The Saga of the Renunciates (102 page)

…
she was wandering in the gray world; she heard Jaelle calling her, but the hideous old woman was there, laughing… wherever she turned, though she ran and ran, always the old crone was there with that terrible screaming laughter that was like the cry of some wild bird, arms outstretched to shoo her back, force her away… suddenly Camilla was there, knife drawn to protect her, facing the old woman; her knife struck blue fire
…

There was something wet on her face; cold moisture was seeping into her collar. She raised her hand—it felt heavy and cold—to push it away and it turned into a damp cloth. It was like fire on her forehead, which felt as if it had been split with an axe.

Camilla’s face looked down into hers; she was pale, and it seemed to Magda that she had been crying.
Nonsense
, she thought,
Camilla never cries
.

“
Bredhiya
,” Camilla murmured, and her hand clasped Magda’s so tightly that she winced, “I thought I had lost you. How do you feel?”

“Like hell. Every bone in my body feels as if it had been beaten with a smith’s hammer,” Magda muttered. She discovered that she was undressed to the waist. “Hell, no wonder I’m cold! Is this standard treatment for shock?”

She tried to make a joke of it, but Jaelle bent over her and said, “I undressed you to make sure you didn’t have any internal injuries. You scraped all the skin off one arm down to the elbow, and you may have cracked a rib. Try to sit up, if you can.”

Magda pulled herself carefully to a sitting position. She moved her head cautiously and wished she hadn’t. “What did I hit, a mountain?”

“Just a rock, Miss Lorne,” Vanessa said. It sounded so absurd; Magda had meant to protest before this. Vanessa asked, “Are you cold?” and put her shirt onto her. Her arm, she discovered, was bandaged heavily over some slick and foul-smelling ointment.

Camilla draped a warm cloak around her. “It will be easier than trying to get your jacket on over the bandages and won’t rub the sore spots so much,” she said, pulling Magda’s jacket around her own lean frame. “Do you feel sleepy?”

Magda tried again to shake her head and didn’t. “No. Sleepy is the last thing I am.”

“Do you think you can go on?” Jaelle asked. “There’s no place to camp here, but if you can’t—”

Magda managed to pull herself upright with Camilla’s help. Her head was still splitting, and she asked for some of Cholayna’s painkillers, but Cholayna shook her head.

“Not until we know how serious your concussion is. If you’re still wide awake when we stop for the night, you can have some. Till then, nothing that might depress your breathing.”

“Miserable sadist,” Magda grumbled; but she too had had basic emergency training, and knew about head injuries.

“Look on the bright side,” said Cholayna, “now you get to ride uphill along with Vanessa, while the rest of us slog along on foot.”

Magda found it almost impossible to haul herself into her saddle, even with Camilla’s help, and when the horse began to move, she wished she were walking; the motion was nearly intolerable. The snow was wet now, half rain and half snow, and clung thickly, soaking through her cloak. She rode in dreary misery, every footfall of her horse jolting as if the beast were actually stepping on her head; and the uphill path was so steep that again she felt as if she were slipping backward off her saddle. Without being asked, Camilla came close and took the reins from her hand.

“
Bredhiya
, you just hang on, I’ll guide your horse. Just a little further now. Poor love, I wish I could carry you.”

“I’m all right, Camilla. Really I am, it’s only a headache. And I feel so foolish, falling like that and delaying all of you this way.”

“Look, here we are at the top of the ridge. Now we can all ride again, and if you can’t sit in your saddle,
bredhiya
, you can ride double with me. My horse will carry two and all you need to do is lean against me. Do you want to do that?”

“No, no, really, I’m all right,” Magda said; and though she knew it was unfair, the older woman’s solicitude embarrassed her—partly because she knew that it must be embarrassing to the other women, especially Vanessa, who could not understand the bond between them. “
Please
don’t fuss over me so, Camilla. Just let me alone, I’m fine.”

“Please yourself, then.” Camilla touched her heels to her horse’s side, and went to the head of the line beside Jaelle. As soon as she was gone, Magda regretted her words and wished Camilla was still beside her; what, after all, did it matter to her what anyone thought, after all these years? Discouraged, her head aching, she clung to the reins and let her horse find his own way down the hill.

As she rounded a turn in the downhill road, past a huge stand of conifers, she could see lights below. A little village huddled in the valley, just a crossing of the narrow road; first an outlying farm or two, then a forge and a stream dammed for a mill, with a granary warehouse, a windmill and a few small stone houses, each surrounded by a patch of garden.

