“Kinsman of mine he is indeed,” she said. “Nor did he lie when he named himself Storn of Storn. Our mountain ways are unknown to you. My brother of Storn is, as you say, blind beyond cure and thus unable to hold laran right in our house; and thus this cousin of ours, adopted into our household, wears the name and title of Storn, his true name forgotten even by brother and sister, nedestro heir to Storn.”
For a moment after she spoke the words she held her breath; then, at a signal from Kerstal, the knives dropped. Melitta dared not let her face show relief.
Storn spoke softly: “What redress does the Great House of Rannath give for deadly insult?”
“I am the Voice of Rannath only,” Kerstal countered. “Learn our customs another time, stranger.”
“It seems to me,” Storn said, his voice still gentle, “that Storns have suffered grave ills at your hands. Deadly insult given to me, and my sister—” His eyes turned on the two men who had haled Melitta into the Hall. “Is this your courtesy to strangers in your city?”
“Amends shall be made,” Kerstal said. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. “My House has no quarrel with you, Lord of Storn; be then our guests and receive gifts consonant with your quality. Let the exchange of courtesy wipe out memory of offense given or taken.”
Stern hesitated, his hand on the hilt of his knife, and Melitta, reading the gesture with astonishment, thought, He’s enjoying this; he half hopes that Kerstal will call challenge!
But if this was Storn’s intention, he remembered his primary intention in time. He said, “Be it so, then. My sister and I gratefully accept your hospitality, kinsman of Rannath,” and all round the circle, there were small sighs and stirs of relief or, perhaps, of disappointment.
Kerstal summoned servants and gave orders, then detained Storn a moment with a raised hand. “You claim this woman, then? See you to it that she does not walk abroad free in defiance of our customs!”
Melitta bit her tongue on an angry retort, feeling Storn’s hand dig hard into her shoulder. This was no time to start any further arguments.
A few minutes later, they were in a large guest room, bare as all Dry-town rooms, with little more than mats on the floor and a shelf or two. When the servants had withdrawn, Melitta faced the stranger who bore her brother’s voice and manner. Left alone with him, she hardly knew what to say.
The stranger said softly, in their own language, “It’s really me, you know, Melitta.” He smiled. “I must say—you came at exactly the right moment. We couldn’t have planned it better!”
“No planning of mine, but good luck,” she conceded. She sank down wearily. “Why did you send me here?”
“Because at one time there were mountain-born mercenaries all through this part of the country, gathering at Carthon. Now, with the Dry-towners moving in here, I’m not sure,” Storn said. “But we are free; we can act. We could do nothing, now, at High Windward.” He threw himself down on one of the pallets. Melitta too, was tired beyond words and she was also ill at ease with a man who still seemed a stranger to her. At last she said, “Who is—the man—”
“His name is Barron; he is a Terran, an off-worlder. His mind lay open to me; I scanned his future and saw that he would be coming into the mountains. And so—” Storn shrugged. Another of those silences fell between brother and sister, a silence which could not be talked about. They both knew that Storn had broken an ancient taboo, forbidden from the earliest years of the Darkovan Compact. Even though the victim was a Terran, the horror remained with Melitta.
They were both relieved when servants of Rannath entered, bearing trays of food, and a pair of chests which, the servants explained, were gifts from the House of Rannath to the Lord and Lady of Storn. When they had gone away again, Melitta rose and approached the pile of gifts, and Storn laughed softly. “Never too tired to be curious—just like a woman! As a matter of fact, Melitta, enjoy these gifts with clear conscience—Rannath’s Voice, or whatever that official calls himself, knows that he is purchasing immunity from a blood feud that would run for years and cost him a hell of a lot more than this! If we were Dry-towners, that is. He’ll despise us a little because we can be bought off, but I for one don’t care a scrap for what a patch of unwashed Dry-towners think about us, do you? I accepted the gifts because, among other things”—he surveyed her—“you looked as if you could use a few gifts! I’ve never seen you look so hoydenish, little sister!”
Melitta felt ready to cry. “You don’t know half of where I’ve been, or how I’ve had to travel, and you’re making fun of what I’m wearing—” Her voice broke.
