“Well, a message will be sent. Have you had anything to eat?”
“They offered me something when we first landed,” he said. He did not say he had been too shaken and frightened to eat, but I surmised that. I called a servant and said, “Ask my uncle to excuse me from his table, and say that Lord Beltran will explain. Then send some food here for my guest and myself.” I turned back to the boy. “Dani, am I your enemy?”
“Captain, I—”
“I’ve left the Guards,” I said. “Not captain, now.”
To my amazement he said, “Too bad. You were the only officer everybody liked. No, you’re not my enemy, Lew, and I always thought your father was my friend. It was Lord Dyan—you do know what happened?”
“More or less,” I said. “Whatever it may have been this time, I know damn well that by the time you drew your dagger he’d given you enough provocation for a dozen duels anywhere else. You don’t have to tell me all the nasty little details. I know Dyan.”
“Why did the Commander—”
“They were children together,” I said. “In his eyes Dyan can do no wrong. I’m not defending him, but didn’t you ever do anything you thought was wrong, for a friend’s sake?”
“Did you?” he asked. I was still trying to think how to answer when our supper was brought. I served Dani, but found I was not hungry and sat nibbling at some fruit while the boy satisfied his appetite. I wondered if they had fed him at all since his capture. No, boys that age were always hungry, that was all.
While he ate I worried what Marjorie would think when she woke and found herself alone. Was Rafe really all right, or should I go and make certain? Had Kermiac suffered any lasting ill-effects from Thyra’s rashness? I didn’t approve of what Beltran had done, but I knew why he had been tempted to do it. We needed someone like Danilo so badly that it terrified me.
I poured Dani a glass of wine when he had finished. He merely tasted it for courtesy’s sake, but at least now he was willing to go through the motions of courtesy again. I took a sip of mine and set it aside.
“Danilo, you know you have laran. You also have one of the rarest and most precious Comyn gifts, one we’ve thought extinct. If Comyn Council finds out, they’ll be ready and willing to make all kinds of amends for the stupid and cruel thing Dyan did to you. They’ll offer you anything you want, up to and including a seat in Comyn Council if you want that, marriage with someone like Linnell Aillard—you name it, you can probably have it. You attended that Council meeting among the Terrans. Are you interested in power of that sort? If so, they’ll be lining up two and three deep to offer it to you. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I never thought about it. I expected, after I finished in the cadets, to stay quietly at home and look after my father while he lived.”
“And then?”
“I hadn’t thought about that either. I suppose I thought when that time came, I’d be grown up, and then I’d know what I wanted.”
I smiled wryly. Yes, at fifteen I too had been sure that by the time I was twenty or so my life would have arranged itself in simple patterns.
“That’s not the way it happens when you have laran,” I said. “Among other things, you must be trained. An untrained telepath is a menace to himself and everyone around him.”
He made a grimace of revulsion. “I’ve never wanted to be a matrix technician.”
“Probably not,” I said. “It takes a certain temperament.” I couldn’t see Danilo in a tower; I, on the other hand, had never wanted anything else. I still didn’t. “Even so, you must learn to control what you are and what gifts you have. All too many untrained telepaths end up as madmen.”
“Then whether I’m interested in Comyn Council or not, what choice do I have? Isn’t this training only in the hands of the Comyn and the towers? And they can train me to do whatever they want me to do.”
“That’s true in the Domains,” I said. “They do draw all telepaths to their service there. But you still have a choice.” I began to tell him about Beltran’s plan, and a little about the work we had begun.
He listened without comment until I had finished. “Then,” he said, “it seems I have a choice between taking bribes for the use of my laran from the Comyn—or from Aldaran.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. We’re asking you to come into this of your own free will. If we do achieve what we want, then the Comyn will no longer have the power to demand that all telepaths serve them or be left prey to madness. And there would be an end to the kind of power-hunger that left you at the mercy of a man like Dyan.”
He thought that over, sipping the wine again and making a childish wry face. Then he said, “It seems as if something like that’s always going to be happening to people like me, like us. Someone’s always going to be bribing us to use our gifts for their good, not our own.” He sounded terribly young, terribly bitter.
