Thendara House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Margali, a man came asking for you; I sent him into the Stranger’s Room. He has a strange accent—perhaps he is one of your kin from beyond the Hellers?”

  A slight, dark man, faintly familiar, rose from a chair as she entered. He spoke her Darkovan name with a good accent, though it was not the accent of Thendara. The Terran. Montray’s son—what was his name—

  “Monty,” he said, reminding her. She looked at him appraisingly.

  “Where did you get those clothes?”

  “Not right?”

  “They’ll pass in a crowd. But the boots are too well made for a tunic as cheap as that one; anyone who could afford boots as good as that could afford to have had his tunic embroidered, not just trimmed with colored threads. And the undertunic is too coarse.”

  “Haldane okayed them,” Monty said. “I wore them on the fire lines; and he didn’t do with me what he did with Li—he ordered Li to pretend to be deaf and dumb, so I thought I’d pass…”

  “Why have you come here?” she asked sharply.

  “Jaelle happened to let it drop that you’re free to go out today. May I escort you—I see you’re dressed to go out—for a little way, have a few minutes conversation with you?”

  Well, if this man was in Intelligence there was no reason to offend him because she thought his father a fool.

  “You can show me where you bought those boots; they’re good and I need a pair made,” she said, “and we can talk on the way to the market. Don’t talk in front of the women in the hall, they might spot your accent as wrong.”

  He bowed. It was not really a bad imitation of the proper bow of a Darkovan servant facing a woman of high rank; he wasn’t stupid, or unobservant, he simply hadn’t had the training she and Peter had had. Or—presumably he was a graduate of the same Intelligence school on Alpha—he hadn’t had the experience. She guessed he was four or five years younger than herself. He followed her at the proper one step behind, through the hallway, and not until they were out of sight of the Guild House did he come up to walk beside her.

  “The Karazin market?”

  “I think so,” he said, “and if I’m going to walk with you I ought to carry that package, hadn’t I?”

  She handed him the rolled bundle, but it burst open, and he stared in consternation at the charred soles, and scorched uppers.

  “How the devil did you do that?”

  “I was caught in one of the break-throughs, where the fire jumped a break.”

  “I heard there were Renunciates there. Were you hurt?”

  “Superficial burns on my feet, they’re healed now.”

  “That explains Jaelle—”

  “Jaelle? Did she go into the fire lines? Oh, I wish I’d seen her—”

  “She didn’t go; Peter told me she’s pregnant,” Monty said. “She couldn’t have gotten Medical clearance, though she wanted to come and even made noises about it.”

  Magda said a proper “How nice,” but inside she felt a curious sinking cold. So Jaelle would give Peter the son he wanted so much.

  “We can go down here and get your feet measured for boots,” he said, “and then we can sit and talk awhile—it’s not forbidden to sit and talk to me in a public place, is it?”

  Magda shrugged. “Not at Festival, certainly. It’s not commonplace, but at Festival we do as we please.” And if they saw her sitting in a public place with a man,, they could hardly think… She cut that thought off in the middle, defiant; let them think what they wished. Again in the person of a mute servant, he handed her package while she arranged with a cobbler to have the soles replaced and bargained for a new pair—he had none to fit her, but if she could return in three hours he would have the soles patched on the old ones and they would serve till the new were ready.

  Magda paid for the work, grateful for the money she had earned helping Rafaella; even after paying her tithes to the house, she had enough for the mended boots and for the new pair. Anyway, she had some back pay in the Terran Zone, banked there, and she should arrange to convert some of it to Darkovan money; she had not needed much in the Guild House but that was more good luck than good management. Food and clothing were available in return for the help she gave in maintaining the House, and now that Rafaella had accepted her in Jaelle’s place and given her work she could do there—sorting loads, packaging travel-food into separate day rations—she had begun to pay her share. When she had finished at the bootstall she walked down the street and Monty caught up again with her.

  “Now where can I talk to you?”

  “What is this all about?”

