Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  “No! I mean, please, I really would crack up if you locked me away. That’s why I hit her—the thought of bed rest . . .”

  “I see. Nonetheless, you must cut back. I will allow you to maintain a quarter-time schedule, three half-days a week, for the next month. After that you will simply have to find other outlets. And speaking of which, your visits to the Quarter. You told Charlotte that you do nothing more physical there than dancing. Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make sure it stays that way. Also, I want you to promise that you will lie down for one hour every afternoon.”

  Dian was glad she was sitting; she went light-headed with relief. “All right,” she managed to say. “Thank you.”

  It was as simple as that. Word spread, as always in the Center; the other Angels made their subtle and accustomed adjustments to this latest manifestation of the mild craziness of all Angels, and made no further reference to Dian’s pregnancy, not to her face. Dian knew there were numerous remarks and humorous glances when her back was turned, but she gritted her teeth and encouraged the attitude. It gave her fellows a focus well away from the true source of her worries.

  Fifteen days left to the rising. A new series of graffiti appeared overnight, an odd pointy squiggle of bilious green paint, like an upside-down mountain range, soon interpreted as two long fangs on either side of a row of pointed teeth: Vampire teeth. The Ds were busy all day painting the marks over; the next morning they were back again. Rocks flew out of nowhere at Angel heads, a pair of teenagers was found painting a fence with a vaguely similar green color, and the arrest edged into a near-riot before an alibi was provided. Sharpened stakes fell out of doorways, trip wires in alleyways sent bucketloads of filth onto Angel heads, and a pail of green paint fell from a roof, spattering the double patrol with indelible, pus-colored smears.

  Inside the Center, tempers flared. The Captain raged, Ds and newcomers collapsed in tears, quarrels escalated into drawn weapons. A minor disagreement with Margaret blossomed into a crisis, ending late at night with a hysterical and very drunk Margaret slamming out Dian’s door. Dian gave her half an hour to calm down and then followed her to her rooms and spent the next three hours comforting her, listening to her weepy plaints and apologies, and feeling gray exhaustion creeping up. The next day, for the first time ever, Dian canceled a patrol and stayed in bed, knowing that the authorities would have heard of her night and been displeased if she had pushed herself onto the streets.

  Fourteen days; thirteen. A messenger Angel at her door: her presence was required by the Captain. Dian’s heart beat heavily in her chest and a hissing built in her ears, but although she felt giddy and shut the door with a degree more abruptness than was good manners, she did not faint. She changed into her newest and most voluminous tunic and, Tomas as always touching her left fingers, walked with the messenger to their Captain’s door. The other Angel raised a hand to knock, but Dian forestalled her with a question.

  “Say, Violet, you’ve done some work on security, haven’t you?”

  “Some, yes.”

  “Well, I was talking to Lieutenant Carmela last week.” This was the woman in charge of the Center’s internal security. “Something she said made me think about this wing, and I’ve been wondering if there’s any way we might improve it. I know the Center’s tight, but if—God forbid—some crazy got inside, she’d be sure to aim for the Captain. What I was thinking was, is there someplace—even a small room—that’s fairly secure already and would only need to be strengthened?” Violet’s eyes flickered to one side, and without following her gaze Dian went on. “Just a space for the Captain to be absolutely safe until we could get her out. It’s not urgent, I suppose, certainly not worth bothering the Captain over until after the Queen is gone, but think about it, huh?”

  The Angel nodded and turned back to the door, and Dian with her, but afterward, coming out of Breaker’s rooms furious and humiliated and relieved and desolate, her eyes went to the spot that had drawn Violet’s eyes. It was an awkward corner, created when two neighboring buildings had been joined, but the paneling was broken in a door-sized rectangle, and a small plate of polished black glass, nearly hidden behind an ill-lit statue of a nude male, covered the number-pad release for a high-security door. Dian noted its position mechanically and walked away.

  She walked alone.

