Heritage and Exile

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  We had planned our death. . . . I remembered that morning in Castle Aldaran when, hostages to the destruction Sharra was sowing in the country round, showering on the Terran spaceport in Caer Donn, I had been allowed to waken from the drugs that had kept me, passive prisoner, chained to the destruction and feeding power into Sharra. I never knew why I had been allowed to come free of the drugs; certainly it had not been any lingering tenderness on Kadarin’s part for either of us. But Marjorie and I had been prepared to die . . . knew we must die in closing the gateway into this world that was Sharra. And so she and I, together, had smashed the gateway . . .

  But then I, using all the power of that matrix, had taken her, and the Sword, and flung us through space bodily—the Terrans called it teleportation, and I had never done it before or since—to Arilinn; where Marjorie had died from her terrible burns, and I . . . . . . I had survived, or some part of me had survived, and all these years had despised myself because I had not followed her to death. Now I knew why I had been spared: Kadarin and Thyra still lived, and somehow they would have recovered the matrix and ravaged Darkover again with its fire. This time there would be no respite; and when Sharra was destroyed, none of us would be left alive. And so I must set my affairs in order.

  I called Andres back to me, and said, “Where is the little girl?”

  “Rella—that’s the cook’s helper—looked after her today, and put her to bed in the room Marius had when he was a little tyke,” Andres said.

  “If I live, I may be able to take her to Armida,” I said, “but if anything should happen to me—no, foster-father, listen; nothing’s certain in this life. Now that my father and brother are gone—you have served us all faithfully for a quarter of a century. If something should happen to me, would you leave Darkover?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it,” the old man said. “I came here with Dom Kennard when we were young men, and it’s been a good life; but I think I might go back to Terra in the end.” He added, with a mirthless grin, “I’ve wondered what it would be like, to be under my own blue sky again, and have a moon like a moon ought to be, not those little things.” He pointed out the window at the paling face of Idriel, greenish like a gem through water.

  “Bring me something to write on.” When he complied, I scribbled with my good hand, folded the paper and sealed it.

  “I can’t leave Armida to you,” I said. “I suppose Gabriel will have it after me; it’s in the Alton Domain. I would if I could, believe me. But if you take this to the Terran Legate in the Trade City, this will take you to Terra, and I’d rather you would foster Marja yourself than turn her over to Gabriel’s wife.” Domna Javanne Hastur has never liked me; no doubt she would do her best by Gabriel’s kinsman, but it would be a cold and dutiful best; and Andres, at least, would care for my daughter for my father’s sake and Linnell’s if not for mine. “My mother—and my father after her—owned some land there; it had better go to you, then.”

  He blinked and I saw tears filling his eyes, but all he said was, “God forbid I should ever have to use it, vai dom. But I’ll do my best for the little girl if anything happens. You know I’d guard her with my life.”

  I said soberly, “You might have to.” I did not know why, but I was filled suddenly with icy shivers; my blood ran cold in my veins, and for a moment, even in the dying light which turned the whole room crimson, it seemed that blood lay over the stones around me. Is this then the place of my death? Only a moment, and it was gone. Andres went to the window, drew the curtains with a bang.

  “The bloody sun!” he said, and it sounded like a curse. Then he tucked the paper I had given him, without looking at it, into a pocket, and went away.

  That was settled. Now there was only Sharra to face. Well, it must come when it would. Tomorrow Kathie and I would ride to Hali, and the plan I had made, for finding the Sword of Aldones and using this last weapon against Sharra, would either succeed or it would fail. Either way, I would probably not see another sunset. My head was afire with the stitches in my forehead. Scars to match those Kadarin had made on my face . . . well, there’s an old saying that the dead in heaven is too happy to care what happens to his corpse, be it beautiful or ugly, and the dead in hell has too much else to worry about! As for me, I had never believed in either heaven or hell; death was no more than endless nothingness and darkness.

