The Forbidden Circle

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I can only say, sir, that I love Callista and I will try to make her happy.”

  “I do not think she will be happy among your people. Do you intend to take her away?”

  “If you had not consented to our marriage, sir, I would have had no choice.” But could he really have taken this sensitive girl, reared among telepaths, to the Terran Zone, to imprison her among tall buildings and machines, to expose her to people who would regard her as an exotic freak? Her very laran would have been regarded as madness or charlatanry. “As matters stand, sir, I will remain here gladly. Perhaps I can prove to you that Terrans are not as alien as you think.”

  “I know that already. Do you think me ungrateful? I know perfectly well that if it had not been for you, Callista would have died in the caverns, and the lands would still lie under their accursed darkness!”

  “I think that was more Damon’s doing than mine, sir,” Andrew said firmly. The old man laughed a short, wry laugh.

  “And so it is like the fairy-tale, fitting that you two should be rewarded with the hands of my daughters, and half my kingdom. Well, I have no kingdom to give, Ann’dra, but you have a son’s place here while you live, and if you wish, your children after you.”

  Callista’s eyes were brimming. She slipped off the bench and knelt beside her father. She whispered, “Thank you,” and his hand rested, for a moment, on her fine, copper-shining braids. Over her bent head he said, “Well, come, Ann’dra, kneel for my blessing.” The harsh voice was kind.

  With a sense of confusion, half embarrassment, half ineradicable strangeness, Andrew knelt beside Callista. On the surface of his mind were random thoughts, such as how damn silly this would seem at Headquarters, and when in Rome . . . but on a deeper level, something in him warmed to the gesture. He felt the old man’s square, calloused hand on his head, and with the still-strange, newly opened telepathic awareness with which he had not yet wholly made his peace, picked up a strange me lange of emotions: misgivings, blended with a tentative, spontaneous liking. He was sure that what he sensed was what the old man felt about him; and to his own surprise, it was not too unlike what he himself felt for the Comyn lord.

  He said, trying to keep his voice neutral, though he was perfectly sure the old man could read his thoughts in turn, “I am grateful, sir. I will try to be a good son to you.”

  Dom Esteban said gruffly, “Well, as you can see, I’m going to need a couple of good ones. Look here, are you going to keep calling me sir for the rest of our lives, son?”

  “Of course not, kinsman.” He used the intimate form of the word now, as Damon did. It could mean “uncle,” or any close relative of a father’s generation. He rose, and as he moved away he encountered the curious stare of the boy Dezi, silent behind Esteban, filled with an angry intensity—yes, and what Andrew could feel as resentment, envy.

  Poor kid, he thought. I come here a stranger, and they treat me like family. He’s family—and the old man treats him like a servant, or a dog! No wonder the kid’s jealous!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It had been decided that the marriage would take place four days hence, a quiet one, with only Leonie for honored guest, and a few neighbors who lived on nearby estates to celebrate with them. The brief interval allowed just time for word to be sent to Dom Esteban’s heir, Domenic, at Thendara, and for one or more of Damon’s brothers to come from Serrais if they wished.

  On the night before the wedding, the twin sisters lay awake late, in the room they had shared as children, before Callista went to the Arilinn Tower. Ellemir said at last, a little sadly, “I had always believed that on my marriage day there would be much feasting, and fine gowns, and all our kinfolk to celebrate with us, not a hasty marriage with a few countryfolk! Well, with Damon for husband I can manage without the rest, but still . . .”

  “I am sorry too, Elli, I know it is my fault,” Callista said. “You are marrying a Comyn lord of the Ridenow Domain, so there is no reason you should not be married by the catenas, with all the festivity and merrymaking you might wish. Andrew and I have spoiled this for you.” A Comyn daughter could not marry di catenas, with the old ceremony, without permission of Comyn Council, and Callista knew there was no chance whatever that Council would give her to a stranger, a nobody—a Terran! So they had chosen the simpler form known as freemate marriage, which could be solemnized by a simple declaration before witnesses.

