“You know, Jaelle, you cannot, by the laws of our Guild, be accepted yet as an Amazon; even our own daughters must wait until they are legally old enough to be counted as women, to marry, or to choose. When you are fifteen, you will be permitted to make that choice; until then, you will be only my fosterling.”
Lady Jerana said querulously, “I think this whole business is outrageous; can’t you stop it, Lorill?”
Rohana thought, with anger she did not know she possessed, that it had been outrageous enough to discuss the girl before her face as if she were deaf, dumb, blind and feeble of wit. Lorill Hastur seemed to echo her indignation as he said, “It is Rohana’s right to choose where Jaelle should be fostered, Jerana; she first consulted you, and you chose not to exercise your privilege of decision. Now I will defend Rohana’s right to choose.”
Oh, good for you, Lorill! She looked at him gratefully, thinking that being Chief Councilor couldn’t be the most pleasant of jobs. Jerana’s pretty, vapid face was spiteful.
“Well, Rohana, at least you need not worry about finding someone to marry Jalak’s daughter; I have always heard that the Free Amazons are eager to find pretty young girls whom they can convert to their unnatural way of life, turning them against marriage and motherhood, making them haters of men and lovers of women. It was clever of you to let Jaelle among them-”
White with anger, Rohana felt that she would like to slap Jerana’s sneering mouth, silence the filthy implication of those words. Then, as she saw Kindra smiling, she knew her sojourn with the Amazons had changed one thing forever.
She would return to her old life, and the world of women. For the rest of her days she would tune her decisions to the invisible winds of Gabriel’s whims, perhaps. But one thing would never be the same; and it was a difference that changed the world.
Rohana knew, now, that she was living that life by choice; not because her mind was too narrowly bounded to imagine any other life, but because, having known another life and weighed it, she had decided that what was good in her world-her deep affection for Gabriel, her love for her children, the responsibility of the estate of Ardais that demanded the hand of its lady-outweighed what was difficult, or hard for her to accept.
And so nothing that any woman like Jerana might say could ever hurt her or make her angry again. Jerana was simply a stupid, narrow, unimaginative and spiteful woman: she had never had any opportunity to be otherwise. Kindra was worth a hundred like Jerana. I am free. She could never be, Rohana thought.
She said, almost gently, “I am sorry you feel that way about it, Jerana, but this seems to me a happy choice for Jaelle; you did not choose to foster her yourself, and since you do not love her, it is just as well. I would be selfish indeed to keep Jaelle tied to the ribbons of my sash, just to comfort me in my bereavement.”
“You will give her to that-that Free Amazon, that shame and scandal to womanhood?”
Rohana said serenely, “I know her, Jerana, and you do not.” She held out her arms to Jaelle and said, “I told you that if my own daughter made such a choice, I would listen to her. Be it as you wish, then.” She folded Jaelle in her arms, and for the first time the little girl hugged her, hard, kissing her on the cheek, her eyes shining. Rohana said, “I give you to Kindra to foster, Jaelle. I bid you be a dutiful daughter to her; and do not forget me.”
Then, letting Jaelle go, she stretched her hands to the Free Amazon. The older woman’s calloused, sunburned hands met her own; the level gray eyes looked straight into hers. She said quietly, “Lady, may the Goddess deal with me as I with Jaelle.”
Rohana’s mind lay open to the touch. Again, and for the last time, she felt the Amazon’s immense kindness, steadiness; she knew she would trust Kindra with her life-or with this other life so precious to her. She was surprised to feel that her eyes were filling with tears.
She thought, I almost wish I were coming with you, too…
Kindra said softly, aloud, “So do I, Rohana.” There was no formal “My Lady” now; they had gone too deep for that. Rohana could not speak, even to say good-bye; she laid Jaelle’s hand in Kindra’s and turned away.
The last thing Rohana heard, as they left the audience chamber, Jaelle skipping along at Kindra’s side, was the little girl asking eagerly, “Foster-mother, will you cut my hair?”
