The Forbidden Tower Read online

  She looked up at him and smiled. Sometimes she thought that if she had first seen him in the ordinary way, rather than as she had come to know him, through his mind-link with hers in the matrix, he would never have seemed handsome to her. She might even have thought him ill-favored. He was a big, broad man, fair-haired as a Dry-Towner, tall, untidy, awkward, and yet, beyond this, how dear he had become to her, how safe she felt in his presence. She wished, with a literal ache, that she could throw herself into his arms, hold herself to him as Ellemir did so freely with Damon, but the old fear held her motionless. But she laid her fingertips, a rare gesture, lightly across his lips. He kissed them and she smiled. She said softly, “And I love you, Andrew. In case you’ve forgotten that,” and went away up the stairs to where Leonie was waiting for her.

  * * *

  Chapter Three

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  The two Keepers of Arilinn, the young and the old, faced one another. Callista stood considering Leonie’s appearance: never beautiful, perhaps, except for the lovely eyes, but with serene, regular features; her body flat and spare, sexless as any emmasca; the face pale and impassive as if carved in marble. Callista felt a faint shiver of horror as she knew that the habit of years, the discipline which had gone bone-deep, was smoothing away her own expression, turning her cold, remote, as withdrawn as Leonie. It seemed that the face of the old Keeper was a mirror of her own across the many dead years which lay ahead. In half a century I will look exactly like her… But no! No! I will not, I will not!

  Like all Keepers, she had learned to barricade her own thoughts. She knew, with an odd clairvoyance, that Leonie was expecting her to break down and weep, to beg and plead like an hysterical girl, but it was Leonie herself who had armored her, years ago, with this icy calm, this absolute control. She was Keeper, Arilinn-trained; she would not show herself unfit. She laid her hands calmly in her lap and waited, and finally it was Leonie who had to speak first.

  “There was a day,” she said, “when a man who sought to seduce a Keeper would have been torn on hooks, Callista.”

  “That day is centuries past,” Callista replied in a voice as passionless as Leonie’s own, “nor did Andrew seek to seduce me; he has offered honorable marriage.”

  Leonie gave a slight shrug. “It is all one,” she said. She was silent for a long time, the silence stretching into minutes, and again Callista felt that Leonie was willing her to lose control, to plead with her. But Callista waited, motionless, and it was again Leonie who had to break the silence.

  “Is this, then, how you keep your oath, Callista of Arilinn?”

  For a moment Callista felt pain clutch at her throat. The title was used only for a Keeper, the title she had won at such terrible cost! And Leonie looked so old, so sad, so weary!

  Leonie is old, she told herself. She wishes to lay aside her burden, give it into my hands. I was traind so carefully, since I was a child. Leonie has worked and waited so patiently for the day I could step into the place she prepared for me. What will she do now?

  Then, instead of pain, anger came, anger at Leonie, for playing so on her emotions. Her voice was calm.

  “For nine years, Leonie, I have borne the weight of the Keeper’s oath. I am not the first to ask leave to lay it down, nor will I be the last to do so.”

  “When I was made Keeper, Callista, it was taken for granted that it was a lifetime decision. I have borne my oath lifelong. I had hoped you would be willing to do no less.”

  Callista wanted to weep, to cry out I cannot, to plead with Leonie. She thought, with a forlorn detachment, that it would be better if she could. Leonie would be readier to believe her unfit, to free her. But she had been taught pride, had fought for it and armored herself with it, and she could not now surrender it.

  “I was never told, Leonie, that I must give my oath lifelong. It was you who told me that it is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting.”

  With stony patience, Leonie said, “That is true. Yet I had believed you stronger. Well, then, tell me about it. Have you lain with your lover?” The word was scornful; it was the same she had used before, meaning “promised husband,” but this time Leonie used the derogatory inflection which gave it, instead, the implication of “paramour,” and Callista had to stop and steady her voice before she could summon up calm enough to speak quietly.

