Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  “You’re in a cheerful mood this morning,” said Margaret from behind her, sounding mildly suspicious. Dian finished pulling her tunic over her head and reached for her brush, and then turned and directed her grin at Margaret.

  “I know. It’s crazy, but I just decided, what the hell. I do want this baby. And I’m not going to allow the Captain to screw me into a corner. Let’s do something tonight. What time are you off?”

  “Early shift, I’ll be home by four.”

  “Great. Let’s get out of the Center. Dinner somewhere where they won’t act like we’ve got the plague. And there might be a decent movie playing. Yes?”

  “You are in a funny mood,” Margaret insisted, but now a smile of her own was tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  “C’mon. What I really want to do is stuff myself silly and dance until dawn, but I can’t do either right now, so we’ll have to practice decorum and be in bed at ten o’clock like the old folks. You game?”

  “I’d love to, Dian.”

  Somehow Dian got through the day. Somehow she kept enough of her mind on the movie to know when to laugh. Later she managed to eat the food that cost her as much as a night in the Quarter would have, aware of Margaret oohing and ahing over the delectable dishes and the glamour of the restaurant, though Dian could only grimly think that it was as well to tuck away as much as her crowded stomach could bear, because it might be some time before she had another hot meal. It could have been stewed wood chips, for all she tasted it. She gave Margaret champagne, and wine, and brandy, and scandalized eyes were averted from the sight of two Angels in their black uniforms, one markedly pregnant and the other decidedly drunk, helping each other out the door.

  Margaret sang rude songs and giggled in the open horse-cab, and once home fell headlong into Dian’s bed and lay senseless, snorting occasionally. Dian removed Margaret’s boots and tucked the blankets over her, and then, before turning off the lights, she eased back the heavy hair that tangled onto Margaret’s face and placed her lips lightly on the skin behind Margaret’s right ear. Margaret grunted and muttered. Dian smiled, sadly, and closed the door quietly, and went to make herself some coffee. She sat with the lights out and the curtains open, looking down at the Angels’ private inner garden, its blossoming trees ghostly in the dim light of lamp and half-moon. She sat, and breathed, and felt the beating of her heart, and waited, and when at twenty-three minutes after midnight the first sirens sounded, she relaxed.

  The waiting was over.

  She picked up her cup and carried it to the kitchen, washed it, dried it, hung it on its hook over the sink. When the alarm bells began to clamor in the hallway, she went in to Margaret, shook her shoulder gently.

  “Margaret, there’s some kind of problem. I’m going to see if I’m needed. Don’t bother getting up, they’ll send for you if they need you; I just wanted to tell you where I was going. And to say thank you.”

  Margaret backhanded the hair from her eyes and squinted groggily up at Dian.

  “F’ what?”

  “For tonight, of course. And for everything since January, I suppose. Go back to sleep now, sweet girl. I’ll see you later.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  She leaned down and kissed the woman lightly, drew the quilt up over her shoulders, and left her. With any luck, Margaret would never know for certain. Bones would no doubt be unearthed in the cooled debris, and what was to say that some of them were not those of one pregnant Angel?

  Dian took her wand from its recharging unit beside the door, strapped it on, reached into the closet for her thick, short-sleeved flak jacket, tight across the belly now but with inner pockets that would not show the items she had secreted there earlier—extra socks, a flint and matches, a few fruit-and-nut bars, a twist of plastic film holding a few tablets, mostly antibiotics, in case she and Robin did not come through unscathed. And a long, thin, strong rope. She did up the jacket’s buttons and reached into the closet for the rest of her riot gear, issued to every Angel but worn only in the rare event that the Angelic mystique of invulnerability was actively, massively challenged. The rifle, her personal choice over the more commonly used shotgun, she slung onto her back; the belt, bristling with ammunition and gas grenades, went around her hips; the claustrophobic helmet she tucked under her arm, and let herself out into the corridors.

  Downstairs it was incredibly noisy, but not chaotic: give Breaker her due, she may be an absolute tyrant, but her women were trained to function without her. There were three people at the communications desk instead of the usual one, all speaking stridently into radio telephones with hands flattened over their free ears. Dian gave her number to the Lieutenant in charge and was told to get to the northern end of the Men’s Quarter, where there was apparently a mass breakout attempt, reports of twenty, forty men already over the wall. Dian obediently left the Quarter, stopped outside to buckle on her helmet and unsling her rifle, and then took off—east, not north. North was the decoy.

  In five minutes she trotted up to one of the minor entrances of the Quarter. The single guard there greeted her with furious questions.

  “Fucking hell!” she exploded. “What’s going on? I can’t get anyone to stop and tell me.”

  “Don’t you have a radio?” Dian asked her.

  “They said to shut up and get off the air.”

  “They probably won’t have told you, then. You’re wanted in the north end. I’m your relief.”

  “What is it?”

  “Breakout attempt and, from the look of it, fires. Better hurry up if you want to get in on the fun.”

  “I should go back for my gear.”

  “The Lieut said no, just get your ass up there. Oh, and you’re to go around the east end, round up any stray Angels you see, and send them up too.”

