The Forbidden Circle (38 page)

“He’ll have a hell of a lot of pain,” Damon said, bending to touch one of the smaller toes, where the nails had sloughed away with the broken and blackened skin, “and he might still lose a toe or two; the nerves were dead there, and I couldn’t do much. But he’ll recover, and he’ll have the use of his feet and hands. And he was the worst.” He tightened his mouth, sobered by the responsibility, and knew, ashamed of himself, that he had almost, somewhere inside himself, hoped for failure. It was too much, he thought, this kind of responsibility. But he could do it, and there were other men in the same danger. And now that he knew he
could
save them . . . He made his voice deliberately harsh as he turned to Dezi and Andrew.

“Well, what are we waiting for? We’d better get on to the others.”

Again, the picked-up threads of rapport. Andrew had the knack of it now, knew just how and when to flood Damon with his own strength when the other man faltered. They were working as a team, as Damon sank his consciousness into the second man’s feet and legs, and Andrew, some small part of him still apart from this, felt the walls enclosing them so that no random thought from outside intruded. He felt with Damon the descent, cell by slow cell, through the layers of flesh and skin and nerves and bone, gently stimulating, sloughing aside, reawakening. It was more effective than a surgeon’s knife, Andrew thought, but what a cost! Twice more the descent into raw, blackened frozen flesh before Damon finally let the last rapport go, separating them, and Andrew felt as if they had slipped outside an enclosed space, a surrounding wall. But four men lay sleeping, their legs and feet raw, sore, damaged, but healing. Definitely healing, without danger of blood poisoning or infection, clean and healthy wounds that would mend as quickly as possible.

They left the men sleeping, warning Ferrika to stay near them, and went back to the lower hall. Damon staggered, and Andrew reached out and supported him physically, feeling that he was repeating, in the physical world, what he had done so often in thought during the long rapport. Not for the first time, he had the feeling that Damon, so much older, was somehow the younger, to be protected.

Damon sat on the bench, exhaustedly leaning back against Andrew, the dead weariness and draining of matrix work settling down over him. He picked up some bread and fruit which had been left on the table after the evening meal, and chewed at it with ravenous hunger, feeling his depleted body demanding a renewal of energy. Dezi too had begun to eat hungrily.

Damon said, “You should eat something too, Andrew; matrix work depletes your energies so much, you’ll collapse.” He had almost forgotten that terrible drained feeling, as if his very life had gone out of him. At Arilinn he had been given technical explanations about the energy currents in the body, the channels of energy which carried physical as well as psychic strength. But he was too weary to remember them long.

Andrew said, “I’m not hungry,” and Damon replied with the ghost of a smile, “Yes you are. You just don’t know it yet.” He put out his hand to stop Dezi as the boy poured a cup of wine. “No, that’s dangerous. Drink water, or fetch some milk or soup from the kitchens, but no drink after something like this. Half a glass will make you drunk as a monk at Midwinter feast!”

Dezi shrugged and went off to the kitchen, returning with a jug of milk which he poured all around. Damon said, “Dezi, you were at Arilinn, so you don’t need explanations, but Andrew should know: you should eat about twice as much as usual, for a day or so, and if you have any dizziness, nausea, anything like that, come and tell me. Dezi, do they keep
kirian
here?”

Dezi said, “Ferrika does not make it, and with Domenic and myself both past threshold sickness, and Valdir in Nevarsin, I do not think anyone here has had need of it.”

Andrew asked, “What’s
kirian
?”

“A psychoactive drug which is used in the Towers, or among telepathic families. It lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, but it can also be helpful in cases of overwork or telepathic stresses. And some developing telepaths have a lot of sickness at adolescence, physical and psychic, when all the development is taking place at once. I suppose you’re too old for threshold sickness, Dezi?”

“I should think so,” the boy said scornfully. “I had outgrown it before I was fourteen.”

“Still, being away from matrix work since you left Arilinn, you might have a touch of it when you try to go back to it,” Damon warned. “And we still don’t know how Andrew will react.” He would ask Callista to try to make
kirian
. There should be some kept in every household of telepaths, against emergencies.

