The Forbidden Circle

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “We are not now in the Tower, domna. Come now, one real kiss. . . .”

  Andrew grabbed the boy by one shoulder and plucked him away, lifting him clear of the floor.

  “Damn it, leave her alone!”

  Dezi looked sullen. “It was but a jest between kinfolk.”

  “A jest Callista seemed not to share,” Andrew said. “Get lost! Or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Dezi sneered. “Challenge me to a duel?”

  Andrew looked down at the slight youngster, flushed, angry, obviously drunk. Abruptly his anger melted away. There was something to be said, he thought, for the Terran custom of a legal age for drinking. “Challenge, hell,” he said laughing, looking down at the angry boy. “I’ll put you over my knee and spank you for the nasty little boy you are. Now go away and sober up and stop bothering the grown-ups!”

  Dezi gave Andrew a look like murder, but he went, and Andrew realized that for the first time since the declaration he was alone with Callista.

  “What the hell was that all about?”

  She was as crimson as her light draperies, but she tried to make a joke of it. “Oh, he said that now I was Keeper no more, I was free at last to give way to the irresistible passion he is sure he must arouse in any female breast.”

  “I should have mopped up the floor with him,” Andrew said.

  She shook her head. “Oh, no, I think he’s simply drunk a bit more than he can carry. And he is a kinsman, after all. It’s not unlikely he’s my father’s son.”

  Andrew had, after all, half guessed this when he saw Domenic and Dezi side by side. “But would he so misuse a girl he believes to be his sister?”

  “Half-sister,” Callista answered, “and in the hills, half-brothers and half-sisters can lie together if they will, or even marry, though it is considered luckier for them to bear no children so close akin. And horseplay and dirty jokes are expected at a wedding, so what he did was only rude, not shocking. I am too sensitive, and after all he is very young.”

  She still looked shaken and distressed, and Andrew still thought he should have wiped the floor up with the boy; then, tardily, he wondered if he had been too hard on Dezi. Dezi wasn’t the first kid or the last to drink more than he could handle and make himself obnoxious.

  He said gently, looking at her tired, strained face, “This will be over soon, love.”

  “I know.” She hesitated. “You do know . . . the custom . . . ?”

  “Damon told me,” he said wryly. “I gather they put us to bed together, with plenty of rough jokes.”

  She nodded, coloring. “It is supposed to encourage the begetting of children, and in this part of the world that is very important to a young family, as you can imagine. So we must simply . . . make the best of it.” She glanced at him, crimson, and said, “I am sorry. I know this will make it worse—”

  He shook his head. “Actually, I don’t think so,” he said, smiling. “If anything, that kind of thing would tend to put me off anyhow.” He saw the flicker of guilt again in her face, and ached to comfort and reassure her.

  “Look,” he said gently, “think of it this way: let them have their fun, but we can do as we please, and that will be our secret, as it should be. In our own time. So we can sit back and ignore their nonsense.”

  She sighed and smiled at him. She said softly, “If you really think of it that way . . .”

  “I do, love.”

  “I’m so glad,” she said in a whisper. “Look, Ellemir is being pulled away by all the girls.” She added quickly, at his look of dismay, “No, they’re not hurting her, it’s only the custom that a bride should struggle and fight a little. It comes from the days when girls were married off without consent, but it’s only a joke now. See, Father’s body-servants have taken my father away, and Leonie will withdraw too, so the young folk can make all the noise they like.”

  But Leonie was not withdrawing; she came and stood beside them, still and somber in her crimson draperies.

  “Callista, child, do you want me to stay? Perhaps in my presence the jokes will be a little more restrained and seemly.”

  Andrew could sense how much Callista longed for this, but she smiled and touched Leonie’s hand, the feather-touch customary among telepaths. “I thank you, kinswoman. But I . . . I must not start by cheating everyone of their fun. No bride ever died of embarrassment, and I am sure I shall not be the first.” And Andrew, looking at her, bravely steeled to endure without complaint whatever obscene horseplay they had created for a Keeper who gave up her ritual virginity, remembered the gallant girl who had made brave little jokes, even when she was a prisoner, alone and terrified in the caves of Corresanti.

