Thendara House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The last of the herd roared past, bleating and shoving. A last straggler bawled. A few of the beasts, driven and pushed to the edges, plunged off the trail and out of sight. Then they were gone, though the noise of their passing still shook the ground. And as the sound dulled to a distant thunder, the rain began, pouring as if the heavens had opened and dumped buckets on them.

  Magda put out a hand in the sudden downpour. She said, “Up this way. I saw a cave.”

  The light was already going as they climbed, and by the time they reached it, it was only a darkness against the cliffside, and Jaelle slid, still shaking, from her pony, and led it in. Magda followed her. She said, in a high terrified voice, “I saw you— and you were just sitting there—and the chervines coming down the canyon like the wind…”

  “What made them—stampede like that?” Jaelle heard herself say. “The kireseth … ?”

  “Was that what it was? I didn’t know. But there is floodwater above, pouring down into the ravine,” Magda said, and put her head out. “Look.”

  Down where they had been riding, a wall of water was sweeping down the canyon, almost a river. Would the chervines be drowned or would they make it to higher ground? Magda thrust her head out till Jaelle was frightened as she hung over the canyon wall from the mouth of the cave, then pulled back inside.

  “The high-water mark is a good four feet below us,” she said. “We’ll be safe here.” She pulled her saddle and saddlebags off the horse. “Well, breda, it’s better than the pass of Scaravel. At least I doubt if we’ll meet any banshees here.”

  Jaelle’s legs would hardly hold her upright. She stood holding on to her horse, unable to move. Magda turned to say sharply, “Better get your saddle off and get into dry clothes if you have any. And have you anything to light a fire? There’s plenty of dry wood stacked back there—and look at the fire-ring; this place must be a regular place of resort for herd-men.”

  But still Jaelle’s legs would not move, and finally Magda came and pushed her down on her spread cloak. “Lie down, then. Keep out of my way while I build a fire.”

  I am shirking again. I have failed my duty. Even Magda, even Magda I have led into my failures. My mother died for me. I failed Rohana when she would have given me my heritage of laran. I failed my brother. And my oath-sisters. And my baby. And Peter…

  Magda had spread a blanket across the entrance for a windbreak, and was kneeling by the ring of stones, kindling a fire. Her dark hair was soaked, clinging in little wisps to her face. She had stripped off her soaked shirt and undertunic. Jaelle coughed on the smoke as the fire caught and began to blaze upward. A rough chimney had been guided through a hole in the roof of the cave. Soon Magda had a small pot rigged and was brewing bark-tea. She brought a small clay cup of the stuff to Jaelle and held it to her lips. Jaelle tasted it; it was sickeningly sweet and she shoved it away. Magda pushed it against her mouth and said sharply, “Drink it. You’re in shock and sugar is the best thing for that.”

  Obediently Jaelle swallowed, and felt her head clear a little. She said after a minute, “You’ve saved my life again. How did you happen to turn up just in time?”

  “I’ve only been trailing you for two days,” Magda said grimly. “What possessed you to take off like that—alone, pregnant, a storm coming up? You must have been crazy.”

  “That’s what Peter said,” Jaelle whispered. “He threatened to have me drugged. Chained—”

  “Peter would never do that,” Magda said incredulously. “Do you think he is a Dry-towner?” Then she caught the picture in Jaelle’s mind, restraints, perhaps tied to a bed in the Hospital floor—she knelt at Jaelle’s side and caught the woman in her arms.

  “Oh, love, they wouldn’t have hurt you—truly they wouldn’t—” she whispered. “I can see how afraid you were—but they wouldn’t have hurt you, and Cholayna, or I could have told them you were not crazy—”

  “I killed him,” Jaelle whispered, her voice only a thread of horror. “I killed Peter. I left him lying dead in the HQ, on the floor of our bedroom!”

