Heritage and Exile (109 page)

The sullen red of another day was dying when I woke; my head throbbed with the half-healed wound Kadarin had given me, and my arm was afire with the long slash from Regis's dagger. I lay and wondered for a moment if the whole thing had been a delirious nightmare born of concussion. Then Andres came in, and the deep lines of grief in his face told me it was real. He had loved Linnell, too. He came and scowled at me, taking off the bandage on my head and inspecting the stitches, then looked at the wound in the arm.

“I suppose you are the only man on Darkover who can go to a Festival Night ball and come home with something like this,” he grumbled. “What sort of fight was it?”

So he had heard only that Linnell was dead—not of the monstrous visitation of Sharra. The cut hurt, but it was no more than a flesh wound. I'd have trouble using the arm for a while, but I held no resentment; Regis had done the only thing he could, releasing me from the call of Sharra. I said, “It was an accident, he didn't mean to hurt me,” and let him think what he liked. “Get me something to eat and some clothes. I have to find out what's happening—”

“You look as if you needed a tenday in bed,” Andres said crossly. Then his very real concern for me surfaced in a harsh, “Lad, I've lost two of you! Don't send yourself after Marius and Linnell! What's going on that you can't wait until tomorrow for it?”

I yielded and lay quiet. Somewhere out there Sharra raged, I supposed . . . but I would know if they came into the Comyn Castle (was I altogether freed? I did not dare look at my matrix to see) and there was nothing to be gained by going out and looking for trouble. I watched Andres grumbling around the room, a soothing sound I remembered from boyhood. When Marius or I had raced our horses at too breakneck a pace and tumbled off, breaking a finger or a collarbone on the way down, he had grumbled in exactly the same way.

Marius and I had never had the boyhood squabbles and fistfights of most brothers I knew; there had been too many years between us. By the time he was out of pinafores and able to assert himself, I was already grown and into the cadet corps. I had only begun to know what kind of man my brother was, and then he was gone from me, the furthest distance of all. I had dragged him, too, into the inexorable fates pursuing me. But at least he had had a clean death, a bullet through the brain, not the death in fire that waited for me.

For now that Kadarin was loose with the Sharra sword, I knew how I would die, and made up my mind to it. Ashara's plan, and the help of Regis Hastur's new and astonishing Gift, which seemed somehow to hold power over Sharra, might destroy the Sharra matrix; but I knew perfectly well that I would go with it into destruction.

Well, that was what had awaited me for all these years, bringing me back to Darkover at the appointed time, to the death appointed, which I should have shared with Marjorie.

We had planned our death
. . . . I remembered that morning in Castle Aldaran when, hostages to the destruction Sharra was sowing in the country round, showering on the Terran spaceport in Caer Donn, I had been allowed to waken from the drugs that had kept me, passive prisoner, chained to the destruction and feeding power into Sharra. I never knew why I had been allowed to come free of the drugs; certainly it had not been any lingering tenderness on Kadarin's part for either of us. But Marjorie and I had been prepared to die . . . knew we must die in closing the gateway into this world that was Sharra. And so she and I, together, had smashed the gateway . . .

But then I, using all the power of that matrix, had taken her, and the Sword, and flung us through space bodily—the Terrans called it teleportation, and I had never done it before or since—to Arilinn; where Marjorie had died from her terrible burns, and I . . . . . . I had survived, or some part of me had survived, and all these years had despised myself because I had not followed her to death. Now I knew why I had been spared: Kadarin and Thyra still lived, and somehow they would have recovered the matrix and ravaged Darkover again with its fire. This time there would be no respite; and when Sharra was destroyed, none of us would be left alive. And so I must set my affairs in order.

I called Andres back to me, and said, “Where is the little girl?”

“Rella—that's the cook's helper—looked after her today, and put her to bed in the room Marius had when he was a little tyke,” Andres said.

“If I live, I may be able to take her to Armida,” I said, “but if anything should happen to me—no, foster-father, listen; nothing's certain in this life. Now that my father and brother are gone—you have served us all faithfully for a quarter of a century. If something should happen to me, would you leave Darkover?”

“I don't know. I never thought about it,” the old man said. “I came here with
Dom
Kennard when we were young men, and it's been a good life; but I think I might go back to Terra in the end.” He added, with a mirthless grin, “I've wondered what it would be like, to be under my own blue sky again, and have a moon like a moon ought to be, not those little things.” He pointed out the window at the paling face of Idriel, greenish like a gem through water.

“Bring me something to write on.” When he complied, I scribbled with my good hand, folded the paper and sealed it.

“I can't leave Armida to you,” I said. “I suppose Gabriel will have it after me; it's in the Alton Domain. I would if I could, believe me. But if you take this to the Terran Legate in the Trade City, this will take you to Terra, and I'd rather you would foster Marja yourself than turn her over to Gabriel's wife.”
Domna
Javanne Hastur has never liked me; no doubt she would do her best by Gabriel's kinsman, but it would be a cold and dutiful best; and Andres, at least, would care for my daughter for my father's sake and Linnell's if not for mine. “My mother—and my father after her—owned some land there; it had better go to you, then.”

He blinked and I saw tears filling his eyes, but all he said was, “God forbid I should ever have to use it,
vai dom.
But I'll do my best for the little girl if anything happens. You know I'd guard her with my life.”

I said soberly, “You might have to.” I did not know why, but I was filled suddenly with icy shivers; my blood ran cold in my veins, and for a moment, even in the dying light which turned the whole room crimson, it seemed that blood lay over the stones around me.
Is this then the place of my death?
Only a moment, and it was gone. Andres went to the window, drew the curtains with a bang.

“The bloody sun!” he said, and it sounded like a curse. Then he tucked the paper I had given him, without looking at it, into a pocket, and went away.

