Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  Not so good was their goal. Assuming they had taken Robin in order to sell him—and it was unlikely that a roving band of half a dozen women would wish to be burdened with such a valuable and vulnerable, to say nothing of potentially dangerous, individual for very long—the most obvious choices were either Redburg, nearly a week to the south in this weather, or Ashtown, five, maybe six days’ reasonable ride from Robin’s cabin. Ashtown, whose walls had held Isaac in as a child. Ashtown, the thought of which had caused a seasoned Traveler in Jamilla’s cozy parlor to shiver and a Meijing guard to go grim. Ashtown, which lay straight in the direction of the line of hoofprints she was following. Five days away, and by the signs, Robin a day and a half ahead of her. The weather would hold, her skin told her that, and she could ride by moonlight. Her thigh ached already from the demands of the last few days; it would just have to ache.

  And if, as her rational mind told her was all too possible, she failed to catch up with them in time? Two choices then, discounting the third possibility of simply turning her back on the whole problem and abandoning him: she could retreat all the way back to Meijing, borrow enough money to buy him out, and ride back with that perilous amount of silver calling out to three hundred miles of countryside, to the clear possibility of finding him long since suicided and buried; or she could go in after him. Enter Ashtown, with its fearsome reputation, and steal him back from that walled and guarded city.

  Neither choice bore thinking about. She would just have to overtake them, she told herself, and put her heels mercilessly into Simon’s sides. She stopped at full dark, cleaned the two hares she had encouraged Tomas to take during the afternoon, and risked a small fire to cook them. She dozed, wrapped in Robin’s filthy, smoke-thick blanket, then mounted up again with moonrise. At the dark before dawn she stopped again, slept for an hour, and dragged herself from her sleeping bag. After sharing the last of the cooked meat with Tomas and giving Simon a large double handful of the spilled grain she had scraped from Robin’s wrecked barn, she pressed on. At midday Simon threw a shoe, and she began to walk occasionally to spell him. The endless day passed, a never ending, never changing cycle of dark tree and white ground, skirted rocks and crossed streams, and always the trail, the mashed-up stretch of hoofprints in the snow, wider now across a meadow, single file in the woods, never seeming any fresher, always mocking, drawing her hypnotically on.

  The day trudged toward darkness in increasing pain and exhaustion, relieved only when she found a wooden button, half-buried in the snow, that had been torn from Robin’s coat and tossed—deliberately? by Robin?—to one side. Later, by moonlight, she found where the party had spent its third night, and the trail leaped half a day nearer. Both discoveries refreshed her more than the snatched two hours of sleep between impassible dark and moon’s light, and she drove on, all three of them limping now, Dian walking as much as she rode.

  The following dawn it took her ten minutes to creep from her sleeping bag and knead the worst of the fire from her cramping thigh. Three hours later they passed the fourth campsite, where Tomas caught a raccoon attracted by the scraps. It was old and tough, but it was food, so she stopped briefly to clean it, giving most of the innards to Tomas and stuffing the rest in her pack to eat raw. The snow was deeper now, but the trail was broken already, so tantalizingly fresh she could almost smell her quarry. She would have to kill five armed, well-fed, rested women, but she would do it, and Robin would not be taken in by Ashtown.

  At dusk, Simon went lame. She turned him loose in a meadow over which a Remnant house brooded. She hoisted her possessions into a tree and stumbled off, carrying only her rifle, binoculars, food, and sleeping bag. The trail was fresh now. She would make it. She would.

  When it was too dark to see the trail, she fell into her sleeping bag next to Tomas, woke reluctantly three hours later, shared out the rest of the cold, raw raccoon, and dropped her trousers to urinate. When she glanced down at the moon-bright snow, her ears suddenly filled with a rushing noise and dizziness threatened to knock her over. She had to strike a light to be certain.

  She was bleeding. Not a lot, not yet, but shockingly red and alarmingly steady. She let the handful of dry needles burn out, and after a while her eyes readjusted to the low light.

  Bleeding. If she went on, she might well lose this baby.

