The Forbidden Circle (60 page)

His gift to Andrew was a set of razors in a velvet case. The razors were made of some light metal alloy, and Andrew knew that on metal-starved Darkover this was a handsome gift. He bent, feeling awkward, and embraced the old man, feeling the whiskered cheeks against his with a curious sense of warmth, of belonging.

“A good festival to you, son, and a joyous New Year.”

“And to you, Father,” said Andrew, wishing he could think of more elequent words. Just the same, he felt as if he had taken another small step toward finding his place here. Callista held his hand tightly, as they went into the house to make preparation for the feast later that day.

All afternoon guests were arriving from outlying farms, from small estates nearby, many of them guests at the wedding. Going up to dress for the festival dinner, Damon found himself exiled from his own half of the suite. Ellemir, drawing him into the rooms shared by Andrew and Callista, told him, “I have given our rooms to the folk from Syrtis, Loran and Caitlia and their daughters. You and I will spend the night in here with Andrew and Callista. I have your holiday clothes here.”

Andrew, sharing the cramped quarters in holiday spirit with Damon, lowered his shaving mirror so that the smaller man could look into it. He crouched, fingering the hair that had grown long on his neck. “I should get someone to cut my hair,” he said, and Damon laughed.

“You’re neither a monk nor a Guardsman, so you surely don’t want it any shorter than it is
now
, do you?” His own hair was trimmed smoothly, about the length of his collar; Andrew shrugged. Custom and dress were completely relative. His own hair now seemed enormously long, shaggy, unkempt, yet it was shorter than Damon’s. Shaving with the new razors, he found himself wondering why, on a freezing planet like Darkover, only old men went bearded against the cold. But then, customs made no sense.

Downstairs, looking at the hall hung with green boughs, and spiced festival cakes smelling not unlike the gingerbread of his Terran Christmases, it seemed poignantly like a childhood celebration on Terra. Most of the guests were people he had seen at his wedding. There was a lot of dancing, and enough heavy drinking to surprise Andrew, who had thought of the Darkovan hillmen as sober people. He said so to Damon, and his brother-in-law nodded. “We are. That’s why we save our drinking for special occasions, and those occasions don’t come very often. So make the best of them. Drink up, brother!” Damon was taking his own advice; he was already half drunk.

There were some of the boisterous kissing games he remembered from his wedding. Andrew remembered something he had read years ago, how urban societies with a great deal of leisure developed highly sophisticated amusements, not needed for the rare leisure of people who spent a lot of time in hard manual work. Remembering what he had heard of frontier days on his own world, quilting parties, corn-husking bees, where hardworking farmers whiled the time with what would later be considered games for young children—bobbing for apples, blindman’s buff—he realized he should have expected this. Even here in the Great House there was plenty of hard work to be done and festivals like this were few, so if the games seemed childlike to him, it was his fault, not the fault of these hardworking farmers and ranchers. Most of the men had calloused hands betraying plenty of hard physical labor, even the noblemen. His own hands were hardened as they had not been since he left the horse ranch in Arizona, at nineteen. The women worked too, he thought, remembering the days Ellemir spent supervising in the kitchens, and Callista’s long hours in still room and greenhouse. Both of them joined gaily in the dancing, and in the simple games. One of them was not unlike blindman’s buff, with a man and a woman blindfolded and made to seek through the crowds for one another.

When the dancing began he was much in demand as a partner. He found out why when a youngster still in his teens swept Callista into the dance, saying over his shoulder to his previous partner, a girl who looked no more than fourteen, “If I dance with a bride at Midwinter, I shall be married before the year is out!”

The girl—a child really, in a child’s flowered frock, her hair in long curls about her cheeks—came up to Andrew, saying with a pert smile to hide her shyness, “Why, then, I’ll dance with the groom!” Andrew let the child pull him on to the dance floor, warning her that he was not a good dancer. Later he saw the girl again, in a corner with the youngster who had wanted to be married that season, kissing with what seemed to be un-childlike passion.

