The Blue Star

by Fletcher Pratt

III

The lodging assigned was in a room over the shop of a tailor named Gualdis, at a corner where three streets ran together. The man had a fat wife and three daughters, one of whom brought from a cookshop on the corner a big dish of lentils and greens with bits of sausage through it, from which they all ate together. The girls chartered profusely, curious as so many magpies about Rodvard and how life was lived in Dossola, for they were too young to remember when Prince Pavinius had turned from Grand Governor to Prophet and the Tritulaccan war began.

Rodvard liked the middle one best; called Leece. She had thick and vividly black eyebrows that gave her eyes a sparkle when she laughed, which was frequently. (The Blue Star told him that behind the sparkle crouched a kind of dumb question whether he might not be the destined man, and the thought of being sought by her was not unpleasant to him, but she turned her head so rapidly and talked so much that he could make out no more.)

After he had been shown to his bed, the usual sleeplessness of a changed condition of life came to him, and he began to examine his thoughts. He felt happy beneath all, and doubting whether he were entitled to, searched for some background of the sense of approaching peril which had held him the night Lalette came to his pensionnario door, and again when he spoke with Tuolén the butler. But it was nowhere; all seemed well in spite of the fact that he was more or less a prisoner in this land. The common report had it that this was not an unusual experience, that Amorosian agents circulated all through the homeland, recruiting for their own purposes especially those with any touch of witchery, and he thought that might be true. The Initiate on the ship had taken him very readily into protection, and if he were like those in the court, must have known that Rodvard bore a Blue Star.

Yet it seemed to him that these Amorosians were so well disposed toward each other that one might do worse to live out a life among them, in spite of a certain unearthliness among their Initiates. Now also he began to look back toward Dossola and to understand why it was that Mancherei should be so hated, most particularly by the upper orders. For it seemed that if he could but return, persuade Remigorius, Mathurin and the rest how the people of the Prophet lived among themselves, the Sons of the New Day might fulfill their mission by striking an alliance in Mancherei. No, never (he answered himself); that would be to set the son above the parent, the colony over the homeland, and politic would never permit it.

Yet was it not cardinal in the thinking of the Sons of the New Day that to hold such a thing wrong was in itself wrong? The evil in the old rule was that it set one man above another for no other reason but his birth. Was not Pyax the Zigraner, with his odd smell and slanted eye, entitled to as much consideration as Baron Brunivar? Why not then, up with the standard of Mancherei and its Prophet? For that, what had Pavinius found so wrong in this place that he had deserted the very rule he founded?

Rodvard twisted in his bed, and thought—of course; I have been slow indeed to miss the flaw. For though there were no episcopals here, the Initiates surely filled their office. If freedom from tyranny were won only by making episcopals into judges, then it was only a viler slavery. Was life, then, a question of whether spirit or body should be free? But on this question Rodvard found himself becoming so involved that he went to sleep, and did not wake till day burned behind the shutters.

Leece brought him his breakfast on a tray and wished him a merry morning, but when he would have spoken to her, said she must hurry to her employ. (Her eyes had some message he could not quite read; if the Initiates were right, it would be a gentle one, and kindly.) His mind was more on her than on his new fortune as he went forth, and he missed a turning in the streets, so that his task began badly with a tardy arrival.

The building of his toil, like so many in Charalkis, was new and of brick, with mullioned windows along the street front and a low, wide door at one side, through which carts passed empty to pick up bales at a platform within. Rodvard entered to see a row of clerks on stools sitting before a single long desk and writing away as though for dear life. A short, round man paced up and down nervously behind them, now and again speaking to one of the writers, or hearing a question from another.

This short man came over to Rodvard and looked up and down his length. “I am the protostylarion,” he announced. “Are you Bergelin, the Dossolan clerk? You are in retard by a third of a glass. The fine is two obulas. Come this way.”

He led down to the inner end of the desk, where under the least light stood a vacant stool. “Here is your place. For the beginning, you have the task of posting to the records of individual couvertines from those of the general sales by ships. Here—this is a ship’s manifest from a voyage to Tritulacca. Three clocks from the couvertine Arpik, as you see, have been sold for eight reuls Tritulaccan. You will open a sheet for Arpik, on which noting this fact, one sheet for each couvertine, then place a mark here to show that the matter is cared for, not pausing to translate—yes, Ivrigo?”

The interrupter held his ledger in hand and diddled from foot to foot, as though being held from a cabinet of ease. “Oh, Ser Maltusz, I crave pardon, but I cannot carry through this posting according to system until I have a ruling on where falls the sea-loss in such a case.”

“Hm, let me see—why, stupidity, look there! It is plainly stated that no offer had been made on the said lost bales. They were therefore couvertine goods still, and not regarding whether the loss were caused by piracy or not, it must fall there.” He turned back to Rodvard. “Do not try to translate into our money, for that is the function of another. You are expected to finish this manifest by evening.”

