The Saga of the Renunciates

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “And to think I believed you loved me!”

  “I do love you,” he retorted, “but does that mean I have to put up with every crazy idea you get into your head?”

  “Peter—ah, Gods, can’t you understand a sense of honor, of obligation? Can you think of no one but yourself?”

  “And who the hell are you thinking of? Certainly not me, or your baby. If you want to convince me you’re in your right mind, put down those damned saddlebags, and try making some sense,” he demanded.

  “Our marriage—it is my fault it failed,” she said quietly. “I think you really wanted to marry di catenas, and though you knew my oath prevented it, you thought perhaps if you loved me enough I would change.”

  You and that damned Oath. For a moment she thought he had said it aloud. There was no talking to him in this mood. What could she do to prevent him carrying out his threat? He was wide open to her; she could feel his rage, his frustration, even grief for the love that had gone awry. Yet it would do no good to walk past him, even to fight her way out of the room, if the moment she was outside he used the intercom and persuaded the Spaceforce guards at the gate that his insane pregnant wife had some lunatic purpose in going out into the coming storm, and should be forcibly prevented for her own good. My wife. She’s pregnant, she’s crazy, I have to keep her locked up for her own good… when had those same thoughts battered her before this? A picture of Jalak, of her mother monstrously swollen in pregnancy… no; surely she could not remember her mother, could not remember Jalak, she had been only a child then, without laran … or had it only been too painful to remember?

  “What you really want,” she flung at him, in confusion and agony so great she hardly knew what she said, “is to put me in chains… so that I will do nothing you do not want…”

  “Ah, God, Jaelle, I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re not even listening to me,” he flung at her, “and if I have to get Medic to put you in restraints I will—” and she saw in his mind a picture of herself… the picture in his mind was only of a quieter Jaelle, perhaps tranquilized, perhaps tied to a bed, but in her mind she saw herself chained, a picture in her father’s mind, the young Jaelle, budding breasts, old enough to be chained like a woman, copper links binding her hands, when she was wounded in the Pass of Scaravel Magda had tied her hands so she would not tear the bandages from her wounds, she had never remembered that till this moment, she heard herself screaming and Magda had quickly untied her. All that night Magda sat by me and held my hands because of my fear of being chained…

  “Don’t touch me,” she spat out at him, retreating backward, “if you dare—”

  He grabbed her hands—and Jaelle exploded, fighting on pure instinct. Camilla had trained her both in armed and unarmed combat, how to react if any man laid a hand on her unwilling; she had forgotten that this was Peter, she had forgotten everything; she fought as she would have fought the men who would come to chain her on the morning of the day after she had become a woman. She felt the edges of her hands, soft now because she had done so little fighting in the last years, strike something soft, she felt Peter’s fear, agony striking through him…

  And silence. Silence… she looked down at Peter. He was lying on the floor, and his laran was silent, nowhere, nowhere… she could not feel his presence in the room.

  She knew now what she had barricaded from her mind for all these many years; she had begun to have laran, begun to reach out with her mind, and then, on that dreadful night when her mother bore her brother Valentine in the desert, surrounded by the Amazons, she had tried to block it out… too much, too much pain and terror…

  Her mother’s arms around her, her mother’s pain filling her to the brim, stifling her. She could not breathe. Jaelle, Jaelle, it was worth it, it was worth it all, you are free, free… oh Jaelle, come here and kiss me… and a flood of pain and weakness and then nothing. Nothing. Nothing, her mother was nowhere in the world, was a lifeless body sprawled bloodless on the sand, blood staining the sand as the rising sun stained the rocks red with blood…

  And nothing, blankness, mind nowhere as Peter’s mind was nowhere, he was lying before her—lifeless? Lifeless? She had killed him, then? She could not see whether he was breathing. She bent toward him, drew her hand back in horror.

  She could call a Medic…

  “And they will say that I murdered him.”

  The icy cold of shock flowed over her. Dead or no, there was nothing she could do now for Peter, and unless she wished to spend all the rest of her pregnancy in Medic, confined for her own good and the safety of her child—they might not be harsh even on a murderess if she was pregnant, but they would certainly never listen to her explanation that it had been purely an accident.

  She must go. She must go at once, before they could stop her. He would not be discovered until the next morning, when someone missed him when he should have reported to work; the Terran obsession with clocks and with being on time for everything, especially work. They would believe he was off duty, closeted with his pregnant wife, if he chose not to appear in the cafeteria they would simply believe that they were sharing a meal in privacy in their quarters.

  Resolutely, she hoisted her shoulderbag. She could get out of the HQ, they had no instructions to stop her, Spaceforce would let her through. And then the Guild House for her horse. Perhaps Magda—no; she was housebound. I must not tempt Margali to break her oath as I have broken mine.

  And after that, the city gates and the long road to Armida, racing to catch Aleki before the storm broke. She blocked from her mind any thought of the length of the road. There is no journey of a thousand miles that does not begin with a single step. And the first step was into this corridor. She hesitated still, listening with her mind for some trace of Peter’s awareness, some sign that perhaps he still lived… no, nothing. She must go, go at once.