“I wonder if there is an inn in this place?” Camilla asked.

Children and women and even a few men had come out to the roadside to watch as they passed; a sure sign, Magda knew from her years in the field, that the place was so isolated that the appearance of any stranger was a major event.

Jaelle asked one of the women, heavy-set, imposing, in clothing somewhat less coarse than the rest, “Is there an inn where we can spend the night and command supper?”

She had to repeat the question several times, in different dialects, before she could make herself understood, and when the woman finally answered, her own dialect was so rude a patois of
cahuenga
that Magda could hardly understand her. She asked Camilla, who had returned to ride beside her, “What did she say? You know more of the mountain languages than I do.”

“She said there is no inn,” Camilla said—speaking pure
casta
so that they would not be understood if they were overheard. “But there is a good public bathhouse, she said, where we could bathe. She also offered us the use of a barn which is empty at this time of year. They look like a fine lot of ruffians to me, and I would just as soon not trust any of them, but I don’t know what alternatives we have.”

Vanessa had heard only part of this. “A bathhouse sounds like exactly what we need most. I’m sure my ankle, and your arm, can use a good long soak in clean hot water. And bathhouse or no, these people look dirty enough that I’d rather sleep in one of their barns than their houses. Or, for that matter, their inns. Lead me to the bath!”

The woman who had appointed herself their guide led the way, a small procession of children following. Cholayna said, “I had not expected to find amenities like this outside Thendara.”

“There are hot springs all through the mountains,” Magda said. “Most little villages have bathhouses, even if every house must fetch water for drinking from a common well. And they have separate soaking rooms and tubs for men and women, so you need not worry about differing customs of modesty.”

Vanessa shrugged. “I am used to mixed bathing and bathhouses on my own world. It wouldn’t bother me if the whole village bathed in one big pool, as long as they changed the water occasionally.”

“Well, it would bother me,” Camilla said, and Jaelle chuckled.

“Me, too. I was brought up in the Dry-Towns, after all.”

She turned to haggle with the woman, who seemed to he the proprietor of the bathhouse and a sort of headwoman of the village, over the bathhouse fee. it seemed exorbitant to Magda, but, after all, this village was very isolated, and the hire of the bathhouse to occasional travelers was, no doubt, their only source of coined money. At least, Jaelle told her, she had managed to secure the place for their exclusive use that evening, and had arranged with the headwoman for a cooked hot meal to be brought to them; the fee also included use of the barn to stable their animals and spread their sleeping bags. Because it was a stone barn, with no stored hay, they had permission to make a fire there. They went to deposit their goods, unsaddle the horses and offload the pack beasts before they went to the bath.

“How is your head, Magda?” Cholayna asked. “How do you feel?”

“Better for the thought of a bath.”

“Wide awake? Then you can have some pain pills,” Cholayna said, and dug some tablets out of the medikit. “Is something wrong, Camilla?” For the woman was standing over their loads, scowling.

“I do not trust these people,” said Camilla, still speaking
casta
, although they seemed to be quite alone. “It looks like the abode of bandits. If we are wise, we will not all go to bathe at once; we should not leave all our goods unguarded.”

“Most hill-folk are so honest, you could leave a bag of copper unguarded in the center of the square, and find it there untouched when you returned half a year later,” Jaelle reminded her, “except that they might have put up a little shelter over it so that the bag would not be destroyed by the winter rains.”

“I’m perfectly aware of that,” Camilla said testily. “But have you been to this particular village before? Do you know these people, Shaya?”

“Not really. But I have been in many, many mountain villages very like this one.”

“Not good enough,” said Camilla. “All of you, go off to bathe. I will stay here and guard our goods.” And though they argued, she would not be moved from this stance. Finally it was agreed that Jaelle and Vanessa would go and use the bath first, and that Magda, Cholayna and Camilla would bathe in a second shift, which meant that one person in each party would be unwounded, healthy, and skilled in the use of weapons.

“I am still not pleased,” Camilla grumbled, as Jaelle and Vanessa went off to the bathhouse, carrying clean clothing over their arms. “These people would cut our throats for the scented soap! The idea might well be to split up our party so that we cannot defend ourselves properly. We should have camped outside the village, and set guard.”

“You have a terribly suspicious nature, Camilla,” Cholayna reproved gently, kneeling on the floor to light a fire. “I for one will be delighted to get a bath!”