  The pain of Breaker’s order, the emptiness at her side, made further explanations about her state of nerves unnecessary. It also submerged the anxiety almost completely. Several times over the next days she forgot entirely, found herself thinking, When Breaker comes back and I have Tomas again—only to remember that, no, she would not see him again, ever. Unless she failed.

  Margaret came in that evening to find Dian sitting in a cold, dark room, staring unseeing at the ashes in the fireplace, a half-empty bottle of Ashtown rotgut on the table before her. Dian did not look up at the movement of the door, seemed not to notice the sudden illumination of the room, and Margaret, after studying her for a long moment, shrugged out of her jacket and took it to the closet, went into the kitchen and put the chicken she’d stewed earlier back into the oven to heat, rubbed out the note she’d written on the message slate asking Dian to put the dish in, made two cups of strong tea, and carried them out into the living room. Dian had not moved. Margaret put the mug down in front of her, laid and lit a fire, closed the curtains, and took the bottle out into the kitchen. She came back to sit near Dian, tucked her feet under her in the chair, and blew at her cup.

  “What happened?” she asked quietly.

  For half a minute more Dian sat unheeding, and then blinked and looked at the fire, then at Margaret.

  “Tomas. She took Tomas.”

  “The Captain?” Margaret was surprised, not at the idea but at Dian’s reaction. Breaker often kept the dog with her for hours, half a day at a time.

  “Bitch,” Dian spat out. “Worse than a bitch in heat. Shameless.” Margaret could hear the slur of Dian’s voice now and knew that she was indeed profoundly drunk. She had never seen it before and was alarmed at the thought of listeners, but there was no stopping Dian. “Been after him for months. Stupid fucking dog, can’t see into her. He’s not mine anymore. Wouldn’t go for her if I ordered him to, not now. Not mine. Never again. Gone. He’s gone. Stupid damned male, thinks with his—” She stopped dead, slapped her hand over her mouth, and turned so pale that Margaret hurriedly put down her cup and scrambled to her feet, looking desperately for something Dian could vomit into.

  Dian dropped the cup she was holding, fumbled to retrieve it, then abandoned the effort and struggled, heavy now and awkward, to her feet. She turned her back on Margaret and walked with swaying dignity out of the room, but she did not pause in either bathroom or kitchen. Instead, Margaret heard the bedroom door close softly, and the creak of the bedsprings, then silence.

  She sat down on the sofa in Dian’s place, filled with bewilderment and uneasiness. Surely Breaker would return Tomas after Bess’s visit. He was much too valuable to sell or give away, and what on earth could she do with him in the Center if not return him to Dian? She couldn’t possibly spend the time on him that Dian did, nor was she a stupid woman, willing to cripple one of her Angels just to demonstrate her power. But Dian had sounded so final. And the hand over the mouth—that had not been the stomach’s rebellion, but almost a parody of shut-my-mouth, especially accompanied as it had been by a strange expression of—what? Drunken slyness? A shaft of sober fear? Alarm, certainly. Because the thought of listeners had suddenly broken through to her? Somehow Margaret thought not. And the uncertainty made her unhappy.

  It had to be connected to the guilt that Dian had been demonstrating in recent days; of that Margaret was certain. Her sudden interest in the Men’s Quarter, her jumpiness and absentmindedness, and tonight’s abrupt self-interruption while referring to male intractability—yes, no doubt about it: there was a man in it somewhere.

  In the dark bedroom Dian lay staring up at
the ceiling, nowhere near as drunk as Margaret thought, but far more so than she should have allowed herself to be. She lay staring at the ceiling, imagining ways to kill her Captain, the woman who had stolen her dog’s loyalty, who had toyed and teased Dian with Tomas’s obedience, taken such languid pleasure in demonstrating her power over the dog, reveling in Dian’s helpless rage, and finally been both amused and aroused by Dian’s hatred of her. She had kissed the nape of Dian’s neck in mocking affection, and laughed aloud in sheer happiness when Dian came within a breath of attacking her.