As the night wore on there was a lot of pairing off in corners and wandering away in couples into the dark outer part of the halls.
Dom
Esteban got very drunk and was eventually carried off to bed, senseless. One by one the guests took their leave, or said good night and were escorted to their beds. Most of the servants had joined in the party and were as drunk as the other guests, not having a long ride in the cold ahead of them. Damon had fallen asleep on a bench in the Great Hall, and was snoring. It was the dimness before dawn when they looked around the Great Hall, with its drooping greenery, scattered bottles and cups, discarded sweets and refreshments, realizing that their duties as hosts were ended and they could seek their own beds. After a few halfhearted efforts to rouse Damon, who muttered drunkenly at them, they left him there and went upstairs without him. Andrew was amazed. Even at his wedding, Damon had drunk sparingly. Well, even a sober man had a right to get drunk at the New Year, he supposed.

In the rooms which the two couples were to share that night because of the house party, he felt a knifelike frustration, intensified by his half-drunken state, amorous and disappointed. It was a hell of a life, married like this and sleeping alone. A hell of a marriage, so far, and what felt like a travesty of a Christmas party. He felt let-down, dismal. Maybe with Damon drunk, Ellemir—but no, the women had climbed together into his big bed, as they had done during Callista’s long illness. He supposed he would sleep again in the small one that was usually Callista’s, and Damon, if he came upstairs at all, in the sitting room of the suite.

The women were giggling together like little girls. Had they been drinking too? Callista called his name softly and he came over to them. They were lying close together, laughing in the dim light. Callista reached up and pulled him down to them.

“There’s room for you here.”

He hesitated. Did this make any sense, tantalizing himself this way? Then he laughed, climbing in beside them. The bed was an enormous one that would have held half a dozen without crowding. Callista said softly, “I wanted to prove something to you, my love,” and gently pushed Ellemir into his arms.

He felt furious embarrassment that seemed to burn through his whole body, dousing his passion like ice water. He had never felt so naked, so exposed, in his life.

Oh hell, he felt. He was behaving like a fool. Wasn’t this the next logical step anyway? But logic had no part in his feelings.

Ellemir felt warm, familiar, comforting in his arms.

“What’s the matter, Andrew?”

The matter, and damn it, she had to know it, was Callista’s presence. He supposed that to some people this would be especially exciting. Ellemir followed his thoughts, which associated this kind of thing with erotic exhibitions, attempts to rouse jaded tastes, decadence. She said in a whisper, “But it isn’t at all like that, Andrew. We are all telepaths. Whatever we do, the others will know it, be part of it, so why pretend that any of us can ever completely shut out any of the others?”

He felt Callista’s fingertips touching his face. Strange that in the dark, though their small hands were almost identical, he could be so sure it was Callista’s hand and not Ellemir’s on his cheek.

Among telepaths the concept of that kind of privacy could not exist, he knew, so shutting doors and going away in isolation was only a pretense. There came a time when you stopped pretending. . . .

He tried to bring back his previous amorous state, but drunkenness and embarrassment conspired to defeat him. Ellemir laughed, but it was perfectly clear that the laugh did not intend ridicule. “I think we’ve all had too much to drink. Let’s sleep, then.”

They were all almost asleep when the door of the room opened and Damon came in, moving unsteadily. He looked down at them, smiling. “Knew I’d find you all here.” He flung his clothes this way and that. He was still blundering drunk. “Come on, make room, where do I—”

“Damon, you want to sleep it off,” Callista said. “Won’t you be more comfortable—”

“Comfortable be damned,” Damon said drowsily. “Nobody ought to have to sleep alone at festival time!”

Laughing, Callista made room at her side and Damon crawled in, was instantly asleep. Andrew felt a mad laughter blowing away his embarrassment. As he fell asleep he became aware of a dim thread of rapport, weaving among them, as if Damon, even in sleep, reached out for the comfort of their presence, drawing them all close together, intertwined, close folded, their hearts beating in rhythm, a slow pulse, an infinite comfort. He thought, not knowing whether it was his own thought or another’s, that Damon was there, it was all right now. That was the way it ought to be. He felt Damon’s awareness:
All my loved ones. . . . I will never be alone again. . . .

