Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Novel 19 (5 page)

 
          
"Rather,
it is you who confer an honor upon us, Scholar Dame," Miranda said.
"A conveyance and driver await us at the entrance, if the honored guest
will follow me."

 
          
Cendri
followed her, her brows ridged slightly; something was beginning to puzzle her.

 
          
Her
manners are too formal.
They don't fit what else
I've seen
here; the
absence of uniforms, the haphazard way
everything else seems
to be run.
Yet she
welcomed me as
if she was familiar with Unity protocol.

 
          
She
wished she could discuss this with Dal; but the way in which the shuttleship
pilot and the Lady Miranda had ignored his existence warned her; too much attention
to Dal in public could even endanger her own status. She soothed her guilt,
reminding herself to have a good long talk with Dal about it as soon as they
were left alone.

 
          
Will
he even care? He's an archaeologist, he couldn't care less about their social
structures
and customs
... .
She thought, suddenly, that it might
be a good thing she had been sent here instead of the Dame di Velo, who might
not know how to cope with this unusual and delicately structured society. And
yet, if it weren't for sheer accident, she would never have been allowed to
come here at all. She told herself she should be grateful to Dal for devising
the strategem which had brought her here, but instead, for no reason at all,
she found herself nursing
a resentment
so intense that
it shook her to the core.

 
          
"..
.
honorable
Scholar Dame?"

 
          
"I
am sorry," Cendri said, recalling
herself
with an
effort. "I fear my mind was wandering; what did you ask me, my Lady?"

 
          
"
Your
Companion—" she did not look at Dal, "may
ride with the driver, if it wishes; I trust it is tractable and obedient?"

 
          
"Very,"
said Cendri, and dared not look at Dal.

 
          
"Tell
it, please, to get into the front compartment with the luggage—" she
watched, with amazement, as Dal climbed in without waiting to be told. "It
actually understands our language?"

 
          
Cendri
said dryly, "My Companion, Lady, is a Scholar on University."

 
          
Miranda
raised her eyebrows in surprise, but made no answer.

 
          
The
driver was a woman, stout and greying; she wore rough dark clothes. She
indicated with a careless gesture that Dal might curl himself up in the
seatless hard space next to the gear levers where the luggage had been stacked.
Cendri herself was ceremoniously ushered into a box-like interior,
well-carpeted and thickly cushioned with pillows and soft textures. It did not
seem to Cendri that it would have crowded them unduly to allow Dal to ride
inside, but she did not know what taboos this would have violated. She was
beginning to feel an immense curiosity, a curiosity so great that she could
barely restrain herself from asking numberless questions which had nothing
whatever to do with her ostensible mission.

 
          
Instead
she said, as the Lady Miranda settled herself awkwardly among the cushions—she
was
very
pregnant—"I trust the quake did not cause too much
damage."

 
          
"Very
little," Miranda said. "A woman in charge of a painting crew was
bruised when a vehicle rocked against a wall, but she made certain none of her
charges was injured; a woman in the Communications Room stayed at her post a
little too long, broadcasting
warnings
down the
coastline, and inhaled smoke from the electrical fixtures; but she will
recover. Another woman was hurt when a trash container fell over on her—I
believe her ankle was broken. And of course there are dozens of screens to be
recovered and repainted, but that is work for the children of the city, and
actually they are always pleased when new screens must be put up in public
places, so our school children will be happy."

 
          
"Are
there many such quakes here?"

 
          
"Unfortunately, a great many."
Miranda added, in
quick reassurance, "You need not be afraid, Scholar Dame; you will be
lodged in the house of the Pro-Matriarch, near the ruins at We-were-guided, and
the ground never trembles, for those who built it hold the ground under their
protection."

 
          
Interesting;
if the society which built the ruins, whether or not they were the hypothetical
Builders, had the technological know-how to locate their city away from tectonic
stress lines! Unlikely, though, that they could be the Builders. The city was
far, far older than the Isis/Cinderella colony, which had been here less than
seventy standard years, but certainly not old enough to be the mysterious
Builders who were supposed to have seeded the Galaxy millennia before any known
race. No surviving technology would have enabled a society to predict tectonic
stress and seismic activity—or freedom from it—from any site more than a few thousand
years in advance.

 
          
And
from what Miranda had said about the builders of the ruins holding the ground
under protection from quakes—they evidently had some quasi-religious veneration
of the site. She wanted to know about that. She wanted to know everything about
this culture!

 
          
Builders
ruins! Builders! Who could possibly care about a
prehistoric race who might not even have been human, when the whole Galaxy, the
whole Unity and beyond, were filled with endlessly fascinating cultures which
were still here, alive, working, to be seen and studied! Again she felt the
sense of frustration. Did these women of the Matriarchate want to keep everyone
away from their culture until it was dead, and had to be studied like that of
the Builders, from almost undiscernible clues left behind by their few imperishable
artifacts?

 
          
Not,
she thought, looking through the clear plastic of the vehicle's window, that
the Matriarchate was likely to leave many imperishable artifacts to be studied
millions of years later. Her first impression of the city was of low, regular
buildings, made of something like sun-dried adobe, smoothed and decorated with
bright paintings, which varied so much in quality that Cendri suspected each
house was decorated, not by professional artists or painters, but by its own
inhabitants.

