Jaelle said softly, “The Amazon oath binds me not to marry di catenas. I never thought I would want to,” and her head went down on Rohana’s knees, the slender shoulders shaking with the violence of her sobs. “I don’t, Rohana! I don’t!”
Rohana thought, Then why are you crying so? But she did not say so, sensing, through the feel of the girl’s head against her knees, the very real heartbreak. She only stroked Jaelle’s soft hair, tenderly. At last she asked, “Are you pregnant, darling?”
“No-no. He has spared me that.”
“And do you really want to be spared, my precious?”
Jaelle couldn’t answer; she was unable to speak. At last Rohana asked, very gently, “Will you stay with him in sorrow as in joy, Jaelle?”
Jaelle raised her flushed face. “I feel now that I would,” she said in anguish, “but how can I be sure? How can I know he will love me in the evil times that come to everyone? How can I even know what 7 will be then? And yet-it seems that it is worth even this. Did you never love anyone, Rohana? Did you never want to give up everything-everything, your pledged way of life, your honor, everything because you could not-could not part from-” She put her head down on Rohana’s knees, and cried desperately again.
Rohana’s heart ached for her, and for a long-healed wound that Jaelle’s words had torn. Yes, there was a time when I would have given up everything: my children, the life I had made for myself, Gabriel-yet the price seemed all too heavy to pay. At last she said, faltering, “There is nothing in this world that is not bought for a price. Even Kindra; she never regretted her oath, but she grieved to the day of her death for the children she had abandoned. It seems to me that is the one flaw in the Amazon oath; you women who take it guard yourselves from the risks all women take willingly. Perhaps it is only that every woman must choose what risks she will bear.”
Jaelle listened, and the words fell heavy on her heart. I came too young to the Amazon oath; most women make these renunciations in grief, knowing that they are real privations. To me it seemed only that I renounced slavery and embraced freedom. I did not weep when I took the oath. I could never truly understand why so many women made the oath only with tears . . ..
“You love Piedro. Will you stay with him?”
“I-I must, I cannot leave him now.”
“Will you bear his children, darling?”
“If he-if he wants them.”
“But your oath/binds you to bear them only if you want them,” Rohana said. “You must choose, and perhaps it is that which I feel so wrong; that you women claim the right to choose.”
“I will never believe that,” Jaelle flared at her. “A woman not free to choose is truly a slave.”
“But even the freedom to choose does not always guarantee happiness,” Rohana said, capturing the cold hands again and caressing them. “I have heard old Amazons lamenting their childlessness, when it was too late to change their minds. And I-“She swallowed hard, for she had never said this to any living being; not to Gabriel, not to Melora, not to Kindra, who for so long had shared her innermost thoughts. “I did not want children, Jaelle. Every time I knew myself pregnant, I wept and raged. You weep because you are not to bear a child, but I cried more when I knew I was. Once I flung a silver bowl at Gabriel’s head, and I hit him, too, and I shrieked at him that I wished I had killed him and he could never do this to me again. I hated being pregnant, I hated having little children around to trouble me, I feared childbirth worse, I think, than you feared the sword that gave you this.” With light fingers she traced the still-crimson scar across Jaelle’s smooth cheek. “Had I been free to choose, I would never have borne a child. And yet now that the children are grown, and I see that they are a part of Gabriel and myself which will survive when we are gone-now, when it would have been too late to change my mind, I find I am glad that the laws of my caste forced me to bear them, and after all these years, I have forgotten-or forgiven-all the unhappiness.”