Thendara House (71 page)

It’s too late for that. What was it Peter had said about Carr,
Death legally terminates a citizen’s responsibilities and privileges
. Now he had no more.

“And you’re all Peter has. You and the baby.”

“I don’t belong to him! And neither does my baby!”

“He thinks - “

“And that was why I hated him, that’s why I killed him! He wanted to own me, me and the baby, like things, toys…”

Magda laid a soothing hand over hers. She said, “You mustn’t talk like this.”
Maybe if she acted like this Peter had reason to think something was wrong with her mind. I wonder
-
is it even possible that she could have killed him? But even Keitha reached a point where she no longer wanted to kill her husband, but only to turn her back and walk away from him… and Jaelle has been a Renunciate all her life
…

“No, I wasn’t,” Jaelle whispered. “Do you remember how you cried when you took the Oath? I never did. I - it was just confirming something I’d made my mind up to, a long time ago, and I was happy about it. I - I wasn’t
renouncing
anything, I never knew till I met Peter that there was anything to renounce - I had forgotten so much, blinded myself to so much - “

Suddenly she was crying, tears raining and raining down her face.

“My mother. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face, remember that her hands were chained, till Peter tried to put chains on me… that was the worst of it, he didn’t know what he was doing. But I am a Renunciate, I should have seen it. I should never have let it go so far. Cholayna - ” her voice choked on a sob. “I could have killed her too, if I had been wearing a knife I would have drawn it on her, when she reminded me that I was truly a woman of the Dry Towns, but it is true, true, they don’t chain us, we chain ourselves.” They were still in contact, their minds open to one another.
I thought it was enough to say no to all this, but that is only the beginning. All the women who had come to the Amazons, and fought and cried through the Training Sessions and left, free, having grown into freedom, but she had pretended she had nothing from which she must be freed
. She had never had any idea of the anguished battles they fought. Now she knew why it took beatings, chainings, the threat of a fatal pregnancy, to drive a woman away from her husband. She gripped Magda’s wrist and felt the pain in her own arm but could not let go until Magda gently took her hand and loosened the fingers.

“They don’t chain us. We chain ourselves. Willingly. More than willingly. We crave chains… Isn’t that what it means to be a woman?”

“Of course not,” Magda said, puzzled and shocked. “It means - to be in command of your own life, your own actions - “

“And your children’s lives. I didn’t want this child, I did it to make Peter happy - “

How sick it was, to want to be dominated by him…

“Darling,” Magda said softly, “it surely wasn’t all like that.”

She could see herself through Magda’s eyes in the first flush of passion, the warmth of her first real love.
I was ready for a love affair, it was no more than that. I would have been saner and wiser to take you for my lover, Margali… Do you think he would have risked his life for me even the first time? And you… I knew there was a life between us
…

You know I love you, Jaelle, and now I know how much, but you are sick and exhausted… This is no time for this kind of decision, bredhya
. She remembered Camilla saying something of the same kind to her when she had been burned on the fire-lines. She cradled Jaelle in her arms, rocking her like a small child.

Like my mother. I cannot really remember my mother, but she died to set me free, and I betrayed her by chaining myself again…

Magda rocked her, gently, crooning to her.
So Jaelle is to have a child and she is no more than a child herself. I wish I could bear it for her
. But when Jaelle’s sobbing quieted, she tucked her under the blankets.

“I’ll make you some tea. You need it. Do you think you could eat something?”

Jaelle lay quiet, content to let Magda mother her. She said at last, “Aleki. He must be dead. First the Ghost Wind, and the stampede, and then the flood…”

Magda crawled to the entrance of the cave and pushed the blanket aside. It was raining, and she looked down into the valley. Through Magda’s eyes Jaelle saw the brownish, mud-swollen torrent still filling the canyon, dead trees floating, and a dead, bloated chervine, belly up and legs sticking straight toward the sky, rolling past.

“He could have found a cave before the flood started,” Magda said, “Let’s not give up hope yet. There are a lot of caves up along here.”

Jaelle surprised herself by saying, “I think I would know if he was dead.” At one time, during the
kireseth
madness, she had reached his mind. After that, surely she would have felt him die if he had died.

Magda brought her the tea and she sat up to drink it. She crawled to the door of the cave and looked down at the flood-swollen valley. She said prosaically “Thanks to the Goddess! I brought ten days’ trail food; it’s going to be some time before we can get out of here.”

Magda felt her forehead. “You aren’t fit to ride anyway; go back and lie down,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do so you may as well rest. That kind of hard riding can’t have been good for you at this stage of pregnancy. I don’t care what Rafaella is supposed to have done, you’re probably not as strong as she is, and all this can’t have been good for you…”

I never wanted this baby! It would be better if it never were born. Knowing I murdered her father
-

And she believes that. That kind of obsession
-
she could worry herself into a miscarriage
.

All the better if I did
! The flood of guilt and misery was so great that Magda came and pushed her gently back on the blanket. “The best thing you can do is to rest, and not worry.”

