The Forbidden Tower

Chapter Fourteen

Dom Esteban had asked them to delay the psi work until Midwinter was past and the repairs of the storm completed. Damon welcomed the respite, even while he felt sick with apprehension, with the need to have it over. He knew that a lot would depend on the weather. If there were another storm, Midwinter festival would be celebrated with only the house-folk, but if the weather were fine, all the people within a day’s ride would come, and many of them would spend the night. Midwinter eve dawned red and pleasant, and Damon could see Dom Esteban visibly brightened by the prospect. He was ashamed of his own reluctance. A break in winter isolation meant a great deal, in the Kilghard Hills, and more to an old man, crippled and chair-bound. At breakfast Ellemir chattered gaily about plans for the festival, taking up the holiday spirit.

“I will set the kitchen girls to baking festival cakes, and one of the men must ride down to the South Valley and ask old Yashri and his sons to come play for the dancing. And if many are going to be sleeping overnight, we must have all the guest rooms opened and aired. And I suppose the chapel is shamefully filled with dust and dirt. I have not been down there since…” She faltered and looked away, and Callista said quickly, “I will tend the chapel, Elli, but are we to make the fire?” She glanced at her father and he said, “I dare say it’s foolishness, in this day and age, to kindle sun-fire.” He looked at Andrew, his eyebrows raised, as if, Damon thought, he expected the younger man to jeer. But Andrew said, “It seems to be one of the most universal customs of mankind, on most worlds, sir, some form of Midwinter festival marking the return of the sun after the longest night, and some form of Summer festival for the longest day.”

Damon had never thought of himself as a sentimental man, had trained himself harshly to leave the past buried, yet now he remembered all the winters he had spent at Armida, as Coryn’s friend. He used to stand beside Coryn at Midwinter festival, with all the little girls around them, and think that if he ever had a family of his own, he would keep to this, custom. His father-in-law picked up the memory and raised his eyes, smiling at Damon. His voice was gruff: “I thought all you young people thought it a pagan nonsense and better forgotten, but if someone can carry my chair into the court we will have it done, then, if there is enough sun for the purpose. Damon, I cannot go choose wine for the feast, so here is the key to the cellars. Rhodri says the wine was good this year, even if I had no hand in the making.”

Andrew was returning from the daily task of inspecting the saddle horses when Callista intercepted him. “Come down and help me tend the chapel. No servant may do this, but only one connected by blood or marriage to the Domain. You have never been down here before.”

Andrew had not. Religion did not seem to play a very great part in the daily life of the Domains, at least not here at Armida. Callista had tied herself up in a big apron, explaining as they went down the stairs, “This was my only task as a child; Dorian and I used to tend the chapel at festivals. Elli was never allowed down here, because she was boisterous and broke things.”

It was easy to see Callista as a small, grave little girl, trusted to handle valuable and fragile things without breaking them. She said as they went into the chapel, “I have not been home for the festival since I went to the Tower. And now Dorian is wedded and has two little daughters — I have never seen them either — and Domenic away in Thendara commanding the Guard, and my youngest brother in Nevarsin. I have not seen Valdir since he was a babe in arms. I do not suppose I will see him now until he is grown.” She stopped and suddenly shivered, as if she had seen something frightening.

“Is Dorian much like you and Elli?”

“No, not much. She is fair, as many of the Ridenows are. Everyone said she was the beauty of the family.”

“I am reluctant to think all your family had defective eyesight,” Andrew said, laughing, and she colored, leading him into the chapel.

At the center was a four-sided altar, a stone slab of translucent white stone. It looked very old. On the walls of the chapel were old paintings. Callista pointed, explaining quietly,

“These are the Four, the old Gods: Aldones, the Lord of Light; Zandru, who works evil in the darkness; Evanda, lady of spring and growing things; and Avarra, the dark mother of birth and death.” She took up a broom and began to sweep the room, which was, indeed, very dusty. Andrew wondered if she herself believed in these gods, or whether her religious observance was merely formal. Her very contempt of religion must be something different from what he believed about it.

