Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Holy Bearer of Burdens!” Annelys whispered. “And this man had reared you as his own child?”

  “Yes—and I had thought he loved me,” she said, her face twisting. Kindra closed her eyes in horror, seeing all too clearly the man who had welcomed his wife’s bastard—but only while she could further his ambition.

  Annelys’ eyes were filled with tears. “How dreadful! Oh, how could any man—”

  “I have come to believe any man would do so,” the girl said, “for Scarface was so angry at my father’s refusal that he gave me to one of his men to be a plaything, and you can see how he used me. That one I killed while he lay sleeping one night, when at last he had come to believe me beaten into submission—and so made my escape, and back to my mother, and she welcomed me with tears and with pity, but I could see in her mind that her greatest fear, now, was that I should shame her by bearing Scarface’s bastard; she feared that my father would say to her, like mother, like daughter, and my disgrace would revive the old story of her own. And I could not forgive my mother—that she should continue to love and to live with that man who had rejected me and given me over to such a fate. And so I made my way to a leronis, who took pity on me—or perhaps she, too, wanted only to be certain I would not disgrace my Comyn blood by becoming a whore or a bandit’s drab—and she made me emmasca, as you see. And I took service with Brydar’s men, and so I won my revenge—”

  Annelys was weeping; but the girl lay with a face like stone. Her very calm was more terrible than hysteria; she had gone beyond tears, into a place where grief and satisfaction were all one, and that one wore the face of death.

  Kindra said softly, “You are safe now; none will harm you. But you must not talk any more; you are weary, and weakened with loss of blood. Come, drink the rest of this wine and sleep, my girl.” She supported the girl’s head while she finished the wine, filled with horror. And yet, through the horror, was admiration. Broken, beaten, ravaged, and then rejected, this girl had won free of her captors by killing one of them; and then she had survived the further rejection of her family, to plot her revenge, and to carry it out, as a noble might do.

  And the proud Comyn rejected this woman? She has the courage of any two of their menfolk! It is this kind of pride and folly that will one day bring the reign of the Comyn crashing down into ruin! And she shuddered with a strange premonitory fear, seeing with her wakening telepathic gift a flashing picture of flames over the Hellers, strange sky-ships, alien men walking the streets of Thendara clad in black leather . . . .

  The woman’s eyes closed, her hands tightening on Kindra’s. “Well, I have had my revenge,” she whispered again, “and so I can die. And with my last breath I will bless you, that I die as a woman, and not in this hated disguise, among men . . . .”

  “But you are not going to die,” Kindra said. “You will live, child.”

  “No.” Her face was set stubbornly in lines of refusal, closed and barriered. “What does life hold for a woman friendless and without kin? I could endure to live alone and secret, among men, disguised, while I nursed the thought of my revenge to strengthen me for the—the daily pretense. But I hate men, I loathe the way they speak of women among themselves, I would rather die than go back to Brydar’s band, or live further among men.”

  Annelys said softly, “But now you are revenged, now you can live as a woman again.”

  Again the nameless woman shook her head. “Live as a woman, subject to men like my father? Go back and beg shelter from my mother who might give me bread in secret so I would not disgrace them further by dying across her doorstep, and keep me hidden away, to drudge among them hidden, sew or spin, when I have ridden free with a mercenary band? Or shall I live as a lone woman, at the mercy of men? I would rather face the mercy of the blizzard and the banshee!” Her hand closed on Kindra’s. “No,” she said, “I would rather die.”

  Kindra drew the girl into her arms, holding her against her breast. “Hush, my poor girl, hush, you are over-wrought, you must not talk like that. When you have slept you will not feel this way,” she soothed, but she felt the depth of despair in the woman in her arms, and her rage overflowed.

  The laws of her Guild forbade her to speak of the Sisterhood, to tell this girl that she could live free, protected by the Guild Charter, never again to be at the mercy of any man. The laws of the Guild, which she might not break, the oath she must keep. And yet on a deeper level, was it not breaking the oath to withhold from this woman, who had risked so much and who had appealed to her in the name of her Goddess, the knowledge that might give her the will to live?

  Whatever I do, I am forsworn; either I break my oath by refusing this girl my help, or I break it by speaking when I am forbidden by the law to speak.

  The law! The law made by men, which still hemmed her in on every side, though she had cast off the ordinary laws by which men forced women to live! And she was doubly damned if she spoke of the Guild before Annelys, though Annelys had fought at, her side. The just law of the Hellers would protect Annelys from this knowledge; it would make trouble for the Sisterhood if Kindra should lure away a daughter of a respectable innkeeper, whose mother needed her, and needed the help her husband would bring to the running of her inn!

  Against her breast, the nameless girl had closed her eyes. Kindra caught the faint thread of her thoughts; she knew that the telepath caste could will themselves to die . . . as this girl had willed herself to live, despite everything that had happened, until she had had her cherished revenge.

  Let me sleep so . . . and I can believe myself in my mother’s arms, in the days when I was still her child and this horror had not touched me . . . Let me sleep so and never wake . . . .

