Two men and two women, all of them in Darkovan clothing, seated around a table. One of the women, very frail, very fair, bending over a matrix… he had seen this before! He froze, terror clawing at him, as the door opened, slowly, slowly… on horror…
He heard his own cry, shrill and terrified, the shriek of a frightened child from the full throat of a man, just in the moment before the world blurred and went dark.
… He was standing, swaying, both-hands gripping at his temples. Elorie, very white, was staring up at him, the crystal fallen into the lap of her skirt.
“Jeff, what did you see?” she whispered. “Avarra and Evanda guard you, I never dreamed of such a shock!” She breathed deeply. “I know now why the woman died! She…” Elorie swayed suddenly, fell back against the wall. Jeff moved to steady her, but she went on, not noticing. “Whatever she saw—and I’m not an empath, but whatever it was that struck you dumb as a child, that poor woman evidently caught the full backlash of it. If she had a weak heart, it probably stopped, literally frightened to death by something you saw more than a quarter of a century ago!”
Jeff took her hands. He said, “Let’s forget it. It’s too dangerous, Elorie, it’s killed one woman already. I can live without knowing whatever it is.”
“No,” she said. “I think we have to know. There have been too many mysteries. No one knows how Cleindori died, and Kennard knows but has been sworn not to tell. I don’t think he killed her,” she went on, and Kerwin stared at her in shock; that had never occurred to him.
“No. I’d stake my life on Kennard’s honesty.” And, Kerwin thought, his very genuine affection for them both.
“I’m a trained Keeper, Jeff, there’s no danger for me. And I’m as eager to know as you are. But wait, give me your matrix,” she added. “It was Cleindori’s. And let’s start with something else. You said that you had only a very few memories before the orphanage; let’s try and go back to them.”
She looked into Kerwin’s matrix; as always when it was in a Keeper’s hands, Jeff felt only the faint threading of Elorie’s consciousness through his own. He shut his eyes, remembering.
The light in the matrix brightened. There were colors, swirls like mist; there was a blue beacon shining somewhere, a low building gleaming white on the shores of a strange lake that was not water, a ghost of perfume; a low and musical voice singing an old song, and Kerwin knew, with a thrill of excitement, that the voice was the voice of his mother, Cleindori, Dorilys of Arilinn, renegade Keeper, singing a lullaby to the child who should never have been born.
Wrapped in a cloak of fur, he was carried through long corridors in the arms of a man with blazing red hair. It was not the face of Jefferson Kerwin, familiar to him from pictures on Terra; but Kerwin knew, in the strange alienated corner of his mind that was his adult self, that he looked on the face of his father. But whose son am I, then? He saw, briefly and in a glimpse, the face of Kennard, younger, unlined, a gay and light-hearted face. Other pictures came and went; he saw himself playing games in a tiled courtyard among flowering plants and bushes, with two smaller children, as alike as twins, except that one had the red hair of their caste, like his own, and the other was small and dark and swarthy. And there was a big burly man in strange dark clothing, who spoke to them in a strangely accented voice, and treated them all with rough kindness, and the twins called him father, and Jeff called him by a word very like it, which meant, in the mountain tongue, foster-father or Uncle; as he called Kennard; and the grown-up Jeff Kerwin felt the hair rising on his head as he knew that he looked on the face of the man whose name he bore; he was not like his pictures in the household of his grandparents, but this was the elder Jeff Kerwin. More hazy were the memories of the fair-haired woman, more blonde than copper-haired, and of another woman whose hair was dark with red glints in the sunlight, and of the hills behind the castle, sharp-toothed mountains, and an old high tower…
But that is Castle Ardais, that is my home… How did you come to be there, Jeff? Kennard and my half-brother Dyan were bredin, they were much together in childhood… And you were brought up in the Hellers, then? And that is the wall of Castle Storn…
How did you come to be reared in the Hellers, beyond the Seven Domains, then? Did Cleindori take refuge there, then, when she fled the Tower? What does my brother Dyan know of this, I wonder? Or was it only that my father was mad, and could not betray them all?