  Ellemir heard the sadness in her sister’s voice and said, “Well, as Father is so fond of saying, the world will go as it will, and not as you or I would have it. In the next Council season, Damon has promised, we shall journey to Thendara and there will be enough merrymaking for everyone.”

  “And by that time,” Callista added, “my marriage to Andrew will be so long established that nothing can alter it.”

  Ellemir laughed. “It would be just my ill fortune to be heavy with child then, and unable to enjoy it! Not that I would think it ill fortune, to have Damon’s child at once.”

  Callista was silent, thinking of the years in the Tower, where she had put aside, unregretted because unknown, all the things a young girl dreams of. Hearing these things in Ellemir’s voice now she asked, hesitating, “Do you want a child at once?”

  Ellemir laughed. “Oh, yes! Don’t you?”

  “I had not thought about it,” Callista said slowly. “There were so many years when I never thought of marriage, or love, or children. . . . I suppose Andrew will want children, soon or late, but it seems to me that a child should be wanted for herself, not only because it is my duty to our clan. I have lived so many years in the Tower, thinking only of duty toward others, that I think I must first have a little time to think only of myself. And of . . . of Andrew.”

  This was puzzling to Ellemir. How could anyone think of her husband without thinking first of her desire to give him a child? But she sensed that it was otherwise with Callista. In any case, she thought with unconscious snobbery, Andrew was not Comyn; it did not matter so much that Callista should give him an heir at once.

  “Remember, Elli, I spent so many years thinking I was not to marry at all. . . .”

  Her voice was so sad and strange that Ellemir could not bear it. She said, “You love Andrew, and your choice was freely made,” but there was a hint of question too. Had Callista chosen to marry her rescuer only because it seemed the simplest thing?

  Callista followed that thought, and said, “No, I love him, more than I can tell you. Yet there is another old saying, I never knew till now how true: no choice goes wholly unregretted, either way will bring more, both of joy and sorrow, than we can foresee. My life had seemed unchanging to me, already settled, so simple: I would take Leonie’s place in Arilinn and serve there until death or age freed me from the burden. And that too seemed a good life to me. Love, marriage, children—these things were not even daydreams to me!”

  Her voice was trembling. Ellemir got out of bed and went to sit on the edge of her sister’s, taking her hand in the darkness. Callista moved, an unconscious, automatic gesture, to draw it away, then said ruefully, more to herself than Ellemir, “I suppose I must learn not to do that.”

  Ellemir said gently, “I do not think Andrew will appreciate it.”

  She felt Callista flinch from the words. “It is a . . . reflex. I find it as hard to break as it was hard to learn.”

  Ellemir said impulsively, “You must have been very lonely, Callista!”

  Callista’s words seemed to come up from some barricaded depth. “Lonely? Not always. In the Tower we are closer than you can imagine. So much a part of one another. Even so, as Keeper I was always apart from them, separated by a . . . a barrier no one could ever cross. It would have been easier, I think, to be truly alone.” Ellemir felt that her sister was not speaking to her at all, but to remote and unsharable memories, trying to put words to something she had never been willing to speak about.

  “The others in the Tower could . . . could give some expression to that closeness. Could touch. Could love
. A Keeper learns a double separateness. To be close, closer than any other, to each mind within the matrix circle, and yet never . . . never quite real to them. Never a woman, never even a living, breathing human being. Only . . . only part of the screens and relays.” She paused, her mind lost in that strange, barricaded, lonely life which had been hers for so many years.

  “So many women try it, and fail. They become involved, somehow, with the human side of the other men and women there. In my first year at Arilinn, I saw six young girls come there, to be trained as Keeper, and fail. And I was proud because I could endure the training. It is . . . not easy,” she said, knowing the words ridiculously inadequate. They gave no hint of the months of rigid physical and mental discipline, until her mind was trained to unbelievable power, until her body could endure the inhuman flows and stresses. She said at last, softly and bitterly, “Now I wish I had failed too!” and stopped, hearing her own words and horrified by them.

