The Forbidden Circle (31 page)

Damon blinked in dismay. “You came here without family, without friends?”

Andrew shrugged. “I grew up on Terra—a horse ranch in a place called Arizona. When I was eighteen or so, my father died, and the ranch was sold for his debts. My mother didn’t live long after that, and I went into space as a civil servant, and a civil servant goes where he’s sent, more or less. I wound up here, and you know the rest.”

“I thought you had no servants among you,” Damon said, and Andrew got into a tangle of words trying to explain to the other man the difference which made a civil servant other than a servant. Damon listened skeptically and finally said, “A servant, then, to computers and paperwork! I think I had rather be an honest groom or cook!”

“Aren’t there cruel masters who exploit their servants?”

Damon shrugged. “No doubt, just as some men ill-treat their saddle horses and whip them to death. But a reasoning man may some day learn the error of his ways, and at the worst, others may restrain him. But there is no way to teach a machine wisdom after folly.”

Andrew grinned. “You know, you’re right. We have a saying, you can’t fight the computer, it’s right even when it’s wrong.”

“Ask
Dom
Esteban’s hall-steward, or the estate midwife Ferrika, if they feel ill-used or exploited,” Damon said. “You’re telepath enough to know if they’re telling the truth. And then, perhaps, you’ll decide you can honorably let some man earn his wages as your body-servant and your groom.”

Andrew shrugged. “No doubt I will. We have a saying, When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Rome, I think, was a city on Terra; it was destroyed in a war or an earthquake, centuries ago, only the proverb remains. . . .”

Damon said, “We have a similar saying; it runs, Don’t try to buy fish in the Dry Towns.” He walked around the room he had chosen for his bedroom and Ellemir’s. “These draperies have not been aired since the days of Regis the Fourth! I’ll get the stewards to change them.” He pulled a bell-rope, and when the steward appeared, gave orders.

“We’ll have it done by tonight, my lord, so you and your ladies can move in when you like. And, Lord Damon, I was asked to let you know that your brother, Lord Serrais, has come to witness your wedding.”

“Very good, thank you. If you can find Lady Ellemir, ask her to come and approve what arrangements we have made,” Damon said. When the servant went away, he grimaced.

“My brother Lorenz! Such good will as he has for my wedding, I suspect, could be dropped into my eyes without pain! I had hoped for my brother Kieran, at least, or my sister Marisela, but I suppose I should be honored, and go to say a word of thanks to Lorenz.”

“Have you many brothers?”

“Five,” Damon said, “and three sisters. I was the youngest son, and my father and mother had already too many children when I was born. Lorenz—” He shrugged. “I suppose he is relieved that I have taken a bride of family so good that he need not haggle about patrimony and a younger son’s portion. I am not wealthy, but I have never wished for much wealth, and Ellemir and I will have enough for our needs. My brother Lorenz and I have never been overly friendly. Kieran—he is only three years older than I—Kieran and I are
bredin
; Marisela and I are only a year apart in age, and we had the same foster-mother. As for my other brothers and sisters, we are civil enough when we meet in Council season, but I suspect none of us would grieve over much if we never met again. My home has always been here. My mother was an Alton, and I was fostered near here, and
Dom
Esteban’s oldest son went with me into the Cadets. We swore the oath of
bredin
.” It was the second time he had used this word, which was the intimate or family form of brother. Damon sighed, looking into space for a moment.

“You were a cadet?”

“A very poor one,” Damon said, “but no Comyn son can escape it if he has two sound legs and his eyesight. Coryn was like all Altons, a born soldier, a born officer. I was something else.” He laughed. “There’s a joke in the cadet corps about the cadet with two right feet and ten thumbs. That was me.”

“Awkward squad all the way, huh?”

Damon nodded, savoring the phrase. “Punishment detail eleven times in a tenday. I’m right-handed, you see. My foster-mother—she was midwife to my mother—used to say I was born upside-down and ass-backward, and I’ve been doing everything that way ever since.”

Andrew, who had been born left-handed into a right-handed society and only on Darkover had found things arranged in a way that made sense to him, everything from silverware to garden tools, said, “I can certainly understand that.”

