Darkover: First Contact (63 page)

Anya stared at her, round-eyed. Before Carlina’s anger she dropped her head, then got out of her seat, kneeling on the cobblestone floor. “I humbly ask your pardon before us all, my sister. And I sentence myself to a half-day digging out the grass around the stones on the temple pathway, with no noon meal but bread and water. Will this suffice?”

Carlina knelt beside her. She said, “It is too harsh. Eat your proper food, little sister, and I will myself help you in digging the stones when I have done with my duties in the House of the Sick, for I was guilty, too, of losing my temper. But in the name of the Goddess, dear sister, I implore you, let the past be hidden under her mantle, and speak that name never again.”

“Be it so,” said Anya, rising, and she gathered up her porridge bowl and cup, carrying them to the kitchen.

Carlina, following with her own, tried self-consciously to smooth away the frown she could feel between her brows. The sound of the name she had laid aside—forever, she had hoped—had disturbed her more than she wanted to say, aroused emotions long since put aside. She had found peace here, companionship, useful work. Here she was happy. She had not, really, been troubled or frightened when Bard had come here with armed men; she had trusted in Avarra to protect her, and she was confident that the protection would hold true as it had done then. Her sisters would protect her; and the spells they had laid on the waters of the lake.

No, she had not been afraid. Let Bard seize all Asturias, all the Hundred Kingdoms, it was nothing to her, he was gone from her mind and from any meaning he might ever have had for her. She had been a young girl then; now she was a woman, a priestess of Avarra, and she was safe within the walls of her chosen place.

Sister Anya had gone to do the hard work on the stones of the path, which must be done but which could not be assigned to anyone and must wait until such time as someone saw fit to volunteer as penance for a broken rule or some real or fancied imperfection of conduct. Or, occasionally, as an outlet for superfluous energies. Carlina knew that she would welcome the hard physical work of pulling out the tightly knotted grass which was shifting the stones of the path, losing her anxieties in the strenuous and sweaty task of lifting and changing the stones and clearing the grass and thorns. But she was not yet free to seek that mind-soothing monotony; it was her day to tend the sick. She took off the pinafore and towel, laid her crockery for the young novices to wash, and went to her allotted work.

In the years since she had come to the Island of Silence, she had learned much of healing, and now was ranked as one of the most skillful healer-priestesses of the second rank. One day, she knew, she would be among the best, those entrusted with the training of others. It was only her youth which kept her, now, from that post. This was not vanity, it was merely a realistic awareness of the skills she had learned since she had come here, skills of which she had had no idea at home in Asturias, for no one at the court had ever troubled to coax them forth and teach their use.

First there was the minor routine of every day. A novice had burned her hand on the porridge kettle. Carlina dressed the burn with oil and gauze and gave her a little lecture about being mindful of what she was doing when she handled hot things. “Meditation is all very well,” she said severely, “but when you are handling hot vessels over the fire, that is not the time for prayerful contemplation. Your body belongs to the Goddess; it is your business to care for it as her property. Do you understand, Lori?” She brewed tea for one of the Mothers who suffered from headache and a young novice who was suffering from cramps, went to pay a visit to one of the very old priestesses who was slipping away mindlessly into a calm, painless death—she could do little for her except to stroke her hand, for the old woman could no longer see or recognize her—and gave some liniment to a priestess who worked in the dairy and had been stepped on by the clumsy foot of a dairy animal.

“Rub it with this, sister, and in future remember, the beast is too foolish to keep from stepping on your foot, so you must be sensible enough to keep your feet out of her way. And do not go to the dairy again for a day or two. Mother Allida will probably die today; you may sit by her and hold her hand and speak to her if she seems restless. She may grow lucid if the end is near. If she should, send at once for Mother Ellinen.”

Then she went to the Stranger’s House, where, twice in a tenday, she had been given the task of first seeing the sick who came to ask help of the priestesses of Avarra, usually after the village healer-women had failed to help them.

