The Forbidden Circle (76 page)

“I doubt not he is already damned,” Damon said, “but the mischief is done.”

“Are you telling us,” Andrew said, laying his hand over Callista’s, and noting with dread that she drew it away, with the old automatic reflex, “that Dezi’s taunt was true after all and our marriage is not lawful?”

Reluctantly Damon nodded. “While Domenic lived and
Dom
Esteban was healthy, no one would question what his daughters did, far away in the Kilghard Hills. But the situation has changed. The Domain is in the hands of a child and a dying man. Even if Callista were still Keeper, legally they could not force her to marry, but any persuasion short of force would be used. And since she has already given back her oath, and publicly refused to return to Arilinn, her marriage is a legitimate concern of Council.”

“Have I no more rights in the matter than a horse led to the marketplace?” Callista demanded.

“Callie, I did not make the laws,” he said tenderly. “I will unmake some of them, if I can, but I cannot do it overnight. The law is what it is.”

“Callista’s father agreed to give her to me,” Andrew said. “Does that decision have no legal merit?”

“But he is a dying man, Andrew. He may die tonight, and I am only warden of Alton under the Council, no more.” He looked deeply troubled. “Only if we could go to Council with an established marriage under the Law of Valeron—”

“What is
that
?” Andrew demanded, and Callista said tonelessly, “A woman of the Aillard Domain, from the plains of Valeron, won a Council decision which has served as a precedent ever since. Whether the marriage is freemate or otherwise, no woman can be separated unwilling from the father of her child. Damon means that if you could take me to bed—and preferably make me pregnant at once—we would have a way to contest the Council.” She made a face. “I do not want a child yet—still less do I want it at the bidding of Council like this, like a mare being taken to stud—but better that, than that I should marry someone chosen by Council for political reasons, and to bear
his
children.” She looked miserably from Damon to Andrew and said, “But you know that it is impossible.”

Damon said quietly, “No, Callista. This marriage, and you know it, stands or falls on whether you can go before Council tomorrow and swear that the marriage has been consummated.”

She cried out, trapped, terrified, “Do you want me to kill him this time?” and buried her face in her hands.

Damon came around the table, gently turned Callista to face him. “There is another way, Callista. No, look at me. Andrew and I are
bredin.
And I am stronger than you. You could hit me with everything you threw at Andrew, and more, and you could not hurt me!”

She turned away, sobbing, “If I must. If I must. But, oh, merciful Avarra, I wanted that to come in love, when I was ready, not in a battle to the death!”

There was a long silence, with only Callista’s stifled weeping. The sound tore at Andrew’s heart, but he knew he must trust Damon to find a way for them. At last Damon said quietly, “Then there is only one way, Callista. Varzil told me that the answer for you was to free your mind from the imprint of years as Keeper on your body. I can free your mind, and your body will be freed, as it was in the winter blooming.”

“You told me that was only an illusion . . .” She faltered.

“I was wrong,” Damon said quietly. “I did not put everything together until a little while ago. I wish, for your sake, that you and Andrew had been able to trust your instincts. But now . . . I have some
kireseth
flowers, Callista.”

Her hands flew to her mouth in apprehension, terror, understanding. “It is taboo, forbidden to anyone Tower-trained!”

“But,” Damon said, and his voice was very gentle, “
our
Tower does not live by the laws of Arilinn,
breda
, and I am not a Keeper by
those
laws. Why do you think it became taboo, Callista? Because, under the impact of the
kireseth
—as you have seen—even a Keeper could not retain her immunity to passion, desire, human need. It is a telepathic catalyst drug, but it is much, much more than that. After the training given to Keepers in the Towers, it is frightening, unthinkable, to admit that there is no
reason
for a Keeper to be chaste, except temporarily, for strenuous work. Certainly there is no need for such lifetime loneliness and withdrawal. The Towers have imposed cruel and needless laws on their Keepers, Callista, from the Ages of Chaos, when the Year’s End ritual was lost. I think it must have been at the time of Midsummer festival then. At our festival, all through the Domains, women are given flowers and fruit in commemoration of Cassilda’s gift to Hastur, but how is the Lady of the Domains always pictured? With the golden bell of
Kireseth
in her hands. This was the ancient ritual, so that a woman might work as Keeper in the matrix circles, with her channels clear, and then return to normal womanhood when she chose.”

