by Speer, Flora
Destiny’s Lovers
by
Flora Speer
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2013, 1990, by Flora Speer
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For my brother, Ralph De Groodt, my “technical advisor”
on the art of sailing, with love and thanks for the help
and advice.
Chapter 1
The sun was still below the horizon when Janina and Tamat approached the shore. Though the ceremonial road from the village was smooth and level, it was a long walk for the elderly priestess. Janina slowed her steps to ease the strain on the woman who had been her great-grandmother’s older sister.
Tamat was in her ninety-eighth year. For more than sixty years she had been known only by her family name and by the designation of High Priestess and Co-Ruler of Ruthlen. Her spine remained unbent by advanced age and she wore her elaborate white-and-gold headdress with easy dignity, yet there was about Tamat an air of fragility. Everyone in Ruthlen knew that Tamat was near to the end of a life devoted to her people and their Chosen Way. Only Tamat did not speak of her approaching death or of what would happen after it.
Except to Janina.
“You are the only one left,” she had said three days before this day, “the only descendant of our line. You must succeed me, Janina. You must keep the line unbroken for a little longer.”
“How can I?” Janina asked. “If I attempted to take your place, I’d only shame you, and our ancestors. No matter how hard I try, I’m not a telepath and never will be.”
“It is possible,” Tamat said, “that you do not try hard enough. I have seen you looking at the young men on festival days.”
“Do you think I’m reluctant because I’d have to remain a virgin for the rest of my life?” Janina exclaimed with a bitter laugh. “I’ll remain a virgin whether I’m a priestess or not, because I lack the one quality necessary to an adequate mating. I’m not a telepath. No man would want me. And the looking you speak of has shown me that there is not a man in all of Ruthlen that I would want.”
“Perhaps,” Tamat said, “there is something I can do to help, if you are willing to take the risk. You have completed all of the necessary theoretical training. You know how to contain and control the Gift when it is released to you. It only remains locked in your mind. We must open the door of your mind and set it free. There are ways. Trust me, Janina, and I’ll see you High Priestess Designate before I die, for I cannot believe that anyone born of my grandmother’s blood is not a telepath. Your Gift must be released! If it is not, then Sidra will be High Priestess when I am gone, and though she is acceptable in every other way, she fails the first test - she is not a Tamat.”
Here, for just a moment, an ancient hand rested gently upon Janina’s.
“I am aware, dear child, that Sidra loves you not. If she becomes High Priestess, your life will be an unhappy one.”
“I trust you, Tamat.” Janina looked directly into her great-great-aunt’s silver-blue eyes and wished with her entire heart that she could make contact with all the knowledge contained within Tamat’s mind. That was the way a High Priestess was made, by a complete mind-linking with her predecessor. If Tamat said there was a way for her to do that, there was a way, and Janina would attempt it. “Tell me what to do.”
And so now Janina walked beside Tamat on the ceremonial road to the sea, her body and mind relaxed by the potent herbal mixture Tamat had prepared and made her drink just before leaving the temple. Janina had fasted for the last three days, and had slept not at all during the previous night. She felt neither hunger nor weariness, but only a weightlessness in her body, as though she was too light for her bare feet to touch the ground.
Behind the High Priestess and Janina walked Sidra, Tamat’s assistant priestess for more than twenty years. Beside Sidra was Osiyar, the High Priest and Co-Ruler of the village, a blue-eyed, golden-haired man, handsome beyond all belief, who lived deep within himself and loved neither man nor woman. After them came the other priestesses and priests and most of the villagers. Janina could feel the disapproval of the villagers like the cold hand of an enemy against her back.
For as long as she could remember, the people of Ruthlen had looked down upon Janina with disgust, scorning her company and occasionally declaring that she ought to be banished because she was different. She lacked the Gift all the others had, the ability to meet mind with mind. During her childhood, she had often been pelted with stones and spat upon by the other children. In her teens, she had been laughed at and mocked by her contemporaries. Never had her parents tried to stop this treatment, for they felt shamed and humiliated by her lack of a quality everyone else possessed.
Now that she was twenty and a woman grown, the villagers ignored her most of the time. She had no friends and, since the deaths of her parents, no other relatives except for Tamat, who had loved her and accepted her as a scholar priestess when no one else wanted her. But she had repaid Tamat with an inability to do the one thing the kind-hearted woman had ever asked of her. She would probably be unable to do it today, too. Once again she would fail Tamat. Were it not for the euphoria induced by the mixture she had drunk, Janina would have wept before the entire company, disgracing herself and Tamat forever.
They had reached the shore. The procession of villagers and temple folk fanned out into a ragged line two or three deep at the place where the road ended. There they stayed, among the dunes and rough grasses at the edge of the beach.
Janina, Tamat, Sidra, and Osiyar walked across the beach. The steadily growing daylight revealed a wide stretch of fine white sand bounded on both left and right by tall, rocky headlands. The sand was perfectly clean, bearing no trace of marine life or human activity.
