Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  Dian admired the frayed sepia photograph of a gap-toothed, pigtailed child in a summer dress and returned it to the proud mother, commented untruthfully on the resemblance, and asked what the family did in Ashtown during the winter months.

  From Maryanne’s description and Dee’s grunts, Dian pieced together a picture of the town as a beehive of activity under its blanket of snow. Politics—three of the family were on various governing bodies, municipal and school boards, and Dee’s mother was a past Mayor. Culture—the city possessed two movie theaters and four live stages; Maryanne’s sister played in the city orchestra; nearly everybody was involved in some sort of dramatic society, even if she only painted sets or sold tickets. Education—school for the children was mostly in fall and winter, and public lectures abounded. And for plain entertainment, there were a number of nightclubs and dance halls. Yes, Maryanne loved her city, and even the more phlegmatic Dee seemed in agreement.

  “It seems like I chose the right time of year to come,” said Dian. “What about your army?”

  The ice went abruptly paper-thin, and Dian could hear the cracks spreading out as Dee looked back over her shoulder at Maryanne and then away.

  “What about it?” asked Dee.

  “A lot of towns use the winter to practice drills, teach the kids to shoot, that kind of thing,” said Dian smoothly.

  The two women looked at each other again and relaxed slightly.

  “No,” said Maryanne, “we don’t have an army.”

  “No army? How do you protect yourselves?”

  “We—the city—have an agreement with Queen Bess. She has an outpost only fifty miles from here.”

  “Ah. Taxation?”

  “Some. Not much, considering the security.”

  “I suppose not. And inside the city? Do her troops police the streets?”

  “No,” said Maryanne, sounding offended. “We have the—we have our own police force. They’re very . . . efficient.” The force’s efficiency was obviously regarded as a mixed blessing, and Dian thought she could put a name to the local militia: these would be the city’s guardian angels.

  “I see,” she said, and did, a great deal: external tribute and an internal police force so effective that it inspired fear even in such prosperous, law-abiding citizens as Maryanne and Dee, coupled with the privilege and corruption that Isaac had fled. . . . “I see. Tell me about the schools. What grade is your daughter in?”

  Relief washed over the woman’s broad features as she realized that Dian was only asking reasonable questions after all, the sort of questions to be expected from a stranger shopping around for a safe haven for her family. She told Dian about the skills her child was learning, and Dian made interested noises and thought furiously.

  Half a mile from the gate, with the snow falling on the roofs and tents that had begun to appear along the road beside them, Maryanne stopped in the middle of a sentence and turned to Dian with the air of a remiss hostess.

  “But you, Dian, do you have a place to stay? Friends?”

  “Not yet. I’ll find work.”

  “What do you do? I’ve been chattering on so . . .”

  They waited for her to answer. She could feel their eyes on her and knew what she had to do. She took the role open to her and stepped into it. She would not need to appear as a member of a group after all—indeed, it would be better if she did not. She turned to them with a small, tight smile on her cold lips.

  “Truth to tell,” she told them, “I’m a guard.” They reacted exactly as she had expected. Dee’s hands jerked on the reins and her stolid face went pale. Maryanne actually swallowed.

  “Mercenary?” Dee asked carefully.

  Dian neither confirmed nor denied it.

  “I got tired of the South,” she said, and chose not to notice that they were not beside her as she lifted her face to the city and rode forward.

  Under ordinary circumstances, the discomfiture inflicted on the two harmless women might have troubled Dian, but circumstances would not be ordinary for a long, long time, and her mind was very much occupied with other things. She could think only of what she would have to do in the next minutes, while Isaac’s past and Robin’s present bore down on her and the nervy feeling of impending evil built into the intensity of a toothache.

  Ashtown’s walls had been modeled on those encircling Meijing, though with considerably less in resources and imagination and no concern whatsoever for aesthetics. Much of it incorporated the backs of buildings, their windows bricked up and the gaps between them filled with a mixture of bound rubble, sheets of rusting metal, and rough logs. It should have looked slapdash and homey, but it did not. It looked brutal, solid, and effective. Although, Dian tried to reassure herself, from the inside the walls would surely not be difficult to scale. Twelve-year-old Isaac had gone over them; so could she.