  Already she was drifting away, and for a moment, in despair, Kindra was tempted to let her die. The law forbids me to speak. And if she should speak, then Annelys, already struck with hero-worship of Kindra, already rebelling against a woman’s lot, having tasted the pride of defending herself, Annelys would follow her, too. Kindra knew it, with a strange, premonitory shiver.

  She let the rage in her have its way and overflow. She shook the nameless woman awake, knowing that already she was willing herself to death.

  “Listen to me! Listen! You must not die,” she said angrily. “Not when you have suffered so much! That is a coward’s way, and you have proven again and again that you are no coward!”

  “Oh, but I am a coward,” the woman said. “I am too much a coward to live in the only way a woman like me can live—through the charity of women such as my mother—or the mercy of men like my father, or like Scarface! I dreamed that when I had my revenge, I could find some other way. But there is no other way.”

  And Kindra’s rage and resolution overflowed. She looked despairing over the nameless woman’s head, into Annelys’ frightened eyes. She swallowed, knowing the seriousness of the step she was about to take. “There—there might be another way,” she said, still temporizing. “You—I do not even know your name, what is your name?”

  “I am nameless,” the woman said, her face like stone. “I swore I would never again speak the name given me by the father and the mother who rejected me. If I had lived, I would have taken another name. Call me what pleases you.”

  And with a great surge of wrath, Kindra made up her mind. She drew the girl against her.

  “I will call you Camilla,” she said, “for from this day forth, I swear it, I shall be mother and sister to you, as was the blessed Cassilda to Camilla; this I swear. Camilla, you shall not die,” she said, pulling the girl upright. Then, with a deep resolute breath, clasping Camilla’s hand in one of hers, and stretching the other to Annelys, she began.

  “My little sisters, let me tell you of the Sisterhood of Free Women, which men call Free Amazons. Let me tell you of the ways of the Renunciates, the Oath-bound, the Comhi-Letzii . . .”

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  Bonds of Sisterhood

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Years afterward, n
either Camilla nor Rafaella could ever remember exactly what had triggered their original quarrel. Somewhere there must have been some initial remark, some small individual episode, which set off a series of silly, pointless squabbles, of rude remarks and covert insults, of endless bickering; but neither of them could ever trace it back and find the spark which had set all this tinder ablaze.

  But it seemed to Rafaella, this winter, that Camilla had for no known reason taken a bitter dislike to her, and went out of her way to pick quarrels over everything. She remembered one bitter dispute over a barn-broom which they were both using in the stable one day, as a result of which Camilla had—accidentally, she insisted—shoved her into the manure pile. And another, in the kitchen, where she had stumbled and scattered a pile of trash which Camilla had laboriously swept up, and because Camilla had loudly accused her of doing it on purpose, she did not, (as normally, she insisted, she would have been glad to do) help the other woman sweep it up again.

  But Camilla—it seemed to Rafaella—was forever making remarks about women who flaunted their lovers, and when Rafaella, one night in the music room, had laughingly admitted to one or two of the younger women that she had reason to believe she might be pregnant, Camilla had muttered “Harlot!” and gotten up to leave the room. Rafaella had flared, “None of your lovers would ever give you so much,” and Camilla had slapped her face.

  That episode had gotten them both called up in House meeting before the Guild-mothers, who, without listening to the remarks they had exchanged—Mother Lauria said sharply that she had heard all the insults young women could put on one another and was not interested—admonished them to try and live at peace. Afterward the Guild-mothers, aware of their hostility, tried to assign them separate tasks; Camilla was working in the city, and Rafaella living in the house and working in the Guild House garden, so that they really did not come in contact very often. Not nearly often enough to quarrel as often as they did. It soon seemed that they could not be in the same room without quarreling, and they made a point of seating themselves at opposite ends of the room in dining room and House meeting.

  The final episode was triggered one night when they happened to be at the same time in the third-floor bath, and (by accident, Rafaella always insisted) Rafaella ran without looking into Camilla, knocking her off balance and splashing her with dirty water. Camilla turned on her furiously.

  “Now see what you have done, you fat bitch!” Her thick nightgown was clinging wetly to her knees, sopping.

  “Bitch yourself,” Rafaella retorted, angry because for once it had really been an accident and she had actually opened her mouth to apologize, to hand Camilla the towel in her own hand, when Camilla turned on her.

  Camilla did not answer. She picked up a basin at hand, and doused the gallon or so of cold, soapy bathwater over Rafaella’s head.

  Shocked, spluttering, furious, frantically pushing ice-cold, soapy hair out of her face, blinded, Rafaella picked up a pitcher and flung it at her.

  “I’ll break your head, you emmasca cat-hag!”

  The pitcher, which was made of stoneware and heavy, struck Camilla on the shoulder, knocking her almost to the floor. She stumbled and went down; a woman behind her caught her and helped her to her feet. Camilla whirled; her clothes were spread out on a stool, and she caught up her dagger from her belt. “You filthy whore, how dare you!” She rushed at Rafaella, and Rafaella gripped at the knife in her boots, in sheer reflex—self-defense, she justified herself later. And then they were fighting in deadly earnest, slipping on the wet stone floor of the bath, Camilla hampered by her long nightgown. It took four women to drag them apart, and both were bleeding from long, painful cuts; Kindra, roused from sleep to deal with the matter, looked grave.

