Dom Stephen said defensively, “I would never so far forget myself, Allart, except that you have not been willing to do your duty by our caste. But I am sure you are enough my son that you will come to life with a woman in your arms!” He added, crudely, “You need not be scrupulous; the creatures are sterile.”
Allart thought, sick with disgust, I may not wait for the room with the green and gold hangings, I may kill him here and now, but his father had turned away and gone into his own chamber.
He thought, enraged, as he made ready for bed, of how corrupt they had become. We, the sacred descendants of the Lord of Light, bearing the blood of Hastur and Cassilda—or was that only a pretty fairy tale? Were the laran gifts of the families descended from Hastur no more than the work of some presumptuous mortal, meddling with gene-matter and brain-cells, some sorceress with a matrix jewel modifying germ plasm as Dom Marius’s leronis did with those riyachiyas, making exotic toys for corrupt men?
The gods themselves—if indeed there are any gods—must turn sick at the sight of us!
The warm, luxurious room sickened him; he wished himself back at Nevarsin, in the solemn night silence. He had turned out the light when he heard an almost noiseless foot-step and the girl Leila, in her flimsy draperies, stole softly across the floor to his side.
“I am here for your contentment, vai dom.”
Her voice was a husky murmur; her eyes alone betrayed that she was not human, for they were dark brown animal eyes, great soft, strange unreadable eyes.
Allart shook his head.
“You can go away again, Leila, I will sleep alone tonight”
Sexual images tormented him, all the things he might do, all the possible futures, an infinitely diverging set of probabilities hinging on this moment. Leila sat on the edge of the bed; her soft slender fingers, so delicate that they seemed almost boneless, stole into his. She murmured, pleading, “If I do not please you, vai dom, I will be punished. What would you have me do? I know many, many ways to give delight.”
He knew his father had maneuvered this situation. The riyachiyas were bred and taught and spelled to be irresistible; had Dom Stephen hoped she would break down Allan’s inhibitions?
“Indeed, my master will be very angry if I fail to give you pleasure. Shall I send for my sister, who is as dark as I am fair? And she is even more skilled. Or would it give you pleasure to beat me, Lord? I like to be beaten, truly I do.”
“Hush, hush!” Allart felt sick. “No one would want anyone more beautiful than you.” And indeed, the shapely young body, the enchanting little face, the loose scented hair falling across him, were enticing. She had a sweet, faintly musky scent; somehow before he touched her he had believed that the riyachiyas would smell animal, not human.
Her spell is on me, he thought. How then could he resist? With a sense of deathly weariness, as he felt her slender fingertips trace a line of awareness down his bare neck from earlobe to shoulder, he thought, What does it matter? I had indeed resolved to live womanless, never to pass on this curse I bear. But this poor creature is sterile, I cannot father a child on her if I would. Perhaps when he knows I have done his will in this, he will be less ready to put insults on me and call me less than a man. Bearer of Burdens, strengthen me! I but make excuses for what I want to do. Why should I not? Why must I alone resist what is given by right to every man of my caste? His mind was spinning. A thousand alternate futures spun out before him: in one he seized the girl in his hands and wrung her neck like the animal he knew her to be; in another he saw himself and the girl entwined in tenderness, and the image swelled, driving the awareness of lust into his body; in another he saw the dark maiden lying dead before him… So many futures, so much death and despair… Spasmodically, desperately, trying to blot out the multiple futures, he took the girl in his arms and drew her down on the bed. Even as his lips came down on hers, he thought of despair, futility. What does it matter, when there is all this ruin before me…?
He heard, as if from nowhere, her small cries of pleasure, and in his wretchedness, thought, At least she is not unwilling, and then he did not think again at all, which was an enormous relief.
* * *
CHAPTER FIVE
« ^ »
When he woke, the girl was gone, and Allart lay without moving for a moment, overcome with sickness and self-contempt. How shall I keep from killing that man, that he brought this upon me… ? But as his father’s dead face swam before his eyes in the familiar room with green and gold hangings, he reminded himself sternly, The choice was mine; he provided only the opportunity.
