Exile's Song (13 page)

Margaret stood for a long time, holding the cooling hand in her own, thinking of their years together, and his many kindnesses. At last her aloneness filled her senses. He was gone, and she would have to do the best she could, though at that moment, she wasn’t sure she knew what that was. She put his hand down on his chest, smoothed the covers a little, touched his wrinkled cheek tenderly, and turned away. There was nothing more she could do.

Exhaustion hit her like a bludgeon then, and her knees buckled. She staggered against the side of the huge bed, hitting her shin so hard that dots of light danced in her eyes. Grimly, she shut out the pain. It would still be there later, she knew. It would always be there. She was empty of tears, empty of everything except pain and loss. Anya took her arm gently, and led her off to bed.

 

 

She opened swollen eyelids and felt the pillow beneath her head. The cover was damp. Margaret blinked her eyes, and cleared her vision. It was not very dark in the room. She turned toward the window, and decided it was about mid-afternoon, local time. Why was she in bed? She hated sleeping in the daytime. It left her feeling muzzy-headed and crabby.

Why had she slept in daylight? Margaret rolled onto her back, and looked up at the richly-painted beams above her head. Memory rose like a river, flooding her mind. The fainting spell in the shop, the terrible run back to Master Everard’s, the spill on the cobblestones. She lifted one hand and saw the tidy gauze bandage which wrapped around her palm. No, she had not imagined it. Ivor was dead.

The tears came again, running into her ears with a maddening trickle. Her grief hardened into a kind of rage, a sense of having been abandoned again! She couldn’t figure out where that came from, this emptiness within her that filled her with a senseless anger which seemed to have no particular object. She sat up and cursed fluently in several languages, expelling the rage with words, until she sounded like a lunatic to herself.

Margaret silenced herself abruptly, and let her mind wander purposelessly. She did not want to think, because thinking just filled her with pain. For a moment she wished for the oblivion of wine, and found herself thinking of the Senator in his bouts of drink. Was this why he did it? For the first time she almost understood him, and found the sensation disquieting. She did not want to understand her father—ever!

Banishing him to the place where she consigned her most hated memories, Margaret found herself recalling the intricate rhymed couplets of Zeepangu. On that mist-shrouded planet, death was seen as an incredible shirking of responsibility. The mourners never wept or showed any sorrow. Instead, they cursed the corpse and cast the two-lined poems into the grave. She almost understood, for a moment, their sense of outrage and loss. But she was not Zeepangese, and she had no desire to curse Ivor for abandoning her. She just desperately wished he hadn’t died, as futile as that desire was, and that she was not so terribly frightened. How did anyone bear the pain of death?

Margaret had arrived at University a naive little Colonial of sixteen. It had been very strange, very alien, and she had hated it until Ivor had found her and given her both a home and a direction for her life. She had never imagined how ignorant she was until she began to meet the students from other worlds of the Federation, all with their own customs and assumptions. And every one of them had been as provincial as she, as certain that the way they did things at home was the
right
way.

The difference between Thetis and the University was the difference between country and city. Margaret hadn’t suspected she was a country mouse, that even the daughter of a Senator could be an idiot under certain circumstances. What a revelation it had been! She had been so frightened, and when she found Ivor and Ida Davidson, they had made her so welcome. She could feel both the terrible aloneness of that time, and the pleasure of being rescued by the kindly Davidsons.

For a moment, she relaxed into the warmth and safety of her treasured memories. But her sense of outrage persisted, like a heated brick just beneath her sternum. She couldn’t hold the pleasant feelings in her mind, because her fury kept bubbling up, no matter how hard she tried to prevent it. Why was she so angry? She was a logical person, a trained scholar, wasn’t she? Worse, why did she feel angry at Ivor? How disgusting!

Margaret experienced a sense of urgency now, a need to discover the source of her anger, to define it, package it up neatly, and thrust it away from her. No one close to her had ever died before. She was sure of that. She sat up in the bed, put her elbows on her bent knees, and rested her chin on her palms, frowning.

Except the feelings refused to allow themselves to be nicely analyzed and tucked away. They seemed like a bag of cats, all howling and scratching. And all of them had a claw in her belly. It was more than Ivor, wasn’t it? Someone else had died, someone she cared for? Margaret thought, but she couldn’t imagine who, except perhaps her real mother, her father’s first wife. She rarely thought about that woman. The few times she had, and had asked Dio about her, the look of pain and distress she had seen had made her wish she had kept silent. Or that other woman, that Thyra person, whom she was sure was part of the puzzle. Was she dead? Master Everard spoke of her in the past tense, so she supposed she was.

Ugh! She stank of sweat and dirt and misery and the Goddess knew what else. Margaret couldn’t bear that a moment longer, so she pushed the covers aside and looked for her clothes. Her uniform was nowhere to be seen, but the soft Darkover clothing she had purchased was hanging in the little closet. It felt wonderful under her fingertips, comforting and safe.

Margaret pinned back her hair and removed her sleeping clothes. She looked at the light, and realized she must have slept the clock around, and lost a day. She found her chronometer, and, indeed, a day had passed. No wonder she felt as if her head were stuffed with weeds. She shivered all over and pulled a robe out of the closet, tugging it across her naked skin, then headed for the huge tub she knew waited across the long hall. Darkover might lack electricity and landcars, but at least they were extremely civilized about bathing.