That was settled. Now there was only Sharra to face. Well, it must come when it would. Tomorrow Kathie and I would ride to Hali, and the plan I had made, for finding the Sword of Aldones and using this last weapon against Sharra, would either succeed or it would fail. Either way, I would probably not see another sunset. My head was afire with the stitches in my forehead. Scars to match those Kadarin had made on my face . . . well, there's an old saying that the dead in heaven is too happy to care what happens to his corpse, be it beautiful or ugly, and the dead in hell has too much else to worry about! As for me, I had never believed in either heaven or hell; death was no more than endless nothingness and darkness.

Yet it seemed I could hear again my father's last cry, directly to my mind. . . .
Return to Darkover and fight for your rights and your brother's! This is my last command . . .
and then, past that, as the life was leaving him, that last cry of joy and tenderness:

Had he, at the last moment, seen something beyond this life, had my half-remembered mother been waiting for him at that last gateway? The
cristoforos
believe something like that, I know; Marjorie had believed. Would Marjorie be waiting for me beyond Sharra's fire? I could not, dared not, let myself think so. And if it were so—I let myself smile, a sour little smile—what would we do when Dio turned up there? But she had already loosed her claim on me . . . if love were the criterion, perhaps she would seek Lerrys beyond the gates of death. And what of those husbands or wives given in marriage who hated their spouses, married out of duty or family ties or political expediency, so that married life was a kind of hell and death a merciful release, would any sane or just God demand that they be tied together in some endless afterlife as well? I dismissed all this as mad rubbish and tried, through the fierce pain in my head and the fiery throbbing of my wounded arm, to compose myself for sleep.

The last red light dimmed, faded and was gone. A chink of the curtains showed me pallid greenish moonlight, lying like ice across my bed; it looked cool, it would cool my fever . . . there was a step and a rustle and soft whisper.

“Lew, are you asleep?”

“Who's there?”

The dim light picked out a gleam of fair hair, and Dio, her face as pale as the pallid moon, looked down at me. She turned and pulled the curtains open where Andres had closed them, letting the moonlight flood the room and the waning moons peep over her shoulder.

The chill of the moonlight seemed to cool my feverish face. I even wondered, incuriously, if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming she was there, she seemed so quiet, so muted. Her eyes were swollen and flushed with tears.

“Lew, your face is so hot . . .” she murmured, and after a minute she came and laid something cold and refreshing on my brow. “Do you mean they left you alone here like this?”

“I'm all right,” I said. “Dio, what's happened?”

“Lerrys is gone,” she whispered, “gone to the Terrans, he has taken ship and swears he will never return . . . he tried to get me to come with him, he . . . he tried to force me, but this time I would not go . . . he said it was death to stay here, with the things that were coming for the Comyn . . .”

“You should have gone with him,” I said dully. I could not protect Dio now, nor care for her, with Sharra raging and Kadarin prowling like a wild beast, Thyra at his side, ready to drag me back into that same corner of hell. . . .

“I will not go when others must stay and fight,” she said. “I am not such a coward as that . . .” but she was weeping. “If he truly feels we are a part of the Empire, he should have stayed and fought for
that
. . .”

“Lerrys was never a fighter,” I said. Well, neither was I, but I had been given no choice; my life was already forfeit. But I had no comfort for Dio now. I said softly, “It is not your fight, either, Dio. You have not been dragged into this thing. You could make a life for yourself elsewhere. It's not too late.”

Lerrys was one of the hypersensitive Ridenow; the Ridenow Gift had been bred into the Comyn, to sense these other-dimension horrors in the Ages of Chaos; a Gift obsolete now, when the Comyn no longer ranged through space and time as legend said they had done in the heyday of the Towers. As those who fight forest-fire keep cagebirds to tell when the poison gases and smoke are growing too dangerous for living things—because the cagebird will die of the poisons before men are aware of them—so the Ridenow served to warn Comyn less sensitive than they of the presence of forces no man could tolerate. I was not surprised that he had fled from Darkover now . . .

“Dio, you shouldn't be here, at this hour—”

“Do you think I care about that?” she said, and her voice was thick with tears. “Don't send me away, Lew. I don't—I don't—I won't ask anything of you, but let me stay here with you for tonight—”

She lay beside me, her curly head against my shoulder, and I tasted salt when I kissed her. And suddenly I realized that if I had changed, Dio had changed no less. The tragedy of that thing in the hospital, which should have been our son, was her tragedy too; more hers than mine, for she had borne it in her body for months; yet I had been distraught with my own selfish grief, and left no room for her. She had come into my life when I had thought it was over forever, and given me a year of happiness, and I owed it to her to remember the happiness, not the horror and tragedy at the end.

I whispered, holding her close, “I wish it had been different. I wish I had had—more for you.”

She kissed my scarred cheek, with a tenderness which somehow drew us closer than the wildest passion. “Never mind, Lew,” she said softly into the darkness, “I know. Sleep, my love, you're weary and wounded.”

And after a moment I felt that she was fast asleep in my arms; but I lay there, wakeful, my eyes burning with regret. I had loved Marjorie with the first fire of an untried boy, all flame and desire; we had never known what we would have grown into, for Marjorie had had no time at all. But Dio had come to me when I was a man, grown through suffering into the capacity for real love, and I had never understood, I had let her walk away from me in the first upheaval. The shared tragedy should have drawn us closer, and I had let it drive us apart.

But for tonight I will pretend that there is something beyond morning, that she and I and Marja can find a world somewhere, and that Sharra's fire will burn out harmlessly before the mingling of the Sword of Aldones and the Hastur Gift. . . .
I half-knew that I was already dreaming, but I lay holding Dio sleeping in my arms until at last, near dawn, I fell asleep too.