  If she stopped here, she would almost certainly lose Robin.

  Dian leaned against the trunk of the tree, staring unseeing at the path of churned snow winding away before her. In the shifting moonlight she could all but see Robin, straight-spined with despair, riding away from her. Eventually, with the movement of an old woman, she reached down for her rifle, and took one step, then another. The being lodged within her was little more than an ounce of organized tissue, whereas Robin . . .

  Robin was real. Robin was family. He had taken her in despite the threat to his life and his freedom; he had saved her life and given Culum burial; he needed her now, not seven months from now. The hypnotic trail pulled her along and she pushed forward, Tomas close by her side as he led her, stumbling and falling, in Robin’s wake.

  She could smell them. At dawn, she thought she saw them through the trees on the very brow of the opposite hilltop. An hour later, she came upon their final campfire, not yet cold; twenty minutes after that she saw clear signs of where Robin had thrown himself from his horse and tumbled down a steep hill, which cost his captors at least half an hour and cost him, going by the dots on the snow, a bloody nose in retribution. The blood was still red, the horse droppings barely cool, and Dian pushed herself into a shambling run.

  She could smell them, see them, could almost hear them across the crisp air. She could do everything, except catch them.

  From her vantage point up a tree two miles away, Dian’s old binoculars showed her the party approaching the city, eleven horses with seven riders merging into the market crowd outside the gates. She lost sight of the bright blond head on the black horse at their lead, then saw her reappear from behind a pavilion. Dian watched until Robin had disappeared through the Ashtown gates, swallowed by the city. It looked very final.

  She sat back against the tree, eyes closed, for a long time, until a faint whine from Tomas below roused her to descend reluctantly from her perch. Utterly, bone-achingly weary, she dropped with a jar from the tree, pulled some fir branches into a rough shelter, and with Tomas beside her, she slept.

  When she woke, as tired as if she had never closed her eyes, she turned her back on Robin and walked through the beginnings of a dull snow, curiously thick flakes that fell against her cheeks like cold spiders, making her way back to the meadow where she had left Simon, the meadow overlooked by the Remnant of some rich person’s vacation house. One side of the building lay smashed beneath a fallen tree, and the oak floor of the remainder was buckled into waves where the rain had entered, but the other wing seemed secure enough and would at least keep her dry.

  She let Simon into an entrance vestibule with an ornate fitted stone floor, shut him into these impromptu stables by dragging the remains of a dining table across the hallway, then took a brief walk through the rest of the house, watching for signs of bear or cougar. She found none, only abandonment and decay. A small closet off one of the musty bedrooms held a store of sheets and mouse-chewed blankets, and she scooped up an armload of the stained and frayed fabric to soften the warped floor. The whole time, from when she jumped down from her vantage tree until she pulled the patched sleeping bag around her head, she continued to feel the slow, sticky ooze of blood from her womb.

  She lay like a dead thing for fourteen hours, Tomas at her back for warmth. When she woke, she let him out into the snow to hunt, took the rabbit he brought to her into the house’s once-grand living room. The scenic wall of glass, mostly broken now, made it into a drafty shell with owls and bats in the high roof beams, but the broad stone fireplace was still functional, and there were plenty of dining room chairs to cook over. She ate, then slept again. The bleeding slowed, tur
ned to spotting, and on the third day stopped entirely. She still had the baby; only time would tell about Robin.

  Tomas continued to act as provider, and one day she shot a deer that ventured too close to the front drive. Simon’s poor grazing was supplemented by the sealed jars of oats and wheat that she found in a pantry off the ornate and useless electric kitchen. And at night she lay with a small kerosene lamp that was more decorative than illuminating and read from the books she found in one of the bedrooms, children’s stories for the most part, familiar and comforting. The days passed, fifteen of them, each one returning to her a degree of strength, if not enthusiasm. And each day saw the same cycle of inner dialogue.

  I have to do this.

  No, you don’t. You’re pregnant, that changes everything.

  I owe him my life. And Culum’s burial.

