Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Rian was not, Fiora thought, really an old man; it was sorrow and perhaps the side effects of the drugs which made him seem so. He should have been in the heartiest stage of his middle years; he was more than a year Dom Kyril’s junior. Yet he seemed decrepit, and she had seen him so in the eyes of everyone at Arilinn. He still stood silent before her, and after a moment she heard the small sound of the stifled sob.

  “Rian, what is it? Is there something else?”

  He did not speak, but the Keeper, open in empathy to the misery of the man before her, was overwhelmed with his despair. In that moment she knew why Rian drugged himself, why he seemed an old man when he was younger than Kyril, as she heard his first stammering, shamed word.

  “I am—I have always been afraid of Kyril. I dare not, I have never been able to face his—his anger, his brutality. Ever since I was a young man, I have tried never to face him at all. Dyan is not afraid of his father. I dare not go home, especially not now, unless Dyan is with me.

  Fiora tried hard to conceal her shock and pity, realizing it was not untouched with a contempt of which she knew she should be ashamed. Rian’s weaknesses were not of his own choosing. Yet she knew nothing would ever be the same again between them. She was Keeper; she had won through to that high office by achievement, hard work, and an austerity which would have broken nine women out of ten. She was Rian’s superior but the man was her elder, and she had always liked and even admired him. The liking remained unchanged, but she was shocked and distressed by the change in her own feelings. Nevertheless, the young Keeper made her voice gentle, without judgment.

  “Well, then, Rian, it seems there is no help for it. I will speak with Dyan. If it can be done without totally wrecking all his training so far, I will give him leave to go with you to Ardais. Send him to me—” she hesitated “—but not here.” She would not have her garden further spoiled for her. “I will await him, an hour from now, in the fireside room.”

  ~o0o~

  Dyan Ardais at this time of his life—he was about nineteen, she thought—was still as slight as a boy. Fiora, who of course could not see him, had seen him often enough in the eyes of the others in the circle at Arilinn. He was a darkly handsome young man, dark hair coarsely curling about his face, which was narrow and finely made. He had also eyes of the colorless steely gray which, Fiora knew, often marked the strongest telepaths. If Dyan was a telepath, though, he had learned to barrier his thoughts perfectly, even from her.

  In the training which had made her Keeper, she had learned to be impervious to all men; and Dyan was no exception. But though Fiora was innocent, she was a Keeper and a telepath and in the course of the early training, when Dyan had first come here, she had learned many things about him, and one was this—he would forever be impervious to her or to any woman. That did not matter to Fiora; he was neither the first nor the last lover of men to make a place and a reputation for himself in the Towers.

  What troubled her was that a boy so young—Fiora herself was not past twenty, but a Keeper’s training made one age rapidly in both body and mind—should be so braced, so impassive and invulnerable. At his age, a novice in a Tower should be open to his Keeper. Was it some early warning sign of the Ardais instability, which might later show itself in becoming, like Rian, addicted to some drug? Or—in fairness, she remembered what she knew of Dom Kyril—was it only the effect of growing up in the presence of a madman?

  As far as she knew, and she would have known, Dyan used kirian only for the necessary work in the Towers and for training. And though some Ardais drank far too much, she had noticed that he drank only moderately and at dinner. He had, as far as she knew, no glaring character flaws. Some Keepers might have considered his homosexuality a flaw, but it did not trouble Fiora as long as it created no trouble within the circle, and so far she had not heard of any dissension that it had caused. The others in the circle were tolerant and seemed to like him. He seemed a quiet, inoffensive youngster, yet something about him, something subliminal which she could not yet quite identify, still troubled her; why should a youth of Dyan’s age be opaque when to his Keeper he should have been transparent?

  Dyan bowed and said, in the musical voice which was, to Fiora, one of his most attractive qualities, “My uncle said you wanted to speak to me, Domna.”

  “Has he told you anything about what it is?”