“No, some of us may have a choice now. Once we are a legitimate part of the Terran Empire—”
“Then I suppose the Empire will find some way to use us,” Danilo said. “The Comyn makes mistakes, but don’t they know more about us and our world than the Terrans ever could?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Are you willing to see them stay in power, controlling all our lives, putting corrupt men like Dyan in charge—”
“No, I’m not,” he said, “nobody would want that. But if people like you and me—you said I could have a seat on the Council if I wanted it—if people like you and me were on the Council, the bad ones like Dyan wouldn’t have everything their own way, would they? Your father’s a good man but, like you said, Dyan can do no wrong in his eyes. But when you take a seat on the Council, you won’t feel that way, will you?”
“What I want,” I said with concealed violence, “is not to be forced to take a seat on the Council, or do all the other damned things the Comyn wants me to do!”
“If good men like you can’t be bothered,” said Danilo, “then who’s left, except the bad ones who shouldn’t?”
There was some truth in that, too. But I said vehemently, “I have other skills and I feel I can serve my people better in other ways. That’s what I’m trying to do now, to benefit everyone on Darkover. I’m not trying to smash the Comyn, Dani, only to give everyone more of a choice. Don’t you think it’s an ambition worth achieving?”
He looked helpless. “I can’t judge,” he said. “I’m not even used to thinking of myself as a telepath yet. I don’t know what I ought to do.”
He looked up at me with that odd, trustful look which made me think somehow, of my brother Marius. If it were Marius standing here before me, gifted with laran, would I try to persuade him to face Sharra? A cold chill iced my spine and I shivered, even though the room was warm. I said, “Can you trust me, then?”
“I’d like to,” he said. “You never lied to me or hurt me. But I don’t think I’d trust any of the Aldarans.”
“Is your mind still full of schoolroom bogeymen?” I asked. “Do you believe they are all wicked renegades because they have an old political quarrel with Comyn? You have reason to distrust the Comyn too, Danilo.”
“True,” he said. “But can I trust a man who begins by kidnapping me and frightening my father to death? If he had come to me, explained what he wanted to do, and that you and he together thought my gift could be useful, then asked my father to give me leave to visit him . . .”
The hell of it was, Dani was entirely right. What had possessed Beltran to do such a thing? “If he had consulted me, that is exactly how I would have suggested he should do it.”
“Yes, I know,” Dani said. “You’re you. But if Beltran isn’t the kind of man to do it that way, how can you trust him?”
“He’s my kinsman,” I said helplessly. “What do you expect me to say? I expect his eagerness got the better of him. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
Dani raged. “You’re talking just the way you said your father did about Lord Dyan!”
&n
bsp; It wasn’t the same, I knew that, but I couldn’t expect Danilo to see it. Finally I said, “Can’t you look beyond personalities in this, Dani? Beltran was wrong, but what we’re trying to do is so enormous that maybe it blinds people to smaller aims and ends. Keep your eyes on what he’s doing, and forgive him. Or are you waiting,” and I spoke deliberately, with malice, to make him see how cynical it sounded, “for the Comyn to make a better offer?”
He flushed, stung to the depths. I hadn’t overestimated either his intelligence or his sensitivity. He was a boy still, but the man would be well worth knowing, with strong integrity and honor. I hoped with all my heart he would be our ally.
“Danilo,” I said, “we need you. The Comyn cast you out in disgrace, undeserved. What loyalty do you owe them?”
“The Comyn, nothing,” he said quietly. “Yet I am pledged and my service given. Even if I wanted to do what you ask, Lew, and I’m not sure, I am not free.”
“What do you mean?”
Danilo’s face was impassive, but I could sense the emotion behind his words. “Regis Hastur sought me out at Syrtis,” he said. “He did not know how or why, but he knew I had been wronged. He pledged himself to set it right.”
“We’re trying to set many wrongs right, Dani. Not just yours.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But we swore an oath together and I pledged him my sword and my service. I am his paxman, Lew, so if you want me to help you, you must ask his consent. If my lord gives me leave, then I am at your service. Otherwise I am his man: I have sworn.”
