Thendara House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “You know how to pass as a native. Haldane can do the same thing. I will take the Braniff-Alpha corticators—I will believe it is safe if you say so—but can you tell me what I am doing wrong, so that in the Old Town I can pass as a native, as you and Haldane and Cargill do?”

  “Why not ask them? They are men and would know what is necessary for a man…”

  “No,” he said. “I’d trust a woman to spot a man and a man to spot a woman, any day. For instance I think I’d spot you even if you wore Darkovan clothes… I mean, when you weren’t off guard, as you are here; I think I’d read you in the market, for instance. You don’t walk quite like them—no, it’s your eyes; you don’t keep them down, not in quite the same way. You—” he groped for words, “you keep them down but I can tell you’re doing it deliberately, not automatically. Is that just being a Renunciate?”

  “Maybe, in part. Though you’re right; I always had some trouble with that. You get into your Darkovan outfit and I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. And while you’re doing it, I need to get down to credit transfer… oh, damn, I can’t go into HQ in this outfit, I’ll set off every alarm in the place!”

  “One of the women in my office is about your size, and she lives just down the hall; let me go borrow a spare uniform for you.”

  She acquiesced, warning him not to tell anyone who it was for. She did not want, on her day off, to be flooded with old acquaintances eager to know all the details of her curious field assignment. When he came back with it he stood aside and let her change in his sleeping quarters. She was surprised at how naked she felt in the narrow tunic and tights, after months of the loose, unrevealing Amazon dress. She was conscious of her cropped hair—short even for a Terran, but she brushed it into a fairly smart coiffure, and Monty had thoughtfully asked for a few cosmetics as well so that she could make up properly. As she stepped out he whistled admiringly.

  “In that outfit you were wearing, I didn’t realize what a smasher you were!”

  Again she laughed, realizing how far she had come from such compliments. It felt familiar and strange at once to walk down the HQ halls, knowing that the uniform made her invisible, just another employee with a right to be there. It was different and somehow comforting to drop her individual identity and slip into anonymity.

  Soon she would be out of seclusion. Would they want her back here? If so, then she must acknowledge to all her sisters that she was Terran; would they hate her for it? When she got back, Monty was in Darkovan clothing again and she applied herself to critical study.

  “Your hair is too short. To look really right, you would have to let it grow down at least to here.” She brushed a fingertip along his neckline. “Now walk for me…” and she watched him seriously. Finally she said, frowning, “I know what it is. You walk too—too lightly, unencumbered. Darkovan men… all of them, except beggars and cripples… grow up wearing a sword, and even when they’re not wearing it, they’re wearing it, if you know what I mean. Here,” she said, picking up the Amazon knife she had laid aside. “Belt this on—try walking with it. It’s not a sword, of course—”

  “It sure looks like one.”

  “Legally it’s not,” Magda said.

  “By law and charter no Amazon may wear a sword.”

  “What is the difference?” Monty asked, studying the blade. It did, Magda realized, look very much like what any Terran would call a sword. “About three inches,” she admitted dryly, and they laughed together as he belted it on.

  “No, you are leaning to one side to compensate. And keep your wrist a little back so you won’t be knocking against the hilt; remember when you first started wearing a wrist-radio and had to learn not to bang it into things? Wrist back—lower—so it won’t get in the way but you could draw it at once if you had to. You have to psych yourself into it; you grew up wearing it, you started wearing and training with it when you were about eight, you never went out without it, you would feel as naked if it wasn’t there as if you forgot to put your pants on in the morning.”

  “Good God,” Monty exclaimed. “I knew the culture was aggressive, but do they really start their youngsters at eight?”

  “The valley men. In the mountains the kids start carrying daggers almost as soon as they can walk, and using them, too. It’s just part of the realities of their world; there are plenty of things bigger than they are, out there. And until you can feel that down in your guts, not just know it intellectually, you’ll never have more than a superficial understanding of what it’s like to be a man on Darkover. Their women are less protected than our men—there were women on the fire lines and they weren’t all Renunciates, either!” After a minute she suggested, “You should get yourself a sword and wear it all the time around your quarters in here.”

  “How in the world do I sit down in the thing?”

  “That’s the point,” Magda said. “Wear it for six weeks, and you’ll know. You’ll be able to sit down with it and get up with it and walk with it and work with it and run with it, and slide into a seat in a tavern without bashing the next guy with it.”

  He followed that, nodded slowly. “Haldane did all that?”

  “Damn right, and more; his father actually let him work out with an arms-master with the other boys his age in the village where we grew up. In Empire uniform, he told me once, he feels undressed. We both do.” She glanced self-consciously at her long legs in the thin tights. “And I have to change back before I leave.” She headed in to the inner room to take off her uniform, adding, “Also, dance as much as you can. Men here start learning it when they’re about five. Like everybody else.”

  “I did hear that,” Monty said. “The old proverb—get three Darkovans together and they hold a dance. I did some work in ballet as well as martial arts before I came back here… studied gravity-dancing on Alpha.”

