The Saga of the Renunciates (59 page)

“In the Terran Zone, a woman is not her freemate’s property, not in law,” Jaelle said, “but there is something in a man which seems to drive him to
possess
… I never knew this existed before.” She shook her head, and her hair, the color of a new-minted copper coin, cascaded around her shoulders and her face, gleaming in the firelight. “In intimacy—the mind—it is raw—I don’t know—” she said half aloud, running her fingers through her hair, shaking it into place with a gesture of pride and defiance.

And suddenly it seemed Jaelle was at one end of the room and all her sisters were at the far end; Magda knew it had never been there before between Jaelle and her sisters, but it was there, a gulf wider than the abysses between the stars; she thought,
I could get up now and proclaim myself a Terran and I would be less alien than Jaelle at this moment
. Jaelle was far away, alien, alone, with nothing save her pride and her flaming hair and the word,
Comyn
, which echoed softly in Magda’s mind, echoed from all over the room.
Comyn
. The very word was like a solid wall which separated Jaelle from the only family she had ever known.

They had known of her blood, of course, knew that Lady Rohana was her close kinswoman; but never in all these years had Jaelle spoken any word or given any hint that she cared for her Comyn blood; her red hair seemed no more than an accident of birth. Now it was in the room with them, and Magda, looking at the faces which were suddenly those of strangers—and she knew that she saw them through Jaelle’s eyes—sensed fear; a wary fear reserved for gods, not men; for Comyn, aliens, outsiders, rulers…

For this moment, Jaelle was an outsider, not a cherished sister, and they all knew it. Trying to break that frightening silence, Magda turned and took Jaelle’s hand in her own. She said, “I think it is a game they like to play with us; possession. They like to think they own us; they know they do not and it makes them insecure. Women do not—do not suffer so much from separation as men do. Perhaps we should not blame them so much for trying to pretend they own us. It is their nature. They have nothing else.”

“Their nature!” Felicia spoke from the shadows, her eyes still swollen, her voice husky. “Are we not to blame them for possessiveness, when I have seen my son torn from me, sobbing, screaming my name—” she turned on Lauria, in shaking anger. “Their nature! Does their nature demand that they shall have command of the world, of their women and their sons, that they and they alone have a right to immortality through their children? What kind of world have they built, where a woman must give up her sons, to be taught to fight and kill as a sign of manliness, never to weep, never to show fear, to instill into his nature the need to
possess
… to possess his women and his children, to make him into the kind of man from which I fled—is it not in my nature, too, to desire my sons? And I am denied this here among you—” She put her face in her hands and began to cry again, heartbrokenly.

Janetta flared, “Would you have your sons grow up among us, then, to turn on us and try to possess us when they are grown?”

Rafaella snarled, “There should be a better way than to return them to that very world, to be made into the kind of men we hate! Perhaps, if they were reared among us they would be different—”

“They would still grow to be
men
,” Janetta cried, “and they do not belong here in the Guild House!”

Mother Lauria raised her hands, trying to impose silence, but the clamor grew. Magda was thinking, almost in despair, not knowing whether the thoughts were hers or another’s,
We give up our sons because that is all men want of us, perhaps what they are trying to do here is hopeless and unnatural
…

Jaelle said into a sudden silence, “I have thought—sometimes—I would like to have a child. I have—have thought some of you foolish for allowing yourselves to become pregnant.” She folded her hands in her lap to keep from wringing them. “But how do you know? The Oath says—we must bear children only in our own time and season. But how do you—how do you
know
whether it is your own wish, or—or only a wish to please
him
?”

“If you had borne two or three children,” Keitha said with great bitterness, “you would know.”

“Would you?” Rafaella asked, and Magda felt the confusion and dismay. Rafaella had borne sons and given them up, and she was torn apart with Felicia’s misery…
how do I know all this
?

Cloris said, “Do we not spend all our time here learning to know our own minds and our own wishes from what men expect of us?”