“And so should I, in any decent place. Or do you think I am fonder of dirt than a Terran? But here, I would feel safer sleeping in the muck of the road.”

“Camilla,” said Magda quietly, out of earshot of the others, as they looked for fresh clothing in their packs, “is this a premonition, is this your
laran
?”

The woman’s face was tight-lipped and closed. “You know what I think of that. If it were so, would not you or Jaelle have known it, you who are
leroni
of the Forbidden Tower? It needs no
laran
to know that a ruffian will be a ruffian.
Laran
!” she snorted again, crossly, and turned away.

Magda felt troubled, for she respected, with good reason, Camilla’s intuitions; but the party was already split, and her head and injured arm ached dreadfully, so that she felt unwilling to forgo the prospect of a bath. She felt she would even endure an onslaught by bandits if she could get a bath and a good hot meal first.

There was a little sound in the corner of the room. Within seconds Camilla had her knife out and rushed to the hidden space behind the door; she came back dragging someone by the wrist: a woman, not young, her dark hair braided carelessly down her back. She was no different from any of the people of the village except, Magda noticed, that she seemed personally clean.

“Who are you?” Camilla growled, gripping the woman’s wrist so hard that she flinched and squealed, and emphasizing her words with a flourish of her knife, “What do you want here? Who sent you?”

“I didn’t mean any harm,” the woman said, with a little yelp of fright. “Are you—are you Shaya n’ha M’lorya?”

The name
Jaelle
was a Dry-Town name, very uncommon in the Kilghard Hills. Magda herself called Jaelle, mostly, by the
casta
version of her name, and had given it to her daughter.

“I am not,” Camilla said, “but I am her oath-sister; and this—” indicating Magda, “her freemate. Speak! What do you want with her. Who are you?”

The woman’s eyes swiveled furtively to stare at Cholayna. Magda thought,
No doubt she has never seen anyone with a black skin before this, maybe she has just come to gawp at the strangers. But then how would she know Jaelle’s name?

“My name is Calisu’,” the woman said. “There are no Renunciates in our village. The headman won’t have it. But some of us are in—in sympathy.” She pulled the loose hair away from her ear, revealing a small earring; the secret sign, Magda knew, recognized for hundreds of years, of women in sympathy with the Guild-houses, who for one reason or another could not legally commit themselves. Lady Rohana herself had worn such a hidden ornament, and Magda was sure not even Dom Gabriel had known why. Seeing it, Camilla’s grip loosened somewhat.

“What do you want? Why were you sneaking around like that?”

Calisu’—the name, Magda remembered, was a dialect version of Callista—said, “Two Renunciates passed through our village ten days ago. They asked for the village midwife, saying one of them suffered from cramps, and when they came to me, asked if—if I wore the earring.”

That was Rafaella’s artifice. Not in a thousand years would Lexie have thought of that.

“And then they wanted me give this message to Shay a n’ha M’lorya. But if’n you’re her freemate, I can give it to you? If they find me here—”

“You can give the message to me,” Magda said.

“She said—they’ll meet wi’ you at Nevarsin Guild-house.”

Camilla said, “But there isn’t—”

Magda kicked her shins and she fell silent. Calisu’ wrenched her arms free from Camilla’s grip, scuttled toward the door and was gone.

Camilla strode after her. She struggled with the ancient mechanism, which was rusted and could not be properly bolted shut again. Finally she sighed, and said, “Put some of the loads in front of it, so we’ll hear if someone tries to get in again. I was afraid this would happen. No, no, not you, you shouldn’t be lifting things with your head—”

“I seldom do,” said Magda, “that’s not my
laran
, I’m sad to say I have to use my hands.” But she stepped back and let Cholayna and Camilla pile loads in front of the side entrance. Camilla said moodily, “You heard her. What does it mean? There is no Guild-house in Nevarsin, it’s a city of
cristoforos
. How can we meet them when—”

“Shaya will understand,” said Magda. Her head was splitting in spite of Cholayna’s pain pills, and she wished that Jaelle would return so that she could go and have a bath and lie down.

Listlessly she found clean underclothing and thick socks, a heavy sweater and woollen breeches to sleep in. Jaelle and Vanessa came in; they had even washed their hair, and Jaelle’s coppery locks were curled up in tight, damp, frizzy ringlets.

“Just what the weary traveler needs,” Jaelle said, elaborately stretching her arms and yawning. “Now, when that meal comes—I saw it cooking; smelled it. Roast fowl on the spit, and mushrooms in a casserole with redberry sauce.” She licked her lips greedily. “This is a better place to stop than I thought. Go along, you three, get your baths. But don’t be too long or we’ll eat all the mushrooms. I wonder if this village makes a good mountain wine?”

