The Ages of Chaos

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  When he had recovered his breath, he picked himself up. Both wing-struts of the glider were smashed, but it could be repaired; he was lucky that his arms were not smashed like the struts. The sight of the splintered rock turned him sick and dizzy, and his head throbbed; but he realized that with all this, he was lucky to be alive. He picked up the broken toy, letting the splintered wings hang folded, and began slowly to trudge up the slope toward the castle gates.

  “She hates me,” Aliciane cried in terror. “She does not want to be born!”

  Through the darkness that seemed to hover around her mind she felt Mikhail catch and hold her flailing hands.

  “My dearest love, that is folly,” he murmured, holding the woman against him, firmly controlling his own fears. He, too, sensed the strangeness of the lightning which flashed and crackled around the high windows, and Aliciane’s terror reinforced his own dread. It seemed there was another in the room, besides the frightened woman, besides the calm presence of Margali, who sat with her head bent, not looking at either of them, her face blue-lighted with the glimmer of the matrix stone. Mikhail could feel the soothing waves of calm Margali sent out, trying to surround them all with it; he tried to let his own mind and body surrender to the calm, relax to it. He began the deep rhythmic breathing he had been taught for control, and after a little he felt Aliciane, too, relax and float with it

  Where, then, whence the terror, the struggle…

  It is she, the unborn… it is her fear, her reluctance …

  Birth is an ordeal of terror; there must be someone to reassure her, someone who awaits her with love… Aldaran had done this service at the birth of all his children; sensing the formless fright and rage of the unformed mind, thrust by forces it could not comprehend. Now, searching his memories (had any of Clariza’s children been so strong? Deonara’s babes, none of them had been able even to fight for their lives, poor little weaklings… ), he reached out, searching for the unfocused thoughts of the struggling child, torn by awareness of the mother’s pain and fright. He sought to send out soothing thoughts of love, of tenderness; not in words, for the unborn had no knowledge of language, but he formed them into words for his own sake and Aliciane’s, to focus their emotions, to give a feeling of warmth and welcome.

  You must not be afraid, little one; it will soon be over… you will breathe free and we will hold you in our arms and love you… you are long awaited and dearly loved… He sought to send out love and tenderness, to banish from his mind the frightening thought of the sons and daughter he had lost, when all his love could not follow them into the darkness their developing laran had cast on their minds. He tried to blot out memory of the weak and pitiful struggles of Deonara’s children, who had never lived to draw breath… Did I love them enough? If I had loved Deonara more, would her children have fought harder to live?

  “Draw the curtains,” he said after a moment, and one of the women in the chamber tiptoed to the window and closed out the darkening sky. But the thunder roared in the room, and the flare of the lightning could be seen even through the drawn curtains.

  “See how she does, the little one,” the midwife said, and Margali rose quietly, came to lay gentle hands around Aliciane’s body, sinking her awareness into the woman, to monitor her breathing, the progress of the birth. A woman with laran, bearing a child, could not be physically examined or touched, for fear of hurting or frightening the unborn with a careless pressure or touch. The leronis must do this, using the perception of her own telepathic and psychokinetic powers. Aliciane felt the soothing touch, and her troubled face relaxed, but as Margali withdrew she cried out in sudden terror.

  “Oh, Donal, Donal—what will become of my boy?”

  Lady Deonara Ardais-Aldaran, a slight aging woman, tiptoed to Aliciane’s side, and took the slender fingers in hers. She said soothingly, “Do not fear for Donal, Aliciane. Avarra forbid it should be needful, but I swear to you that I will, from this day forth, be foster-mother to him, as tenderly as if he were one of my own sons.”

  “You have been kind to me, Deonara,” Aliciane said, “and I sought to take Mikhail from you.”

  “Child, child—this is no time to think of this; if you can give Mikhail what I could not, then you are my sister and I will love you as Cassilda loved Camilla, I swear it.” Deonara bent and kissed Aliciane’s pale cheek. “Set your mind at rest, breda; think only of this little one who comes to our arms. I will love her too.”