The memories moved on. Kerwin realized that his breath choked in his throat, that he was approaching the point of peril; he felt his own blood pounding in his ears. Suddenly there was a blaze of blue light, and a woman stood before him; a tall woman, slender and youthful, but no longer young; and he knew he looked on his mother. Why had he never been able to remember her face before this moment ? She was wearing a curiously-cut crimson robe, the robe Elorie had cast aside forever, the ceremonial robe of a Keeper of Arilinn; but even as he looked on her it shredded and disappeared, to leave her standing before him in the old, workaday tartan skirt and white embroidered tunic embroidered in a pattern of butterflies that she wore every day; he could remember the very texture of the cloth.
Why did not Elorie see her? “Mother,” he said in a whisper, “I thought you were dead.” And he knew his voice as a child’s voice. And then he knew she was not there, that it was her image he saw; the image of a woman many, many years dead; and he felt the tears coming into his throat and choking him, tears he knew he had never been able to shed before.
My mother. And she died, horribly, murdered by fanatics…
But he heard her voice, distracted, desperate, sorrowing.
How can I do this to my child? My son, my little one, he is too young to bear such a weight, too young for the matrix, and yet… twice now I have so narrowly escaped death, and soon or late, they will have me and kill me, those fanatics who believe a Keeper’s virginity is more important than her powers! Even when I have shown them what I can do…
And another voice, a man’s voice deep and gentle, sounded in his mind: Did you expect anything else of Arilinn, my Cleindori? And somehow through his mother’s memory and perceptions, Kerwin saw, as a child and as a man, with a strange double vision, the face of the speaker—an old man, stooped with age, with a remote, scholarly face, his hair silver-grey, his eyes remarkably kind—but bitter. They cast Callista forth, though I showed them what you tried to show them.
Father, are all the folk of Arilinn such fools? It was a cry of despair. Look, here is my son, your namesake, Damon Aillard; and they will not stop at killing me, and Lewis, and Cassilde; they will kill Jeff and Andres and Kennard and all the rest of us, down to Cassilde’s little boys and the daughter she will bear to Jeff this summer! Father, father, what can I do? Have I brought death upon them all? I never meant any harm, I would have given them new laws, I would have cast down the cruel old laws of Arilinn, so that the women there might live in happiness, that the men and women of Arilinn might not give themselves up to a living death; and they would not listen, even though the Keeper of Arilinn spoke! The Law of Arilinn is that the Keeper’s word is law; and yet when I would have given them this new dispensation, they would not hear me, and persecuted me, and Lewis, until we fled… Father, father, how could I have been so wrong? And now they have killed my son’s father and I know they will not stop until they have killed every last child of the Forbidden Tower! Is there no way I can save them?
Kerwin shared, for a searing moment, the thoughts of Damon Ridenow; all of them, everyone who had worked within the walls of what they still called, defiantly, the Forbidden Tower, had drawn a death sentence, which sooner or later would fall upon them all.
He felt the despair with which Damon spoke.
There is no way to use reason with fanatics, Cleindori. Reason and justice tell you that a Keeper is responsible to her own conscience; but they are immune to reason and justice. You are not the matrix worker; it is not as a matrix worker that they want you in Arilinn for Keeper, but what they want in Arilinn is a sacre
d virgin, a sacrifice to their own guilts and fears. I do not think the forces of reason have any weight against fanatics and blind superstition, Cleindori.
Father, you reared me to believe in reason!
I was wrong. Oh, my darling, I was wrong.
And then he heard the resolution.
I could hide here forever, and be safe, or hide among the Terrans. But if I must die, and I know now that soon or late I must die, I will go to Thendara, and I will teach others the work I have learned can be done. You have taught many matrix workers. I will teach others. They can kill me, then, but they cannot forever hide what I have learned, and what I have taught. There will be matrix workers outside the Tower; and when the Arilinn Tower comes crashing down in the ruins of its hatred and the living death of the souls of the men and women who live there, blind to justice and right and truth, then there will be others, so that the old matrix sciences of Darkover will never die. Bid me farewell, Father, and bless my son. For I know now that we will never meet again.