She said, hesitating, “I am not sure what I believe. I am a Keeper, a tenerésteis, a mechanic. We are taught that the order of the universe does not depend upon any deities and yet… and yet who knows if it was not the Gods who ordained these laws which built things as they are, the laws we cannot refuse to obey.” She stood quietly for a moment, then went to sweep in the corner, calling Andrew to help her brush up the dust, gather the small dishes and vessels from the altar. In a niche on the wall was a very old statue of a veiled woman, surrounded by roughly sculptured children’s heads in blue stone. She said in a low voice, “Perhaps I am superstitious after all. This is Cassilda, called the Blessed, who bore a son to the Lord Hastur, son of Light. They say that from his seven sons were descended the seven Domains. I have no idea whether the tale is true, or only legend or fairy-tale, or garbled memory of some old truth somewhere, but the women of our family make offerings…” She was silent, and in the dust of the neglected altar Andrew saw a bunch of flowers, left to wither there.

Ellemir’s offering, when she thought she was to bear Damon’s child…

Silently he put his arm around Callista’s waist, feeling closer to her than at any time since the dreadful night of catastrophe. Many strange threads went to the making of a marriage… Her lips were moving, and he wondered if she was praying, then she raised her head, sighed and took the withered posy between her fingers, dropping it tenderly into the pile of rubbish.

“Come, we must clean all these vessels and make the altar clean for the new fire to burn there. We must scrape all these candlesticks — how came they to leave all the dead wax in them last year, I wonder?” The gaiety was back in her voice again. “Go out to the well, Andrew, and bring in some fresh water.”

By noontime the great red disk of the sun hung clear and cloudless overhead, and two or three of the strongest Guardsmen carried Dom Esteban into the courtyard, while Damon set up the arrangement of mirror, burning-glass and tinder which would kindle the fire in the ancient stoneware fire-pan. They could smell the balsam incense Callista had kindled on the altar inside, and Damon, looking at Callista and Ellemir, could almost see them as little girls in tartan dresses, their hair curling around their cheeks, solemn and well behaved. Dorian had sometimes brought her doll to the ceremony — he could not remember ever seeing either Callista or Ellemir with a doll. He and Coryn had stood beside Dom Esteban for this ceremony. Now the old man could not kneel beside the fire-pan, and it was Damon who held the burning-glass, stood waiting while the brilliant focus of light crawled across the tinder and resin-needles, raising a thin trail of fragrant smoke. For a long time the spot smoldered, the smoke rising. Then a crimson spark echoed the glare of the sun in the mirror, and a tiny flame leaped to life at the center of the smoke. Damon crouched over the fire-pan, coaxing the flame, carefully feeding it with resin-needles and shavings, until it blazed up, to an accompaniment of cheers and cries of encouragement from the watchers. He handed the fire-pan to Ellemir, who carried it inside to the altar. Then, laughing and exchanging good wishes and season’s greetings, they began to leave the court, passing one by one past the old man’s chair to receive small gifts. Ellemir, standing beside him, handed them out, trinkets of silver and sometimes copper. In a few cases — the more valued servants — she gave certificates entitling them to livestock or other property. Callista and Ellemir bent one after another to kiss their father and wish him the joy of the season. His gifts to his daughters were valuable furs which they could have made into riding cloaks for the worst weather.

His gift to Andrew was a set of razors in a velvet case. The razors were made of some light metal alloy, and Andrew knew that on metal-starved Darkover this was a handsome gift. He bent, feeling awkward, and embraced the old man, feeling the whiskered cheeks against his with a curious sense of warmth, of belonging.

“A good festival to you, son, and a joyous New Year.”

“And to you, Father,” said Andrew, wishing he could think of more elequent words. Just the same, he felt as if he had taken another small step toward finding his place here. Callista held his hand tightly, as they went into the house to make preparation for the feast later that day.

All afternoon guests were arriving from outlying farms, from small estates nearby, many of them guests at the wedding. Going up to dress for the festival dinner, Damon found himself exiled from his own half of the suite. Ellemir, drawing him into the rooms shared by Andrew and Callista, told him, “I have given our rooms to the folk from Syrtis, Loran and Caitlia and their daughters. You and I will spend the night in here with Andrew and Callista. I have your holiday clothes here.”

Andrew, sharing the cramped quarters in holiday spirit with Damon, lowered his shaving mirror so that the smaller man could look into it. He crouched, fingering the hair that had grown long on his neck. “I should get someone to cut my hair,” he said, and Damon laughed.

