The Saga of the Renunciates

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  At least, Magda thought as she crept into the tent she shared with Vanessa, they were all speaking again. Magda rejoiced; it would be hard enough to cross Scaravel even with their utmost cooperation.

  * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jaelle pointed through a light flurry of falling snow.

  “The City of Snows: Nevarsin,” she said. And Magda picked up her thought—they were almost frighteningly open to one another now—Will we find Rafaella and Lexie there? And if we do not, what then? It was beyond belief that Jaelle, at least, would be willing to turn around and go home again. In her mind this journey took on unreal and dreamlike proportions, it would go on forever, farther and farther into the unknown, in pursuit of robed figures, the sound of crows calling, the shadow of the Goddess brooding over them with great dark wings…

  Camilla’s horse bumped gently into hers. “Hey, there! Are you asleep on your feet like a farmer at spring market, gawking at the big city?”

  Nevarsin rose above them, a city built on the side of a mountain, streets climbing steeply toward the peak, where the monastery rose, naked rock walls carved from the living stone of the peak. Above the monastery were only the eternal snows.

  They entered the gates of Nevarsin late in the day, and found their way through snow-covered streets, which angled and climbed and sometimes were no more than flights of narrow steep steps, up which their horses had to be urged and their chervines led and sometimes manhandled upward. Everywhere there were statues of the cristoforo prophet or god— Magda knew little about the cristoforo sect—the Bearer of Burdens, a robed figure with the Holy Child on his shoulders surmounted by what could have been a sun or a world or perhaps merely a halo. Bells rang out at frequent intervals, and once as they climbed toward the top of a narrow street, they met a procession of monks, robed in austere garments of sacking, barefoot in the snow-covered streets. (But they seemed as comfortable, their feet as pink and healthy, as if they were dressed for a more amenable climate. )

  The monks, chanting as they came—Magda could make out very little of the words of their hymn or canticle, which was in an obscure dialect of casta— looked neither to left nor to right, and the women had to move their horses and pull them to one side of the street, dismounting to hold the reins of the pack animals. The monk at the head of the procession, a balding old man with a hook nose and a fierce scowl, looked crossly at the women, and Magda supposed he did not approve of Renunciates.

  So much the worse for him, then; she was going about her own business just as he was, and really with far less trouble to other people; at least their band were not expecting everybody to get out of the middle of what was, after all, a public thoroughfare.

  There were a great many of the monks, and by the time they had all passed by, dusk was falling, and the snow was coming down heavily.

  “Where are we going, Jaelle? I suppose you know?” Camilla asked.

  “Nevarsin is a cristoforo city,” Jaelle said, “and as I think I told you, women are not welcome at public-houses or inns unless properly escorted by husbands or fathers. I told you about the place; Rafi and I used to make jokes about the Nevarsin Guild-House. They may be there waiting for us.”

  The house, a large one built from the local stone, was in the remotest corner of the city, and inside had the good smell of freshly worked leather. Inside, the great door opened on a huge courtyard (“Dry-town style,” Jaelle whispered to Magda as they were shown inside), where young women in heavy workman’s aprons and thick boots were running about. They stopped to greet the strangers with hospitable bows. The mistress of all these women, a small tough old woman with arms like a blacksmith’s, came out, looked at Jaelle with a huge grin, then wrapped her in a smothering embrace.

  “Ah, Kindra’s fosterling!”

  “Arlinda, you look no different than when I last saw you—can it have been seven years ago? More than that?”

  “It was seven years; Betta had just died, Goddess give her rest, and left the place in my hands. How good to see you, there is always room here for Renunciates to lodge! Come in, come in! Suzel, Marissa, Shavanne, lead their horses into the stable, run and tell Lulie in the kitchen that there will be three, no, four, no, five guests for dinner! Give their horses hay and grain, and their chervines too, and haul all their packloads into the strongroom; I will give you a receipt, no, chiya? Just so there’s no question. You came across Scaravel? Mercy me, you look thin and tired, and no wonder, after such a trip! What can I do for you first? Hot wine and cakes? A bath? A meal within ten minutes, if you are famished?”

