Thendara House

Thendara House

By
MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

ELF digital back-up edition 1.0

THE OATH OF THE FREE AMAZONS

From this day forth, I renounce the right to marry save as a freemate. No man shall bind me
di catenas
and I will dwell in no man’s household as a
barragana
.

I swear that I am prepared to defend myself by force if I am attacked by force, and that I shall turn to no man for protection.

From this day forth I swear I shall never again be known by the name of any man, be he father, guardian, lover or husband, but simply and solely as the daughter of my mother.

From this day forth I swear I will give myself to no man save in my own time and season and of my own free will, at my own desire; I will never earn my bread as the object of any man’s lust.

From this day forth I swear I will bear no child to any man save for my own pleasure and at my own time and choice; I will bear no child to any man for house or heritage, clan or inheritance, pnde or posterity; I swear that I alone will determine rearing and fosterage of any child I bear, without regard to any man’s place, position or pride.

From this day forth I renounce allegiance to any family, clan, household, warden or liege lord, and take oath that I owe allegiance only to the laws of the land as a free citizen must, to the kingdom, the crown and the Gods.

I shall appeal to no man as of right, for protection, support or Succor: but shall owe allegiance only to my oath-mother, to my sisters in the Guild and to my employer for the season of my employment.

And I further swear that the members of the Guild of Free Amazons shall be to me, each and every one, as my mother, my sister or my daughter, born of one blood with me, and that no woman sealed by oath to the Guild shall appeal to me in vain.

From this moment, I swear to obey all the laws of the Guild of Free Amazons and any lawful command of my oath-mother, the Guild members or my elected leader for the season of my employment. And if I betray any secret of the Guild, or prove false to my oath, then I shall submit myself to the Guild-mothers for such discipline as they shall choose; and if I fail, then may every woman’s hand turn against me, let them slay me like an animal and consign my body unburied to corruption and my soul to the mercy of the Goddess.

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY in DAW Books:

Darkover Landfall

The Spell Sword

The Heritage of Hastur

The Shattered Chain

The Forbidden Tower

Stormqueen!

Two to Conquer

Hawkmistress!

Hunters of the Red Moon

Sharra’s Exile

With The Friends of Darkover
.

Sword of Chaos

The Keeper’s Price

With Paul Edwin Zimmer

The Survivors

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

COPYRIGHT ©, 1983, BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

COVER ART BY HANNAH M G SHAPERO.

FIRST PRINTING, SEPTEMBER 1983

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Shortly after I completed the novel
The Shattered Chain
, I began writing, for my own amusement, the story of Magda in the Amazon Guild House. At that time Jacqueline Lichtenberg and I were corresponding regularly and frequently, and she suggested that I should also write the story of Jaelle among the Terrans. I said I didn’t feel qualified just then to do so, but that
she
could, if she wished. So, for the fun of it, we wrote about half a dozen chapters each, passing them back and forth between us and discussing them, with an eye to eventual professional collaboration. However, we were both busy with other projects, far from Darkover, and Jacqueline’s career was taking off in a far different direction. Also, it turned out, we had quite different ideas about where the story was going, and before long we discovered that we were pulling in opposite directions, and, with suitable expressions of regret and mutual esteem, abandoned this particular collaboration; she went back to her own “Sime” and “Molt Brother” seria - if that is the plural of series - and I to write other Darkover and non-Darkover novels, feeling that the botched collaboration was not redeemable, and tossing it into my bottom file drawer with other projects on what I believed would be permanent “hold.”

Years later, taking up this collaboration, although I have rewritten almost everything Jacqueline did on it - for our writing styles and themes are very different - I note that my concept of the character of Jaelle has nevertheless been broadened and strengthened by her input on the chapters in which she had the first touch. Although this is not a collaboration, I am still greatly indebted to Jacqueline for allowing me to see a character of my own through her eyes. As she has graciously acknowledged my part in what I consider her best book.
Unto Zeor, Forever
, so I must acknowledge her part in this book of mine.

- - MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

Part One:
CONFLICTING OATHS

CHAPTER ONE

Magdalen Lorne

Light feathers of snow were falling overhead; but toward the east there was a break in the clouds where the dull reddish light of Cottman IV - the sun of Darkover, called the Bloody Sun by the Terran Empire - could be seen dimly through cloud, like a great bloodshot eye.

Magdalen Lorne shivered a little as she walked slowly up the approach to the Terran HQ. She was in Darkovan dress, so she had to show her indent cards to the Spaceforce people at the gates; but one of them knew her by sight.