  “I don’t believe you,” Magda said flatly. “I think you are delirious and don’t know what you did, or didn’t do. For now, get out of those wet clothes. We can’t keep a fire in here all night—we have to save the dry wood in case it snows, everything outside here is wet.” But Jaelle sat dazed and in the end Magda had to undress her like a child and wrap her in a blanket from her pack. With the embers of the fire Magda toasted some dry meat over the coals, and tried to persuade Jaelle to eat a little, but Jaelle, though she tried, could neither chew nor swallow.

  Magda got into dry underwear and a dry tunic, hanging her breeches near the coals of the fire.

  “I was terrified,” she said at last. “You must have been completely out of it—you were sitting in the middle of the trail with all those chervines stampeding down the canyon and the flood-water up ahead. And I kept seeing—I know it was only the clouds, but it looked like—well, once I saw all the Comyn lords parading down the streets in Thendara with their banners, only this time they weren’t parading. They were chasing a girl—a girl with red hair, and she looked like you. Like you, Jaelle, and I thought for a moment it was you. And they all went galloping and galloping by over my head, and then I knew it was a real stampede through the hallucination, but you weren’t up in the sky dressed in Comyn robes, you were down in the canyon right in the middle of the stampede—” She shuddered, and clutched at Jaelle.

  “I saw the same thing,” said Jaelle almost in a whisper, but the noise of the rain drowned her out and she had to repeat it. She had not realized that the girl in the vision had worn her face. An irrational conviction kept saying, that was my baby, and the Comyn will kill her.

  Magda said at last, “I have heard that kireseth can do strange things to people’s minds. There is an underground traffic in kirian resin in Thendara, you know. The stuff comes up from the plains of Valeron, and there are people who drink it for the visions it gives. Banned in the Terran Zone, of course, but people do go over the wall for it, the way they do for women. If we were breathing it, that explains… well. It’s over now.” She crumbled pieces of bread into the bark tea and fed it to Jaelle, like a child. Jaelle swallowed obediently. She could not remember when she had eaten last. The food and hot drink cleared away the last remnants of the fuzziness from her mind. Even the overwhelming horror of the murder receded. Maybe Magda was right. Maybe her memory was playing her tricks. If she could remember things she had forgotten since her mother died, how could she trust what she thought she knew? She could not do anything about it now, anyhow.

  She said at last, shakily, “I don’t understand. How is it that you are here? You are supposed to be still housebound. If you forswore your Oath to save my life—it wasn’t worth it, Margali. I am not worth it.”

  “You’re no judge of that right now,” said Magda coldly. “Go to sleep. As it happens, I didn’t break my oath. Camilla gave me leave to go. She loves you; you don’t seem to have realized that.” Her face was so grim that Jaelle could not bear it. Abruptly, in utter exhaustion, she dropped into a bottomless pit of sleep.

  When she woke the fire had burned down to a dead pit of coals, the tiniest red eyes in the darkness, and Magda was curled up at her side; but Magda heard her stir and rolled over.

  “Are you all right?”

  “You saved my life again,” Jaelle whispered. “Oh, breda, I thought I was so brave, and I am such a coward, and I have failed at everything—you shouldn’t have risked your life for me—

  “Hush, hush,” Magda whispered, holding her. “It’s all right.”

  “Piedro—you know I killed him—

  “You told me,” Magda said softly, but she could hear Magda’s thoughts, like colored spiderwebs in the curious darkness, I don’t believe you did any such thing. “Forget about Piedro.”

  “Why should I forget him?” she flared, “I’ll forget him in my own time and my own way!” She did not know why she was filled with such
murderous rage. “It’s not for you to say!”

  “Jaelle, I only meant—I’m sorry for him. One of these days Montray will succeed in getting him kicked off Darkover—”

  It’s too late for that. What was it Peter had said about Carr, Death legally terminates a citizen’s responsibilities and privileges. Now he had no more.

  “And you’re all Peter has. You and the baby.”

  “I don’t belong to him! And neither does my baby!”

