Hastur looked at me with sympathy. That hurt, too. It would have been hard enough to strip myself this way before a man my own age. Finally he said gently, “There’s never been any question of compulsion, Lew. But promise me to think about it. The Storn-Lanart girl has applied to Neskaya Tower. We need Keepers and psi technicians. But we also need sensitive women, telepaths, to marry into our families. If you could come to like one another, we would welcome her.”
I said, drawing a deep breath, “I’ll think about it.” Linnea was a telepath. It might be enough. But to put it bluntly, I was afraid. Hastur gestured to a servant to take his emptied plate and my nearly untouched one. “More wine?”
“Thank you, sir, but I have already drunk more than I usually do in a week. And I promised my foster-sister another dance.”
Kind as he had been, I was glad to get away from him. The conversation had rubbed me raw-edged, rousing thoughts I had learned to keep firmly below the surface of my mind.
Love—to put it more precisely, sex—is never easy for a telepath. Not even when you’re very young and still childishly playing around, discovering your own needs and desires, learning to know your own body and its hungers.
I suppose, from the way other lads talk—and there’s plenty of talk in the cadets and the Guards—for most people, at least for a time, anyone of the right sex who is accessible and not completely repulsive will do. But even during those early experiments I had always been too conscious of the other party’s motives and reactions, and they would rarely stand up to so close an examination. And after I went to Arilinn and submerged myself in the intense sharing and closeness there, it had changed from merely difficult to impossible.
Well, I had promised Linnell a dance. And what I had told Hastur was true. Linnell was not a woman to me and she would not disturb me emotionally at all.
But Callina was alone, watching a group of classic dancers do a rhythmic dance which mimicked the leaves in a spring storm. Their draperies, gray-green, yellow-green, blue-green, flickered and flowed in the lights like sunshine. Callina had thrown back her hood and, preoccupied in watching the dancers, looked rather forlorn, very small and fragile and solemn. I came and stood beside her. After a moment she turned and said, “You promised Linnell to dance again, didn’t you? Well, you can save yourself the trouble, cousin, she and the Storn-Lanart child are in the balcony, watching and chattering to one another about gowns and hair-dressing.” She smiled, a small whimsical smile which momentarily lightened her pale stern face. “It’s foolish to bring little girls that age to a formal ball, they’d be just as happy at a dancing class!”
I said, letting out my pent-up bitterness, “Oh, they’re old enough to be up for auction to the highest bidder. It’s how we make fine marriages in the Comyn. Are you for sale too, damisela?”
She smiled faintly. “I don’t imagine you’re making an offer? No, I’m not for sale this year at least. I’m Keeper at Neskaya Tower, and you know what that means.”
I knew, of course. The Keepers are no longer required to be cloistered virgins to whom no man dares raise even a careless glance. But while they are working at the center of the energon relays, they are required, by harsh necessity, to remain strictly chaste. They learned not to attract desires they dared not satisfy. Probably they learned not to feel them, either, which is a good trick if you can manage it. I wished I could.
I relaxed. Against Callina, tower-trained and a working Keeper, I need not be on my guard. We shared a deeper kinship than blood, the strong tie of the tower-trained telepath.
I’ve been a matrix technician long enough to know that the work uses up so much physical and nervous energy that there’s not much left over for sex. The will may be there, but not the energy. The Keepers are required, for their physical and emotional safety, to remain celibate. The others in the circle—technicians, mechanics, psi monitors—are usually generous and sensitive about satisfying what little remains. In any case you get too close for playing the elaborate games of flirt and retreat that men and women elsewhere are given to playing. And Callina understood all this without being told, having been part of it.
She was also sensitive enough to be aware of my mood. She said, with a faint tinge of gentle malice, “I have heard Linnea will be sent to Arilinn next year, if you both choose not to marry. You’ll have time for second thoughts. Shall I ask them to be sure she is not made Keeper, in case you should change your mind?”