  “No. I have not yet been given back my oath, and he is too honorable to seek it. I asked leave to marry, not absolution for betrayal, Leonie.”

  “Truly?” Leonie said, disbelief in the word, and her cold face scornful. “Having resolved to break your oath, I wonder you waited for my word!”

  It took all of Callista’s self-control, this time, to keep from bursting into angry defense of herself, of Andrew—then she realized that Leonie was baiting her, testing to see if she had indeed lost control of her carefully disciplined emotions. This game she knew from her earliest days at Arilinn, and relief at the memory made her want to laugh. Laughter would have been as unthinkable as tears in this solemn confrontation, but there was merriment in her voice, and she knew Leonie was aware of it, as she said with calm amusement, “We keep a midwife at Armida, Leonie; send for her, if you wish, and let her certify me virgin.”

  It was Leonie who lowered her eyes, saying at last, “That will not be necessary, child. But I came here prepared to face, if need be, the knowledge that you had been raped.”

  “In the hands of nonhumans? No, I suffered fear, cold, imprisonment, hunger, abuse, but rape I was spared.”

  “It would not really have mattered, you know,” Leonie said, and her voice was very gentle. “Of course, a Keeper need not, in general, have to fear rape very much. You know as well as I that any man who lays hands on a Keeper trained as you have been trained takes his life in his hands. Yet rape is possible. Some women have been overpowered by sheer might, and some fear at the last moment to invoke that strength to protect themselves. So it was this, among other things, I came to tell you: even if you had truly been raped, you still had a choice, my child. It is not the physical act which makes the difference, you know.” Callista had not known, and was vaguely surprised.

  Leonie went on, dispassionately: “If you had been taken unwillingly, wholly without consent, it would make no difference that could not be quickly overcome by a little time in seclusion, for the healing of your fears and hurts. But even if it was not a question of rape, if you had lain with your rescuer afterward, in gratitude or kindness, without any genuine involvement—as you might well have done—even that need not be irrevocable. A time of seclusion, of retraining, and you could be as before, unchanged, unharmed, still free to be Keeper. This is not widely known; we keep it secret, for obvious reasons. But you still have a choice, child. I do not want you to think that you are cast out from the Tower for all time because of something which happened without your will.”

  Leonie still spoke quietly, almost impassively, but Callista knew she was pleading. Callista said, wrung with pity and pain, “No, it is not like that, Leonie. What has happened between us… It is quite different. I came to know him, and love him, before I ever saw his face in this world. But he is too honorable to ask that I break an oath given, without leave.”

  Leonie raised her eyes, and the steel-blue gaze was suddenly like a glare of lightning.

  “Is it that he is too honorable,” she said harshly, “or is it that you are afraid?”

  Callista felt a stab of inward pain, but she kept her voice steady. “I am not afraid.”

  “Not for yourself perhaps—I acknowledge it! But for him, Callista? You can still return to Arilinn, without penalty, without harm. But if you do not return—do you want your lover’s blood on your head? You would not be the first Keeper to bring a man to death!”

  Callista raised her head, opened her lips to protest, but Leonie gestured her to silence and went on mercilessly, “Have you been able even to touch his hand, even so much as that?”

  Callista felt relief wash through her, a relief so
great that it was like physical pain, draining her of strength. With a telepath’s whole total recall, the image in her memory returned, annihilating everything else that lay between…

  Andrew had carried her from the cave where the Great Cat lay dead, a blackened corpse beside the shattered matrix he had profaned. Andrew had wrapped her in his cloak and set her before him on his horse. She felt it again, in complete recall, bow she had rested against him, her head on his breast, folded close into the curve of his arms, his heart beating beneath her cheek. Safe, warm, happy, wholly at peace. For the first time since she had been made Keeper, she felt free, touching and being touched, lying in his arms, content to be there. And all during that long ride to Armida she had lain there, folded inside his cloak, happy with such a happiness as she had never guessed.

