Two To Conquer ELF Read online

  TWO TO CONQUER

  Marion Zimmer Bradley

  a novel of darkover

  * * *

  Ebook Liberation Front digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  valid XHTML 1.0 strict

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  Contents

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE: The Foster Brothers 1|2|3|4|5|6|

  BOOK TWO: The Kilghard Wolf 1|2|3|4|5|

  BOOK THREE: The Dark Twin 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9

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  Marion Zimmer Bradley in DAW Editions:

  DARKOVER LANDFALL

  THE SPELL SWORD

  THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR

  THE SHATTERED CHAIN

  THE FORBIDDEN TOWER

  STORMQUEEN!

  HUNTERS OF THE RED MOON

  THE SURVIVORS (with Paul Zimmer)

  THE KEEPER’S PRICE (with the Friends of Darkover)

  COPYRIGHT ©, 1980, BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by John Pound.

  DAW BOOKS, INC

  Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher

  1533 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To “Cinhil MacAran” of the SCA for the first verse of “Four and Twenty Leroni—to the tune of “The Ball of Kirriemuir” and

  To Patricia Mathews for creating the Sisterhood of the Sword and dressing them in red.

  * * *

  FIRST PRINTING, JUNE 1980

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. MARCA REGISTEADA. HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  * * *

  DEDICATION

  for TANITH LEE

  To commemorate an old argument which neither of us won, or lost, or ever will

  * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  Like all the Darkover novels, this is an independent story and not an incomplete part of a series. But for those who actually like to trace the chronology of Darkover, the events in Two To Conquer take place toward the end of the Ages of Chaos, during what was later known as the Time of the Hundred Kingdoms; about two hundred years, more or less, after Allart Elhalyn reigned at Hali and Thendara, as told in Stormqueen!

  Wars and the devastation of matrix warfare had split the old kingdoms into many little independent kingdoms, city-states, baronies, shires and independent republics, none of them very large; it was said of some of the kingdoms that the king could stand on a hill and look out over all his kingdom and into the land of his neighbor kings.

  Many men of that time had the dream of unifying the Hundred Kingdoms and bringing a reign of law into the anarchy of those days. And one of these men was Varzil, whom history was to subtitle The Good, laranzu of Neskaya; and another was Bard di Asturien, whom they called the Wolf of the Kilghard Hills. And this is their story.

  —MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  * * *

  PROLOGUE: The Alien

  ^ »

  Paul Harrell woke, blurred and semi-conscious, with a sense of having survived nightmares for a long time. Every muscle in his body ached like a separate toothache, and his head felt as if he had a truly monumental hangover. Blurred memories, vague, a man with his face, his own voice asking, Who the hell are you, you’re not the devil, by any chance? Not that he believed in the devil, or hell, or any of those things invented to try to force men to do what other people thought they should do instead of what they wanted to do.

  He moved his head, and the pain in it made him wince. Whew! I really must have tied one on last night!

  He stretched, trying to turn over, and found that he was lying, his legs flung out at ease, comfortably stretched out. That brought him wide awake, in shock.

  He could move, stretch; he wasn’t in the stasis box!

  Had it all been a nightmare, then? The flight from the Alpha police, the rebellion he had led in the colony, the final confrontation, with his men shot down around him, the capture and the trial, and finally the horror of the stasis box closing around him forever.

  Forever. That had been his last thought. Forever.

  Painless, of course, Even pleasant, like going to sleep when you were completely exhausted. But he had struggled and fought for that last instant of consciousness, knowing that it would be the last; he would never waken.

  Humane governments had abolished the death penalty long ago. Too often, new evidence, a few years after the prisoner was executed, had proved him innocent. Death made the mistake irrevocable, and embarrassed the whole judicial system. The stasis box kept the prisoner safely removed from society… but he could always be reprieved and recalled to life. And no prisons, no traumatic memories of association with hardened criminals, no prison riots, no need for counseling, recreation, rehabilitation. Just stick them away in a stasis box and let them age there, naturally, and finally die, unconscious, lifeless… unless they were proved innocent. Then you could take them out.

  But, Paul Harrell thought, they couldn’t prove him innocent He was guilty as hell, and furthermore, he’d admitted it, and tried as hard as he could to be shot down before capture. What was more, he made sure he took about ten of the damn cops with him, so they couldn’t legally grant him the option of Rehab.

  The rest of his men, the ones they didn’t shoot down, went meekly down to Rehabilitation like so many sheep, to be made over into the conformist nothings which are all they want in this stupid world. Pussycats. Gutless wonders. And right up to the end, he could see that the judge and all his legal advisers were hoping he’d break down and beg for executive clemency—a chance for Rehab, so they could tinker with his brain, with drugs and re-education and brainwashing, so they could make him over into a nobody, to march along in lockstep just like everybody else through what they call life. But not me, thanks. I wouldn’t play their damned game. When I finished my run, I was ready to go, and I went.

  And it had been a good life while it lasted, he thought. He’d made hash of their stupid laws because for years they couldn’t even imagine that anyone would break laws except through accident or ignorance! He’d had all the women he wanted, and all the high living.