Three women sat silently on a bench. She beckoned the first into a small inner room.

“In the name of the Mother Avarra, how may I help you, my sister?”

“In the name of Avarra,” said the woman—she was a small, pretty, rather faded-looking woman—“I have been married for seven years and have never once conceived a child. My husband loves me, and he would have accepted this as the will of the gods, but his mother and father—we live on their land—have threatened to make him divorce me and take a fertile wife. I—I—” she broke down, stammering. “I have offered to foster and adopt any child he might father by another woman, but his family want him married to a woman who will give him many children. And I—I love him,” she said, and was silent.

Carlina asked quietly, “Do you truly want children? Or do you look on them as your duty to your husband, a way to keep his love and attention?”

“Both,” said the woman, furtively wiping her eyes on the edge of her veil. Carlina, her
laran
awareness tuned high enough to hear the overtones in the answer, could
feel
the woman’s sincerity as she said, weeping, “I told him that I would foster his sons by any other woman he chose. We have his sister’s baby to foster, and I have found that I love little children.... I see the other women with their children at their breasts and I want my own, oh, I want my own. You who are vowed to chastity, you can’t know what it is like to see other women with their babies and know you will never have one of your own—I have my fosterling to love, but I want to bear one too, and I want to stay with Mikhail. . . .”

Carlina considered for a moment, then said, “I will see what I can do to help you.” She made the woman lie on a long table. The woman looked at her apprehensively, and Carlina, still attuned to her, was aware that she had suffered the painful ministrations of midwives who had tried to help her.

“I will not hurt you,” Carlina said, “nor even touch you; but you must be very quiet and calm or I can do nothing.” Taking her starstone from about her neck, she let the awareness sink deep into the body, finding after a time the blockage which had prevented conception; and she let herself descend, in that consciousness, into nerves, tissues, almost cell by cell unblocking the damage.

Then she gestured to the woman to sit up.

“I can promise nothing,” she said, “but there is now no reason you should
not
bear a child. You say your husband has fathered children for others? Then, within a year, you should have conceived yours.” The woman began to pour out thanks, but Carlina stopped her.

“Give no thanks to me, but to the Mother Avarra,” she said, “and when you are an old woman, never speak cruel words to a barren woman, or punish her for her barrenness. It may not be her fault.”

She was glad, as she saw the woman go away, that she had actually found a physical blockage. When there was nothing to be found she must assume either that the woman did not really want a child and, with
laran
she was not aware she had, was blocking conception—or that the woman’s husband was sterile. Few women—and fewer men—could believe that a virile man could be sterile. A few generations ago, when marriage had been a group affair and women as a matter of course bore children to different men, it had been simple; a matter of simply encouraging a shy or timid woman to lie with two or three other than her own husband, perhaps at Festival, so that the woman could sincerely believe that the child was fathered by the one she had chosen. But now, when inheritance of property rested so firmly on literal fatherhood, she had the unpalatable choice of counseling a woman to accept her barrenness, or take a lover and risk her husband’s anger. The old way, she thought, had made more sense.

The second woman, also, was concerned with fertility— which did not surprise Carlina, for it was to the Goddess that women usually came for this.

“We have three daughters, but all our sons died except the last,” the woman said, “and my husband is angry with me, for I have had no children for five years, and he calls me worthless. . . .”

The old story,
Carlina thought, and asked her, “Tell me, do you really want another child?”

“If my husband were content, I would be content too,” said the woman, shakily, “for I have borne eight children, and four still live, and our son is healthy and well and already six years old. And our eldest daughter is already old enough to marry. But I cannot bear his anger. . . .”

Carlina said sternly, “You must say to him that it is the will of Avarra; and he must thank her mercy that a single son was spared to you. He must rejoice in the children he has, for it is not you who denies him children, but the Mother herself who has said to you that you have done your part in bearing so many children.”

