The Saga of the Renunciates (54 page)

It would be better, Magda thought, if someone would call her names. Anything would be better than this endless, reproachful silence, this careful courtesy.

“Are you quite ready, Margali?” Rafaella asked. “Will you work with Doria and Keitha? I think they need more practice in falling.”

Magda nodded. The big room called the Armory was filled with the white light of the snow outside, for the windowshades had been rolled back to let in maximum light. Mats were unrolled on the floor, and a dozen women were doing beginning exercises in stretching and bending, in preparation for the lesson in unarmed combat which Rafaella was about to give.

Magda remembered her third day in the house, when she had had her first lesson under Rafaella. After several days of struggling with unfamiliar tasks, baking bread, trying to learn to milk dairy animals, struggling with heavy barn brooms and shovels, it had been a great relief to come upon something she could actually do. She had been thoroughly trained in unarmed-combat skills in the Intelligence schools on Alpha, and she was eager to show Rafaella that she was not a complete idiot.

She had been prepared—then—to like Rafaella, knowing the slight, dark woman was Jaelle’s partner in their travel-counseling business. Also, on her first evening in the House she had heard Rafaella singing to the harp. Magda’s own mother had been a notable musician, the first Terran to transcribe many of the Darkovan folk ballads, and to make the historical connections between Darkovan and Terran music. Magda was no musician herself—she had a good sense of pitch, but no singing voice— but she admired the talent in others. She had been ready not only to like, but to admire Rafaella.

But Rafaella had been, from the first, persistently unfriendly, and when, in that first lesson, it became apparent that Rafaella expected her to be completely stupid, as clumsy as the house-bred Keitha, Magda had summoned all her knowledge of Terran
judo
and Alphan
vaidokan
. When she had twice thrown Rafaella on her back, the older woman had stopped the lesson and frowned at her.

“Where in Zandru’s hells did you learn all that?”

Too late Magda realized what she had done. She had learned it on a planet half a Galaxy away, from a Terran-Arcturian woman who had trained both her and Peter in self-defense; but she was in honor bound to Mother Lauria not to say so.

“I learned it—when I was a very young woman,” she said. “A long way from here.”

“Yes, I remember, you were born in the Hellers near Caer Donn,” said Rafaella. “But did your father permit such learning?”

“He was dead by that time,” said Magda truthfully, “and there was no other who had a right to object to it.”

Rafaella looked at her skeptically. “I cannot imagine any man but a husband teaching such things to a woman,” she said, and Magda said, again truthfully, “My freemate had no objections.”

Quite without intending it, Magda remembered a time early in their marriage—before the growing competitiveness that had destroyed it—when she and Peter had worked together in unarmed combat techniques. Rafaella scowled at her.

“Well,” she said, “it is certain that I can teach you nothing more; rather, you have much to teach us all. I hope you will help me, and the rest of us as well, to learn some of those holds. I suppose it is a technique known in the mountains.” And so Magda had become a second teacher of the lessons in unarmed combat. It was not as easy as she thought it would be; she had learned the techniques to use them, not to teach them, and she had spent considerable time working alone, trying to figure out how she did things. But it had given her some much needed self-esteem, and she had even, a little, managed to disarm Rafaella’s unfriendliness. Until the day when she had fought for the house and disgraced them. Camilla had managed to disarm the man’s anger, and they had escaped blood-feud at their door, but they had had to pay a heavy cash indemnity which the house could ill afford. Magda had been kept in bed almost a tenday after the wound, and had just been allowed up.

“Are you able to work this way?” Rafaella asked. “You do not want to break the wound open and start the bleeding again.”

“Marisela said I should exercise it carefully,” she said, “or it would grow stiff.”

Rafaella shrugged and turned her back. “You know best,” she said, and went to the corner where she was trying to induce Keitha—without much success—to relax and fall perfectly limp on one of the mats.

Byrna, wearing an old pair of trousers too large for her, wrapped twice about her waist, touched Magda’s shoulder. She said “Don’t be upset; Rafi is like that. She’s cross because she’s been teaching unarmed-combat here in the House for the last twelve years, and now you come here, a newcomer, and you are better at it than she is. She’s jealous, can’t you tell?”