I felt somewhat abashed. That was an outrageous thing to say! But what would have infuriated me from an outsider did not trouble me from her. Within a tower circle such a statement would not have embarrassed me, although I would not have felt constrained to answer, either. She was simply treating me like one of our own kind. In the rapport of the tower circles, we were all very much aware of each other’s needs and hungers, eager to keep them from reaching a point of frustration or pain.
But now my circle was scattered, others serving in my place, and somehow I had to cope with a world full of elaborate games and complex relationships. I said, as I would have said to a sister, “They’re pressuring me to marry, Callina. What shall I do? It’s too soon. I’m still—” I gestured, unable to put it into words.
She nodded gravely. “Perhaps you should take Linnea after all. It would mean they couldn’t put any constraint on you for someone less suitable.” She was seriously considering my problem, giving it her full attention. “I suppose, mostly, what they want is for you to father a son for Armida. If you could do that, they wouldn’t care whether you married the girl or not, would they?”
It wouldn’t have been difficult to have fathered a child on one of the women in my circle at Arilinn, even though pregnancy makes it too dangerous for a woman to remain in the tower. But the thought of that was like salt in a raw wound. I said at last, and heard my voice crack, “I am a bastard myself. Do you honestly think I would ever inflict that on any son of mine? And Linnea is very young and she was . . . honest with me.” This whole conversation troubled me for obscure reasons. “And how do you come to know so much about this? Has my love life become a subject for Council debate, Callina comynara?”
She shook her head pityingly. “No, of course not. But Javanne and I played dolls together, and she still tells me things. Not Council gossip, Lew, just women’s talk.”
I hardly heard her. Like all Altons, I sometimes have a disturbing tendency to see time out of focus, and Callina’s image kept wavering and trembling, as if I saw her through running water or through flowing time. For a moment I would lose sight of her as she was now, pale and plain and crimson-draped, as she shimmered in an ice-blue glittering mist. Then she would seem to float, cold and aloof and beautiful, shimmering with a darkness like the midnight sky. I was tormented, struggling with mingled rage and frustration, my whole body aching with it—
I blinked, trying to get the world back in focus.
“Are you ill, kinsman?”
I realized with sheer horror that I had been, for an instant, on the very edge of taking her into my arms. Since she was not now Keeper within the circle, this was only a rudeness, not an unthinkable atrocity. Still, I must be mad! I was actually trembling. This was insane! I was still looking at Callina, reacting to her as if she were a desirable woman, not barred from me by double taboo and oath of a tower technician.
She met my eyes, deeply troubled. There was cool sympathy and kindliness in her glance, but no response to my surge of uncontrollable emotion. Of course not!
“Damisela, I apologize profoundly,” I said, feeling my breath raw in my throat. “It’s this crowd. Plays hell with my . . . barriers.”
She nodded, accepting the excuse. “I hate such affairs. I try never to come to them, except when I must. Let’s get into the air for a moment, Lew.” She led the way out to one of the small balconies where a thin fine rain was falling. I breathed the cold dampness with relief. She was wearing a long, fine, shimmering black veil that spun out behind her like wings, gleaming in the darkness. I co
uld not resist the impulse to seize her in my arms, crush her against me, press her lips against mine—Again I blinked, staring at the cool rainless night, the clear stars, Callina calm in her brilliant drapery. Suddenly I felt sick and faint and clung to the balcony railing. I felt myself falling into infinite distances, a wild nowhere of empty space. . . .
Callina said quietly, “This isn’t just the crowd. Have you some kirian, Lew?”
I shook my head, fighting to get the world in perspective. I was too old for this, damn it. Most telepaths outgrow these psychic upheavals at puberty. I hadn’t had threshold sickness since before I went to Arilinn. I had no idea why it should overcome me just now.
