How she hates Vaniya, Cendri thought. She has virtually told Vaniya that as soon as she is verified High Matriarch, she will be relieved of all official duties. I suppose politics is the same everywhere.
Vaniya said gruffly, "I hope you have not put your household to the trouble and expense of readying for a move from the Residence of the Pro-Matriarch yet, my sister. No doubt you will soon be moving, but there is still some doubt as to the destination." Her face was set and grim; and Mahala frowned. Without answering, she turned on her heel and led the way into an inner chamber, where a group of women, most of them middle-aged or beyond, sat in a circle on low cushions. Vaniya turned to Cendri, and to Lialla and her partner, motioning them to seats outside the circle, and went forward, with Mahala, to take the two vacant cushions to either side.
One of the women seated on the cushions said solemnly, "The Pro-Matriarch Mahala has claimed that our late Mother, Rezali of blessed memory, has communicated with her from beyond the great barrier of death and designated her successor by revealing to Mahala the location of her ring and her robe. Produce them, Mother."
Mahala gestured to a member of her entourage, and Cendri saw, in surprise, that it was a fat, blobby, sexless person, neither male nor female ... an Inquirer, a neutered man?
Mahala said, "My Inquirer, Karay, holds them for your judgment."
One by one, the women examined the objects. Cendri could see only that they were a heavy ring, deeply engraved, and a robe of stiff material, heavily embroidered with metallic threads.
At last they came to Vaniya. She bent over them, solemnly, giving them her full attention. At last she raised her head, and her eyes were lambent with anger.
"These are forgeries," she said, "and clumsy forgeries at that! The ring is a good forgery; but a forgery none the less. The ring of our revered Matriarch, as you may see from the effigy in the Hall of Matriarchs, bore a snake with three eyes; this serpent has two. The embroidery is done with copper-colored threads; the embroidered robe of our Matriarch, again I call the Hall of Matriarchs to witness, is done with a twisted thread of two strands, one copper and one burnt orange color. I do not even speak of the patterns, which any little child could see for clumsy imitations of the real thing, no doubt hurriedly done by Mahala's own sewing women, or if she does not trust them that much, by her daughters and foster-daughters. Councilwomen of Ariadne, I ask that these be rejected for the clumsy imitations they are! Mahala—" she turned her eyes on her rival, "how dare you bring this stupid imposture here!"
Mahala said calmly, "I will await the judgment of the Council, my sister and rival."
One woman said, "They are obvious forgeries! How can Mahala insult our intelligence this way?"
"Oh, come," another one interrupted, "is it not possible that the Mother Rezali might have passed these imitations because of her own failing eyesight and memory? I suggest we accept Mahala's word that these are what they claim to be, and hail her as our new Pro-Matriarch!"
Will it depend, Cendri thought, only on the will of the Council, and not on the objective fact? It is certain that Vaniya believes; she has prayed and fasted and awaited word. Is Mahala more realistic, or simply more cynical?
Vaniya said, with an obvious effort to steady her voice and speak calmly through her tremendous wrath, "The will of the Council makes no difference. The law clearly states that every member of the Council must be satisfied that what the candidate presents is the authentic ring and robe of the former Pro-Matriarch."
"Then," said Mahala, turning directly to the Council, "I beg each of you to be satisfied, Mothers. The high festival is upon us, already the men have come into the city to visit the sea; if there is no government, no High Matriarch, and the city is in a state of anarchy, we may have a rebellion on our hands."
One of the Council mothers said, "This is sacrilege you speak, Mahala!"
"Sacrilege? Nonsense," Mahala said contemptuously. "We are making fools of ourselves before the Scholar Dame from the civilized worlds. Is there really any woman here who truly believes that the spirit of the dead will speak to an Inquirer, or to anyone else? In an age when starships can come and go between the Galaxies, will any woman stand up here and tell me she truly believes this superstitious rubbish? It is for the Council to accept me, or reject, and I beg of you not to ask for further ghost-stories!"
