“Donal,” he said, and the younger man stirred.
“Cousin…”
“You have more of the weather gift than I. Can you read this storm and discover how far it extends, and how long it will take to move past us?”
“I will try.” Donal sank inward in consciousness, and Allart, lightly in rapport, saw again the curious extended sense of pressures and forces, like nets of energy upon the surface of the ground, and in the thin envelope of air above it. Finally, returning to surface consciousness, Donal said soberly, “Too far, I fear. And it is moving sluggishly. Would that I had my sister’s gift, to control the storms and move them here and there at my will!”
Suddenly Allart knew that was the answer, as he began to see ahead again. His laran was real foresight, yes; he could dislocate time and stand outside it, but it was limited by his own interpretation of what he saw. For that reason it would always be unreliable as a sole guide to his actions. He must never be content with an obvious future; there was always the probability, however small, that interaction with someone whose actions he could not foresee would alter that future beyond recognition. He could rule his laran, but as with his matrix jewel, he must never let it rule him instead. Yesterday he had used it to find safety here and avoid the most obvious deaths lying in wait; it had worked to avert imminent death until he could explore some other probability.
“If we could somehow make contact with Dorilys—”
“She is not a telepath,” Donal said, sounding doubtful. “Never have I been able to reach her with my thoughts.” Then he lifted his eyes and said, “Renata… Renata is a telepath. If one of you two could manage to reach Renata—”
Yes, for Renata was the key to control of Dorilys’s power.
Allart said, “You try to reach her, Donal.”
“But—I am not so strong a telepath.”
“Nevertheless. Those who have shared love, as you two, can often make such a link when no other can. Tell Renata of our plight, and perhaps Dorilys can read the storm, or help it to pass more quickly beyond us!”
“I will do what I can,” Donal said. Drawing himself upright, the cloaks still hunched around him. he drew out his matrix and began to focus himself within it. Allart and Cassandra, clinging together beneath the remaining cloak, could almost see the luminous lines of force spreading out, so that Donal seemed no more than a solid network of swirling energies, fields of force… Then, abruptly, the contact flared and Allart and Cassandra, both telepaths, could not close away that amplified rapport
Renata!
Donal! The joy and blaze of that contact spilled over to Cassandra and Allart, as if she touched them, too, embraced them.
I was fearful, with this storm! Are you safe? Have you remained at Tramontana, then? I feared when it broke that the escort would be forced to turn back; did they meet with you, then?
No, my beloved. Quickly, in rapid mental images, Donal sketched their plight. He interrupted Renata’s horrified reaction. No, love, don’t waste time and strength that way. Here is what you must do.
Of course, Dorilys can help us, and the swift touch, awareness. I will find her at once, show her what to do.
The contact was gone. The lines of force faded out and Donal shivered under the doubled cloaks.
Allart handed him the last of the food, and said, when he protested, “Your energy is drained with the matrix; you need the strength.”
“Still, your lady—” Donal protested, but Cassandra shook her head. In the gray snowlight she looked pale, drawn, deathly.
“I am not hungry, Donal. You need it far more than I. I am cold, so cold…”
Quickly Allart knew what she meant and what faced her now. He said, “What is it with the leg, then?”
“I will monitor and be sure,” she said, a flicker of a smile touching her face, a wry smile indeed. “I have not wanted to know the worst, since there seems nothing I could do to mend it, however bad it may be.” But he saw her look go abstracted, focused inward. Finally, reluctant, she said, “It is not good. The cold, the forced inactivity—and in the lower part of that leg the circulation is already impaired, so that it is more susceptible to chilling.”
There was nothing Allart could say but, “Help may soon reach us, my love. Meanwhile—” He took off his outer tunic, began to wrap it around the injured knee to protect it, and wrapped her in his under-cloak, remaining in his undertunic and breeches. At their shocked protest, he said with a smile,
“Ah, you forget; I was a monk at Nevarsin for six years, and I slept naked in worse weather than this.” Indeed, the old lessons took over; as the cold struck his now unprotected flesh, he began automatically the old breathing, flooding his body with inner warmth. He said, “Truly, I am not cold. Feel and see…”
Cassandra reached out her hand, wondering. “It is true! You are warm as a furnace.”
