Thendara House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Absolutely zero,” Jaelle replied promptly. “I told you; she is in her housebound half-year for training, and during that time she cannot leave the house except at the direct command of a Guild Mother.”

  Cholayna frowned a little and said, “I understood you were her superior; can’t you send for her and order it?”

  “I suppose I could,” Jaelle said slowly, “but I would not do that to her. It would set her apart from the others and she could never recover, if she is really to be one of them.”

  “I think you’re being overconscientious,” Peter said. “The decision to use Free Amazons—excuse me, Renunciates—in Terran employment is an important one for both our worlds and it should be implemented as soon as humanly possible, before we lose the momentum of that decision.”

  “Just the same, we don’t want to disturb Magda’s cover,” said Cholayna, “If she has gone among them as one of them we don’t want to single her out in any way. Jaelle, could you go there and talk privately to her?”

  Jaelle was suddenly overcome with a flood of homesickness. To visit the Guild House, to be one with her sisters again! “I’d be glad to do that, and I can talk to Mother Lauria about it, too.”

  “The only thing wrong with that,” Peter said wryly, “is that I can’t come with you, can I?”

  “Not to the Guild House, I’m afraid,” she said, but smiled, thinking that one day before long they would surely walk in the snow together, through the city she loved. He loved it too, he had spent years living as a Darkovan in her world. Why had she begun to think of him as a Terran and alien? Somehow she must help him, as well as herself, to recapture the Darkovan Piedro she had loved.

  “I want to talk a little about the kind of woman we need here,” said Cholayna. “Above all, they must be flexible, capable of learning new ways of thinking, doing, capable of adjusting to alien conditions. In fact—” she smiled at Jaelle and it was like a warm touch of the woman’s hand, “like you, Jaelle; capable of surviving culture shock.”

  “Ah,” Peter said, “but there aren’t any more like Jaelle. When they made her, they broke the mold.”

  “I don’t think I’m as unique as all that,” she said, smiling, but already her mind was running over the women she knew in the Guild House. There might be others she did not know as well, suited to training among the Terrans. Rafaella would never make a Medic technician, but she might be useful as a mountain guide, would certainly be valuable to the Terrans for her knowledge of travel in the hills and the Hellers. Marisela—Jaelle frowned for a moment, thinking of the midwife’s skill and the adaptability which allowed her to work in the city with women who despised the ordinary Free Amazon. Marisela, certainly, would benefit by this kind of training, but could they spare her in the Guild House? She shrugged it off, deciding that she would talk it over with Mother Lauria, and raised her eyes to meet Cholayna’s smile.

  “Where were you?” she asked, smiling, and Jaelle laughed and apologized. “Thinking over the women in the Guild House.”

  Cholayna laughed and dismissed her. “Well, go and talk it over with your Guild Mothers. Some day, perhaps—would it be possible for me to visit a Guild House?”

  “I don’t know why not,” Jaelle said, responding again to the woman’s spontaneous friendliness. “I think Mother Lauria would like you very much. I wish you could have known my oath-mother, Kindra.” They were, she decided as she went down to her quarters, very much alike in many ways. Although Cholayna had grown up in a world where no one had made it difficult for her to learn and grow, and she had come to her strength, not by revolt and renunciation, as an Amazon must do, but simply by choosing this work…

  And then Jaelle was shocked at herself. Was she criticizing her own world, in favor of the Terranan? Had a few tendays here corrupted her so much?

  Corrupted? Is it corruption, then, to love Peter or to appreciate his world? She slammed the door of her quarters and tore off her uniform with shaking hands. It was, indeed, time to revisit her home!