The woman could not conceal the relief in her eyes. “But he will be very angry and perhaps he will beat me—”

“If he does,” said Carlina, and she could not conceal a smile, “I tell you in the name of Avarra to pick up a log of wood from the fire and hit him over the head with it; and while you are at it, hit him for me too.” She added, more seriously, “And remind him, too, that the gods punish impiety. He must accept the blessings he has been given and not be greedy for more.”

The woman thanked her, and Carlina thought, dazed,
Merciful Mother of All! Eight children, and she was willing to consider having more?

The last woman was in her fifties, and when she was summoned into the little room told Carlina timidly that she had begun to bleed again when the time for such things was many years past. She was thin and sallow and had a bad color, and for the first time, Carlina, after asking many questions, examined her physically as well as with the starstone. Then she said, “I have not the skill to treat this myself; you must come again in a tenday to speak with one of the Mothers. Meanwhile, drink this tea—” she gave her a packet. “It will ease the pain and lessen the bleeding. Try to eat well and put on some flesh so you will have the strength to endure any treatment which she may feel is needed.”

The woman went away, clutching her packet of herb tea, and Carlina sat sighing, thinking of what probably lay ahead. Neutering might save the woman; only the most skilled could decide whether it was worth it, or would only prolong suffering. If not, the Chief Priestess would give her another packet of tea, but this one would contain a slow poison which would give her death before the pain robbed her of humanity and dignity. She hated this sentence; but Avarra’s mercy included easing the death of those for whom death was, in any case, inevitable. All the afternoon, while she labored at Anya’s side with the tough grass and twisted thorns which had dislodged the stones of the pathway to the temple, she thought of them, the women she had sent away, content, the one she could not help. Shortly before the service at sunset, she was sent for again by the Mother Ellinen.

“Mother Amalie has had a seeing,” she told Carlina, “that we shall need more protection. We will be invaded again. And I foresee it will be for your sake that they will come against us.” She patted Carlina’s hand. “I know it is not your fault, Sister Liriel. Evil dwells in the world, by the will of the gods, but the Mother will protect us.”

I hope so
, Carlina thought, trembling.
I hope so, indeed.

But it seemed, in the far distance, that she could hear Bard speak her name, and hear the threat he had made.

 

“Carlina,” Bard repeated, “my wife. And I cannot reach the Isle of Silence. But you can, you are immune to illusions, unless you pick them up from another mind you can read, and there are not many you can read. You can reach the Island of Silence and bring Carlina back to me. But make no mistake,” he warned, “I know that we want the same women, and I have given you Melisendra. But I swear to you, if you lay so much as the tip of your finger upon Carlina, I will kill you. Carlina is mine, and wherever she may be hiding I will have her!”

And now Paul stood, surveying the quiet waters of the Lake of Silence. Hidden in the reeds, he had studied the ferry-boat on a rope by which it could be hauled over from either side, even though it took, laden, some rowing to steer it across. He could kill the old ferrywoman; but he had observed that two women rowed over, morning and night, to bring her food and a jug of wine. And they might notice her absence. After much thought, when she rowed the priestesses back to the isle, he sneaked into her hut and spiked the wine with a powerful, strong, colorless spirit. It would make her far too drunk to know what was going on, and if the priestesses found her drunk, she could say no more than that she had drunk her usual ration of wine and it had for some reason affected her. By the time they suspected she had been drugged it would be too late to do anything about it. Whereas if they should find her dead, or even unconscious, or bound and gagged, the first thing they would suspect was that there was an intruder on the island.

So he waited until she came back from returning the two priestesses, and sat down in front of her little dwelling to eat and drink. She ate heartily of the bread and fruit they had left, washing it down with thirsty draughts of the wine, and as he had foreseen, she quickly grew dizzy and staggered inside to lie down on her bed. Soon she was snoring in a heavy drunken stupor. Paul nodded, approving. Now, even if they sensed, psychically, that she was stupidly drunk, they could not be alarmed. She was, after all, an elderly woman who could not be expected to carry her wine like a young person.