The Judas Rose (60 page)

He stopped and grinned at her. “Nurses,” he said softly.
“You clever little old females. . . . There you were with your silly ‘woman's language,' all verbed up and no place to go. No way to get it out beyond the Lines. And then you remembered
nurses
—the only women who come and go freely between the Lines and the public, the only women who have the opportunity to talk to all sorts and kinds of people, and—coincidentally—women who had access to the hospital chapels. All you had to do was seduce the resident nurses from each of the Lines into your cozy little Thursday night meetings in the Womanhouses, and convince them that your Langlish twaddle was romantic and exotic and terribly terribly mysterious and exciting, and they would take it straight out into the world for you. And
damned
if they didn't fall for it!”

He threw back his head and laughed, while Nazareth waited patiently and watched the small golden fishes in the aquarium that was set into the wall behind him. He had added the aquarium because it distracted people talking to him; he had a screen he pulled over it when he didn't want them distracted. And when he looked at her again she was not looking at the fish but giving him her full courteous attention.

“It was all your idea, wasn't it?” he demanded.

“I'm sure I don't remember, my dear,” she answered vaguely. “It's been such a long time ago. I suppose I may have had something to do with it.”

He snorted. “You old fraud,” he said.

“Thank you kindly, I'm sure, Jonathan.”

“The priests were alarmed at what they heard,” he went on, “and they seriously considered forbidding their women to take part in these shenanigans. But that would have meant passing up their golden opportunity, you perceive. Here were all these plump little round womanly souls, just waiting to be plucked and gathered in to the ample bosom of the church . . . it was much too good to pass up. So they set up an entire project, headed by a senior nun, to do nothing but fix up the Langlish Bible translations so they weren't offensive to Catholic sensibilities, and they churned the stuff out for
years
, Nazareth! All of it submitted in turn to a head honcho for approval, and certified squeaky-Catholic-clean, and authorized for use in church. And they sent their nuns back out into the cities and towns to spread the sanitized word across the land. . . .” He stopped and steepled his hands and peered at her over his fingertips. “Nazareth Chornyak—you wretched women had an entire
regiment
of innocent nuns employed in the furthering of your plan to spread Langlish beyond the lines. Or Láadan, if you prefer—the Bishop
wasn't entirely clear on that, not that it matters. You have had working for you, for free, a crew of holy sisters and an actual Bishop! Nazareth, you perceive me before you
stunned
.”

“Well,” Nazareth murmured, “we tried, dear.”

“You
tried!
” He pinned her in her chair with his eyes, and she looked startled, and let her tremor get just a tad worse. “You tried! You succeeded! How in the name of all the bleeding saints—especially appropriate in this instance—did you women pull that off? Nazareth, the Roman Catholic Church is not a little country chapel out on a frontier somewhere! We are talking of the Holy Roman Catholic
Church
. I understand why it had to be them . . . they were the only ones with women living all together in isolation from men, and they were the only ones with the necessary lines of communication. But damned if you didn't suck them in just as slick as smoke! God
damn
, Aunt Natha!”

“You're angry, Jonathan,” Nazareth suggested, so that he could make his point.

“I certainly ought to be. Don't you think I ought to be?”

“Now how would I know that?” she objected. “I have never in all my life understood the workings of a man's mind, or what makes them angry, or what consumes them with bliss, for that matter. You are asking that question of the wrong person, Jonathan.” And there had been a time when that was all true, and she had spent her life butting her head against the walls of maleness, tied to a husband she detested and subject to a houseful of other males she despised. But over the course of a hundred years she had learned a thing or two; she still understood very little about
why
men did things, but she had come to have a reasonable competence in predicting
what
they would do in response to a particular stimulus.

“Consider it as an abstract question, Nazareth,” he said. “Shouldn't I be angry?”

“Well, are you?”

“No!” he declared, giving the old desk a brisk punch and sending files flying to the floor. “Never mind that I ought to be! The very idea of the women of the Lines suckering all those pious old potentates—how can I be angry?”

“We didn't ask if we could do it,” she pointed out.

“No, you didn't. Because if you had asked, we would have said no, and you knew that.”

“That's true.”

“And so you did an end run around us—with the help of the nurses of America assembled, and the Catholic Church—and you
wreaked glorious havoc! Bless your nefarious little hearts and whatever passes for your brains!”

Nazareth allowed herself a soft noise somewhere between a chuckle and a giggle, an old-woman sort of smothered noise, and Jonathan beamed at her, vastly satisfied. He had forgotten again about being stern.

“I would have said no,” he repeated. “Damn right I would. I would have forbidden it absolutely, from the beginning. But since you didn't ask, and since I didn't say you couldn't do it, let me tell you that I think you women should get a medal for it.”

“That's very kind of you, Jonathan,” she said.

“Mmhmm. Hypocrite, as well as fraud. But Nazareth, old dear, it gets better. It gets
much
better. You've only heard the very beginning.”

“Really?” Nazareth frowned, and bit her lip.

“Really.”

“Why, what else could there be? I don't believe there could be more, my dear. Nor do I see why the bishop bothered to come talk to you, because that silly fad died out long long ago. Wasn't he a little late to be complaining?”

His eyes narrowed, and he ran one thumbnail back and forth across his lower lip, grinning at her, a narrow grin that matched the eyes. This was what he'd actually called her in for, she saw, but he had had it in mind to tease her awhile before he shared the news, whatever it was.

