“Take off his slippers and look, Ellemir.”
“Oh, come, Callie, I was joking—”
“I wasn’t. Hilary was caught once on a level where there seemed to be fire, and came back with burns and blisters on the soles of her feet. She could not walk for days,” Callista said. “Leonie used to say, ‘The mind writes deeply in the body.’ Damon, what is it?” She bent to look at the bare feet, smiled. “No, there seems no physical injury, but I am sure you feel half frozen. When you have finished your soup, perhaps you should get into a hot bath. It will make certain your circulation is not really impaired.”
She sensed Andrew’s questioning look, and went on. “Truly, I do not know if it is the cold of the levels reflected in his body, or something in the mind, or whether the kirian makes it easier for the mind to reflect into the body, or whether kirian slows down the circulation and makes it easier to visualize cold. But whatever it is, the subjective experience in the overworld is cold, icy cold, chill to the bone, and without arguing where the cold comes from, I have experienced it often enough to know that hot soup, hot bricks, hot baths, and plenty of blankets should be all ready for anyone who returns from such a journey.”
Damon felt unwilling to be alone, even in his bath. While lying flat he felt fine, but when he tried to sit up, to walk, it seemed that his body thinned to insubstantiality, his feet did not feel the floor, he walked bodiless and fading in empty space. He heard, ashamed, his own soft wail of protest.
He felt Andrew’s strong arm under his, holding him up, making him solid, real again to himself. He said, half in apology, “I’m sorry. I keep feeling as if I’m disappearing.”
“I won’t let you fall.” In the end Andrew almost had to carry him to his bath. The hot water brought Damon back to consciousness of his physical self again. Andrew, warned of this reaction by Callista, looked relieved as Damon began to look like himself. He sat on a stool beside the tub, saying, “I’m here if you need me.”
Damon was filled with overflowing warmth, gratitude. How good they all were to him, how kind, how loving, how careful of his well-being! How he loved them all! He lay in his bath, floating, euphoric, an elation as great as his former misery, until the water began to cool. Andrew, disregarding the request to send for his body-servant, lifted him bodily out of the tub, dried him, wrapped him in a robe. When they came back to the women he was still floating in euphoria. Callista had sent for more food, and Damon ate slowly, cherishing every bite, feeling that food had never tasted so fresh, so sweet, so good.
At the back of his mind he knew that his present elation was simply part of the reaction and would sooner or later give way to enormous depression, but he clung to it, enjoying it, trying to savor every moment of it. When he had eaten as much as he could possibly hold (Callista, too, had eaten like a horse-drover, after the exhaustion of the long monitoring session) he begged, “I don’t want to be alone. Can’t we all stay together as we did at Midwinter?”
Callista hesitated, then said, with a glance at Andrew, “Certainly. None of us will leave you while you need us close to you.”
Knowing that the presence of nontelepathic servants would be intensely painful to Damon and Callista in their present state, Andrew went to carry the dishes and the remnants of the supper from the room. When he came back they were all in bed, Callista already asleep next to the wall, Damon holding Ellemir in his arms, his eyes closed. Ellemir looked up, drowsily making room for him at her side, and Andrew unhesitatingly joined them. It seemed right, natural, a necessary response to Damon’s need.
Damon, Ellemir held close to him, felt Andrew and then Ellemir drop off to sleep, but he lay awake, unwilling to leave them even in sleep. He felt no hint of desire — knew that under present conditions he would feel none for some days — but he was content simply to feel Ellemir in his arms, her hair against his cheek, to reassure himself that he, himself, was real. He could hear and sense Andrew, just beyond, a strong bulwark against fear. I am here with my loved ones, I am not alone. I am safe.
