by Bill Fawcett
"Promiscuous?" Kaeritha fought successfully not to grin, but Leeana's blush darkened anyway.
"I'm not all that innocent, Dame Kaeritha," she said just a touch huffily. "For that matter, I grew up on one of the Kingdom's biggest stud farms, for goodness' sake! So I'm quite familiar with what goes on between men and women, thank you. Well," she added hastily as Kaeritha chuckled despite herself, "as familiar as I can be without actually— That is, as— Oh, you know what I mean!"
"Yes, Leeana," Kaeritha said, her tone just a bit contrite. "I do know what you mean."
"Well," Leeana went on in a slightly mollified voice, "what bothers me I guess is that the people who seem so fond of the Voice's political views are also talking about how 'liberated' her views are on . . . other things."
"Leeana," Kaeritha said carefully, "Lillinara doesn't require celibacy of any of Her Voices. Some of them take individual vows of celibacy when they decide they have a vocation to serve Her, but that's different. A personal decision to free them from other needs and desires in order to concentrate solely on Her, and there's actually some disagreement as to whether or not She really approves of it even then. In fact, her High Voices can't be virgins. She is the Goddess of Women, you know—all women, not just the patron of maidens—and She feels that Her church, and Her priestesses, need to have experienced the things they're going to be counseling Her worshipers about."
"Really?" Leeana considered that for several seconds, her expression intent, then nodded. "That makes sense," she pronounced with the definitiveness of the young.
"I'm glad you approve," Kaeritha murmured, and the girl blushed again. Then she grinned.
"On the other hand," Kaeritha continued, "it sounded to me like you were talking about something you feel goes a bit far even bearing that in mind."
"Well, yes," Leeana agreed, but her expression remained thoughtful, and she cocked her head at Kaeritha. "Can I ask you a question, Dame Kaeritha?"
"Of course you may," Kaeritha assured her, but the girl hesitated a moment, despite the reassurance.
"I was wondering," she said finally, slowly, "about how the other gods feel about that." She looked away, gazing out over the training salle's grounds. "For example, you're a Champion of Tomanak. How does He feel about it?"
"About celibacy?" Kaeritha chuckled. "Let's just say that as the God of Justice, He wouldn't exactly think it was 'just' to require His followers to forswear something that fundamental to the mortal condition. Like Lillinara, He expects us not to be casual about it, and He expects us to recognize and meet any responsibilities which might arise out of it. But all of the Gods of Light celebrate life, Leeana, and I can't think of anything much more 'life-affirming' than the embracing of a loving, shared physical relationship."
"Really?" There was something about that single word which made Kaeritha wonder exactly what the girl was thinking. But then Leeana shook herself, and turned back towards her.
"That makes sense, too," she said. "But it doesn't sound like what the people who worry me are saying, either."
"What do you mean?" Kaeritha asked intently.
"The loving and sharing part seems to get left out a lot," Leeana said simply. "And so does the part about responsibility." Kaeritha frowned, but she didn't interrupt, and the young woman continued. "There were a couple of other parts that surprised me a little, just at first. They shouldn't have, but I guess that despite everything, I've got a lot more 'conventional' leftovers in my attitudes then I realized I did. I mean, the war maids are a community of women who've chosen not to live in a society run by men. Under the circumstances, I should have been surprised if many of them hadn't chosen other women as their partners, not the other way around.
"But even if that surprised me, at first, it didn't take me long to understand it. And what bothered me, Dame Kaeritha, wasn't who someone chose to fall in love with. It was the way these particular war maids were talking about the what the Voice thought about the proper 'freedom' when it comes to choosing lovers, whether they're men or women."
She didn't seem a bit flustered by her subject matter now, Kaeritha noted. It was as if her concentration on explaining what she meant had banished such mundane concerns.
"Why?"
