The Forbidden Circle (63 page)

Whatever the lost festival, it could be recaptured or reconstructed somehow—a ritual to free the mind of its constraints? If all else failed—what had Varzil said?
Come back when you have won your full strength as Keeper.

Damon shuddered. Must he, then, continue this frightening work, outside the safety of a Tower, to make himself Keeper in truth, as well as in the potential Leonie had seen in him? Well, he was pledged, and for Callista there was, perhaps, no other way.

It might not be that bad, he thought hopefully. There must be records of the festival of Year’s End in the other Towers, or perhaps at Hali, in the
rhu fead
, the holy place of the Comyn.

Ellemir looked over Callista’s shoulder. Her eyes were red with crying. He sat up, clutching the blankets about him. “Did I frighten you, my dearest love?”

She gasped. “You were so cold, so stiff, you didn’t even seem to be breathing. And then you would start gasping, moaning—I thought you were dying, dead—oh, Damon!” Her hands clutched at him. “Never do this again! Promise me!”

Forty days ago he would have promised her, with pleasure. “My darling, this is the work I was trained for, and I must be free to do it at need.” Varzil had hailed him as Keeper. Was that his destiny?

But not at a Tower again. They had made an art of deforming the lives of their workers. In seeking to free Callista, would he free all his sons and daughters to come?

Callista raised her head at a slight sound. “That will be the food I sent for. Go and fetch it, Andrew, we don’t want outsiders in here.” When he returned, she poured hot soup into a mug. “Drink it down as quickly as you can, Damon. You are as weak as a bird newly hatched.”

He grimaced, saying, “Next time I think I’ll stay inside the egg.” He began to drink in hesitant sips, not sure, at first, that he could swallow. His hands would not hold the mug, and Andrew steadied it for him.

“How long was I out?”

“All day, and most of the night,” Callista said. “And of course I could not move during that time either, so I’m stiff as planks nailed into a coffin!” Wearily she stretched her cramped limbs, and Andrew, leaving Ellemir to hold Damon’s mug, came and knelt before her, pulling off her velvet slippers and rubbing her feet with his strong hands. “How cold they are!” he said in dismay.

“About the only advantage the higher levels have over winter in Nevarsin is that you don’t get frostbite,” Callista said, and Damon grinned wryly. “You don’t get frostbite in the hells, either, but I never heard that advanced as a good reason not to stay out of them.” Andrew looked puzzled, and Damon asked, “Or do your people have a hot hell, as I heard the Dry-Towners do?”

Andrew nodded, and Damon finished his soup and held out his mug for more. He explained, “Zandru supposedly rules over nine hells, each colder than the last. When I was in Nevarsin they used to say that the student dormitory was kept about the temperature of the fourth hell, as a way of showing us what might be in store for us if we broke too many rules.” He glanced at the harsh darkness outside the window. “Is it snowing?”

Andrew asked, “Does it ever do anything
else
here at night?”

Damon cradled his cold fingers around the stoneware mug. “Oh, yes, sometimes in summer we have eight, ten nights without snow.”

“And I suppose,” Andrew said, straight-faced, “that people start to collapse with sunstroke and die of heat exhaustion.”

“Why, no, I never heard that—” Callista began, then, seeing the twinkle in Andrew’s eyes, broke off and laughed. Damon watched them, exhausted, weary, at peace. He wriggled his toes. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find I had frostbite, after all. On one level I was climbing on ice—or thought I was,” he added, with a reminiscent shiver.

“Take off his slippers and look, Ellemir.”

“Oh, come, Callie, I was joking—”

“I wasn’t. Hilary was caught once on a level where there seemed to be fire, and came back with burns and blisters on the soles of her feet. She could not walk for days,” Callista said. “Leonie used to say, ‘The mind writes deeply in the body.’ Damon, what is it?” She bent to look at the bare feet, smiled. “No, there seems no physical injury, but I am sure you
feel
half frozen. When you have finished your soup, perhaps you should get into a hot bath. It will make certain your circulation is not really impaired.”