“If not,” Cholayna joked, “I shall complain to the head woman.”

The bathhouse was an isolated stone building, from which issued wisps of steam. When they went inside, the bath attendant gave them little three-legged stools to sit on and asked with rough deference if the ladies had their own soap and sponges. She scrubbed them well, clucking at Magda’s injured arm, and even managed not to stare too long or too inquisitively at Cholayna. Then she ushered them down the steps into the stone-lined pool filled with steaming hot water. Magda sighed with pure pleasure, feeling the scalding heat drawing the pain from her wounded arm, and lay back so that she was covered to the neck.

“Feels good,” Camilla agreed, and Magda remembered that she too had hurt her ankle, though not as seriously as Vanessa.

“Are you really all right,
breda
?”

“Nothing hot water and a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure.
If
I felt safe about getting it here,” Camilla muttered, softly so the bath attendant wouldn’t hear. “Careful, let’s not say anything serious, it may be her business to carry tales. No, I trust
none
of them, no farther than I could kick a statue uphill.”

Under the surface of the water, Magda sought Camilla’s hand and pressed the long fingers between her own. She was ashamed of how she had behaved in the afternoon. Had she really been willing to hurt Camilla’s feelings because of what Vanessa might think? Why should it matter? She sat holding Camilla’s hand, silently, and in the quiet comfort of the bath, she slowly began to pick her friend’s fear, her suspicion.

She could understand both. In the days when she and Peter Haldane, then married, had explored from the Kilghard Hills to the Plains of Arilinn, they had encountered their share, or more, of bandits and outlaws. They had had more than enough narrow escapes—although they had survived, when others had not. Those had been the days when the so-called “Lorne Legend” was in the making. Poor Peter, in a sense it was unfair; it might as well have been called the Haldane Legend, for he had done as much as she in the matter of gathering information about territories and boundaries, recording linguistic variables and social customs—all the basic information for Intelligence. The difference was that Magda had done it on a world, and in a milieu, where women found it almost impossible to go into the field at all, let alone accomplish anything meaningful there; and so Magda had gotten most of the credit and all the attention.

But Peter had had his reward: he had become Legate, and he was a good one, concerned, fair, committed to the world he loved. She had chosen another path, and different rewards.

“Magda? Don’t fall asleep here, there is a good supper waiting for us.”

“No, I’m not asleep.” Magda pulled herself upright in the steaming water, blinking. She felt almost dangerously relaxed.

Camilla squeezed her hand underwater, and said in a whisper that could not be heard inches away, “
Z’bredhyi
,
chiya
.” Magda returned the pressure and whispered, “I love you, too.” But because they were not alone, she turned to Cholayna and said aloud, “I suppose they are waiting for us, they may not serve supper till we’re all there. I suppose we should get out, but I could stay here all night.”

Cholayna looked at her fingers, beginning to wrinkle like dried fruit in the steaming water. “We’d end up a great deal smaller, I think.” She pulled herself to her feet, and the bath attendant brought a towel to wrap about her. Camilla followed, and Magda saw that in the hot water, the old scars on her back and side were clear white, standing out against her fair skin reddened by the heat. She saw the bath attendant notice them, and Cholayna actually opened her mouth to speak. Magda could almost hear her:
In the name of the secret gods, what happened to you
? before she realized that neither Cholayna nor the attendant had said a word. In the peace and relaxation of the bath, once again she was picking up unspoken thoughts.

Reluctantly, Magda hauled herself out of the hot, relaxing bath, and wrapped herself in the thick towel provided by the attendant. It felt wonderful to dress in clean clothes from the skin out.

“Now for some of that good roast fowl, and maybe the mountain wine Jaelle was talking about.”

Cholayna pursed her lips. “I don’t want to sound like a nervous foster mother, Magda, but if you really have concussion, you shouldn’t drink any wine. How is your head?”

Magda, though the hot water had relaxed the muscles of her neck and she felt much better, admitted that the headache was still there, a dull hard pounding despite the pain pills.

Camilla said, “She’s right, Margali, you really should stick to tea or soup till we’re sure about your head,” and Magda, inching her sweater over the throbbing bump on her skull, shrugged.

“I’ll have to make do with good hot food and fine company, then. Lucky Vanessa, she only bashed her ankle, she can have a hangover if she wants to. I really could use a drink, but I’ll defer to your medical knowledge.”