  Held tenderly in the arms of her child’s father, of the woman who had sworn to welcome her child as her own, Aliciane knew that she should be comforted. Yet, as lightning flared on the heights and rumbled around the walls of the castle, she felt terror all through and pervading her. Is it the child’s terror or mine? Her mind swam into darkness under the soothing of the leronis, under the flooding reassurances of Mikhail, pouring out love and tenderness. Is it for me or only for the child? It no longer seemed to matter; she could see no further. Always before, she had had some faint sense of what would come after, but now it seemed there was nothing in the world but her own fear, the child’s fear, the formless, wordless rage. It seemed to her that the rage focused with the thunder, that the birth pains tearing her were brightening and darkening as the lightning came and went… thunder crashing not on the heights outside but in and around her own violated body… terror, rage, fury expending itself within her… the lightning bringing fury and pain. She struggled for breath and cried out and her mind sank, almost with relief, into dark, and silence, and nothingness…

  “Ai! She is a little fury,” the midwife said, gingerly holding the struggling child. “You must calm her, domna, before I cut her life from her mother’s, or she will struggle and bleed overmuch—but she is strong, a hearty little woman!”

  Margali bent over the shrieking infant. The face was dark red, contorted into a furious scream of rage; the eyes, squinted almost shut, were a blazing blue. The round little head was covered with thick red fuzz. Margali laid her slender hands along the naked body of the child, crooning softly to her. Under the touch the baby calmed a little and stopped fighting; and the midwife was able to sever the umbilical cord and tie it. But when the woman took the infant and wrapped her in a warmed blanket, she began to shriek again and struggle and the woman laid her down, drawing back a shocked hand.

  “Ai! Evanda have mercy, she is one of those! Well, when she is grown, the little maiden need not fear rape, if she can strike already with laran. I have never heard of this in a babe so young!”

  “You frightened her,” Margali said, smiling; but as she took the child, her smile slid off. Like all of Deonara’s women, she had loved the gentle Aliciane. “Poor child, to lose so loving a mother, so soon!”

  Mikhail of Aldaran knelt, his face drawn with anguish, beside the body of the woman he had loved. “Aliciane! Aliciane, my beloved,” he mourned. Then he raised his face, in bitterness. Deonara had taken the wrapped infant from Margali and was holding it, with the fierce hunger of thwarted motherhood, to her meager breast.

  “You are not ill content, are you, Deonara—that none will vie with you to mother this child?”

  “That is not worthy of you, Mikhail,” Deonara said, holding Aliciane’s child close. “I loved Aliciane well, my lord; would you have me cast aside her child, or can I best show my love by rearing her as tenderly as if she were my own? Take her, then, my husband, until you find another love.” Try as she would, Lady Aldaran could not keep the bitterness from her voice. “She is your only living child. And if already she has laran, she will need much care to rear her. My poor babes never lived even this long.” She put the child into Dom Mikhail’s arms, and he stood looking down, with infinite tenderness and grief, at his only child.

  Mayra’s curse rang in his mind: You will take no other to your bed… your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree. As if his own dismay communicated itself to the infant in his arms she began to struggle again and shriek in the blanket. Beyond the window the storm raged.

&nbs
p; Dom Mikhail looked into the face of his daughter. Infinitely precious she seemed to the childless man; the more so if the curse should be true. She was rigid in his arms, squalling, her small face contorted as if she were trying to outshout the rage of the storm outside, her tiny pink fists clenched with rage. Yet already he could see in her face a miniature blurred copy of Aliciane’s—the arched brows and high cheekbones, the eyes blazing blue, the fuzz of red hair.

  “Aliciane died to give me this great gift. Shall we give her her mother’s name, in memory?”

  Deonara shuddered and flinched. “Would you bestow on your only daughter the name of the dead, my lord? Seek a name of better omen!”

  “As you will. Give her what name pleases you, domna.”