  You don’t owe him your child’s life. Isaac’s child’s life.

  Robin will die, in Ashtown.

  Robin’s a survivor.

  Not of this.

  That’s his choice, then. You didn’t put him in this position, and just shut up about his not wearing the handgun, that’s not your fault.

  I can’t leave him.

  He wouldn’t want you to come after him. You know he wouldn’t.

  I owe him.

  If you go, it’s because, deep down, you don’t want this child. Don’t want what it’ll do to you, tie you down, change you.

  Shut up.

  It’s true, you know it.

  It’s for Isa—I mean, for Robin.

  Yes, what about Isaac—whatever happened to telling Miriam her people would not be welcome in the Valley? If you go after Robin, who’ll be there to warn Judith?

  Plenty of time for that. Plenty of time.

  What if there isn’t?

  If there isn’t, then Judith will deal with it. But there is time enough.

  You don’t have to do this. Turn around now, Robin will be fine.

  I do. I do have to do this.

  The argument went around and around in her head, as maddening as it was unproductive. One night Dian had a nightmare about a maggot-infested otter rising sleekly from its grave and attacking the child she held in her arms, but even that did not turn her completely from Ashtown.

  In the end, the decision made itself, just as Dian’s initial impulse to follow Robin’s abductors had made itself: her feet simply could not imagine moving south, to safety.

  She waited two weeks, both for the sake of her body and in order to avoid any possible link between her arrival and the party that had preceded her. For fourteen days she lived among the ghosts in the wing of the lodge, and on the morning of the fifteenth day, a gray dawn that declared its intention of snow by nightfall, she saddled Simon and turned his head in the direction of Ashtown.

  CALIFíA, QUEEN OF CALIFORNIA, [RODE] TOWARD THEM EQUIPPED FOR BATTLE.

  TWENTY-TWO

  DIAN RODE SOUTHEAST, OR AS CLOSE TO THAT DIRECTION as the terrain would allow, doubling back in order to join with the main north–south road and appear to be just another Traveler from the south. Once on the road, she was fortunate, for the signs showed a band of half a dozen horses an hour or so ahead, and she was followed by a slow-moving group of wagons, three miles behind at mid-morning, considerably further back when she stopped to rest the animals and take a cold meal at noon.

  At three-thirty Ashtown appeared in the distance, and Dian was shocked at the icy stomach and loose bowels that seized her at the sight of its wall and roofs. Simon startled, lost his footing briefly, and distracted her into self-control. She reined in and sat looking at it for some minutes. When she nudged the horse back into motion with her knees, her face was grim.

  Five miles from the city she caught up with straggling riders from the party in front, two women on a single horse and leading a gelding gone lame. Dian’s first impulse was to drop back, but after watching them undetected for a while she decided that they did not feel dangerous and that the advantages in appearing at the gates as part of a group might justify the small risk that these two represented. She rode on, into a bad moment when the woman riding pillion spotted her and reached for her rifle, but the woman left it half-drawn at Dian’s raised and open hands and slid it back into place when it became apparent Dian was alone. Their trust did not extend to wanting a stranger at their backs, however, and they sat and waited for her to come up to them. She stopped twenty feet away and pushed her hat back on her head. The woman on the horse’s rump took this as a conversational opening and nodded her head.

  “Afternoon.”

  Dian agreed.

  “You, eh, you alone?”

  Dian turned and glanced behind her at the stretch of trampled snow and mud that curved off into the trees.

  “Looks like it,” she answered. There was a pause.

  “Going to Ashtown?” the woman asked.

  “Thought I might.” Another pause stretched out, not tense, but in need of filling.

  “You part of the bunch up there?” asked Dian, raising her chin at the road ahead. A flake of snow drifted down, and another.

  “Yeah. There’s a baby; they went ahead to get out of the cold.”

  Dian nodded, and as at a signal both she and the rider in charge of the horse pressed their heels in, so the horses moved northward again.

  “You, eh, you don’t live in Ashtown, do you?”

  “Not yet,” Dian answered. “Heard it might be a good place.”