Gently, without desire, he fondled her, his fingers caressing her soft hair, her warm bare neck, her soft breasts. His awareness was tuned so high that he could feel through her sleep her awareness of the touch, the new tingle there. As he had been taught long ago when he was a monitor, he let his awareness sink down through her body, feeling the changes in the breasts, deep in the womb, without surprise. He had been so careful since she lost their child, it must have been of Andrew’s making. It was just as well, he felt. She and he were such close kin. He kissed the nape of her neck, so warmed and filled with love that he felt he would burst with its weight. He had by instinct guarded Ellemir from the danger of a child of long generations of inbreeding, and now she could have the child she hungered for, without fear. He knew, with a deep inner knowledge, that this child would not be lost too soon to live, and rejoiced for Ellemir, for all of them. He reached past Ellemir to touch Andrew’s hand in the darkness. Andrew did not wake, but clasped his fingers on Damon’s in his sleep. My friend. My brother. Do you know, yet, of our good fortune? Clasping Ellemir tightly, he realized with a shudder that he could have died out there on the higher levels of the overworld, that he might never again have seen any of these whom he so loved, but even that thought did not long disturb him.
Andrew would have cared for them, all their lives. But it was good to be with them still, to share this warmth, to think of the children who would be born to them here, of the life before them, the endless warmth. He would never be alone again. Falling asleep, he thought, I have never been so happy in my life.
When Damon woke hours later, the last dregs of warmth and euphoria had been squeezed from his mood. He felt cold and alone, his body dim and vanishing. He could not feel his own body, and clutched at Ellemir in a spasm of panic. His touch woke her at once, and she reacted to his hungry need for contact, folding herself against him, warm, sensual, alive against his cold deathliness. He knew, rationally, that he had nothing sexual for her now, but he still clung, desperately trying to stir in himself some flicker, some shadow, some hint of the love he felt for her. It was an agony of need, and Ellemir knew in despair that it was not really sexual at all. She held him and soothed him, and did what she could, but in his drained state of exhaustion he could not sustain even the momentary flickers of arousal that came and went. She was terribly afraid that he would exhaust himself still more in this despairing attempt, but she could think of nothing to say which would not hurt him still more. Under that frenzied tenderness, she felt her heart would break. At last, as she had known he must, he sighed, releasing her. She wanted to say that it did not matter, that she understood, but it mattered to Damon, and she knew it, and there would never be any way to change that. She simply kissed him, accepting the failure and his desperation, and sighed.
But now he sensed that the others were awake. He reached out gently, gathering the fourfold rapport around him, reassuring him more than the desperate attempt at sex. Intense, aware, closer than the touch of bodies, beyond words, beyond sex, they felt themselves blending into one. Andrew, feeling Damon’s need in himself, reached for Ellemir, who came eagerly into his arms. The blended excitement grew, spreading out shivering ripples through all of them, engulfing even Callista, melting them into a single entity, touching, enfolding, surging, responding. Whose lips touched and crushed, whose thighs clasped, whose arms held which body in a fierce embrace? It overflowed, spread like a wave, a flood of fire, a scalding, shivering explosion of pleasure and fulfillment. As the excitement subsided — stabilized, rather, at a less intense level — Ellemir slipped out of Andrew’s arms, caught Callista close, holding her, generously opening her mind to her sister. Callista clung to the mental contact hungrily, trying to hold something of that closeness, that togetherness she could share only this way, at second hand. For a moment she was actually unaware of her own unresponding body, so closely circled in the unbroken chain of emotion.
Andrew, sensing when Callista’s mind opene
d wholly, so that in a sense it had been Callista in his arms, felt a dizzy exaltation. He felt as if he overflowed, spread out so that he seemed to occupy all the space in the room, to encircle all four of them in his arms, and both Damon and Callista picked up his impulsive thought: I wish I could be everywhere at once! I want to make love to all of you at once! Damon moved close to Andrew, holding him in a confused desire to share, somehow, in this intense delight and closeness, sharing, actually participating in the slow repeated rise of excitement, the gentle, intense caresses…
Then shock, dismay — What the hell is going on? — as Andrew realized whose were the caressing hands. The fragile web of contact shattered like breaking glass, smashed with harsh physical shock. Callista gave a short, shaking cry, like a sob, and Ellemir almost cried it aloud: Oh, Andrew, how could you …!
