The Forbidden Circle (59 page)

Damon nodded, knowing this was true.

“It is not easy to get your mind far enough from the agreements of what you call the real world to be free of time as you know it. Time itself is probably no more than a way of structuring reality so that our brains can make some sense out of it,” Leonie said. “Probably in the ultimate reality of the universe, to which our experiences are approximations, there is no experience of time as a sequence, but past and present and future all exist together as one chaotic whole. On a physical level—of course that includes the level where we are now, the world of images, where our visualization constantly recreates the world we prefer to see around us—we find it easier to travel along a personal sequence from what we call past to present to future. But in reality even a physical organism probably exists in its entirety at once, and its biological development from embryo to senility and death is merely another of its dimensions, like length. Am I confusing you, Damon?”

“Not much. Go on.”

“On the level of Timesearch that whole concept of linear sequence disappears. You must create it for yourself so that you do not become lost in the chaotic reality, and you must anchor yourself somehow so that you will not regress your physical body through the resonances. It is like wandering blindfold in a mirror-maze. I would rather do anything in this universe than try it again. Yet I fear that only in such a quest into time can you find an answer for Callista. Damon,
must
you risk it?”

“I must, Leonie. I made Callista a promise.” He would not tell Leonie of the extremity in which the promise had been made, or of the agony she had endured, when it would have been easier to die, because she trusted that promise. “I am not a Hastur, but I will not forswear my word.”

Leonie sighed deeply. She said, “I am a Hastur, and a Keeper, responsible for everyone who has given me an oath, man or woman. I feel now that if it were for me to choose, no woman would be trained as Keeper unless she first consented to be neutered, as was done in the ancient days. But the world will go as it will, and not as I would have it. I will take responsibility, Damon, yet I cannot take all the responsibility. I am the only surviving Keeper at Arilinn. Neskaya is often out of the relays because Theolinda is not strong enough even now, and Dalereuth is using a mechanic’s circle with no Keeper, so that I feel guilty keeping Janine at my side in Arilinn. We cannot train enough Keepers as it is now, Damon, and those we train often lose their powers while still young. Do you see why we need Callista so terribly, Damon?”

It was a problem with no answer, but Damon would not have Callista made a pawn, and Leonie knew it. She said at last, in wonder, “How you must love her, Damon! Perhaps it is to you I should have given her.”

Damon replied, “Love? Not in that sense, Leonie. Though she is dear to me, and I who have so little courage admire it above all else in anyone.”

“You have little courage, Damon?” Leonie was silent for a long time and he saw her image ripple and waver like heat waves in the desert beyond the Dry Towns. “Damon, oh, Damon, have I destroyed everyone I love? Only now do I see that I broke you, as I broke Callista. . . .”

The sound of that rang, timeless, like an echo, in Damon.
Have I destroyed everyone I love? Everyone I love, everyone I—everyone I love?

“You said it was for my own good that you sent me from Arilinn, Leonie, that I was too sensitive, that the work would destroy me.” He had lived with those words for years, had choked on them, swallowed them in bitterness, hating himself for living to hear them or repeat them. He never thought to doubt them, not for an instant . . . the word of a Keeper, a Hastur.

Trapped, she cried out, “What could I possibly have said to you?” Then, in a great cry of agony: “Something is wrong, terribly wrong, with our whole system of training psi workers! How can it possibly be right to sacrifice lives wholesale this way? Callista’s, Hilary’s, yours!” She added, with indescribable bitterness, “My own.”

If she had the courage or the honesty, Damon thought bitterly, to tell him the truth, to say to him, “One of us must go, and I am Keeper, and cannot be spared,” then he would have lost to Arilinn, yes, but he would not have been lost to himself.

But now he had recovered something lost when he was sent from the Towers. He was whole again, not broken as he was when Leonie cast him out, thinking of himself as weak, useless, not strong enough for the work he had chosen.

Something was desperately wrong with the system of training psi workers. Now even Leonie knew it.

He was shocked by the tragedy in Leonie’s eyes. She whispered, “What do you want of me, Damon? Because I came near to destroying your life in my weakness, does the honor of a Hastur demand I must stand unflinching and let you destroy mine in turn?”