Part II MAGDA LORNE,
Terran Agent
Twelve years elapse between the first part and the second.
Chapter
SIX
If there was a noisier job anywhere in the Galaxy than building a spaceport, Magda Lorne hoped she’d never have to listen to it.
And a long job. This one, it seemed, had been building most of Magda’s life. She had been born at Caer Donn, the Terran Empire’s first foothold on Darkover; had been eight years old when the HQ had been moved here to Thendara; and the spaceport had been under construction ever since.
Even the violence of the autumnal storm had only dulled, not silenced, the roar of the building machines, although the mountains behind the city had disappeared into a blur of white snow, and even the old town beyond the HQ was all but invisible. Magda went through the heavy storm doors into the unmarried women’s quarters and simultaneously slammed out storm and noise. Inside it was soundproofed. The lights here were yellow Earth-normal. At least this building was finished, she thought, and quiet. All during her brief marriage to Peter, they had lived in Married Personnel Quarters; unfinished and the soundproofing still not complete. And she wondered, sometimes, just how much the perpetual tension of the noise had contributed to the breakup of that marriage. She shrugged the thought off, opening the door of her room. It would never have worked, no matter what the conditions. I don’t think I was ever in love with Peter, and I’m perfectly sure he was never in love with me. We’d just been together too much, her thoughts ran on the familiar track, and not quite enough, not quite enough to get it out of our systems. When that wore off, we realized there wasn’t anything else to hold us together.
Recalling her marriage to Peter, her thoughts continued along an annoying, smooth and familiar groove. Where is he? He’s never been away so long before. I hope nothing’s happened to him.
She sternly admonished herself not to worry! Like herself, Peter Haldane was a graduate in Alien Anthropology from the Empire University; like herself he had been brought up since childhood on Cottman IV, which the natives called Darkover; and like herself when they returned to the planet that both was and was not their home world, they had gone directly into Empire Intelligence work. The Empire might call the work they did Intelligence and think of it as elaborate spying, but to Magda, and Peter, and the others like them-not many, here on Darkover-it was the best training for an alien anthropologist: to mingle with the people of their world, to get to know them in a way anthropologists not reared here never could. Peter was evidently on a lengthy assignment somewhere. But this time he had been gone so long!
And there were the dreams. …
Magda knew she should report the dreams. In the course of her Alien Psychology credentials, she had been tested for psi potential; and had tested very high. Just the same, she was reluctant to make an official report of her recurrent dreams-all of which, without exception, warned her that Peter Haldane was in trouble-as if to do so might give them some reality. Dreams are just dreams, that’s all. …
Nevertheless, when she finished shedding her heavy outer layer of clothing, she went to the communicator button.
“Personnel? Lorne here. Is that you, Bethany? I don’t suppose Haldane has reported back, or sent word, has he, in the last twenty-eight?”
“Not a word, Magda,” the woman in the coordinator’s office replied. “I knew it; you’re still carrying around a yen for Peter, aren’t you? You’ve been on the button every twenty-eight, asking for news.”
“Yen be damned,” Magda said irritably. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve known Peter since I was five years old; we grew up together, and I worry.” And that, she though
t, cutting the connection, is why I don’t report the dreams. I’m sick and tired of every bored woman here speculating, out loud, how long it will be before Peter and I get together again! Is it going to get so bad that one of us has to put in for a transfer and leave Darkover? Damn it, I grew up here, this is my home, too!
I wonder if Peter feels that way too? We never talked about it. We never talked much about anything, outside of bed. That was half our trouble. …
She still felt irritable as she took off the Darkovan outfit she wore for her work outside the HQ gates. She wore the ordinary dress of a woman of Thendara: a long, full skirt of heavy cloth, woven in a tartan pattern, a high-necked and long-sleeved tunic, embroidered at the neck, and ankle-high sandals of thin leather. Her hair was long and dark, coiled low on her neck and fastened with the butterfly-shaped clasp that every woman wore in the Domains. Magda’s was made of silver, a noblewoman would have worn copper, a poor woman’s clasp would have been carved of wood or even leather; but no chaste woman exposed her bare neck in public.