  “You know that perfectly well,” he said, exasperated. “I need a report from you—I told you that when I came there before. We’re going to have eight of them down in Medic— Cholayna told me the other day. We need to know more about what makes them tick. You’re the only expert we have on Darkovan women.”

  “Ask Jaelle,” Magda said, and he laughed.

  “I’m afraid she’s a little too prickly for me. In a society like this one, I can see how women who had gotten out of it would be a little bit on the defensive—what I can’t imagine is how she came to marry Haldane. Can you explain it?”

  “Since I think you know that he and I were married once, I suppose that question is purely rhetorical.”

  “No,” Monty said, suddenly serious. “Not at all. Working in the field and seeing the different way men treat women in the Darkovan culture has caused me to re-examine some of my own values. I wonder, sometimes, if perhaps women really prefer a culture where they’re looked after. Cared about. Cherished and protected. We make such a big thing of equality, but the women here seem happy enough Oh, there are exceptions, but seriously, Magda—” he had spoken her Terran name, but she did not correct him, since no one was near enough to hear, “it seems to make sense, to give women supremacy in their own sphere, and not bring them into direct competition; let them have one place where they can be really superior, and keep it separate. Lots of societies work that way… hell, you had anthropology and sociology of culture on Alpha, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t like the assumptions behind that kind of culture,” Magda said sharply. “Why should everything be divided up into what women do and what men do?”

  “Well why shouldn’t they? It happens anyway; it’s just that some societies admit it, and others try to pretend it doesn’t exist. Most women are less competitive, less athletic—why should a society be based on the exceptions? I don’t see anything wrong with a man spending his life in, for instance, dress, but I wouldn’t force all men to wear dresses, for instance, so that the few who want to won’t feel conspicuous. I remember one nursery school I was in where they wouldn’t let the boys play with trucks and spaceships because they said we shouldn’t get stereotyped. There were a couple of little girls there who really wanted to play dolls and the nurses kept shoving them at the spaceships and trying to get them to play football.”

  “So you’d give the girls the dolls and the boys the spaceships, and leave it at that?”

  Monty shrugged. “Why not, as long as the girls who want the spaceships and toy trucks get a chance to try them out now and then? But I never got up the slightest interest in playing dolls, no matter how many they shoved into my little hands. At least on Darkover they would have taken it for granted that since I was a boy, I had a right to act like one.”

  Magda chuckled. “Well, I never had to fight for my chance at a doll or a toy truck. I usually spent my time with paints and listening to my mother play the harp. And dancing. Remember I grew up in Caer Donn.”

  “I envy you,” he said seriously. “A wonderful chance, to grow up in the world you really live in… you know my father. He has lived thirty years on Darkover and still can’t tolerate the light of the red sun because he lives all the time under Terran-style lights.”

  “Don’t envy me, Monty,” she said, matching his seriousness. “It’s not an enviable option, to grow up never knowing where you belong, n
ot—not knowing the recognition signals. I was never really Darkovan, and my young friends knew it. And I knew it. Oh, God, I knew it! And when I went to the Terrans it was worse… how the devil did I get into all this?”

  He smiled. He had, she realized, a nice smile. “I admit I led you into it,” he said, “I wanted to hear what made you tick. You’re the expert, you know, on Darkovan culture and language, That doesn’t surprise me, I don’t think any man has the power of observation about details that a good woman can have.”

  “I’m glad you admit us to that competence,” she said dryly. “I wondered if perhaps you thought my proper sphere of influence was judging suitable clothing.”

  “Well, that’s one of them,” he said equably, “and you’re living proof that a woman can pass better than a man.”

  “Well, in a Guild House, anyway,” she said, losing the impulse to argue with him.

  “Look, you keep saying you want better understanding between Darkover and the Empire. Start contributing to it, then. Help me understand.”