  The woman hesitated no longer, but grabbed her equipment and set off at a run down the lit boulevard. Dian let out a sigh of relief. She’d been prepared to wand the woman, or shoot her, but deceit was far better. She tapped twice on the thick wooden door. She felt eyes on her but nothing happened, and then she remembered that she was completely anonymous, and hastened to raise the obscuring faceplate on the helmet. The door opened instantly, and she slid inside.

  “You’ll have to put someone on the door,” she started to say, but a black-clad almost-woman was already pushing past her to the guardhouse. She nodded and turned back to the dark passageway, which her senses told her was full of people. The door behind her shut, the lights went back on, and, prepared though she was, she took an involuntary step back at what confronted her.

  The room was filled with men, moreover, a group of men surrounded by the clear, taut aura of violence. It was a scene few women living could have witnessed: a small male army, armed to the teeth, knives and clips of ammunition strung around their bodies. It was a scene straight out of Before, when men were the warriors, something out of a storybook or the grainy, flickering movies Margaret liked, although Dian had always found the idea of a male army so unlikely as to be amusing, and slightly embarrassing. It did not strike her that way now. She found these men noble, determined, and very impressive; they smelled of power and death.

  The impression lasted only a moment, until she blinked and saw before her twenty-seven edgy, self-conscious, out-of-shape, overarmed men, but the vision stayed with her and erased the last traces of her doubt and condescension. These were hardly prime male specimens. A few of them had muscles, but several were distinctly pudgy, and all of them were typical overfed and underworked pampered city-dwellers. However, she would now trust them to know roughly what needed doing.

  She straightened, realized that she was gripping her half-raised gun with unnecessary fervor and let it droop, and scanned the faces for Robin. She missed him at first, started to open her mouth with an angry protest, and then her eyes snapped back to a familiar woman: Robin, in a padded vest as of old, dressed as an Angel. All the men wore black, some more successful imitations of the A
ngel uniforms than others. Two of them held helmets, all had false wands—reasonable facsimiles—and the variety of guns was sufficiently Angelic to pass. However:

  “Couldn’t you find black boots?” she asked. Some of them looked taken aback, and she had to admit it was an odd note on which to begin a heroic evening.

  “Oh, my dears,” a voice drawled from the back. “If only I’d known the proper fashion for a revolution. This is just too humiliating.”

  Laughter woke the little passageway, nervous, basso, and relieved, but Dian did not join it.

  “The brown ones will pass in the dark,” she persisted, “but you’ll have to do something about the lighter ones. You’ll be spotted from a mile off. At least rub some lampblack into them, anything.” A pot of some black greasepaint was produced and depleted, and at last Dian was satisfied.

  “Robin, the supplies?” She handed him the Angel knapsack she’d secreted away. “Put whatever you have in here with some grenades on top in case it’s checked. Now, who’s heading this?” Glances gave her the answer, an unassuming middle-age bookish sort with implacable eyes behind wire spectacles. She held out a scrap of paper that held a few lines of names and numbers. “I’ve given you everything you asked for,” she told him. “In another ten minutes the Center will be virtually empty, and the route Robin gave you is the safest and most direct. I can’t do anything about the door lock, but you knew that, and I assume you have something in mind. I’ve done my part,” she stressed. “What I want in return is these twelve lives spared. These women do not deserve death, and if you deal with them honestly, they could be of great value to you. Also, I suggest that you consider sparing anyone whose number is higher than eight hundred. Anyone over that has only been here for a year or so, and a lot of them are new recruits under sixteen. Children. And all the numbers above one thousand are servants, whose only sins were to cook and do Angel laundry. If you refuse to save these women and girls, there is nothing I can do. But I ask it of your honor to try.”

  The man studied her eyes and then took the paper from her hand, looked at it, and buttoned it into a pocket. He nodded once, and she told him, “I probably don’t need to mention that, if you are captured, that piece of paper would be the end of those twelve.”

  “No,” he said, and again she was, irrationally, reassured. She held out her hand to him, and he took it.

  “Good luck,” she said. She slung her rifle again across her back and moved to the door, then stopped. “Two more things. One, none of you saw me tonight. I am missing, dead, but you never heard of me. Second, I suppose it doesn’t much matter what you think of me, but I’d like you to know that I’m not a traitor. I came to Ashtown to get Robin out, and that’s what I’m doing. I’ve never been an Angel in anything other than appearances. I tell you this so you know that the information you have and the names on that list are clean; they come from someone whose word is solid.”

  The man smiled then, just a little with his eyes, and he was no longer unassuming.

  “Good luck to you too, Dian,” he said, and laid his hand in a brief blessing on Robin’s shoulder. “Good-bye, Robby. We’ll name a street after you,” and he pushed them out the door. The false Angel put his head through the archway.

  “Anything?” she asked him.

  “Half a dozen Vam—Angels running by a minute ago, nothing since.”

  “Good.” She pulled off her helmet and gave it to Robin, shook her head again at his shoes, and showed him how to drop the visor. “I don’t suppose that jacket is armored,” she asked.

  “No, just warm.”