He put aside his cup of milk, half finished. He was deathly weary. “Go and rest, Dezi lad . . . you are worthy of Arilinn training, believe me.” He gave the boy a brief embrace and watched him go off toward his room near
Dom
Esteban’s, hoping the old man would sleep through the night so the boy could rest undisturbed.

Whatever Dezi’s faults, Damon considered, at least he had nursed the old man as filially as an acknowledged son would have. Was it affection, he wondered, or self-interest?

He let himself lean on Andrew as they climbed the stairs, making a rueful apology, but Andrew brushed it aside. “Forget it. You think I don’t know you pulled the whole weight of that?” So Damon let Andrew help him up the stairs, thinking,
I lean on you now as I did in the matrix
. . . .

In the outer room of their suite he hesitated a moment. “You aren’t Tower-trained, so you should be warned of this, too: matrix work . . . you’ll be impotent for a day or two. Don’t worry about it, it’s temporary.”

Andrew shrugged, with a twist of wry amusement, and Damon, remembering abruptly the real state of affairs between Andrew and Callista, knew that a word of apology would only reemphasize the tactlessness of his words. He asked himself how in hell he could have been groggy enough to have forgotten that.

In their room, Ellemir lay half asleep on the bed, wrapped in a fleecy white shawl. She had taken down her braids and her hair was scattered like light on the pillow. As Damon looked down at his wife, she sat up, blinking sleepily, then, as Ellemir always did, moving from sleep to waking without transition, she held out her arms. “Oh, Damon, you look so weary, was it very terrible?”

He sank down beside her, resting his head against her breast. “No. Only I am no longer used to this work, and there is such a need for it, such a terrible need! Elli—” He sat bolt upright, looking down at her. “So many people here on Darkover are dying, when they should not die, suffering, being crippled, dying of minor injuries. It should not be so. We do not have the kind of medical services Andrew tells me that his Terrans have. But there are so many things that a man—or a woman—with a matrix can heal. And yet how are the injured to be taken to Arilinn or Neskaya or Dalereuth or Hali, to be treated in the Towers there? What do the matrix circles in the great Towers care for a poor workman’s frost bite, or some poor hunter clawed by a hunting-beast or kicked in the head by an
oudrakhi
?”

“Well,” said Ellemir, puzzled, but trying to follow his vehemence, “in the Towers they have other things to do. Important things. Communications. And . . . and mining, and all of those things. They would have no time to look after wounds.”

“That’s true. But listen, Elli, all over Darkover there are men like Dezi, or women like Callista, or like you. Women and men who cannot, do not
want
to spend their lives in a Tower, away from the ordinary lives of humankind. But they could do any of these things.” He sank down on the bed beside Ellemir, realizing he was more fatigued than after any battle he had fought in the Guards. “One need not be Comyn, or have enormous skill, to do these things. Anyone with a little
laran
could be trained so, to help, to heal, and no one does!”

“But Damon,” she said reasonably, “I have always heard—Callista has told me—it is dangerous to use these powers outside the Towers.”

“Flummery!” Damon exclaimed. “Are you so superstitious, Elli? You yourself have been in contact with Callista. Did you find it so dangerous?”

“No,” she said uneasily, “but during the Ages of Chaos, so many terrible things were done with the great matrix screens, such terrible weapons—fire-forms, and wind-creatures to tear down castles and whole walls, and creatures from other dimensions walking abroad in the land—that they decreed in those days that all matrix work should be done only in the Towers, and only under safeguards.”

“But that time is past, Ellemir, and most of those enormous, illegal matrix weapons were destroyed during the Ages of Chaos, or in the days of Varzil the Good. Do you really think that because I healed four men’s frozen feet and restored to them the ability to use their limbs, that I am likely to send a fire-form raging in the forest, or raise a cave-thing to blight the crops?”

“No, no, of course not.” She sat up, holding out her arms to him. “Lie down, rest, my dearest, you are so weary.”

He let her help him undress, and lay down at her side, but he went on, staring stubbornly into the darkness.

“Elli, there is something very wrong with the use we are making of telepaths here on Darkover. Either they must live guarded all their lives within the Towers, hardly human—you know that it nearly destroyed me when I was sent from Arilinn—or else they must give up everything they have learned. Like Callista—Evanda pity her,” he added, a flicker of consciousness still in link with Andrew, looking down at the sleeping Callista, traces of tears still on her face. “She has had to give up everything she ever learned, everything she has ever done. She is afraid to do anything else. There ought to be a way, Elli, there ought to be a way!”