  Yet it seemed I could hear again my father’s last cry, directly to my mind. . . . Return to Darkover and fight for your rights and your brother’s! This is my last command . . . and then, past that, as the life was leaving him, that last cry of joy and tenderness:

  Yllana! Beloved—!

  Had he, at the last moment, seen something beyond this life, had my half-remembered mother been waiting for him at that last gateway? The cristoforos believe something like that, I know; Marjorie had believed. Would Marjorie be waiting for me beyond Sharra’s fire? I could not, dared not, let myself think so. And if it were so—I let myself smile, a sour little smile—what would we do when Dio turned up there? But she had already loosed her claim on me . . . if love were the criterion, perhaps she would seek Lerrys beyond the gates of death. And what of those husbands or wives given in marriage who hated their spouses, married out of duty or family ties or political expediency, so that married life was a kind of hell and death a merciful release, would any sane or just God demand that they be tied together in some endless afterlife as well? I dismissed all this as mad rubbish and tried, through the fierce pain in my head and the fiery throbbing of my wounded arm, to compose myself for sleep.

  The last red light dimmed, faded and was gone. A chink of the curtains showed me pallid greenish moonlight, lying like ice across my bed; it looked cool, it would cool my fever . . . there was a step and a rustle and soft whisper.

  “Lew, are you asleep?”

  “Who’s there?”

  The dim light picked out a gleam of fair hair, and Dio, her face as pale as the pallid moon, looked down at me. She turned and pulled the curtains open where Andres had closed them, letting the moonlight flood the room and the waning moons peep over her shoulder.

  The chill of the moonlight seemed to cool my feverish face. I even wondered, incuriously, if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming she was there, she seemed so quiet, so muted. Her eyes were swollen and flushed with tears.

  “Lew, your face is so hot . . .” she murmured, and after a minute she came and laid something cold and refreshing on my brow. “Do you mean they left you alone here like this?”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Dio, what’s happened?”

  “Lerrys is gone,” she whispered, “gone to the Terrans, he has taken ship and swears he will never return . . . he tried to get me to come with him, he . . . he tried to force me, but this time I would not go . . . he said it was death to stay here, with the things that were coming for the Comyn . . .”

  “You should have gone with him,” I said dully. I could not protect Dio now, nor care for her, with Sharra raging and Kadarin prowling like a wild beast, Thyra at his side, ready to drag me back into that same corner of hell. . . .

  “I will not go when others must stay and fight,” she said. “I am not such a coward as that . . .” but she was weeping. “If he truly feels we are a part of the Empire, he should have stayed and fought for that . . .”

  “Lerrys was never a fighter,” I said. Well, neither was I, but I had been given no choice; my life was already forfeit. But I had no comfort for Dio now. I said softly, “It is not your fight, either, Dio. You have not been dragged into this thing. You could make a life for yourself elsewhere. It’s not too late.”

  Lerrys was one of the hypersensitive Ridenow; the Ridenow Gift had been bred into the Comyn, to sense these other-dimension horrors in the Ages of Chaos; a Gift obsolete now, when the Comyn no longer ranged through space and time as legend said they had done in the heyday of the Towers. As those who fight forest-fire keep cagebirds to tell when the poison gases and smoke are growing too dangerous f
or living things—because the cagebird will die of the poisons before men are aware of them—so the Ridenow served to warn Comyn less sensitive than they of the presence of forces no man could tolerate. I was not surprised that he had fled from Darkover now . . .

  I only wished I could do the same!

  “Dio, you shouldn’t be here, at this hour—”

  “Do you think I care about that?” she said, and her voice was thick with tears. “Don’t send me away, Lew. I don’t—I don’t—I won’t ask anything of you, but let me stay here with you for tonight—”

  She lay beside me, her curly head against my shoulder, and I tasted salt when I kissed her. And suddenly I realized that if I had changed, Dio had changed no less. The tragedy of that thing in the hospital, which should have been our son, was her tragedy too; more hers than mine, for she had borne it in her body for months; yet I had been distraught with my own selfish grief, and left no room for her. She had come into my life when I had thought it was over forever, and given me a year of happiness, and I owed it to her to remember the happiness, not the horror and tragedy at the end.