  That sounded reasonable. While she was thinking it over, he said, “You have two or three hours to kill, anyhow, while your boots are getting ready. We won’t make it a formal report. Just come back to HQ with me, and we can have a drink in my quarters while you put some basic reports on file for me. And show me how to access your other reports, or how to get clearance to work with them, okay? Good God, girl, don’t you even know your work is posted as the standard of excellence not only here, but all over the Empire? Even when I was still on Alpha I heard about Lorne’s work on Cottman Four, and I was hoping I’d be put on assignment with you!”

  Flattery, Magda thought; he’s trying to get what he wants. That’s all. But after the discouragement and self-doubt of the last weeks it touched something so deep in her that she could not help feeling warmed and satisfied by the words.

  “All right. If I can have a few minutes to get down to the credit transfer department…”

  “All the time you want,” he said amiably, having made his point.

  Going in through the Spaceforce-guarded gate, it felt like the times she had come back with Peter from a field assignment, still in field clothes, but ready to take off her Darkovan persona and return to her true self. I believed then that it was my true self and the Darkovan Margali only a mask. What is the truth? She was no longer sure.

  His quarters were in Unmarried Personnel, not too far from her own old rooms; he found her a seat, asked what she would have to drink.

  “Coffee,” she said without a moment’s hesitation, “if you had to ask me what one thing I missed most, that would be it… that, and a hot shower in the morning.”

  He went to dial it from the comsole. “Pretty primitive in the Guild House?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, flicked again on the raw by that assumption. “They have hot baths, hot tubs to soak in, everything… it’s just that they have a different lifestyle and a different set of priorities. Some things you have to be brought up to; they take it for granted that a nice cold bath is just what you need to wake up in the morning, and hot water is a nighttime indulgence. And I’ve had to adapt.” She laughed, turning the coffee cup between her hands. “I never realized how Terran I was until I had to be Darkovan 28 hours a day, ten days a week.” She sipped the coffee; it still tasted good to her, despite the sudden strangeness; she wondered if the caffeine in it, now that she was unaccustomed to it, would give her some unexpected high.

  “Well, now. What do you need to know? Languages? That’s simple—sleep with the corticator tape for at least seven days. Too many people here try to cheat—they can get along after one or two days so they never go back, and that takes time; I grew up on the language, of course, in fact I probably made the tapes you’re using, but when I learned the Dry-Town language I slept with it for two full tendays. You have to know it, not on the surface, but where it counts, down in your guts. There was some excuse when we didn’t have the tapes in full, but now we do. Program the subconscious all the way, not just the superficial language course. You have clearance to use a Braniff-Alpha level corticator, don’t you?”

  “I’ve always been nervous about it. I don’t like the idea of anything mucking around with my very nerve synapses!”

  “It’s the only way you can get it on the same level you’d have gotten it when you were a child,” she said. “And it’s better than being deaf and dumb!”

  “That’s for sure,” Monty laughed. “Now can you put in a report on the Free Amazons—oh, pardon me, Renunciates—”

  She corrected his pronunciation slightly, knowing it was temporizing. But a dozen of her sisters would be working here in Medic. She was, in a sense, doing this for the Guild. Monty found her a scribing machine, and Magda sat down to her work.

  “The name Guild of Free Amazons, commonly used by Terrans and in the Empire,” she began, “is a romantic misconception, based on a Terran legend of a tribe of independent women. The true name of the Guild in their language could be better translated as the Order of Oath-Bound Renunciates,” and went on from there, explaining what she knew about the history and original charter of the Amazon movement, which had begun formally in Thendara only about 300 years ago, and for almost half of that time had been a highly secret movement, operating underground, with only a single concealed Guild House which operated almost like a cloistered convent; only recently, in the last hundred years, had the Amazons begun to operate openly and build other Houses of Refuge.