  Holding that cold comfort to her, Dian approached the left of the two entrance portals, the one that declared itself to be for Strangers. The guard cubicle was empty, as opposed to Residents on the right with its line of tired travelers being harassed by an equally tired-looking woman in a dark blue uniform studded with shiny buttons and draped with scarlet braid. She was arguing with a short, blocky figure in a coat of ratty wolf skin, both of them waving papers. Between them and the gate stood two big women in black, a dull, unrelieved black that seemed to suck the color from anything nearby. The women were standing in front of a smoking brazier, warming themselves and looking bored. Two old but well-cared-for shotguns leaned against the wall, ten feet away. Each of the guards had an odd black tubular object strapped to the outside of her forearm, some nine inches long and slightly thicker than a thumb. Some sort of Artifact, from its appearance, vaguely similar to objects she’d seen on the Meijing guards along the Road—communications device, or weapon?

  The Strangers door was tightly shut, with neither uniformed official nor black guard in sight. The two women in black smirked at Dian’s indecision and ignored her. With that smirk Dian’s path was set. She dismounted slowly, feeling their watching eyes. She eased her back and squatted down to dig the ice from Simon’s hooves, then did the same for Tomas’s paws before rising to rummage through the saddlebags for a couple of half-frozen rabbit legs that she had roasted over the lodge’s fireplace the night before. She stripped one bare, giving the meat to Tomas and sticking the bones back into the saddlebag; then, carrying the other leg and leaving Tomas to stand watch over the horse, Dian walked across to the ornately uniformed bureaucrat. The two big guards by the brazier watched her approach. One of them turned her back and made a remark to the other, who laughed through yellow teeth. Dian ignored them both, instead walking straight up to insinuate herself between the paper-waving duo, where she stood, stripping and chewing the meat while she looked from one to the other with undisguised interest. The woman in the wolf skin looked irritated, and the uniformed official stopped what she was saying.

  “Lady, you’ll have to get in line,” she told Dian rudely.

  “I am in line,” said Dian. She gestured with the gnawed rabbit leg past the woman’s nose at Simon and Tomas, chewed, swallowed, and smiled. “Do I just go in?”

  “Of course not. You’ll have to wait until the attendant returns.” She moved to look around Dian at the woman in wolf skin. “Now, your pass says you’d be back by—”

  Her voice ended in a squeak of pain and astonishment as Dian’s greasy fingers shot out to dig into her jaw, forcing her head around. Dian continued to smile into the woman’s frightened eyes.

  “And how long will that be, please?”

  “I—I don’t know. Twenty minutes?”

  “Good.” She let go of the woman’s face and patted her cheek affectionately. “Twenty minutes. If they’re not here by then I’ll come back and join your line. Right?” The bureaucrat swallowed and swiveled to look for her two black-clad guards. One of them had her gun, the other was still fumbling. Dian faced them: dead silence, two guns aimed at her, the surreptitious noises of p
eople behind her moving briskly away. She held out both hands, empty but for the half-stripped leg, and shrugged at the two guards. “Just asking a question,” she said mildly. She raised the meat to her teeth again, sucked off the last shreds, chewed, swallowed, and gave the guards a wide smile.

  Then she tossed the bone over her shoulder and walked off, unarmed and covered in freezing sweat, walking up the row of stalls as if to investigate their few offerings, leaving horse, rifle, and possessions under Tomas’s watchful eye.

  A Meijing copper bought a cup of hot broth, and a small silver gained her two meat pies. She strolled back at a leisurely pace that belied the pounding in her veins, ignoring the eyes on her and the ice in her guts. She gave one of the pies to Tomas, nodded politely at the black guards and their ready weapons, nodded again and smiled to the suddenly nervous bureaucrat, and settled her back into a comfortable squat against the logs of the wall to eat her own pie.