  It is for this that I love her so, he told himself.

  Leonie said, very gently, “As you will, then, darling. Take my blessing.” She bowed gravely to them both and went away.

  As if her withdrawal had loosed the floodgates, a tide of young men and girls came surging up to them in full flood.

  “Callista, Ann’dra, you waste time here, the night is wearing away. Have you nothing better to do this night than talk?”

  He saw Damon being pulled along by Dezi; Domenic grasped his own hand and he was drawn away from Callista, saw the flood of young girls surge up around her and conceal her from him. Someone shouted out, “We’ll make sure she’s ready for you, Ann’dra, so you needn’t defile these holy robes of hers!”

  “Come along, both of you,” Domenic cried, in high good spirits. “These fellows would rather stay here drinking all night, I am sure, but now they must do their duty, a bride must not be kept waiting.”

  He and Damon were hauled up the stairs, shoved into the living room of the suite they had prepared this morning. “Don’t get them mixed up now,” the Guardsman Caradoc called out drunkenly. “When the brides are twins, how is a mere husband, and drunk at that, to know if he lies in the arms of the right woman?”

  “What difference does it make?” asked a strange young man. “That is for them to settle among themselves, is it not? And when the lamp is out, one woman is like another. If they are confused between left hand and right, what difference does it make?”

  “We must start with Damon. He has lost so much time that he must make haste to do his duty to his clan,” Domenic said gaily. Damon was quickly stripped of his clothing and wrapped in a long robe. The bedroom door was opened with ceremony and Andrew could see Ellemir, thinly gowned in spider-silk, her copper hair unbound and streaming over her breasts. She was red-faced, giggling uncontrollably, but Andrew sensed that it was on the ragged edge of hysterical sobbing. It was enough, he thought. It was too much. Everyone should get out and leave them alone.

  “Damon,” Domenic said solemnly, “I have made you a gift.”

  Andrew saw with relief that Damon was just drunk enough to be good-natured. “That is kind of you, brother-in-law. What is your gift?”

  “I have made you a calendar, marked with the days and the moons. If you do your duty this night, see, I have marked in crimson the date when your first son will be born!”

  Damon was red with stifled laughter. Andrew could see that he would rather have thrown it at Domenic’s head, but he accepted it, let them ceremoniously help him into bed at Ellemir’s side. Domenic said something to Ellemir which made her duck down and smother her face in the sheets, then conducted the watchers to the door, with mock solemnity.

  “And now, so that we may pass our night in peaceful drinking, undisturbed by whatever goes on beyond these doors, I have another gift for the happy couple. I shall set up a telepathic damper just inside your doors—”

  Damon sat up in bed and flung a pillow at them, finally losing patience. “Enough is enough,” he shouted. “Get the hell out of here and leave us in peace!”

  As if that had been what they were waiting for—perhaps it was—the whole crowd of men and women began to withdraw quickly toward the doors. “Really,” Domenic rebuked, drawing his face into reproving lines, “can you not contain y
our impatience a little longer, Damon? My poor little sister, at the mercy of such unseemly haste!” But he closed the door, and behind him Andrew heard Damon come to the door and bolt it. At least there was a limit to the jokes considered proper, and Damon and Ellemir were alone.

  But now it was his turn. There was, he thought grimly, only one good thing about all this. By the time the drunken men were finished with their horseplay, he was going to be too tired—and too damn mad—for anything except sleep.

  They thrust him into the room where Callista waited, surrounded by the young girls, friends of Ellemir, their own servants, young noblewomen from the surrounding countryside. They had taken away her somber crimson draperies, put her into a thin gown like Ellemir’s, her hair unbraided, streaming over her bare shoulders. She looked quickly up at him, and somehow it seemed to Andrew for a moment that she looked much younger than Ellemir: young, lost, and vulnerable.