Vaniya stood up, her eyes blazing at Mahala. She said, "I will not sit and listen to this! You, the council of Elders of Ariadne, have been twice insulted by this woman, first by imposture and then by blasphemy! I call upon you, my sisters, to name me their true High Matriarch, on the grounds that Mahala has proven, by coming before us with a forged ring and robe, that she knows the Mother Rezali will not speak to her spirit!"
"I notice," Mahala said calmly, "that even you, Vaniya, have not had the hardihood to claim that she has spoken to yours. You are not a madwoman either—not yet, although if you go on awaiting a ghostly voice to appoint you High Matriarch, you will be so soon."
"Peace, both of you," said one of the Elders, sternly, "the High Matriarch has been chosen like this since we founded the High Matriarchate!"
"I remind you," Mahala said, the honey in her voice now a little sour, "that Rezali's reign has been so long that no woman in this room had yet grown her breasts when Rezali was chosen to rule over us; we were still on the mother-world of Persephone then. We know only that this is how the Council said a High Matriarch was chosen. It is quite possible that it has always been what I say it is now, a pious fraud to baffle outsiders!"
"This is heresy," said one of the women, and another simply stared in shock, her mouth falling open.
Another said slowly, "Perhaps there is some truth in what Mahala says. In living memory, no woman has been appointed by any such method—"
The debate dissolved in general clamor. Vaniya finally made herself heard.
"I have been summoned here upon a false pretense," she said, "and there are affairs which demand my presence elsewhere. I hold myself in readiness to meet when I am justly summoned; meanwhile, I bid you farewell." She gestured to the women in her party; Cendri rose along with them and followed Vaniya out of the Council Hall. The children gathered in the Hall of Matriarchs stood in small staring groups, watching wide-eyed. As they got into Vaniya's car, they saw Mahala and her party leaving by another door, and Vaniya audibly sighed with relief.
"A calculated risk," she said to Cendri. "She is persuasive, she might after all have persuaded the Council to see matters her way. But if she had done so I could have gained nothing by staying there." Again the weary sigh. "I must think what to do." She leaned her head against the cushions and closed her eyes, and no one spoke on the ride back to the Residence.
As they alighted from the vehicle, Lialla put her arm around her mother.
"Vaniya, dearest Mother," she entreated, "will you not eat something and take some rest? We are all in your hands now; you must preserve your strength for the difficult days which will come."
Vaniya stroked her daughter's cheek indulgently, but she shook her head.
"No, my dear, there are more serious things on my mind than food and sleep. I must consult with those who are wiser than I. All of you, I beg you, go to bed." But she stretched her hand to Cendri and said, "Stay with me for a little while, Scholar Dame."
She rarely used Cendri's title; that she had done so now indicated to Cendri—and, Cendri thought, to the other women—that she was not rejecting her daughters, on a personal level, for a stranger, but that she wished to speak with Cendri as representative of the Unity, of University. Cendri followed her into the great, deserted dining-hall. Vaniya lowered herself on to a cushion, sat with her head leaning against another. After a time she said to Cendri, "Believe me, Cendri, I am not ambitious. My sister and rival is a good administrator and a worthy and honest woman; I say this in spite of her clumsy attempt to befool us all today. She truly believes—and I feel this is tragic, it bespeaks so much of the poverty of her mind and heart—that t
here is nothing beyond what she can see and feel. I would willingly turn the mundane administration of the government over to her. She is younger than I, and, I think, stronger and more fit to rule in the secular duties assigned to a High Matriarch. If it were only this, I would step down today and spend my declining years surrounded by my granddaughters and fosterlings. But I cannot sit by and say nothing while she robs our spiritual life of its meaning. Fit she may be for Matriarch; as Priestess she has proven herself unfit, not only by her actions of today, but by her attitude over all the years. She seems not fully aware that without vision and awareness of the things which are beyond material well-being, the soul and spirit of humanity dies." A long silence, and for a moment Cendri thought the woman, exhausted, had fallen into sleep. Then she said, "It is this, I think, which has made so many of the worlds ruled by men intolerable to our society; that they rested on material well-being, and gave no thought to the spirit and the soul of their people. The Goddess knows, I am eager for their physical well-being; I know there have been priesthoods where a pretended concern for spiritual wealth has been used to defraud mankind—and I say mankind deliberately, for no woman will allow such a spiritual death—to defraud mankind of material comforts and allow riches to fall into the hands of the powerful. And so one of the major precepts of the Matriarchate is that the spiritual and the material well-being of our women go hand in hand, always, and this is why the High Matriarch has also been High Priestess; to remind the woman who holds this dual office that material comforts without spiritual riches are barren of benefit, and that spiritual worth without due attention to the bodies of our sisters is a lie and a sham. I fear that Mahala wishes to separate them, to destroy the whole ethical basis of the Matriarchate, and I am afraid; but she will not do it while I live, Cendri."