Halfway across the beach Tamat stopped, the others pausing with her. The sky was now an opalescent rose with a faint tinge of gold along the horizon. On this day there was no morning mist. Janina wondered if Tamat had commanded it away.
“It is time,” Tamat said.
Leaving Tamat standing between Osiyar and Sidra, Janina walked forward to the water’s edge. She stood there a moment, feeling the moist sand between her toes. A tiny wave foamed cool salt water around her feet. When the breeze blew her sheer, sleeveless white robe against her slender form and lifted a few strands of silver-gold hair, Janina felt a chill along her upper arms. Another wave swept across her feet, splashing her ankles and the hem of her robe.
The tide had turned and was coming in. The wind was from the sea, the twin moons had set, the sun was about to rise. The moment of testing had arrived.
Janina took a deep breath and lifted her arms. An instant later, the uppermost rim of the sun showed above the edge of the world. Janina cupped her hands, holding them out toward the rising sun, willing the Power to come to her, to fill her hands with light, to unlock itself from the deep recesses of her mind.
Tamat could do it. Janina had seen the aged priestess standing in this same spot with her feet in the sea and glistening light spilling out of her hands into the air around her until Tamat was encased in sparkling silver.
Janina focused all her strength and all her will upon the rising sun. Her eyes swam with tears from the glory of it as the huge, orange-gold disk swelled until it rested exactly upon the horizon.
Now. Janina opened her mind and l
ifted her arms above her head.
A shadow skimmed across the face of the sun and rested there. Janina ignored the sudden murmuring behind her, for in the shadow she saw a face. As it became more distinct, she realized that it was a man’s face, though it was like no man she had ever seen before, dark and ugly, and yet - and yet, known and beloved. Black hair, thick black brows, dark eyes.
“He comes ... to change everything.” Janina’s voice was a high-pitched moan, foreign to her own ears. “New people on this world. I can feel them. A man comes. Beloved…He will change…change…”
Sudden blackness enveloped her. She collapsed toward the sea now swirling about her knees and knew nothing more.
Chapter 2
Reid was lost. He had become separated from the others as they fought their way through an unnaturally dense forest. At first it had been pleasant to be out of the reach of Herne’s sour remarks about their expedition and Alla’s constant lectures to him on the plants and trees they were passing.
He raised one hand, drawing his fingers through dark, curly hair, thinking how upset Alla would be if he wasn’t there to order around and try to protect. Alla’s mother and his had been sisters, Reid and Alla had grown up together, and while she was only two years older than Reid, Alla had always treated him as if she were his mother. She had even joined Tank’s colony when she learned Reid had signed up for it. She was entirely too protective of him. He loved her, but a man needed room to breathe and make his own life.
He wished one of the other women from the colony had come along on this trek instead of Alla, someone with whom he could have bedded down at night for a little uncomplicated entertainment before sleep. Herne wouldn’t have minded. Herne didn’t care about anything but medicine and complaining.
Where in the star-blasted universe were his companions? Looking about him, it was easy to see how they had disappeared so quickly. There was something mysterious, even eerie, about the thick, silent forest, the warm, humid air, the gently drizzling rain. He couldn’t move without brushing against damp leaves, and the foliage muffled sound most effectively.
Soon after the voices of the others had faded, he tried to use his pocket communicator to contact them again, only to discover it wasn’t working. That made him angry. He was the communications officer on this expedition. If something was wrong with his equipment, he should have known about it and made the necessary repairs. But there had been nothing wrong with the communicator until now. Nothing at all.
He pulled the cover off the offending communicator for the third time and checked it once more, but could find no reason for the malfunction. Slamming the cover back into place, he shouted, but there was no answering call.
“Beloved…”
At first he thought it was the leaves rustling, or the buzzing of insects. When he heard the sound again, he peered through the trees, wondering if Alla or Herne might be playing a trick on him, though it would be out of character for either of them.
“Beloved…”
“Where are you?” he called, spinning around, then around again, the action causing a miniature rainstorm as moisture showered off every leaf he touched. He was surrounded by green. He had never seen so many shades of one color. The moss at his feet was a rich gold-green, the underbrush pale green which turned paler still when some movement of his revealed the silvery undersides of the leaves. Over his head, green vines looped back and forth between the trees, and far above the vines, the tops of the trees were the deepest green of all. He could not see the sky. It was screened from view by thick layers of leaves.
Even the air was green, soft and moist and scented by a hundred varieties of leaves and by the tiny purple flowers that grew wherever the trees left them room enough.
“Come, beloved…”
Oddly, he was not afraid after hearing that tantalizing whisper. Nothing about Dulan’s Planet frightened him. He had felt at home on it as soon as his feet touched its soil. That was why he had volunteered to join the exploration team. He was going to spend the rest of his life on this world, so he wanted to know all of it.