Nevertheless, he felt overwhelming self-contempt as he moved around the room, making ready to ride. In the night past he had learned something about himself that he would rather not have known.
In his six years in Nevarsin it had been no trouble to him to keep to the womanless precincts of the monastery, to live without thought of women; he had never been tempted, even at midsummer festival when even the monks were free to join in the revelry, to seek love or its counterfeit in the lower town. So it had never occurred to him that he would find it difficult to keep his resolve—not to marry, not to father children bearing the monstrous curse of laran. Yet, even through his loathing and revulsion for the thing Leila was, not even human, six years of self-imposed celibacy had been cast aside in minutes, at the touch of a riyachiya’s obscenely soft fingertips.
Now what is to become of me? If I cannot keep my resolve for a single night. … In the crowding, diverging futures he saw before his every step, there was a new one, and it displeased him: that he might become some such creature as old Dom Marius, refusing marriage indeed, sating his lust with these unnaturally bred pleasure girls, or worse.
He was grateful that their host did not appear at breakfast; he found it hard enough to face his father, and the vision of his father’s dead face came near to blotting out the real, live presence of the old man, good-natured over his buttered bread and porridge. Sensing his son’s unspoken anger (Allart wondered if his father had had reports from servants, or even if he had stooped low enough to question the girl Leila, to verify that Allart had proved his masculinity), Dom Stephen kept silence until they were donning their riding-cloaks, then said, “We will leave the riding-animals here, son; Dom Marius has offered us an air-car which will take us directly to Hali, and the servants can bring the riding-animals on in a few days. You have not ridden in an air-car since you were very small, have you?”
“I do not remember that I rode in one even then,” said Allart, interested against his will. “Surely they were not common in such times.”
“No, very uncommon, and of course they are toys for the wealthy, demanding a skilled laran operator as they do,” Lord Elhalyn said. “They are useless in the mountains; the crossdrafts and winds would dash any heavier-than-air vehicle against the crags. But here in the Lowlands it is safe enough, and I thought such a flight would divert you.”
“I confess I am curious,” Allart said, thinking that Dom Marius of Syrtis certainly spared no pains to ingratiate himself with his overlord. First he put his favorite pleasure girls at their disposal, and now this! “But I heard at Nevarsin that these contrivances were not safe in the Lowlands either. While war rages between Elhalyn and Ridenow, they are all too easily attacked.”
Dom Stephen shrugged, saying, “We all have laran; we can make short work of any attackers. After six years in a monastery, no doubt your fighting skills are rusty when it comes to sword and shield, but I have no doubt you could strike anyone who attacked us out of the sky. I have fire-talismans.” He looked shrewdly at his son, then said, “Or are you going to tell me that the monks have made you such a man of peace that you will not defend your life or the life of your kinsmen, Allart? I seem to remember that as a boy you had no stomach for fighting.”
No, for at every stroke I saw death or disaster for myself or another, and it is cruel of you to taunt me with childish weakness which was no fault of mine, but of your own accursed heredi
tary Blood-Gift… But aloud Allart said, forcing himself to ignore the shocking dead face of his father which persisted in appearing before his eyes, blurring his father’s living face, “While I live, I will defend my father and my Lord to the death, and the gods do so to me and more also if I fail or falter.”
Startled, warmed by something in Allart’s voice, Lord Elhalyn put out his arms and embraced his son. For the first time Allart could remember, to him or anyone, the old man said, “Forgive me, dear son, that was not worthy of me. I should not so accuse you unmerited,” and Allart felt tears stinging his eyes.
Gods forgive me. He is not cruel, or if he is, it is only out of fear for me, too… He truly wills to be kind…
The air-car was long and sleek, made of some gleaming glassy material, with ornamental stripes of silver down the length of it, a long cockpit with four seats, open to the sky. Cralmacs rolled it out from its shed, onto the ornamented paving of the inner courtyard, and the operator, a slender young man with the red hair which proclaimed the minor nobility of the Kilghard Hills, approached them with a curt bow, a mere perfunctory reverence; a highly trained expert, a laranzu of this kind, needed to be deferential to no man, not even to the brother of the king at Thendara.
