Then she saw them coming, a long solemn line, up from the shore. Cendri heard some woman—a very young one by the sound— giggling nervously, and someone near her reproved her in a whisper. At her side Cendri felt Laurina's fingers clutch at her arm, with a deep, convulsive gasp. And suddenly Cendri understood.
So this is how men and women come together. Solemnly, by moonlight, in ritual: "visiting the sea." She should have known. Miranda's jokes about fish dinners. And now she was here, a part of it. Something in Cendri panicked, cried out to her wildly to get away, she had no part in this, she could not.. .yet some other part of her was excited and exhilarated, wanting to see it through, knowing that anyway there was no way she could remove herself now from the women of Isis, clustered here and awaiting their seasonal ritual of mating. An errant thought touched her mind, I am an anthropologist, I wanted to study their customs, and then, with secret hilarity, it's called participant observation.
Suddenly the male forms were looming over them. Cendri
braced herself, telling herself firmly not to panic, she could endure
the experience; an anthropologist studying planetary cultures got
into stranger things than this, her own Mentor had studied among
the Koridorni and had found himself joining in their ritual
cannibalism___
A man was kneeling on the sand before her, his face indistinct in the moonlight. His voice was husky and tentative, and Cendri somehow judged that he was very young.
"In the name of the Goddess who has bidden us to visit the sea...."
Cendri thought there was probably a ritual answer, but she didn't know it. It didn't seem to matter. He put his arms around her, drawing her down on the cool sand.
She had expected, feared, something cold and impersonal, a ritual brutality like rape, had braced herself to endure that. Her preconceptions melted away before the gentleness of the man whose face she never saw. His hands on her were clumsy, yet tender; his body on hers warm and inviting. Her dread melted away; she welcomed him into herself, giving herself over to the night and to the soft sounds all around her. Laurina was close, so close that she could have touched the other woman, she could hear the sounds and almost feel the movements of the other's lovemaking. It didn't seem to matter.
In one small part of her mind she was amazed and shamed. She had had a lover or two, before Dal, but they both came from monogamous societies and since her marriage she had been faithful, neither desiring nor seriously paying attention to any other man. She thought almost regretfully of Dal, but on a deeper level something in Cendri desired just this, accepted it.
At last he moved a little apart from her, but still holding her in the curve of his arm, lightly touching her hair, her breasts. He murmured, "My name is Yan; may I know yours, to treasure it in memory when I have returned to the Men's House?"
Cendri started to speak her name; remembered that all the female names here were three-syllabeled, amended it slightly: "Cendriya."
He repeated it in a whisper. "Lovely, and strange. I shall cherish the memory." He laid something in her hand; it was a chain of carven leather. A belt, a headband? "My gift to you," he whispered, and was gone.
A sea-gift. And this was how Miranda had passed off Rhu's fine pearl. Cendri lay back on the sand, weighing the strange experience. Then she was aware of another dark form, kneeling, whispering:
"In the name of the Goddess who has bidden us to visit the sea__ "
After the fourth time, during that long night, she stopped trying to count the men who came silently out of the dark, whispering their ritual greeting. Afterward there was always the whispered exchange of names, and each of them left her a gift; a necklace of shells, a small jewel—she could not see it in the dark—on a fine chain; a polished carving of glinting nacre; one, who seemed hardly out of childhood, left her a garland of ribbon which, he told her, he had won in the arena in the boy's foot-race. Some of them left her quickly after the ritual exchange of names; others lingered for a few moments, to lie close to her in tenderness, holding her close and murmuring; one or two talked a little. One man told her that he was working on the delta dam project, south of Ariadne, and that he was the leader of a group of a dozen men there; he talked, troubled and almost compulsively, of a comrade of his who had had his foot crushed in a rockslide and been unable to come to the festival. "We promised each other we would go together," he told her, almost weeping, and Cendri did not know what to say to comfort him. She found herself wondering, briefly, and troubled, if the men paired off as the women did, in long-term partnerships. On the whole she thought probably not; nest-building was a female instinct. But they evidently formed deep and lasting ties.
Another, the very young man who would later give her his athlete's prize, wept for a few moments against her breast, saying that she reminded him of his mother, that he had been in the Men's House only a few moons. Cendri thought it was a strange compliment, until she remembered Rhu's song:
Twice have I been driven from paradise;
Once when I left my Mother's womb,
And again when I was driven
From my Mother's house___
Here, perhaps, the image of the mother was deep-rooted, ineradicable; every contact with women re-stimulated the memory of the lost paradise of living in a world of women, every woman would become a search for the Mother. And indeed, in a society where no one could possibly know who had fathered any child—now she understood Miranda's bewilderment at the question—no tie existed save that of the Mother. And there was, in fact, nothing to prevent a grown son from meeting his mother in this way...no incest taboo. She cradled the sobbing boy against her breast, and strangely thought that some day she would like to have a child there...he calmed, at last, and began kissing her breasts in a most unfilial way.
