The Ages of Chaos

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Renata said firmly, aloud, “No, of course not. Why do you think we have been training and teaching you, if not to strengthen you for this? I had not expected it quite so soon, that is all. Now don’t try to read anymore; you haven’t the strength. We will teach you to shut it out and control it.”

  But Dorilys was not hearing her. She was staring at them in a nightmare of panic and dread, their thoughts mirrored back at them in the first frightening moment of overload. She stared around her like some small trapped animal, her mouth open, her eyes so wide with terror that the whites showed all around the shrunken pupils.

  Margali got up and went to her foster-child, trying to take her into a comforting embrace. Dorilys stood rigid, unmoving, unaware of the touch, unable to perceive anything but the massive onslaught of internal sensation. When Margali would have lifted her into her arms, she struck out unknowing, striking Margali with a painful shock that crumpled the old woman against the wall. Elisa hurried to her aid, lifting Margali, and the woman sat there staring in shock and consternation.

  To turn on me this way … on me?

  Renata said, “She doesn’t know what she is doing, Margali; she doesn’t know anything. I can hold her,” she added, reaching out to hold the girl motionless as she had done when Dorilys first defied her, “but this is serious; she must have some kirian.”

  Margali went for the drug, and Elisa, at a word from Renata, asked the guests to leave. Too many minds nearby would confuse Dorilys more frighteningly. She should be in the presence of only a few she trusted. When Margali returned with the kirian, only Renata, Cassandra, and Margali herself remained.

  Renata went to Dorilys, trying to make contact with the terrified girl, isolated behind her panicked barricade of fear. After a time Dorilys began to breathe more easily, her eyes unlocked from their rigid, rolled-up unseeing position. When Margali held the vial of kirian to her lips she swallowed it without protest. They laid her on a couch and tucked a blanket around her, but when Renata knelt at her side to monitor her, she cried out again in panic and sudden terror.

  “No, no, don’t touch me, don’t!” Thunder suddenly crashed around the heights of the castle, a rattling roar.

  “Chiya. I won’t hurt you, really. I only want to see—”

  “Don’t touch me, Renata!” Dorilys shrieked. “You want me to die, and then you can have Donal!”

  Shocked, Renata recoiled. Such a thought had never crossed her mind, but had Dorilys probed to a level of which even Renata herself was unaware? Fiercely dismissing the guilt, she held out her arms to the girl.

  “No, darling, no. Look—you can read my thoughts if you will and see what nonsense that is. I want nothing more than to have you well again.”

  But, Dorilys’s teeth were chattering, and they knew she was in no state to listen to reason. Cassandra came and took her place; she could not kneel because of her lame knee, but she sat on the edge of the couch beside Dorilys.

  “Renata would never hurt you, chiya, but we do not want you to upset yourself either. I am a monitor, too. I will monitor you. You are not afraid of me, are you?” She added to Renata, “When she is calmer, she will know the truth.”

  Renata moved away, still so horrified by Dorilys’s sudden attack that she was almost incapable of rational thought. Has she lost her senses? Does threshold sickness presage madness also? She had been prepared for Dorilys to show ordinary sisterly jealousy because Donal was no longer specially hers; she had not been prepared for the intense emotion of this.

  Damn that mad old man, if he has encouraged her to believe this will be anything but a legal fiction! Although Renata had hoped very soon to reveal to Donal that she was bearing his son—for now she was certain, and she had monitored the unborn, germ-deep, to be certain it bore no lethals—she realized that it must be kept secret for a while longer. If Dorilys were sick and unstable, this would only hurt her more.

  Cassandra went through the monitoring process; then, as the kirian began to take effect, lowering Dorilys’s terrified defenses against the new sense which had frightened her so, Dorilys quieted, her breathing growing more steady.

  “It’s stopped,” she said at last, and her face was calm, her heart no longer racing with panic. Only the memory of fear remained. “Will it—will it start again?”