  “Oh, it is, it really is,” the woman enthused. “There’s a lot happening there, some good schools—I don’t know whether you have kids or not—and it’s safe, not like down south—”

  “Jesus, Mares, you sound like a chamber of commerce or something.” The other woman spoke for the first time, growling but not unfriendly. She tipped her head to look at Dian. “Name’s Dee,” she offered. “She’s Maryanne.”

  “Dian.”

  “And what’s that?” grunted Dee. “Baby moose?” She was looking down at Tomas, who walked between his mistress and the strangers, watchful but not overly concerned.

  “That’s Tomas. He comes from nowhere, he is bound for salvation, for he moves on a holy quest.” Dee and Maryanne looked startled, as well they might.

  “What seeks he?” Maryanne finally ventured.

  “He seeks the genetic improvement of his race throughout the north. He seeks the creation of a race of superior dogs, great in body and spirit, and has humbly dedicated his life to the cause.”

  Dee and Maryanne stared at each other over Dee’s shoulder, looked at Tomas and carefully at Dian, and finally decided it was a joke. They burst into laughter, Dee’s giggles strangely girlish for such a large woman. Tomas cocked his eyebrows quizzically and wagged his tail, which set the two off again. Maryanne finally rearranged her face.

  “It is a just cause, Tomas. May the Heavens bless your—your work,” she spluttered.

  “Thank you,” Dian answered seriously for him.

  “He is a fine dog,” Maryanne said. “A good head. I’d like a pup, if you know of anyone whose bitch is, eh, participating in Tomas’s holy quest.” The two women again collapsed in giggles, somewhat excessively for such a mild jest, Dian thought. Maryanne finally wiped her nose on the end of a scarf, and then tipped her head to Dian in a conspiratorial aside.

  “You’ll have to watch that kind of joke in Ashtown, though, Dian. They’re a little, um, straitlaced there. Not too much of a sense of humor, sometimes.”

  “But then, what can you expect,” muttered Dee, “in a city full of guardian angels?” Maryanne gaped at the back of her partner’s head, glanced uneasily at Dian, and to Dian’s amazement clapped a gloved hand over her mouth and began to snigger. The tips of Dee’s ears had gone bright red; the two women looked for all the world like a pair of kids making dirty jokes about the head of the family.

  “Shit’s sake, Dee,” Maryanne sputtered, “talk about watching your jokes,” and she took her hand from her mouth to jab the other woman hard
in the ribs. Dee shrugged, but it was an uncomfortable, tight motion, and she did not look at Dian for some time.

  So, mused Dian, it would appear that a person did not jest about certain things in Ashtown, a town where streets were safe, the children were schooled, and jokes that linked sex and religion were considered daring—even these two had been shocked, though they regarded themselves as too sophisticated to show it. Interesting. And what the hell had Dee meant by “guardian angels”? Dian had four miles, maybe an hour, to pump these two and discover where the ice was apt to be thin beneath her feet in Ashtown.

  Dee and Maryanne were part of a large family of trader–farmers, twenty-four women, seven men (which numbers indicated that they were a successful family of traders), and a variable number of children. The six now on the road had been part of a group trading in Meijing and south into the Valley when, in August, Dee’s cousin had been knocked under a wagon and broken her leg, very badly. They had intended to ride for home in September, but the leg was not expected to heal until October at the earliest. Normally they would have left her, to make her own way home or to be picked up the following summer, but—she was pregnant. It was all extremely inconvenient, and Dee personally thought the woman had known her condition before they left Ashtown in June, but in any case by October she would be six months along, and the healers and midwives all agreed that in view of the accident, she’d be a damned fool to travel. So half the group, five of them, had stayed behind. The baby, a girl, was born six weeks early, in the beginning of December, but was healthy, only slightly small, and ate heartily. As soon as the mother’s bleeding stopped they had bought heavy fur parkas and left for Ashtown. They were looking forward to getting home (which at this time of year was a house, or several connected houses, within the city walls) and to seeing the children, one of whom was Maryanne’s.