  She heard, for a while, Monty moving around the quarters, then lost consciousness of him as she went on making her report; she translated the text of the oath and explained some of its more obscure provisions, mentioned some of the taboos and courtesies of the Amazons among themselves and those observed by the common people toward them, including the incredible hostility toward Free Amazons found among the commoner women in the Kilghard Hills. But when it came to speaking of the common accusation that they were haters of men and lovers of women, she found it difficult to keep the detachment of the trained anthropologist. She welcomed, in a sense, the ability to recapture her Terran self, to remain an outsider; but when she began to speak of this she hesitated, played back what she had said, then wiped the last ten minutes and substituted some vague generalities about relationships of the Amazons with men on the fire lines. Monty came in again while she was finishing this up, and said, “Now I understand how your boots got in such a mess. Tell me—you were out in the edge of the Kilghard Hills, then, as the fire was coming down toward Thendara?”

  Magda nodded. He said, “I ordered us up some lunch; dictating is hungry work and your throat must be dry, at least.” He set a tray in front of her, and she smelled it appreciatively. Terran food … she told herself defensively that she had been brought up on Darkovan foods and liked them but that she was enjoying the change, it was nice to have something different. She had forgotten the completely different textures of synthetic foods, and tasted them exploringly.

  He drew up a chair, digging into his own meal, looking appreciatively at the pile of narrow spindles she had piled up. “That’s marvelous,” he said fervently, “You’ll get a footnote in history or something, and I won’t deny that I’ll get a footnote to the footnote for talking you into it!”

  She chuckled, shoving aside a tube of apple-flavored synthetic. The stuff, she decided, was as bland and flavorless as she remembered it. “You ought to have a footnote on your own. Or aren’t you planning to follow in the Old Man’s footsteps?”

  Monty’s laugh created sudden intimacy between them. “You know, and I know, that my father is no more fit to be Coordinator on a planet like Darkover than that donkey in one of your folk tales—Duran, was it?”

  “Durraman,” she said. “The one who starved to death between two bales of hay because he couldn’t decide which one to bite into first…”

  “Seriously, it’s not his fault, Magda; he wanted to command a space station, it was what he was trained for; he got in with the wrong politic
al crowd,” Monty said. “My good fortune, of course, this was my world from the moment I could decide… more coffee?”

  She shook her head, pushing the tray away. “That was good,” she admitted, “for a change, anyway.”

  He glanced at his chronometer, which kept Empire time. “You don’t need to hurry; your boots won’t be ready for another hour,” he said, “but I hate to ask you to do any more dictating; you’ve done a heroic job already. I can’t thank you enough, but you’ll find a bonus on your credit when you get back… by the way, when are you coming back? The Old Man was talking about a special liaison post created just for you…”

  “Forty days more to fulfill my obligation to the Guild House; after that, I’m not sure. I might apply to change citizenship—”

  “Oh, don’t do that,” he said quickly. “Empire citizenship is too valuable for that; Haldane put through for citizenship for Jaelle, so their kid will be born a full citizen. Be as Darkovan as you like, but hang on to your citizenship. Just in case.”

  Yes, that was the Terran way. Defend against all contingencies, never make a full commitment without leaving a way of escape. Cover yourself. She glanced again at her timepiece. “I should run up to Intelligence HQ, now they’ve got one, and check in with Cholayna—”

  “She’s off duty,” Monty said, “and I happen to know she went to the Meditation Center and put through a notice not to be disturbed for at least eighteen hours. I suspect she’s in an isolation tank or something—she belongs to one of those queer Alphan religions. Very odd lady, though it’s good to have someone really competent in Intelligence. Only one drawback; she can’t do her own fieldwork. So we have to depend on you. Could I ask a personal favor, Magda?”

  “You can always ask,” she said, smiling, and suddenly knew that in a sense she was flirting with him, letting the personal part of their communication take over momentarily from the business one, as a way of flattering him… was this worthy of an Amazon? It was the Terran way. She had never noticed it before, but now she knew she was doing it, and heard the harsh voice of Rafaella, is it so important to you that a man must consider you beautiful? Rafaella certainly was not the one to talk, she had three sons by three different fathers… at least Camilla, who was a lover of women, was consistent! But through all her doubts it was reassuring, that she could still attract attention, not only professionally, but as a woman.