Margaret almost smiled, and found that the muscles of her face were so stiff that it was nearly painful. She never wanted to smile again! She felt stupid, then. She was still angry, and was probably going to be for a long time—even if she couldn’t find a specific reason to be raging. It would not go away for wishing. And she would smile again, and even laugh—Ivor would have wanted her to do that. But not right now. For the present, she was going to have to cope with having several strong emotions all at the same time, and none of them very pleasant. She sighed deeply, and a part of her chided herself for being so very dramatic. She felt as if some stranger had invaded her body while she slept, some other Margaret that she had known was lurking in her mind, waiting for the opportunity to escape and take over her body. Foolish, of course, but that was the truth of it.

Sinking into the heated depths of the bath, she reached for a green jar that stood on the side of the tub. Pouring some of the contents into the tub, she was overwhelmed by the scent. It was sweet and flowery—and somehow familiar. That little door in her dream came back to her, vividly. She stopped moving, remembering. What lay behind it? It was not an actual door, but she knew it had some meaning.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and the sweet scent of the flowers seemed to calm her. She was small again, a child’s body somehow superimposed over her own. She was sitting in a tub of warm water, scented with this same green mixture. Graceful arms had lowered her in.

Whose? Margaret was almost certain those arms belonged to the red-haired woman who haunted her nightmares. And there was someone else, too, someone she could not see. The silver-haired man?

And abruptly Margaret remembered another night before she left Thetis, a night she had shut away in her mental closet with all the others. For days before she left she had been too excited to sleep much, had packed and unpacked half a dozen times, trying to decide what to take with the small weight allowance permitted. At last she had gone downstairs to find something dull to read, to put her to sleep.

The Old Man was sitting before the fire, a glass in his hand. Her memory reconstructed every line of his face; the dark coarse beard, the deep furrows between his brows, and the scars he covered with flesh-colored makeup when he was outside his own house. She had often asked him, when she was small, how his face had become so scarred, but he had never answered her. Later, she had learned not to ask questions, not to remember, and never to disobey his strange orders.

He looked up and part of a smile touched his mouth. “Marja.” He had always called her that. Her passport named her “Margaret,” but Dio and the Senator always called her Marja.

“Excited?”

“A little. I couldn’t sleep. I suppose I’ll get some rest on the ship.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “When we left . . . when we came here, you were so sick. You appear to have inherited my allergies to most of the hyperspace drugs, though they have developed some new ones since then. Marja, do you remember anything at all from before you came here?”

For some reason, though he had spoken gently, the question made her chest tighten with terror. “Not much,” she said, “I was almost a baby.”

“But you weren’t. You were nearly six, and that’s old enough to remember a lot. Nothing? Not even in dreams?”

“Not really,” she replied. Six? Surely he was mistaken. How could she have forgotten six years of her life? Margaret felt angry and cheated. It was an old and bitter anger, one she wished she did not have. It came up at odd times, when Dio tried to explain the odd ways in which the Senator behaved toward her, or when she asked questions and was told to be quiet. “Dreams? Of course I dream . . . everyone does.”

“What about?” he asked instantly.

“Oh, the usual rubbish,” she said casually. The few months of the year when the three of them were together, when the Senator was not away doing whatever it was that he did, they kept such distance between them that they had nothing like a family life. His question made her feel as if the privacy they had long established between them had been violated, and she squirmed and wished she had stayed in her room. “You know. Stuff. Symbolic things. Locked rooms. Doors, walls. Something very valuable is locked up behind one door.”

His eyes brightened as she said this. “Like what?”

“A big—well, a jewel,” she said uncomfortably. “Does it matter?”

“It might. Is there anything more?”

“No, not really.” But there was.

Some awareness must have reached him, because he said, quite gently, “Tell me, child.”

“Oh, nothing. Sometimes I dream about a little door that seems very dreadful. I cry and bang on the door, but I can’t get in. Or maybe I cannot get out. Who knows in dreams. I’m very small, but the door’s smaller, and then—” She stopped, overcome by an emotion she could not put a name to. “Then you and Dio are there, the way you always are.”
But you weren’t there when I was locked away!
It was remarkable how angry she felt when she thought about the dream. She hoped he had not heard her thoughts—sometimes it seemed as if he could—because she did not want him to know how angry she was.

Apparently he had not caught the strong emotions that rattled her adolescent mind, or he was too far gone with drink to notice. “Come. Sit here, Marja; on the floor beside me, as you did when you were very small.”

For a second the offer was tempting. She had loved to curl up beside him before the fire when she was young, but now it made her feel stupid. “I’m not your puppy dog.”

“No,” he retorted, his quiet mood vanishing suddenly and inexplicably, the way it often did when he was drinking. “You’re a hellish redheaded bitch—just like your mother.”

“That is a fine way to talk about your dead wife!” she flared. Then she shivered. It was dangerous to provoke him when he was like this.

The Senator looked startled. “Marjorie? Why would you think I meant her? I loved her more than words can say,” he answered, a little more kindly. “But she wasn’t your real mother, curse the gods!”

“Dio is all the mother I have ever known. But I thought my biological mother was your first wife, even though you never talked about her. I just thought you loved her so much you couldn’t.” The words spilled out, even as she tried to hold them back. Margaret knew how dangerous it was to confront the Old Man, and she was surprised at herself. Everything had become confusing since she had decided to go off to University. He still wasn’t happy about her choice, but he would never say why.