  Especially women. He didn’t play the stupid games women tried to make men play. He was a man, and if they wanted a man instead of a sheep, they learned right away that Paul Harrell didn’t play by their conformist, ball-less rules.

  That damned woman who led the police down on me.

  Her mother had probably taught her that you had to make noises about rape, unless the man got down on his knees and pretended to be a capon, a gutless wonder who’d let a woman lead him around by the nose and never touch her unless she said she wanted it! Hell, he knew better than that. That was what women wanted and they loved it, when you gave it to them and didn’t take no for an answer! Well, she found out; he didn’t play their games, even with the stasis box hanging over him! She probably thought he’d go and whine for a chance at Rehab, and they’d make him over into a pussycat she could lead around by the balls!

  Well, the hell with her, she’ll wake up nights all the rest of her life, remembering that for once she had a real man…

  And when he had gotten this far in his memories Paul Harrell sat up and stared. He wasn’t in the stasis box, but he wasn’t anywhere else he could remember being, either. Had it all been a nightmare, then, the girl, the rebellion, the shoot-out with the police, the judge, trial, the stasis box…

  Had he ever been there at all, had any of it ever happened?

  And if so, what had gotten him out?

  He was lying on a soft mattress, covered with clean coarse linens, and over them, thick wool blankets and quilts and a fur cover. All around him was a very faint, dim,
reddish light. He reached out and found that the light was coming through heavy bed-curtains; that he was in a high curtained bed such as he’d seen somewhere once in a museum, and that curtains around the bed were closing out the light. Red curtains.

  He thrust them aside. He was in a room he had never seen before. Not only had he never seen the room before, he had never seen anything remotely like it before.

  One thing was for damn sure. He wasn’t in the stasis box, unless part of the punishment was a series of bizarre dreams. Nor was he anywhere in the Rehab center. In fact, he thought, glancing out the high arched window at a huge red sun beyond, he wasn’t on Alpha at all, nor on Terra, nor on any of the planets of the Confederated Worlds that he had ever visited before.

  Maybe this was Valhalla, or something. There were old legends about a perfect place for warriors who met a hero’s end. And he had certainly gone down fighting; at his trial they said he had killed eight policemen and crippled another for life. He’d gone out like a man, not a brainwashed conformist; he hadn’t cringed and whimpered and begged for a chance to crawl around on his knees a while longer in a world with no respect for anyone who’d rather die on his feet!

  Anyway, he was out of the box, that was a good place to start. But he was naked, just the way he’d gone into the box. His hair was still clipped short, as when he’d gone into the box… no. They’d shaved it then, so he’d been in there a month or two, anyhow, because he could feel the thick soft nap of it. He looked at the room around him. The room had a stone floor with a few thick fur and skin rugs. There was no furniture except the bed and a heavy chest carved richly of some dark wood.

  And now, through the pain that still pounded in his head, he remembered something else; flaring pain, blue lightnings around him, a circle of faces, falling as if from a great height—pain, and then a man. A man with his own face, and his own voice asking, Who are you? You’re not the devil, by any chance? Old legends. If you met a man with your own face, your double, your doppelganger, your fetch, it was either the devil or a warning of death. But he had died, for all practical purposes, when they put him into the stasis box, so what more could anyone do to him? Anyway, that had been a dream. Hadn’t it? Or, when he went into the box, had they cloned him and brainwashed the clone into being the good respectable, conformist citizen they’d always wanted him to be?

  Somehow, something had brought him here. But who, and when, and how? And above all, why?

  And then the door opened, and the man with his face came in.

  Not a close resemblance, as of brothers or twins. Himself.

  Like himself, the man had blond hair; only on the strange man, it was thick and long and twisted into a tight braid, wrapped with a red cord. Paul had never known a man who wore his hair that way.

  He had never seen a man dressed as the man with his face was dressed, either, in garments of heavy wool and leather; a laced leather jerkin, a thick tunic under it of unbleached wool, leather breeches, high boots. Now that Paul was part way out from under the covers, he realized it was cold enough in the room for that kind of clothing to make sense; and now, through the windows, he saw that snow lay thickly on the ground. Well, he already knew he wasn’t on Alpha; if he’d had any doubts, the faint purple shadows on the snow, and the great red sun, would have told him.

  But beyond all that, the man with his face. Not just a close resemblance. Not a likeness which would fade at close range. Not even the image he would have seen in a mirror, reversed, but the face he had seen, watching taped video of himself, at his trial.

  A clone, if anyone except rich eccentrics could have afforded such a thing. An absolute, identical replica of himself, down to the cleft chin and the small brown birthmark on his left thumb. What the hell was going on here?

  He demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

  The man in the leather jerkin said, “I was coming here to ask the same question of you.”

  Paul heard the strangeness of the syllables. They sounded a little like Old Spanish—a language of which Paul knew only a few words. But he could clearly understand the stranger’s meaning, and that frightened him worse than anything else that had happened yet. They were reading each other’s thoughts.