"Because the sort of commitment and responsibility you're talking about doesn't seem very important to them. They talk about it as if it were, well, only physical. As if it's all about selfish pleasure, or just a momentary fling. Like . . . like the other person doesn't really matter, or isn't really real. Just a convenience. I'm not naive enough to think there aren't a lot of people in the world who feel that way anyway, Dame Kaeritha. But these women were laughing—almost snickering—about it, like they knew what they were suggesting was wrong and that only made it better, somehow. And every time I heard one of them saying something like that, I thought about all of the people who already believe that all war maids think that way."
Kaeritha frowned, and her thoughts were grim. It was possible Leeana was overreacting to a few chance words. As she herself had said, she was the product of a Sothoii upbringing herself. Perhaps not quite as conventional as most, but even an 'unconventional' Sothoii rearing was bound to leave a few footprints.
Yet Kaeritha didn't think that was the case. Not only was Leeana keenly intelligent and observant, but the situation she described fitted only too well into the pattern Kaeritha had begun to discern. Or that she was afraid she had, at any rate.
"Do you think I'm imagining things?" Leeana asked, once again almost as if she could read Kaeritha's mind, and the knight shook her head.
"No. I'm certain you're not imagining things, Leeana. It's possible you're reading more into what you've heard than was actually intended, but I don't believe you've imagined anything."
"Oh," Leeana said in a voice which was suddenly so tiny that Kaeritha looked at her in surprise.
"I'd hoped I was," the young woman said softly.
* * *
Kaeritha left Kalatha seven days later.
She hadn't intended to stay that long, but her conversation with Leeana had suggested to her that there might be more that needed looking into at Kalatha than she'd thought. Conducting her own discreet investigations took more time than she'd allowed for. But that was all right . . . it also took her longer than she'd expected to secure another opportunity to examine the original charter and land grant.
Mayor Yalith's assistant, Sharral, was as helpful and efficient as ever, but it turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to arrange the visit to the town's archives this time around. Lanitha, Kalatha's librarian and archivist, was relatively new to her position, and more than a bit young for responsibilities of such magnitude. She was, however, attentive and determined to discharge those responsibilities to the very best of her ability. Which, Kaeritha knew from her previous visits to the town archives, was quite high.
This time, though, Lanitha, although she made it obvious she was trying her very best, found it difficult to schedule an opportunity for Kaeritha to consult the required documents. Given their importance to the town of Kalatha itself, and to all war maids in general, Kaeritha wasn't surprised that the young woman responsible for their security and proper care wanted to be present whenever they were consulted. If their positions had been reversed, Kaeritha would have felt exactly the same way. Not only that, but Lanitha had been a great help to her and Yalith when she first examined them. Still, she could have wished for it to take less than three days for Lanitha to clear her schedule sufficiently to allow her to offer Kaeritha the degree of personal assistance the champion of any god, and especially of the God of War and Justice, deserved. And then, on the fourth day, when Kaeritha arrived at the archives, she was surprised (although probably less so than she should have been) to discover that Lanitha had been called away by an unanticipated personal emergency. She'd left her profound apologies and promised she would be available the next day—or the day after that, at the very latest—but it had been simply impossible for her to keep her scheduled appointment
.
Despite the undeniable frustration she felt at the delays, Kaeritha had put the time she found on her hands to efficient use. Most casual observers might have been excused for not noticing that, but Kaeritha had been a champion of Tomanak for quite a few years. And one thing champions of Tomanak learned—well, most of His champions, at any rate, Kaeritha had corrected herself with a smile—was how to conduct an unobtrusive investigation. It helped that most people expected a champion's methods to be flashy and dramatic. As, indeed, some of the tools in Kaeritha's arsenal were, she cheerfully admitted. But there were times when it was far better to be discreet, and this seemed to be one of them. Which was why none of the war maids of Kalatha noticed that the visiting champion of Tomanak sharing their meals, working out with them in the exercise salle, or training in weapons craft with them, managed to pick up an amazing amount of information.