  God, she hated Breaker, loathed her, wanted nothing more in life but the pleasure of killing her. Almost nothing, she corrected herself. First she would thwart Breaker and her city, walk away from its prison bars and loose the menfolk on it: freedom, whatever the cost. She would give Robin that, and (she was becoming more sober, depressingly so) she would carry out her responsibilities to the child in her womb, Isaac’s child.

  Someday, though, she would return. Someday.

  Twelve days. Dian woke to find herself alone and bereft, but safe: the Center thought she was going nuts with her pregnancy, the Captain saw her being pushed off center by the loss of Tomas, and Margaret read her anger as guilt; all were, in part, correct. As long as Dian refrained from disillusioning any of them, she and the men were safe.

  Eleven, ten, nine days. The Angels cracked down hard, drew the curfew back an hour, punished anyone found with paintbrush or rock in hand. It appeared to be working; things calmed down, the Vampire graffiti failed to appear one morning, the turmoil within the Center calmed somewhat. Breaker walked with a swing in her stride, believing her hard hand had done the trick. Dian knew the truth: the men didn’t want to risk her canceling the trip north.

  One week before Breaker was due to leave for the rendezvous with Queen Bess, Dian went to the Angel in charge of the duty roster and told her she wanted to start her maternity leave.

  “About time, I’d say. Effective today?”

  “If it’s convenient.”

  “Sure. Things have been quiet lately. You’d never’ve thought so a couple of weeks ago, but the problems just faded away. Bit of graffiti last night, but we haven’t had anyone throwing rocks in days. Must’ve been a phase of the moon or something.”

  “Funny.”

  “Yeah, it is. Anyway, sure, this is a fine time to get you off the streets. We may need to call on you once the Queen arrives, but there’s nothing urgent until then. You want a job in the meantime, or some time off? You have the credits.”

  “You know me, I’ve got to have something to do. A desk job, or teaching?” she suggested, knowing she’d never finish any class she started.

  “Can I put you down for tutoring duty? Nothing too physical, maybe wand and guns?”

  “Sure. Archery if you want it,” Dian offered. “Or staff, if I wear a padded vest.”

  “I don’t know about the staff, but we were just saying the other day that we should do a refresher in archery. I’ll see if I can put together a class. You get more credits for a group,” she added, and made a note in her ledger. “Might even join myself—I did a bit as a kid, but it would be fun to pick it up again.”

  “Fun, yes, well. Schedule it whenever you like, two or three days a week. See you,” she said, reflecting that she probably would not, ever again.

  “Sure. Say, where’s the dog?” the Angel asked innocently. Dian paused, her hand on the door frame, searching the woman’s face for mischief and not seeing it. She was that rare creature, an Angel who missed out on the gossip.

  “With Breaker,” Dian said finally.

  “With—oh, yeah, come to think of it I did hear something. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without him. Must feel funny.”

  “It feels like I’ve had an arm amputated,” she said flatly, and went out the door.

  It was the truth. She felt the loss of Tomas even more acutely than she had Culum. Then she had the distraction of fever, and the death had been noble and clean; this, however, was neither. It was betrayal, it was selling the dog into slavery, and the thought of Tomas working with Breaker was almost as repugnant as the idea of giving birth to a citizen of Ashtown. That Tomas was young enough to recover from her absence, that he would be pampered and valued the rest of his life, almost made it worse. Death in battle would have suited him better.

  She was also quite simply not herself without Tomas. Since she had taken her first steps, Dian had never been away from her dogs for more than an hour or two at a time. The dangling fingers of her left hand were continually startled at encountering nothing but air. She kept thinking she was hearing things, only to realize it was an absence, not a presence, of the click of canine nails on pavement. The nights rang with emptiness, and she often jerked awake in alarm at the lack of grunts and snores from the floor beside the bed, imagining the silence to mean Tomas sitting up, pricking his ears at an intruder. Every time her hand went out in a command as automatic as breathing, she was brought up hard by the realization that the human partner at her side was not about to respond. Her reaction time was shot to hell; she really had no business patrolling the streets.