  She nearly laughed at the absurdity of it, the ease with which one person can terrify another merely by ignoring her sacred symbols of power. She ate the last of the pie, pleased that she could swallow around the dryness in her throat, washed it down with the dregs of the broth, stood up (seemingly oblivious of the jittery reaction her movements set off on the other side of the entrance), and walked back down to return the cup to the vendor. All the way down she felt the eyes of the crowd on her; on the way back she felt like a wolf strolling past a flock of penned sheep. Dee and Maryanne, standing at the rear of the Residents line, would not meet her eyes, but she nodded at them anyway, and smiled, and smiled.

  She stopped halfway between the portals, pulled up her sleeve and peered elaborately at her bare wrist, and, grinning merrily, looked over at the uniformed official, who dropped her papers on the muddy stones. Dian walked over and squatted to help the woman gather them up.

  “How stupid of me,” said Dian, and held out a sheaf of papers. “I don’t have a watch. Has it been twenty minutes?” The woman gulped, reached for the papers, and backed away from Dian, who followed her with a look of polite expectation arranged on her face. The woman stopped and cast an appeal at the guards.

  “I suppose, uh, that is, she doesn’t seem to be there yet. . . .”

  “No, she doesn’t, does she?” agreed Dian. “Ah, well, that’s all right. I’ll just come through your side.”

  “But I don’t have the forms,” the woman squeaked, “the authority—”

  With that, the blunt barrel of a shotgun came up to rest on Dian’s chest.

  Dark, dead eyes, rotten teeth, an ill-healed knife scar on her face, an inch taller than Dian and thirty pounds heavier. Dian looked over to where Tomas crouched, quivering, and pointed a commanding forefinger at him until he subsided. She glanced over at the other guard, down at the gun barrel, into the eyes, and smiled.

  “It’s just that I had some business inside, and I’d rather not wait out here all night. I need to see somebody, and there’s obviously no one of any importance out here. But if you insist that I should wait . . .” She took a step back and caught the look the second guard threw up at the overhanging wall, a look of triumph consulting authority. The moment’s lapse, the gloating relaxation of the closer guard, and the knowledge that the person she needed to see was watching from above coalesced into movement. Dian’s arm came up under the gun, which boomed past her ear and sent the remaining onlookers diving for cover while her forearm continued up to slam the heavy double barrel upward and hard into the woman’s face. Before the woman had staggered back, Dian’s legs were already launching her at the other guard, whose gun was coming up but not fast enough. Dian tackled the guard at knee level and her gun, too, fired, a window high above them tinkling into fragments. They rolled, and Dian drove the base of her hand up into the woman’s chin. The guard’s eyes fluttered.

  Dian reached up through the tangle of woman lying on top of her, found a wrist, and struggled to her feet with the woman’s arm pushed high behind the dark back. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of women diving behind walls, horses rearing and slipping, but she was only concerned with Tomas, standing teeth bared over the guard with the bloody face.

  “Tomas, enough. Fetch the gun,” she ordered quietly. Reluctantly, one hundred fifty pounds of dog wrapped its lips back over its teeth and went, stiff-legged and huge of ruff, to bring his mistress the heavy metal stick with the foul smell. She took it from him, broke it to knock out the remaining shell, and tossed it next to the other one.

  “Guard the guns, Tomas.” He stalked over to the weapons and placed himself over them.

  The forecourt was now so silent, even above the ringing in her ear Dian could hear the wet snuffling and outraged curses of the guard with the crushed nose, the raised shouts down the road, the nervous jangle and snort of the horses, and—and a voice from within the walls. She searched for its source, found the narrow slit fifteen feet up the wall, saw someone behind it, and forced her mouth into what felt like a rictus of death but she hoped looked like an insouciant smile.

