The Forbidden Circle (44 page)

Upstairs, food had been brought, and Damon had carried it to Callista’s bedside. Callista was in bed again, looking white and worn. Ellemir was coaxing her to eat, in small bites as she would have coaxed a sick child. Damon made room for Andrew at his side, handed him a hot roll. “We didn’t wait for you. I was hungry after last night. The servants probably think we’re having an orgy up here!”

Callista said, with a small wry laugh, “I wish they were right. It would certainly be an improvement over present conditions.” She shook her head as Ellemir proffered her a bite of hot bread, spread with the aromatic mountain honey. “No, really, I can’t.”

Damon watched her with disquiet. She had drunk a few sips of milk, but had refused to eat, as if the very effort of swallowing was too much for her. He said at last, “You’ve taken over the still-room, Callista, have you made any
kirian
?”

She shook her head. “I’d been putting it off, and there’s no one here who needs it, with Valdir in Nevarsin. And it’s troublesome to make, having to be distilled three times.”

“I know. I’ve never made it, but I’ve watched it being done,” Damon said, looking sharply at her as she shifted weight. “You’re still in pain?”

She nodded, saying in a small voice, “I’m bleeding.”

“That, too?” Wasn’t she to be spared anything? “How much before the regular time is it? If it’s only a few days, it might be simply the shock.”

She shook her head. “You still don’t understand. There is no . . . no regular time for me. This is the first time—”

He stared at her in shock, almost disbelieving. He said, “But you had turned thirteen when you first went to the Tower, were your woman’s cycles not yet established?”

It seemed to Andrew that she looked embarrassed, almost ashamed. “No. Leonie said it was a good thing that they had not yet begun.”

Damon said angrily, “She should have waited for that to begin your training!”

Callista looked away, turning red. “She told me . . . beginning so young, some of the normal physical processes would be disrupted. But she said it would make it easier for me if I was spared that altogether.”

Damon said, “I thought
that
was a barbarism from the Ages of Chaos! For generations it has been taken for granted that a Keeper should be a woman grown!”

Callista rushed to the defense of her foster-mother. “She told me that six other girls had tried, and failed to make the adjustments, that it would be easier for me, with less pain and trouble. . . .”

Damon frowned, sipping at a glass of wine, staring into the depths as if he had seen something unpleasant there.

“Tell me, and think carefully. In the Tower, were you given any kind of drug to suppress your menses?”

“No, it was never necessary.”

“I cannot think it of Leonie, but did she ever work with a matrix, on your body currents?”

“Only in the ordinary pattern-training, I think,” Callista said doubtfully. Andrew broke in. “Look here, what is this all about?”

Damon’s face was grim. “In the old days, a Keeper in training was sometimes neutered—Marisela said something like that, remember? I cannot believe—I cannot
believe
,” he added with emphasis, “that Leonie would have blighted your womanhood that way!”

Callista said, stricken, “Oh, no, Damon! Oh, no! Leonie loves me, she would never . . .” But her voice faded out. She was afraid.

Leonie had been so sure that her choice was lifelong, had been so reluctant to release her. . . .

Andrew reached for Callista’s cold hand. Damon said, frowning, “No, I know you were not neutered, of course not. If your cycles have come on, your clock is running again. But it was done sometimes in the old days, when they felt virginity was less of a burden to a girl still immature.”

“But now it’s begun, she’ll be all right, won’t she?” Ellemir asked anxiously, and Damon said, “We’ll hope so.” Perhaps the arousal of last night, abortive as it had been, had reawakened some of those blocked pathways in her body; if she had suddenly matured, it might be that her illness and physical discomfort might be the normal troubles of early development. He remembered from his years in the Tower that young women in Keeper’s training, or for that matter any women working with psi mechanics above the level of monitor, were subject to recurrent and occasionally excruciating menstrual difficulties. Callista, following his thought, laughed a little and said, “Well, I have handed out golden-flower tea and such remedies to other women at Arilinn, and always thought myself lucky that I was immune to their miseries. It seems I have joined the ranks of normal women in
that
respect at least! I know we have golden-flower tea in the stillroom; Ferrika gives it to half the women on the estate. Perhaps a dose of that will be all I need.”