“Melitta! Don’t cry, don’t—” He reached out and took her into his arms, holding her tight, her face on his shoulder. “Little sister, breda, chiya…” He cuddled her, crooning pet names from their childhood. Gradually she quieted, then drew away, vaguely embarrassed. The voice, the manner, were her brother’s, but the strange man’s body and touch were disconcerting. She lowered her eyes, and Storn laughed, embarrassed.
“Let’s see what Kerstal has sent us, and we’ll see how high he rates the kihar of the House of Storn.”
“Not cheaply, at any rate,” Melitta said, opening the chests.
There was a sword of fine temper for Storn. He buckled it on, saying, “Remember, these are Dry-towners—it does not mean what it would mean in our mountains. Worse luck, or it would be a pledge to come to our aid.” With the sword was an embroidered vest and baldric. For Melitta, as she had hoped, were gowns of linen trimmed with fur, hoods and coifs—and a gilt chain with a tiny padlock. She stared at that, unbelieving.
Storn laughed as he picked it up: “Evidently he thinks I’m going to put you on a leash!” Then, as her eyes flashed again, he added quickly, “Never mind, you don’t have to wear it. Come, breda, let us eat, and then rest for a little while. We’re safe here, at least. Time enough tomorrow to think about what we’re going to do, if Rannath decides that no one here can help us.”
* * *
XI
« ^ »
STORN HAD proved an accurate prophet. However eager the House of Rannath might be to avoid a lengthy blood feud with the Storns, the word had evidently gone out all over Carthon; no one was “at leisure,” as he told them regretfully, to pursue a war in the mountains.
Storn, privately, didn’t blame them. The Dry-towners were never at ease in the foothills, let alone in the high passes; and the House of Rannath had enough to do to hold Carthon, without scattering such armies as he could command on missions in the far Sierras. For that matter, Dry-town mercenaries, unskilled at mountaineering and ill-guarded against snow and cold, would be more trouble than they were worth. They needed mountain men, and there were none in Carthon.
When the brother and sister insisted on taking their leave, Kerstal besought them to stay and managed not to sound nearly as insincere as they both knew he was. When they pleaded urgent necessity, he found Melitta an excellent riding horse from his private stables and pressed it upon her as a gift.
“And thus,” Storn said cynically as they rode away from the Great House, “the Voice of Rannath serves his lord by cutting another tie with the mountains and making it less likely that more mountain folk will come here. That makes it more convenient for the few who remain in Carthon to go elsewhere—I wonder what happened to all the Lanarts? They used to hold land near Carthon,” he explained, “and they were a sub-clan of the Altons, along with the Leyniers and the people of Syrtis. I hope the damned Dry-towners haven’t killed them off by entangling them in blood feud and picking them off one at a time; they were good people. Domenic Lanart offered his eldest son in marriage to you, once, Melitta.”
“And you never told me.”
He chuckled. “At the time you were eight years old.” Then he sobered again. “I should have married you off, both of you, years gone; then we would have kinfolk at our call. But I was reluctant to part with you. Allira had no great wish to marry…”
They both fell silent. When they spo
ke again, it was of the past of Carthon and how it had fallen to this deserted state. Not until they were free of the city did Storn again broach the subject of their next move.
“Since Carthon has proved a false hope—”
Melitta broke in: “We are within a few days ride of Armida, and Valdir Alton has banded together all the men of the foothills against bandits—look what he did against Cyrillon des Trailles! Storn, appeal to him! Surely he will help us!”
“I cannot,” Storn said somberly. “I dare not even meet with Valdir’s men, Melitta. Valdir is a Comyn telepath, and has Alton powers; he would know at once what I have done. I think he already suspects. And besides”—he flushed darkly, ashamed—“I stole a horse from one of Alton’s men.”
Melitta said dryly, “I wondered where you got such a beauty.”
Storn’s own thoughts ran bitter counterpoint. Valdir’s foster son pledged himself with a knife—but it was to the Earthling, Barron. He knows nothing of me and has no friendship for me. And now that road is closed, too. What now? He said at last, “We are far kin to the House of Aldaran. I have heard that they, too, are a rallying-point for the people of the mountains. Perhaps they can help us. If they cannot help us for old kinship’s sake, perhaps they will know where we can find mercenaries. We will go to Aldaran.”