  “That explains it,” she said. “How you manage to pass at all; you don’t walk quite like the average Terran who has no notion of how to move. I noticed that you were graceful. Most Darkovans think Terrans are incredibly clumsy. Dance—they say—is one of the very few wholly human activities; most things are also done by animals, but there’s a saying: only men laugh, only men dance, only men weep.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” he said, “the way both men and women move, gracefully… you move like them” he added, “like a feather…”

  She was suddenly self-conscious about the way he was looking at her. “I must go and change,” she said. “Not even a whore would go out on the streets like this.”

  He did not look away. “I cannot decide which way I like you better. Darkovan women are so modest, so—” he hesitated, searching for a word, “so womanly. It makes me more conscious of myself as a man. Yet in your Amazon clothing you seem to be trying to negate all that, to be distant. And in uniform—you are very beautiful, Magda,” he said, and came over to her. He turned her slowly round and kissed her. “I have been wanting to do that since I first set eyes on you that day in the Guild House when you were so angry with me. And now when I know you are not some sort of shrew or spitfire but a beautiful woman—and, and, so many things, a colleague and a friend and a woman too—” he stopped talking and kissed her again.

  She said after a minute, softly, “Am I really so intimidating?”

  “Not now. Don’t go and change, Magda, stay with me here awhile…” and he drew her against him. Letting him kiss her again, she felt again the curious ambivalence. She liked him. She did not want him to be attracted to her this way. Yet it was reassuring, to know that even through her defenses, she was still desirable—he kissed her bare neck, and she drew away, troubled.

  “No,” she said in a low voice, “Monty, no. I came here with you for work, not for—not for this.”

  He did not move away. “It is not true what they say—that the Amazons are haters of men and lovers of women, is it?”

  And that is what they say, and now I am wondering is it true? One of the women said it once in Training Session… that
a woman who gives her love to men is traitor to other women, that men are always trying to reduce us only to something they can, or cannot, have as a sexual conquest, because it means they do not have to take us seriously. He was talking about how my work is the standard of excellence here… does he need to seduce me simply to prove that for all that, I am no more than a woman to be taken?

  Nevertheless she let him draw her down on the couch, gave herself over to his kisses. She was uneasily conscious of her own response.

  I don’t want to. I have lived alone and celibate for more than a year, I should be eager. He’s a very nice person, but I really don’t want to. What’s wrong with me? I should never have let it go this far. If she were going to stop him she should have done it swiftly and decisively when he made the first move, she had let him think she wanted it too. It would be cheap and small-minded to stop him now.

  It’s not as if I were a virgin, for heaven’s sake!

  After a time he whispered “This is foolish, Magda, kissing like children, with all our clothes on—we’re both rational grownup people. You do want me too, don’t you?”

  Do I? Do I not? Or do I simply want to reassure myself that I am still capable of reacting to a man, that I have not become an alien sexless thing—like Camilla—why am I thinking now of Camilla? That frightened her. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “Of course I do,” she said clearly, “but I never go to bed with a man before I know his first name.”

  He laughed down at her with relief and pleasure. His eyes were dark and shining, his face flushed. “Oh, that’s all right then,” he said, accenting the absurdity, “I don’t use it because there’s no Darkovan equivalent. That doesn’t bother my father but it does bother me, I don’t like having a name no one can pronounce, so I’m Monty. My name is Wade. I really ought to take a Darkovan given name for myself, I just haven’t made up my mind yet. Isn’t that ridiculous? But if that’s all it takes—” He leaned down to her, laughing, and she smiled and let him draw her down again to the couch.

  When she was dressing again, before his mirror, he came and touched her face gently.

  “You are so lovely,” he said in a soft voice, “but in those clothes you look so hard and strange. I hate to see you hide yourself in them, even now that I know it is a lie, that you are not really like that.”

  She said, laying her hand lightly on his arm, “No, Monty. It’s not a lie. It is—it is part of what I am. Can you understand?”

  “No,” he said, “Never. But I’ll try. Shall we have that drink now?” He was trying to accept her lightness but she liked him a little better now that she knew it was not entirely casual with him.

  It was not casual with me either. I liked him and he is a friend, even if it meant no more than that. Is it wrong to wish to give pleasure to a friend, even if he is a man? She sat beside him, drinking, knowing that he needed somehow to stay close to her through this strangeness. She wished she could make him understand that it was strange to her too.

  To give myself only in my own time and season … the words of the Oath rang in her head. But I don’t know what that means anymore. Was I using him for my own needs… not sexual needs, but the need of demonstrating to myself that I could still attract a man? Is that what the Oath means, to use men for our needs instead of letting them use us for theirs? Don’t we both have needs?

  “It’s hard,” he said, fumbling, “to get involved or not to get involved. I—I don’t want to get married. And yet I just can’t get that interested in, in the kind of women I might find in the red-light district. I played around a little because—because—this isn’t going to make sense—in a way they were Darkover to me. The only part of it I could have. The real world is a billion light-years away from those girls, and I know it, yet I can— could have them, at least in a limited sense, and I couldn’t have the rest. Do you understand what I’m saying? And, oh, hell, it suddenly occurred to me, this woman knows, I can level with her… you know, I really didn’t invite you up here to seduce you, it never crossed my mind—”

  “Never mind, Monty. Things happen. As you said, we’re both grown up.” She sipped from his glass and patted his hand. How absurd that she should be the one to reassure him!