I looked at the solemn young face and knew there was nothing I could say to that. I felt a quite irrational anger at Regis because he had forestalled me here. For a moment I wrestled with strong temptation. I could make him see it my way . . .
I recoiled in horror and shame at my own thoughts. The first pledge I had sworn at Arilinn was this: never, never force the will or conscience of another, even for his own good. I could persuade. I could plead. I could use reason, emotion, logic, rhetoric. I could even seek out Regis and beg him for his consent; he too had reason to be disaffected, to rebel against the corruption in the Comyn. But further than this I could not go. I could not. That I had even thought of it made me feel a little sick.
“I may indeed ask Regis for your aid, Dani,” I said quietly. “He too is my friend. But I will never force you. I am not Dyan Ardais!”
That made him smile a little. “I never thought you were, Lew. And if my lord gives me leave, then I will trust him, and you. But until that time shall come, Dom Lewis”—he gave me my title very formally, though we had been using the familiar mode before this—“have I your permission to depart and return to my father?”
I gestured at the snow, a white torrent whipping the windows, sending little spits of sleet down the chimney. “In this, lad? Let me at least offer you the hospitality of my kinsman’s roof until the weather suits! Then you shall be given proper escort and company out of these mountains. You cannot expect me to set you adrift in these mountains, at night and in winter, with a storm blowing up?” I summoned a servant again, and requested that he provide proper lodging for a guest, near my own quarters. Before Danilo went away to his bed, I gave him a kinsman’s embrace, which he returned with a childlike friendliness that made me feel better.
But I was still deeply troubled. Damn it, I’d have a word with Beltran before I slept!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Regis rode slowly, head down against the biting wind. He told himself that if he ever got out of these mountains, no place on Darkover would ever seem cold to him again.
A few days ago he had stopped in a mountain village and traded his horse for one of the sturdy little mountain ponies. He felt a sort of despairing grief at the necessity—the black mare was Kennard’s gift and he loved her—but this one attracted less attention and was surer-footed along the terrible trails. Poor Melisande would surely have died of the cold or broken a leg on these steep paths.
The trip had been a long nightmare: steep unfamiliar trails, intense cold, sheltering at night in abandoned barns or shepherd’s huts or wrapped in cloak and blanket against a rock wall, close curled against the horse’s body. He tried in general to avoid being seen, but every few days he had gone into a village to bargain for food and fodder for his pony. He aroused little curiosity; he thought life must be so hard in these mountains that the people had no time for curiosity about travelers.
Now and again, when he feared losing his way, he had drawn out the matrix, trying by furious concentration to fix his attention on Danilo. The matrix acted like one of those Terran instruments Kennard had once told him about, guiding him, with an insistent subliminal pull, toward Aldaran and Danilo.
By now he was numbed to fear, and only determination kept him going, that, and the memory of his pledge to Dani’s father. But there were times when he rode in a dark dream, losing awareness of Danilo and the roads where he was. Images would spin in his mind, which seemed to drink up pictures and thoughts from the villages he passed. The thought of looking again into the matrix filled him with such a crawling sickness that he could not force himself to draw it out. Threshold sickness again. Javanne had warned him. At the last few villages he had simply inquired the road to Aldaran.
All the morning he had been riding up a long slope where forest fires had raged a few seasons ago. He could see miles of scorched and blackened hillside, ragged stumps sticking up gaunt and leafless through the gullied wasteland. In his hypersuggestible state the stink of burned woods, ashes and soot swirling up every time his pony put a hoof down, brought him back to that last summer at Armida and his first turn on the fire-lines, the night the fire came so close to Armida that the outbuildings burned.
That evening he and Lew had eaten out of the same bowl because supplies were running short. When they had lain down the stink of ashes and burned wood was all around them. Regis had smelled it even in his sleep, the way he was smelling it now. Toward midnight something woke him, and he had seen Lew sitting bolt upright, staring at the red glow where the fire was.
And Regis had known Lew was afraid. He’d touched Lew’s mind, and felt it: his fear, the pain of his burns, everything. He could feel it as if it had been in his own mind. And Lew’s fear hurt so much that Regis couldn’t stand it. He would have done anything to comfort Lew, to take his mind off the pain and the fear. It had been too much. Regis couldn’t shut it out, couldn’t stand it.