  She got into her embroidered linen undertunic, heavy drawers and the thick woollen breeches and overtunic; sat down to lace her boots. Swearing, she ran her hand through her long thick hair. Time, and more than time, to have it cut. No, damnation, why should she? She was living as Peter’s freemate—which the terms of her Oath permitted her to do, she reminded herself severely. Yet the thought persisted; what would Rafaella say, or Camilla, when she appeared in the Guild House with long hair instead of the distinctive Renunciate cut which proclaimed her independence of any man? Oh, damn them all! She fingered a pair of scissors, looked reflectively in the mirror, remembering Peter’s hands caressing her hair. She actually set the scissors to her neckline, then swore again, angrily, and flung them down. It was her own hair and her own life, and if she wished to please her beloved freemate that too was her privilege. Yet the sting of guilt remained.

  If it was snowing outside, she should have creams to protect her face against the wind and chill. She rummaged in the drawer, appreciating the soft perfumed Terran cosmetics; the perfume was a little stronger, the texture somewhat smoother, than those she could have bought in the market or the ones that some of the women made in the Guild House when funds were short for a time. As she was smoothing the stuff on her face, she encountered the small calculating device of beads which she used to keep track of her women’s cycles by the movement of the moons; the beads colored like the four moons, violet, peacock-blue, pale green and white. She slid down a violet bead, for she had noted that Uriel’s disc was full, and stopped, staring at the beads. She should have pulled down a red bead for bleeding, at least a tenday ago. She had been so disrupted by the dreadful fight with Peter, and the distress accompanying it, and after it, her exacting work with Cholayna and Aleki, that she had simply pulled down the beads mechanically every day without noticing.

  Was it simply the disruption of the cycles which, she had been warned, might come with living by artificial yellow light? Or was it possible that she might have become pregnant, that Peter, in the ecstatic reunion which had followed their quarrel, had managed to make her pregnant?

  She could not help a deep-based flicker of pleasure at the thought, immediately followed by doubt and dread. Did she really want this? Did she want to be at the mercy of some small parasite within her body, sickness, distortion, the appalling ordeal of birth which had killed her own mother? For a second her mind flickered the terror of a nightmare… red spilling into the parched sand of a waterhole, sunrise and blood… and a sharp stab of pain in her hands told her that without knowing it she had clenched her fist so tightly that her nails dug into the palm. Nonsense, what was she thinking, this mixture of old nightmares?

  Peter would be so pleased when she told him! For a moment she anticipated the delight that would spread over his face, the tenderness and pride that would light his eyes.

  Pride. The words of the oath reverberated in her mind, Bear a child only in my own time and season; bear no child for any man’s heritage or position… Oh, nonsense, she told herself. Peter was not Comyn, even though he looked so much like Kyril, he had none of the particular pride in heritage which was so much a part of Comyn life. The sneaking thought remained, Rohana too will be pleased, that I have chosen to bear a child for the Aillard Domain, and she slammed that thought shut, too. Not for Aillard. Not for Peter. For myself, because we love each other and this is the surest confirmation of our love! For myself, damn it!

  But she slammed the drawer shut on the beads, almost with guilt, when she heard Peter’s step.

  “Jaelle? Love, I thought you were going to the Guild House—”

  “I am just going,” she said, and tried not to look guiltily at the drawer. If he were telepathic like Kyril, he would know without being told, without even seeing the beads. She had once explained the device to him, but he had never paid much attention to it, though he admitted he had seen them for sale in the market and wondered if they were a kind of abacus. He had shown her how an abacus worked,
telling her it was the most ancient Terran variety of calculator.

  “Surely you won’t go in this blizzard, Jaelle—”

  “You’ve been in the Terran Zone too long, if you call this little flurry of snow a blizzard,” she said gaily. She wanted to get out into the bracing cold of the weather, not skulk here in the debilitating artificial heat of the HQ buildings.

  “Let me go with you,” he said, pulling on his outdoor boots and jacket. She hesitated.

  “Love, in Amazon clothing I should not walk through the streets of the city with you this way, and it will expose you, too, to comment and gossip—” and at his blank look she elaborated, “You are still in uniform.”

  “Oh. That. I can change,” he offered, but she shook her head.

  “I would rather not. Do you really mind, Peter? I’d rather be alone now. If I come to the Guild House in the company of a Terran—or of any man—there will be talk which will make my mission harder.”