Ellemir said, “I’ll go and fetch you some,” and after awhile she came back with a small cup of some steaming hot brew. It had a pungent herbal smell, strongly aromatic. Callista’s voice held, for a moment, an echo of her old gaiety.

“Would you believe I have never tasted this? I hope it’s not too dreadful a potion!”

Ellemir laughed. “It would serve you right if it were, you wretched girl, if you hand out such decoctions with no idea of what they taste like! No, actually, it’s rather nice tasting. I never minded taking it. It will make you sleepy, though, so lie down and let it do its work.”

Obediently Callista drank off the steaming stuff and settled down under her blanket. Ellemir brought some needlework and sat beside her, and Damon said, “Come along, Andrew, they’ll be all right now,” and let him out of the room.

Downstairs, in the stone-floored still-room, Damon began to look through Callista’s supply of herbs, essences, distilling equipment. Andrew, looking at the oddly shaped flasks, the mortars and pestles and the bottles ranged on shelves, the bunches of dried herbs, leaves, stalks, pods, flowers, seeds, asked, “Are these all drugs and medicines?”

“Oh, no,” Damon said absently, pulling a drawer open. “These”—he gestured to some crushed seeds—“are cooking spices, and she makes incense to sweeten the air, and some cosmetic lotions and perfumes. None of the stuff you can buy in the towns is half as good as what’s made here by the old recipes.”

“What was that stuff Ellemir gave her?”

Damon shrugged. “Golden-flower? It’s a smooth muscle tonic, good for cramps and spasms of all kinds. It can’t hurt her; they give it to pregnant women and to babies with the colic too.” But, he wondered, frowning, if it could help Callista. Such serious interference with the physical processes . . . how could Leonie have done such a thing?

Andrew picked up the thought, as clearly as if Damon had spoken it aloud. “I knew Keepers underwent some physical changes. But this?”

“I am shocked too,” said Damon, turning a bunch of white thornleaf in his hands. “It’s certainly not customary these days. I had believed it was against the laws. Of course Leonie’s intentions couldn’t have been better. You saw the alterations in the nerve currents. Some of the girls do have a dreadful time with their woman’s cycles, and Leonie probably could not bear to see her suffering. But what a price to pay!” He scowled and began opening drawers again. “If Callista had freely chosen . . . but Leonie didn’t tell her! That is what I find hard to understand, or to forgive!”

Andrew felt an insidious dismay, a physical horror. Why should it, after all, shock him so much? Physical modification was not, after all, anything so unheard of. Most of the women who crewed Empire starships—they were made sterile by deep space radiations anyway—were spared the nuisance of menstruation. Hormone treatments made it unnecessary for women not actively engaged in childbearing. Why should it shock him so? It wasn’t shocking, except that
Damon
found it so! Would he ever get used to this goldfish-bowl life? Couldn’t he even think his own thoughts?

Damon was turning over bunches of herbs. He said, “You must understand. Callista is past twenty. She’s a grown woman who has been doing difficult, highly technical work as a matrix mechanic for years. She’s an experienced professional in the most demanding work on Darkover. Now none of her previous training, none of her skills, nothing is any good to her at all. She’s struggling with deconditioning, and with sexual awakening, and she has all the emotional problems of any bride. And now, on top of all that, I discover that physically she’s been held in the state of a girl of twelve or thirteen! Evanda! If I had only known. . . .”

Andrew looked at the floor. More than once, since the terrible fiasco of last night, he had felt as he imagined a rapist must feel. If Callista was, physically, an unawakened girl in her early teens—he felt a spasm of horror.

Damon said gently, “Don’t! Callista didn’t know it herself. Remember, for six years she’s been functioning as an adult, experienced professional.” Yet he knew this was not entirely true, either. Callista must have been aware of the enormous and ineradicable gulf between her and the other women. Leonie might have spared her protégée some physical suffering, but at what price?