  Ellemir said softly, “I wish we hadn’t grown so far apart, breda.” Almost for the first time, she spoke the word for sister in the intimate mode; it could also mean darling. Callista responded to the tone, rather than the word.

  “It was never that I didn’t . . . didn’t love you, or remember you, Ellemir. But I was taught—oh, you can’t imagine how!—to hold myself apart from every human contact. And you were my twin sister—I had been closest to you. For my first year, I cried myself to sleep at night because I was so lonely for you. But later . . . later you came to seem like all the rest of my life before Arilinn, like someone I had known only in a dream. And so, later, when I was allowed to see you now and again, to visit you, I tried to keep you distant, part of the dream, so that I would not be torn apart with every new separation. Our lives lay apart and I knew it must be so.”

  Her voice was sadder than tears. Impulsively, eager to comfort, Ellemir lay down beside her sister and took her in her arms. Callista went rigid against the touch, then, sighing, lay still; but Ellemir sensed the effort her sister was making not to pull away from her. She thought, with a violent surge of anger, How could they do this to her? It’s deforming, as if they’d made her a cripple or a hunch-back!

  She hugged her and said, “I hope we can find our way back to each other!”

  Callista tolerated the gesture, though she did not return it. “So do I, Ellemir.”

  “It seems dreadful, to think you have never been in love.”

  Her sister said lightly, “Oh, it is not as bad as that. We were so close in the Towers that I suppose, in one way or another, we were always in love.” It was too dark to see Callista’s face, but Ellemir sensed the smile as she added, “What if I should tell you that when I first came to Arilinn, Damon was still there, and for a little I fancied myself in love with him? Are you very jealous, Ellemir?”

  Ellemir laughed. “No, not very.”

  “He was a senior technician, he taught me monitoring. Of course, I was not a woman to him, just one of the little girls in training. Of course for him there was no woman alive, save for Leonie—” She stopped herself and said quickly, “That is long over, of course.”

  Ellemir laughed aloud. “I know Damon’s heart is all mine. How could I be jealous of such love as a man can give a Keeper, a pledged virgin?” Ellemir heard her own words and broke off in consternation. “Oh, Callista, I did not mean—”

  “I think you did,” Callista said gently, “but love is love, even without any hint of the physical. If I had not known that before, I would have learned it in the caves of Corresanti, when I came to love Andrew. It is love, and it was real, and if I were you I would not smile at it, nor scorn Damon’s love for Leonie, as if it were a boy’s green fancy.” She thought, but did not say, that it had been real enough to disturb Leonie’s peace, even if no one but Callista herself had ever guessed it.

  She did right to send Damon away. . . .

  “It seems strange to me to love without desire,” Ellemir said, “and not quite real, whatever you say.”

  “Men have desired me,” Callista said quietly, “in spite of the taboo. It happens. Most of the time it aroused nothing in me, it only made me feel as if . . . as if dirty insects were crawling on my body. But there were other times when I almost wished I knew how to desire them in return.”

  Suddenly her voice broke. Ellemir heard a wild note in it, very like terror. “Oh, Ellemir, Elli, if I shrink even from your touch—if I shrink from the touch of my twin-born sister—what will I do to Andrew? Oh, merciful Avarra, how much will I have to hurt him?”

  “Breda, Andrew loves you, surely he will understand—”

  “But it may not be enough to understand! Oh, Elli, even if it were someone like Damon, who knows the ways of the Towers, knows what a Keeper is, I would be afraid! And Andrew does not know, or understand, and there are no words to tell him! And he too has abandoned the only world he has ever known, and what can I give him in return?”

  Ellemir said gently, “But you have been freed from a Keeper’s oath.” The habit of many years, she knew, could not be broken in a day, but once Callista freed herself from her fears, surely all would be well! She held Callista close, saying with quiet tenderness, “Love is nothing to fear, breda, even if it seems strange to you, or frightful.”