At last the first glimmer of dawn showed in the sky. Cendri could clearly see the face of the last man who came to her; he was the only one who did not delay to ask her name, simply pressed a beautiful shell into her hand, kissed her long and tenderly, and went quickly away. The men gathered silently on the shore, took up their masks and spears and melted into the rising sun.
Cendri lay on the sand, listening to the tide slowly lapping toward the full again. The women drew together around the cold ashes of the fire, in a close group. Cendri felt Laurina's arms
tighten around her, her face against Cendri's, and for some strange reason, wanted to cry. Around her the women were clustered, hugging one another, snuggling together in each other's arms, and Cendri understood; this too was a part of ritual, a ceremonial reaffirming that after the bonds of mating, the deepest and truest ties of the women of Isis were with one another.
Laurina, her face against Cendri's, whispered, "I hope I have a baby this time.. .I came away empty last season, I thought my heart would break.. .my daughter is already in her tenth year, I long for a little one...."
Cendri held her tight, murmuring, "I hope you do, if that is what you want." Oddly, and only for a moment, she found herself wishing that she could be pregnant. It could not happen, of course. When she and Dal had agreed to delay childbearing, they had each taken medical treatments to abolish their fertility for a time. Since they were monogamous, Dal had offered to have himself temporarily sterilized and save her the physical side-effects of the treatment. But she had chosen to share the treatment, and though Dal had not been happy about her choice—men of Pioneer took it for granted that they would be the custodian of their wives' fertility—he knew it was not the custom on Cendri's world.
And if he had not conceded her right to take responsibility for her own fertility, she would have been vulnerable now to pregnancy. So that by giving her the choice, he had saved himself possible humiliation; their marriage had included an agreement that she would not bear any child not of his fathering. Would she ever be able to tell Dal about any of this?
She did not protest when she felt herself drawn into a close embrace, felt Laurina's kiss like a lover's
on her mouth. She had been too shaken, too surprised by the strangeness of this ritual mating on the sand, to find the sort of pleasure she normally took in sex; surprised, shocked at herself, she discovered that the woman's touch was bringing her to the release which tension and uncertainty had denied her before. In a surge of tenderness she found herself reciprocating, felt a curious shaken delight as the other woman trembled and cried out under her caresses.
Dal, she thought with last-minute compunction, would probably think this was worse than the fact that I had sex with eleven, or was it thirteen, men tonight. But she no longer cared. Her last waking thought was, Why should I care what any man thinks? and even then there was a faint flicker of surprise at it. Then she slept a little, beside Laurina, cradled close in each other's arms.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sun was high when she woke. All around her women were slowly coming awake, gathering up the small piles of gifts, and concealing them within the folds of their robes as they made their way back to their homes. Cendri woke and sat watching for a moment, then shook her head in amazement, hardly able to realize that she had been a part of it. At her side, Laurina said softly, "I must go back to the city, and see how my daughter fares; she is still a year or two too young for the festival. Will you need my aid at We-were-guided today, Scholar Dame?"
Cendri knew why Laurina had spoken formally, and smiled, touching her hand in kindly reassurance. She said, "Not today, I think, I want to sleep. Tomorrow, Laurina."
All around her the women of Vaniya's household were making their way up from the shore. Cendri joined them, realizing that her festival gown was soiled and bedraggled, and that she was covered with sand. She wanted a bath and a long sleep. It was still very early; no one was about in the downstairs hallway but a few small children, and Miranda, cross-legged on the floor, dabbing listlessly at a screen with watercolor paints adorning it with small delicately-drawn fish and flowers.
Cendri said, "I had hoped your child would be born last night, Miranda!"
Miranda sighed and said, "For a time I thought so, but it was only another false alarm, I did the same with my first child, false labor every day for twenty or thirty days." Cendri had not even known that Miranda had another child, so much had been made of her present child being Vaniya's heir; she said so, and Miranda shrugged listlessly.
"It was only a male; Lialla looks after it much of the time, as she seems to be barren, and Zamila has no daughters either. But Maret has predicted that this will be a daughter." She sighed again. "So the midwife is provoked at me because she missed the festival for nothing, and did not even drink much lest she should have to work later; and Rhu is sulking—there is a proverb, as sullen as a Companion on festival-morning—go and sleep, Cendri, I am not fit company for any woman on this morning!" She laughed a little at herself, but she looked wretched and weary.
"That is a pretty screen you are painting," Cendri said, and Miranda frowned almost angrily. "Such children's work serves to pass the time, and now I am not supposed to do anything more strenuous than this!" A small child ran up to her, tangled in a wet breechclout, and Miranda snapped at it as she dragged herself upright and hauled it, in no pleasant mood, off to be changed and dried.
Cendri went up to her room, feeling exhausted and let down, all the exhilaration of the night evaporating. Dal still slept in his corner; Cendri put away the little pile of sea-gifts in her personal luggage-case without examining them. Some day, she knew, she would want to take them out again, look them over, study them, examine as a scientist, examine their psychological meaning to the men of Isis and to the women who received them, but for the moment she was too emotionally involved with the memory to be detached, and she was sure she would not want to look at them for a long, long time.