Andrew lay very still, rigidly forcing himself not to move physically apart from Damon. He is my friend. It isn’t that important. But the moment was gone. Damon turned away, burying his face in the pillow, and his voice came hoarsely:
“Zandru’s hells, Andrew, how long do you and I have to be afraid of each other?”
Andrew, blinking, surfaced slowly from the confusion. He realized only dimly what had happened. He turned and laid a hand on Damon’s shaking shoulder, saying awkwardly, “I’m sorry, brother. You startled me, that’s all.”
Damon had control of himself again, but he had been caught at the deepest moment of vulnerability, wholly open to all of them, and the rebuff had hurt unimaginably. Even so, he was a Ridenow, and an empath, and he grieved at Andrew’s regret and guilt. “Another of your cultural taboos?”
Andrew nodded, shaken. It had never occurred to him that anything he could do, anything, could hurt Damon so enormously. “I’m — Damon, I’m sorry. It was just sort of… sort of a reflex, that’s all.” Awkward, still scared at the immensity of what he had done to Damon, he bent and hugged him a little. Damon laughed, returned the hug, and sat up. He felt drained, aching, but the disorientation was gone.
Shock treatment, he realized. Soothing was effective in hysteria. So was a good hard slap. When he got up to wash and dress he felt gratifyingly solid, real to himself again. He thought, soberly, that it was not so bad, after all. This time, when Andrew received a shock to one of his ingrained taboos, he didn’t run away or try to shake loose. He knew he’d hurt Damon, and accepted it.
They both lingered a moment in the outer room of the suite when the women had dressed and gone. Andrew glanced at Damon with constraint, wondering if Damon was still angry with him.
“Not angry,” Damon said aloud. “I should have expected it. You have always been afraid of male sexuality, haven’t you? That first night, when you and Callista went into rapport with Ellemir and me, I sensed that. There was so much else to worry about that night, I’d forgotten, but when we touched by accident, in the link, you panicked.” He felt again Andrew’s tentative response, his troubled withdrawal. “Is it culturally necessary to regard all male sexuality except your own as a threat?”
“Not afraid,” said Andrew, with a glint of anger, “repelled when it’s directed at me.”
Damon shrugged. “Humans are not herd animals who regard every other male as a rival or a threat. Is it impossible for you to take pleasure in male sexuality?”
Andrew said, with distaste, “Hell, yes. Do you?”
“Of course,” Damon said, bewildered. “I cherish the… the awareness of your maleness as I cherish the femininity of the women. Is that so hard to understand? It makes me more aware of my own… own manhood—” He broke off with an uneasy laugh. “How can we get into a tangle like this? Even telepathy is no good, there are no mental images to go with the words.” He added, more gently, “I’m not a lover of men, Andrew. But I find it hard to understand that kind of… fear.”
Andrew muttered, not looking at him, “I guess it doesn’t matter all that much. Not here.”
Damon felt dismay that something so simple to him should cause such enormous self-doubt, real fear, in his friend. He said, troubled, “No, but Andrew, we’re married to twin sisters. We will probably spend a lot of our lives together. Am I always going to have to fear that a moment of… of affection will alienate you, upset you to the point where all of us, even the women, are hurt by it? Are you always going to fear that I will… will overstep some invisible boundary, try to force something on you which… which repels you like this? How long” — his voice broke — “how long are you going to be on guard against me?”
Andrew felt intense discomfort. He wished he were a thousand miles away, that he need not stand like this, exposed to Damon’s intensity, his closeness. He had never realized what it was to be a telepath and part of a group like this, where there was no way to hide. Every time they tried to hide from each other they got into trouble. They had to face things. Abruptly he raised his head and looked straight at Damon. He said in a low voice, “Look, you’re my friend. Anything you want is… is always going to be okay with me, I’ll try not to… get so upset about things. I” — not even their hands touched, but it felt somehow as if he and Damon were close together, embracing like brothers — “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, Damon, and if you don’t know it, you ought to.”