  “Perhaps you can show me where to find a sword? I’d like to try that thing you told me about,” he said, and she nodded.

  “Of course. Although, really, Peter would know more about it. He really knows weapons, and I’m no judge, though I’ve been taught a little, a very little really, about using them. Peter really is an expert.”

  “All right, I’ll ask him, though I really don’t know him that well. Actually I know his wife a little better; we work together a lot. Jaelle. You know her, don’t you, she’s your friend?”

  “My oath-mother in the Guild. It’s a very special relationship,” Magda said, and wondered why the thought filled her with such pain. What had come between them, that they were no longer close friends as they once had been? She did not want to think about that.

  “She’s a nice little thing,” Monty said, “and she seems so isolated here, out of her depth. Oh, competent—very competent. But she looks so sad. She must really be crazy in love with that man, to have left her world for him. A woman who would do that for a man—oh, hell,” he broke off, as the door-chime made its discreet announcing burp, “I’ll see who that is and try to get rid of them, shall I?”

  “Not on my account, Monty, I really have to go and get my boots,” she said, as he went to the door.

  “Oh, come in, Li. You know Lorne from Intelligence?”

  “Cholayna’s filled me full of stories about her,” Alessandro Li said, bending over her hand. Magda picked up her knife and began to belt it on, fancying that Alessandro Li’s eyes followed her. She flushed, knowing it was foolish. He could not possibly know what had happened between them and probably would not care if he did. She said, “Ask Peter about it, Monty. He can get you a good one, and I understand buying swords is a specialized business—you have to know what you are doing, and on a metal-poor planet like this, they are not cheap! But it’s a lifetime investment.”

  “Thinking of taking up swordplay, Monty?”

  “No, but I’ll never be able to pass in the field until I learn to handle them, or at least to look as if I knew how,” Monty said.

  “Not the kind of thing that would attract me,” Li said offhand. “I really do know your work. Miss Lorne, it’s a pleasaure to meet you. Jaelle gave me the Darkovan name of Aleki, by the way.”

  She nodded. “Living here, it’s a good idea to have one, to learn to answer to it and think of it as your name, an automatic reflex.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with Father,” Monty said suddenly, “he can’t think of himself as having anything to do with this world. After—how long? Eleven, thirteen, years, he still feels like an alien.”

  “Well, after all,” Aleiki said, “he is alien. It’s not healthy— useful for our work, maybe, but not healthy—to get to thinking of one’s self as belonging to an alien world. I don’t think it’s ever right to lose sight of the fact that it’s a pretense, a mask… to let the mask become real. Granted, when we appoint a Legate here, he should be a man who feels real concern for the natives, and can identify with them. But he should be a career Empire man first and foremost. Take Haldane, for instance. He’s smart, he knows this planet backward and forward, and he’s got a mind like the proverbial steel trap. When he’s a bit older—of course I don’t have to tell either of you that it’s going to depend in part on my report whether they set up a Legate in here or not, and when. Haldane’s sharp and ambitious—couple of bad spots in his record, but he’s young yet, and he’s learning. What about it. Miss Lorne? Do you think Peter Haldane would make a good Legate, or are you the right one to ask? You were married to him once, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I am the right person to ask or not,” she said, “I like him, but I’m not blind to his faults, if that’s what you mean. Of course he’d
do better as Coordinator than Russ Montray. Who wouldn’t?” But she glanced apologetically at Monty. “Anyone would. I would.”

  “You could have a shot at Coordinator if it were most worlds, but not on Darkover,” Aleki said. “It’s just one of those things; this society won’t accept a woman in the job. If you want a Coordinator’s job somewhere else, Lorne, I can put you up for it. Not here, though. But you were telling me what you thought about Haldane—”

  “I’m not sure the mistakes he’s made are reversible,” she said slowly, almost with apology, “or whether they mean a flaw in his imagination. But he’s committed to Darkover and wants to stay here.”

  “I don’t know,” Aleki demurred, “in a key position like this, you want a man who’s unquestionably loyal to Empire, who puts Empire first and the particular planet second—”

  Magda shook her head. “If it was up to me,” she said, “I’d want a man who thought of the planet first—just to counterbalance all those bureaucrats who are going to put the Empire first; a Legate ought to be a spokesman for the planet itself.”

  “That’s a job for their Senators and other key men in Empire government,” Aleki said, “though it’s true that they do sometimes think of a Legate as a man to speak up for the world in question. Different theories of how to appoint people, that’s all. That’s why, even if the Darkovans would accept a woman in the job, you wouldn’t make it higher than Coordinator; your service record shows you have a tendency to go native—think from a planetary, not an Empire point of view, and a Legate can’t be provincial, planet-minded. Haldane, at least, seems to be working hard to develop a larger point of view.” He accepted the drink Monty poured for him. “Oh, thanks.”