Some of it was entirely open and aboveboard, and no less valuable because it was. Kaeritha's own two-sword technique was one she had evolved almost entirely on her own. The fact that she'd been born ambidextrous helped explain why it had occurred to her, but there'd been few weapons masters (or mistresses) in the Empire of the Axe who taught a combat technique which used a primary weapon in each hand. Many of them taught sword and dagger, or sword and dirk, and even more of them taught techniques for fighting with one's off hand, since it was always possible for one's normal weapon hand or arm to be wounded. But all of that was quite different from fighting with matched short swords in both hands simultaneously.
Quite a few of the war maids, however, used a technique which, despite many differences in detail, was very similar overall. Erlis, the Commander of One Hundred in charge of Leeana's physical training class, was one of them, and Kaeritha looked forward to her opportunities to match her own skills against the Hundred's. Erlis appeared to enjoy their training matches just as much as Kaeritha did, although it quickly became apparent to both of them that for all her own experience and skills, the war maid was thoroughly outclassed. But that, as Erlis pointed out herself, was as it ought to be when the person she was measuring her own abilities against was a chosen champion of the God of War.
But in addition to adding some new wrinkles to her own combat repertoire, Kaeritha found the opportunity to spend time with Kalatha's war maids in informal surroundings invaluable. It wasn't so much what they said to her, as what they said to one another . . . or didn't say to her when she asked carefully casual questions. Kaeritha's natural hearing was more acute than that of most humans, although it fell far short of the sensitivity of a hradani like Bahzell. But one of her abilities as Tomanak's champion was to "listen" to conversations she couldn't possibly have overheard otherwise. It wasn't like the telepathy many magi possessed, and she could only "listen" to conversations she knew about and could see with her own eyes. But it meant that even across a crowded ballroom—or a noisy training yard—she could sit in unobtrusively while other people spoke.
It was an ability she used sparingly, because it would have been so easy to misuse. But it was also one which was extraordinarily helpful to any investigator, and she employed it to good effect during her extended stay in Kalatha.
And what she heard confirmed her unhappy suspicion that Leeana had not been an alarmist young woman seeing shadows where none existed. In fact, if anything, the girl had underestimated what was happening.
There was nothing overt enough that Kaeritha could have taken it to a magistrate, but the pattern was clear. There were at least three factions in Kalatha.
One was Mayor Yalith's, which—for the moment, at least—was the most numerous and the most important and influential one. As Yalith herself, its members were angry with Trisu and determined to force him to admit his transgressions. They were gratified by the Quaysar Voice's strong support, but they were still essentially prepared to allow the system to work. Partly because they were convinced of the rectitude of their own positions and believed that, ultimately, the courts must decide in their favor. But also partly because they accepted that it was incumbent upon them to prove that they and their demands had been reasonable from the outset. It wasn't because they were any less angry than anyone else, but they were only too well aware that the subjects of the Kingdom of the Sothoii were predisposed to view all war maids with disapproval. They were determined not to provide that prejudice with any fresh ammunition to use against them.
The second faction Kaeritha had identified consisted of most of the townsfolk who weren't firmly behind their mayor. Their view of the disputes was that the mayor and her council were pushing too hard. It wasn't that they doubted Yalith's arguments or her judgment of the technical legalities of the situation; they simply didn't feel the confrontation with Trisu was ultimately worth what it was likely to cost. Whatever else they might think of him, he was the most powerful noble in the vicinity, and they were going to have to deal with him—and his sons—for years to come, regardless of what any judge in a court might decide. Very few people in that faction, however, were upset enough to actively oppose Yalith. They simply didn't support her, except with a certain disgruntled sense of civic responsibility, and there appeared to be significantly fewer of them than there were of the mayor's strong partisans.