He took her two hands in his. She tried, in the old, automatic way, to draw them away, but he held them firmly in his own, controlling her. “Callista, have you the courage to turn your back on Arilinn and explore, with us, a tradition which will allow you to be Keeper and woman at once?”

He had struck the right note when he appealed to her courage. Together they had tested it to the outermost limits. She bowed her head, consenting. But when he brought the
kireseth
flowers, folded into a cloth, she hesitated, holding the bundle in her hands.

“I have broken every law of Arilinn save this. Now I am truly outcaste,” she said, near to tears again.

Damon said, “They have called us both renegades. I will not ask you to do anything I am not willing to do first, Callista.”

He took the cloth from her hand, unfolded it and raised it to his face, deeply inhaling the dizzying scent. Fear rushed through him—the forbidden thing, the taboo—but he recalled Varzil’s words:

“This is why we instituted the old sacramental rite of Year’s End. . . . You are her Keeper; it is for you to be responsible.”

Callista was white and shaking, but she took the
kireseth
from Damon’s hands, breathing in deeply. Damon meanwhile thought of the Arilinn circle, which would strike them at sunrise. Was he making a tragic mistake?

During his years there, when serious work was contemplated any kind of stress was prohibited, anything like sexual contact above all.
They
would spend this night in solitary concentration, preparing for the battle ahead of them.

But Damon was not working along those lines. He knew he could not defeat Arilinn by doing what they did. His Tower was building something wholly new, built upon their fourfold rapport. It was only right that they should spend this night in completing the bond, helping Callista to be part of it, to share it fully.

Andrew took the flowers from Callista’s hands. As he breathed their scent—dried, powdery, but still reminiscent of the field of golden flowers under the crimson sunlight—he seemed to see Callista coming through the field of flowers again, and the memory made him faint with longing. As Ellemir took them in her turn, he felt moved to protest—was this safe for her, in her condition? But she had the right to choose. She should share whatever this night brought them.

Damon felt a rush of expanding outward consciousness, a heightened awareness. It seemed that the matrix at his throat was flickering, throbbing like a live thing. He cradled it in his hand and it seemed to speak to him, and for the moment he wondered if the matrices were, after all, a form of alien life, experiencing time at a fantastically different rate, symbiotic with mankind?

Then he seemed to rush backward as he had done during Timesearch, and experience, with curious clairvoyance, what he had heard of the history of the Towers, at Arilinn and at Nevarsin. After the Ages of Chaos, centuries of decadence, corruption, and conflicts which had decimated the Domains and raged over half a world, the Towers had been rebuilt and the Compact formed, forbidding all weapons save those within hand’s reach of the wielder, and forcing anyone who would kill to take an equal chance at death. Matrix work had been relegated to the Towers and to those of Comyn blood, sworn to the Towers and the Keepers. The Keepers, vowed to chastity and without allegiance even to family ties, were required to be disinterested, without political or dynastic interest in the rule of the Domains. The training of Tower workers was based on strong ethical principles and the breaking of all other bonds, creating strength and integrity in a world corrupt and laid waste.

And the Keepers were sworn to protect the Domains, to guard against further misuse of the matrix stones. Without political power, they had nevertheless taken on tremendous personal and charismatic force, priestesses, sorceresses, with a vital spiritual and religious ascendancy, controlling all the matrix workers on Darkover.

But had this in itself become an abuse?