  I whispered, holding her close, “I wish it had been different. I wish I had had—more for you.”

  She kissed my scarred cheek, with a tenderness which somehow drew us closer than the wildest passion. “Never mind, Lew,” she said softly into the darkness, “I know. Sleep, my love, you’re weary and wounded.”

  And after a moment I felt that she was fast asleep in my arms; but I lay there, wakeful, my eyes burning with regret. I had loved Marjorie with the first fire of an untried boy, all flame and desire; we had never known what we would have grown into, for Marjorie had had no time at all. But Dio had come to me when I was a man, grown through suffering into the capacity for real love, and I had never understood, I had let her walk away from me in the first upheaval. The shared tragedy should have drawn us closer, and I had let it drive us apart.

  If only I could live, I could somehow make it up to Dio, if I only had time to let her know how much I loved her. . . .

  But it is too late; I must let her go, so that she will not grieve too much for me. . . .

  But for tonight I will pretend that there is something beyond morning, that she and I and Marja can find a world somewhere, and that Sharra’s fire will burn out harmlessly before the mingling of the Sword of Aldones and the Hastur Gift. . . . I half-knew that I was already dreaming, but I lay holding Dio sleeping in my arms until at last, near dawn, I fell asleep too.

  Red sunlight woke me, and the closing of a door somewhere in the Alton suite. Dio—had she really been there? I was not sure; but the curtains she had opened to the moonlight were open to the sun, and there was a fine red-gold hair lying on my pillow. The pain in head and wounded arm had subsided to the dullest of aches; I sat up, knowing that it was time to act.

  While I dressed for riding, I considered. Surely, this day or the next, what was left of the Comyn would ride to Hali for the state funeral for Linnell—and for Derik. Perhaps it would be better to ride with them, not to attract attention, and then to slip away toward the rhu fead . . .

  No. There was no time for that. I had loved Linnell and she had been my foster-sister, but I could not wait to speak words of tenderness and regret over her grave. I could not help her now, and either way, she had gone too far to care whether or not I was there to speak at her burying. For Linnell I could only try to ensure that the land she had loved was not ravaged by Sharra’s fires. It might be that we could do something for Callina too; surely Beltran, who had been part of the original circle who had tried to raise Sharra, would die with us when we closed that gateway for the last time. And then Callina too would be freed.

  I went in search of Callina, and found her in the room where I had seen Linnell playing her rryl, that night before we had gone to Ashara’s Tower. Callina was sitting before the harp, her hands lax in her lap, so white and still that I had to speak to her twice before she heard me; and then she turned a dead face to me, a face so cold and distant, so like Ashara’s, that I was shocked and horrified. I shook her, hard, and finally slapped her face; at that she came back, life and anger in her pale cheeks.

  “How dare you!”

  “Callina, I’m sorry—you were so far away, I couldn’t make you hear me—you were in a trance—”

  “Oh, no—” she gasped, her hands flying to cover her mouth in consternation, “Oh, no, it can’t be. . . .” She swallowed and swallowed again, fighting tears. She said, “I felt I could not bear my grief, and it seemed to me that Ashara could give me peace, take away grief . . . grief and guilt, because if I had not—not used the screen with you, not found that—that Kathie girl, Linnell would have been alive. . . .”

  “You don’t know that,” I said harshly. “There’s no way of telling what might have happened when Kadarin drew—that sword. Kathie might have died instead of Linnell; or they might both have died. Either way, don’t blame yourself. Where is Kathie?”

  “I don’t want to see her,” Callina said shakily. “She is like—it’s like seeing Linnell’s ghost, and I cannot bear it—” and for a moment I thought she would go far away into the trance state again.

  “There’s no time for that, Callina! We don’t know what Beltran, or Kadarin, may be planning,” I said. “We don’t have much time; things could start up again at any moment.” How had I been able to sleep last night, with this hanging over us? But at least now I was strong enough for what I must do. “Where is Kathie?”