Callina said gently, “I wish I could help you, Lew. You know what’s really wrong with you, don’t you?” She brushed past me with a feather-light touch and left me. I stood in the cold damp air of the balcony, feeling the sting of the words. Yes, I knew what was wrong and resented it, bitterly, that she should remind me from behind the barricade of her own invulnerability. She did not share my needs, desires; it was a torment from which she, as Keeper, was free. For the moment, in my flaring anger at the girl, I forgot the cruel discipline behind her hard-won immunity.
Yes, I knew what was really wrong with me. At Arilinn I had grown accustomed to women who were sensitive to my needs, who shared them. Now I had been a long time away, a long time alone. I was even barred, being what I am, from the kind of uncomplicated relief which the least of my fellow Guardsmen might find. The few times—very few times—when, in desperation, I had been driven to seek it, it had only made me sick. Sensitive women don’t take up that particular profession. Or if they do I’ve never met them. Leaning my head on the railing, I gave way to envy . . . a bitter envy of a man who could find even temporary solace with any woman with a willing body.
Momentarily, knowing it would make it worse in the end, I let myself think of the girl Linnea. Terran blood. A sensitive, a telepath. Perhaps I had been too hasty.
Rage gripped me again. So Hastur and my father thought they could manipulate me no other way, now they tried to bribe me with sex. They had bribed Dyan by putting him in charge of a barracks-full of half-grown boys, who at the very least would feed his ego by admiring him and flattering him. And however discreetly, he thrived on it.
And they would bribe me, too. Differently, of course, for my needs were different, but essentially still a bribe. They would keep me in control, pliable, by dangling a young, beautiful, sexually exciting girl before me, a half-spoken agreement.
And my own needs, which my telepathic father knew all too well, would do the rest. I felt sick at the knowledge of how nearly I had fallen into their trap.
The festivities inside the ballroom were breaking up. The cadets had long gone back to barracks. A few lingerers were still drinking at the buffet, but servants were moving around, beginning to clear away. I strode through the halls toward the Alton rooms, still alive with rage.
The central hall was deserted, but I saw a light in my father’s room and went in without knocking. He was half-dressed, looking weary and off guard.
“I want to talk to you!”
He said mildly, “You didn’t have to charge in here like a cralmac in rut for that.” He reached out briefly and touched my mind. He hasn’t done that much since I was grown up, and it made me angry that he should treat me like a child after so many years. He withdrew quickly and said, “Can’t it wait till morning, Lew? You’re not well.”
Even his solicitude added to my wrath. “If I’m not, you know whose fault it is. What in the hell do you mean, trying to marry me off without a word of warning?”
He met my anger head-on. “Because, Lew, you’re too proud and too damned stubborn to admit you need anything. You’re ready, past ready, for marriage. Don’t be like the man in the old tale, who when the devil bade him take the road to paradise, set off on the high-road to hell!” He sounded as raw as I felt. “Damn it, do you think I don’t know how you feel?”
I thought about that for a moment. I’ve wondered, now and then, if my father has lived alone all these years since my mother died. He’d certainly had no acknowledged mistress. I had never tried to spy on him, or inquire even in thought about his most private life, therefore I was doubly angered that he left me no rag of privacy to cover my nakedness, had forced me to strip myself naked before Hastur and disgrace myself before my cousin Callina.
“It won’t work,” I flung at him in a fury. “I wouldn’t marry the girl now if she was as beautiful as the Blessed Cassilda, and came dowered with all the jewels of Carthon!”
My father shrugged, with a deep sigh. “Of course not,” he said wearily. “When did you ever do anything so sensible? Suit yourself. I married to please myself; I told Hastur I would never compel you.”
“Do you think you could?” I was still raging.
“Since I’m not trying, what does it matter?” My father sounded as weary as I felt. “I think you’re a fool, but if it helps you feel independent and virtuous to go around with an ache in your”—to my surprise and shock he used a vulgar phrase from the Guard hall, one I’d never suspected him of knowing—“then be just as damned stubborn as you want. You’re my son all right: you have no more sense than I had at your age!” He shrugged in a way that indicated he was through with the subject. “Threshold sickness? I have some kirian somewhere, if you need it.”