  “He said to me that there was trouble at home, and that I was needed there. No more than that . . . no, he said, too, that it was important enough that I should have to go home even though I have not yet passed my first period of probation here.” He paused, expectantly.

  Fiora asked, “Do you want to go home, Dyan?” And for the first time she sensed a trace of emotion in his voice.

  “Why? Has my work here been unsatisfactory? I have—have tried very hard—”

  She said quickly, “It is nothing like that, Dyan. Nothing would please me more than that you should complete your training with us here, and perhaps work with us for a time, perhaps many years; although, as you are Heir to Ardais, you cannot spend a lifetime here. But, as Rian has told you, there is trouble at home which he feels he is not competent to meet alone. He has asked us as a favor that you be allowed to go with him. This is very unusual at this stage in your training, and I need to assess whether it will do any damage to interrupt your training at this point.” She added forthrightly, “If you are here only because you are unhappy at home, as you can see, your dedication to Arilinn is certainly in question.”

  She could feel that he smiled. He said, “It is true that I have no great love for living at Ardais. I do not know how much you know about my father, Lady, but I assure you, a desire to escape the chaos of life at Ardais is a healthy sign of a sane mind. That I find pleasure in my work here—is that a bad thing?”

  “Of course not,” she said, “and I have no particular fault to find with you at this point. Who has been training you?”

  “Rian, for the most part. He has told me that he thinks I will make a technician. And Domna Angelica has said she believes I have mastered the work of a monitor. She said she thought I was ready for the monitor’s Oath.”

  “That I will certainly authorize,” Fiora said, “and it is even your right to take it at my hands if you desire. Even so, you must have realized while we were talking that you have not answered my question, Dyan. Do you want to go home?”

  He sighed, and that heavy sigh answered her question. Fiora was not a maternal woman, but for a moment she felt she would have liked to shelter the youth in her arms; a fleeting sensation, and one, she knew, which would have distressed Dyan as much as herself. Recalling herself to the duty of questioning, not only in words, she reached out to him; she could feel the tension in his shoulders, the weight of the lines in his face, telling her better than sight what the answer would have been to her question.

  “I do not. But if I am needed, how can I refuse? Rian means well, but he is not—” he paused, and she felt him searching for truthful words which would not reflect on his kinsman, “not worldly.”

  She did not challenge the polite evasion of what she had really asked him; though she felt, with some distress, that he should have been willing to be more honest with his Keeper.

  “Dyan, you are a responsible young man; what do you think? Will it harm your training? I shall leave it to you.”

  The sigh he gave seemed drawn up from his very depths. He said “I thank you, Domna, for asking that question. The only answer that I can give is that if the Domain demands my presence, I must not think of anything else.”

  Again, without really knowing why, Fiora felt an enormous pity for the young man before her. “Spoken like an honorable man, Dyan.”

  She could sense the very stoop of Dyan’s shoulders, as if he bore the weight of a world on them. No, not a world. Only a Domain. She said gently, “Then it remains only to give you the monitor’s Oath, Dyan; you must not leave here without that. Then you are free to do as your conscience bids you.”


  ~o0o~

  She took leave of them a few hours later at the front gates of Arilinn. Rian already in his saddle, stooped and looking older than his years; Dyan standing beside his horse, his handsome face drawn with tension which Fiora could sense, without sight, from her distance of several feet. He bent over her hand respectfully and she could feel the lines drawn in his face.

  “Farewell, Lady. I hope to return to you soon.”

  “I wish you a pleasant journey.”

  “That is impossible,” Dyan said with a faint tinge of amusement. “The journey to Ardais lies through some of the worst mountains in the Domains, including the Pass of Scaravel.”

  “Then I wish you a safe journey, and I shall hope that you may be able to return soon and that when you arrive at your home you find the problems less serious than you have foreseen,” she said, and they mounted and rode away. As he went, Fiora felt enormous anger. No, she thought, I should never have let him go!