They will kill you, Cleindori. Oh, my daughter, my golden bell, must I lose you too?
Soon or late, all men and women born of this earth must die. Bless me, father, and bless my son.
Kerwin, through his strange divided double consciousness, felt Damon’s hand on his head. Take my blessing, darling. And you, too, little one in whom my own name and my own childhood are reborn. And then consciousness was swamped in the awareness of anguish, as father and daughter parted for the last time.
Kerwin, caught up in the memory, knew that tears were flooding down his face; but he was caught up in the matrix, caught up in the memory Cleindori had imprinted into her child; unwilling, for he was too young, but still knowing that some record must be kept, lest the knowledge of her death be forever hidden…
Time had come and gone; he did not know how many days and nights he had lived in the hidden room, how many people had come and gone secretly to the house in Thendara where the work of teaching went on, led by Cleindori and the gentle woman he called foster-mother, whose name was Cassilde, the mother of Auster and Ragan, who were his playmates. She was, he knew vaguely as a child knows, soon to give them all a little sister. Already they called the unborn child Dorilys, which he knew was his own mother’s name, for Cassilde said that was a fine name for a rebel. “And may she raise a storm over the Hellers as her namesake did in years gone by! For she will one day be our Keeper,” Cassilde had promised. They had to play quietly, for no one must know that folk lived there, his mother said; and Jeff and Andres, coming and going from the spaceport, brought them food and clothing and whatever else they needed. Once he had asked why his foster-father Kennard was not with them.
“Because there are too many who could find him, Damon; he is trying to gain amnesty for us in Council, but it is long work, and he has not the ear of Hastur,” his mother had replied, and he did not know what an amnesty was, but he knew it was very important, for his foster-father Arnad talked of nothing else. He never asked about his father; he knew vaguely that his father had gone away to fight, and that he would not come back. Valdir, Lord Alton, and Damon Ridenow, the old Regent of Alton, were fighting with the Council, and Jeff’s child-mind wondered if they were fighting duels with swords and knives in the Council room and how many people they would have to fight before he and his mother and all of them could all go home again.
And then…
Jeff felt his heart pounding, the breath coming hard in his veins, and knew that the hour he could never remember, the terror that had blotted out mind and memory, was upon him. And suddenly, fighting the memory in terror, feeling Elorie’s relentless will driving through the matrix, he was his own childish self, he was five years old, playing on the rug in the small, dark, cramped room, a little toy spaceship in his hands…
… The tall man in Terran clothing stood up, letting the toy ship fall from his hands. The three of them began to squabble over it, but Jeff Kerwin silenced them with a gesture.
“Boys, boys—hush, hush, you must not make so much noise… You know better than that,” he admonished in a whisper.
“It is hard to keep them so quiet,” Cassilde said in a low voice. She was heavy, now, and clumsy, and Jeff Kerwin went and put her into a chair before he said, “I know. They ought not to be here; we should send them to safety.”
“There is no safety for them!” Cassilde said, and sighed. The twins were playing, now, with the toy ship, but the child Damon, who was one day to be called Jeff Kerwin, knelt a little apart from them, his eyes fixed on his mother, standing behind the matrix in its cradle.
“Cleindori, I have told you what you should do,” Kerwin said, and there was tenderness in his eyes. “I have offered to find safety for all of you with the Empire. You need not tell them more than you think they should know; but even for that much they will be more than grateful; they will send you and the children to safety on any world you choose.”
“Am I to go into exile because fools and fanatics yell and shout slogans in the streets of Thendara?”
Cassilde said, cradling her hands over her pregnant body as if to protect the child that sheltered there, “Fools and fanatics can be more dangerous than the wise men. I am not afraid of Hastur, nor of the Council. And the people of Arilinn itself—they may despise us, but they will not harm us; no more than Leonie harmed Damon, after the duel that won him the right to keep the Forbidden Tower. But I am afraid of the fanatics, the conservatives who want everything, including Arilinn and Hali, to go as they were in the times of our grandsires. I cannot go to Terra, not until after my child is born; and the children are too young for star-travel. But I think you should go, Cleindori. Leave your child in the care of the Terrans, and go. I will ask shelter of the Council; and I am sure they will have me at Neskaya.”