Melitta, reflecting that meant recrossing the Kadarin and turning back into the mountains, wished they had gone there first; but then she remembered that Storn—Barron—had come all the way from the valley lands far to the other side of the foothills. Carthon had been the best intermediary place they could locate, and furthermore Storn had had every reason to believe they could find help at Carthon. It was the strangest thing; when she did not look at him, it was easy to believe she rode with her brother Storn; the voice, unfamiliar in timbre and tone, had still her brother’s familiar mannerisms and speech rhythms, as if it came filtered through distance. But when her eyes alighted on the strange figure which rode so easily on the great black horse—tall, dark, sullenly alien—the unease overtook her again. What would happen if Storn withdrew and she was left alone with this stranger, this off-worlder, this unbelievably alien man? Melitta had thought, after her terrible trek through the mountains, that she had little left to fear. She discovered that there were fears she had never thought of before this, the unknown hazards of an alien man, an alien mind.
She told herself, grimly, Even if he—gets out—he couldn’t be worse than Brynat’s gang of toughs. I doubt if he’d want to murder me, or rape me. Surreptitiously she studied the strange face, masked in her brother’s familiar presence, and thought, I wonder what he’s really like? He seems a decent sort of man—no lines of cruelty, or dissipation—sad, if anything, and a little lonely. I wonder if I’ll ever know?
The third evening out of Carthon, they discovered that they were being followed.
Melitta sensed it first, with senses abnormally sharpened by the tension and fear of the journey; as if, she was to say later, “I’d gotten in the habit of riding looking over my shoulder.” She also suspected that she was developing, perhaps from contact with Storn or from some other stimulus, from a latent telepath into an actual one. She could not at first tell whether it was by the impact on her mind, or through some subliminal stimulation of her five sharpened senses—sounds too faint to be normally heard, shapes too distant to see—in any case it made little or no difference. When they found shelter in an abandoned herdsman’s hut on a hill pasture, she finally told Storn of her suspicions, half afraid he would laugh.
Nothing was further from his mind than laughter. His mouth pinched tight—Melitta knew the gesture if not the mouth—and he said, “I thought so, last night; but I thought I listened only to my own fear.”
“But who could be following us? Certainly none of Brynat’s men, at such a distance! Men from Carthon?”
“That’s not impossible,” Storn said. “The House of Rannath might not mind seeing another of the old mountain families disappear—but then, sooner or later he might have to deal with Brynat’s raiders himself. Raiding parties have been known to come as far as Carthon, and I dare say he would find us more towardly neighbors than the Scarface—he might not help us, but I doubt if he would hinder. No, what I fear is worse than that.”
“Bandits? A raiding nonhuman band?”
Somberly, Storn shook his head. Then, seeing Melitta’s fear, he tried to smile. “I’m no doubt imagining things, breda, and in any case we are armed.”
He did not say what he most feared: that Larry, through sworn friendship and fear for Barron, might have set Valdir on his track. He had not meant any harm—quite the opposite. But Barron had twice—or was it three times—asked questions about Carthon. It would have been simple enough to trail him there. And if no Terran had come there—well, Valdir at least would know what he had done and why Barron the Earthling had vanished. From what little Storn knew of the Comyn, once on the track of such an offense against the ancient laws of Darkover, they would make little of chasing him over half a world.
And when they caught him—what then?
With the uncanny habit she was developing, of reading his thoughts (Had he done well, to waken laran in the girl?) Melitta asked, “Storn, just what are the Comyn?”
“That’s like asking what the mountains are. Originally there were seven Great Houses on Darkover, or Domains, each with a particular telepathic gift. If I ever knew which House had which Gift, I have forgotten, and in any case, generations of inbreeding and intermarriage have blurred them so that nobody knows any more. When men spoke of the Comyn, they usually meant Comyn Council—a hierarchy of gifted telepaths from every House, who were responsible, first, for surveillance over the use of the old powers and gifts of the mind—and later, they gained temporal power, too. You’ve heard the ballads—originally the seven houses were descended from the sons of Hastur and Cassilda, so they say. It might even be true, for all I know, but that’s beside the point. Just now, they’re the givers of law—such law as there has been since the Compact—all over this part of Darkover. Their writ doesn’t run in the Dry Towns, or in trailman country, and the mountain people are pretty much out of their orbit—you know as well as I do that we mountain people live under our own customs and ways.”