  The kinsmen rode in silence for some time. At last Dyan said, “You knew that Fiora had insisted that I take the monitor’s Oath before I left the Tower. Is such haste usual, uncle?”

  Rian sighed and said, “Indeed, it is customary to give the Oath even to children at the first moment they are old enough to understand its meaning.”

  “Then it was not a personal statement that Fiora did not trust me—that she was in such haste to bind my Oath?” Dyan asked.

  Rian frowned and said “Of course not. It is customary.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You can hardly have any qualms of conscience about taking the Oath of a monitor,” exclaimed Rian, recalling the words of the Oath . . . to enter no mind save to help or heal, and never to force the conscience of any.

  “Perhaps not,” Dyan said after a moment, “yet I cannot help but feel as if I had ceded some right over my own conscience. I thought not that I needed any to keep my conscience, nor an Oath to bind me to ethical use of laran.”

  “The Oath is needed most by those most reluctant to take it,” said Rian. “Those who feel they need it not should surely have no qualms about it.”

  He felt that Dyan wanted to say more. But he didn’t.

  ~o0o~

  The journey took four days, at the best speed they could make over the mountains. When they came in sight of Castle Ardais, Dyan noticed that the crimson and gray pennant was flying which announced that the Head of the Domain was in residence.

  “He is here,” Dyan said. “Perhaps I wished that he had fled us. The Domain is in mourning; this is arrogance.”

  “More likely,” Rian said, “he feels himself so justified that it would not occur to him to flee justice.”

  Dyan said sighing, “I remember him as he was before—when I was a little child. I loved him; now I can hardly remember when he was not a brute. I remember hiding in a cupboard from him when he was drunk and roaring all over the castle, threatening us all . . . I think it the saddest of all that Elorie will remember nothing but this and has no memory of a father to love; because despite everything, Rian, never doubt this, I love my father well, whatever he has done.”

  “I never thought to doubt that, lad,” Rian said gently. “Once I loved him, too.”

  ~o0o~

  Almost on the threshold, Elorie appeared, pale as death; it looked to the men as if she had neither slept nor eaten since her mother’s death. She flung herself, weeping, into Dyan’s arms.

  “Oh, my brother! You have heard—my mother—”

  “Hush, little sister,” Dyan said, stroking her hair. “I came as soon as I heard. I loved her, too. Where is our father?”

  “He has barricaded himself in the Tower room and will let no one near him, not even his body-servants. For a full day afterward, he was drunk and shouting and roaring all over the castle, offering to fight anyone—” Elorie shivered, and Dyan, remembering similar episodes when he himself was very young, patted her as if she were a little girl. “Then he hid himself in the Tower room and would not come out. I had to arrange everything for—for Mother—”

  “I am sorry, little sister; I am here now, and you need not be frightened of anything. You must go and rest now, and sleep. Tell your nurse to put you to bed, and give you a sleeping draught; I will take care of everything, as befits Warden of the Domain,” said Dyan. “And as soon as your mother is buried, you cannot stay here alone with Father, not now.”

  “But where can I go?” she asked.

  “I will find a place to send you; perhaps you could be fostered at Armida or even in one of the Towers; you are Comyn and nobly born,” Dyan said, “but now you must sleep and eat and rest; you must look seemly and lady-like when your mother is laid to rest. You do not want to look as if you dwelt under siege here—even,” he added shrewdly, “if that is what you feel like.”

  “But what of Father? Will you let him hide there in the Tower saying evil things of how Mother drove him to kill her?”

  Dyan said quietly “You must just leave Father to me, Lori, child.”

  And at her look of relief he stroked her hair again and said to Rian, “Ring for her nurse now, will you, and tell her to take Lori away to her rooms and look after her properly.”

  “Oh,” Elorie sighed, and he could see that she was near to collapse, “I am so weary, so glad you are home, brother. Now you are here, everything will be all right.”

  When Elorie had been taken to her own rooms, Dyan went into the Great Hall. and called the coridom.