  “A bath would be heaven,” Jaelle said, to enthusiastic seconding murmurs from all four of the others. “But I thought we would have to go out to the women’s bathhouse—”

  “My dears, we are the women’s bathhouse now, it was going downhill, no towels, the attendants with their hands out for tips all the time, and pimps hanging around for so many of the women of the streets that the respectable family men wouldn’t let their respectable family women go to it anymore! So I bought it on the cheap, and let it be known that I wanted the street girls certified clean by one of the women’s doctors here. And if I caught them making assignations here, out they went. And I chased off all the pimps for good and all. I let the good-time girls know in no uncertain terms that if they wanted baths here, they’d better behave on these premises like apprentice virgin Keepers! And do you know, I think they were glad of it, to be treated just like family women, no difference between them and the wives and daughters of gentlefolk.” She shouted. “Suzel, take these ladies to the best guest-chamber, and then straight to the baths, bath’s on the house, no charge, these are old friends!”

  She drew Jaelle aside but they all heard her whisper, “And when you’re bathed and rested, deary, I have a message for you from your partner. Not now, not now, go and have your bath and I’ll send some hot wine for you in your guest room.”

  Jaelle looked pale and strained. “I beg of you, Arlinda, if Rafi is here, send her to me at once. We have traveled from Thendara in the greatest haste we could manage, hoping to overtake her. Don’t play games with me, dear cousin.”

  Arlinda wrinkled up her face, wrinkled and tanned like her own saddle leather. “Would I do that to you, deary? Oh, no, Rafi’s not here; they were here three days and went on only yesterday morning. The one who’d been sent to meet them from you-know-where came for them and they left with her.”

  Jaelle slumped forward and for a minute Magda thought she would faint. She put her arm out and Jaelle leaned on it hard. Through the touch of her freemate’s hand Magda could feel misery and dismay.

  To come so far, and to miss them by so little…

  But she recovered herself swiftly. She said with gentle dignity, “You spoke of a message, but if they have gone on before us, it certainly can wait until my companions are bathed and rested. I thank you, cousin.”

  Arlinda’s establishment was nothing if not efficient. In a few seconds, so it seemed to Magda, they had been shown to rooms, given receipts for their packloads and had their personal sacks brought to their assigned room, which was large and light and as clean as if it were a department of Terran Medic. There was a laundry on the premises too, and their soiled and travel-grubbied clothing was whisked away with the promise that it would be returned the next morning. All these things were accomplished by young, energetic, friendly girls, mostly between fifteen and twenty, who scurried around briskly, but with the utmost gaiety, and showed no sign whatever of being driven or intimidated. When Camilla was slow to change her garments (Camilla, because of the scars on her mutilated body, always hesitated to bare herself among strangers) they tactfully offered her a bathwrap to wear while her clothing was being washed, whisked away to fetch it for her, and had her clothes off and the fresh wrap on her body almost, it seemed, while Camilla was grumbling at them that she could manage perfectly well without it.

  “Now I know,” said Camilla, wrapping herself in the bath garment, which was fad
ed and wrinkled but smelled cleanly of soap, “why Kindra used to call this place the Nevarsin Guild-house.”

  “It’s certainly more efficiently run than many in the Domains,” Magda agreed. One of the young women, beckoning to conduct them to the bath, halted a little and she addressed herself directly to Jaelle.

  “You are the leader of this band, mestra?”

  “I am.”

  “The tall woman with white hair. She is—does she—is the skin disease from which she suffers contagious in any way? If so, mestra, your friend must bathe by herself and may not come into the common pool.” Her voice was a little embarrassed, but quite firm, and Jaelle answered in the same way.

  “On my honor, she suffers from no contagious ailment. Her skin is that way from birth; she comes from a far country where all men and women have such coloring.”

