The Shattered Chain (34 page)

She sat looking intently at Magda for a moment. “If Lorill is wrong—if it can be proved that what he believes about your people is wrong—I do not need to tell you what it will mean for both your world and mine.”

To Magda, with her heightened sensitivity, the force of what she had always called “hunch” raising her perceptions, it seemed at this moment that she caught the very image in Rohana’s mind: a great barricaded door, slowly swinging open between two locked-away worlds, two peoples; opening to give a bright and sunlit view.

Magda thought,
We should be one people, not two … I would do anything for that. …

Rohana said, slowly, more as if she were thinking aloud than speaking, and yet Magda knew she was meant to share the woman’s thoughts, “Does it not seem to you, Margali, that there is a design of some sort in this? That of all the Terrans on our world, it should be your friend, who could be so easily mistaken for my son, who should be taken by Rumal di Scarp? I myself, in a quick look, can still be deceived, and must look at their ringers and hands to be certain, until one of them speaks. Does it not seem fantastic to you that of all the Amazons of Darkover, you should fall into Jaelle’s hands, and that the two of you should be so tested that you have become sworn friends as well?”

Magda felt uneasy. She said, “Coincidence, Lady.”

“One coincidence, perhaps. Two, maybe. But so many, like beads strung on a necklace? No, this is more than coincidence, my friend; or if it is coincidence, then coincidence itself is only another word for a design intended by whatever force it is that shapes the fates of man.” She smiled, and seemed to come back to the practical world, saying, “Now I must ask something of you, child. Will you take care in what you say to your friends, and to your superiors in the Terran Zone, at least until I have had a chance to speak with Lorill?”

“Indeed I will,” Magda said, smiling a little at the thought of Montray’s face if she should ever try to tell him about the matrix operation that had healed Jaelle’s wound within a few minutes, or that Lady Rohana had said that she herself had
laran.
If this was ever to be brought up between Darkovan and Terran, she was quite willing it should be someone other than herself who should do it—and she hoped there would be a more receptive audience than Russell Montray!

Rohana rose, and said, “Go now, Margali. I must think this over and decide what to do.”

Magda hesitated just a moment. “But what shall I tell Lady Alida?”

“Don’t worry about her. I will tell her that I have tested you myself,” Rohana said, and her smile was droll. “Don’t you realize that is what I have been doing?”

The blizzard lasted for another ten days—almost exactly as dom Gabriel had predicted—and when the weather finally cleared, the roads and passes lay blocked with drifts so deep that the three guests at Ardais were readily persuaded to remain for a few more days. Yet Magda had begun to brace herself, mentally, for their departure, and for whatever lay ahead. She could not return to her old life inside the Terran Zone, venturing outside it only in disguise; she knew the disguise had become her truest self. But what she could do instead—that she did not know either.

She found herself thinking again and again of what Rohana had said about a design in the chain of coincidences that had brought them together; even in the peculiar pattern that had drawn Peter and Jaelle together as lovers. If the Empire was to remain on Darkover indefinitely, sooner or later there would be—as on all planets inhabited by different groups of humans—entanglements, romances, liaisons, and eventually marriages, even children who belonged to both worlds. And someone had to be the first.

Of course, one day Darkover would be an Empire planet. It was inevitable. The Empire did not conquer; but once the contacted planet saw the pattern of the Galactic Empire, and what it could mean to be part of it, the rulers always asked to be affiliated. When that time came, Terran and Darkovan would all be Empire citizens, and such affairs and romances would concern no one but the two people involved, and perhaps their families. But now it could cause only complications.

Magda hoped their departure would not be too long delayed. Jaelle and Peter were beginning to be a little less careful, and Magda wondered what the end would be. Again and again, seeing them together, she felt the small, indefinable pricklings of “hunch”—or precognition.
Sooner or later, this meant danger. …
Yet how could she speak to Jaelle, warn her, without the younger girl thinking that she was jealous, or grudged her the happiness she had found with her lover? Still less was it possible to remonstrate with Peter. So she only watched them with growing disquiet and anxiety.

In anticipation of their imminent departure she began to sort and put together her possessions; Jaelle found her occupied by this, and suggested that most of their traveling clothes were in need of repair, and that they might profitably spend the day in putting them in order. Magda was surprised to find that Jaelle was an expert needlewoman; somehow this had seemed too feminine an art for an Amazon. Magda herself, accustomed to the readily replaceable, cheap synthetics of the Terran Zone, had never mastered the art; had, in fact, been taught to scorn it as being a pointless way of passing time for women who had no useful work to do.

When she said this to Jaelle, the younger woman laughed. “And so it is, much of the time! Last night in the hall, when Rohana invited us to join her women at the tapestry they were making for the hall chair cushions, I thought I should go mad! I love to embroider,” she added, “but how Rohana can endure it, I cannot imagine! I myself should go mad, to sit there night after night, surrounded by those fools of sewing-women … stitch, stitch, stitch, gossip, gossip, gossip! Rohana runs the whole estate of Ardais, and does it better than dom Gabriel could do, and she sits in Council and gives advice to Hastur, yet there she sits among those foolish girls
_,
and chatters with them as if she had never had a thought in her head more serious than whether to embroider the next cushion with a rainfish or a star-flower! As if it mattered to anyone’s backside what was embroidered on a cushion, as long as it was well stuffed!” But even as she spoke, she was setting small neat stitches in the torn fingers of her glove.

Magda, watching her, thought that it made good sense to learn an art of this kind, on a world like Darkover, where warm and durable clothing was a necessity of life. She said ruefully, looking at the mess she had made of the torn tunic, “I am even less skillful with a needle than a sword!”