  Deonara said, faltering, “I would have named our first daughter Dorilys, had she lived long enough to be named. Let her bear that name, in token that I will be a mother to her.” She touched the rose-petal cheek with a finger. “How do you like that name, little woman? Look—she sleeps. She is weary with so much crying…”

  Beyond the windows of the birth-chamber the storm muttered into silence and died away, and there was no sound but the slow dripping of the last raindrops outside.

  Chapter Three

  Eleven Years Later

  It was the dark hour before dawn. Snow fell silently over the monastery of Nevarsin, already buried under deep snow.

  There was no bell, or if there was, it rang silently, unheard, in Father Master’s quarters. Yet in every cell and dormitory, brothers and novices and students moved silently, as if on that single noiseless signal, out of sleep.

  Allart Hastur of Elhalyn came awake sharply, something in his mind tuned and receptive to the call. In his first years he had often slept through it, but no one in the monastery might waken another; part of the training here was that the novices should hear the inaudible and see what was not there to be seen.

  Nor did he feel cold, though he was covered, by rule, only with the outer cowl of his long robe; he had by now disciplined his body so that it would generate heat to warm him as he slept. With no need of light, he rose, drew the cowl over the simple inner garment he wore night and day, and thrust his feet into rude sandals woven of straw. Into his pockets he thrust the small bound prayer book, the pen case and sealed ink-horn, his own bowl and spoon; now in the pockets of the robe were all the items which a monk might own or use. Dom Allart Hastur was not yet a fully sworn brother of Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows at Nevarsin. It would be a year before he could achieve that final detachment from the world which lay below him—a troubling world, and one which he remembered every time he fastened the leather strap of his sandals; for in the world of the Domains below him, sandal-wearer was the ultimate insult for a male, implying effeminate behavior, or worse. Even now, as he fastened the sandal-strap, he was forced to calm his mind from that memory by the three slow breaths, pause, three more breaths paced to a murmured prayer for the cause of the offense; but Allart was painfully aware of the irony in this.

  To pray for peace for my brother, who put this insult on me, when it was he who drove me here, for my very sanity’s sake? Aware that he still felt anger and resentment, he did the breathing ritual again, firmly dismissing his brother from his mind, remembering the words of the Father Master.

  “You have no power over the world or the things of the world, my son; you have renounced all desire for that power. The power you have come here to attain is the power over the things within. Peace will come only when you become fully aware that your thoughts are not from outside yourself; they come from within, and thus are wholly yours, the only things in this universe over which it is legitimate to have total power. You, not your thoughts and memories, rule your mind, and it is you, no other, who bid them to come and go. The man who allows his own thoughts to torment him is like the man who clasps a scorpion-ant to his breast, bidding it bite him further.”

  Allart repeated the exercise, and at the end of it, the memory of his brother had vanished from his mind. He has no place here, not even in my mind and memory. Calm now, his breathing coming and going in a small white cloud about his mouth, he left the cell and moved silently down the long corridor.

  The chapel, reached by a brief passage through the falling snow, was the oldest part of the monastery. Four hundred years ago, the first band of brothers had come here to be above the world they wished to renounce, digging their monastery from the living rock of the mountain, hollowing out the small cave in which, it was said, Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows had lived out his life. Around the hermit’s remains, a city had grown: Nevarsin, the City of Snows. Now several buildings clustered here, each one built with the labor of monkish hands, in defiance of the ease of these days; it was the brothers’ boast that not a single stone had been moved with the aid of any matrix, or with anything other than the toil of hands and mind.