  “Probably,” Cassandra said, but stilled Dorilys’s look of swift panic with, “It will grow less troubling as you grow used to it. Each time it will be easier, and when you are fully mature, you will be able to use it as you do your sight, to look selectively as you wish, near and far, and to shut out everything you do not want.”

  “I’m afraid,” Dorilys whispered. “Don’t leave me alone.”

  “No, my lamb,” Margali said. “I will sleep in your room as long as you need me.”

  Renata said, “I know Margali has been like a mother to you, and you want her near you, but truly, Dorilys, I am more skilled in this and I could help you more if you needed it for the next few nights.”

  Dorilys held out her arms, and Renata came into them. The girl hid her face against Renata’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Renata. I didn’t mean it. Forgive me, cousin… you know I love you. Please, stay with me.”

  “Of course, darling,” Renata said, holding her in a reassuring hug. “I know, I know. I have had threshold sickness, too. You were scared, and all kinds of wild ideas were flooding into your mind at once. It is hard to control when it comes on you so suddenly like that. From now on we must work a little every day with your matrix, to help you control it; because when it comes on your again you must be prepared.”

  I wish that we had her in a Tower. She would be safer there, and so would all of us, she thought. She felt Cassandra echo the wish as the thunder rolled again and crackled in the air outside the castle.

  In the great hall Allart heard the thunder, and so did Donal. Donal never heard thunder, no matter how or where, without thinking of Dorilys; and Dom Mikhail evidently followed his thoughts.

  “Now that your bride is become a woman, you can go about the business of fathering an heir. If we know there is to be a son with Aldaran blood, then we will indeed be ready to defy Scathfell when he comes on us—and spring is not far,” Aldaran said with a fierce smile. But Donal’s face was taut with rejection, and Dom Mikhail looked at him and scowled.

  “Zandru’s hells, lad! I do not expect that a child so young should attract you too much as a lover! But when you have done your duty to your clan, you can have as many other women as you will. No one will gainsay that! The important thing now is to give the Domain a legitimate, catenas heir, fathered in lawful marriage!”

  Donal made a gesture of rejection. Are all old people always so cynical? At the same moment he felt his foster-father’s thoughts crossing and reinforcing his, with a kind of rueful affection.

  Are all young people always so foolishly idealistic? Mikhail of Aldaran reached out to clasp his foster-son’s hand.

  “My dear boy, think of it this way. This time next year there will be an heir to Aldaran, and you will be his regent lawfully,” he said.

  As he spoke Allart almost gasped aloud, for his laran clearly showed it. In this great hall where they now sat, he could see it as clearly as if it were at this moment present to his eyes: Dom Mikhail, looking older, stooped and aged, held up a blanketed child—newborn, only a small red oval of baby face between the folds of the fleecy shawl—proclaiming Aldaran’s heir. The cries of acclamation were so loud that for a moment Allart could not believe the other; could not hear them… The images were gone, had yet to be. But he was deeply shaken.

  Would Donal, then, actually father a child on his little sister? Would this be the heir to Aldaran? His foresight seemed so clear and unequivocal! Donal picked it up from his mind and sat staring at him, helplessly, but some hint of it spilled over to the old man and he grinned in fierce triumph, seeing in Allart’s mind the heir with whom he was obsessed.

  At that moment Margali and Cassandra entered the hall, and Aldaran looked at them with a
benevolent smile.

  “I had not thought your merrymaking would end so quickly, ladies. When the hall-steward’s daughter came of age, there was dancing and singing in the women’s rooms until midnight was past—” He broke off abruptly. “Margali, kinswoman, what is wrong?”

  But he read the truth quickly in her face.

  “Threshold sickness! Merciful Avarra!”

  Suddenly, from ambition and paranoia, he was only a concerned father again. His voice shook when he said, “I had hoped she would be spared this. Aliciane’s laran came on her early, and she had no crisis at puberty, but there is a curse on my seed… my older sons and daughter so died.” He bowed his head. “I have not thought of them in years.”