 

It was late when they woke, but the drawn curtains made it dark in the room. Ellemir was still folded in his arms. She stirred, turned sleepily toward him, enfolded him with her woman’s warmth. The sense of closeness, of unique sharing, was still there, and he let himself be swept into it, accepting the welcoming of her body. It was not only himself and Ellemir, somehow, but the very awareness, somewhere below conscious level, that they were all part of it, they fitted together, uniquely and without analysis. He felt like shouting to the world, to everyone, “I love you, I love all of you.” In his exultation he did not distinguish his sexual awareness of Ellemir, the tenderness for Callista, the strong, protective warmth he felt for Damon. They were all one emotion, and it was love. He floated in it he drowned in it, he lay spent, luxuriating in it. He knew they had wakened the others. It didn’t seem to matter.

Ellemir moved first, stretching, sighing, laughing, yawning. She raised herself a little, kissed him quickly. “I would like to stay here all day,” she said ruefully, “but I am thinking of the chaos downstairs in the hall. If any of our guests are to have breakfast, I must go down and make sure something is done!” She leaned over and kissed Damon and, after a moment, kissed Callista too, then slid from the bed and went to dress.

Damon, less physically involved, sensed the effort Callista was making to keep herself barriered. So it was not complete, after all. She was still outside. He touched a light fingertip to her closed eyes. Andrew had gone into the bath. They were alone, and he felt the gallant pretense dissolve.

“Crying, Callie?”

“No, of course not. Why should I?” But she was.

He held her, knowing at this moment they shared something from which the others were excluded, that shared experience, that painful discipline, the sense of
apartness
.

Andrew had gone to dress. Damon caught a fragment of his thought, contentment mingled with chagrin, and thought how for a little while Andrew was one of them. Now he was apart from them too. He sensed Callista’s emotions too, not begrudging Ellemir anything, but desperately needing to know before she could share it. He sensed her desperate grief, the sudden mad impulse to tear at herself with her nails, beat herself with her fists, turn against this useless mutilated body which was so far from what it should have been. He held her against him, trying to calm and soothe her with his touch.

Ellemir came back from her bath, the ends of her hair dripping, and sat at Callista’s dressing table. “I will wear one of your housedresses, Callie, there is so much clearing away to be done,” she said. “That is the only bad thing about a party!” She saw Callista, hiding her face against Damon, and for a moment she was wrung by Callista’s grief. Ellemir had been brought up thinking of herself as having little of the
laran
of her clan, but now, taking the full impact of her twin’s sorrow, she knew it was more of a curse than a blessing. And when Andrew came back she sensed his sudden apartness.

Andrew was thinking that you just had to be brought up to that kind of thing. He interpreted Ellemir’s tense silence as shame or regret for what had happened and wondered if he ought somehow to apologize. For what? To whom? Ellemir? Damon? He saw Callista lying in Damon’s arms. Where would he get any right to complain? Turn about was fair play, but he still felt an almost physical queasiness and disgust, or was it only that he had drunk too much the night before?

Damon saw his eyes on them and smiled.

“I suppose
Dom
Esteban has a head worse than mine this morning. I’ll go douse some cold water on mine, and go down and see if I can do something for our father. I haven’t the heart to leave him to his body-servant today.” He added, disentangling himself slowly and without haste from Callista, “Have your Terrans any suitable expression for the morning after the night before?”

“Dozens,” Andrew said glumly, “and every one as revolting as the thing itself.” Hangovers, he thought.

Damon went into the bath and Andrew stood jerking a comb through his hair, glowering at Callista. He did not even see that her eyes were red. Slowly she got out of bed and into her flowered chamber robe. “I must go help Ellemir. The maids will hardly know where to start. Why are you staring at me, my husband?”

The phrase made him angry, quarrelsome. “You will not even let me touch your fingertips, and if I kiss you, you draw away as if I meant rape, yet you were lying in Damon’s arms—”

She lowered her eyes. “You know why I dare . . . with him.”

Andrew remembered the intense awareness, sexuality, he had sensed,
shared
with Damon. It was disquieting, flooding him with vague unease. “You cannot say that Damon is not a man!”