  At last Callina sighed and showed me the way to where Kathie slept. She was lying on a couch, awake, half naked, scanning a set of tiles, but she started as I came in, and caught a blanket around her. “Get out! Oh—it’s you again! What do you want?”

  “Not what you seem to be expecting,” I said dryly. “I want you to dress and ride with us. Can you ride?”

  “Yes, certainly. But why—”

  I rummaged behind a panel, finding some clothes I had seen Linnell wear. It suddenly outraged me that these lengths of cloth, these embroideries, should still be intact, with Linnell’s perfume still in their folds, when my foster-sister lay cold in the chapel at the side of her dead lover. I flung them, almost angrily, across the couch.

  “These will do for riding. Put them on.” I sank down to wait for her, was recalled, by her angry stare, to memory of Terran taboos. I rose, actually reddening; how could Terran women be so immodest out of doors and so prudish within? “I forgot. Call me when you’re ready.”

  A peculiar choked sound made me turn back. She was staring helplessly at the armful of clothing, turning the pieces this way and that. “I haven’t the faintest notion how to get into these things.”

  “After what you were just thinking at me,” I said stiffly, “I’m certainly not going to offer to help you.”

  She blushed too. “And anyway, how could I ride in a long skirt?”

  “Zandru’s hells, girl, what else would you wear? They are Linnell’s riding-clothes; if she rode in them, you certainly can.” Linnell had worn them to ride to Marius’s funeral.

  “I’ve never worn anything like this for riding, and I’m certainly not going to start now,” she blazed. “If you want me to ride somewhere on a horse, you’re going to have to get me some decent clothes!”

  “These clothes belonged to my foster-sister; they are perfectly decent.”

  “Damn it, get me some indecent ones, then!”

  I laughed. I had to. “I’ll see what I can do, Kathie.”

  The Ridenow apartments were almost deserted this early, except for a servant mopping the stone floor, and I was glad; I had no desire to walk in upon Lord Edric. It occurred to me that Dio and I had married without the permission of her Domain Lord.

  Freemate marriage cannot be dissolved after the woman has borne a child, except by mutual consent.

  But that was Darkovan law. Dio and I had married by the law of the Empire . . . why was I thinking this, as if there were still time to go back and mend what had gone astr
ay between us? At least I would see her once more. I asked the servant if Domna Diotima would see me, and after a moment, Dio, in a long woolly dressing-gown, came sleepily out into the main room. Her face lighted when she saw me; but there was no time for that. I explained my predicament, and she must have read the rest in my face and manner.

  “Kathie? Yes, I remember her from—from the hospital,” she said, “I still have my Terran riding things, the ones I wore on Vainwal; she should be able to wear them.” She giggled, then broke off. “I know it’s not really funny. I just can’t help it, thinking—never mind; I’ll go and help her with them.”

  “And I’ll go down and see if I can find horses for us,” I said, and went down, swiftly, by an old and little-known stairway, to the Guard hall. Fortunately there was a Guardsman there who had known me when I was a cadet.

  “Hjalmar, can you find horses? I must ride to Hali.”

  “Certainly, sir. How many horses?”

  “Three,” I said after a moment, “one with a lady’s saddle.” Kathie might ride like Dio, astride and in breeches like some Free Amazon, but Callina certainly would not. I told him where to bring them, and went back to find Kathie neatly dressed in the tunic and breeches I had seen Dio wear.

  I was happy then. But I did not know it, and now it is too late—now and forever.

  Some Terran poet said that—that the saddest words in any language are always too late.

  The door thrust suddenly open and Regis came in. He said, “Where are you going? I’d better come with you.”

  I shook my head. “No. If anything happens—if we don’t make it—you’re the only one with any strength against Sharra.”

  “That is exactly why I must come with you,” Regis said. “No, leave the women here—”

  “Kathie at least must come,” I said. “We are going to Hali, to the rhu fead,” and added, when he still looked confused, “It’s possible that Kathie may be the only person on this world who can reach the Sword of Aldones.”