“Yes,” he said, taking her chilly fingers in his and laying them under his arm. “Here, let me warm your hands.”
Donal said, in astonishment, “I would that you could teach me that trick, cousin.”
Feeling enormously genial with the sudden flooding warmth, Allart replied, “It needs little teaching. We teach it to the novices in their first season with us, so that before a few tendays have passed, they are romping half naked in the snow. Children who are crying with the cold in their first few days soon begin to run about in the courtyards without even remembering to put on their cowls.”
“Is it a secret of your cristoforo religion?” Donal asked suspiciously.
Allart shook his head. “No, only a trick of the mind; it needs not even a matrix. The first thing we tell them is that cold is born of fear; that if they needed protection against cold, they would have been born with fur or feathers; that the forces of nature protect even the fruits with snow-pods if they need them; but man, being born naked, needs no protection against the weather. Once they come to believe that, that mankind wears clothes because he wishes to, for modesty or for decoration, but not to shelter against the weather, then the worst is over and soon they can adjust their bodies to cold or heat as they wish.” He laughed, knowing the euphoria of the extra oxygen he was taking into his body was beginning to act upon him, to be converted into warmth. “I am less cold than I was last night under our shared cloaks and body warmth.”
Cassandra tried to imitate his breathing, but she was in severe pain, and this inhibited her concentration, while Donal was wholly untrained.
Outside, the storm raged even more fiercely, and Allart lay down between the two, trying to share with them his warmth. He was desperately anxious about Cassandra; if she suffered much more pain and chilling, her knee might not heal for a long time, perhaps never wholly restore itself. He tried to conceal his anxiety from her, but the same closeness which had enabled Donal to reach Renata—without a Tower screen, through an open matrix-link alone—meant he and Cassandra were similarly linked and, especially at this close range, could not conceal a fear so strong from one another.
She reached for his hand and murmured, “Don’t be frightened. The pain is not so bad now; truly it is not.”
Well, when they reached Aldaran, Margali and Renata could tend her; for now there was nothing to be done. In the dimness he held the slight six-fingered hand in his, felt the knotted scar of the clingfire burn. She had endured war and fear and pain before this; he had not brought her out of peaceful life into danger. If he had simply substituted one danger for another, still, he knew, it was the danger which she had freely chosen for another less to her liking, and that was all any human being could ask in such days. Comforted a little, he dropped off, for a time, to sleep, held in her arms.
When he woke it was to hear a cry from Cassandra.
“Look! The storm has cleared!” He looked up, dazed, at the sky. It had stopped snowing entirely, and clouds were tearing across the sky at a wild pace.
“Dorilys,” Donal said. “No storm ever moved across these hills at such a pace.” He drew a long, shaking
breath. “Her power—the power we have all feared so much—has saved all our lives.”
Allart, sending his laran out across the country around, realized that the escort had been weathered in on the other side of the ledge he had hesitated to face in the storm. Now, as soon as they could bring their riding-animals across it—a matter of a few hours, certainly—help would be with them, food and shelter and care.
It had not been Dorilys’s laran alone that had saved them, he thought soberly. The laran he had considered a curse had now proved its worth—and its limitations.
I cannot ignore it. But I must never wholly rely on it, either. I need not hide from it in terror, as I did all those years in Nevarsin. But I cannot let it whollv rule my actions.
Maybe I am beginning to know its limitations, Allart thought. It suddenly occurred to him that he had thought of Donal as very young, childishly young. Yet he himself, he realized, was no more than two years Donal’s senior. With a completely new humility, free for once in his life of self-pity, he thought, I am still very young myself. And I may not be given enough time to learn wisdom. But if I live, I may find that some of my problems were only because I was too young, and too foolish to know I was only too young.