Well, it was a good sign that the menstrual cycle had spontaneously reinstated itself. Perhaps other barriers would disappear with nothing more than time and patience. He picked up a bunch of dried blossoms and cautiously sniffed. “Good, here we are.
Kireseth
—no, don’t smell it, Andrew, it does funny things to the human brain.” He felt the faint guilt of memory. The taboo against the
kireseth
, among psi workers, was absolute, and he felt as if he had committed a crime in handling it. He said, speaking more to himself than Andrew, “I can make
kirian
from this. I don’t know how to distill it as they do in Arilinn, but I can make a tincture. . . .” His mind was busy with possibilities: a strong solution of the resins dissolved out in alcohol. Perhaps with Ferrika’s help he could make a single distillation. He put the stuff down, fancying that the smell of it was going to the roots of his brain, destroying controls, breaking barriers between mind and body. . . .

Andrew paced restlessly in the still-room. His own mind was filled with horrors. “Damon, Callista must have
known
what could happen.”

“Of course she knew,” said Damon, not really listening to him. “She learned that before she was fifteen years old, that no man can touch a Keeper.”

“And if I could hurt or frighten her so terribly—Damon!” Suddenly he was overcome by the horror and revulsion which had gripped him last night. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you know what she wanted me to do? She asked me to . . . to knock her unconscious and rape her when she . . . when she could not resist.” He tried to convey some of the horror that had awakened in him; but Damon only looked thoughtful.

“It just might have worked, at that,” he said. “It was intelligent of Callista to think of it. It shows she has some grasp of the problems involved.”

Andrew could not keep back a horrified “Good God! And you can say it like that, so calmly.”

Damon, turning, suddenly realized that the younger man was at the edge of his endurance. He said gently, “Andrew, you do know what saved you from being killed, don’t you?”

“I don’t know anything any more. And what I do know doesn’t help much!” He felt ragged despair. “Do you really think I could have—”

“No, no, of course not,
bredu
. I understand why you couldn’t. I don’t think any decent man could!” Gently, he laid a hand on Andrew’s wrist. “Andrew, what saved you—saved you both—was the fact that she
wasn’t
afraid. That she loved you, wanted you. So all she hit you with was the physical reflex she couldn’t control. She didn’t even knock you out; it was hitting your head on the furniture that did that. If she had been terrified and fighting you, if you had really been trying to take her unwilling, can you
imagine
what she would have thrown at you?” he demanded. “Callista is one of the most powerful telepaths on Darkover, and trained as a Keeper in Arilinn! If she had hated it, if she had thought of it as rape, if she had felt any . . . any fear or revulsion against your desire, you’d have been dead!” He repeated for emphasis, “You’d be dead, dead,
dead!”

But she was afraid, Andrew thought, until Damon and Ellemir made contact. . . . It was the awareness of Ellemir’s pleasure that made her want to share it! Even more disturbing was the thought of Damon, aware of Callista as
he
had been aware of Ellemir. Damon, sensing his distress, was for a moment shocked, experiencing it as a rebuff. They had all been so close, didn’t Andrew want to be part of what they were? He laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, a rare touch for a telepath, natural enough at this moment in the awareness of the intimacy they had shared. Andrew shrank from it, and Damon withdrew, troubled and a little saddened. Must he stay at such a distance? How long? How long? Was he brother or stranger?

But he said gently, “I know it’s new to you, Andrew. I keep forgetting that I grew up as a telepath, taking this sort of thing for granted. It will be all right, you’ll see.”

All right? Andrew asked himself. To know that only the fact that he had become an involuntary voyeur kept his wife from killing him? To know that Damon—and Ellemir—both took this kind of thing for granted, expected it, welcomed it? Did Damon resent his wanting Callista all to himself? He remembered the suggestion that Callista had made, remembered the feel of Ellemir in his arms, warm, responsive—
as Callista could not be
. Shocked, in desperate confusion, he turned away from Damon, blundering with horror to get out of the room. He was overloaded with shame and horror. He wanted—needed—to get away, anywhere, anywhere out of here, away from Damon’s too revealing touch, from the man who could read his most intimate thoughts. He did not know that he was virtually ill, with a very real illness known as culture shock. He only knew he felt sick, and the sickness took the form of furious rage against Damon. The heavy scent of the herbs made him afraid he would vomit. He said thickly, “I’ve got to get some air,” and pushed the door open, stumbling through the deserted kitchens and into the yard. He stood with the heavy snow falling all around him, and damned the planet where he had come and the chances that had brought him here.