“You’re neither a monk nor a Guardsman, so you surely don’t want it any shorter than it is now, do you?” His own hair was trimmed smoothly, about the length of his collar; Andrew shrugged. Custom and dress were completely relative. His own hair now seemed enormously long, shaggy, unkempt, yet it was shorter than Damon’s. Shaving with the new razors, he found himself wondering why, on a freezing planet like Darkover, only old men went bearded against the cold. But then, customs made no sense.

Downstairs, looking at the hall hung with green boughs, and spiced festival cakes smelling not unlike the gingerbread of his Terran Christmases, it seemed poignantly like a childhood celebration on Terra. Most of the guests were people he had seen at his wedding. There was a lot of dancing, and enough heavy drinking to surprise Andrew, who had thought of the Darkovan hillmen as sober people. He said so to Damon, and his brother-in-law nodded. “We are. That’s why we save our drinking for special occasions, and those occasions don’t come very often. So make the best of them. Drink up, brother!” Damon was taking his own advice; he was already half drunk.

There were some of the boisterous kissing games he remembered from his wedding. Andrew remembered something he had read years ago, how urban societies with a great deal of leisure developed highly sophisticated amusements, not needed for the rare leisure of people who spent a lot of time in hard manual work. Remembering what he had heard of frontier days on his own world, quilting parties, corn-husking bees, where hardworking farmers whiled the time with what would later be considered games for young children — bobbing for apples, blindman’s buff — he realized he should have expected this. Even here in the Great House there was plenty of hard work to be done and festivals like this were few, so if the games seemed childlike to him, it was his fault, not the fault of these hardworking farmers and ranchers. Most of the men had calloused hands betraying plenty of hard physical labor, even the noblemen. His own hands were hardened as they had not been since he left the horse ranch in Arizona, at nineteen. The women worked too, he thought, remembering the days Ellemir spent supervising in the kitchens, and Callista’s long hours in still-room and greenhouse. Both of them joined gaily in the dancing, and in the simple games. One of them was not unlike blindman’s buff, with a man and a woman blindfolded and made to seek through the crowds for one another.

When the dancing began he was much in demand as a partner. He found out why when a youngster still in his teens swept Callista into the dance, saying over his shoulder to his previous partner, a girl who looked no more than fourteen, “If I dance with a bride at Midwinter, I shall be married before the year is out!”

The girl — a child really, in a child’s flowered frock, her hair in long curls about her cheeks — came up to Andrew, saying with a pert smile to hide her shyness, “Why, then, I’ll dance with the groom!” Andrew let the child pull him on to the dance floor, warning her that he was not a good dancer. Later he saw the girl again, in a corner with the youngster who had wanted to be married that season, kissing with what seemed to be unchildlike passion.

As the night wore on there was a lot of pairing off in corners and wandering away in couples into the dark outer part of the halls. Dom Esteban got very drunk and was eventually carried off to bed, senseless. One by one the guests took their leave, or said good night and were escorted to their beds. Most of the servants had joined in the party and were as drunk as the other guests, not having a long ride in the cold ahead of them. Damon had fallen asleep on a bench in the Great Hall, and was snoring. It was the dimness before dawn when they looked around the Great Hall, with its drooping greenery, scattered bottles and cups, discarded sweets and refreshments, realizing that their duties as hosts were ended and they could seek their own beds. After a few halfhearted efforts to rouse Damon, who muttered drunkenly at them, they left him there and went upstairs without him. Andrew was amazed. Even at his wedding, Damon had drunk sparingly. Well, even a sober man had a right to get drunk at the New Year, he supposed.

In the rooms which the two couples were to share that night because of the house party, he felt a knifelike frustration, intensified by his half-drunken state, amorous and disappointed. It was a hell of a life, married like this and sleeping alone. A hell of a marriage, so far, and what felt like a travesty of a Christmas party. He felt let-down, dismal. Maybe with Damon drunk, Ellemir — but no, the women had climbed together into his big bed, as they had done during Callista’s long illness. He supposed he would sleep again in the small one that was usually Callista’s, and Damon, if he came upstairs at all, in the sitting room of the suite.

The women were giggling together like little girls. Had they been drinking too? Callista called his name softly and he came over to them. They were lying close together, laughing in the dim light. Callista reached up and pulled him down to them.

“There’s room for you here.”

