Thendara House (41 page)

Janetta put her head in at the door and said, “Margali, Keitha, Mother Lauria wants you both down in the hall.”

Magda gratefully bundled her sewing into an untidy ball and thrust it into the wooden cubbyhole bearing her name. Keitha stopped to fold her work more neatly, but Magda heard her steps behind her on the stairs and they ran down side by side.

Camilla was there, dressed for riding, and Rafaella and Felicia, with a little group of women Magda did not know; but on their sleeves they bore the red slashmark of Neskaya Guild House.

“Margali, Keitha, are you weary of being housebound? Are you willing to put yourself in some danger? There is fire in the Kilghard Hills, on Alton lands; the Guild women are not required by law to go, but we are permitted to share this obligation, when all able-bodied men are required to go. There is no law which says you
must
go,” she repeated carefully, “but you may go if you will.”

“I will go,” Magda said, and Keitha added more timidly, “I would be glad to go, but I do not know what use I should be.”

“Leave that to us,” said one of the strange women, “if you cannot fight the fire, you can help around the camp, but we can use every willing pair of hands.”

Mother Lauria looked at them one after the other, then said, “Good; I will send you, then.” Magda realized that they had in effect been ordered to go; the housebound time required that they remain indoors unless specifically ordered to go by a Guild Mother.

“You must learn to bear yourself properly among men, and to work with them as one of themselves, not with a woman’s special privilege. You are in the charge of Camilla and Rafaella; you are to obey them implicitly, and to speak to no one, and especially to no man, without their permission. Is that understood? Good; go and dress yourselves for riding, and wear your warmest clothes and cloaks, and strongest boots. Fetch clean linen for four days, and be down here before the clock strikes again.”

As she made ready to ride, and rolled her clean underlinen in the small canvas bag Rafaella had given her, Magda was shaking with excitement. She was a little frightened, too; but, she reminded herself, she was stronger than many men required by law to meet this obligation.
And I am a Renunciate
.

As they saddled their horses, Rafaella said quietly to Keitha and Magda, “Some of the men with whom we will travel will try to lure you into conversation; or they will make rude and suggestive remarks. Whatever they say to you, you may not reply to them, not a single word; pretend if you wish that you are deaf and dumb. If they lay hands upon you, you may defend yourself, but you must accustom yourself to the fact that they resent us, and learn to live with it, since there’s no helping it.”

The detachment of men waiting at the City gates was an ill-assorted crew. At their head were three dozen young Guardsmen in uniform, commanded by a smart young officer not yet out of his teens.

“Valentine Aillard,
para servirte, mestra
,” he said, giving Rafaella a cool and courteous nod. “Your women are welcome; we can use every pair of hands. Have you rations and tools?”

“They are on our pack-animals there,” Rafaella said, and gestured to the women to fall into line. The polite young officer had evidently made it clear to his Guardsmen how they were to behave, for, though the Guardsmen looked at them with some curiosity, there were no overt signs of resentment. It was otherwise with the other men, traveling to the fire-lines with the guardsmen but all too obviously not under military discipline. There were soft whistles, coos intended to attract attention, and leers; and as they took their place in the line, a murmured obscene phrase or two. Magda ignored them; Keitha was as red as a bellflower. She drew her hood over her head, and Magda thought she was crying under its shelter. The women from Neskaya House, all of whom were in their forties or older, rode by the men without a glance their way, while Camilla - Magda remembered that at one time she had been a mercenary soldier - rode ahead with the Guardsmen, chatting casually with them.

Keitha whispered, “Why is she allowed to speak with them when we are not?”

“Probably because they do not yet trust us to know how to behave,” Magda whispered back. “Do you
want
to talk with them?”

“No,” Keitha whispered vehemently. “But it seems to me strange that she will talk and be friendly with the same men who are treating us so badly.”

That had occurred to Magda too, but she supposed Camilla, who had been a Renunciate for many years, had managed somehow to make the distinction between men who accepted her as one of themselves and those who treated her as a woman to be cajoled. In any case Camilla was a law to herself.

All afternoon they rode, and well into the night; finally the officer at the head of the column called a halt and they camped in a meadow; the Amazons cooked over their own fire, and later laid their blankets in a circle. Rafaella said, “Keitha, you will sleep with me, and Margali, you with Camilla. Whenever we are among men this way, we always sleep two and two; just to make it abundantly clear to any men that we are not seeking company. And if anyone does get the wrong idea, you can protect one another.”

Magda could see the sense in this, although she was sure that the men around the other fire, if they did not get the idea that the women wanted their company, were sure to get another idea which might be almost equally mistaken. She reminded herself sternly that it was none of their business what the men thought. Still, it made her self-conscious when she spread her blankets with Camilla’s.

Rafaella asked one of the women from Naskaya, “Where is my daughter? I had hoped to see Doria with you.”

“I told her she could come if she wished,” the woman said, “and she was as eager to get out of the house as any of us; but it was the first day of her cycles, and hard work and hard riding at such a time are no pleasure, I could see she was really feeling ill, so I did not try to persuade her to go.”

Rafaella said angrily, “I do not like to think of my daughter shirking! I have ridden and worked hard when I was seven moons pregnant, and she let that stop her?”

The other woman shrugged. She said, “There is no law to say that all women must react alike to their bodies; because you do not mind hard work, would you force it on her? I am sure, if the fire was near and we really needed every available hand, she would have been right beside us - she does not strike me as lazy or slothful. There were enough of us who were willing and even eager to come. Don’t worry over her, Rafi; she is out of your hands now. If she really shows any sign of slacking - and so far I have seen no sign of it - let the Neskaya Guild Mothers deal with her.”

