He had struck the right note when he appealed to her courage. Together they had tested it to the outermost limits. She bowed her head, consenting. But when he brought the kireseth flowers, folded into a cloth, she hesitated, holding the bundle in her hands.
“I have broken every law of Arilinn save this. Now I am truly outcaste,” she said, near to tears again.
Damon said, “They have called us both renegades. I will not ask you to do anything I am not willing to do first, Callista.”
He took the cloth from her hand, unfolded it and raised it to his face, deeply inhaling the dizzying scent. Fear rushed through him— the forbidden thing, the taboo— but he recalled Varzil’s words:
“This is why we instituted the old sacramental rite of Year’s End. You are her Keeper; it is for you to be responsible.
Callista was white and shaking, but she took the kireseth from Damon’s hands, breathing in deeply. Damon meanwhile thought of the Arilinn circle, which would strike them at sunrise. Was he making a tragic mistake?
During his years there, when serious work was contemplated any kind of stress was prohibited, anything like sexual contact above all. They would spend this night in solitary concentration, preparing for the battle ahead of them.
But Damon was not working along those lines. He knew he could not defeat Arilinn by doing what they did. His Tower was building something wholly new, built upon their fourfold rapport. It was only right that they should spend this night in completing the bond, helping Callista to be part of it, to share it fully.
Andrew took the flowers from Callista’s hands. As he breathed their scent— dried, powdery, but still reminiscent of the field of golden flowers under the crimson sunlight— he seemed to see Callista coming through the field of flowers again, and the memory made him faint with longing. As Ellemir took them in her turn, he felt moved to protest—was this safe for her, in her condition? But she had the right to choose. She should share whatever this night brought them.
Damon felt a rush of expanding outward consciousness, a heightened awareness. It seemed that the matrix at his throat was flickering, throbbing like a live thing. He cradled it in his hand and it seemed to speak to him, and for the moment he wondered if the matrices were, after all, a form of alien life, experiencing time at a fantastically different rate, symbiotic with mankind?
Then he seemed to rush backward as he had done during Timesearch, and experience, with curious clairvoyance, what he had heard of the history of the Towers, at Arilinn and at Nevarsin. After the Ages of Chaos, centuries of decadence, corruption, and conflicts which had decimated the Domains and raged over half a world, the Towers had been rebuilt and the Compact formed, forbidding all weapons save those within hand’s reach of the wielder, and forcing anyone who would kill to take an equal chance at death. Matrix work had been relegated to the Towers and to those of Comyn blood, sworn to the Towers and the Keepers. The Keepers, vowed to chastity and without allegiance even to family ties, were required to be disinterested, without political or dynastic interest in the rule of the Domains. The training of Tower workers was based on strong ethical principles and the breaking of all other bonds, creating strength and integrity in a world corrupt and laid waste.
And the Keepers were sworn to protect the Domains, to guard against further misuse of the matrix stones. Without political power, they had nevertheless taken on tremendous personal and charismatic force, priestesses, sorceresses, with a vital spiritual and religious ascendancy, controlling all the matrix workers on Darkover.
But had this in itself become an abuse?
It seemed to Damon that he was in telepathic contact across the centuries with his distant kinsman Varzil—or was it a faint racial memory? When had the Towers abandoned the Year’s End ritual which kept them in touch with their common humanity? The ritual had allowed a Keeper, celibate by harsh necessity for her incredibly difficult and demanding work—and in those days, at the height of the Towers, it had been far more demanding still—to become periodically aware of her common humanity, sharing the instincts and desires of her fellow men and women.
When had they abandoned it? Even more, why had they abandoned it? At some time during the Ages of Chaos had it become a kind of debauchery? For whatever reasons, good or bad, it was gone, and with it the knowledge of how to unlock the channels frozen for psi work at such a high level. So the Keepers, no longer neutered, had been forced to rely on a kind of training basically inhuman, and the power of the Keepers lay in the hands of such women who were capable of withdrawing themselves thus completely from their instincts and desires.