She hung the Darkovan clothes away, first rubbing their folds with an aromatic mixture of spices; it was as important to smell right as to look right, in the Old Town. She showered and got into Terran clothes, thin crimson tights and a tunic with the Empire emblem on the sleeve. They felt chilly, and she thought it made no sense to wear thin synthetics here and heat the buildings to a temperature that made them practical. It just made the Terrans unfit for the climate.
It’s like the yellow Earth-normal lights everywhere in the HQ; it just keeps everyone from adapting to the red sun. I know, it’s Empire policy everywhere; and when spaceport personnel are likely to be transferred all across the Galaxy at a few days’ notice, of course maintaining a stable set of standard conditions makes sense.
But it’s hard on those of us who really live here. …
She was trying to decide whether to have food sent to her room, or to go to the HQ cafeteria and eat in company, when the communicator summoned her again.
“Lorne here,” she said, in no pleasant temper. “I’m off duty, you know.”
“I know-Montray here. Magda, you’re an expert on the Darkovan languages, aren’t you? Isn’t there a special inflection for speaking to the nobility, and a feminine mode of address?”
“Both. Do you want a capsule lecture, or a library reference? My father compiled the standard text, and I’m working on a revision.”
“Neither; I want you to translate,” the coordinator said, “You’re our only resident female expert; and I’m mortally afraid of offending the lady by some improper form of speech. I’ve heard about the various gender taboos, but I don’t know half enough about them, and that’s a fact.”
“The lady?” Magda’s curiosity was piqued; noblewomen were rarely seen even on the streets of Thendara.
“A lady of the Comyn.”
“Good God,” Magda said. She had rarely set eyes on a single member of this royal and aloof caste; even the men of the Comyn, if they felt the need to speak with one of the representatives of the Empire-which didn’t happen often-did not hesitate to summon them into Thendara instead. “One of the women of the Comyn has summoned you?”
“Summoned, nothing! The lady’s in my office right now,” said Montray, and Magda blinked.
She said, “I’ll be there in three minutes.” Her normal duties did not include working as a translator, but she could understand why Montray was unwilling to use the regular staff.
This was completely unprecedented; a woman of the Comyn, in Montray’s office…
Magda put on her outdoor clothing. She had removed her butterfly-clasp; she started to coil up her long hair on top of her head. The Darkovans certainly knew that Terrans went, in Darkovan clothing, into the Old Town, just as the Terrans knew that a considerable number of the Darkovans who worked at construction jobs on the spaceport were paid to pass along information about the off-worlders to the Darkovan authorities. But neither side took official notice of it. It was important for Magda to look like any other Terran translator. But her bare neck prickled at the exposure.
I ought to act as if I didn’t even know about the proper degree of exposure for a Darkovan woman. But she felt bare and immodest; she took the braid down and let it hang loose down her back.
The noise had shut down now to a nighttime roar; her feet, in thin shoes, slid on the slippery, sleeted sidewalks. She was glad to get into the Temporary HQ building, where Temporary Coordinator Russ Montray-Darkover wasn’t important enough in the Empire; yet, to be assigned a proper Legate for liaison with the native residents-met her in the outer office.
“It’s good of you to do this for me, Magda. It won’t hurt to let them know we have some people who can speak the language the way it really ought to be spoken.” He was a plump, balding man in his forties, with a habitual worried look; even in his centrally heated office, with the thermostat turned up to the maximum, he always looked, and was, cold. “I took the lady into my inner office,” he said, and held the door for her.
He said, in his poor and stumbling cahuenga (the lingua franca of the Trade City), “Lady Ardais, I present to you my assistant, Magdalen Lorne, who will speak with you more easily than I can do.” He added to Magda, “Tell her we are honored at her visit, and ask what we can do for her. She must want something, or she’d have sent for us instead of coming here herself.”
