn’t know a better way to explain it.

  “Indeed, a hidey hole from the hurricane. We’ve a number of them over the fishing grounds. With enough warning they’ll be as safe as can be.”

  “Now, Domna Leonie, you’d best get back home and get decently dressed,” one of the widows said. “We’ll wake the town and organize those here to pack their things and come up the cliff. But it won’t do for you to greet your guests in a night dress.”

  Leonie shook her head and snorted. Life and death and all they cared about was that she was not properly dressed! Ridiculous. The widows stared and she tried to stare them down, but in the end she remembered the power the widows had, and that she had to win their respect.

  So Leonie turned and stomped off back to the manor to put on boots and, very incidentally, a striped skirt and bodice. There, she was respectable. Down below on the beach path from the village she saw the families, women and children staggering under sacks, many with sheep or chervines carrying packs or even pulling carts. None had horses.

  “Where in Avarra’s good world shall we put them all?” Dika asked.

  “In the caves, of course,” Leonie snapped, a little more sharply than she had intended.

  “They’re disgusting,” Dika replied.

  “Better than dyi
ng,” Leonie replied. “How many brooms do we have?”

  “How would I know? Ask Irmelin.” Leonie almost said that Dika’s tone sounded very much like insolence. Instead, she turned and went to the kitchen.

  “How many brooms do we have?” she demanded.

  But Irmelin was too busy ordering the entire household as a general might order his troops to notice. “Secure the water cisterns first, and make sure to bring plenty inside for drinking and washing first. Drain as much as you can. We will try to capture as much as possible from the storm,” she instructed two muscular men Leonie had never seen before.

  “And you,” she pointed to several young boys and a girl who, Leonie knew, turned the kitchen spit, ran errands, and generally made themselves useful. “You will fasten all the shutters as I showed you. Teams of two, every room. Make sure the rods go deep into the stone and lock, mind you, and if one single one blows open during the storm you won’t sit down for a week, I promise you.” The children nodded and ran off, each pair hand in hand.

  “And you,” Irmelin turned to her scullery maids, “you had better secure all the storage caves. Be especially careful of the blue-grain stores, for it that gets damp it will mold and we won’t be able to replace it until Midsummer. Then all the dried fish and fruits and the preserves in glass last, for those should be safe even if the damp penetrates into the stone.”

  Then she turned to Leonie and scowled. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “Brooms. And the location of the most habitable caves that we are not currently using for storage. The safest ones that are not sea-facing.”

  Irmelin laughed out loud. “They are all sea-facing. The sea carved them out.” Leonie could practically hear her think, “you ninny.” Still, the cook paused to give her request more consideration. “Do you plan to shelter people in them, then? There are the westerlies, the caverns that lie deep behind the cliff and have only the smallest entrances here. But you can’t use them. No one would go there.”