Cassandra was lying on his cloak, gray with pain and exhausted. He turned to her, and was touched that she tried to smile and appear brave. Now he could reassure her honestly, without hiding his own fear. Help was on the way and would reach them soon; there was only a little more time to wait.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Donal Delleray, called Rockhaven, and Dorilys, heir to Aldaran, were formally married by the catenas on midwinter night.
It was not a festive occasion. The weather prevented, as often in the Hellers, inviting any but the nearest of Aldaran’s neighbors; and of those invited, many chose not to come, in which Aldaran saw, rightly or not, a sign that they had chosen to align with his brother of Scathfell. So that the marriage was held in the presence of the immediate household alone, and even among these there was murmuring.
This kind of marriage, half-brother to half-sister, had once been commonplace in the early days of the breeding program, especially among the great nobles of the Domains— and imitated, like all such customs, by their inferiors. But it had fallen now into disuse and was regarded as mildly scandalous.
“They do not like it,” said Allart to Cassandra as they went into the great hall where the festive supper, and the ceremony, and afterward the dance for the household, were all to be held. She was leaning heavily on his arm; she still walked with a dragging limp, memento of their ordeal in the snow, despite the best care Margali and Renata could give. It might heal with time, but it was still difficult for her to walk without help.
“They do not like it,” he repeated. “Had anyone other than Dom Mikhail given orders for such a thing, they would have defied him, I think.”
“What is it they do not like? That Donal shall inherit Aldaran when he is not of the blood of Hastur and Cassilda?”
“No,” said Allart. “As far as I can tell from talking to Aldaran’s vassals and household knights, that pleases them rather than otherwise; none of them has any love for Scathfell, nor any wish to see him rule here. If Dom Mikhail had given it out, true or not, that Donal was his nedestro son and would inherit, they would have stood by him to the death. Even if they knew it was false, they would have treated it as a legal fiction. What they do not like is this marriage of brother and sister.”
“But this is a legal fiction, too,” Cassandra protested.
Allart said, “I am not so sure of that. And neither are they. I still feel guilty that it was my own careless words which put this mad idea into Dom Mikhail’s mind. And those who support Dom Mikhail in this—well, they do it as if they were humoring a madman. I am not so sure they are wrong,” he added after a moment. “All madmen do not rave and froth at the mouth and chase butterflies in midwinter snow. Pride and obsession like Dom Mikhail’s come near to madness, even if they are couched in reason and logic.”
Since the bride was a little girl, the guests could not even hope to lighten the occasion with the jokes and rough horseplay which usually marked a wedding, culminating in the rowdy business of putting the bride and groom to bed together. Dorilys was not even full-grown, far less of legal age to be married. No one had wanted to rouse in Dorilys any bitter memories of her last handfasting, and so there had been no question of presenting her as a grown woman. In her childish dress, her copper hair hanging in long curls about her shoulders, she looked like a child of the household who had been allowed to stay up for the festivities, rather than like the appointed bride. As for the bridegroom, though he made an attempt to give decent lip service to the occasion, he looked grim and joyless, and before they went into the hall, the guests observed that he went toward a group of the bride’s waiting-women and called Renata Leynier apart, talking with her vehemently for some minutes. A few of the house-folk, and most of the servants, knew the true state of affairs between Donal and Renata, and shook their heads at this indiscretion in a man about to be wed. Others, looking at the little bride, surrounded by her nurses and governesses, compared her mentally with Renata and did not censure him.
“Whatever he says, whatever mummery he may make with the catenas, this is no more than a handfasting, and not a legal wedding. In law, even a catenas marriage is not legal till it is consummated,” Donal argued. Renata, about to tell him that this point was still being argued before the Council and the lawgivers of the land, knew that he needed reassurance, not reason.
“It will make no difference to me! Swear it will make no difference to you, Renata, or I will defy my foster-father here and now, before all his vassals!”