Magda was not sure, but she said firmly, “Shall we get started?” and began to do the ballet-like stretching exercises which preceded a workout. Her leg hurt, and she stopped, rolled up her trousers and looked at it. It was firmly scabbed over; she knew the pain was only the stretching of muscles gone soft while she had been in bed.

“Me too,” said Byrna, groaning, “Marisela warned me to exercise all the time I was pregnant, and I was too lazy, and now every muscle shrieks at me!” She winced as her arm jostled her full breasts. “And I will have to go upstairs in half an hour and feed the little one! But I suppose I should get a little exercise, so I will get back into condition somehow.”

“Come over here and work with me, Byrna,” said Rafaella, “I have had the experience of working out while I was nursing a hungry suckling, and I can show you how to recover your muscles quickly. And you, Margali,” she added formally, “will you do me the favor of working with Keitha for a time?”

Magda thought; of course; as
soon as I begin talking with someone who is really friendly to me
—for since the night when Byrna’s child was born, she had grown to know and like the other woman very much—
Rafaella calls her away, and I am alone again
. Keitha obediently came to her, moving stiffly, and Magda said, “Try to make your whole body soft and limp, Keitha. Until you stop being afraid of hurting yourself, you will always be tense, and then you
will
hurt yourself.” Keitha, she thought uncharitably, was as stiff as a barn broom; when Magda urged her to fall over, she stiffened and went down, putting out an arm to try to break her fall.

“No, no,” Magda urged. “Try to
roll
as you fall. Limp—like this,” she said, demonstrating, falling relaxed and unhurt on the map, and Keitha, though she tried bravely to imitate Magda, could not repress a cry of pain.

“Ow!” She rubbed her bruised shoulders and hip. Magda was tempted to lose patience with her, but she said only “Watch how Doria does it.” She looked up as some of the other women approached, asking, “Do you want to work with us?”

The other women said, with perfect politeness, “No, thank you,” and went to the far end of the room, pointedly ignoring them.

Keitha is friendly, and Byrna, and Doria. For the others, I don’t exist
, Magda thought, and shrugged, turning back to Doria. The one thing she had not wanted was to get into direct competion with Rafaella; but somehow she had managed that too.

“Keitha, I won’t let you hurt yourself,” she said, trying to encourage the woman to relax. “Look, like this—” and again she let herself go limp, landing easily. After two or three more tries, Keitha, though still stiff, had lost some of the terrified rigidity which had made every fall a painful ordeal. Well a lifetime of decorous, ladylike movement was not easy to overcome.

Byrna and Doria were practicing holds together; Doria tripped and fell clumsily, and as she picked herself up, Magda, watching, realized something which she had not noticed, even in herself, until she noticed it in Doria.

“It is not so much a matter of
movement
as of
breath
,” she said. “Try and visualize the center of your body
here
, and try to breathe from it.” She pointed at the center of her abdomen. “This point here, your center of gravity, really doesn’t move; your body moves around it. That is why methods of self-defense designed for men are not really so suitable for women; a woman’s center of gravity is lower, because of a man’s bony structure.”

“But some women are built almost like men,” Doria protested, “Rafi—she’s so tall and thin—” and she looked at her foster-mother, who stopped work and listened. Magda felt self-conscious as she said, “It is not so much a matter of male or female as a matter of different bone structure; everyone must learn precisely where her own—or his own, for a man—where the particular balance point is for the body, and learn to move around it. Part of it can be done through what we call centering, in the—” she stopped and gulped; she had been about to use the Old Terran word
dojo
, still used in the Alpha Colony for a martial-arts school—“in the place where I studied,” she hastily amended. “You can learn this
centering
through breathing and meditation, and through physical practice, learning to move your body around this absolute physical point, wherever it is. I am taller and heavier than you are; it would be different for me than for you, and different yet for Rafaella, or Camilla—she looked around the room to see if the old
emmasca
was there. She was, but she was busy at relining the grip on a knife hilt, and seemingly paying no attention to the lesson. Rafaella, however, had stopped working with her group and had moved closer to listen, and Magda felt, again, the self-consciousness as she finished, hunting for the right words—it was not easy to find equivalents for the Terran style of martial arts and translate them into Darkovan; she had to use the language of Darkovan dancing, for there was no other. ”It is a kind of balance; you find a place where your center is motionless and your body moves
around
it, balancing on that spot.“