Cendri said, "And you cannot produce the true ring and robe?" This time Vaniya's sigh seemed ripped from the very depths of her being.
"I cannot. Even Maret's far-seeing is silent on this. May the Goddess forgive me, I too have had doubts like Mahala's. Perhaps indeed once Rezali had put off her suffering flesh she has no further thought for her daughters left motherless in this world—or," she added with a ghost of her old grin, "it is superstitious nonsense to believe the dead concern themselves with the fate of the living. Perhaps the ancient foremothers in their wisdom felt that the woman who could seek out and engage the finest clairvoyants was best fitted to rule over us."
Cendri had never believed in survival after death, but had seen extra-sensory perception and clairvoyance proven again and again; that issue was no longer in doubt, and so Vaniya's conjecture seemed a very likely idea.
Vaniya rose, abruptly. "Will you come with me, Cendri, while I seek the council of those who are wiser than I?"
Cendri looked at her in blank astonishment. "I, Vaniya?"
"Mahala has accused me of ignorance and superstition, says that I am making our world ridiculous before the scholars from University. I want you, who are one of those, to see for yourself that it is no mere superstition which sends me to seek the aid of those at We-were-guided; will you come with me, my alien daughter?" She held out her hands to Cendri, and the younger woman, astonished, yet touched by this appeal, clasped them.
"Of course, Vaniya."
Silently, Vaniya went around the big room, taking up a warm cloak against the chill of the damp night; gave one to Cendri. She took a torch in her hand, and they went out through the damp garden.
A thick sea-fog had drifted in, and the garden was thick with white mist. Cendri could not see more than a few feet beyond her face, but Vaniya moved unerringly along thefamiliar paths, toward the shore. As they followed the path, now familiar to Cendri, and began slowly to ascend the long hill that led to the ruins, Cendri recalled the first night in Vaniya's house, when she had stood at her upper window, watching the procession winding into the ruins.
Vaniya seemed to know every step of the way. As they climbed, they came up above the mist, and Cendri, looking down, saw it lying, like a thick white blanket, along the shore, flowing and drifting in the moonlight. Above them, clear in the light of the growing moons, lay the ruins; dark, massive, strange, and as she moved silently along the canyons of the dead city, Cendri shivered.
Vaniya looked at the moons, their pale gibbous faces floating silently above the dark spires of the immeasurably old buildings. She said in a low voice, "The highest of our festivals is upon us; it frightens me, sometimes, to think that there might be no priestess to bless our rites." She turned to Cendri in the dark, reaching for the younger woman's hand. She said, and her plump fingers felt cold, "I am not an ignorant woman, Cendri; my mind knows as well as yours that the rites are holy because the minds and hearts of our women, and our men, make them so, and it would be no word of mine, nor of Mahala's, which makes them sacred. Children would be conceived and born, the crops would grow, all things would go on in order, no matter who performs the rites, or even if they are not performed at all. I am not the superstitious ninny Mahala thinks me—Cendri, my child, it was I who piloted the ship which bore us from Persephone to this world! I was a young woman then, I had no thought that I would ever hold any office, far less this highest of offices. It was Mahala who always sought for the power of leadership, and I was content that she should have it, so long as she bore in mind what our people needed. But—Cendri—even though the world would go on without the blessing of the rites, our people need them. We need all things done decently and in order, and a people react as they have been taught. Every year since we came from Persephone, our lives have been structured according to the world we found. As on our mother world we were structured to the turn of the seasons, planting and reaping and sowing, here we are structured to the turn of the tides, the rise and fall of the sea. The priestesses do not make this happen. I do not believe that even when the mass of folk were ignorant anyone believed that it was the word of the priestesses which made all this happen, but it is their word which gives license or restraint. I know what happens to a people which believes it is responsible to no one except themselves, and their own whim and will. Yes, if we wished, we could change our society to one based not on the will of the Goddess and the cycles of nature, but on our own will, strongly enforced by laws which the women have made for themselves. Such laws are tyranny, always; we live more content under the gentle hand of nature, by the name of the Goddess, than under laws which we have devised by ourselves and must enforce by fear and threat of punishments. I think Mahala feels this would suffice, but I have seen how the laws made by man at last reach a point where crime is not regarded except whether or not the appropriate punishment is enforced."