He hesitated. Did this make any sense, tantalizing himself this way? Then he laughed, climbing in beside them. The bed was an enormous one that would have held half a dozen without crowding. Callista said softly, “I wanted to prove something to you, my love,” and gently pushed Ellemir into his arms.

He felt furious embarrassment that seemed to burn through his whole body, dousing his passion like ice water. He had never felt so naked, so exposed, in his life.

Oh hell, he felt. He was behaving like a fool. Wasn’t this the next logical step anyway? But logic had no part in his feelings.

Ellemir felt warm, familiar, comforting in his arms.

What’s the matter, Andrew?

The matter, and damn it, she had to know it, was Callista’s presence. He supposed that to some people this would be especially exciting. Ellemir followed his thoughts, which associated this kind of thing with erotic exhibitions, attempts to rouse jaded tastes, decadence. She said in a whisper, “But it isn’t at all like that, Andrew. We are all telepaths. Whatever we do, the others will know it, be part of it, so why pretend that any of us can ever completely shut out any of the others?”

He felt Callista’s fingertips touching his face. Strange that in the dark, though their small hands were almost identical, he could be so sure it was Callista’s hand and not Ellemir’s on his cheek.

Among telepaths the concept of that kind of privacy could not exist, he knew, so shutting doors and going away in isolation was only a pretense. There came a time when you stopped pretending…

He tried to bring back his previous amorous state, but drunkenness and embarrassment conspired to defeat him. Ellemir laughed, but it was perfectly clear that the laugh did not intend ridicule. “I think we’ve all had too much to drink. Let’s sleep, then.”

They were all almost asleep when the door of the room opened and Damon came in, moving unsteadily. He looked down at them, smiling. “Knew I’d find you all here.” He flung his clothes this way and that. He was still blundering drunk. “Come on, make room, where do I—”

“Damon, you want to sleep it off,” Callista said. “Won’t you be more comfortable—”

“Comfortable be damned,” Damon said drowsily. “Nobody ought to have to sleep alone at festival time!”

Laughing, Callista made room at her side and Damon crawled in, was instantly asleep. Andrew felt a mad laughter blowing away his embarrassment. As he fell asleep he became aware of a dim thread of rapport, weaving among them, as if Damon, even in sleep, reached out for the comfort of their presence, drawing them all close together, intertwined, close-folded, their hearts beating in rhythm, a slow pulse, an infinite comfort. He thought, not knowing whether it was his own thought or another’s, that Damon was there, it was all right now. That was the way it ought to be. He felt Damon’s awareness: All my loved ones… I will never be alone again…

It was late when they woke, but the drawn curtains made it dark in the room. Ellemir was still folded in his arms. She stirred, turned sleepily toward him, enfolded him with her woman’s warmth. The sense of closeness, of unique sharing, was still there, and he let himself be swept into it, accepting the welcoming of her body. It was not only himself and Ellemir, somehow, but the very awareness, somewhere below conscious level, that they were all part of it, they fitted together, uniquely and without analysis. He felt like shouting to the world, to everyone, “I love you, I love all of you.” In his exultation he did not distinguish his sexual awareness of Ellemir, the tenderness for Callista, the strong, protective warmth he felt for Damon, They were all one emotion, and it was love. He floated in it, he drowned in it, he lay spent, luxuriating in it. He knew they had wakened the others. It didn’t seem to matter.

Ellemir moved first, stretching, sighing, laughing, yawning. She raised herself a little, kissed him quickly. “I would like to stay here all day,” she said ruefully, “but I am thinking of the chaos downstairs in the hall. If any of our guests are to have breakfast, I must go down and make sure something is done!” She leaned over and kissed Damon and, after a moment, kissed Callista too, then slid from the bed and went to dress.

Damon, less physically involved, sensed the effort Callista was making to keep herself barriered. So it was not complete, after all. She was still outside. He touched a light fingertip to her closed eyes. Andrew had gone into the bath. They were alone, and he felt the gallant pretense dissolve.

“Crying, Callie?”

“No, of course not. Why should I?” But she was.

He held her, knowing at this moment they shared something from which the others were excluded, that shared experience, that painful discipline, the sense of apartness.