Nazareth had the privilege of great age; she had diapered this alpha male many many times. And of course, by comparison with her father and her brother, who'd been Heads before him, he was a very mild alpha male indeed. She leaned across the desk and patted his free hand.

“Don't tease now, Jonathan Asher,” she admonished him. “I'm much too old for that. I'll forget what we're talking about and you'll have to start all over again from the beginning.”

“Would you now?”

“I'm sure I would. In fact, I feel my memory failing me this very minute, Charles.”

“You're faking,” he said. “But you're right, I should get on with it. This is not a holiday, although I may declare it one yet, in honor of the triumph of the Lines over the ecclesiasticals. It's the way you women bamboozled the
priests
that warms my heart, you perceive.”

“Oh? Really?”

“They're so damned irritating. They don't have the guts for being men, but they want the privileges, so they go hiding in the skirts of what they rightly call their ‘Mother' Church, where you can't get at them. I suppose it's a good thing males like that have some respectable haven to flee
to
, but it rankles. You always want to dare them to come out and fight, but you can't do that because they're all dressed up in skirts. I can't tell you how much satisfaction it gives me that you women whipped that pack of—”

Nazareth clucked her tongue, and he stopped short.

“Well, they are.”

“Some of them are rather nice,” she said. “And think what a lot of good they do.”

He glared at her, and she suggested that he tell her what had happened next.

“Oh, yes. Nazareth, what the Bishop came to tell me this morning is that the nun they had in charge of laundering your heresies—that's what he calls them, dear, ‘heresies'—was actually in charge of a secret rebellion inside the convents. Can you believe that? All the time they thought she was doing nothing but following her orders and turning out authorized sanitized gibberish, she was in solemn truth recruiting nuns—who recruited nuns, who recruited nuns—to make handwritten copies of those very same heresies and distribute them in secret from one end of the world to the other. And they don't know how long that went on . . . they keep saying ‘sixty years' but they don't really know . . . or how many nuns are involved, or how deep the Wicked Nun's tendrils are in the loam!”

Nazareth ignored the ache in her heart, and asked, cautiously, “What are they going to do to her, Jonathan?”

“To who?”

“To whoever it was that did this? The Wicked Nun? What will they do to her?”

“They can't do anything to her,” he laughed, “except rejoice in what they confidently assume to be the warm place she inhabits in Hell; she died without their ever knowing what she'd been up to. And the nun that gave it all away only tattled on her deathbed; she's far beyond their reach as well. As for the ones she ratted on, only god knows what they will do to them—but she didn't name them, Natha, and the good fathers will have to
catch
them, first! And at this point—”

His face changed, and the sterness she saw there now was not feigned. “Nazareth,” he said, “I gave the Bishop my word that
what I am telling you will remain confidential, and I expect that promise to be honored.
You
may know—even the Bishop would agree that you're entitled to know, and whether he agreed or not,
I
would rule that you were. But you are not to tell anyone else. Do you understand?”

“Ah,” she said, “don't concern yourself; I won't speak of it to anyone at all.” She did not add that she was safe as churches, but allowed him to make the joke and joined him in laughing at his wit.

“In confidence, then,” he said. “They have no information but the knowledge that the plot existed, and that it still exists. But so determined are they to ‘stamp out the perversion' that they are sending one hundred priests—
one hundred
, Nazareth—to search out the terrible tawdry traitors and bring them in.”

Nazareth sat back and sighed, shaking her head in the amazement he would expect of her, her heart quieting on its own. It was all right; everything was all right. And she listened respectfully while Jonathan told her about the plan to post priests as observers to the convents until the guilty nuns betrayed themselves and then to bring them in one by one with no one else ever knowing, on trumped-up excuses. Finding and destroying the Láadan texts one by one as they went along, with no one else ever knowing. All very hush-hush and solemnly secret; it was clear that the priests were well aware that no more powerful instrument for change exists than language, for all that they weren't linguists, and that they took this matter absolutely seriously.

When he had finished telling her the last detail, and describing the discomfiture of the visiting bishop, and admiring the set of extraordinary coincidences the women of the Lines had managed to turn to their own purposes to make all this happen, and marveling over how many
points
all this meant for the Lines, he finally began to weary of the subject. He was vastly amused that one hundred priests were to go out and devote their lives to superstitious nonsense concocted by the linguist women and revised by nuns. And he most certainly would not, as the bishop had advised that he do, order the women of the Lines to give up the use of Langlish/Láadan forever.

“It will be a very cold day in hell,” he noted grimly, “theirs or ours, when we find it necessary to take instruction in the managing of our women from the Roman Catholic Church!”

“Such arrogance!” Nazareth observed, looking shocked.

“So I informed him. And I gave him a thirty point blood
pressure boost by telling him that not only would I not forbid you women your Annual Central Caucus, as he said I ‘must' do, but I intended to add an additional half-day to it to demonstrate what value I placed on his meddling.”

“My goodness.”

“I believe I made my feelings clear.”

“I'm sure you did. And well you should have. It's none of his business what we do.”

“I told him,” Jonathan said, “that the women of the Lines have been speaking Láadan among themselves for decades, and that the result has been the antithesis of the corruption and cataclysms he predicts. The only effect the use of the language has had upon
our
women, I told His Exalted Whatsis, has been to make them ever more womanly.”

“Why, thank you, Jonathan! What a lovely thing to say!”

“It's no more than the simple truth,” he told her kindly. “It has been good for you women, and for all of us. But, Nazareth—”

“Yes, my dear?” She cocked her head and leaned toward him, her lips half-parted and her posture attentive.