Damon bowed his head. His long love, the suffering he had mastered, the love he had thought burned out years ago, lent him compassion. Here in the overworld, where no hint of physical passion could lend danger to the gesture or the thought, he reached for Leonie, and as he had longed to do through many hopeless years, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It did not matter that only images met, that they were, in the real world, a tenday ride apart, that no more than Callista could she ever have responded to his passion. None of this mattered. It was a kiss of such despairing love as he had never given, would never again give to any living woman. For a moment Leonie’s image wavered, flowed, until she was again the younger Leonie, radiant, chaste, untouchable, the Leonie for whose very presence he had hungered for so many anguished, lonely years, and tormented himself with guilt for the longing.

Then she was the Leonie of today, faded, worn, ravaged by time, weeping with a helpless sound he thought would break his heart. She whispered, “Go now, Damon. Return after Midwinter, and I will guide you to where you may seek in time for Callista’s destiny and your own. But for now, if there is any pity left in you, go!”

The overworld trembled as if in a storm, vanished in grayness, and Damon found himself back in the room at Armida. Callista was looking at him in dismay and consternation. Ellemir whispered, “Damon, my love, why are you crying?” But Damon knew he could never answer.

Needless, Cassilda and all the Gods, needless, all that suffering, his, Callista’s. Poor little Hilary’s. Leonie’s. And the pitying Avarra alone knew how many lives, how many telepaths in the Towers of the Domains, condemned to suffer. . . .

It would have been better for the Comyn, better for all of them, he despaired, if in the Ages of Chaos every son of Hastur and Cassilda had blown themselves to bits and their starstones with them! But there must be an end to it, an end to this suffering!

He clung desperately to Ellemir, reached beyond her to clutch at Andrew’s hands, at Callista’s. It wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough to wipe out his awareness of all that misery. But while they were all around him, close, he could live with it. For now. Maybe.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dom
Esteban had asked them to delay the psi work until Midwinter was past and the repairs of the storm completed. Damon welcomed the respite, even while he felt sick with apprehension, with the need to have it over. He knew that a lot would depend on the weather. If there were another storm, Midwinter festival would be celebrated with only the housefolk, but if the weather were fine, all the people within a day’s ride would come, and many of them would spend the night. Midwinter eve dawned red and pleasant, and Damon could see
Dom
Esteban visibly brightened by the prospect. He was ashamed of his own reluctance. A break in winter isolation meant a great deal, in the Kilghard Hills, and more to an old man, crippled and chair-bound. At breakfast Ellemir chattered gaily about plans for the festival, taking up the holiday spirit.

“I will set the kitchen girls to baking festival cakes, and one of the men must ride down to the South Valley and ask old Yashri and his sons to come play for the dancing. And if many are going to be sleeping overnight, we must have all the guest rooms opened and aired. And I suppose the chapel is shamefully filled with dust and dirt. I have not been down there since . . .” She faltered and looked away, and Callista said quickly, “I will tend the chapel, Elli, but are we to make the fire?” She glanced at her father and he said, “I dare say it’s foolishness, in this day and age, to kindle sun-fire.” He looked at Andrew, his eyebrows raised, as if, Damon thought, he expected the younger man to jeer. But Andrew said, “It seems to be one of the most universal customs of mankind, on most worlds, sir, some form of Midwinter festival marking the return of the sun after the longest night, and some form of Summer festival for the longest day.”

Damon had never thought of himself as a sentimental man, had trained himself harshly to leave the past buried, yet now he remembered all the winters he had spent at Armida, as Coryn’s friend. He used to stand beside Coryn at Midwinter festival, with all the little girls around them, and think that if he ever had a family of his own, he would keep to this custom. His father-in-law picked up the memory and raised his eyes, smiling at Damon. His voice was gruff: “I thought all you young people thought it a pagan nonsense and better forgotten, but if someone can carry my chair into the court we will have it done, then, if there is enough sun for the purpose. Damon, I cannot go choose wine for the feast, so here is the key to the cellars. Rhodri says the wine was good this year, even if I had no hand in the making.”

Andrew was returning from the daily task of inspecting the saddle horses when Callista intercepted him. “Come down and help me tend the chapel. No servant may do this, but only one connected by blood or marriage to the Domain. You have never been down here before.”

Andrew had not. Religion did not seem to play a very great part in the daily life of the Domains, at least not here at Armida. Callista had tied herself up in a big apron, explaining as they went down the stairs, “This was my only task as a child; Dorian and I used to tend the chapel at festivals. Elli was never allowed down here, because she was boisterous and broke things.”