 
          
The
houses were arranged in clusters, irregularly, in park-like gardens. The car
moved leisurely along narrow streets which seemed reasonably full of men and
women and little children, dressed in the same confusing variety of clothing
Cendri had seen on the spaceport. There was no uniformity, though in general
those who were working—a man hanging lengths of brilliantly dyed fabric on a
wooden framework, a woman pushing a barrow piled high with bright green globes
which could have been vegetables or playthings—wore rather less than those few
who were doing nothing.

 
          
The
earthquake had not made havoc in the city—probably due to the specialized
construction of the houses—but everywhere there were piles of rubble being
cleared away, and people hauling out broken, torn or smoke-damaged wall-screens
to be repaired. A group of men were working in an excavation which had
evidently caved in.

 
          
There
were children everywhere; those beneath the age of puberty went naked except
for sunhats and sandals, and looked browned and healthy. The older ones were
working alongisde their elders, helping to clear away earthquake damage. The
younger ones were playing games which looked, to an inexperienced observer, like
aimless running around, although a group of small girls was squatting in a
patch of sand, playing some kind of game with flat stones, and a mixed group of
preadolescents were turning a jumprope and jumping through it in
precisely-timed patterns.

 
          
It
was late afternoon, and the sun moved, low and slanting, over the roof of a low
white building, surrounded by ornamental shrubbery. "You have come here at
an unfortunate time, Scholar Dame," said the Lady Miranda. "This is
the Residence of the High Matriarch of Isis, which is also the
Temple
of the Goddess. It was she who sent for
you—or rather, for the Scholar Dame di Velo; but at this moment our beloved
Matriarch lies in a coma, near to death."

 
          
Cendri
did not know what, if anything, it was proper to say. Depending on the
society's attitude toward death, such an occasion might call for condolences—or
for congratulations! She murmured non-committally, "I am sorry to have
come at an inconvenient time."

 
          
"I
fear the inconvenience will be mostly to
yourself
,
Scholar Dame," the Lady Miranda said, twisting the end of her long braid.
"I fear that if our Mother and Priestess should die without naming a
successor, it will be a long time till we know which of the two Pro-Matriarchs
will assume her rank, ring and robe; so everything is likely to come entirely
to a stop until we have consulted the Inquirers. And, I fear, your work would
be halted, too, until such time as we have resolved the differences between the
two Pro-Matriarchs—my mother, Vaniya, and her rival and colleague, Mahala.
Those differences, so my mother tells me, are very many, and go back to the
days when they were little girls squabbling over games on our motherworld of
Persephone."

 
          
Cendri
felt troubled. She had been intensively trained in the ethic which forbade a
sociological student, or an anthropologist, to take either side between rival
factions on any world; was it proper that she should actually be lodged in the
home of one of the rivals? Well, she supposed it had all been arranged long
before she came here, and indeed Miranda's next words confirmed this: "I
myself know nothing of politics, nor of the many rivalries and differences
between them," she said, "I am the loyal daughter of my mother,
regardless of what the rights and wrongs of the matter may seem to others. And
my mother has told me; on the last day when the High Matriarch could speak
coherently, it was of this she spoke; that you should be brought here, and
lodged at our house, which is located so near to the ruins at We-were-guided
that from the upper rooms, the Ruins can be seen clearly, and from our front
gates, it is only a little walk along the shore. It seemed to the High
Matriarch that your work could best be done from there. And of course this has
made the Pro-Matriarch Mahala very angry; partly because she hates my mother,
as I have said, and perhaps, I think, because the Mother Rezali had not
confided the honored guests to
her
care. But then, during all her years
on
Isis
, the Pro-Matriarch Mahala has made it a
point of honor to disbelieve in the Builders—" "You believe in them,
then?" Cendri asked. "Oh, yes," Miranda said. "I have
communicated with them very often. But Mahala, you understand, is one of those
women who
believes
in nothing unless it fits certain
rules she has invented for herself, and so she says that our contact with the
Builders is all superstition and nonsense. She has not examined the evidence,
you understand. She is, I believe, a very stupid woman."

 
          
It
took Cendri a moment to digest this unbelievable statement.
Communication?
With the
Builders?
She blinked at Miranda's
matter-of-fact tone, forcibly reminding herself that the Builders—if they had
ever existed at all, which most reputable scientists doubted—were supposed to
have left their ruins no less than two million years ago! Surely, surely, the
Lady Miranda's statement must have some symbolic, or religious, interpretation!
And she could not even inquire about it until she knew precisely what weight
was given to religious matters in this society!

 
          
She
felt intensely frustrated, but she made her voice noncommittal again. "It
will indeed come most conveniently to our work, to be located so near to the
ruins. That was most thoughtful of the High Matriarch."

 
          
"It
was a decision demanding courage," Miranda said, "and now it is
likely to go for nothing—depending, of course, on who is appointed High
Matriarch in her place. Her death at this time may undo all the work she has
done—she has believed for many years that we on Isis should have more contact
with the Unity, but it has taken this long for the time to be ripe for this
opening gesture; inviting the Scholar Dame di Velo here to explore the ruins.
There are still those who fear any kind of contact with the worlds dominated by
men; they feel they can only bring contamination to our society—" she
broke off and said anxiously, her fingers nervously twisting her long braid.
"Please—my mother said I must be certain not to offend you, since you are
from a world dominated by males—and there are those here who feel you will have
nothing to offer us but temptation—I'm not saying this at all well," she
said, with her diffident smile.