  He sighed. “As you wish,” he said, pulling her close and kissing her. The kiss lingered suggestively.

  “Wouldn’t you rather stay here where it’s nice and warm?”

  The thought was tempting. Had she fallen into the Terran way of making love by the clock, with no room for emotional spontaneity? But, firmly, she disengaged herself from his arms.

  “I’m working, darling. I really do have to go. As you’re fond of reminding me about Montray, Cholayna’s my boss.”

  He let her go almost too promptly. “You’ll be back before dark?”

  “I might spend the night in the Guild House,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing I can do in an hour or so.” She laughed at his crestfallen look.

  “Piedro, love, it’s not the end of the world, to sleep apart for a single night!”

  “I suppose not,” he grumbled, “but I’ll miss you.”

  She softened. “I’ll miss you too,” she whispered into his neck, hugging him close again, “but there are going to be times when you’re out in the field, and I’ll have to stay alone. We might as well get used to it now.”

  But the hurt look in his eyes followed her down the stairs, out into the chill of the base, past the Spaceforce guards which separated the HQ from the Trade City. Feeling the welcome cold of snow on her cheeks, she still wished she had softened their parting with her good news.

  But there would be time enough for that.

  It would be better, Magda thought, if someone would call her names. Anything would be better than this endless, reproachful silence, this careful courtesy.

  “Are you quite ready, Margali?” Rafaella asked. “Will you work with Doria and Keitha? I think they need more practice in falling.”

  Magda nodded. The big room called the Armory was filled with the white light of the snow outside, for the windowshades had been rolled back to let in maximum light. Mats were unrolled on the floor, and a dozen women were doing beginning exercises in stretching and bending, in preparation for the lesson in unarmed combat which Rafaella was about to give.

  Magda remembered her third day in the house, when she had had her first lesson under Rafaella. After several days of struggling with unfamiliar tasks, baking bread, trying to learn to milk dairy animals, struggling with heavy barn brooms and shovels, it had been a great relief to come upon something she could actually do. She had been thoroughly trained in unarmed-combat skills in the Intelligence schools on Alpha, and she was eager to show Rafaella that she was not a complete idiot.

  She had been prepared—then—to like Rafaella, knowing the slight, dark woman was Jaelle’s partner in their travel-counseling business. Also, on her first evening in the House she had heard Rafaella singing to the harp. Magda’s own mother had been a notable musician, the first Terran to transcribe many of the Darkovan folk ballads, and to make the historical connections between Darkovan and Terran music. Magda was no musician herself—she had a good sense of pitch, but no singing voice— but she admired the talent in others. She had been ready not only to like, but to admire Rafaella.

  But Rafaella had been, from the first, persistently unfriendly, and when, in that first lesson, it became apparent that Rafaella expected her to be completely stupid, as clumsy as the house-bred Keitha, Magda had summoned all her knowledge of Terran judo and Alphan vaidokan. When she had twice thrown Rafaella on her back, the older woman had stopped the lesson and frowned at her.

  “Where in Zandru’s hells did you learn all that?”

  Too late Magda realized what she had done. She had learned it on a planet half a Galaxy away, from a Terran-Arcturian woman who had trained both her and Peter in self-defense; but she was in honor bound to Mother Lauria not to say so.

  “I learned it—when I was a very young woman,” she said. “A long way from here.”

  “Yes, I remember, you were born in the Hellers near Caer Donn,” said Rafaella. “But did your father permit such learning?”

  “He was dead by that time,” said Magda truthfully, “and there was no other who had a right to object to it.”

  Rafaella looked at her skeptically. “I cannot imagine any man but a husband teaching such things to a woman,” she said, and Magda said, again truthfully, “My freemate had no objections.”

  Quite without intending it, Magda remembered a time early in their marriage—before the growing competitiveness that had destroyed it—when she and Peter had worked together in unarmed combat techniques. Rafaella scowled at her.