  “Well, I never! Who’d have believed it!” the girl blurted in wonder. Cholayna, who had stood behind Jaelle wondering what was going to happen, said, “It is true, my girl. But if your customers in the bathhouse will be bothered or afraid that they will catch something, I am willing to bathe alone, as long as I have a bath somehow.”

  “Oh, no, mestra, that won’t be necessary, our mistress has known Jaelle a long time, her word’s good,” the little girl said, kindly if not tactfully. “It’s just that nobody here’s ever seen nobody like you, so we didn’t know, so we had to ask because of the other customers, you see? No offense meant, none at all.”

  “None taken,” Cholayna said graciously (how she managed it, naked in a bath wrap. Magda never knew). As they went on into the bath cubicles assigned to them, Cholayna said to Magda in an undertone, “I had never thought how strange it would be, in a part of the world where everyone looks very much alike. But then, there are other planets like this, though not many. Skin as pale as Camilla’s would be almost as unusual on, say, Alpha, as I am here. What material is this?” she asked, fingering the bathwrap, “It can’t be cotton, not in this climate; or do they grow it in the south near Dalereuth?”

  “It is the fiber of the featherpod tree; they grow everywhere in the hills. Woven podwool like this is costly; it is commoner to treat it like felting or papermaking, because the fibers are short. But when it is woven this way, it takes the dyes so beautifully that many people think it worth the trouble and cost. In the old days, pod weavers were a separate guild, who kept their craft secrets by living in their own villages and never marrying outsiders at all.”

  Then the bath attendants came in; the child must have passed on the word about Cholayna, for there was not even any undue staring as they soaped and scrubbed all the women; even Camilla’s customary defensiveness relaxed when no one paid the faintest attention to the scars covering her body, and she laughed like a young girl as the attendants rinsed them under a hot spray before sending them out into the hot pool. Magda sank into it gratefully, though the water was too hot at first tor Vanessa, who yelped aloud as she stepped in.

  “You sound like a pig ready for butchering, Vanessa! You’ll get used to it,” Jaelle advised, lowering herself into the steaming water. It smelled faintly sulfurous and seemed to soothe out all the sores and aches of riding. The women leaned back on the stone shelf in the water, sighing.

  “It feels too good to be true,” Cholayna said. “The last time we were this comfortable, they had us drugged and poisoned!”

  “After this, I feel as if I could handle my weight in bandits,” Magda laughed.

  Jaelle said seriously, “We are as safe here as in our own Guild-house, and much safer than we should have been in any of the public bathhouses, some of which are run by pimps and such people.”

  “In Nevarsin? Where the holy monks rule everywhere?” Camilla was frankly skeptical.

  “The holy monks are much too holy to think of such things as laws to protect women traveling alone,” Jaelle said wryly. “In their opinion, virtuous women do not use such luxuries as public bathhouses where strangers might see their naked bodies, and if a woman frequented such a place she would deserve whatever came to her—disease, unwelcome attentions of whatever kind. There was a time, when the cristoforo rule of Nevarsin was absolute, that there were laws to close all the public bathhouses. A few stayed open outside the law and of course, being run by lawless men, they were lawless places; and the monks used the conduct at such places to justify their closing them… see, baths are wicked places, look at the kind of people who attend them! Fortunately the laws are more sensible now, but I understand the monks are still not allowed to attend public bathhouses, nor are pious cristoforo women.”

  Camilla snorted. “If the monks’ bodies are as filthy as their thoughts, then they must be a dirty lot indeed.”

  “Oh, no, Camilla, they have their own baths, I am told, within the monastery. And many homes also have baths on the premises. But of course those are only the richer folk, and the poorer sort of people, especially poor women, had no respectable place for a clean bath until some women opened them. And of course, the early ones were not overly respectable, as Arlinda told us; she has done the women of this city as much service as any Guild-house.”

  “She should be made an honorary Renunciate,” Camilla said, sinking down to her chin in the hot water.