“No,” Jaelle said. “There’s no way for ordinary minds to know, they can teach that only in the Towers—oh, there’s no talking to you, you don’t even have
laran
, how can you know?” And suddenly Magda realized again that Jaelle had not said this aloud, that she had flung no more at Cloris than a strangled “No—” and stopped, shaking. Marisela leaned over and took Jaelle’s hand, a firm clasp that silenced the red-haired woman. Magda too was held silent, hardly hearing what Mother Lauria was saying:

“You have given us another important thing to consider; how do we know when we do our own will, or the will of another whose approval is important to us?” She went on talking, but Magda was no longer listening, and heard only snatches of the rest of the training session. One of the women said “… if we all chose never to bear children, and if all women were as we were, then should we be as extinct as the
chieri
, the desire of a woman to bear is as inborn as the desire of a man to engender,” and Janetta said in protest, “That is not a true desire from within us, it is a desire we have been told we must have! I have never known a man, I never shall; I do not feel it is right that a Renunciate should renounce men and their world and their property, and continue to lie with men, to love them, to bear them children for whom we must take these wretched compromises! If we have given up men’s rule, cannot we give up the power over men which comes from lying with them?”

Marisela asked gently, “Would you have us all lovers of women, Janetta, as some men say we are?”

“And why not? At least I will never bear a child to be snatched away into the world I have renounced and made into the kind of man I hate!”

“Yet I would not want to live in a house without children,” someone said. “Life would be worse without such as Doria, and Jaelle who was fostered among us—and the house is empty— Magda could feel Felicia’s awful grief for her child, and Marisela’s memory of Byrna’s baby…

Mother Lauria said gently, “The wish for children is after all a natural desire, and cannot be dismissed as something born of man’s pride alone. That can be destroyed quickly enough by ill treatment, sometimes even in men it can be destroyed. There are men with no desire for women, and I think that sad, too. This is part of what we share with men, too; the wish for children, our immortality, companions for our old age, or even, like our little Doria, little ones to cherish and care for and watch them growing to womanhood among us—”

“And for that selfish desire,” Janetta argued, “you would bear a child into a world which enslaves women and corrupts men to go on enslaving them?”

Magda found a curious picture floating in her mind; a woman, beautiful, queenly… chained, hung about with heavy chains that hindered her, weighed her down… the image shattered; was she hallucinating again?

“… but you had a choice, Felicia; you could have kept your son, by living outside the House, or even with your son’s father.”

“It seemed I could not bear either choice,” Felicia said, shaking, “I could not bear to leave my sisters. Yet no woman can teach a man to live as a man. A man who could live by our code would be an effeminate, never at ease anywhere—I would not condemn my son to such a fate.”

“Yet if we despise the way men live,” said Mother Lauria, “Is it right to allow them to bring up our sons to be more of that kind of men?”

Keitha said, “I would prefer a man to be effeminate rather than to be masculine at the cost of all decency and consideration.”

Mother Lauria said quietly, “Some day, perhaps, there may be another answer for us. But the world will go as it will, not as you or I will have it. May the Goddess grant that some changes come in our lifetime; yet we, who are changing the world, will always suffer for it. I do not think your suffering is wasted—nor Keitha’s, nor Camilla’s, nor Byrna’s—every one of us is suffering to show the men of the Domains that perhaps we would rather suffer than live by their rules. And yet if men and women are to live forever barricaded from another, how then shall the human race go on?”

Marisela said slyly, “Perhaps as they say the Terrans do it—with machines,” and the room broke up into an uproar of laughter; even Mother Lauria laughed. Only Magda did not laugh; she was not intending to tell Mother Lauria about the worlds where that was actually the normal procedure. The woman began unwinding stiffened legs, rubbing cold hands over the fire; they clustered in small groups, talking softly, while some of the others went to the kitchen, bringing back a huge kettle of hot cider and plates of cakes and sweets. Magda dipped up a cup of the hot, spicy drink and stood by the fire, separated from the others. Camilla, Rafaella and Jaelle were clustered near the fire; the moment of alienation Magda had seen, when Jaelle seemed suddenly apart from all of them, was gone as if it had never been. Magda wondered if she had imagined it. Mother Lauria came, leading Doria by the hand, and gestured Rafaella away, and Jaelle, looking up, signalled Magda to join them. She took up a plate of the crisp little fried cakes which always made their appearance on these nights, and went over to Jaelle.

“Where is Camilla?”