  “Well, stand behind me if bullets start flying. And if anyone comes up to us, do something to keep them from looking at your feet. Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Be a fool not to be.”

  She laughed happily and slapped him on the shoulder. Call her a fool, then, but she felt like she was crawling out of the grave, more alive every minute.

  “Come on, then,” she said, and strode off big-bellied down the middle of the deserted boulevard with Robin at her heels.

  In January she had reassured herself with the wan thought that escape from within the walls would be an easy thing, and to her surprise it proved to be true, particularly for an Angel of the streets who had spent hundreds of hours patrolling every twist, turn, niche, and pile of builder’s rubbish with precisely that goal in mind. Dressed as they were, no citizen questioned them, though many an eye peered out of curtains at them; the few Angels they passed made only the most cursory and preoccupied of greetings. She came to a point where the wall formed an angle and pushed Robin into a doorway that she knew to be boarded up from within. She looked at her watch.

  “We made good time,” she whispered. “Now, if your engineering wizard knows his stuff, the lights will go off in five minutes. If not, we get to climb over the wall in full light. Can’t risk shooting them out.” Guns had been heard from the north for the last few minutes, single shots, a few automatic bursts, and two explosions of grenades, but there had been nothing closer yet.

  “You have a rope?’ asked Robin.

  “A gorgeous one, cost me two weeks’ pay. I’ll go up and tie it to that standard there, you see?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dian. I know I’m just a man and no Angel, but I can climb and I’m not seven months pregnant. I’ll go up, drop the rope down for the pack and then you.”

  “Well, all right,” she said reluctantly, “but I want you to wear this jacket as well as the helmet.”

  “Agreed. But you take it back on the other side.” They made the exchange and then settled to wait in silence. After a while the wind shifted, and it smelled of smoke and something more pungent: tear gas.

  “How long do you think they’ll hold out, in the north?” she asked.

  “Hours. They’re well entrenched and supplied. Been collecting stuff for this move for years, ever since Howard saw the failure of the last one.” Howard was the man with the wire glasses. “He’s an unlikely- looking revolutionary, but the perfect combination of chess player and assassin. The other day—”

  The lights went out. Dian never did find out what had happened the other day, because Robin was already edging out of the doorway, blind but with the terrain firmly planted in his woodsman’s eye. Dian followed his progress with her ears: up a drainpipe, along the top of a bay window, onto the roof, over to the next roof, and finally a scramble onto the building whose end formed part of the perimeter wall. There were voices coming from the upper floor of the middle building, and candles were lit there and in the ground floor of the end one, but in the darkened street she and Robin were invisible.

  She heard a faint slithering noise and the nylon rope was there. The pack went up with only two thumps; the rope returned. She tested it, found it secure, and pulled her way up it, slowly but silent. Once on the top they reversed the process, and Robin ended by climbing down the doubled rope (which Dian had bought long for just that reason, in order to reach twice the height of the wall) and pulled it down after him.

  They were out. They were free. Now there was only the getting away.

  Dian led him along the wall, skirting shacks and dwellings, freezing at dogs and voices that were beginning to be raised as the disturbance inside the wall built. Finally they were at one of the Angels’ three stables. The guard there was awake, until Dian strode up to the woman in full riot gear while Robin came up from behind and cracked her on the head. They left her tied, drove off all the horses but two, and stole every bit of gear they could manage, chucking most of it into a ditch outside the town.

  They stopped only once, while Robin took out the alcohol, needles, and the scalpel he’d somehow got his hands on and subjected Dian to a quick, messy, and unanesthetized surgery on her upper breast. It hurt like hell, but at the end of it, she was no longer an Angel.

  [CALIFíA] HAD MORE BOLD ENERGY AND

  MORE FIRE IN HER BRAVE HEART

&nbs
p; THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS.

  THIRTY

  THE SUN SHONE; THE RAIN REFUSED TO FALL; THEIR tracks lay open on the soil for all to see.

  Late on the third morning the maps failed them. Where there should have been the gentle slope of a creek bed and the Remnants of a narrow roadway, there was only an apparently endless expanse of boulders and scree that stretched around the corner half a mile away, debris that once had been part of the overhanging hill. Bomb, earthquake, or natural landfall, it hardly mattered, for the way was impassable. They filled their bottles from the trickle’s pools and turned back to follow the ridge.

  An hour later they were leading their horses along the shaky, sparsely treed ridge when some vaguely remembered urge caused Dian to look over her shoulder. At that distance she might have dismissed the figures as a herd of elk fleeing wolves, or a group of wild horses, but they were not.

  “Robin,” she said. Startled, he slipped and nearly lost his footing, recovered, and looked at her. She tipped her head at their pursuers, and saw the bones of his face emerge, taut in fear. She looked away.

  “Shit,” he said. “So soon. I thought we’d throw them with that business at the creek and the rocks. All that delay for nothing. They must’ve picked up one of Queen Bess’s trackers; I don’t think there’s anybody that good in Ashtown.”

  “No, it’s not one of Bess’s,” she said, her voice quiet and even and filled with rage and despair. “It’s the Captain herself. She’s using Tomas.”