Andrew had gone to dress. Damon caught a fragment of his thought, contentment mingled with chagrin, and thought how for a little while Andrew was one of them. Now he was apart from them too. He sensed Callista’s emotions too, not begrudging Ellemir anything, but desperately needing to know before she could share it. He sensed her desperate grief, the sudden mad impulse to tear at herself with her nails, beat herself with her fists, turn against this useless mutilated body which was so far from what it should have been. He held her against him, trying to calm and soothe her with his touch.

Ellemir came back from her bath, the ends of her hair dripping, and sat at Callista’s dressing table. “I will wear one of your housedresses, Callie, there is so much clearing away to be done,” she said. “That is the only bad thing about a party!” She saw Callista, hiding her face against Damon, and for a moment she was wrung by Callista’s grief. Ellemir had been brought up thinking of herself as having a little of the laran of her clan, but now, taking the full impact of her twin’s sorrow, she knew it was more of a curse than a blessing. And when Andrew came back she sensed his sudden apartness.

Andrew was thinking that you just had to be brought up to that kind of thing. He interpreted Ellemir’s tense silence as shame or regret for what had happened and wondered if he ought somehow to apologize. For what? To whom? Ellemir? Damon? He saw Callista lying in Damon’s arms. Where would he get any right to complain? Turn about was fair play, but he still felt an almost physical queasiness and disgust, or was it only that he had drunk too much the night before?

Damon saw his eyes on them and smiled.

“I suppose Dom Esteban has a head worse than mine this morning. I’ll go douse some cold water on mine, and go down and see if I can do something for our father. I haven’t the heart to leave him to his body-servant today.” He added, disentangling himself slowly and without haste from Callista, “Have your Terrans any suitable expression for the morning after the night before?”

“Dozens,” Andrew said glumly, “and every one as revolting as the thing itself.” Hangovers, he thought.

Damon went into the bath and Andrew stood jerking a comb through his hair, glowering at Callista. He did not even see that her eyes were red. Slowly she got out of bed and into her flowered chamber robe. “I must go help Ellemir. The maids will hardly know where to start. Why are you staring at me, my husband?”

The phrase made him angry, quarrelsome. “You will not even let me touch your fingertips, and if I kiss you, you draw away as if I meant rape, yet you were lying in Damon’s arms—”

She lowered her eyes. “You know why I dare… with him.”

Andrew remembered the intense awareness, sexuality, he had sensed, shared with Damon. It was disquieting, flooding him with vague unease. “You cannot say that Damon is not a man!”

“Of course he is,” said Callista, “but he has learned — and in the same hard school as I — when and how not to seem so.”

That was somehow, to Andrew’s hypersensitive guilt, like a taunt, as if he were some kind of brute, animal, who could not control his sexual urges but must be accommodated. She had literally pushed him into Ellemir’s arms, but Damon needed no such concessions. Suddenly, angrily, he took Callista in his arms, forced his mouth on hers. For a moment she fought him, twisting her mouth away from his, and he could feel the wild upheaveal in her. Suddenly she went wholly passive in his arms, her lips cold, unmoving, so far away she might not have been in the same room with him at all. Her low voice tore at him like fangs.

“Whatever you feel you must do, I can bear. As I am now, it would make no difference. It will not damage me now, nor stir me to the point where I will react or strike at you. Even if you felt you must… must take me to bed… it would mean nothing to me, but if it gave you any pleasure…”

Cold, shocked to the very bones, he let her go. Somehow this was more horrible than if she had resisted him madly, torn at him with teeth and fingernails, struck him again with the lightning bolt. Before, she feared her own arousal. Now she knew that nothing would get through her defenses… nothing.

“Oh, Callista, forgive me! Oh, God, Callista, forgive me!” He fell to his knees before her, gathering up her small fingertips in his, pressing them to his lips in an agony of remorse. Damon came from the bath, standing appalled at the tableau, but neither of them heard or saw him. Slowly Callista laid her hands on either side of Andrew’s face. She said in a whisper, “Ah, love, it is I should ask you to forgive me. I do not want… I do not want to be indifferent to you.” Her voice was filled with such grief that Damon knew he could not wait any longer.

He knew why he had gotten so drunk last night. It was because, with Midwinter past, he could no longer delay the ordeal. Now he must go into the overworld, into time itself, and search for help there, for a way to bring Callista back to them. Now, before her frantic grief, he felt he would risk more than this for her, for Andrew.

Very quietly, he withdrew and went out of the suite the other way.