She sensed Andrew’s questioning look, and went on. “Truly, I do not know if it is the cold of the levels reflected in his body, or something in the mind, or whether the
kirian
makes it easier for the mind to reflect into the body, or whether
kirian
slows down the circulation and makes it easier to visualize cold. But whatever it is, the subjective experience in the overworld is
cold
, icy cold, chill to the bone, and without arguing where the cold comes from, I have experienced it often enough to know that hot soup, hot bricks, hot baths, and plenty of blankets should be all ready for anyone who returns from such a journey.”

Damon felt unwilling to be alone, even in his bath. While lying flat he felt fine, but when he tried to sit up, to walk, it seemed that his body thinned to insubstantial ity, his feet did not feel the floor, he walked bodiless and fading in empty space. He heard, ashamed, his own soft wail of protest.

He felt Andrew’s strong arm under his, holding him up, making him solid,
real
again to himself. He said, half in apology, “I’m sorry. I keep feeling as if I’m disappearing.”

“I won’t let you fall.” In the end Andrew almost had to carry him to his bath. The hot water brought Damon back to consciousness of his physical self again. Andrew, warned of this reaction by Callista, looked relieved as Damon began to look like himself. He sat on a stool beside the tub, saying, “I’m here if you need me.”

Damon was filled with overflowing warmth, gratitude. How good they all were to him, how kind, how loving, how careful of his well-being! How he loved them all! He lay in his bath, floating, euphoric, an elation as great as his former misery, until the water began to cool. Andrew, disregarding the request to send for his body-servant, lifted him bodily out of the tub, dried him, wrapped him in a robe. When they came back to the women he was still floating in euphoria. Callista had sent for more food, and Damon ate slowly, cherishing every bite, feeling that food had never tasted so fresh, so sweet, so good.

At the back of his mind he knew that his present elation was simply part of the reaction and would sooner or later give way to enormous depression, but he clung to it, enjoying it, trying to savor every moment of it. When he had eaten as much as he could possibly hold (Callista, too, had eaten like a horse-drover, after the exhaustion of the long monitoring session) he begged, “I don’t want to be alone. Can’t we all stay together as we did at Midwinter?”

Callista hesitated, then said, with a glance at Andrew, “Certainly. None of us will leave you while you need us close to you.”

Knowing that the presence of nontelepathic servants would be intensely painful to Damon and Callista in their present state, Andrew went to carry the dishes and the remnants of the supper from the room. When he came back they were all in bed, Callista already asleep next to the wall, Damon holding Ellemir in his arms, his eyes closed. Ellemir looked up, drowsily making room for him at her side, and Andrew unhesitatingly joined them. It seemed right, natural, a necessary response to Damon’s need.

Damon, Ellemir held close to him, felt Andrew and then Ellemir drop off to sleep, but he lay awake, unwilling to leave them even in sleep. He felt no hint of desire—knew that under present conditions he would feel none for some days—but he was content simply to feel Ellemir in his arms, her hair against his cheek, to reassure himself that he, himself, was
real
. He could hear and sense Andrew, just beyond, a strong bulwark against fear.
I am here with my loved ones, I am not alone. I am safe
.

Gently, without desire, he fondled her, his fingers caressing her soft hair, her warm bare neck, her soft breasts. His awareness was tuned so high that he could feel through her sleep her awareness of the touch, the new tingle there. As he had been taught long ago when he was a monitor, he let his awareness sink down through her body, feeling the changes in the breasts, deep in the womb, without surprise. He had been so careful since she lost their child, it must have been of Andrew’s making. It was just as well, he felt. She and he were such close kin. He kissed the nape of her neck, so warmed and filled with love that he felt he would burst with its weight. He had by instinct guarded Ellemir from the danger of a child of long generations of inbreeding, and now she could have the child she hungered for, without fear. He
knew
, with a deep inner knowledge, that this child would not be lost too soon to live, and rejoiced for Ellemir, for all of them. He reached past Ellemir to touch Andrew’s hand in the darkness. Andrew did not wake, but clasped his fingers on Damon’s in his sleep.
My friend. My brother. Do you know, yet, of our good fortune?
Clasping Ellemir tightly, he realized with a shudder that he could have died out there on the higher levels of the overworld, that he might never again have seen any of these whom he so loved, but even that thought did not long disturb him.

Andrew would have cared for them, all their lives. But it was good to be with them still, to share this warmth, to think of the children who would be born to them here, of the life before them, the endless warmth. He would never be alone again. Falling asleep, he thought,
I have never been so happy in my life
.