It seemed to Damon that he was in telepathic contact across the centuries with his distant kinsman Varzil—or was it a faint racial memory? When had the Towers abandoned the Year’s End ritual which kept them in touch with their common humanity? The ritual had allowed a Keeper, celibate by harsh necessity for her incredibly difficult and demanding work—and in those days, at the height of the Towers, it had been far more demanding still—to become periodically aware of her common humanity, sharing the instincts and desires of her fellow men and women.

When had they abandoned it? Even more,
why
had they abandoned it? At some time during the Ages of Chaos had it become a kind of debauchery? For whatever reasons, good or bad, it was gone, and with it the knowledge of how to unlock the channels frozen for psi work at such a high level. So the Keepers, no longer neutered, had been forced to rely on a kind of training basically inhuman, and the power of the Keepers lay in the hands of such women who were capable of withdrawing themselves thus completely from their instincts and desires.

It seemed to Damon, as he traversed the years, that he could feel within himself all the suffering of these men and women, alienated, despairing, many failing because they could not so fully separate themselves from the human lot. And those who succeeded had had to adopt impossible standards for themselves, training of an inhuman rigor, total alienation even from their own circles. But what choice had they had?

But now they would rediscover what the old rite could have done. . . .

He was not looking at Callista but he
felt
her frozen decorum dissolving, felt the lessening physical rigidity, tension running out of her like running water. She had dropped into a chair. He turned and saw her smiling, stretching like a cat, holding out her arms to Andrew. Andrew went and knelt beside her, and Damon watched, thinking with longing of a lovely child in the Tower, all her exquisite spontaneity leaving her day by day, slowly changing to a prim tense silence. Now, his heart aching, he could see a little of that child in the sweet smile Callista gave Andrew. Andrew kissed her hesitantly, then with growing passion. As the fourfold rapport began to weave among them again, they all shared, for a moment, in the kiss. But Andrew, his own inhibitions broken by the
kireseth
, moved a little too quickly. His arms tightened around Callista, crushing her against him, and the growing demand of his kisses frightened her. In sudden panic she broke away from him, thrusting him away with the full strength of her arms, her eyes wide with dread.

Damon felt the double texture of her fear: partly she feared that what had happened before would happen again, that the reflex she could not control would strike Andrew, hurt him, kill him; partly she feared her own arousal, strange, unfamiliar. She looked at Andrew with something like terror, stared at Damon with a numb, trapped look which bewildered him.

Ellemir’s thoughts moved quickly through the growing rapport.
Have you forgotten how young she is?

Andrew stared at her without comprehension. After all, Callista was Ellemir’s twin!

Yes, and after so many years as a Keeper, in some ways she is older, but all of that is gone from her mind now. She is, essentially, the little girl of thirteen who went to the Tower. For her, sex is still a memory of terror and pain, and how she nearly killed you. She has nothing good to remember except a few kisses among the flowers. Leave her to me for a little, Andrew
.

Reluctantly Andrew drew away from Callista, and Ellemir put an arm around her twin’s shrinking shoulders. None of them needed to speak aloud now, and didn’t bother.

Come with me, darling, it won’t hurt them to wait until you are ready.
She led her into the inner room, telling her,
This is your real wedding night, Callista, and there will be no crude horseplay and jokes
.

Pliant as a child, and to Ellemir she seemed almost like a child, Callista allowed her twin to undress her, to remove the paint with which she had concealed the red marks on her face, to brush out her long hair over her shoulders, put her into a nightgown. The touch laid them open to one another, Ellemir’s guard also going down under the growing influence of the
kireseth.
She felt the flood of memories her twin had not been able to share when they had tried, on the night before their wedding, to exchange hesitant confidences.

Ellemir felt and
experienced
, with Callista, the conditioning to withdrawal, the harsh discipline against even a random touch of any other human hand. With overwhelming horror, she looked at the small healed scars on Callista’s wrists and hands, awash with the physical and emotional anguish of those first terrible years in the Tower.
And Damon had a part in this!
For a moment she shared Callista’s agonized resentment, the rage never given voice or outlet, poured into a tension and force whose only outlet was through the focused energy of the matrix screens and relays.