Cendri nodded, slowly. A government ruled by custom and tradition, without crime and without rebellion, and without need of law or enforcement. She did not know if she would care for such a world, but the problem of crime and enforcement was an enormous one on every world in the Unity. The women of the Matriarchate had solved it in their own way, which was, by and large, quite successful. They had, at least, a right to complete their experiment without interference from the Unity.
Vaniya spread her cloak on the top of the flight of steps which led into the open square leading down into the ruins of the spaceship which had brought them there. She sat down, inviting Cendri to sit beside her. She said, "I piloted the ship that brought us here to Isis, Cendri. I was a young woman then, I had no children. I had been chosen for education by the Mother Rezali, and had learned a good deal about the workings of the Universe. And so I, and half a dozen others, were entrusted with the ship, while the others were drugged to insensibility—you are too young to remember that in those days the drives were less endurable by a person in waking state, and all except the most necessary personnel were kept under sedation."
The technical language sounded strange on Vaniya's lips. She went on, her voice quiet and thoughtful in the moonlit darkness, her face a pale large blob rather like the pale moons in the sky.
"I was alone during much of
all that long trip; I had a great deal of time to think, about the world we had left, the world to which we would go. And at last our ship—there it lies below us," she gestured, "was floating in orbit around this world, and I looked down on the strange planet below, wrapped in its clouds, its oceans moved by unknown storms and quakes and tidal waves, and I was afraid. I was afraid, Cendri, for all I knew of the mechanics of the Universe, and for all the education I had received, and for all my belief in the society we had built on Persephone, against the general trend of the Unity. I was filled with terror and with doubt. Would it not be better for us to return and submit ourselves to the laws which the people of the Unity had made for mankind? I even wondered, and doubted the Matriarchate. Were men and women truly so different, that the laws made by men could not be enforced for women too, and give women freedom enough to do as we would? Should we not return, and work for more of a place for women within the Unity, rather than removing ourselves so completely from its entire structure? So I pondered, while I looked down at our new planet below us, and I prayed, though I was not a religious woman then. I knew that we would need all the help we could get, whether from ourselves, or from some force greater than we were. And then, Cendri, I was answered."
"Answered, Vaniya?"
"Answered, my child. By those who dwell here, whom you call Builders. They spoke to me, as they still speak to any woman who will come and kneel before them and seek their counsel. They reassured me, and quieted my doubts. They guided the ship here, and they proved to me—" her voice was shaking with intensity, "that our way of life, the Matriarchate, was what we believed, ordained of old before men had seized power from the women."
Cendri felt a curious cold prickle running up and down her spine. She whispered, "Proved to you, Vaniya? How did they prove such a thing to you?"
Vaniya's voice, too, was not more than a whisper. She said, "They spoke to me, as I know they have spoken to you; I saw your face when we came to the ruins, the day of the great wave, when the village was destroyed, and you proved yourself one of us by risking your life to ring the alarm. But in all the years we have dwelt on Isis, Cendri, in all the years we have come here to worship, they have spoken to no male. No male has ever heard their voice. And thus we know, Cendri, we know beyond any possible shadow of a doubt, that the Builders of our race ordained women to rule, and that the Unity was wrong, wrong, wrong! Tell me—" she turned her face, pale in the moonlight, to the younger woman, "during all your time in the ruins, has your Companion ever heard their voice?"
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 Page 21