“I’m a bit short-sighted, too, which didn’t help, though it was a help in learning to read. None of my brothers have any clerical skills, and they can’t do much more than spell out a placard or scrawl their names to a deed. But I took to it like a rabbithorn to the snow, so when I finished in the cadets I went to Nevarsin, and spent a year or two learning to read and write and do some map-making and the like. That was when Lorenz decided I’d never make a man. When they accepted me at Arilinn, it only confirmed him in his decision: half monk, half eunuch, he used to say.” Damon was silent, his face set in lines of distaste. Finally he said, “But for all that he was no better pleased when they sent me from the Tower, a few years ago. For Coryn’s sake—Coryn was dead then, poor lad, killed in a fall from the cliffs—but for his sake,
Dom
Esteban took me into the Guards. I was never much of a soldier, though, hospital officer, cadet-master for a year or two.” He shrugged. “And that’s my life, and enough of that. Listen, the women are coming, we can show our wives around before I have to go down and try to be polite to Lorenz!”

Andrew saw, with relief, that the lonely, introspective sadness slid off his face as Ellemir and Callista came in.

“Come, Ellemir, see the rooms I have chosen for us.”

He took her through a door at the far end, and Andrew sensed, rather than heard, that he was kissing her. Callista followed them with her eyes and smiled. “I am glad to see them so happy.”

“Are you happy too, my love?”

She said, “I love you, Andrew. I do not find it so easy to rejoice. Perhaps I am naturally a little less light of heart. Come, show me the rooms we are to have.”

She approved of nearly everything, though she pointed out half a dozen pieces of furniture which, she said, were so old they were not safe to sit on, and called a steward, directing that they be taken away. She called the maids and gave directions about what things were to be brought from the household storerooms for bedroom and bath linens, and sent another to have her clothing brought and stored in the enormous clothes-press in her dressing room. Andrew listened in silence, finally saying, “You are quite a homemaker, Callista!”

Her laugh was delightful. “It is all pretense. I have been listening to Ellemir, that is all, because I do not want to sound ignorant in front of her servants. I know very little about such things. I have been taught to sew, because I was never allowed to let my hands sit idle, but when I watch Ellemir about the kitchens, I realize that I know less of housekeeping than any girl of ten.”

“I feel the same way,” Andrew confessed. “Every thing I learned in the Terran Zone is useless to me now.”

“But you know something of horse-breaking—”

Andrew laughed. “Yes, and in the Terran Zone that was considered an anachronism, a useless skill. I used to take Dad’s saddle horses and break them, but I thought when I left Arizona that I’d never ride again.”

“Does everyone on Terra walk, then?”

He shook his head. “Motor transit. Slidewalks. Horses were an exotic luxury for rich eccentrics.” He went to the window and looked out on the sunlit landscape. “Strange, that of all the known worlds of the Terran Empire, I should have come
here
.” A faint shudder went through him at the thought of how narrowly he could have missed what now seemed his fate, his life, the true purpose for which he had been born. He wanted desperately to reach out and draw Callista into his arms, but as if his thought had somehow reached her, she went tense and white. He sighed and stepped a pace away from her.

She said, as if completing a thought that no longer interested her much, “Our horse-handler is already an old man, and without Father at hand, it may be up to you to teach the younger ones.” Then she stopped and looked up at him, twisting the end of one long braid.

“I want to talk to you,” she said abruptly.

He had never decided whether her eyes were blue or gray; they seemed to vary with the light, and in this light they were almost colorless. “Andrew, will this be too hard on you? To share a room when we cannot—as yet—share a bed?”

He had been warned of this when they first discussed marriage, that she had been conditioned so deeply that it might be a long time before they could consummate their marriage. He had promised her then, unasked, that he would never hurry her or try to put any pressure on her, that he would wait as long as necessary. He said now, touching her fingertips lightly, “Don’t worry about it, Callista. I promised you that already.”