  “Hell,” he blurted out “You’re me!”

  “Not quite,” said the other man, “but near enough. And that is why we brought you here.”

  “Here,” Paul said, fastening on that. “Where is here? What world is this? What sun is that? And how did I get here? And who are you?”

  The man shook his head, and again Paul had the eerie sense that he was watching himself.

  “The sun is the sun,” he said, “and we are in what they call the Hundred Kingdoms; this is the Kingdom of Asturias. As for what world this is, it is called Darkover, and it is the only world I know. When I was a boy they told me some fable about the other stars being suns like our own, with a million million other worlds circling them like ours, and perhaps men like ours on them, but I always thought that was a story to frighten babes and girl children! But I have seen stranger things, and heard stranger things than that, in the last night. My father’s sorcery brought you here, and if you wish to know why, you must ask him. But we mean you no harm.”

  Paul hardly heard the explanation. He was staring at the man with his face, his body, his own hands, and trying to understand what he felt about the man.

  His brother. Himself, He’d understand me. Those thoughts flickered through his mind. And at the same time, crowding them, a sudden raging anger: How does he dare to go around wearing my face? And then, in total confusion, if he’s me, who in hell am I?

  And the other man spoke his question aloud. “If you are me,” he said, and his fists clenched, “then who am I?”

  Paul said, with a harsh half-laugh, “Maybe you’re the devil after all. What’s your name?”

  “Bard,” said the man, “but they call me Wolf. Bard di Asturien, the Kilghard Wolf. And you?”

  “My name is Paul Harrell,” he said, and swayed. Was this all a bizarre dream of the stasis box? Had he died and wound up in Valhalla? None of it made sense to him. None at all.

  * * *

  Seven Years Earlier…

  BOOK ONE

  The Foster Brothers

  * * *

  Chapter One

  « ^ »

  Light blazed from every window and embrasure of Castle Asturias; on this night King Ardrin of Asturias held high festival, for he was handfasting his daughter Carlina to his foster son and nephew, Bard di Asturien, son of his brother, Dom Rafael of High Fens. Most of the nobles of Asturias, and a few from the neighboring kingdoms, had come to do honor to the handfasting and to the king’s daughter, and the courtyard was ablaze with brilliance; strange horses and riding beasts to be stabled, nobles richly dressed, commoners crowding in to spy what they could from outside the gates and accept the dole of food and wine and sweets given out from the kitchens to all comers, servants running here or there on real or invented errands.

  High in the secluded chambers of the women, Carlina di Asturien looked with distaste on the embroidered veils and the blue velvet over-gown, set with pearls from Temora, that she would wear for the handfasting ceremony. She was fourteen years old; a slender, pale, young woman, with long dark braids looped below her ears, and wide gray eyes which were the only good feature in a face too thin and thoughtful for beauty. Her face was reddened around the eyelids; she had been crying for a long time.

  “Come, now, come, now,” her nurse, Ysabet, urged. “You mustn’t cry like this, chiya. Look at the pretty gown, you will never have one so fine again. And Bard is so handsome and brave; just think, your father made him banner bearer on the field for bravery in the battle of Snow Glen. And, after all, dear child, it is not as if you would be marrying a stranger; Bard is your foster brother, reared here in the king’s house since he was ten years old. Why, when you were children, you were always playing together, I thought you loved him well!”

  “And so I do�
��as a brother,” Carlina said in a whisper.

  “But to marry Bard—no, Nurse, I don’t want to. I don’t want to marry at all—”

  “Now that is folly,” said the older woman, clucking, and she held up the pearl-broidered overdress to help her nursling into it. Carlina submitted like a doll being dressed, knowing that resistance would do her no good.

  “Why don’t you want to marry Bard, then? He is handsome, and brave—how many young men have distinguished themselves before reaching their sixteenth year?” Ysabet demanded. “One day, I have no doubt, he will be general of all your father’s armies! You are not holding it against him that he is nedestro, are you? The poor lad did not choose to be born to one of his father’s fancy-women instead of to his lawful wife!”

  Carlina smiled faintly at the thought of anyone calling Bard “poor lad.”

  Her nurse pinched her cheek. She said, “Now, that is the right way to go to your handfasting, with a smile! Let me do up these laces properly.” She tugged at the lacings, then tucked in the ribbons. “Sit here, my pretty, while I do up your sandals. Look how dainty, your mother had them made to match the gown, blue leather with pearls! How pretty you are, Carlie, like a blue flower! Let me fasten the ribbons here in your hair. I do not think there is a prettier bride anywhere in nine kingdoms this night! And Bard handsome enough, surely, to be worthy of you, so fair where you are so dark…”

  “What a pity,” Carlina said dryly, “that he cannot marry you, Nurse, since you like him so much.”

  “Oh, come now, he wouldn’t want me, old and withered as I am,” said Ysabet, bridling. “A handsome young warrior like Bard must have a young and beautiful bride, and so your father has ordained it… I cannot imagine why the wedding is not on this night as well, and the bedding too!”