I shook my head, realizing that something, perhaps just the flooding of my system with violent anger, had dispelled the worst of it.
“I had something to say to you, but it can wait till morning if you’re not in shape to listen. Meanwhile, I want another drink.” He started to struggle to his feet; I said, “Let me serve you, Father,” and brought him a glass of wine, got one for myself and sat beside him to drink it. He sat sipping it slowly. After a time he reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder, a rare gesture of intimacy from childhood. It did not make me angry now.
Finally he said, “You were at the Council. You know what’s going on.”
“You mean Aldaran.” I was glad he had actually changed the subject.
“The worst of it is, I cannot be spared from Thendara, and what’s more, I don’t think I can make the journey, Lew.” His barriers were down, and I could feel his weariness. “I’ve never admitted, before, that there was anything I could not do. But now,” and he gave me his quick, rare smile, “I have a son I can trust to take my place. And since we’ve both defied Hastur, Thendara might not be too comfortable for you in the next weeks. I’m going to send you to Aldaran as my deputy, Lew.”
“Me, Father?”
“Who else? There is no one else I can trust so well. You did as well as I could have done on the fire-beacon business. And you can claim blood-kinship there; old Kermiac of Aldaran is your great-uncle.” I had known I was of the Aldaran kin, but I had not known it was so high in the clan, nor so close. “Also, you have Terran blood. You can go and find out, beyond all rumors, what is really happening back there in the mountains.”
I felt both elated and uncertain about being sent on this highly sensitive mission, knowing that Father trusted me with it. Hastur had spoken of our duty to serve the Comyn, our world. Now I was ready to take my place among those of our Domain who had done so for more generations than any of us could count. “When do I start?”
“As soon as I can arrange escort and self-conduct for you. There’s no time to be lost,” he said. “They know you are heir to Comyn. But you are also kinsman to Aldaran; they will welcome you as they would never welcome me.” I was grateful to my father for giving me this mission, then, a new feeling and a good one, I realized that the gratitude need not be all mine. He genuinely needed me. I had a chance to serve him, too, to do something for him better than he could do it himself. I was eager to begin.
CHAPTER NINE
At this season the sun was already up when the rising-bell rang in the barracks. Little runnels of snow were melting in the court as they crossed the cobblestones
toward the mess hall. Regis was still sleepy in spite of the icy water he had splashed on his face. He felt that he’d almost rather miss breakfast than get up for it at this hour. But he was proud of his good record; he was the only cadet who had never incurred a punishment detail for sleeping through the bell and stumbling in late and half asleep. Nevarsin had done him some good, after all.
He slid into his assigned seat between Danilo and Gareth Lindir. An orderly slapped battered trays in front of them: thick crockery bowls of porridge mixed with nuts, heavy mugs of the sour country beer Regis hated and never touched. He put a spoon distastefully into the porridge.
“Does the food really get worse every morning, or am I imagining it?” Damon MacAnndra asked.
“It gets worse,” said Danilo. “Who’s capable of imagining anything at this God-forgotten hour? What’s that?”
There was a small commotion at the door. Regis jerked up his head and stared. After a brief scuttle a cadet was flung off his feet and went reeling across the room, crashed headfirst into a table and lay still. Dyan Ardais was standing in the doorway waiting for the unfortunate cadet to rise. When he did not stir, Dyan motioned to an orderly to go and pick him up.
Damon said, “Zandru’s hells, it’s Julian!” He got up from his seat and hurried to his friend’s side. Dyan was standing over him, looking grim.
“Back to you seat, cadet. Finish your meal.”
“He’s my friend. I want to see if he’s hurt.” Ignoring Dyan’s angry glare, Damon knelt beside the fallen cadet; the other cadets, craning their necks, could see the bright smear of blood where Julian’s head had struck the table. “He’s bleeding! You’ve killed him!” Damon said in a shrill, shaking voice.
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