Jaelle laughed. “My skill with a dagger is incidental,” she said. “I told you I was no fighter, but for my first year or two among the Amazons I used to work at Kindra’s side. She was my foster-mother and had been a mercenary soldier. And when there was peace in the Domains, she hired herself out as a bodyguard to escort travelers through the Kilghard Hills and the Hellers, and protect them against bandits, catmen and what-have-you. For a few years I worked with her; but I did not really like it, and gradually I discovered my real skill.”

“What is that, Jaelle?” Magda remembered Rohana saying that the Amazons worked at any honest trade; but she was curious to know which of them Jaelle had made her own.

“I am a travel-organizer,” Jaelle said. “People who intend to travel in the hills come and consult me. I can tell them precisely how many pack animals they will need for supplies for any number of men, for the length of their trip, and where to hire or buy them, and where to hire drivers for them, and precisely how much equipment they must buy—or I can buy it for them, on commission. Then I can advise them about how much of the different kinds of food they must buy to keep the men healthy, and provide them with guides and bodyguards, tell them what roads to take, how long the journey will last at the specific season of the year, what passes might be closed or what rivers in flood, and anything else they might wish to know. It is not a business to make anyone rich, but I make a good living at it. Some people only wish for an hour or two of advice, and I give it to them for a fee; others put all the preparations for the trip in my hands, and I do everything from buying pack saddles to choosing meals and equipment they can use at midwinter in the high passes.”

“Tell me,” Magda said hesitantly. “From what I have seen of Thendara—are there many men willing to turn such responsibility over to a woman?”

“More than you might think,” Jaelle said. “Rafaella, who started this business, told me that in the first year or two, her business was almost limited to providing escort service for ladies whose kinsmen had no leisure to escort them and would not trust them to strange men. Amazon bodyguards for women were much in demand because they knew the ladies would arrive unraped! But as it became known that the caravans we organized could take quicker routes, and arrive without running out of fodder, or having to live on porridge-powder for the last four or five days, the ladies themselves began to insist that we be allowed to make plans for their husbands’ business journeyings, and so it had grown to a point where we have as much business as we can do.”

“It still seems a strange business for a woman—here,” Magda said. “I have grown used to thinking that a woman’s life on Darkover was always so limited. Oh,
damn
this thing!” She broke off, sucking the finger she had pricked with an incautious stitch.

Jaelle laughed, saying, “Don’t bother; give it to one of Rohana’s sewing-women. They will be glad to have something to do, and it will give them pleasure to think there is something,
anything
they can do better than a Free Amazon.”

Jaelle, Magda thought, was a puzzle; she was devoted to her sisters in the Guild of Free Amazons—and yet she could be so contemptuous of other women! She said, “Do you really think all women would be happier as Amazons, Jaelle?”

Jaelle put her mended glove back with its mate and began to sort out some small things at the bottom of her saddlebag. She said, not looking up, “No, I don’t. I used to think so, when I was younger. And I do truly look forward to a day on our world when all women will have the freedoms that we—the Guild—have seized and declared for ourselves; when they will have them by law, and not by revolt and renunciation. But I know now that there are many women who could not be happy living my kind of life.” She sat in the windowseat, her legs folded up under her chin, her short hair tousled; she looked like an adolescent girl. She had a bit of ribbon in her hand and was absentmindedly twisting it about her wrists as she spoke. “Rohana’s women. They think of nothing but marriage; they are shocked and troubled at the idea of any other life than they live. It seems dreadful to them, to think of hiring themselves out, as men do, at any work for which they have the strength and skills, instead of serving for a time as waiting-women in one of the Great Houses, and then going home, as Lanilla is doing at winter’s end, to a marriage arranged by their families. I asked her what her husband was like and she said she did not know, and asked me, ‘Does it matter?’ It was enough for her that she would have a home of her own, and a husband. Did you ever want to marry, Margali?”

Magda reminded her softly, “I
was
married.”

“But only for a time—”

“I did not know when I married that it was only for a time,” Magda said, with a twinge of the old pain. They had made so many plans for permanence!

“Tell me: if you had had a child, would you have stayed with him? Do you think it can be a bond between you?”

“My mother found it so,” Magda said slowly. “She followed my father to four different worlds; then we came here, and I was born, and she always seemed content.”

“Content only—to make a home for him? Is that your way, in the Empire?”

“She was a musician,” Magda said. “She played on several instruments, and she wrote many songs. She translated many of the mountain songs into the Empire’s standard language; and she wrote music for some poems written in
casta.
But my father was always the center of her life; after he died, she seemed to lose all joy in living, and seldom touched her music again; and she did not live very long.”

“Rohana married dom Gabriel when she had seen him only twice,” Jaelle said reflectively. “To me that seemed frightful, to be given to a man I barely knew, to lie with him, to bear his children. It seemed no better than slavery or rape made lawful! But when I said as much to Rohana, she laughed at me, and said that any man and woman, with health and goodwill, can live together in kindness and make a good life for one another. She said she thought herself lucky that he was decent and kindly and eager to please her; not a drunkard or a gambler or a lover of men, as so many of the Ardais are. To me, that seemed like a man, who has received a cudgeling, rejoicing that he had not been horsewhipped as well. …” She was still absently twisting the ribbon around her wrists, looping and uncoiling it. “And now he is truly the center of her life. I cannot understand it, though I find I like him better as I grow older. But there are times, too, when it seems to me that Rohana has as much freedom as any of us, that she does as she wishes and has given up little. … ”