“I am Karinn, vai dom. I have orders to take you to Hali. Please take your seats.”
He left it to the cralmacs to lift Dom Stephen into his seat, and to fasten the straps around him, but as Allart took a place, Karinn lingered a moment before going to his own seat. He said, “Have you ever ridden in one of these, Dom Allart?”
“Not since I can remember. Is it powered by such a matrix as you alone can handle? That would seem beyond belief!”
“Not entirely; in there”—Karinn pointed—“is a battery charged with energy to run the turbines; it would indeed demand more power than one man has at his command, to levitate and move such an apparatus, but the batteries are charged by the matrix circles, and my laran, at this moment, is needed only to guide and steer—and to be aware of attackers and evade them.” His face was somber. “I would not defy my overlord, and it is no part of my duty to refuse to do as I am bid, but—have you laran?”
As Karinn spoke, the unease in Allart clarified, with a sudden sharp vision of this air-car bursting asunder, exploding, falling out of the sky like a stone. Was this only a distant probability or did it truly lie before them? He had no way of knowing.
“I have laran enough to be uneasy at trusting myself to this contraption. Father, we will be attacked. You know that?”
“Dom Allart,” Karinn said, “this contraption, as you call it, is the safest means of transport ever devised by starstone technology. You are vulnerable to attack between here and Hali, should you go a-horse, for three days; in an air-car you will be there before midday and they must place their attackers very precisely. Furthermore, it is easier to defend yourself with laran than against such weapons as they may send against you with armed men. I can see a day coming on Darkover when all the Great Houses will have such weapons and devices to protect themselves against envious rivals or rebellious vassals; and then there will be no more wars, either, for no sane men will risk this kind of death and destruction. Such contraptions as this, vai dom, may be only expensive toys for rich men now, but they will bring us such an age of peace as Darkover has never known!”
He spoke with such conviction and enthusiasm that Allart doubted his own rising vision of dreadful warfare with weapons ever more dreadful. Karinn must be right. Such weapons would surely restrain sane men from making war at all, and so he who invented the most terrible weapens worked the harder for peace.
Taking his seat, Allart said, “Aldones, Lord of Light, grant you speak with true vision, Karinn. And now let us see this miracle.”
I have seen many possible futures which never came to pass. I have found this morning that I love my father well, and I will cling to the belief that I will never lay hands upon him, no more than I would wring the neck of that poor harmless little riyachiya in the night past. I will not fear attack, either, but I will guard against it, while I take pleasure in this new means of travel. He let Karinn show him how to fasten the straps that would hold him in his seat if the air became turbulent, and the device that swiveled his seat behind a magnified pane of glass, giving him instant view of any attackers or menace.
He listened closely as the laranzu, taking his own seat and fastening himself into place, bent his head in alert concentration and the battery-powered turbine began to roar. He had practiced enough in boyhood, in the tiny gliders levitated by small matrixes and soaring on the air currents around the Lake of Hali, to be aware of the elementary principles of heavier-than-air flight, but it was incredible to him that a matrix circle, a group of close-linked telepath minds, could charge a battery strongly enough to power such enormous turbines. Yet laran could be powerful, and a matrix could amplify the electric currents of the brain and body enormously, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. He wondered how many minds with laran it took, operating for how long, to charge such batteries with the tremendous humming power of those roaring turbines. He would have liked to ask Karinn— but would not disturb the laranzu’s concentration—why such a vehicle could not be adapted to ground transit, but quickly realized that for any ground vehicle roads and highways were needed. Someday, perhaps, roads would be practical, but on the rough terrain from the Kilghard Hills north, ground transit would probably always be limited to the feet of men and animals.