But when Jaelle had fallen again into an uneasy, nightmare-ridden sleep, Magda went again to the cave mouth and sat there, watching the endless rain swelling the torrent in the canyon. They could be there for days, a tenday. No one knew they were there. She did not like the feverish look in Jaelle’s eyes, the burning, almost delirious intensity of her thoughts. She was taking it for granted now that she would share Jaelle’s thoughts if there was close contact between them. Well, Lady Rohana had told her once that she had potentially strong
laran
, and now she knew that Camilla had confirmed it, in her own way, even managing to keep it barriered for her for a long time. Camilla’s intentions had been good - in fact, she had done it out of the purest love - but it meant she had had no chance to learn to control it and to grow strong in its use. And now something had intensified it. Contact with Jaelle? Exposure to the
kireseth
resin, strongly psychedelic as it was?

However it had happened, it
had
happened and now she was confronted with it, with an enormous overload of new sensory data that her mind had not yet learned to process. It seemed that she saw all the way around her, as if she had eyes not only in the back of her head but in her scalp too and at several places on her body, so that she saw the back walls of the cave as well as the flooded canyon below her, the small rodents scurrying in the back walls, nocturnal mammals half hibernating in nests of sticks hanging from the ceiling. She could feel Jaelle’s body as it were embedded in her own extended senses - was this what it was like to be pregnant, feeling an
other
within yourself? She could feel pain slumbering somewhere inside Jaelle ready to waken. Reaching deeper, she could feel the sleeping consciousness at a deeper level where the baby curled and sheltered within her womb, drowsing, but aware…

I never wanted a child. Was it only that I did not want Peter’s child? I thought I did, but somewhere within me I knew I did not. And now I know that what I would feel for a child is what I feel for Jaelle, and more, and I shall never be happy now until I have a child
. And that made her smile to herself, almost sadly,
for now I am certain that I am a lover of women, and it is not very likely that I shall manage to get pregnant that way. That is the only disadvantage I can think of. Maybe I should have had a baby before I decided that
. But she laughed inside herself, knowing that when she left the Guild House she had left that kind of self-definition behind her forever.
No, I do not call myself a lover of women. There are women that I love, that is all, but what may happen in the future
-
well, I will fly that falcon when her wings are grown
. She wondered why, in spite of their desperate situation, alone, isolated by flood, with Jaelle sick, perhaps desperately sick and perhaps insane, she felt such flooding happiness, as if she and Jaelle and the child were all one with something greater than themselves, something that beat through all the living things around them. Sky and water and falling rain and rushing torrent, trees standing to bathe their leaves in the rain, the earth opening to the flood like a woman to a lover’s touch, even the little beasts burrowing in the cave and the tiny bugs in the straw were part of it. Was she still a little drugged with resin of
kireseth
? No, this was something else. She supposed if she were a religious person she would call it an awareness of God, a knowledge that everything around her had life and that she was part of it. Her love for Camilla, her intense love for Jaelle, the passion she had shared with Peter, her brief tenderness for Monty, even the sympathy she had felt dancing with Darrell, son of Darnak, even the way she had mothered old Coordinator Montray, the pain she had shared with Byrna giving birth, her own fear on the trail - all these things came together as if, for one moment, she saw her whole life pure and whole. Even as she was aware of it she knew it was beginning to fade, and she knew she must not fight to keep it, for then she would retain only the struggle. She must let it go. But it would be part of her forever.

She built up the fire, then went and lay down beside Jaelle. She, too, was still weary from the long ride, and she must build up her strength for the time when they could get out of here. She hoped Jaelle would be able to ride.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Four more times night settled down over the cave on the canyon wall; four more dawns rose red, and on the third dawn, when the Bloody Sun rose over the canyons, the rain had stopped and by that night the water had begun to go down. Magda, leading the horses out to graze on the slope, felt relieved, for though they had enough food, the grain she had brought for the horses was beginning to fail. But it would be a considerable time before the canyon was passable, and they were running short of dry wood for fires. Resin-trees would burn, even when wet, but not very well.

Jaelle was sitting up when she came back, and Magda realized that she was dreadfully worried about her. She was rational most of the time now, but she clung to her obsession that she had murdered Peter and Magda would not talk with her about it. Jaelle believed it; that was all there was to it. Magda firmly refused to believe it.

And the short Midsummer season was waning; soon they would need fire to survive. They must be ready to ride out as soon as the canyon waters went down enough so that they could get out even by swimming the horses, and for that Jaelle must be stronger. The fever hung on, and every night she woke screaming from nightmares, so that Magda had to hold and soothe her for a long time before she knew where she was; all her forgotten Dry-Town childhood seemed to be coming back to her, and again and again she woke screaming, believing herself in chains. Magda shared enough of these nightmares, with her new awareness of Jaelle, so that she insisted that they should sleep at opposite ends of the cave.

“We’re simply picking up each other’s nightmares and reinforcing them,” she said, “and we each have enough of our own, I’d think.” But it was really too cold and they did not have enough blankets for that, so she slept beside Jaelle, and when the other woman woke shrieking, she would hold her and soothe her back to sleep. Magda was always grateful to see the cave begin to lighten. But during the day, though Jaelle was feverish and in pain - Magda wondered if she had caught some illness on the trail - she was rational enough.
Except for that damned delusion about Peter. Or is it a delusion
?