  She must get her horse, and food from the Guild-House. But Magda must not be involved.

  She closed the room door behind her, slamming down a gate in her mind on the memory of Peter, their love and their failure… and now it had ended in murder. But she could still salvage something. Perhaps if she saved Aleki’s life it would count for something in honor. A life for a life to the Terrans …

  On silent feet she went out of the building, across the great plaza, proffering her ident disk to the Spaceforce man at the gates for the last time. She hurried through darkening streets and gusty winds, the weather knowledge of a lifetime telling her that she might, if she hurried, make it before the storm.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  The rain was beginning, mixed with little slashes of sleet, but warmer than most of the nocturnal rains; it was after all, Magda realized, only a day after Midsummer, and the daylight lingered, even though the sun was already hidden in boiling cloud to the west. She pulled the hood of her thick riding cloak over her head; the stiffened brim kept the rain from her eyes. Her horse twitched its head from side to side, protesting this ride in the rain, evidently troubled at the oncoming night and the absence of the warm Guild-House stable, but Magda urged the creature on into the face of the rain.

  Two hours north of the City she paused to consider. There was a multitude of roads into the Kilghard Hills, and Jaelle might, or might not, have seen the good aerial map of Darkover which had been made by survey. The commonest road to Armida itself was to take the Great North road as far as Hali, and turn off westward, just south of the ruined city, riding along the Lake on the road to Neskaya as far as Edelweiss; then turn southeast toward the fold of the hills where the Great House of Armida lay. This meant good fast roads all the way, and she had heard that a good rider on a really fast horse could, in dire necessity, make that trip in a single day. It would be a very long day indeed, of very hard riding, pushing your best horse to the edge of exhaustion. Riding with the firefighting crew they had, of course, had riders good, bad and indifferent, and had been accompanied by pack-wagons and pack animals of equipment and supplies; it had
taken the best part of two days and they had not gone nearly as far as Armida. Also, they had traveled by side roads, some of them not much better than pack-trails.

  Alessandro Li had been out with the firefighting crew though they had arrived when most of the work was over. He might have known the road they took better than the North road. Jaelle, she supposed, who had actually staffed a travel-service, would know virtually all the roads through the hills, but which one she had taken, and which one she thought Li would have taken, was still conjectural. For the first time since she had taken flight from the Amazon house, Magda stopped to wonder if she had done a reckless and foolish thing. Tracking Jaelle into the hills, when Jaelle herself was distraught and on the trail of a man who did not know the hills himself, was a blunder twice compounded. As a Terran she could have requisitioned a helicopter for a search to find Ambassador Li—or at least to make certain he was not in any danger. But with the cloud-cover and rain, it was unlikely that a helicopter could see much, and if the wind of the fierce storm she felt in her bones should actually arise, it might well blow any helicopter right out of the sky.

  As for Jaelle, herself on the trail of Li—perhaps she should have gone to Comyn Castle and thrown herself on the mercy of someone like Lady Rohana, to trail her with a starstone… and then Magda wondered if she were going mad. How Jaelle, who detested everything to do with matrix technology, would react to such trailing, she could only conjecture.

  Yet I have done a foolish thing. Jaelle was in danger; she knew it; she could feel it, like the oncoming storm, in her very bones; yet racing off alone into the storm after her, with no hint even as to which way she had taken, was not the most rational decision either. At the very least she should have asked the weatherwise Camilla, a skilled tracker and guide, to accompany her. Camilla loves us both… and Jaelle is like a daughter to her. Yet it had never occurred to her.

  Why did I rush off like this alone? Try as she might, Magda could find no answer except the compelling, Because I must, because there was no other honorable way.

  She had rushed away from the Guild House without eating her dinner. Now she took a handful of dried fruit from the pocket of her cloak and chewed on it, a piece at a time, while she let her horse take a slow jog. Soon she must decide which road to take into the hills. She could follow the present good road, the Great North Road which ran all the way up into the Hellers to end at Aldaran, as far as Hali; but if she did so, she might lose her chance of overtaking Jaelle quickly. She might not be able to persuade Jaelle that Alessandro Li could be trusted on a mission— but she could, at least, ride with her and help to find the man before his ignorance of Darkovan roads and Darkovan weather killed him.

  Damn fool girl, rushing off like that… would she, Magda, have done as much for her superior officer? Well, yes; in a sense she had done something nearly as rash when she had taken the road into the mountains, disguised in Free Amazon clothing, though knowing little of the Amazons, to rescue Peter Haldane. And that apparent madness had brought her here; Amazon herself, sworn Renunciate, it had been a mad choice and yet the right one on the road to her destiny. Would she have wished it undone? No, for it had saved Peter’s life—and for all the ways in which she was angered by Peter, she still would not have wished him dead—and it had brought her to the Guild House, which had also been a part of her fate so inescapable that now she could not think of her life without the background of the Oath.