  “He thinks—”

  “And that was why I hated him, that’s why I killed him! He wanted to own me, me and the baby, like things, toys…”

  Magda laid a soothing hand over hers. She said, “You mustn’t talk like this.” Maybe if she acted like this Peter had reason to think something was wrong with her mind. I wonder—is it even possible that she could have killed him? But even Keitha reached a point where she no longer wanted to kill her husband, but only to turn her back and walk away from him… and Jaelle has been a Renunciate all her life…

  “No, I wasn’t,” Jaelle whispered. “Do you remember how you cried when you took the Oath? I never did. I—it was just confirming something I’d made my mind up to, a long time ago, and I was happy about it. I—I wasn’t renouncing anything, I never knew till I met Peter that there was anything to renounce—I had forgotten so much, blinded myself to so much—”

  Suddenly she was crying, tears raining and raining down her face.

  “My mother. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face, remember that her hands were chained, till Peter tried to put chains on me… that was the worst of it, he didn’t know what he was doing. But I am a Renunciate, I should have seen it. I should never have let it go so far. Cholayna—” her voice choked on a sob. “I could have killed her too, if I had been wearing a knife I would have drawn it on her, when she reminded me that I was truly a woman of the Dry Towns, but it is true, true, they don’t chain us, we chain ourselves.” They were still in contact, their minds open to one another. I thought it was enough to say no to all this, but that is only the beginning. All the women who had come to the Amazons, and fought and cried through the Training Sessions and left, free, having grown into freedom, but she had pretended she had nothing from which she must be freed. She had never had any idea of the anguished battles they fought. Now she knew why it took beatings, chainings, the threat of a fatal pregnancy, to drive a woman away from her husband. She gripped Magda’s wrist and felt the pain in her own arm but could not let go until Magda gently took her hand and loosened the fingers.

  “They don’t chain us. We chain ourselves. Willingly. More than willingly. We crave chains… Isn’t that what it means to be a woman?”

  “Of course not,” Magda said, puzzled and shocked. “It means—to be in command of your own life, your own actions—”

  “And your children’s lives. I didn’t want this child, I did it to make Peter happy—”

  How sick it was, to want to be dominated by him…

  “Darling,” Magda said softly, “it surely wasn’t all like that.”

  She could see herself through Magda’s eyes in the first flush of passion, the warmth of her first real love. I was ready for a love affair, it was no more than that. I would have been saner and wiser to take you for my lover, Margali… Do you think he would have risked his life for me even the first time? And you… I knew there was a life between us…

  You know I love you, Jaelle, and now I know how much, but you are sick and exhausted… This is no time for this kind of decision, bredhya. She remembered Camilla saying something of the same kind to her when she had been burned on the fire-lines. She cradled Jaelle in her arms, rocking her like a small child.

  Like my mother. I cannot really remember my mother, but she died to set me free, and I betrayed her by chaining myself again…

  Magda rocked her, gently, crooning to her. So Jaelle is to have a child and she is no more than a child herself. I wish I could bear it for her. But when Jaelle’s sobbing quieted, she tucked her under the blankets.

  “I’ll make you some tea. You need it. Do you think you could eat something?”

  Jaelle lay quiet, content to let Magda mother her. She said at last, “Aleki. He must be dead. First the Ghost Wind, and the stampede, and then the flood…”

  Magda crawled to the entrance of the cave and pushed the blanket aside. It was raining, and she looked down into the valley. Through Magda’s eyes Jaelle saw the brownish, mud-swollen torrent still filling the canyon, dead trees floating, and a dead, bloated chervine, belly up and legs sticking straight toward the sky, rolling past.

  “He could have found a cave before the flood started,” Magda said, “Let’s not give up hope yet. There are a lot of caves up along here.”

  Jaelle surprised herself by saying, “I think I would know if he was dead.” At one time, during the kireseth madness, she had reached his mind. After that, surely she would have felt him die if he had died.

  Magda brought her the tea and she sat up to drink it. She crawled to the door of the cave and looked down at the flood-swollen valley. She said prosaically “Thanks to the Goddess! I brought ten days’ trail food; it’s going to be some time before we can get out of here.”