“Damon, Damon,” she entreated, holding him close, “it has always been so. The Tower-trained are wiser than we are; they must know what they are about when they ordain it so!”

“I am not so sure.”

“In any case, there is nothing we can do about it now, my dearest. You must rest now, and calm yourself, or you will disturb
her
,” she said, taking Damon’s hand in her own and laying it against her body. Damon, knowing he was being deliberately diverted, but willing to go along with it—after all, Ellemir was right—smiled, letting himself begin to pick up the formless, random emanations—not yet thoughts—of the unborn child. “
Her
, you said?”

Ellemir laughed softly in delight. “I am not sure how I know, but I am certain of it. A little Callista, perhaps?”

Damon thought,
I hope her life will be happier. I would not wish to see the hand of Arilinn laid on any daughter of mine
. . . . Then he suddenly shuddered, in a flick of precognition seeing a slender red-haired woman, in the crimson robes of a Keeper in Arilinn. . . . She tore them from neck to ankle, rending them, casting them aside. . . . He blinked. It was gone. Precognition? Or was it a dramatization, an hallucination, born of his own disquiet? Holding his wife and child in his arms, he tried to put it all aside for the time.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The frostbitten men were recovering, but with so many men disabled, an extra share of the actual physical work fell on Andrew, and even Damon took a hand now and then. The weather had moderated, but
Dom
Esteban told them this was only a break before the real winter storms would sweep down from the Hellers, layering the foothills deep in snow for months.

Damon had offered to ride to Serrais with Andrew, and bring back some surplus men from the estate there, to work for the estate through the winter, and help with the crops in the early spring. The journey would last more than a tenday. They were making plans in the Great Hall of Armida that morning. Ellemir’s morning sickness had subsided, and, as usual, she was in the kitchens, supervising the women with their work. Callista was seated beside her father when suddenly she sat upright with a look of disquiet. She said, “Oh—Elli, Elli—oh, no—!” But even before she was on her feet Damon’s chair crashed over backward and he ran toward the kitchens. At that moment there were cries of dismay from the other rooms.

Dom
Esteban grumbled, “What’s wrong with those women?” but no one was listening. Callista had run toward the kitchen door. After a moment Damon came hurrying back, beckoned to Andrew.

“Ellemir has fainted. I do not want any stranger touching her now. Can you carry her?”

Ellemir lay in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor, surrounded by staring, crowding women. Damon motioned them away, and Andrew picked up Ellemir. Her pallor was frightening, but Andrew knew nothing about pregnant women, and fainting like this, he supposed, was not so alarming.

“Carry her to her room, Andrew. I will go and call Ferrika.”

By the time Andrew laid Ellemir on her own bed Damon was there with the woman. His hands closed on Ellemir’s as he slipped into rapport with her, searching for the faint, formless contact with the unborn. Even as he felt in his own body the painful spasms racking Ellemir’s, he knew, in anguish, what was happening. He begged, “Can’t you do anything?”

Ferrika said gently, “I will do all I can, Lord Damon,” but over her bent head, Damon met Callista’s eyes. They were full of tears. She said, “Ellemir is not in danger, Damon. But it’s already too late for the baby.”

Ellemir clutched at Damon’s hands. “Don’t leave me,” she begged, and he murmured, “No, love. Never. I’ll stay with you.” This was custom; no telepath Comyn of the Domains left his wife alone while she bore their child, or shrank from sharing her ordeal. And now he must strengthen Ellemir for their loss, not for joy. Fighting back his own anguished grief, he knelt beside her, holding her in his arms, cradling her against him.

Andrew had gone downstairs again to
Dom
Esteban, with nothing to tell except that Damon was with her, and Callista, and they had sent for Ferrika. He felt the pall that lay over the estate, all that day. Even the maids clustered in frightened huddles. Andrew wanted to reach out for Damon, to try to strengthen him, reassure him, but what could he do or say? Once, looking up the stairs, he saw Dezi coming from the outer hall, and Dezi asked “How is Ellemir?” and Andrew’s resentment against the youngster overflowed.