When Damon woke hours later, the last dregs of warmth and euphoria had been squeezed from his mood. He felt cold and alone, his body dim and vanishing. He could not feel his own body, and clutched at Ellemir in a spasm of panic. His touch woke her at once, and she reacted to his hungry need for contact, folding herself against him, warm, sensual, alive against his cold deathli ness. He knew, rationally, that he had nothing sexual for her now, but he still clung, desperately trying to stir in himself some flicker, some shadow, some hint of the love he felt for her. It was an agony of need, and Ellemir knew in despair that it was not really sexual at all. She held him and soothed him, and did what she could, but in his drained state of exhaustion he could not sustain even the momentary flickers of arousal that came and went. She was terribly afraid that he would exhaust himself still more in this despairing attempt, but she could think of nothing to say which would not hurt him still more. Under that frenzied tenderness, she felt her heart would break. At last, as she had known he must, he sighed, releasing her. She wanted to say that it did not matter, that she understood, but it mattered to Damon, and she knew it, and there would never be any way to change that. She simply kissed him, accepting the failure and his desperation, and sighed.

But now he sensed that the others were awake. He reached out gently, gathering the fourfold rapport around him, reassuring him more than the desperate attempt at sex. Intense, aware, closer than the touch of bodies, beyond words, beyond sex, they felt themselves blending into one. Andrew, feeling Damon’s need in himself, reached for Ellemir, who came eagerly into his arms. The blended excitement grew, spreading out shivering ripples through all of them, engulfing even Callista, melting them into a single entity, touching, enfolding, surging, responding. Whose lips touched and crushed, whose thighs clasped, whose arms held which body in a fierce embrace? It overflowed, spread like a wave, a flood of fire, a scalding, shivering explosion of pleasure and fulfillment. As the excitement subsided—stabilized, rather, at a less intense level—Ellemir slipped out of Andrew’s arms, caught Callista close, holding her, generously opening her mind to her sister. Callista clung to the mental contact hungrily, trying to hold something of that closeness, that togetherness she could share only this way, at second hand. For a moment she was actually unaware of her own unresponding body, so closely circled in the unbroken chain of emotion.

Andrew, sensing when Callista’s mind opened wholly, so that in a sense it
had
been Callista in his arms, felt a dizzy exaltation. He felt as if he overflowed, spread out so that he seemed to occupy all the space in the room, to encircle all four of them in his arms, and both Damon and Callista picked up his impulsive thought:
I wish I could be everywhere at once! I want to make love to all of you at once!
Damon moved close to Andrew, holding him in a confused desire to share, somehow, in this intense delight and closeness, sharing, actually participating in the slow repeated rise of excitement, the gentle, intense caresses. . . .

Then shock, dismay—
What the hell is going on?
—as Andrew realized whose were the caressing hands. The fragile web of contact shattered like breaking glass, smashed with harsh physical shock. Callista gave a short, shaking cry, like a sob, and Ellemir almost cried it aloud:
Oh, Andrew, how could you . . . !

Andrew lay very still, rigidly forcing himself not to move physically apart from Damon.
He is my friend. It isn’t that important
. But the moment was gone. Damon turned away, burying his face in the pillow, and his voice came hoarsely:

“Zandru’s hells, Andrew, how long do you and I have to be afraid of each other?”

Andrew, blinking, surfaced slowly from the confusion. He realized only dimly what had happened. He turned and laid a hand on Damon’s shaking shoulder, saying awkwardly, “I’m sorry, brother. You startled me, that’s all.”

Damon had control of himself again, but he had been caught at the deepest moment of vulnerability, wholly open to all of them, and the rebuff had hurt unimaginably. Even so, he was a Ridenow, and an empath, and he grieved at Andrew’s regret and guilt. “Another of your cultural taboos?”

Andrew nodded, shaken. It had never occurred to him that anything he could do,
anything
, could hurt Damon so enormously. “I’m—Damon, I’m sorry. It was just sort of . . . sort of a reflex, that’s all.” Awkward, still scared at the immensity of what he had done to Damon, he bent and hugged him a little. Damon laughed, returned the hug, and sat up. He felt drained, aching, but the disorientation was gone.