  “Lord Dyan, how good to see you,” the man said, and curiously repeated what Elorie had said, “Now you are here, everything will be all right.” It was like a weight on him, Dyan thought, with smothered rage. They should be seeking to make things easy for him, instead of all waiting until the burden could be put on his shoulders.

  He was not ready for the weight of the Domain; could he not even complete his education? He should have known when he was summoned, a year earlier than he had been promised from Nevarsin, that he might assume the place of Warden of the Domain, when his father was ill with the autumn fever; they had feared he might die and had lost no time in naming Dyan as Warden. It was the fever that did it, Dyan thought; some injury to his brain. Before that he had been drunken and dissolute, but sane, and only rarely cruel.

  There had never been any question, he thought dispassionately, of naming Rian as Kyril’s successor. Not even the most optimistic of Ardais kindred had believed Rian fit for that office; they were all ready to dump it on the shoulders of a boy of nineteen.

  The coridom began telling how the ill-fated feast had begun, but Dyan waved him to silence.

  “None of that matters; how came he to strike down my stepmother?”

  “I am not sure he knew he struck down any; he was drunk.”

  “Then, in the name of all the Gods,” Dyan shouted in frustration, “when all of you know he has these rages when he is drunk, why do you not keep him away from drink?”

  “Lord Dyan, if you who are his son, or the Lady who was his wife, cannot forbid it, how are we who are but servants to do so?”

  Dyan supposed there was some justice to the question. But now it was too late to leave such things to servants or chance.

  “There’s no help for it; the man’s mad, he must be watched over, perhaps locked up so he’ll do no harm to himself or others,” Dyan said.

  “And what of the Domain, with my Lady dead and you all away in the Tower?” asked the coridom.

  Dyan sighed heavily and said “Leave that to me. Now I will go and see my father.”

  ~o0o~

  Dom Kyril had barricaded himself inside the topmost room of the north tower, and Dyan struggled in vain with the heavy door. Finally he shouted and kicked at the heavy door, and at last a quavering voice came from inside.

  “Who is there?”

  “It is Dyan, father. Your son.”

  “Oh, no,” the voice said. “You can’t get me that way. My son Dyan is in Arilinn. If he were here, none of this would be happening; he’d make sur
e my rebellious servants did my will.”

  “Father, I journeyed last night from Arilinn,” Dyan said feeling his heart sink at the crafty madness—real or feigned?—in his father’s voice. If I had been here it is true this would not have happened; I’d have had him chained first.

  “Damn you, Father, open this door or I’ll kick it in!”

  Dyan backed up the threat with a mighty kick that rattled the hinges.

  “I’ll open, I’ll open,” said the voice petulantly “No need to go breaking things.”

  There was a creak in the mighty lock, and after a moment a small crack widened, and Dyan saw his father’s face.

  Once Dom Kyril had been handsome, with the good looks of all the Ardais men. Now his eyes were bloodshot, his face puffy and swollen, the features blurred with drink and indecision, his clothes filthy and disheveled. He looked with hostile grimaces at Dyan and muttered, “What are you doing here, then? You were so anxious to go off to the Tower and get away, now what are you doing back?”

  So that would be his defense? Pretending to ignore what had happened and putting Dyan on the defensive?

  “I went with your leave, Father. Was I to think the Domain could not be trusted with its ruler? Come, Father, don’t pretend to be madder or drunker than you are.”

  Dom Kyril’s bloodshot eyes grimaced closed; he said, “Dyan, is it you? Really you? Why is everybody angry with me? What did I do this time? I need a drink, boy, and they won’t bring me wine—”

  Dyan was not surprised; but now he understood his father’s ravings. A long-term drunkard, abruptly deprived of all drink—by this stage no doubt he was seeing things crawling out of the walls at him.

  He could understand the servants, but, at this point, if they were to have any rational discourse, his father must have at least enough of the poison to give him the simulacrum of sanity. His brain had grown unused to functioning without drink; Dyan could see the shaking hands, the uneven gait.