  “I knew you did not understand,” Callista said, sighing. “There were other women in the Towers, women who did not live by a Keeper’s laws, who were free to share the closeness we all shared. There was so much . . . so much love among us, and I knew how happy it made them, to love, or even to satisfy desire, when there was not love but only . . . need, and kindness.” She sighed again. “I am not ignorant, Ellemir,” she said with a curious, forlorn dignity, “inexperienced, yes, because of what I am, but not ignorant. I have learned ways to . . . not to be much aware of it. It was easier that way, but I knew, oh, yes, I knew. Just as I knew, for instance, that you had lovers before Damon.”

  Ellemir laughed. “I never made any secret of it. If I did not speak of it to you, it was because I knew the laws under which you lived—or knew as much as any outsider can know—and that seemed a barrier between us.”

  “But you must surely have known that I envied you that,” Callista said, and Ellemir sat up in bed, looking at her twin in surprise and shock. They could see one another only dimly; a small green moon, the dimmest of crescents, hung outside their window. At last Ellemir said, hesitating, “Envy . . . me? I had thought . . . thought surely . . . that a Keeper, pledged so, would surely despise me, or think it shameful, that I—that a comynara should be no different than a peasant woman, or some female animal in heat.”

  “Despise you? Never,” Callista said. “If we do not talk much about it, it is for fear we would not be able to endure our differences. Even the other women in the Towers, who do not share our isolation, look on us as alien, almost inhuman. . . . . Separateness, pride, become our only defense, pride, as if to conceal a wound, conceal our own . . . our own incompletion.”

  Her voice sounded shaken, but Ellemir thought that her sister’s face, in the dim moonlight, was inhumanly impassive, like something carved in stone. It seemed that Callista was almost heartbreakingly distant, that they were trying to talk across a great and aching chasm which lay between them.

  All her life Ellemir had been taught to think of a Keeper as something remote, far above her, to be revered, almost worshiped. Even her own sister, her twin, was like a goddess, far out of reach. Now for a moment she had an almost dizzying sense of reversal, shaking her certainties; now it was Callista who looked up to her, envied her, Callista who was somehow younger than herself and far more vulnerable, not clothed in the remote majesty of Arilinn, but a woman like herself, frail, unsure. . . . She said in a whisper, “I wish I had known this about you before, Callie.”

  “I wish I had known it about myself,” Callista said with a sad smile. “We are not encouraged to think much about such things, or about much of anything but our work. I am only beginning to discover myself as a woman, and I . . .
do not quite know how to begin.” It seemed to Ellemir an incredibly sad confession. After a moment Callista said softly in the darkness, “Ellemir, I have told you what I can of my life. Tell me something of yours. I don’t want to pry, but you have had lovers. Tell me about that.”

  Ellemir hesitated, but sensed that there was more behind the question than simple sexual curiosity. There was that too, and considering the way in which Callista had been forced to stifle this kind of awareness during her years as Keeper, it was a healthy sign and augured well for the coming marriage. But there was more too, a desire to share something of Ellemir’s life during the years of their separation. Responding impulsively to that need, she said, “It was the year Dorian was married. Did you meet Mikhail at all?”

  “I saw him at the wedding.” Their older sister Dorian had married a nedestro cousin of Lord Ardais’. “He seemed a kind, well-spoken young man, but I exchanged no more than, a few dozen words with him. I had seen Dorian so seldom since childhood.”

  “It was that winter,” said Ellemir. “Dorian begged me to come and spend the winter with her; she was lonely, and already pregnant, and had made few friends of the mountain women. Father gave me leave to go. And later in the spring, when Dorian grew heavy, so it was no pleasure to her to share his bed, Mikhail and I had grown to be such friends that I took her place there.” She giggled a little, reminiscently.

  Callista said, startled, “You were no more than fifteen!”

  Ellemir answered, laughing, “That is old enough to marry; Dorian had been no more. I would have been married, had Father not wanted me to stay home and keep his house!”

  Again Callista felt the cruel envy, the sense of desperate alienation. How simple it had been for Ellemir, and how right! And how different for her! “Were there others?”