She was tempted simply to fling herself down beside Dal and sleep again, but her festival gown was so bedraggled that she wanted to take it off, and that once done, she felt so gritty and soiled with sand and seaweed that she wanted to bathe. Before she had finished Dal came in and stood beside the running shower.
"How was the festival, Cendri? Interesting?"
She pretended not to hear him over the noise of the shower as she carefully soaped the sand and grime from her hair, enjoying the luxurious bathing facilities of the suite. When she stepped out, wrapping herself in a robe, he repeated the question and she discovered that she was reluctant to say anything at all. She merely shrugged.
"It was interesting enough. I know you aren't interested in the anthropological aspects, Dal, so I won't bore you with them. There was a moonlight dinner on the shore, and spearfishing, which is only allowed at festivals. We cooked the fish and ate it."
He scowled. "Something Rhu let drop—I understand it's a kind of fertility ritual! You didn't take part, did you?"
She found herself remembering Miranda's phrase, sullen as a Companion on festival morning. She thought, suddenly, that she would like to tell Dal all about it, share it—but he was a man of Pioneer; he would never understand how she had felt about it, he would never see anything except that she had been unfaithful to him. She knew he could have tolerated a deeply emotional episode, as he would have expected her to tolerate a genuine love affair on his part; but he could never have understood this kind of simple, undiscriminating sexuality.
He noticed that she had not answered and his frown deepened.
"Cendri, tell me about it!" he demanded, "Fertility rituals on undeveloped planets are all indecent! If you're not ashamed of it, why don't you want to tell me about it?"
Suddenly she was angry. "Because I know perfectly well you wouldn't understand," she flared at him, "You've made it very clear that you regard all these things as senseless native customs and superstition; I'm not going to hold it up for you to ridicule!"
"Cendri, we agreed to share our work—"
"Share be damned!" She was really angry now. "What you mean by sharing is that you tell me what to do and we do it! If you feel like it, that is! You won't say a word about what you're doing with the men, and every time I ask, you tell me to mind my own business, keep out of it! You have refused to let me know anything of what you are doing among the men; how dare you question my work among the women?"
"Cendri," he said quietly, very sober, "if I do not confide in you about my work among the men, it is only to protect you. I think you can guess that it would be dangerous."
"So much for your talk of sharing," she flung at him, surprised at herself for what was surfacing in her now. "If I were truly your equal, Dal, and not just your—your pawn, your figurehead—you would be willing to share risks as well as triumphs! The real reason you will not share it with me is because you know that what you are doing is not lawful! Are you trying to start a civil war on this world?"
"That only shows me that you would never understand."
"Where is your integrity as a Scholar of University? One of the reasons why the Scholars of University are so highly regarded as scientists is because they are above the petty politics within the Unity—"
"We are outside the Unity, Cendri. And how can you—you of all people—reprove me for taking part in politics, when you have allied yourself so firmly with Vaniya and her party? If the ruins at We-were-guided are truly Builder ruins—I don't think you understand even now what that means, Cendri! Do you realize that they are the most important artifacts ever discovered in the known universe, then? Isis must be made part of the Unity, by any means possible! This is the scientific discovery of the aeon—don't you even realize that? What do the politics of the Matriarchy mean, stacked up in the scale against that?"
She cried, shaken, "And you'd destroy the whole culture of Isis for your damned Ruins, just to be the man who opened them to the Unity, just for your own personal ambition?"
"And you call yourself a scientist!" he stared at her in scorn and the beginnings of contempt. "I don't believe you even care about the Ruins, Cendri!"
She didn't know what she was going to say until she heard hers
elf saying it.
"Not in the way you do, no—I don't give a damn! You don't know half as much as I do about the ruins at We-were-guided, because you never believe in anything you can't weigh and measure! They mean more to me than they can ever mean to you! You just see them as a dead culture, you would let in every Scholar and scientist and gaping tourist in the Unity, to break into them, trample all over them, just for your own personal ambition. I don't give a damn about the ruins, Dal, I am interested in something more important than that! And I'm not going along with some stupid man's idea of what ought to be done with them! Now get out of here! I want to sleep!"
"Cendri—" he begged, troubled.
"No! Damn it, Dal, get out of here and let me alone!" She wrapped herself in the toweling robe, and threw herself down to sleep. Dal said her name again, kneeling beside her, but she did not raise her head, closing her eyes resolutely. It had felt good, for once to speak her mind to him, to give voice to all the hostility she had been suppressing ever since she came here, his contempt for her own work, the way in which he made her pay for every slight and humiliation the society of Isis put in him. She felt purged and honest. A trace of contrition stirred briefly in her—had she been too hard on him? No, he had deserved every harsh word she had spoken, and she would not undo it all and capitulate again. As sullen as a Companion on festival morning. It was just offended male pride. He'd get over it, and then she would speak more moderately, too. Firmly ignoring him, she drifted off to sleep.
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 Page 24