  As the image in her mind communicated itself to Leonie, the older woman’s face changed. At last she said, in a gentler voice than Callista had ever heard, “Is it so, chiya? Why, then, if Avarra is merciful to you, it may be as you desire. I had not believed it possible.”

  And Callista felt a strange disquiet. She had not, after all, been wholly truthful with Leonie. Yes, for that little while she had been all afire with love, warm, unafraid, content— but then the old nervous constraint had come back little by little, until now she found it difficult even to touch his fingertips. But surely that was only habit, the habit of years, she told herself. It would certainly be all right…

  Leonie said gently, “Then, child, would it indeed make you so unhappy, to part from your lover?”

  Callista found that her calm had deserted her. She said, and knew that her voice was breaking and that tears were flooding her eyes, “I would not want to live, Leonie.”

  “So…” Leonie looked at her for a long moment, with a dreadful, remote sadness. “Does he understand how hard it will be, child?”

  “I think—I am sure I can make him understand,” Callista said, hesitating. “He promised to wait as long as we must.”

  Leonie sighed. After a moment she said, “Why, then, child… child, I do not want you to be unhappy. Even as I said, a Keeper’s oath is too heavy to be borne unconsenting.” Deliberately, a curiously formal gesture, she reached out her hands, palm up, to Callista; the younger woman laid her hands against the older woman’s, palm against palm. Leonie drew a deep breath and said, “Be free of your oath, Callista Lanart. Before the Gods and before all men I declare you guiltless and unloosed from the bond, and I will so maintain.”

  Their hands slowly fell apart. Callista was shaking in every limb. Leonie took her kerchief and dried Callista’s eyes. She said, “I pray you are both strong enough, then.” She seemed about to say something more, but stopped herself. “Well, I suppose your father will have a good deal to say about this, my darling, so let us go and listen to him say it.” She smiled and added, “And then, when he has said it all, we will tell him what is to be, whether he likes it or not. Don’t be afraid, my child; I am not afraid of Esteban Lanart, and you must not be either.”

  Andrew waited in the greenhouse which stretched behind the main building at Armida. Alone, he looked through the thick and wavy glass toward the outline of the faraway hills. It was hot here, with a thick scent of leaves and soil and plants. The light from the solar collectors made him narrow his eyes till he got used to it. He walked through the rows of plants, damp from watering, feeling isolated and unfathomably alone.

  It struck him like this, now and again. Most of the time he had come to feel at home here, more at home than he had ever felt anywhere else in the Empire; more at home than he had felt since, at eighteen, the Arizona horse ranch where he had spent his childhood had been sold for debts, and he had gone into space as an Empire civil servant, moving from planet to planet at the will of the administrators and computers. And they had welcomed him here, after the first few days of strangeness. When they heard that he knew something of horse-breaking and horse-training, a rare and highly paid field of expertise on Darkover, they had treated him with respect, as a highly trained and skilled professional. The horses from Armida were said to be the finest in the Domains, but they usually brought their trainers up from Dalereuth, far to the South.

  And so, in general, he had been happy here, in the weeks since he had come, as Callista’s pledged husband. His Terran birth was known only to Damon and Dom Esteban, to Callista and Ellemir; the others simply thought him a stranger from the lowlands beyond Thendara. Beyond belief, he had found here a second home. The sun was huge and blood-tinged, the four moons that swung at night in the curiously violet sky were strangely colored and bore names he did not yet know, but beyond all this, it had become his home…

  Home. And yet there were moments like this, moments when he felt his own cruel isolation; knew it was only Callista’s presence that made it home to him. Under the noonday glare of the greenhouse, he had one of those moments. Lonely for what? There was nothing in the world he had been taught to call his own, the dry and barren world of the Terran HQ, nothing he wanted. But would there be a life for him here after all, or would Leonie snatch Callista back to the alien world of the Towers?

  After a long time, he realized that Damon was standing behind him, not touching him—Andrew was used to that now, among telepaths—but close enough that he could sense the older man as a comforting presence.

