Am 1 only an instrument to give him sons? she thought, and was horrified at herself. Quickly she turned her thoughts elsewhere: What place can we make in the Domains for the son of a Dry-Towner? And Jaelle, so cold and withdrawn, will she ever accept me?
It was too much to expect, that she could find comfort in the child. I am a mother myself, that was the greatest comfort to me, that something remained of Melora . . . but Jaelle is a child. She sees only that poor little Val robbed her of their mother . . ..
Kindra drew her horse close to Rohana’s. She said, “Lady, is that where the Terrans are building their spaceport? What do they want here, these men from another world?”
“I do not know.” Rohana gazed at the great dirt-colored slash beyond the city of Thendara, where, it seemed, several miles of the valley had been ripped open by their enormous machines and smoothed to an eerie, unnatural flatness. Part of the area had been paved, and buildings were sprouting in strange, unlikely shapes. “I have heard that our world is at a crossroad of their travel roads among the stars; they seem to have trade caravans between the many worlds as we have between the towns in the Lake Country. I don’t know what their trade may be, no one has bothered to tell me, though I think Gabriel knows.” She fancied a look of contempt from Kindra. Why should I be content with ignorance? Oh, damn these Amazons, they are making me question everything: myself, Gabriel, my very life!
It made her voice edgy. “These people, they call themselves the Terran Empire, came first to Caer Donn, near Aldaran, and began a spaceport-a small one, they could not build so wide in the mountains there-and dealt with the accursed Aldarans. Hastur offered them a place here to build their spaceport where the climate would be more to their liking-I have heard that to them our world seems cold-and so we can keep watch over their doings; but of course we have nothing to do with them.”.
“Why not?” asked Kindra. “I should think that a race which can travel from star to star as readily as I can ride from here to Nevarsin would have a great deal to teach us.”
Rohana said stiffly, “I do not know; Hastur has willed it so.”
“How fortunate are the men of the Domains, that they have the son of Hastur to teach them,” said Kindra, her gray eyebrows lifting. “A stupid woman like myself would have felt that a race which can make trade caravans among the stars might outreach even a Hastur in wisdom.”
Rohana was annoyed by the sarcasm, but she felt too deeply indebted to Kindra to take her to task for it. “I have heard it explained thus: Hastur feels there is much in their way of life that might be more of a threat than we can know at once. They have, for a beginning, leased the spaceport here for five hundred years, so that we will have plenty of time to choose what we can learn from them.”
“I see,” said Kindra, and was silent, thinking it over, studying the enormous slash on the horizon, where strange machines crawled and unknown shapes grew against the horizon.
Rohana, too, was silent. As they rode this last mile, it seemed that she was, in a curious way, changing worlds. For near to forty days she had lived in a world as alien to her as the world of the Terrans below; then she had grown used to it, and now she must again change worlds, make ready to reenter her own.
At first the world in which the Amazons lived had seemed hard and comfortless, strange and lonely. Then she had realized that most of the strangeness was not the physical lack of comfort at all. It was quite different. It was easy to get used to long hours of riding, to unfamiliar and ugly clothes, to bathing as one could in stream or river, to sleeping in tents or under the sky.
But it was not nearly so easy to give up the familiar support of known protections, known ways of thinking. Until she came on this journey, she had never quite realized how much all her decisions, even small personal ones, had been left to her father and brothers, or, since she married, to her husband. Even such small things as Shall I wear a blue gown or a green? Shall I order fish or fowl for the table tonight7 had been dictated less by her own tastes and preferences than Gabriel’s wishes. She had not realized, until Jaelle and the newborn Val were hers for fostering, how much even what she had said to the children or done for them had been based, openly or not, on how well Gabriel would think of her for her dealings with them.