  Magda felt her forehead. “You aren’t fit to ride anyway; go back and lie down,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do so you may as well rest. That kind of hard riding can’t have been good for you at this stage of pregnancy. I don’t care what Rafaella is supposed to have done, you’re probably not as strong as she is, and all this can’t have been good for you…”

  I never wanted this baby! It would be better if it never were born. Knowing I murdered her father—

  And she believes that. That kind of obsession—she could worry herself into a miscarriage.

  All the better if I did! The flood of guilt and misery was so great that Magda came and pushed her gently back on the blanket. “The best thing you can do is to rest, and not worry.”

  But when Jaelle had fallen again into an uneasy, nightmare-ridden sleep, Magda went again to the cave mouth and sat there, watching the endless rain swelling the torrent in the canyon. They could be there for days, a tenday. No one knew they were there. She did not like the feverish look in Jaelle’s eyes, the burning, almost delirious intensity of her thoughts. She was taking it for granted now that she would share Jaelle’s thoughts if there was close contact between them. Well, Lady Rohana had told her once that she had potentially strong laran, and now she knew that Camilla had confirmed it, in her own way, even managing to keep it barriered for her for a long time. Camilla’s intentions had been good—in fact, she had done it out of the purest love—but it meant she had had no chance to learn to control it and to grow strong in its use. And now something had intensified it. Contact with Jaelle? Exposure to the kireseth resin, strongly psychedelic as it was?

  However it had happened, it had happened and now she was confronted with it, with an enormous overload of new sensory data that her mind had not yet learned to process. It seemed that she saw all the way around her, as if she had eyes not only in the back of her head but in her scalp too and at several places on her body, so that she saw the back walls of the cave as well as the flooded canyon below her, the small rodents scurrying in the back walls, nocturnal mammals half hibernating in nests of sticks hanging from the ceiling. She could feel Jaelle’s body as it were embedded in her own extended senses—was this what it was like to be pregnant, feeling an other within yourself? She could feel pain slumbering somewhere inside Jaelle ready to waken. Reaching deeper, she could feel the sleeping consciousness at a deeper level where the baby curled and sheltered within her womb, drowsing, but aware…

  I never wanted a child. Was it only that I did not want Peter’s child? I thought I did, but somewhere within me I knew I did not. And now I know that what I would feel for a child is what I feel for Jaelle, and more, and I shall never be happy now until I have a child. And that made her smile to herself, almost sadly, for now I am certain that I am
a lover of women, and it is not very likely that I shall manage to get pregnant that way. That is the only disadvantage I can think of. Maybe I should have had a baby before I decided that. But she laughed inside herself, knowing that when she left the Guild House she had left that kind of self-definition behind her forever. No, I do not call myself a lover of women. There are women that I love, that is all, but what may happen in the future—well, I will fly that falcon when her wings are grown. She wondered why, in spite of their desperate situation, alone, isolated by flood, with Jaelle sick, perhaps desperately sick and perhaps insane, she felt such flooding happiness, as if she and Jaelle and the child were all one with something greater than themselves, something that beat through all the living things around them. Sky and water and falling rain and rushing torrent, trees standing to bathe their leaves in the rain, the earth opening to the flood like a woman to a lover’s touch, even the little beasts burrowing in the cave and the tiny bugs in the straw were part of it. Was she still a little drugged with resin of kireseth? No, this was something else. She supposed if she were a religious person she would call it an awareness of God, a knowledge that everything around her had life and that she was part of it. Her love for Camilla, her intense love for Jaelle, the passion she had shared with Peter, her brief tenderness for Monty, even the sympathy she had felt dancing with Darrell, son of Darnak, even the way she had mothered old Coordinator Montray, the pain she had shared with Byrna giving birth, her own fear on the trail—all these things came together as if, for one moment, she saw her whole life pure and whole. Even as she was aware of it she knew it was beginning to fade, and she knew she must not fight to keep it, for then she would retain only the struggle. She must let it go. But it would be part of her forever.

  She built up the fire, then went and lay down beside Jaelle. She, too, was still weary from the long ride, and she must build up her strength for the time when they could get out of here. She hoped Jaelle would be able to ride.