Magda gave him a warning look; she guessed, from the flash of intelligence in the lady’s eyes, that she understood Terran Standard-or that she was one of the occasional telepaths rumored to be found on Darkover. She began, “Domna, you lend us grace. How may we best serve you?”
The woman looked up, meeting Magda’s eyes; Magda, who had spent her life on Darkover and knew the nuances, thought, This woman is from the mountains; the women of the lowlands are more timid with strangers. As custom demanded for all of the Comyn, she had brought a bodyguard-a tall, uniformed man in the green and black of the City Guard-and a lady companion, but she paid no attention to either of them. She said quietly, “I am Rohana Ardais; my husband is Gabriel Dyan, Warden of Ardais. You speak our language well, my child; may I ask where you learned it?”
“I spent my childhood at Caer Donn, Lady, where the citizens mingled more with the Terrans than is the custom here; all my playmates were Darkovan children.”
“Ah, that explains, why you speak with the accent of the Hellers,” Rohana said. Magda, studying her with the eyes of a trained observer, saw a small, slightly built woman, not nearly as tall as Magda herself. It was hard to tell her age, for there were no telltale lines in her face, but she was not young; the heavy auburn hair, coiled low on her neck and confined with an expensive butterfly-clasp of copper set with green gems, was liberally streaked with gray. She was well and warmly clad in a heavy dress of thick green wool, woven and dyed and elaborately embroidered. She bore herself with great poise, but her hands, clasped in her lap, moved nervously on one another.
“I have come here, against the will of my kinfolk, to ask a service of you Terrans. Perhaps it is foolish, a forlorn hope-” She hesitated, and Magda told her that it would be an honor to serve the Lady Ardais.
Rohana said quietly, “It is my son; he has disappeared. We feared foul play. Then a workman who is employed here in your port on one of your great buildings-surely it is no secret that many of these are paid by us to tell us what we wish to know about your people-one of these workmen, who knows my son slightly, reported to us that he had seen my son here, at work. This was some months ago; but it seemed to us, at last, that any rumor was worth investigating …”
Startled, Magda relayed Rohana’s words to the coordinator. “It is true that we employ many Darkovans. But your son, Lady? Most of those we employ are put to work as common laborers, running machines, doing carpentry and building-”
“Our son is young, and eager for adventure, like all men his age,” Rohana said. “To him, no doubt, it would seem a great adventure, to mingle with men from another world
. He would not hesitate to work as a layer of bricks or a pavement-maker, for the sake of that. And as I say, he was seen and recognized here.” She handed Montray a small packet wrapped in silk; he unwrapped it, slowly, glancing at Magda as she translated Rohana’s words.
“I have brought a likeness of my son; perhaps you could ask those of your men who are responsible for the work crews of our people, when he was last employed here.”
Inside the silk was a copper locket; Montray opened the clasp to reveal a miniature painting. His eyebrows rose as he looked at it.
“Take a look at this, Magda.”
He handed it to her, and she looked on an elaborately painted likeness of Peter Haldane.
“I can see by your faces that you both recognize my son,” Lady Rohana said. Magda’s first thought was, This is impossible, insane! Then sanity came to her rescue. A chance resemblance, no more. A fantastic coincidence.
Montray was on the communicator. “Get me a personnel solido and photos of Peter Haldane, Bethany. Magda”-he turned back to her-“you can explain.”
Magda tried. She could see faint beads of perspiration along the lady’s hairline; whether from nervousness or from the heat of Montray’s office-or both-she could not tell.
“Chance resemblance? Impossible, my child. He was recognized by the color of his hair, and that color is borne by none but Comyn, or those of Comyn blood.”
“It is not rare among Terrans, my Lady,” Magda said. (She had known this; Peter had made jokes of it. “On the Darkovan side they think I must be some nobleman’s bastard!”) “It carries among us no claim to nobility, but means only that one’s parents had red hair, and a certain racial makeup.” She broke off as Bethany came in, took the small solido and personnel printout that bore a color photo of Peter Haldane. She handed them to Lady Rohana without comment.