  The chapel was dark, a single small light glowing in the shrine where the statue of the Holy Bearer of Burdens stood, above the last resting-place of the saint. Allart, moving quietly, eyes closed as the rule demanded, turned into his assigned place on the benches; as one, the brotherhood knelt. Allart, eyes still closed by rule, heard the shuffle of feet, an occasional stumble of some novice who must still rely on the outer instead of the inner sight to move his clumsy body about the darkness of the monastery. The students, unsworn, with minimal teaching, stumbled in the darkness, ignorant of why the monks neither allowed nor required light. Whispering, pushing one another, they stumbled and sometimes fell, but eventually they were all in their assigned places. Again there was no discernible sound, but the monks rose with a single disciplined movement, following again some invisible signal from Father Master, and their voices rose in the morning hymn:

  “One Power created

  Heaven and Earth

  Mountains and valleys

  Darkness and light;

  Male and female

  Human and nonhuman.

  This Power cannot be seen

  Cannot be heard

  Cannot be measured

  By anything except the mind

  Which partakes of this Power;

  I name it Divine…”

  This was the moment of every day when Allart’s inward questions, searchings, and dismay wholly vanished. Hearing the voices of his brothers singing, old and young, treble with childhood or rusty with age, loosing his own voice in the great affirmation, he lost all sense of himself as a separate, searching, questing entity. He rested, floating, in the knowledge that he was a part of something greater than himself, a part of the great Power which maintained the motion of moons, stars, sun, and the unknown Universe beyond; that here he had a true place in the harmony; that if he vanished, he would leave an Allart-sized hole in the Universal Mind, something never to be replaced or altered. Hearing the singing, he was wholly at peace. The sound of his own voice, a finely trained tenor, gave him pleasure, but no more than the sounds of each voice in the choir, even the rusty and untuneful quavering of old Brother Fenelon next to him. Whenever he sang with his brothers, he recalled the first words he had ever read of Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows, words which had come to him during the years of his greatest torment, and which had given him the first peace he had known since he left his childhood behind.

  “Each one of us is like a single voice within a great choir, a voice like no other; each of us sings for a few years within that great choir and then that voice is forever silenced, and other voices take its place; but every voice is unique and none is more beautiful than another, or can sing another’s song. I call nothing evil but the attempt to sing to another’s tune or in another’s voice.”

  And Allart, reading those words, had known that from childhood he had been attempting, at the command of his father and brothers, tutors, arms-masters and grooms, servants and superiors, to sing to a tune, and in a voice, which could never be his own. He had become a cristoforo, which was believed unseemly for a Hastur; a descendant of Hastur and Cassilda, a descendant of g
ods, one who bore laran; a Hastur of Elhalyn, near to the holy places at Hali where the gods once had walked. All the Hasturs, from time immemorial, had worshiped the Lord of Light. Yet Allart had become a cristoforo, and a time had come when he had left his brethren and renounced his inheritance and come here to be Brother Allart, his lineage half forgotten even by the brethren of Nevarsin.

  Forgetful of self, and yet all-mindful of his own individual and unique place in the choir, in the monastery, in the Universe, Allart sang the long hymns; later he went, his fast still unbroken, to his assigned work of the morning, bringing breakfast to the novices and students in the outer refectory. He carried the steaming jugs of tea and hot bean-porridge to the boys, pouring the food into stoneware bowls and mugs, noticing how the cold young hands curved around the heat to try to warm themselves. Most of the boys were too young to have mastered the techniques of internal heat, and he knew that some of them wore their blankets wrapped under their cowls. He felt a detached sympathy for them, remembering his own early sufferings with the cold before his untrained mind could learn how to warm his body; but they had hot food and slept under extra blankets and the more they felt the cold, the sooner they would apply themselves to conquering it.

  He kept silence (though he knew he should have reproved them) when they grumbled about the coarseness of the food; here in the quarters of the children, food rich and luxurious, by contrast, was served. He himself had tasted hot food only twice since entering the full monastic regimen; both times when he had done extraordinary work in the deep passes, rescuing snowbound travelers. Father Master had judged the chilling of his body had gone to a point where it endangered his health, and had ordered him to eat hot food and sleep under extra blankets for a few days. Under ordinary conditions, Allart had so mastered his body that summer and winter were indifferent to him, and his body made full use of whatever food came his way, hot or cold.