“She is right,” Camilla said, raising her head. “This I had to learn for myself, when I studied swordplay among men; it may be one reason I am better with a sword than many men. They did not notice, thinking me a man, and it is true that I am very tall and thin, but my center is still lower than a man’s of my height; I had to learn to compensate for that, and the constant practice to match myself against men gave me more skill than many of them.” She came and touched Doria’s shoulder. “You are very thin, and your hips still very narrow—I do not think you are quite full grown yet; your balance will change as you grow, but once you have learned how to find your center, you will know how to recognize the changes.”

Some of the women were moving and balancing curiously, trying to test for themselves whether what Magda said was true. Keitha said scornfully, “It sounds like that old mystical theory— that the center of a woman’s body is in her womb!”

Rafaella chuckled. “Nothing mystical about it. That’s exactly where it is.” Keitha made a gesture of revulsion, and Rafaella added, “Ask Byrna if her balance did not change when she was pregnant?”

“Indeed it did,” Byrna said, “and I still have not recovered my old balance, having carried the child so long!”

Rafaella said directly to Keitha, “Why do you think a child is carried just
there
? Because it is exactly where the body is balanced and can best take the weight of a child.” She looked Keitha over with an experienced eye. “I should imagine you would carry very low—am I right?”

Keitha said sullenly, “Yes. What of it?”

“That is your trouble in movement,” Rafaella said. “You are trying to brace your body from the small of your back, as a man does and you should bring your weight forward—try to stand like this,” she added, readjusting Keitha with a careful hand. She looked at Magda with momentary camaraderie. “You are so tall I would judge that you carry very high, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Magda said, “I have never been pregnant.”

“No? Well, when you are, I am sure you will notice the change in balance,” Rafaella said. “Keitha, if you bring your weight forward—look how Margali stands—you will balance more easily.” She moved away, and Magda said, “Doria, will you try with me? I want to show them—

Doria turned to her, taking the braced stance for practice, and Rafaella reached out and moved her roughly into position.

“Not that way, stupid thing,” she said. “How dull you are, Doria!”

Magda drew a deep breath, and said, carefully, “Rafaella, I think Doria would do better if you were not constantly standing over her and correcting her. She is doing well enough.”

“She is
my
daughter,” Rafaella flared, “and it is not enough for her to do
well enough
! That is all very well for outsiders—” she looked scornfully at Keitha, “who have never been taught to believe in themselves and have to learn here what every girl should learn before she is ten years old! But Doria was brought up among us, and there is no excuse for her to be so stupid and clumsy!”

Doria was struggling with tears again, and Magda bit her lip; Rafaella was so anxious for the girl to excel that she kept Doria constantly on the edge of hysteria. “Rafaella, forgive me, but it was you who asked me to teach Doria, and I believe it is for me to say when she is doing well or not—”

“It is for you to say
nothing
!” Rafaella snapped. “You ignorant hill-woman, it is not even sure that they will let you stay among us, after what you have done!”

Magda fought twin impulses; to turn on her heel and walk out of the Armory, to slap Rafaella harder than she had ever hit anything in her life. She felt again the terrifying surge of fury which had overcome her when she had fought for the house; she knew with her last grip on sanity that if she struck Rafaella now, with the skills she had learned in Alpha’s Intelligence School, she would kill the woman with her bare hands. Shaking, her hands gripped into fists, she walked a little away from them.

Camilla said peacefully, “Rafaella, at Doria’s age a girl can learn better from a stranger than from her mother—”

Rafaella put her arm around Doria and murmured, “Darling, I only want to be proud of you here in our own Guild House, that is all. It is only for your own good—” and Doria burst into tears and clung to Rafaella.