  He sensed that she was fighting to keep back tears. Shyness and reluctance were part of the game, but if she really broke down and cried, he knew, they would be ashamed and resentful of her for spoiling their fun. They would despise her for her inability to join in the game.

  Children could be cruel, he told himself, and so many of these girls were only children. Young as she looked, Callista was a woman. She was, perhaps, never a child; she had her childhood stolen by the Tower. . . . He steeled himself against whatever was coming, knowing that however rough it was for him, it was worse for Callista.

  How soon can I get them out of here, he wondered, before she breaks down and cries, and hates herself for it? Why should she have to endure this nonsense?

  Domenic took him firmly by the shoulders and turned him around, facing away from Callista.

  “Pay attention,” he admonished. “We have not finished with you yet, and the women have not yet made Callista ready for you. Can you not wait a few minutes?” And Andrew let Domenic do as he would, preparing to give courteous attention to the jokes he did not understand. But he thought longingly of the time when he and Callista would be alone.

  Or would that be worse? Well, whether or not there was this to get through, somehow, first. He let Domenic and the men lead him into the adjoining room.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There were times when it seemed to Andrew that Damon’s contentment was a visible thing, something which could be seen and measured. At such times, as the days lengthened and winter came on in the Kilghard Hills, Andrew could not help feeling a bitter envy. Not that he grudged Damon a moment of his happiness; it was only that he longed to share it.

  Ellemir too looked radiant. It made him cringe, sometimes, to think that the servants at Armida, strangers, Dom Esteban himself, noticed this difference and blamed him, that forty days after their marriage Ellemir looked so joyous, while day by day Callista seemed to grow more pale and grave, more constrained and sorrowful.

  It was not that Andrew was unhappy. Frustrated, yes, for it was sometimes nerve-racking to be so close to Callista—to endure the good-natured jokes and raillery which were the lot, he supposed, of every newly married man in the galaxy—and to be separated from her by an invisible line he could not cross.

  And yet, if they had come to know one another by any ordinary route, there would have been a long time of waiting. He reminded himself that they had married when he had known her less than forty days. And this way he could be with her a great deal, coming to know the outward girl, Callista, as well as he had come to know her inwardly, in mind and spirit, when she had been in the hands of the catmen, imprisoned in darkness within the caves of Corresanti. Then, when for some strange reason she could reach no other mind on Darkover save Andrew Carr’s, their minds had touched, so deeply that years of living together could have created no closer bond. Before he had ever laid eyes on her in the flesh he had loved her, loved her for her courage in the face of terror, for what they had endured together.

  Now he came to love her for outward things as well: for her grace, her sweet voice, her airy charm and quick wit. She could make jokes even about their present frustrating separation, which was more than Andrew could do! He loved too the gentleness with which she treated everyone, from her father, who was crippled and often peevish, to the youngest and clumsiest of the household servants.

  One thing for which he had not been prepared was her inarticulateness. For all her quick wit and easy repartee, she found it difficult to speak of things which were important to her. He had hoped they could talk freely together about the difficulties which faced them, about the nature of her training in the Tower, the way in which she had been taught never to respond with the slightest sexual awareness. But on this subject she was silent, and on the few occasions Andrew tried to get her to speak of it she would turn her face away, stammer and grow silent, her eyes filling with tears.

  He wondered if the memory was so painful, and would be filled again with indignation at the barbarous way in which a young woman’s life had been deformed. He hoped, eventually, she would feel free enough to talk about it; he could not think of anything else that might help free her from the constraint. But for the present, unwilling to force her into anything, even to speaking against her will, he waited.