If you were going to defy him, Renata thought in despair, you should have done so from the beginning, certainly before things went this far! It is too late for public defiance without destroying both of you! Aloud she said only, “Nothing could make any difference to me, Donal; you know that too well to need any oaths, and this is neither the time nor the place. I must go back to the women, Donal.” But she touched his hand lightly, with a smile that was almost pity.
We were so happy this summer! How could we come to this? I am not blameless; I should have married him at once. To do him justice, he wished for that. Renata’s thoughts were in turmoil as she walked, with Dorilys’s women, into the hall.
Dom Mikhail was standing by the fireplace, lighted with the midwinter-fires kindled that day with sunfire, token of the return of light from the darkest day, greeting each of his guests in turn. Dorilys made her father a formal curtsy, and he bowed to her, kissed her on either cheek, and set her at his right side, at the high table. Then, one by one, he greeted the women.
“Lady Elisa, I would like to express my gratitude for your work in cultivating the lovely voice my daughter has inherited from her mother,” he said, bowing. “Kinswoman Margali, again at this season I am grateful to you that you have taken a mother’s place with my orphaned child. Damisela—” he bowed over Renata’s hand —“how can I express my pleasure in what you have done for Dorilys? It is the greatest pleasure to welcome you to my—to my festal board,” he said, stumbling. Renata, a telepath and keyed to the highest level of sensitivity at this moment, knew with a moment of anguish that he had started to say, “to my family,” and then had remembered the real state of affairs between herself and Donal, and forborne to speak those words.
I always thought he knew, Renata thought, blind with pain. Yet it means more to him, to carry out this plan of his! Now she even regretted the scruples that had prevented her from again becoming pregnant by Donal at once.
If I had come to midwinter night visibly pregnant with Donal’s child, would he have had the insolence to give Donal in marriage to another before my very eyes? When he insists that I have been the salvation of Dorilys? Could I have forced his hand that way? She walked to her seat, blinded by tears, in a welter of regrets and anxieties.
Although Aldaran’s c
ooks and stewards had done their best, and the feast spread before them was notable, it was a joyless occasion. Dorilys seemed nervous, twisting her long curls, at once restless and sleepy. At the close of the meal Dom Mikhail signaled for attention, and called Donal and Dorilys to him. Cassandra and Allart, seated side by side at the far end of the high table, watched in tension, Allart braced for some untoward explosion, either from Donal, guarded and miserable behind a taut facade of civility, or from one of the sullen stewards and household knights at high table or lower hall. But no one interrupted. Watching Dom Mikhail’s face, Allart thought no one would have dared to cross him now.
“This is indeed a joyous occasion for Aldaran,” said Dom Mikhail.
Allart, briefly meeting Donal’s eyes, shared a thought with him, quickly barricaded again. Like Zandru’s hell it is!
“On this day of revelry it is my pleasure to place the guardianship of my house and my only heir, still a minor, Dorilys of Aldaran, into the hands of my beloved foster-son Donal of Rockraven.”
Donal flinched at the name which proclaimed him bastard, and his lips moved in inaudible protest.
“Donal Delleray,” Dom Mikhail corrected himself, reluctantly.
Allart thought, Even now he does not wish to face the fact that Donal is not his son.
Aldaran placed the twin bracelets of finely chased copper—engraved and filigreed, and lined on the side nearest the skin with gold plating so that the precious metal would not irritate the skin—on Donal’s right wrist and Dorilys’s left. Allart, looking down at the bracelet on his own wrist, held out his hand to Cassandra. All around the hall married couples were doing the same, as Aldaran spoke the ritual words.
“As the left hand to the right, may you be forever at one; in caste and clan, in home and heritage, at fireside and in council, sharing all things at home and abroad, in love and in loyalty, now and for all time to come,” he said, locking the bracelets together. Smiling for a moment despite his disquiet, Allart fitted the link of his own bracelet into that of his wife and they clasped hands tightly. He picked up Cassandra’s thought, If only it were Donal and Renata … and felt again a surge of anger at this travesty.
The Ages of Chaos Page 32