  “Well,” she said, “it is certain that I can teach you nothing more; rather, you have much to teach us all. I hope you will help me, and the rest of us as well, to learn some of those holds. I suppose it is a technique known in the mountains.” And so Magda had become a second teacher of the lessons in unarmed combat. It was not as easy as she thought it would be; she had learned the techniques to use them, not to teach them, and she had spent considerable time working alone, trying to figure out how she did things. But it had given her some much needed self-esteem, and she had even, a little, managed to disarm Rafaella’s unfriendliness. Until the day when she had fought for the house and disgraced them. Camilla had managed to disarm the man’s anger, and they had escaped blood-feud at their door, but they had had to pay a heavy cash indemnity which the house could ill afford. Magda had been kept in bed almost a tenday after the wound, and had just been allowed up.

  “Are you able to work this way?” Rafaella asked. “You do not want to break the wound open and start the bleeding again.”

  “Marisela said I should exercise it carefully,” she said, “or it would grow stiff.”

  Rafaella shrugged and turned her back. “You know best,” she said, and went to the corner where she was trying to induce Keitha—without much success—to relax and fall perfectly limp on one of the mats.

  Byrna, wearing an old pair of trousers too large for her, wrapped twice about her waist, touched Magda’s shoulder. She said “Don’t be upset; Rafi is like that. She’s cross because she’s been teaching unarmed-combat here in the House for the last twelve years, and now you come here, a newcomer, and you are better at it than she is. She’s jealous, can’t you tell?”

  Magda was not sure, but she said firmly, “Shall we get started?” and began to do the ballet-like stretching exercises which preceded a workout. Her leg hurt, and she stopped, rolled up her trousers and looked at it. It was firmly scabbed over; she knew the pain was only the stretching of muscles gone soft while she had been in bed.

  “Me too,” said Byrna, groaning, “Marisela warned me to exercise all the time I was pregnant, and I was too lazy, and now every muscle shrieks at me!” She winced as her arm jostled her full breasts. “And I will have to go upstairs in half an hour and feed the little one! But I suppose I should get a little exercise, so I will get back into condition somehow.”

  “Come over here and work with me, Byrna,” said Rafaella, “I have had the experience of working out while I was nursing a hungry suckling, and I can show you how to recover your muscles quickly. And you, Margali,”
she added formally, “will you do me the favor of working with Keitha for a time?”

  Magda thought; of course; as soon as I begin talking with someone who is really friendly to me—for since the night when Byrna’s child was born, she had grown to know and like the other woman very much—Rafaella calls her away, and I am alone again. Keitha obediently came to her, moving stiffly, and Magda said, “Try to make your whole body soft and limp, Keitha. Until you stop being afraid of hurting yourself, you will always be tense, and then you will hurt yourself.” Keitha, she thought uncharitably, was as stiff as a barn broom; when Magda urged her to fall over, she stiffened and went down, putting out an arm to try to break her fall.

  “No, no,” Magda urged. “Try to roll as you fall. Limp—like this,” she said, demonstrating, falling relaxed and unhurt on the map, and Keitha, though she tried bravely to imitate Magda, could not repress a cry of pain.

  “Ow!” She rubbed her bruised shoulders and hip. Magda was tempted to lose patience with her, but she said only “Watch how Doria does it.” She looked up as some of the other women approached, asking, “Do you want to work with us?”

  The other women said, with perfect politeness, “No, thank you,” and went to the far end of the room, pointedly ignoring them.

  Keitha is friendly, and Byrna, and Doria. For the others, I don’t exist, Magda thought, and shrugged, turning back to Doria. The one thing she had not wanted was to get into direct competion with Rafaella; but somehow she had managed that too.

  “Keitha, I won’t let you hurt yourself,” she said, trying to encourage the woman to relax. “Look, like this—” and again she let herself go limp, landing easily. After two or three more tries, Keitha, though still stiff, had lost some of the terrified rigidity which had made every fall a painful ordeal. Well a lifetime of decorous, ladylike movement was not easy to overcome.