“It’s all right, Miss Lorne. You’ll have to go over to the new building, though.”

“They finally finished the new quarters for Intelligence?”

The uniformed man nodded.

“That’s right. And the new Chief came in from Alpha Centaurus the other day - have you met her yet?”

This was news to Magda. Darkover was a Closed Planet, Class B, which meant Terrans were - officially, at least - restricted to certain Treaty Zones and Trade Cities. There was no official Intelligence Service, except for a small office in Records and Communications, working directly out of the Coordinator’s office.

It’s about time they opened a branch of Intelligence here. They could do with a Department of Alien Anthropology, too
. Then Magda wondered what it would mean to her own somewhat irregular status. She had been born on Darkover, in Caer Donn, where the Terrans had built their first spaceport before shifting to the new Empire Headquarters here in Thendara. She had been reared among Darkovans, before the new policy of standardization of Spaceport buildings to Empire-normal yellow lights - a policy making little or no provision for the red sun of Darkover and the fierce cold of the climate. This, of course, made sense for Empire personnel stationed on ordinary Empire planets, who seldom stayed in one post more than a year or so and did not need to acclimatize themselves; but conditions on Darkover were, to say the least, unusual for an Empire planet.

Magda’s parents had been linguists who had spent much of their lives in Caer Donn; she had grown up more Darkovan than Terran, one of only three or four people who spoke the language like a native and were capable of doing undercover research into customs and language. She had never been away from Darkover except for three years of schooling in the Empire’s Intelligence School on Alpha Colony; then she had accepted a position in Communications as a matter of course. But what had been, to her superiors, only convenient disguise, fitting her for research and undercover work on the planet of her birth, had become to Magda her deepest self.

And it is to that Darkovan self, Margali, not Magda, that I must now be true. And not just Margali, but Margali n’ha Ysabet. Renunciate of the Comhi-Letzii, what the Terrans would call Free Amazon. That is what I am now and must be henceforth
, men dia pre’zhiuro… Magda whispered to herself the first words of the Renunciate’s Oath, and shivered. It would not be easy. But as she had sworn, so would she do. To a Terran, an oath given under duress was not binding.
Darkovan, the Oath binds me without question, the very thought of escaping it dishonorable
.

She wrenched her thoughts from that endless loop in her mind.
A new section for Intelligence
, he had said,
and a new Chief
. Probably, Magda thought with a resigned shrug, someone who knew considerably less about the job than she did herself. She, and her ex-husband, Peter Haldane, had both been born here, were naturally bilingual, knew and accepted the customs as their own. But that was not the way the Empire did things.

The new Intelligence Office was in a tall skyscraper, still shining with newness, high above the Port. By the Terra-normal yellow lights, too bright for Magda’s eyes, she saw a woman standing; a woman she knew, or had once known, very well.

Cholayna Ares was taller than Magda, brown-skinned, with white hair - Magda had never known whether it was prematurely grayed or whether it had always been naturally silver-white, for her face was, and had always been, unusually young. She smiled and reached out in a welcoming gesture, and Magda took her old teacher’s hand.

“It’s hard to imagine you’d give up the Training School,” Magda said “Certainly not to come here - “

“Oh, I didn’t exactly give it up.” Cholayna Ares laughed. “There was the usual sort of bureaucratic hassle - each group tried to get me on their side, and I said a plague on both their houses, and put in for transfer. So I wound up - here. Not a popular post, so no competition for getting it. I remembered that you came from here, and you liked it. Not many people have a chance of building the Intelligence Service up out of nothing on a Class B planet. And with you and Peter Haldane - didn’t I hear once that you’d married him?”

“The marriage broke up last year,” Magda said. “The usual sort of thing.” She warded her former teacher’s look of curious sympathy away with a hard shrug. “The only problem it created was that they didn’t send us out in the field together any more.”

“If there was no Intelligence Service here, what were you doing in the field?”

“We worked out of Communications,” Magda said. “Language research; at one time they had me recording jokes and idioms from the marketplace, just a way of keeping up with language and current slang, so people who
did
have to go into the field wouldn’t make stupid mistakes.”

“And so, my first day on the job, you come up to greet me and make me feel welcome?” Cholayna asked. “Sit down - tell me all about this place. It’s kind of you, Magda. I always knew you’d make a good career in Intelligence.”

Magda lowered her eyes. “That wasn’t the idea - I hadn’t been told you were here.” She decided the only way to get it said was to say it. “I came here to resign.”

Cholayna’s dark eyes showed the dismay she felt.