But he had forgotten. Had made himself forget, till now. He had blocked away the memory until, later that year, when he was tested for laran at Nevarsin, he had not even remembered anything but the fire.
And that, he realized, was why Lew was surprised when Regis told him he did not have laran. . . .
The mountain pony stumbled and went down. Regis scrambled to his feet, shaken but unhurt, taking the beast by the bridle and gently urging him to his feet. He ran his hand up and down the animal’s legs. No bones were broken, but the pony flinched when Regis touched his rear right hock. He was limping, and Regis knew the pony could not bear his weight for a while. He led him along the trail as they crested the pass. The downward trail was even steeper, black and mucky underfoot where recent rains had soaked the remnants of the fire., The stench in his nostrils was worse than ever, restimulating again the memories of the earlier fire and the shared fear. He kept asking himself why he forgot, why he made himself forget.
The sun was hidden behind thick clouds. A few drifting snowflakes, not many but relentless, began to fall as he went down toward the valley. He guessed it was about midday. He felt a little hungry, but not enough to stop and dig into his pack and get out something to eat.
He hadn’t been eating much lately. The villagers had been kind to him, often refusing to take payment for food, which was tasty, though unfamiliar. He was usually on the edge of nausea, though, unwilling to start up that reflex again by actually chewing and swallowing something. Hunger was less painful.
After a time he did dig some grain out
of his pack for the horse. The trail was well-traveled now; there must be another village not far away. But the silence was disturbing. Not a dog barked, no wild bird or beast cried. There was no sound but his own footsteps and the halting rhythm of the lame pony’s steps. And far above, the unending wind moaning in the gaunt snags of the dead forest.
It was too much solitude. Even the presence of a bodyguard would have been welcome now, or two, chatting about the small chances of the trail. He remembered riding in the hills around Armida with Lew, hunting or checking the herdsmen who cared for the horses out in the open uplands. Suddenly, as if the thought of Lew had brought him to mind again, Lew’s face was before him, lighted with a glow—not forest fire now! It was aglow, blazing in a great blue glare, space-twisting, gut-wrenching, the glare of the matrix! The ground was reeling and dipping under his feet, but for a moment, even as Regis dropped the pony’s reins and clapped his hands over his tormented eyes, he saw a great form sketch itself on the inside of his eyelids, inside his very brain.
. . . a woman, a golden goddess, flame-clothes, flame-crowned, golden-chained, burning, glowing, blazing, consuming . . .
Then he lost consciousness. Over his head the mountain pony edged carefully around, uneasily nuzzling at the unconscious lad.
It was the pony’s nuzzling that woke him, some time later. The sky was darkening, and it was snowing so hard that when he got stiffly to his feet, a little cascade of snow showered off him. A faint sickening smell told him that he had vomited as he lay senseless. What in Zandru’s hells happened to me?
He dug his water bottle from his saddlebag, rinsed his mouth and drank a little, but was still too queasy to swallow much.
It was snowing so hard that he knew he must find shelter at once. He had been trained at Nevarsin to find shelter in unlikely places, even a heap of underbrush would do, but on a road as well-traveled as this there were sure to be huts, barns, shelters. He was not mistaken. A few hundred feet further on, the outline of a great stone barn made a dark square against the swirling whiteness. The stones were blackened with the fire that had swept over it and a few of the roof slates had fallen in, but someone had replaced the door with rough-hewn planking. Drifted ice and snow from the last storm was banked against the door, but he knew that in mountain country doors were usually left unfastened against just such emergencies. After much struggling and heaving Regis managed to shove the rough door partway open and wedge himself and the pony through into a gloomy and musty darkness. It had once been a fodder-storage barn; there were still a few rodent-nibbled bales lying forgotten against the walls. It was bitterly cold, but at least it was out of the wind. Regis unsaddled his pony, fed him and hobbled him loosely at one end of the barn. Then he raked some more of the moldy fodder together, laid his blankets out on it, crawled into them and let sleep, or unconsciousness, take him again.
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