It seemed to Damon, as he traversed the years, that he could feel within himself all the suffering of these men and women, alienated, despairing, many failing because they could not so fully separate themselves from the human lot. And those who succeeded had had to adopt impossible standards for themselves, training of an inhuman rigor, total alienation even from their own circles. But what choice had they had?
But now they would rediscover what the old rite could have done…
He was not looking at Callista but he felt her frozen decorum dissolving, felt the lessening physical rigidity, tension running out of her like running water. She had dropped into a chair. He turned and saw her smiling, stretching like a cat, holding out her arms to Andrew. Andrew went and knelt beside her, and Damon watched, thinking with longing of a lovely child in the Tower, all her exquisite spontaneity leaving her day by day, slowly changing to a prim tense silence. Now, his heart aching, he could see a little of that child in the sweet smile Callista gave Andrew. Andrew kissed her hesitantly, then with growing passion. As the fourfold rapport began to weave among them again, they all shared, for a moment, in the kiss. But Andrew, his own inhibitions broken by the kireseth, moved a little too quickly. His arms tightened around Callista, crushing her against him, and the growing demand of his kisses frightened her. In sudden panic she broke away from him, thrusting him away with the full strength of her arms, her eyes wide with dread.
Damon felt the double texture of her fear: partly she feared that what had happened before would happen again, that the reflex she could not control would strike Andrew, hurt him, kill him; partly she feared her own arousal, strange, unfamiliar. She looked at Andrew with something like terror, stared at Damon with a numb, trapped look which bewildered him.
Ellemir’s thoughts moved quickly through the growing rapport. Have you forgotten how young she is?
Andrew stared at her without comprehension. After all, Callista was Ellemir’s twin!
Yes, and after so many years as a Keeper, in some ways she is older, but all of that is gone from her mind now. She is, essentially, the little girl of thirteen who went to the Tower. For her, sex is still a memory of terror and pain, and how she nearly killed you. She has nothing good to remember except a few kisses among the flowers. Leave her to me for a little, Andrew.
Reluctantly Andrew drew away from Callista, and Ellemir put an arm around her twin’s shrinking shoulders. None of them needed to speak aloud now, and didn’t bother.
Come with me, darling, it won’t hurt them to wait until you are ready. She led her into the inner room, telling her, This is your real wedding night, Callista, and there will be no crude horseplay and jokes.
Pliant as a child, and to Ellemir she seemed almost like a child, Callista allowed her twin to undress her, to remove the paint with which she had concealed the red marks on her face, to brush out her long hair over her shoulders, put her into a nightgown. The touch laid them open to one another, Ellemir’s guard also going down under the growing influence of the kireseth. She felt the flood of memories her twin had not been able to share when they had tried, on the night before their wedding, to exchange hesitant confidences.
Ellemir felt and experienced, with Callista, the conditioning to withdrawal, the harsh discipline against even a random touch of any other human hand. With overwhelming horror, she looked at the small healed scars on Callista’s wrists and hands,
awash with the physical and emotional anguish of those first terrible years in the Tower. And Damon had a part in this! For a moment she shared Callista’s agonized resentment, the rage never given voice or outlet, poured into a tension and force whose only outlet was through the focused energy of the matrix screens and relays.
She reexperienced with Callista the slow, inexorable deadening of normal physical responses, the numbing of bodily reflexes, the hardening of tensions in mind and body into a rigid armoring. Callista, by the third year in Arilinn, had no longer been lonely, had no longer craved human contact or emotional nourishment.
She was a Keeper.
It was a miracle, Ellemir realized, that she had any human compassion, any real feeling left at all. In a few more years it would have been too late; even kireseth could not have dissolved away the hard armor of the years, the imprint in the mind of so much tension.
But the kireseth had dissolved the patterning in Callista, leaving her a trembling child. Her mind was freed, and her body was no longer bound by the inexorable reflexes of the training, but with it had gone all the intellectual acceptance and maturity with which Callista had overlaid her inexperience, and she was a frightened little girl. Essentially, Ellemir thought with deep compassion, Callista was younger than she herself had been when she took her own first lover.
After being freed like this, Callista should have had a year or two to grow up normally, to come first to emotional and then to physical awareness of love. But she did not have that much time. She had only tonight, to cross a gulf of years.