It was easy to see Callista as a small, grave little girl, trusted to handle valuable and fragile things without breaking them. She said as they went into the chapel, “I have not been home for the festival since I went to the Tower. And now Dorian is wedded and has two little daughters—I have never seen them either—and Domenic away in Thendara commanding the Guard, and my youngest brother in Nevarsin. I have not seen Valdir since he was a babe in arms. I do not suppose I will see him now until he is grown.” She stopped and suddenly shivered, as if she had seen something frightening.

“Is Dorian much like you and Elli?”

“No, not much. She is fair, as many of the Ridenows are. Everyone said she was the beauty of the family.”

“I am reluctant to think all your family had defective eyesight,” Andrew said, laughing, and she colored, leading him into the chapel.

At the center was a four-sided altar, a stone slab of translucent white stone. It looked very old. On the walls of the chapel were old paintings. Callista pointed, explaining quietly, “These are the Four, the old Gods: Aldones, the Lord of Light; Zandru, who works evil in the darkness; Evanda, lady of spring and growing things; and Avarra, the dark mother of birth and death.” She took up a broom and began to sweep the room, which was, indeed, very dusty. Andrew wondered if she herself believed in these gods, or whether her religious observance was merely formal. Her very contempt of religion must be something different from what he believed about it.

She said, hesitating, “I am not sure what I believe. I am a Keeper, a
tenerésteis
, a mechanic. We are taught that the order of the universe does not depend upon any deities and yet . . . and yet who knows if it was not the Gods who ordained these laws which built things as they are, the laws we cannot refuse to obey.” She stood quietly for a moment, then went to sweep in the corner, calling Andrew to help her brush up the dust, gather the small dishes and vessels from the altar. In a niche on the wall was a very old statue of a veiled woman, surrounded by roughly sculptured children’s heads in blue stone. She said in a low voice, “Perhaps I am superstitious after all. This is Cassilda, called the Blessed, who bore a son to the Lord Hastur, son of Light. They say that from
his
seven sons were descended the seven Domains. I have no idea whether the tale is true, or only legend or fairy-tale, or garbled memory of some old truth somewhere, but the women of our family make offerings. . . .” She was silent, and in the dust of the neglected altar Andrew saw a bunch of flowers, left to wither there.

Ellemir’s offering, when she thought she was to bear Damon’s child. . . .

Silently he put his arm around Callista’s waist, feeling closer to her than at any time since the dreadful night of catastrophe. Many strange threads went to the making of a marriage. . . . Her lips were moving, and he wondered if she was praying, then she raised her head, sighed and took the withered posy between her fingers, dropping it tenderly into the pile of rubbish.

“Come, we must clean all these vessels and make the altar clean for the new fire to burn there. We must scrape all these candlesticks—how came they to leave all the dead wax in them last year, I wonder?” The gaiety was back in her voice again. “Go out to the well, Andrew, and bring in some fresh water.”

By noontime the great red disk of the sun hung clear and cloudless overhead, and two or three of the strongest Guardsmen carried
Dom
Esteban into the courtyard, while Damon set up the arrangement of mirror, burning-glass and tinder which would kindle the fire in the ancient stoneware fire-pan. They could smell the balsam incense Callista had kindled on the altar inside, and Damon, looking at Callista and Ellemir, could almost see them as little girls in tartan dresses, their hair curling around their cheeks, solemn and well behaved. Dorian had sometimes brought her doll to the ceremony—he could not remember ever seeing either Callista or Ellemir with a doll. He and Coryn had stood beside
Dom
Esteban for this ceremony. Now the old man could not kneel beside the fire-pan, and it was Damon who held the burning-glass, stood waiting while the brilliant focus of light crawled across the tinder and resin-needles, raising a thin trail of fragrant smoke. For a long time the spot smoldered, the smoke rising. Then a crimson spark echoed the glare of the sun in the mirror, and a tiny flame leaped to life at the center of the smoke. Damon crouched over the fire-pan, coaxing the flame, carefully feeding it with resin-needles and shavings, until it blazed up, to an accompaniment of cheers and cries of encouragement from the watchers. He handed the fire-pan to Ellemir, who carried it inside to the altar. Then, laughing and exchanging good wishes and season’s greetings, they began to leave the court, passing one by one past the old man’s chair to receive small gifts. Ellemir, standing beside him, handed them out, trinkets of silver and sometimes copper. In a few cases—the more valued servants—she gave certificates entitling them to livestock or other property. Callista and Ellemir bent one after another to kiss their father and wish him the joy of the season. His gifts to his daughters were valuable furs which they could have made into riding cloaks for the worst weather.