  “Don’t worry this way, Andrew. Leonie’s not an ogre. She loves Callista. The bonds of a Tower circle are the closest bonds we know. She’ll know what Callista really wants.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Andrew said through a dry throat. “Maybe Callista doesn’t know what she wants. Maybe she turned to me only because she was alone and afraid. I’m afraid of that old woman’s hold on her. The grip of the Tower—I’m afraid it’s too strong.”

  Damon sighed. “Yet it can be broken. I broke it. It was hard—I can’t begin to tell you how hard—yet I have built another life at last. And if you should lose Callista that way, better now than when it’s too late to return.”

  “It’s already too late for me,” Andrew said, and Damon nodded, with a troubled smile.

  “I don’t want to lose you either, my friend,” Damon said, but to himself he thought: You are part of this new life I have built with so much pain. You, and Ellemir, and Callista. I cannot endure another amputation. But Damon did not speak the words; he only sighed, standing beside Andrew. The silence in the greenhouse stretched so long that the red sun, angling from the zenith, lost strength in the greenhouse and Damon, sighing, went to adjust the solar collectors. Andrew flung at him, “How can you wait so calmly? What is that old woman saying to her?”

  Yet Andrew had already learned that telepathic eavesdropping was considered one of the most shameful crimes possible in a caste of telepaths. He dared not even try to reach Callista that way. All his frustrations went into pacing the greenhouse floor.

  “Easy, easy,” Damon remonstrated. “Callista loves you. She won’t let Leonie persuade her out of that.”

  “I’m not even sure of that anymore,” Andrew said in desperation. “She won’t let me touch her, kiss her—”

  Damon said gently, “I thought I had explained that to you; she cannot. These are… reflexes. They go deeper than you could imagine. The habit of years cannot be undone in a few days, yet I can tell that she is trying hard to overcome this… this deep conditioning. You know, do you not, that in a Tower, it would be unthinkable for her to take your hand, as I saw her do, to let you kiss even her fingertips. Have you any idea what a struggle that must have been, against years of training, of conditioning?”

  Against his will Damon was remembering a time in his life he had taught himself, painfully, not to remember: a lonely struggle, all the worse because it was not physical at all, to quench his own awareness of Leonie, to control even his thoughts, so that she should never guess what he was concealing. He would never have dared to imagine a finger-tip-touch such as Callista bestowed on Andrew in the hall, just before she went up to Leonie.
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  With relief, he saw that Ellemir had come into the greenhouse. She walked between the rows of green plants, knelt before a heavily laden vine. She rose with satisfaction, saying, “If there is sunlight for another day, these will be ripened for the wedding.” Then her smile slid off as she saw Damon’s strained face, Andrew’s desperate quiet. She came and stood on tiptoe, putting her arms around Damon, sensing he needed the comfort of her presence, her touch. She wished she could comfort Andrew too, as he said in distress, “Even if Leonie gives her consent, what of her father? Will he consent? I do not think he likes me much…”

  “He likes you well,” Ellemir said, “but you must understand that he is a proud man. He thought me too good for Damon, but I am old enough to do my own will. If he had offered me to Aran Elhalyn, who warms the throne at Then-dara, Father would still have thought him not good enough. For Callista, no man ever born of woman would be good enough, not if he was rich as the Lord of Carthon, and born bastard to a god! And of course, even in these days, it is a great thing to have a child at Arilinn. Callista was to be Keeper at Arilinn, and it will go hard with him, to renounce that.” Andrew felt his heart sink. She said, “Don’t worry! I think it will be all right. Look, there is Callista now.”

  The door at the top of the steps opened, and Callista came down into the greenhouse. She held out her hands toward them, blindly.

  “I am not to return to Arilinn,” she said, “and Father has given his consent to our marriage—”

  She broke down then, sobbing. Andrew held out his arms, but she turned away from him and leaned against the heavy glass wall, hiding her face, her slender shoulders heaving with the violence of her weeping.