  “You two have been keeping the house in an uproar for half a season,” she accused. “This cannot go on. While it was only harsh words, we held our peace, but this—” she looked, shocked, at the slash along Rafaella’s bare arm, the two cuts on Camilla’s face, “this is serious, this is oath-breaking. You are sworn, like all of us, to live at peace, as kin and sisters.”

  Camilla hung her head. In the slashed, dripping night-gown, she looked ludicrous. Rafaella saw Kindra’s eyes on hers and wanted to cry.

  Kindra said quietly, “Daughters, I ask you now to kiss one another, beg each other’s pardon, and swear to live at peace as sisters should. Will you now obey me, and we need carry this no further.”

  Rafaella looked at Camilla with cold, fastidious distaste—as if, Camilla said later, I was something with a hundred legs that you had found in your porridge. “I’d rather kiss a cralmac!”

  “Rafaella, my child, this is not worthy of you,” Kindra said.

  Camilla said, in shaking rage, “Let her keep away from me, and I will promise to keep my hands off her dirty throat. I will promise no more!”

  Kindra stared from one to the other of them, angry and appalled. “We cannot have this here! You know that!”

  “Then send me away,” Camilla flared, “where I need not listen night and day to her taunting! There are other Guild Houses in the Domains!”

  Rafaella’s eyes rested on Camilla; she felt her lip curl as she said, “Perhaps that would settle it best. I am trying to stay as far away from her as I can, but it seems the House is not big enough for us both. If she chooses to leave here, that would solve everyone’s problem.”

  “Oh, Kindra,” Rafaella added, and her eyes filled with tears, “I have tried, truly I have, but I can’t live with her! One of us must go, even if—” she heard her voice catch in a sob, “even if it must be me!”

  Would Kindra actually send her away? Rafaella thought, wretchedly, Does she care more for that emmasca than for me? A year ago she would have flung herself into Kindra’s arms and cried, promising to do everything Kindra asked. She moved toward Kindra, on the verge of breaking down, longing for Kindra to take her into her arms, but Kindra frowned and drew back. She said, and her voice was hard, “It is not to me, Rafaella, but to Camilla, that you must make your apology.”

  “To her?” Rafaella was cold and incredulous. “Never!” She wanted to cry out, Kindra, don’t you love me anymore at all? But she swallowed the words back, knowing she had no right to speak them.

  Kindra took Camilla’s long fingers in hers. She said “Kima, my child, you are the elder, and you have been one of us longer. She is a child. Will you yield? I should not ask it. Yet I do.”

  Camilla’s voice was husky; but her eyes were tearless and her face like stone. “It is unfair for you to ask it, Kindra. You know I would do anything for you save this, but I have done nothing to merit her persecution—”

  “Nothing?” Rafaella cried, “You—”

  “Rafi!” Kindra’s voice was not loud; but it cut Rafaella off in mid-syllable.

  Camilla went on, steadily, “If she will apologize, I will accept her apology, and carry this no further, but I will not crawl to her and beg forgiveness for allowing her to ill-use me!”

  Kindra sighed. She said, “You have left me no choice,” and summoned the women who had disarmed them. “Keep them in separate rooms while I send for the judges.”

  Left alone, frightened as the night crawled on, Rafaella heard the words of her oath echoing in her mind.

  And if I prove false to my oath, I shall submit myself to the Guild-mothers for such discipline as they see fit, and if I fail, let them slay me like an animal and consign my body unburied to corruption and my soul to the mercy of the Goddess . . . .

  Oath-breaking. She had once heard her father say that the most vicious crime was to turn drawn steel against kinfolk; she had been brought up on the ballad of the outlaw berserker who had slain his brethren and been exiled by his last remaining sister . . . and she had drawn her dagger on Camilla. True, Camilla had first come at her with a dagger. But perhaps the woman had only been trying to frighten her . . . it need not have come to a fight. The slash on her arm smarted and throbbed; no one had troubled to bandage it. By oath, Ca
milla is my sister . . . mother and sister and daughter to every other woman oath bound to the Guild. And I drew my dagger on a kinswoman, the more so because she, too, is Kindra’s oath-daughter.

  But Kindra could not help her now.

  She does not love me at all! She would not pledge herself to me . . . she loves Camilla better than me!

  At last one of the women came and summoned them, and Rafaella saw the pale angry face of her fellow culprit. They stood side by side before the four Guild-mothers, their slashed garments and small wounds telling the tale, and Kindra added that they had refused, before witnesses, to compromise or amend their quarrel. Mother Callista, the oldest of the Guild-mothers, and one of the judges of the Guild, said at last. “This is oath-breaking,” and Rafaella trembled.

  What will they do to me? she wondered.