  Allart saw them in his mind, reinforced by the memories of the old leronis: a dark, laughing boy; a smaller, more solid boy with a mop of riotous curls and a triangular scar on his chin; a delicate, dreamy dark girl who somehow, in the lift of her small head, had something of a look of Dorilys, too… Allart felt in himself the anguish of the father who had seen them sicken and die, one after another, all their promise and beauty wiped out. He saw in the older man’s mind a terrible picture, never to be effaced or forgotten: the girl lying arched, convulsed, her long hair matted, her lips bitten through so that her face was smeared with blood, the dreamy eyes those of an agonized maddened animal…

  “You must not despair, cousin,” Margali said. “Renata has trained her well, to endure this. Often the first attack of threshold sickness is the most severe so that if she survives that, the worst is over.”

  “It is often so,” Dom Mikhail said, his voice brooding inward on horror. “It was so with Rafaella, one day laughing and dancing and playing her harp; and the next day, the very next, a screaming, tormented thing going into convulsion after convulsion in my arms. She never opened her eyes again to know me. When at last she ceased to struggle, I did not know whether to be more grieved, or more glad that she had come to the end of her agony… But Dorilys has survived.”

  “Yes,” Cassandra said compassionately, “and she did not even go into crisis, Dom Mikhail. There is no reason to think she will die.”

  Donal’s voice was fierce, angry. “Now do you see, Father, what was on my mind? Before we speak of getting her with child, can we at least be sure she will live to womanhood?”

  Aldaran flinched, as with a crushing blow. In the dying thunder past the windows, there was suddenly a crash and a rumble, and rain smote them, sluicing down and rattling, pounding, like the tramp of Scathfell’s armies on the march toward them.

  For now the spring thaw was upon the Hellers, and the war was upon them.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  For the first moon of spring it rained incessantly, and Allart, welcoming the rain because he knew it would keep Scathfell’s armies from the road, still fretted with indecision. Damon-Rafael had sent a message expressing kindly concern, which to Allart’s perception read false in every line of it, and ended by ordering his brother home at the earliest moment when the roads were open and he was able to travel.

  If I return home now, Damon-Rafael will kill me. It is as simple as that… Treason. I am forsworn. I gave my oath that I would support his rule, and now I know I will not. My life is forfeit to him, for I have broken my oath, in thought if not in deed… yet. So indecision made him linger at Aldaran, glad of the spring rains which kept him there.

  Damon-Rafael is not sure, not yet. But if the roads are open and still I do not come—then I am a traitor, my life forfeit. And he wondered what Damon-Rafael would do when there was no longer any room for doubt.

  Meanwhile, Dorilys had had a few repeated attacks of threshold sickness, but they had not been very severe, and at no time had Renata considered her life to be in danger. Renata had stayed with her tirelessly—though on one occasion she said to Cassandra, with the wry lift of a smile, “I do not know if she truly wishes to keep me at her side—or whether she feels that when I am with her, at least I am not with Donal.” Both women knew there was another thing, unspoken.

  Soon or late, she must know that I am bearing Donal’s child. I do not want to hurt her or cause her any more grief.

  Donal, whenever he saw Dorilys—which was seldom, for he was organizing the defenses of Aldaran against the attack which they knew would come with the spring—was kindly and attentive, the loving elder brother he had always been. But whenever Dorilys spoke the words “my husband,” he never answered with anything except an indulgent laugh, as if this were indeed a childish game they were playing, and he humoring her in it.

  During these days when Dorilys was subject to recurring attacks of disorientation and upheaval—her telepathic sense, not yet under control, plunging her into a nightmare of terror and overload—she and Cassandra had become very close. Their shared love of music cemented this bond. Dorilys was already a talented player on the lute; Cassandra taught her to play a rryl as well, and she learned from the older woman some of the songs of Cassandra’s faraway homeland at Valeron.

  “I cannot see how you can endure to live in the Lowlands,” Dorilys said. “I could not live without the mountain peaks surrounding me. It must be so dismal there, and so dull.”

  Cassandra smiled. “No, sweetheart, it is very beautiful. Sometimes here I feel the mountains are closing around me so that I can hardly breathe, as if the peaks were the bars of a cage.”