“She went to speak with Keitha,” Jaelle said. “That is a bad situation, Margali; Camilla is her oath-mother, there should not be so much hostility between them.”

“I cannot imagine what has caused it,” said Mother Lauria, joining them, with Rafaella and Doria at her side. “I thought you would like to know, we have settled it that Doria shall go to Neskaya for her training—”

Fine
, Magda thought,
one more friend gone
! Doria hugged Magda shyly.

“I’ll miss you, Margali, and Keitha,—I don’t want to go away,” she said tearfully. “This is my home, but—but—”

“But everyone leaves her home for training, and you may not be different,” Jaelle said, “Remember, Kindra made me spend half a year with Lady Rohana at Ardais, so that I might know for certain what the life was, that I was renouncing—so that no one could say I had renounced it without a clear idea of the choice I was making. At least you, Doria, are going to another Guild House. I know many of the women in Neskaya—you will find many friends there, and they are all your sisters, after all.”

Behind her, Magda heard Rafaella ask, “But what can Keitha possibly have against Camilla? Surely not just that she is an
emmasca
, neutered—she could not possibly be as cruel or bigoted as that, could she?”

“I do not think it is only that,” said Jaelle. “Camilla is a lover of women; she has been kind and affectionate with Keitha, and possibly Keitha has misunderstood her affection—”

Magda’s face burned, though rationally she knew the words were not directed at her, neither woman knew anything about the moment when she had kissed Keitha, in her delirium after being wounded—how could they? And she was sure Camilla had not told either of them of the encounter where she herself had rebuffed Camilla.

“Keitha is a
cristoforo
,” said Rafaella, “and they are as bad as the Terrans on that subject. But Camilla is not the type to press her wishes where she is rebuffed, even gently. Certainly Keitha does not think of Camilla as a danger to her, does she? Margali, you know her as well as anyone here, what does she think?”

“I don’t know what Keitha thinks,” Magda said, “I don’t even know what I think myself. But if Keitha cannot see that Camilla is a good and honorable woman, then it is certainly her loss.”

“But there cannot be hostility between a woman and her oath-mother,” said Rafaella, “it is unnatural and wrong. Something must be done about it!” She hovered with her hand over the plate of sweet cakes, then shook her head, laughing. “I have eaten too many already, I am as greedy as if I were four months pregnant! Jaelle, are you spending the night in the house? You surely can’t go back through the streets of Thendara at this hour, can you? And listen,” she added, pausing, and they could hear the violence of sleet against the windows, the wind that hurled itself incessantly around the corners of the houses in the street.

“I like hearing it,” said Jaelle, though Magda shivered. “In the Terran Zone, we are so insulated from the weather, we never know whether it is snowing or the sun is shining—”

“If you are staying, would you like to sleep in my room? They moved Marisela out because she had to come in and out so often, a midwife’s sleep is like a farmer’s at calving season! And Devra is still in Nevarsin, so there is plenty of room there—

“Yes, and perhaps we can have a few minutes to talk about the business,” Jaelle said. “I think you may need to take a partner, after all, for the next year or two—”

“Jaelle! Are you pregnant, then? I would like to meet that freemate of yours, if he could change your mind about something like that,” Rafaella said, teasing, but Jaelle shook her head She said, “It’s too soon to be sure, Rafi. Believe me, you would be the first one I would confide in, but of course there is always the possibility. In any case I will be with the Terrans for at least a year, I have given my word. There is also—”

“There is also the matter of which women to send to learn their medical techniques,” Mother Lauria said, “and I will try to consult you about that, Rafaella, before we make the final decisions. Perhaps when she finishes her housebound time in Neskaya, Doria might like to go; I was thinking of sending her to Arilinn, for midwife’s training. She has clever hands and she is good with animals, she might be good at that too. But not tonight,” she added, looking around the room, where only a few small groups of women remained, the others having scattered. Three or four were settled down in a corner by the hearth, drinking wine, as if they had decided to make a night of it; two others were absorbed in some kind of card game, Irmelin with two of her helpers was gathering up the used plates and mugs. Mother Lauria said, “I had hoped to bring this up in the meeting, but it went otherwise and I did not want to keep you all too late.