  As she had foreseen, it was not easy to be so close to her, and yet distant. Sleeping in the same room, though they did not share a bed, seeing her sleepy and flushed and beautiful in the morning, in her bed, seeing her half-dressed, her hair about her shoulders—and yet not daring more than the most casual touch. His frustration took strange forms. Once, when she was in her bath, feeling foolish but unable to resist, he had picked up her nightgown and pressed it passionately to his lips, breathing in the fragrance of her body and the delicate scent she used. He felt dizzy and ashamed, as if he had committed some unspeakable perversion. When she returned, he could not face her, knowing that they were open to one another and that she knew what he had done. He had avoided her eyes and gone quickly away, unwilling to face the imagined contempt—or pity—in her face.

  He wondered if she would have preferred him to sleep elsewhere, but when he asked her, she said shyly, “No, I like to have you near me.” It occurred to him that perhaps this intimacy, sexless as it was, was a necessary first step in her reawakening.

  Forty days after the marriage the high winds and snow flurries gave way to heavy snows, and Andrew’s time was taken up, day after day, in arranging for the wintering of the horses and other livestock, storing accessible fodder in sheltered areas, inspecting and stocking the herdmen’s shelters in the upland valleys. For days at a time he would be out, spending days in the saddle and nights in outdoor shelters or in the far-flung farmsteads which were part of the great estate.

  During this time he realized how wise Dom Esteban had been to insist on the wedding feast. At the time, knowing the wedding would have been legal with one or two witnesses, he had been angry with his father-in-law for not letting it take place in privacy. But that night of horseplay and rough jokes had made him one of the countryfolk, not a stranger from nowhere, but Dom Esteban’s son-in-law, a man whom they had seen married. It had saved him years of trying to make a place for himself among them.

  He woke one morning to hear the hard rattle of snow against the window, and knew the first storm of the oncoming winter had set in. There would be no riding out today. He lay listening to the wind moaning around the heights of the old house, mentally reviewing the disposition of the stock under his care. Those brood mares in the pasture under the twin peaks—there was fodder enough stored in windbreak shelters, and one stream, the old horse-master had told him, which never completely froze over—they would do well enough. He should have separated out the young stallions from the herd—there might be fighting—but it was too late now.

  There was gray light outside the window, through a white blur of snow. There would be no sunrise today. Callista lay quiet in her narrow bed across the room, her back to him so that he could see only the braids on her pillow. She and Ellemir were so different, Ellemir
always awake and astir at dawn, Callista never waking until the sun was high. He should soon be hearing Ellemir moving in the other half of the suite, but it was early even for that.

  Callista cried out in her sleep, a cry of terror and dread, again some evil nightmare of the time when she had lain prisoner of the catmen? With a single stride Andrew was beside her, but she sat up, abruptly wide awake, staring past him, her face blank with dismay.

  “Ellemir!” she cried, catching her breath. “I must go to her!” And without a word or a look at Andrew she slid from her bed, catching up a chamber robe, and ran out into the center part of the suite.

  Andrew watched, dismayed, thinking of the bond of twins. He had been vaguely aware of the telepathic link between Ellemir and her sister, yet even twins respected one another’s privacy. If Ellemir’s distress signal had reached Callista’s mind it must have been powerful indeed. Troubled, he began to dress. He was lacing his second boot when he heard Damon in the sitting room of their suite. He went out to him, and Damon’s smiling face dispelled his fears.

  “You must have worried, when Callista ran out of here so quickly, I think Ellemir was frightened too, for a moment, more surprised than anything else. Many women escape this altogether, and Ellemir is so healthy, but I suppose no man can tell much about such things.”

  “Then she’s not seriously ill?”

  “If she is, it will cure itself in time,” Damon said, laughing, then sobered quickly. “Of course, just now she’s miserable, poor girl, but Ferrika says this stage will pass in a tenday or two, so I left her to Ferrika’s ministrations and Callista’s comforting. There’s little any man can do for her now.”

  Andrew, knowing that Ferrika was the estate midwife, knew at once what Ellemir’s indisposition must be. “Is it customary and proper to offer congratulations?”