Faint color crept slowly across her pale cheeks. She said, “I have been taught that it is . . . shameful to arouse a desire I will not satisfy. Yet if I stay apart from you, and do
not
rouse it, so that in turn your thoughts may act on me, then things may never be different at all. If we are together, then, slowly perhaps, things may be different. But it will be so hard on you, Andrew.” Her face twisted. She said, “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

Once, once only, and with great constraint, and briefly, he had spoken of this with Leonie. Now, as he stood looking down at Callista, that brief meeting, difficult on both sides, came back to his mind as if again he stood before the Comyn
leronis
. She had come to him in the courtyard, saying quietly, “Look at me, Terran.” He had raised his eyes, unable to resist. Leonie was so tall that their eyes were on a level. She had said, in a low voice, “I want to see to what manner of man I am giving the child I love.” Their eyes had met, and for a long moment Andrew Carr felt as if every thought of his entire life had been turned over and rummaged through by the woman, as if in that one glance, and not a long one, she had drawn the very inmost part from him and left it to dangle there, cold and withering. Finally—it had not been more than a second or two, but it had seemed an age—Leonie had sighed and said, “So be it. You are honest and kind and you mean well, but have you the faintest idea of what a Keeper’s training means, or how hard it will be for Callista to lay it down?”

He had wanted to protest, but instead he had only shaken his head and said humbly, “How can I know? But I will try to make it easy for her.”

Leonie’s sigh had seemed ripped up from the very depths of her being. She had said, “Nothing you could do, in this world or the next, could make it easy for her. If you are patient and careful—and lucky—you may make it
possible
. I do not want Callista to suffer. And yet in the choice she has made, there will be much suffering. She is young, but not so young that she can put aside her training without pain. The training that makes a Keeper is long; it cannot be undone in a little while.”

Andrew had protested. “I know—” and Leonie had sighed again. “Do you? I wonder. It is not only a matter of delaying the consummation of your marriage for days, or perhaps for seasons; that will be only the beginning. She loves you, and is eager for your love—”

“I can be patient until she is ready,” Andrew had sworn, but Leonie had said, shaking her head, “Patience may not be enough. What Callista has learned cannot be unlearned. You do not want to know about that. Perhaps it is better for you not to know too much.”

He had said again, protesting, “I’ll try to make it easy for her,” and again Leonie had shaken her head and sighed, repeating, “Nothing you could do could make it easy. Chickens cannot go back into eggs. Callista will suffer, and I fear you will suffer with her, but if you are—if you
both
are lucky, you may make it possible for her to retrace her steps. Not easy. But possible.”

Indignation had burst out of him then. “How can you people do this to young girls? How can you destroy their lives this way?” But Leonie had not answered, lowering her head and moving noiselessly away from him. When he blinked she was gone, as swiftly as if she had been a shadow, so that he began to doubt his sanity, began to wonder if she had ever been there at all, or if his own doubts and fears had constructed an hallucination.

Callista, standing before him in the room that—tomorrow—would be theirs to share, raised her eyes again, slowly, to his. She said in a whisper, “I did not know Leonie had come to you that way,” and he saw her hands clench tightly, so tightly that the small knuckles were white as bone. Then she said, looking away from him, “Andrew, promise me something.”

“Anything, my love.”

“Promise me. If you ever . . . desire some woman, promise me you will take her and not suffer needlessly. . . .”

He exploded. “What kind of man do you think I am? I love you! Why would I want anyone else?”

“I cannot expect—It is not right or natural. . . .”

“Look here, Callista,” and his voice was gentle, “I’ve lived a long time without women. I never found it did me all that much harm. A few, here and there, while I was knocking around the Empire on my own. Nothing serious.”

She looked down at the tips of her small dyed-leather sandals. “That’s different, men alone, living away from women. But here, living with me, sleeping in the same room, being near me all the time and knowing . . .” She ran out of words. He wanted to take her into his arms and kiss her till she lost that rigid, lost look. He actually laid his hands on her shoulders, felt her tense under the touch, and let his hands drop to his sides. Damn anyone who could build pathological reflexes into a young girl this way! But even without the touch, he felt the grief in her, grief and guilt. She said softly, “You have no bargain in a wife, Andrew.”