“They rule? Doesn’t the King rule in the lowlands?”
“Oh, yes, there is a King in Thendara, ruling under the Comyn Council. The kingship used to rest with the Hasturs, but they gave it up, a few generations ago, in favor of another Comyn family, the Elhalyns, who are so intermarried with the Hasturs that it doesn’t make much difference. You know all this, damn it, I remember telling you when you were a child, as well as about the Aldarans.”
“I’m sorry, it all seemed very faraway.” They sat on blankets and furs inside the dark hut, crouched close to the fire, although to anyone accustomed to the fierce cold of the mountains it was not really cold. Outside, sleety rain whispered thickly along the slats of the hut. “What about the Aldarans? Surely they’re Comyn too?”
“They used to be; they may have some Comyn powers. But they were kicked out of Comyn Council generations ago; the story goes that they did something so horrible nobody knows or remembers what it was. Personally I suspect it was the usual sort of political dogfight, but I can’t say. No one alive knows, except maybe the Lords of Comyn Council.” He fell silent again. It was not Comyn he feared, but Valdir, specifically, and that too-knowing, all-reading gaze.
Storn did not have to be told how Melitta felt about what he had done. He felt the same way himself. He, too, had been brought up in the reverence of this Darkovan law against interfering with another human mind. Yet he justified himself fiercely, with the desperation of the law-abiding and peaceful man turned renegade. I don’t care what laws I have broken, it was my sister and my young brother in the hands of those men, and the village folk who have served my family for generations. Let me see them free and I don’t care if they hang me! What good is an invalid’s life, anyhow? I’ve nev
er been more than half alive, before this!
He was intensely aware of Melitta, half-kneeling before the low fire, close to him on the blankets. Isolated by the conditions of his life, as he had been till now, there had been few women, and none of his own caste, about whom he could care personally. To a developing telepath that had meant much. Habit and low vitality had made him indifferent to this deprivation; but the strange and newly vigorous body, in which he now felt quite at home, was more than marginally aware of the closeness of the girl.
It crossed his mind that Melitta was extraordinarily beautiful, even in the worn and stained riding clothes she had resumed when they left Carthon. She had loosened her hair and removed the outer cloak and tunic; under it was a loose rough linen shift. Some small ornament gleamed at her throat and her feet were bare. Storn, weary from days of riding, was still conscious of the reflex physical stir of awareness and desire. He let himself play at random with the thought, perhaps because all his other thoughts were too disturbing. Sexual liaisons between even full siblings in the mountains were not prohibited, although children born to such couples were thought unfortunate—the isolated mountain people were too aware of the dangers of inbreeding. With the grimmest humor he had yet felt, Storn thought, In a stranger’s body even that would not be anything to fear!
Then he felt a sudden revulsion. The stranger’s body was that of an alien, an Earthling, a stranger on their world—and he had been thinking of letting such a one share the body of his sister, a Lady of Storn? He set his jaw roughly, reached out and covered the fire.
“It’s late,” he said. “We have far to travel tomorrow. You’d better go to sleep.”
Melitta obeyed without a word, rolling herself in her fur cloak and turning away from him. She was aware of what he was thinking, and intensely sorry for him, but she dared not offer him overt sympathy. Her brother would have rejected it as he had done all her life, and she was still a little afraid of the stranger. It was not the low-keyed throb of his desire, which Melitta could feel almost as a physical presence, which disturbed her, of course. She did not care about that. As with any mountain girl of her caste, she knew that, travelling alone with any man, such a problem would in all probability arise. With Storn’s own person she might not have thought of it, but she was much more aware of the stranger than Storn realized. She had been forced to think about this eventuality and to make up her mind about it. She felt no particular attraction to the stranger, although if his presence had been uncomplicated by the eerie uncanniness of knowing that he was also her brother, she might have found him intriguing; certainly he was handsome, and seemed gentle and from the tones of his voice, likable. But if she had even inadvertently roused desire in him, common decency, by the code of women of her caste, demanded that she give it some release; to refuse this would have been wrong and cruelly whorish. If she had been unalterably opposed to this possibility, she would not have agreed to travel entirely alone with him; no mountain girl would have done so. It would not have been impossible to find a travelling companion in Carthon.
The Winds of Darkover Page 12