  Show no fear, not any, she thought incoherently: only confidence—spark curiosity—put on a mask. But what if I’m wrong, what if there is no authority behind the wall—or if there is, what if it’s just as brutal as these two, no brains, the fear that unseen figure inspires nothing more subtle than the fear of a mad giant with a stick, what if I’m wrong, she’ll cut me down and I’ve failed them all, Robin and Judith and Isaac and Culum and—

  Stop. No fear. The guard she was using to block her body from a potential shot out of the window had recovered from the stunning blow to her chin and was tense under Dian’s hands, spoiling for a fight but not willing to sacrifice her arm for the pleasure. The other guard was getting to her feet, and Dian knew that in seconds she would no longer control the courtyard. Unless . . . She let go of the guard’s wrist and held out her hands.

  The guard stumbled away, leaving Dian completely exposed, unarmed, her hands spread open away from her sides. She was gambling all on the ability of an unseen presence to control her troops; she did not hear the low command from above, she simply stood, for an endless string of seconds, twisting her palms up now in a gesture of waiting, ever smiling at the hole in the wall, eyebrows lifted in a secret amusement, smiling. The bullets did not come. Ten, eleven, twenty seconds, and she started to lower her hands when it came, a crack that hit the stones ten feet behind her, and even as her body was trying to react, her mind was furiously countermanding the movement, so that she twitched violently but did not actually move from her place.

  “Leave it, Bernie,” said the voice from above, and a moment later snarled, “I said leave it!” Dian turned her head slightly to look at Bernie with the broken nose, the red blood covering the lower half of her face to glisten against the flat black of her garment. There was rage in her eyes and in her stance, and the black forearm tube was now in her hand, held in precisely the same stance Dian had last seen during the fight on Harvest Day between Laine and Sonja. A weapon, then, but not a gun.

  With great deliberation Dian turned away from her, wiped her palms off on her coat, and walked over to her frightened horse. She wanted nothing but to sit down and shake for a while, or to sprint for the hills, but forced herself to gather up Simon’s reins, talk soothing nonsense to him, and stroke his flaring nose.

  The Strangers door opened and out came two more black-clad women, these with rifles over their shoulders. They marched past her without so much as a glance, over to where the two failed guards sat, both of them cursing and packing the one woman’s broken nose with snow. The Residents line formed up again hesitantly, its first member a good fifty feet away and ready to leap for cover.

  These new guards did not look the type to leave their weapons out of reach, Dian thought. Bernie and her friend apparently knew they were outclassed, or outranked, because they followed the newcomers’ curt orders to leave without much argument. Dian watched in amusement as the two tried to decide what to do about their shotguns, still straddled by
Tomas’s legs, then tensed as one of them took a step forward with the black weapon tube in her hand—whatever those things were, Tomas would not know how to deal with them. However, the older of the new guards shouted at them to leave the guns and, cursing with great violence and little eloquence, they both spat imprecations in Dian’s direction and went through Strangers. She smiled, and the door shut behind them.

  The guards got the line moving again, and the uniformed woman began briskly to funnel her charges through their gate. Dian leaned against Simon’s reassuring flank, and picked her teeth, and wondered what the hell to do now. It was cold, it was getting dark, it was beginning to snow in earnest, and her leg ached from knee to waist. In ten minutes the last of the travelers had gone through and the first of the stall-holders was being passed, and although the two guards were including Dian in their watch, nothing else happened.

  Had it not been so damnably cold, with so much at stake, it would have been funny. Dian felt a sudden confirmation of respect for her opponent in the room above, but it had to end, one way or another. She pushed away from Simon’s shoulder, pulled off her hat and slapped it against the saddle to free both of snow, put it back on, went around to put her foot in the stirrup, and mounted. She circled Simon around until she was facing the upper window, and though it was too dark to see inside, she knew the woman who commanded the guards was there, watching her. Dian could feel her. She raised her voice to carry through the ramshackle wall.

  “I thought you might have need of someone with a bit of talent.” She showed her teeth in a grin, as if it mattered not at all. “Guess I was wrong. Tomas, heel,” she called and, pressing her boots into the horse’s ribs, turned confidently out into the snow.