  It was true that she was not needed, that the turmoil which had been building throughout the spring had abruptly tapered off. Breaker would leave with a confident mind, and Dian, too, was reassured, though for markedly different reasons: the quiet streets demonstrated more than Robin’s words that the Men’s Quarter had a greater degree of control, over events and over itself, than she had feared. Perhaps utter disaster was not to be the inevitable outcome of this.

  Eight, seven. Dian went to the Quarter that afternoon while Margaret was on duty in the infirmary, spent two hours with the syrupy music blaring, and when she left, the route to the small locked room was in Robin’s head. She did not know how the menfolk would get in, either to the Center or the room, but she assumed that there must be some way to overcome the numbered code behind the black glass plate—after all, what if Breaker died without telling anyone the code? Actually, she did not much care; if the men couldn’t figure it out, that was their problem. She and Robin would be gone.

  Six days, five. Four. Less than forty-eight hours before Breaker left, and coming up from the bowels of the Center where she’d been coaching the new Angels in the use of the bow and arrow, Dian turned a corner and there was Breaker with Tomas at her knee. Both Dian and her dog reacted instantaneously, he leaping at her like a puppy and biting affectionately and stropping his hundred fifty pounds of enthusiastic muscle against her legs and flailing his tail around so hard that the next day she had bruises along her shins, and she thumping him and tugging his ruff and slapping at his grinning mouth and shaking his lower jaw with her hand and feeling his tongue slobber and work against her palm and his teeth chew gently. It was perhaps thirty seconds before Dian remembered.

  She looked up slowly into a pair of yellow eyes utterly devoid of any human expression, and a cold shiver of fear rose through her. Not for herself, but for Tomas. She extracted her hand and stood away from him.

  “Tomas, heel,” said Breaker in a gentle voice that held a razor’s edge, but Tomas was having none of it and would not be stood away from. He ignored Breaker completely.

  “Tomas!” she said again, and this time his ear twitched, but he did not budge. Dian reached down with both hands and seized the fur along his jaws, and bent her forehead down to touch his, holding it there for a moment. When she stepped away this time, it was final.

  “Tomas, go,” she said firmly, and without looking at Breaker she began to move away. He made to follow her, and she brought out the voice saved for the direst of sins, the voice that combined shock and disappointment and hurt and a hint of anger, the voice of a condemning god. “Tomas! Bad dog. Go.”

  He froze, and she turned and stumbled off.

  Dian was not a weeping woman, but when she had reached the refuge of her rooms she gave herself over to it, and allowed Margaret to hold her and comfort her, and wept for that too.<
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  The Men’s Quarter was slightly more than a sixth of the city in acreage, slightly less than a sixth in population. It was in the northeast quadrant of the roughly heptagonal city, a rounded-off triangle surrounded by three wide, flat boulevards that were lit harshly at night, with access to the Quarter only through barbed wire and broken glass and alarms. The closest the Quarter came to Ashtown’s perimeter walls was a fourth of a mile from its northernmost point. The southeastern tip of the triangle was half a mile from the wall, and the western tip was buried in the city, a few hundred yards from the Center. The men would make their break halfway along the Quarter’s southern wall. They would head west to the Center; she and Robin would make due east for the outside wall.

  Breaker left at night lest the populace take her departure as an invitation to mischief. Dian did not see them off. She was in the shooting range buried far beneath the Center, plugging copious quantities of bullets into paper figures that looked like Breaker.

  One more day and its night, and then another day, the last day, never again to see a dawn in Ashtown. The thought was powerful, life-giving, and she kissed Margaret with more affection than she’d demonstrated in some time. She felt—dear God, she was happy, for the first time in forever. When had she last felt like this? Childhood? Then she remembered: the intoxicating hours of freedom after leaving the Valley the previous October, before finding Willa. The exhilaration of action, movement, anything to stir the stagnation that had tugged at her, clung to her, turned her into a fat old pregnant woman. God—the first few nights I’m probably going to bitch at how hard the ground is, she thought, and grinned to herself.