  “Really? How strange! Cassandra, I cannot play that chord as you do at the end of the ballad.”

  Cassandra took the rryl from her hand and demonstrated. “But you cannot finger it as I do. You will have to ask Elisa to show you the fingering,” Cassandra said, and spread out her hand before Dorilys. The girl stared, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, you have six fingers on your hand! No wonder I cannot play it as you do! I have heard that is a sign of chieri blood, but you are not emmasca as the chieri are; are you, cousin?”

  “No,” Cassandra said, smiling.

  “I have heard—Father told me that the king in the Lowlands is emmasca, so they will take the throne from him this summer. How terrible for him, poor king. Have you ever seen him? What is he like?”

  “He was only the young prince when I saw him last,” said Cassandra. “He is quiet, and sad faced, and I think he would have made a good king, if they had been willing to let him reign.”

  Dorilys bent over the instrument, experimentally fingering the chord she could not play again and again. Finally she gave up the attempt. “I wish I had six fingers,” she said. “There is no way I can play it properly! I wonder if my children will inherit my musical talents, or only my laran.”

  “Surely you are too young to be thinking yet about children,” Cassandra said, smiling.

  “In a few more moons, I will be capable of bearing. You know there is a great need for a son of Aldaran blood.” She spoke so seriously that Cassandra felt a great wrench of pity.

  This they do to all the women of our caste! Dorilys has hardly put away her dolls, and already she can think of nothing but her duty to her clan! After a long silence, hesitating, she said, “Perhaps—Dorilys, perhaps you should not have children, with this curse of laran you bear.”

  “As a son of our house must risk death in war, so a daughter of a great house must risk everything to give children to her caste.” She repeated it simply and positively, and Cassandra sighed.

  “I know, chiya. Since I was a child younger than you, I, too, heard that day in and day out, as a religion it was impious to doubt, and I believed it as you do now. But I feel you should be old enough to decide.”

  “I am old enough to decide,” said Dorilys. “You do not have that kind of problem, cousin. Your husband is not heir to a Domain.”

  “You did not know?” Cassandra said. “Allart’s elder brother will be king, if the emmasca of Hali is dethroned. This brother has no legitimate sons.”

  Dorilys stared at her. She said, “You could be queen,” and her face held awe. Evidently she had had no idea of Allart’s caste; he was
only her brother’s friend. “Then Dom Allart, too, stands desperately in need of an heir, and you are not yet bearing him one.” Her eyes held a hint of reproach.

  Hesitant, Cassandra explained the choice they had made. “Now, perhaps, with what I know, it might be safe, but we will wait till we are sure. Till we are very sure…”

  “Renata said I should bear no daughters,” Dorilys said, “or I might die as my mother died in giving me birth. But I am not sure I trust Renata anymore. She loves Donal, and she does not want me bearing his children.”

  “If that is true,” Cassandra said very gently, “then it is only that she fears for you, chiya.”

  “Well, in any case, I should have a son first,” Dorilys said, “and then I will decide. Perhaps, when I give him a son, Donal will forget Renata, because I will be the mother of his heir.” Her young arrogance was so great that Cassandra felt troubled, and again assailed by doubts.

  Could she cement her bond with Allart best by giving him the son he must have, if they were not to deny him the throne like Prince Felix? They had not spoken of this seriously for some time.

  I would give anything, to be so sure of myself as Dorilys! But she changed the subject firmly, taking the rryl on her lap again, and placing Dorilys’s fingers on the strings.

  “Look. I think perhaps if you hold it this way, you can play that chord, even with only five fingers,” she said.

  Again and again, as the days passed, Allart wakened to the awareness of Aldaran under siege, then knew that the reality was not yet with them, that it was only his foresight which spread the inevitable visibly before him. That it was inevitable he knew perfectly well.

  “At this season,” Donal said one morning, “the spring storms would have subsided in the Lowlands, but I do not know how the weather goes at Scathfell or Sain Scarp, or whether their armies can move. I shall go up to the watchtower, which commands all the country around, and see if there is any suspicious movement on the roads.”