Quickly, with the humming power, they skimmed along a level runway surfaced with glassy material which must have been poured there by matrix-power, too; then they were airborne, rising swiftly over treetops and forests, moving into the very clouds with an exhilarating speed that took Allart’s breath away. It was as far beyond the soaring he had done on gliders, as the gliders were above the slow plodding of a chervine! Karinn motioned, and the air-car turned its vast wings southward and flew over the forests to the south.
They had flown for a considerable time. Allart was beginning to feel the straps constricting his body, and wished he might loosen them for a little, when he felt within himself, with a spurt of sudden excitement, alertness and fear.
We are seen, pursued—we will be attacked!
Look to the west, Allart—
Allart squinted his eyes into the light. Small shapes appeared there, one, two, three—were they gliders? If they were, such an air-car could outrun them swiftly. And, indeed, Karinn, with swift motions of his hands, was turning the air-car to evade the pursuers. For a moment it seemed they would not be followed; one of the gliding forms—These are not gliders! Are they hawks?—soared up, up, above them, higher and higher. It was indeed a hawk, but Allart could feel human intelligence, human, awareness, watching them with malevolent will. No natural hawk had ever had eyes which glittered so, like great jewels! No, this is no normal bird! Restless with unease, he watched the soaring flight of the bird as it went higher and higher, winging with long, swift flapping strokes into the sky above them…
Suddenly a narrow, gleaming shape detached itself from the bird and fell down, plummeting, arrowlike, toward the car. Allart’s vision, even before thought, provided him with the knowledge of what would happen if that long, deadly shape, gleaming like glass, should strike the air-car: they would explode into fragments, each fragment coated with the terrible clingfire, which clung to what it touched and went on burning and burning, through metal and glass and flesh and bone.
Allart grasped the matrix he wore about his neck, jerked it with shaking fingers from the protecting silks. There is so little time… Focusing into the depths of the jewel, he altered his awareness of time so that now the glassy shape fell ever more slowly, and he could focus on it, as if taking it between invisible fingers of force… Slowly, slowly, carefully… he must not risk having it break while it could fall into the air-car and fragments of clingfire destroy flesh and car. His slowed awareness spun accelerated futures through his mind—he saw the air-car exploding in fragments, hi
s father slumping over and blazing up with clingfire in his hair, Karinn going up like a torch, and the air-car falling out of control, heavier than a stone… but none of those things would be allowed to happen!
With infinite delicacy, his mind focused into the pulsing lights of his matrix, and his eyes closed, Allart manipulated the glassy shape away from the air-car. He sensed resistance, knew the one guiding the device was fighting him for control of it. He struggled silently, feeling as if his physical hands were trying to keep hold of a greased and wriggling live thing while other hands fought to wrest it away, to fling it at him.
Karinn, quickly, get us higher if you can so that it will break below us…
He felt his body slump against the straps as the air-car angled sharply upward; saw, with a fragment of his mind, his father collapse in his seat, thinking with swift contrition, He is old, frail, his heart cannot take much of this… but the main part of his mind was still in those fingers of force that struggled with the now-writhing device, which seemed to squirm under the control of his mind. They were nearly free of it now—
It exploded with a wild crash that seemed to rock all space and time, and Allart felt sharp burning pain in his hands; swiftly he withdrew his consciousness from the vicinity of the exploded device, but the burning still resonated in his physical hands. Now he opened his eyes and saw that the device had indeed exploded well below them, and fragments of clingfire were falling in a molten shower to set ablaze the forests below. But one fragment of the glassy shell had been flung upward, over the rim of the air-car, and the thin fire was spreading along the edge of the cockpit, reaching fingers of flame toward where his father lay slumped and unconscious.
Allart fought against his first impulse—to lean over and beat out the fire with his hands. Clingfire could not be extinguished that way; any fragment that touched his hands would burn through his clothing and his flesh and through to the bone, as long as there was anything left to be consumed. He focused again into the matrix—there was no time to take out the fire-talisman Karinn had given him, he should have had it ready!—calling his own fire and flaring it out toward the clingfire. Briefly it flamed high, then with a last gutter of light, the clingfire died and was gone.
Stormqueen! Page 7