  Even though, at this moment, she left the sworn oath behind her…

  No. There was no reason to torment herself with scruples. She had Camilla’s permission to go, the permission of a Guild Mother in the House. Magda drew up her horse, in the fading gray light and rain, looking at the crossroads and trying to summon up in her mind—trained in eidetic memory techniques by Terran Intelligence—the picture of the map, the roads that ran into the Kilghard Hills. Where she sat her horse, three roads forked; the Great North Road running northward past Hali and later turning off to Armida, the small trail that led westward up through Dammerung Pass and into the Venza Mountains (at least she could forget about that one), and the road that turned directly into the Kilghard Hills. This road was narrow, steep, twisting and turning along the slopes of several hills—or, to put it correctly in any but Darkovan terms, fairly high mountains. No sensible person familiar with the terrain would take this road to Armida. Yet anyone who had only seen it on the flat surface of a map, since it cut directly across the hypotenuse where the Great North Road and the road from Hali were the two straight legs of a right triangle, might consider it a short cut; and Alessandro Li, as far as she knew, had spent most of his life in civilized planets and probably believed that a road marked on a map was a road as he thought of it; a surfaced artifact. If Jaelle’s intention had been only to reach Armida before him, she would have taken the longer, faster, better-surfaced road. But Jaelle’s concern was for Li, traveling alone and unprotected on a world whose dangers he would not recognize.

  Mentally Magda rehearsed those dangers. Sleet and snow, even at midsummer, in these latitudes. Hardly banshees, unless he went astray and got on to one of the high passes above the timberline. But that was not impossible, either. And there was the ever-present danger of forest fire among the resin trees, he could set a fire himself, unless he was overwhelmingly careful about camping and cooking his food. And, if he thought of roads in the way most Empire personnel thought of roads from experience on tamer worlds, he could easily lose the trail and be hopelessly lost in country which was, except to the trained eye, trackless wilderness.

  Now it would really be a help to be psychic, and know which way Li went, and which way Jaelle went after him. And did she know which way he had gone or was she only guessing? Jaelle makes a point of the fact that she has no really reliable laran, and again and again she makes it clear that she hates and mistrusts her own laran.

  So I’ll just have to psych her out and try to decide how her mind was working when she made the choice.

  She was afraid of the hazards of the wild road through the hills. Yet even as she told herself that Li would not have hazarded it but stuck to the better traveled road, a picture came to her mind, Jaelle on her scrubby little mountain pony, her tartan hood bundled over her head, riding head down along a road that clung hazardously to the side of a narrow track overlooking a shadowed valley.

  Hallucination? Or a genuine flash of psychic sight? Magda did not know. The picture was gone and try as she might she could not bring it back. Whichever way she chose, she would be guessing; she might as well treat her hunch as valid. She had done so before and never regretted it. Hesitating, trying to see in that strange way, she tried to cast her mind ahead and see if she could bring to mind an image of Jaelle on the better-surfaced Great North Road, hurrying along to catch up with Li—but she only saw again the steep mountain trail. She sighed and tugged at the rein to turn her horse off the main road and on to the narrow trail.

  At first the road was only a little narrower, leading past isolated farmsteads with dim huddled shapes of buildings, the soft noises of animals bedded in snug barns for the night, pale firelight past the windows. Once or twice a dog barked with idle curiosity but to her great relief no one ventured into the rain to see what had aroused the creatures. Any solitary traveler on a night like this, the farm people doubtless thought, was bound on his own concerns, and in no way interesting. It made Magda think of that other trip—had it, after all, been less than a year ago?—when she had ridden north after Peter Haldane.

  But after a time the road grew softer underfoot, sodden with rain, and began to climb into the hills. Thick trees, smelling of resin and wet needles, overhung the road which was narrower and narrower, until Magda knew that two horses could hardly ride abreast on the trail. The isolated farmsteads were left behind, and somewhere Magda heard the cry of a prowling night-beast of the cat-kind, hunting. The sound made her shudder; the cat-creatures seldom attacked mankind unprovoked, but if she disturbed one by accident they were savage. Th
en, too, in these hills there were still the remnants of the wild hominids called by early explorers catmen; they were sentient, probably protohuman, and very dangerous. She did not know of any Terran, except Kadarin, who explored in curious places alone, who had ever actually encountered one; but his reports had been quite enough to imbue her with a healthy respect for the creatures. Of all the nonhuman races on Darkover, only the catmen were a real threat to homo sapiens. And while she had heard that they no longer lived in the Kilghard Hills, only four or five years before this, a nest of them had made war on the folk of the hills, and word had come to the Trade City that many of them had been killed; there might be stray survivors, bitterer than ever against the humans who had all but exterminated them

  Strictly speaking the Terrans should have moved in to prevent genocide, if they are protohuman. Humans are the worst enemy of the protohuman cultures. Why am I worrying about that now? Afar in the hills she heard again the cat-cry and knew why it was in her mind. Well, she had a knife, and had been trained in its use, and she had sworn the Amazon oath to defend herself and turn to no man for protection. She could probably manage the catlike hunting beasts, and if she let them alone they would certainly let her alone. And since few humans, and no Terrans, had ever encountered a catman, why should she imagine she would be the first?

  It was completely dark now; her horse had to pick its way, step after step, on the trail which was growing steeper and muddier by the minute. The rain beat down as if something had forgotten how to turn off a celestial spigot somewhere up there.