He had willingly joined the colonists who set out to establish a secret listening post on Dulan’s Planet, to observe any Cetan activity that might be construed as warlike and report it directly to the Leader of the Jurisdiction. The Cetans and the Jurisdiction had only recently signed a peace treaty after centuries of war, and Leader Almaric was not completely certain the Cetans could be trusted.
Heading the ten colonists was Almaric’s younger son, Tarik, with Tarik’s wife, Narisa, as second in command. They made their headquarters upon an island in a large lake, where there was a shelter built more than six centuries before by a vanished Race. Once their communications equipment was working well, they had begun to explore the planet. The first group to set out had chosen the southern area of the continent they had landed on, and had relayed massive amounts of information back to headquarters before returning eight days later.
Reid volunteered for the second expedition, toward the east. Of course Alla then said she wanted to go, too, and Herne had grumbled that he might as well go along on this trip, because the third expedition was scheduled to explore the rocky northernmost region of the continent and he hated cold weather and certainly did not want to be assigned to that group.
The three of them were flown by shuttlecraft for an entire day across a barren, stony desert before they were set down at the edge of a prairie. They planned to trek to the cliffs which their scanning instruments told them rimmed the sea. When they reached the cliffs, they would signal for pickup by the shuttle.
Two of the Chon went with them. The friendly, telepathic birds indigenous to Dulan’s Planet were seldom far away from the colonists.
Reid, Alla, and Herne had tramped across the prairie for three days, finding nothing more interesting to report back to headquarters than a wide variety of grasses and small mammals, and a remarkable number of stinging insects.
The forest was a relief from the unbroken glare of the orange-gold sun, but as they moved into the trees, they lost their winged companions, who apparently did not frequent this part of the planet. Reid missed them. Still, he could understand why they did not come into a forest so impenetrable. Among the closely packed trees and draped vines there would be no space for the large birds to spread their wings and fly. When they were gone he felt a peculiar sense of loss, almost of foreboding, as though the Chon were trying to warn him of something. He mentioned his feeling to the others. They said they had noticed nothing strange.
“Beloved…”
Reid stuffed his nonfunctional communicator back into the waist pocket of his high-visibility orange treksuit and looked upward, to see if the owner of the mysterious voice was hiding there, but he could discern nothing except the thick canopy of leaves. He decided there was no point in staying where he was.
“We are supposed to be exploring,” he said aloud to the disembodied voice, “so I will explore. Perhaps I’ll find you, or at least find the others.” He moved forward.
* * * * *
“You have fostered a prophetess!” Osiyar stared at Tamat across Janina’s limp figure. He had snatched her from the surf just in time to keep her from being swept out to sea. She lay across his arms, her long wet hair dragging in the sand, her eyes closed. On her otherwise peaceful face there was the faintest hint of a line between her brows. Whether it was a line of pain, or of bewilderment at what had happened to her, no one could tell. Osiyar kept his eyes fixed upon the High Priestess. “Did you know of this before?”
“I did not know, I only suspected,” Tamat replied. “Because she is of my grandmother’s blood, some portion of the Gift must be hers. I tried repeatedly to touch it and could not. I thought it was locked within her because she witnessed the horror of her parents’ death. But I never dreamed the Test would result in prophecy.”
“You should have told me what you planned, dear Tamat.” Sidra spoke in a low-pitched voice, sweet as the nectar of the reddest flow
ers of the khata plant. “I might have helped you. With our minds joined we might have reached her, and there would have been no need for this terrible Test.”
“Sidra, you do not love Janina,” Tamat replied. “You have always been afraid of her, as most of the village is afraid of her. Now we know why.”
“Since she is not a true telepath, she can never be High Priestess,” Osiyar said.
“No,” Tamat agreed, and with an aching heart she watched the tiny flare of triumph in Sidra’s blue eyes.
“Will you banish her?” Osiyar asked.
“Never.” Tamat’s voice cracked on the word. Banishment meant certain death, for there was nothing beyond the narrow strip of land that was Ruthlen, only empty desolation and danger.
“What will you tell them?” Osiyar inclined his head toward the villagers still waiting at the far edge of the beach.
“The truth,” Tamat replied.
“They will kill her with demands that she take the potion again and again so they can know the future,” Sidra objected. “Tamat, I may not love Janina, but I do love you, who have been my teacher all my life. I would not see you bowed down with grief at Janina’s death, which will happen if she must drink that strong brew too often. Tell the villagers only a part of the truth. Say that she has a portion of the Gift, but it is inadequate to qualify her to be High Priestess. Then let Janina remain with us as a lesser priestess. She will be well cared for all of her life.”
And her Gift well-used by you, Tamat thought. She knew Sidra heart and soul, knew her need for power and her frustrated lust for Osiyar. Once Tamat was dead, Sidra would have no compunction about feeding the potion to Janina so she could use the girl to gain knowledge of the future in order to improve and consolidate her own position. And though Sidra might never break her Sacred Vow to remain a virgin, she would probably find a way to use Osiyar to satisfy her desire for him in some other manner. Tamat suddenly felt the weight of every one of her ninety-eight years crushing her.