Damon looked up at him, tremendously touched and moved, sensing the enormous courage it had taken for Andrew to say this. An outsider; and he had come so far. Knowing that Andrew had gone more than halfway to heal the rift he had made, he touched him lightly on the wrist, the feather-touch telepaths used among themselves to intensify closeness. He said, very gently, “And I’ll try and remember that this is still strange to you. You are so much one of us now that I forget to make allowances. And now enough of that. There is work to be done. I must look everywhere in the archives of Armida to find if there is any record of the old Year’s End festival before the Ages of Chaos and the burning of Neskaya. Failing that, I must look in the records of all the other Towers, and some of that must be done through the telepath relays. I cannot travel to Arilinn and to Neskaya and to ‘Dalereuth, but truly, I think now that we will some day have the answer.”
He began to tell Andrew about it. He still felt weary and depressed, the residual fatigue from the long overworld journey overwhelming him with the inevitable reaction. He told himself that he must not blame Andrew for his own state of mind. It would be easier when they were all back to normal.
But at least, he thought, there was now something like a hope for that.
Chapter Sixteen
The search in the archives of Armida was unproductive. There were records of all kinds of festivals which had at one time or another been customary in the Kilghard Hills, but the only Year’s End festival he could discover was an old fertility ritual which had died out considerably before the time of the burning of Neskaya and which seemed to have rather less than no bearing at all on Callista’s problem. Now that the search was underway, however, she was patient, and her health continued to improve.
Her menstruation had returned twice, but although Damon insisted that she should spend a precautionary day in bed each time, and he had been prepared to clear her channels again if needed, they remained clear. It was a good sign for her physical health, but a poor one for the eventual development of normal selectivity of the channels!
The normal winter work at Armida moved on, a mild winter, toward the spring thaw. As usual in winter, Armida was isolated, with few tidings of what happened in the outside world. Small bits of news took on major importance. A brood mare in one of the lower pastures gave birth to twin foals, both fillies. Dam Esteban gave them to Callista and Ellemir, saying that they should have matched saddle horses in a few years if they chose. The old minstrel Yashri, who had played for the dancing at Midwinter, broke two fingers of his hand in a fall during a drunken birthday party in the village, and his nine-year-old grandson came proudly to Armida, carrying his grandsire’s harp — which was nearly as tall as he was — to play dances f
or them in the long evenings. A woman on the further edge of the estate gave birth to four children at a single birth, and Callista rode with Ferrika out to the village where it had happened, to deliver gifts and good-will wishes. An overnight storm forced her to spend two nights away from home, to Andrew’s dread and worry. When she returned and he asked why this had been necessary, she told him gently, “It is needful for the safety of the babes, my husband. In the far hills the people are ignorant. They regard such a birth as a portent of luck, evil or good, and who is to know how it will take them? Ferrika can tell them this is nonsense, but she is one of themselves and they will not listen to her, though she is a midwife trained in Arilinn, a Free Amazon, and probably much more intelligent than I am. But I am Comyn, and a leronis. When I take gifts to the children, and comforts to the mother, the people know I have them under my protection, and at least they will not treat them as some frightful omen of catastrophe to come.”
“What were the babies like?” Ellemir asked eagerly, and Callista grimaced. “All newborn babes look to me like hairless rabbithorns for the spit, Elli, surpassingly ugly.”
“Oh, Callie, how can you say that!” Ellemir reproached. “Well, I shall simply have to go and see them for myself! Four at a birth, what a marvel!”
“Still, it is hard for the poor woman. I managed to encourage two women of the village to share the suckling, but even before they are weaned, we shall have to send them a dairy animal.”
News of the quadruple birth spread far and wide around the hills, and Ferrika said she was glad it was still winter and the roads not too good — though indeed it was a mild winter — or the poor woman would be bothered to death by people coming to see this marvel. Andrew found himself wondering what a severe winter would be like, if this was a mild one. He supposed that some year he would find out.
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