With anguished empathy, cradling the shaking girl in her arms, Ellemir wished she could give Callista some of her own acceptance. Callista did not lack courage—no one who had been able to endure that kind of training could be thought lacking in courage. She would harden herself, go through with the consummation, so that she could face the Council tomorrow and swear that it had been done, but, Ellemir feared, it would be an ordeal, a test of courage, not the joyous thing it should have been.
It was cruel, Ellemir decided. They were asking a child to consent to her own rape—for in essence that was what it would be!
She would not be the first. So many women of Comyn were married, almost as children, to men they hardly knew and did not love. Callista had courage, so she would not rebel. And she really loved Andrew. But still, Ellemir thought, it would be a wretched wedding night for her, poor child.
Time was the one thing she needed, and the one thing Ellemir could not give her.
She felt Callista’s tentative touch on her mind, a reaching for reassurance, and suddenly realized that there was a way to share her own experience with her twin. They were both telepaths. Ellemir had always been doubtful, hesitant about her own laran, but under the kireseth she too was discovering a new potential, a new growth.
Confidently, holding Callista’s hands in hers, she let her mind drift back to her fifteenth year, the time of Dorian’s pregnancy, her growing closeness to Dorian’s young husband, the agreement of the sisters that Ellemir should take Dorian’s place in his bed. Ellemir had been a little afraid, not of the experience itself, but that Mikhail might think her ignorant or childish, too young, too inexperienced, not a fit substitute for Dorian. When he first came to her, and Ellemir had not remembered this in years, she had been paralyzed with fright, almost as frightened as Callista was now. Would he find her awkward, ugly?
And yet how easy it had been, how simple and pleasant, after all, how foolish her apprehension had seemed. When Dorian’s child was born and the time was at an end, she had regretted it.
Slowly she moved forward in time, blending her awareness with Callista’s, sharing the growth of her love for Damon. The first time they had danced together in Thendara, at Midsummer festival, he had seemed middle-aged to her, only one of her father’s officers, silent, withdrawn, showing attention to his cousin out of politeness, no more. Not until Callista was imprisoned among the catmen and she had sent for him in panic, had it occurred to her that Damon was anything but a friendly older kinsman, the friend of her long-dead elder brother. And then she had known what he meant to her. She shared with Callista, as she could never have done in words, the growing frustration of waiting, the dissatisfaction with kisses and chaste embraces, the ecstasy of their first coming together. If I could have known then, Callie, how to share this with you!
She reexperienced, with mingled joy and the memory of dread, her first suspicion of pregnancy: happiness, the fear and sickness, the turmoil of her body which had turned into a hostile strange thing, but through it all, the ioyfulness. She felt herself sobbing again uncontrollably as she relived the day the fragile link had given way and Damon’s daughter had died unborn. And then, more hesitantly—are you able to accept this? Do you resent it?—she felt again her growing awareness of Andrew’s need, welcoming him into her bed, for a little almost fearing it would lessen her closeness to Damon; again the delight of learning that it heightened it, because now it was a matter of choice and not merely custom, that her relationship with Damon had developed even more deeply with what she had learned about herself and her own desires from Andrew.
I knew you wanted me to do this, Callista, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was because you really did not know what it meant to me.
Callista sat up in bed, put her arms around Ellemir and kissed her, reassuringly. Her eyes were wide with wonder and awe. Ellemir was struck by her beauty. She knew Damon loved Callista too, sharing something with her that Ellemir never could. Yet she could accept it, as she knew Callista accepted that Ellemir and not she herself would give Andrew his first child. Independently she came to the conclusion Andrew had reached: they were not two couples changing partners now and then, like some figure in a complicated dance. They were something else, and each of them had something unique to give the others.
She knew Callista’s fear had gone, that she was eager to become part of this thing they were, and she did not need to raise her eyes to know that Andrew and Damon had come to join them. For a moment she wondered if she and Damon should withdraw, leaving Andrew alone with Callista, then almost laughed at herself for the idea. They were all a part of this.