  Jaelle lowered her voice so that the small group of pregnant matrons at the far end of the hot pool might not hear.

  “I think she is more than that. Did you hear what she said about Rafaella? The woman sent from you-know-where… what, do you think, could that be, if not some envoy from the place we are looking for? One of the things mentioned in the old legend was this: if you came far enough, you would be guided. Rafaella and Lexie have come far enough, perhaps, to encounter that guidance. It may be that the message Rafi left me was about the guides sent from—that place.”

  Camilla’s voice was openly scornful.

  “And when we get there we will find ourselves among the spicebread-trees and the rainbirds who build nests of scented woods to roast themselves for the hungry traveler?”

  But Jaelle was perfectly serious.

  “I do not know at all what it is that we will find. The legend says that what each person finds is different, and suited to his needs. There was an old story my nurse used to tell me—oh, I was very little then, a tiny child in the Great House of Shainsa.” Magda could hardly keep from staring at her freemate. Only once before in all the years she had known her freemate had Jaelle referred, even fleetingly, to her childhood in the Dry-Towns, and never to anyone in her father’s house there. She could tell from Camilla’s eyes that this was equally astonishing to her.

  “The story said that three men went out to seek good fortune,” Jaelle said, in a faraway voice, “and one married a beautiful wife with much gold and treasure, and thought he was fortunate. And the second found an abandoned homestead where he pruned the trees and they grew fruits and mushrooms for him, and he tamed wild cattle, and fowl, and as he labored night and day to build his farm by the hard work of his hands, felt himself the most fortunate of all men. But the third, they say, sat in the sun and watched the clouds, and heard the grass grow, and listened to the voice of God, and said, Never was any man so fortunate and favored as I.”

  There was a long minute of silence. Then Cholayna said, determinedly practical, “As long as I find Alexis Anders alive and unharmed, I have already enough notes on this country and have seen enough strange things that I should be the most ungrateful of women to complain if I find nothing more.”

  “I would hope for a mountain to equal Montenegro Summit,” said Vanessa, “but one can’t have everything.”

  “Be careful what you pray for,” Jaelle laughed, “you might get it. There are mountains here, I tell you, much higher than Scaravel—though, after this, I could live richly content if I knew I would never again travel above the treeline. Margali, what do you want from that city of legends, should we be guided there?”

  “Like Cholayna, I’ll be content to find Lexie and Rafaella safe and well. Somehow
I can’t imagine either of them being very interested in ancient wisdom—”

  “And as for legends,” Vanessa said cheekily, “you yourself are the legend against which they are measuring themselves, you, Lorne—”

  Magda flinched as if Vanessa had struck her. She needed no reminding of that—that in a sense she was to blame that these two women, who should have been her friends, had risked this desperate and dangerous journey.

  For all that, would I have wished this road untraveled? I have tested my own strength and found myself stronger than I ever believed. Would I wish this undone?

  Leaning back in the clouds of steam, her body at ease in the hot bath, she realized that it did not matter a particle whether she wished all this undone. It had happened; it was a part of her, whether for good or bad did not matter either. It was up to her to learn what she could from the experience, and pass on to the next thing in her life.

  Just as she suddenly knew that she felt free of the “Lorne legend” which had pursued her for so long. No one, least of all Magda, had required of Alexis Anders that she try to equal or surpass Magda’s achievements. It had been Lexie’s own doing, not hers! Magda felt as if a burden heavier than the chervine packloads had fallen from her back and dissolved in the hot water. She would still help Lexie when she found her; the younger woman had gone into deeper waters than she was trained to handle. Magda was obligated to do anything she could to help her. But only, as her vow required her to be… in the words of the Renunciate Oath… mother and sister and daughter to all women. Not from guilt, not because it was her fault Lexie had done this rash and stupid thing. She sighed, a long sigh of pure relief.

  “I am getting soggy,” Vanessa said. “I think I will get out, and try some of that hot wine they offered us.”