III
The linen stitching was very tedious. Five or six of them, all novices like herself, sat in a circle and went round the edges of napkins, drawing three threads, stitching them home, drawing three threads, bringing them home again, while the mattern or Mircella or one of the older girls read slowly from the First Book of the Prophet, pausing now and again to make exposition of the meaning of a passage. Talking was discouraged. At noon there was always the same meal of pulse with fresh greens or fruit, but in the evening sometimes a piece of meat.
Every fourth-day they all marched in procession to the house of religion and there was a service, not like those in the Dossolan churches, with their flowers and music, but merely a discourse, such as Lalette had first heard at the conventicle in Netznegon, with everybody embracing each other afterward, and prayers of grace pronounced by an Initiate. This took place at noon; after the service, no more work was done on these days.
After dinner and on the free afternoons, all were at liberty except for such matters as personal laundry. Most of the girls walked two and two for a while in the garden, where tall alleys of hollyhocks divided the vegetable plots on which some of the Myonessae labored during the day. Going on, out into the street was not forbidden, but not encouraged. Neither—as Lalette quickly discovered—was it very pleasant, for although these people of Mancherei had no badges of status, which at first seemed a very strange thing, everybody seemed to know at once that she was one of the sisterhood. This was all right as to older people, but in the half-twilight, young men would call out to her, or what was worse, sidle alongside her on the pave and try to make conversation, or offer a glass of wine.
She found their insinuation so infuriating that the second time this happened, with the fellow almost directly making an insinuation, only the memory of Tegval kept her from putting a witchery on him then and there. Dame Quasso had been walking in the garden that night. As Lalette came hurrying through the gate, she looked so long and intently that it seemed she must somehow have caught part of the Initiates’ trick of thought-reading, and to Lalette’s other troubles was added the fear of being known for a murderess.
On this night of all, the blonde Nanhilde would choose to come to her room for a talk, babbling against the clerks of account, who had allowed her far less than she deserved for some broideries she had done; “—and they gave ’Zina just double my price. I know what it is; she slips out of here on fourth-days and gets drunk with some of those clerks and lets them do anything they want. She’s awful.”
Lalette (upset, and wanting to talk about anything but this); “But how can she keep the mattern from knowing about it?”
“Oh, she is careful. A girl has to be in this place. She always gets back before bedtime, and her sister in town says she spends the afternoons there.”
Lalette sighed. “I thought, when I came here—”
Nanhilde said; “What did you expect to be different?”
Lalette’s hands fluttered. “Is there no way we can escape from the overwhelming lusts of men?”
“A girl in the Myonessae can do very well if she does not fear herself.”
Lalette burst into tears.
21
MIDWINTER: THE RETURN
“Make up this account for closing,” said the protostylarion, handing Rodvard a dossier which bore the endorsement: “Approved to expel the subject from the Myonessae for contumacious refusal to accept any choice—Tradit, I.”
Rodvard dragged weary feet to the bench, for his night had been sleepless, with this matter of Leece reaching a crisis. All week, she had striven to pretend in the presence of others that nothing was changed, but would neither bring his breakfast, nor allow him any opportunity to speak with her alone in the evening. A crisis—the sleepless night began when he had refused to walk with her and Vyana under planes still clinging to their last leaves, then felt unhappy over the look of a friend betrayed that came into her eyes. A crisis; for that look was a trap as grim as the one the witch had set for him. He did not really want the dark-browed Leece (he told himself), overall, at the price of permanent union she set upon her body. It would have been, it was, enough merely to talk with her and be gay companions, as he was with the other sisters. Only the moments when a contact of lips or body sent a devouring flame along his veins were different. Yet there was now upon him a compulsion to find the next move in the game and carry it through, as though he were involved in a complex dance and dared not miss a pace.
What is this, then? (he asked himself). Am I a mechanician’s instrument, or so weak I am not my own master? Is it that I owe her a duty, and by what sanction am I held thereto? The priest at the academy might have had an answer for that. He would have said that the sanction was of God, “who sends us all peace, so that even those misguided men who say there is no God must make an inner peace, through a claim to be true to some image of the Ideal, which they call themselves. So that God is not balked, but enters in them unawares, and they only make their own path harder by reaching Him through devious ways instead of simple.” He could remember the argument accurately, and how its force had once struck him. Thus the priest, then; but if the sanction was of God, did God (Rodvard now asked himself) urge him to this pursuit of Leece? No matter what; he knew that when he reached the Gualdis’ house that night, the intricate pavanne would continue, and he a part of it as before.
Leave then. No. Not in this land, where he was a public prisoner, required still to report on every tenth day, an irritating routine. For that matter, leave for where? Not Dossola, with the prosecution hanging over his head; not any other place. Dance out the dance.
The protostylarion’s step roused him from reverie. He opened the dossier and with a feeling of vertigo, perceived that it was from the couvertine Lolau: “—on the account of the Myonessan Lalette Asterhax.”