For a little the contact was only of their minds, as Damon began to reach out and weave the fourfold rapport among them, close, intertwining, complete as it had never been before. Ellemir thought in musical images, and to her it was like blending voices, Callista’s clear and golden like the singing to the harp, Andrew’s a strong bass undercurrent, Damon’s a curiously many-voiced harmony, her own weaving them together, blending with each. Even as she visualized this rapport as music, as harmony, she shared the images of the others: a sunburst of blending colors in Callista’s mind; the close tactile sense of Andrew’s private imagery, so that for a little it seemed that they all curled naked together in a strange darkness, touching everywhere; sparkling spiderweb threads from Damon’s consciousness, weaving them all into one. For a long time they seemed to need no more than this. Callista, floating in the glowing colors, was faintly amused to feel Damon’s touch and knew he had kept enough separate awareness to monitor her channels. Then, as he touched her, the emotional rapport deepened, became a stronger awareness in her body, something new and strange, but not frightening.
Vaguely, at the edge of her mind, she remembered her father’s stories. Kireseth was given to reluctant brides. Well, she was reluctant no more. Was the effect of the resin on body or mind? Was it the opening of the mind which had freed her to be so aware of her body, of the closeness to Ellemir, who was roused and aware of all of them? Or was it the body’s hunger for closeness which opened the mind to the deeper communion of minds? Did it matter? She knew Andrew was still afraid to touch her. Poor Andrew, she had hurt him so much. She reached out to him, drawing him into her arms, felt him cover her with kisses. This time she gave herself up to them, feeling as if she were drowning in the ecstatic shimmer of lights, and at the same time woven into a trembling darkness.
In a sudde
n bewilderment of sensuality it was simply not enough to be in Andrew’s arms. She did not move away from him, but she reached for Damon, felt his touch, kissed him and suddenly, in a flash, remembered how she had found herself wanting to do this during her first year in the Tower, had stifled the memory in a frenzy of error and shame. Touching both hard male bodies, she felt her fingertips tracing down the curve of her sister’s breast, down the pregnant body, letting her consciousness sink deeper, just touching the faint, faint stir of the unborn child’s dreamless sleep. Somehow she felt enfolded like that, safe, surrounded by love, and she knew she was ready for the rest too.
Andrew, sharing this with her, knew that for Callista, Ellemir’s accepting sexuality would always be the key, that it had bridged the gap for Callista as it had almost done on their first catastrophic attempt. He knew that if he had welcomed the rapport, even then Ellemir might have managed to bring them all safely through. But he had wanted to be alone with Callista, separate.
If I could only have trusted Ellemir and Damon then ... and through his regret felt Damon’s thoughts, That was then, this is now, we have all changed and grown.
And that was the last moment of separate awareness for any of them. Now, as it had almost been at Midwinter, the rapport was complete. None of them ever knew or wanted to know, none of them ever tried to separate out or untangle isolated sensations. Details did not matter it that point— whose thighs opened or clasped, whose arms held close, who moved away for a moment, only to come closer, who kissed, probing, whose lips opened to the kiss, who penetrated or was penetrated. It seemed that for a little while they all touched everywhere, sharing every closeness so deeply that there was no separate consciousness at all. Callista was never sure, afterward, whether she had shared Ellemir’s awareness of the act of love or had experienced it for herself, and for a little while, briefly dropping into rapport with one of the men, saw and embraced herself—or was it her twin? She felt one of the men explode into orgasm, but was not sure whether or not she had participated in it. Her own consciousness was too diffuse. She felt her own awareness expanding, with Damon and Andrew and Ellemir like more solid spots in her own body, which had somehow expanded to take up all the space in the room, pulsing in multiple rhythms of excitement and awareness. Whether she herself had known pleasure or whether she had simply shared the intense pleasure of the others, she was never wholly sure; she did not want to know. Nor did any of them ever know which of them had first possessed Callista’s body. It did not matter; none of them wanted to know. They floated, they submerged in ecstasy, so blended from sensuality and the sharing of intense love that such things were irrelevant. Time had gone completely out of focus. It seemed to have gone on for years.
The Forbidden Tower Page 41