It was a shock to go out into the cold again. The fierce wind had blown the snow into deep drifts; they hurried across the narrow space between the buildings. In places the snow had drifted so high that it came up over their boot-tops, icy, chilling the new warmth of their feet. They were glad to see the blazing fire inside the barn allotted to them. The building was so large that it was not exactly warm, but at least they were out of the wind.

Vanessa and Jaelle had made the beds up, and the place looked clean and inviting, almost homelike; though it was hardly like their own homes, with horses and chervines stabled at the other end. An ample supply of hay had been brought in for them, which gave a clean healthy smell to the surroundings. Almost at once, serving women began to parade in with dishes and smoking platters; in addition to the roast fowl, there was a haunch of roasted chervine with its sizzling layer of good-smelling fat, and rabbithorn stewed in wine. There were long rolls of bread, hot from the oven, with plenty of butter and honey, a savory casserole of mushrooms and bland but nourishing boiled whiteroot, and the promised redberry sauce.

“Why, this is really lavish!” Cholayna exclaimed.

“It ought to be. Enjoy it. We paid enough for it,” Jaelle said, as they gathered around, sitting on piled-up loads and packs, digging in with a good appetite—all except Cholayna. The older woman ate some of the boiled whiteroot, and tasted the redberry sauce with appreciation, but after valiantly trying to eat the piece of roast fowl Jaelle had carved for her, she turned pale and put her plate aside.

“What’s the matter,
comi’ya
?” asked Camilla.

Cholayna said faintly, “It looks—still looks too much like the—the living animal. I’m sorry, I—I tried. When it’s just a—a bar, or a slice, I can manage it, but—but this is a
wing
!”

“You need the protein,” Vanessa said. “Hunt out some emergency rations. You can’t make a meal on mushrooms and redberry sauce.”

“I—I’m sorry.” Cholayna apologized again, and found the load containing the packaged Terran rations. This was forbidden in the field, lest some unauthorized observer should catch sight of the obviously alien packaging, but Magda had not the heart to reprimand her; she looked so sick. Cholayna had had a hard few days, and she supposed that if you really applied the rules strictly, even the elastic bandage on Vanessa’s ankle would be against the laws of Intelligence work.

On the other hand, if the head of Intelligence for Darkover can’t break a rule when there’s hardly even anyone to know she’s done so
—

“Never mind,” Camilla was saying, “have some of the wine, at least. It’s very good. They certainly aren’t skimping on us, I’ll say that for them! Shaya, tell me—there isn’t a Guild-house in Nevarsin, is there?”

“Goodness, no!” Jaelle laughed, raising her winecup to be refilled for the third time. “Keitha used to talk about starting one there, remember? There is a hostel where some women lived while they were copying some of the old manuscripts from the Monastery of Saint Valentine, years ago, but that would hardly count.” She frowned. “Why, Camilla?”

“There was a message.” She told about Calisu’, her earring and her relayed words, and Jaelle frowned.

“Rafi evidently thought it would mean something to me, but—oh, wait!” She broke off and said, “When we were girls, traveling with Kindra, there was a place where we used to lodge. It wasn’t an inn; women can’t go to public inns in the Hellers unless they are properly escorted by their menfolk. There was an old dame who made leather jackets and boots to sell—that was where I learned to make gloves and sandals, in fact.”

“Oh, of course,” Camilla said. “I went there once, and one of the young girls taught me to embroider gloves with beads! I remember old Betta, and all her wards and foster daughters!”

“She took in all the female orphans she could find in the city, and brought them up to work for her, but instead of getting them married off, as virtuous
cristoforo
matrons do with their girl apprentices, this old dame used to teach them a trade and encourage them to set up business for themselves. Some of them went off and got married anyway, but some of them are still in business and living in the old woman’s house, and others, old Betta sent them south with us to the Guild-house. Kindra used to say, when there
was
a Guild-house in Nevarsin, we should get Betta to run it for us. I think she’s dead, but four of her adopted daughters are still running the place, and Guild-women were always welcome there. Certainly, that is where Rafi would lodge.”

She drained the winecup, looked wistfully at the bottle, and sighed.

“Oh, finish it if you want to,” Camilla chuckled. “You can drink Margali’s share.”

“Yes, have it by all means,” Magda said; her head was spinning and she felt dizzy, though she had not even touched the wine. Jaelle resolutely pushed it away.