“We do,” said Marjorie. She was very calm. Father Sandoval had suggested he hear her confession and give her absolution. She had told him there wasn’t time. She wasn’t sure she wanted to confess anything. She wasn’t sure anything needed confession. Even if it did, she didn’t think she would, or could, share it, because she hadn’t figured it out yet. “Tony, we do have someone.”
“Who?” he asked in surprise.
“Me,” said a voice from the door. She stood there in the light from outside, very pale, dressed in her bon riding coat and a hastily remodeled set of trousers. Rowena.
Sylvan gasped. “Mother!”
“I’m glad I have a child left to call me mother,” she said coldly. “Have you seen Dimity, Sylvan?”
He bowed his head, for a moment unable to reply. “I’ve seen her, yes. I know what condition she’s in. But it won’t help her for you to do this,” he murmured. “You’re not well, not healed….”
“I promised Marjorie my help if ever she should need it. She needs it. And who else will do it? A few hours ago Marjorie took me out and taught me how. It’s nothing. Nothing compared to what I did all my girlhood, most of my Obermum life, even after you were born, Sylvan. Oh, I’ve enough experience riding to get through this, I think. Have you seen Emmy, Sylvan? She looks almost like Dimity. Though the doctors say she will heal, in time.”
“Father did that,” he said expressionlessly.
“I don’t blame Stavenger,” she said. “Why blame a dead man? I blame the Hippae. I blame who’s responsible, and that has always been the Hippae.”
“The bons and the foxen both deserve a share of blame,” Marjorie said hotly. “The foxen let it happen. They allowed themselves a comfortable retirement. They let happen what would. Then, when it all went wrong, they chose to discuss it philosophically. When men came here, they learned new ideas of guilt and redemption and talked about that. They engaged in great theological arguments. They sent Brother Mainoa to find out if they could be forgiven. They talked of original sin, collective guilt. They’re still doing it. They haven’t learned that being penitent sometimes does no good at all.” She pulled on a girth so furiously that Don Quixote whuffed in complaint.
“Mother,” Tony said. “Don’t.”
“Damn it, Tony, they could help. They’re great, powerful beasts, evolved to be so to protect themselves from something even more terrible that was long ago extinct. But they no longer do anything. They think. They discuss. They don’t decide.”
“I thought when they helped you, they had decided,” Rigo said. She had told him about the climbers.
“Aaah,” she growled, “Aaah. One of them helped me. By himself. I don’t think even he would be much help against a dozen of the Hippae. Not alone. The rest of them are all sitting up there in the trees, thinking about it. Wondering what they might do if they ever decide to do anything. I made a mistake back there in the Tree City when I didn’t kill those two climbers. I set a good example. They’re all too ready to take a good example if it means they won’t have to do anything and then take responsibility for it.”
For the tenth time she checked her lance, a strong spear of light metal alloy with a trigger mounted on it which would turn on a big laser knife, one of the kind they had given their workmen for harvesting grasses. The knife was mounted at the tip of the lance and was counterbalanced by a weight in the butt end. Roalds’ workmen had built the lances as well as the bucklers each of them wore, a kind of light breastplate with a hook under the left arm to hold the end of the lance down. The breasts and flanks of the horses were armored in similar fashion, with light plates strung on tough fabric, to keep the weight down. Rigo had remembered the breastplates from armor he had seen, armor dating from a time when lances had been monstrously heavy and had had to be carried dead level.