Rafaella sighed and said, “I suppose you are right,” and was silent. After a time the other woman said gently, “I think perhaps the children of Renunciates have a harder time than those who come to us from the outside world. We expect so much more of them, don’t we?” and Magda saw the strange woman stroke Rafaella’s hair gently. “I have a daughter who chose to leave the Guild and marry. She is happy, she has two children, and her husband treats her as well as even I could wish, but I still feel I failed with her. At least your daughter has taken oath, my sister, and is no man’s servant or slave.”

Camilla murmured into Magda’s ear, “And if I had said that to Rafaella, she would have slapped me. I am glad that someone else thought to do so.” She stood up and called the women around the fire. “Before we sleep,” she said, “Annelys will give you some instructions in firefighting.” Annelys was the woman from Neskaya Guild House; she gathered the women around their fire and gave them some rudimentary instructions about the theory of firefighting, what to do under various conditions, elementary safety precautions; although she emphasized that most of them would be put to doing ordinary manual work on the fire line and would not need to know what was going on, but only obey instructions precisely. Around the other fire, Magda could hear one of the young officers telling the men almost the same things; his voice was mostly a sound with no words distinguishable but now and then a chance silence or a gust of wind their way would bring them a few words.

“If it were only the Guardsmen,” Camilla murmured - she was sitting between Magda and Rafaella - “we would all work together and camp together too. But some of these men are riffraff and we do not trust them. After a time you will learn which men can be trusted and which cannot. Always err on the side of caution. You should know that.”

Annelys heard her and said, “I am not so sure that any men can be trusted completely. They are not when I am in charge of any work details of Renunciates, believe me, Camilla.”

Camilla shrugged. “Maybe I am more trusting than you. Or perhaps it is only that I have nothing more to lose, and any man who lays a hand on me will draw back a bleeding stump - and knows it perfectly well!”

Annelys yawned. “Well, today was a long hard day, and tomorrow will be longer and harder still. Let us sleep, my sisters,” she said, and bent to cover the fire. Magda was tired and sore from riding, and the ground was hard beneath the thin blankets, but even as she told herself that she could not possibly sleep under such conditions, she drifted off. She woke once in the night, seeing the campfire like a sullen red eye, still smoldering; Camilla had moved close to her, and Magda put her arms around the woman, glad of the warmth, for she was cold. Camilla murmured something drowsy, shifted her weight in her sleep, and Magda snuggled close; Camilla kissed her lightly and Magda felt her drift off into deep sleep again.

But Magda felt troubled. As she had done all too often in the last few weeks, she found herself examining her thoughts closely.

Jaelle. Exactly what had happened between them? They had wakened in one another’s arms, out of a shared dream, the
laran
she had not known she possessed . . and Jaelle had pulled her down and kissed her, not the casual light kiss she could have taken for granted, the offhand sleepy kiss Camilla had just given her, but a real kiss, the kiss of lovers, with an intensely sensual awareness which frightened Magda. Like many women whose experience has been entirely conventional, she found it hard even to imagine that she could respond to such a thing. Jaelle had not been angry… but Magda had run away. Now, close to Camilla, she tried again to test her own feelings. Camilla, too, had once asked this of her, and Magda had refused her but she no longer knew why.

Is this what I want, then, is this why my marriage failed, because at heart I am a lover of women…
? She felt troubled, alien to herself. Finally, telling herself firmly that hard work awaited her tomorrow, she managed to drift off into uneasy dreams.

Before noon the next day they began to smell and hear the fire, a roaring, a dull acridness in the air, lurid red against the sky. Along the hillside a row of grimy forms, men and boys, stretched out with hoes and rakes, scraping a firebreak in the soil; when they reached the camp, they found others felling trees within the firebreak.

Magda and Felicia were put to scraping firebreak-lines with the men; Keitha, they judged, was not strong enough to work on the lines, so they sent her to the fire-camp where women were cooking and hauling water. Camilla was sent to the tree-felling party with Annelys and some of the others.

Magda could not, where she was working, even see the fire, but she could hear it; the grubby hoe in her hands scraped blisters, even through her gloves, and her back began to ache before she had been at the work for an hour, but she kept on. After an hour or so, some men brought a pail of water along, and she straightened and drank in her turn. The man beside her on the line looked at her for the first time, her smudged face and filthy hands, the rough riding clothes, and said, “Zandru’s hells, it’s a girl! What are you doing here,
mestra
?”

“The same thing you are doing, man - fighting a fire,” Magda said before she remembered that she had been ordered not to speak to any man, good or bad, and lowered her head, draining the cup and returning it to the old man who was carrying the water bucket. The old man said, “What is a nice girl like you doing out here among all the men, girlie? Shouldn’t you be back at the camp, where my wife and daughters are?” But Magda shoved the cup into his hand and picked up her hoe, bending to grub away at the line, and after a time the man, grumbling, moved on to offer his cup to the next man.

No one had bothered to explain to Magda what they were doing, but Annelys’s explanation had told her a little, and she supposed that the idea was to scrape away everything burnable beyond a certain distance, so the line was barren of anything which could support the fire. At dusk they were relieved by another party, Magda was almost too weary to stand; her hands were blistered and her back felt as if it would never stop hurting.