But it was the third faction which worried Kaeritha. The smallest of the three, it was also the angriest. It consisted primarily, although not exclusively, of younger war maids and those too junior in Kalatha's hierarchy to force their own opinions upon the Town Council. The most senior of them whom Kaeritha had identified so far was a mere Commander of Fifty—the equivalent of an infantry captain in the Royal and Imperial Army—but that didn't necessarily mean they weren't influential. They were the ones who were most furious with Trisu, most militant in their insistence that their rights, and those of all war maids, must be defended. They were impatient with any argument which suggested they must be cautious, or appear reasonable. It was time for someone else to be reasonable, as far as they were concerned, and in all honesty, Kaeritha found it easy to sympathize with them in that view.
But many of the conversations she overheard went beyond that. There were no more than ten or fifteen women whom Kaeritha would have considered "ringleaders." The vast majority were no more or less than understandably outraged and angry women reacting to endless years of prejudice and bigotry. But those ten or fifteen Kaeritha had picked out clearly had an organized agenda. They weren't simply angry; they were manipulating the anger of others and using it to subtly undermine the traditional figures of authority in the Kalathan war maid community. That was bad enough, but Leeana had also been correct about the rest of what they were saying. Whether they were actually taking their cue directly from the Voice at Quaysar or not—and at this point, whatever her suspicions, Kaeritha had no way of knowing whether they were—they were using the Voice's supposed statements and views to assert that Lillinara Herself supported self-centered, narcissistic life choices which appalled Kaeritha. And which she was grimly certain would be equally appalling to Lillinara. It wasn't just the denial of responsibility, or the notion that it was morally acceptable to use someone else for one's own advantage or pleasure. It was the fact that they justified that denial and notion at least in part on the basis that it was time the war maids "got even" for all the indignities and oppression they had ever suffered.
Kaeritha knew, from bitter personal experience, the difference between vengeance and justice, and she knew what bitter tang she tasted in the low-voiced, bitter conversations she listened to about her.
Unfortunately, all she had were suspicions. It was nothing she could really take to Yalith, and even if it had been, Yalith was angry enough herself that she might not have listened. Besides, there was something about the mayor's own position that bothered Kaeritha. Yalith's tenure as mayor of Kalatha predated the beginnings of the current confrontation with Trisu. If, as Kaeritha had come to suspect, the original documents at Kalatha had been tampered with somehow, Yalith ought to have been aware of it. Which sugg
ested, logically, that if something nefarious was going on in Kalatha, Yalith was a part of it. Kaeritha didn't think she was, and she'd done a little subtle probing of the mayor's honesty—enough to be as certain as she could without the same sort of examination she'd given Salthan that Yalith honestly and sincerely believed she was in the right.
Which suggested to Kaeritha that something more than mere documents might have been tampered with in Kalatha.
* * *
"I am so sorry about the delay, Dame Kaeritha," Lanitha of Kalatha said as she ushered Kaeritha into the main Records Room. "I know your time is valuable, to Tomanak as well as to yourself, and I hate it that you sat around cooling your heels waiting for me for almost an entire week."
She shook her head, her expression simultaneously harassed, irritated, and apologetic.
"It's like there was some sort of curse on my week," she continued, bustling around the Records Room to open the heavy curtains which normally protected its contents and let the daylight in. "Every time I thought I was going to get over here and pull the documents for you, some fresh disaster came rolling out of nowhere."
"That's perfectly all right, Lanitha," Kaeritha reassured her. "I imagine everyone's had weeks like that, you know. I certainly have!"
"Thank you." Lanitha paused to smile gratefully at her. "I'm relieved that you're so understanding. Not that your sympathy makes me look any more efficient and organized!"
Kaeritha only returned her smile and waited, her expression pleasant, while the archivist finished drawing back the curtains and unlocked the large cabinet which contained the most important of Kalatha's official documents.
"Mayor Yalith—or, rather, Sharral—didn't tell me exactly which sections you're particularly interested in this time," she said over her shoulder as she opened the heavy, iron-reinforced door.
"I need to reexamine the section of Kellos' grant where the boundary by the grist mill is established," Kaeritha said casually.