“I have never done this—”

“Work is prayer. There is the lamp.”

19
TWO CHOICES

The stern-faced mattern’s name was Dame Quasso; she told Mircella to show Lalette to a small brown room angled by a dormer, where a bed with one blanket, a chair and a chiffonier were the only furniture.

“The dress-room is down here,” said the servant, pointing. “The regulation is that all demoiselles stir themselves together at the ringing of the morning-bell, so that the day’s tasks may be assigned.”

“Why?” said Lalette, sitting down on the edge of the bed (so glad to hear a voice without malice or innuendo in it that the words hardly mattered).

The eyes were round and the mouth was round; a series of rounds. Said Mircella; “It is the regulation. . . . You must dress your best for evening. It is the day of the diaconals.”

“Ah?”

“Oh, some of them are quite rich. We will have roast meat for supper. Wouldn’t it be nice if one of them would take you way up in the mountains?”

Lalette felt her heart contract. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I am from Dossola, and this is all new to me.”

“Why, the diaconals. Those learners who are in the second stage, almost Initiates, so they can’t be married, and once a month they come—”

“Mircella!” came Dame Quasso’s voice, impatiently.

“I must go. You won’t have to work today. You never do on the first day.”

Lalette thought: what trap am I caught in? It was a diaconal that Tegval said he was, and that he had chosen me, that horrible night when—when—. A fierce surge of anger burned through her at the widow Domijaiek, who had babbled so of love and God, yet brought her to this dubious resort; and once more, as when she stood in the mask-maker’s parlor, there was the feeling of being hemmed in by metal walls. But before her fury could rise to the performing of the black witchery already forming at the back of her mind, the door was tapped and a toothless old man brought in her chest and said Dame Quasso awaited her attendance.

The entrance broke a spell; Lalette was inwardly assuring herself there was some mistake, the thing might be better than appearances, while the mattern began in the most ordinary way to ask her what work she had done or might be fitted for. At last Dame Quasso said:

“I do not know what you Dossolan girls are trained for by your mothers, except marriage to counts. No one of you can earn the worth of her clothing. You know nothing; but I will place you with the stitchers who work on linen till you have learned something better. You will find your witchery of little value here. I suppose the charge is justified?”

Lalette stamped her foot (all the fury returning at this treatment). “Madame,” she cried, “as I was brought up, a girl sold into prostitution had already earned the worth of her clothing and something else beside.”

There was a silence, in which the cool, hard eyes did not change, nor the face around them (and Lalette had the sensation that if she looked into them any longer, she would drown). Dame Quasso said; “Sit down. . . . We have had girls like you before, and always they make me doubtful of those who admit you to the company of the Myonessae. Nevertheless, it is our task, who conduct these couvertines, to see that you are instructed to a better way of life. Listen attentively; there is in this domain of Mancherei and in our honorable order no question of prostitution, which concerns those who sell for money what they should give for love. But it is the wise ordinance of our Prophet that they who would attain to the state of Initiates shall not marry before quitting this material body for that life which is the God of love. For marriage is viewed with approval by the old churches as though it were something to be desired. Yet it is but a license to serve the god of Evil, in whose armory no weapon is so potent as the propagation of further mankind into this bodily world, which he wholly rules. Therefore it is ordered that when one who has reached the diaconal estate is overcome by the desires which the god of Evil has placed in all flesh, he shall seek out the Myonessae, choose one, and cohabit with her for as long as they both will. It is a matter of free choice and no compulsion. Yet during such time, the diaconal is not allowed to continue his studies, thus standing in danger of never becoming Initiate, but of dying and being reborn into some ugly form, as a serpent or an insect.”

Said Lalette, nipping a lip in her little white teeth; “And what of us, who merely satisfy the lusts of these men?”

From severity, the mattern’s face turned to astonishment. “Why, this is the very service of love, that we offer our bodies, not in exchange for the sustainment a man gives us and the satisfaction of our own desires, but in the name of the love of God, that all may benefit by learning the vanity of earthly wishes.”

“I was not told of this, and I do not think I like it.”

Dame Quasso’s face turned stern again. “Very well,” she said in an iron voice. “There are some who will not accept instruction. I will have the account made up of what you owe for the passage here. When it is paid, you may have a porter take your box wherever you please.”

(Where, indeed? And how pay? Panic mingled with the anger that boiled anew in Lalette’s mind.) “Ah,” she said, “you talk of love and holiness, and—” then burst into tears, leaning forward with her hands covering her face. The mattern came around and placed a surprisingly gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“My child,” she said. “It is not I nor the Initiates of Mancherei that place you under hard compulsion, but this material world, in which the god of Evil has all power. All you have learned, all you have gained through witchery is straight from hell. Return to your room; meditate what I have said until supper, when some of the diaconals will come, and see for yourself whether it is as sour a fate to be of the Myonessae as you now think.”