“Oh, Evanda and Avarra guard you,” Cleindori said despairingly, looking at her half-sister. “I endanger you simply by remaining, do I not? You are not a Keeper, Cassie, and you can go where you will and live as you will, but it is I, I that am the renegade and under sentence of death, from the moment I stood before them and proclaimed that I had made fools of them all, that Lewis and I had been lovers for more than a year and yet I continued to work as Keeper in their precious Arilinn! Lewis—” her voice broke. “I loved him… and he died for my love! Kennard should hate me for it. And yet he continues to fight for me in the Council—”
Jeff said cynically, “The death of Lewis Lanart-Alton has made Kennard Heir to Alton, Cleindori.”
“And yet you want me to beg for the protection of the Council, from Lord Hastur who has called me abominable things? Yet I will do it if you all ask me. Jeff? Cassie? Arnad?”
The tall man in the green-and-golden cloak came up behind Cleindori and put his arms around her, laughing. He said, “If any of us had any such thoughts we would be ashamed to show it before you, Golden Bell! But I think we must be realistic.”
“Believe me,” the Terran said, “I would rather defy them all, at least until the Council has made its decision. But I think Cassilde should go to Neskaya, or at least to Comyn Castle, until her child is born; no assassin can touch her there. The Council may disapprove of her, but they will protect her physically; she is under no sentence of death.”
“Except,” Cassilde said, “that I have borne children to the despised Terrans.” Her mouth was wry.
Arnad said, “You are not the first; nor will you be the last. There have been intermarriages enough. No one, I think, cares, except the fanatics. And you, Cleindori, must go; leave your child with the Terrans, who will protect him—even in Comyn Castle, the child of a forsworn Keeper might not be safe from an assassin’s knife, but the Terrans will protect him.”
Cleindori’s mouth quirked up in a smile. “And what would induce the Terrans to give refuge to the child of a renegade Keeper and the late Heir to Alton? What is he to them?”
“How are they to know he is not my son?” Kerwin asked. “The Terrans have none of your elaborate monitoring methods
; the child calls me foster-father, and there are not enough language experts on Darkover to know the difference between the words. I am legally entitled to have my son reared in the Spacemen’s Orphanage; even if I thought my child’s mother unfit to rear him as befits the son of a Terran, they would accept him there.” He came and touched Cleindori’s shoulder, a gesture of great tenderness. “I beg you, breda; let me do this, and send you to Terra for a year or two on another world, until this fanaticism dies down, and then you can come back and teach, openly, what you teach secretly now. Already, Valdir and Damon managed to persuade the City Elders to license matrix mechanics as a profession; and they are working in Thendara and Neskaya, and one day they will work in Arilinn too. The Council does not like it, but how runs the proverb … the will of Hastur is the will of Hastur, but it is not the law of the land. Let me do this for you, breda. Let me send you to Terra.”
Cleindori lowered her head. “As you will, if you all think it best. You will go to Neskaya, then, Cassie? What of you, Arnad?”
“I’m tempted to go with you to Terra,” the red-haired man in green and gold said defiantly, “but if you’re going under Jeff’s protection, it wouldn’t be wise; I suppose he’ll have to call you his wife?”
Cleindori shrugged. “What do I care what it says on the Terran records? They live in computers and believe that because their record says a thing it is true; what do I care?”
“I’ll go now, to make the arrangements,” Jeff said, “but are you all safe here? I’m not sure…”
Arnad said, with an arrogant gesture, dropping his hand to his sword, “I have this; I’ll protect them!”
Time seemed to spin out and drag endlessly when he had gone. Cassilde put the twins to bed behind a curtained alcove; Arnad paced the floor restlessly, his hand straying now and then to his sword hilt. The child Damon knelt forgotten on the rug, motionless, waiting, filled with the apprehension of the adults around him. At last Cleindori said, “Jeff should be back by now—”
The Bloody Sun Page 29