Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Colin gasped for breath, and each forward step was a struggle. His heart was a sharp hot pain in his chest, but he thrust aside all thought of his own safety. I will put on the armor of Light

  But the Darkness that Simon had set as his tyler was too strong—a thing of venom and poison that assaulted the senses with its foulness. Colin felt himself begin to fail, as his heart stuttered under the impact of its hate. The real world of the herb garden that surrounded him and Leslie was shrouded from his sight-caught up in the maelstrom as he was, Colin stumbled forward on instinct alone.

  “Begone, begone, BE YE GONE!” Leslie’s voice, vibrant and demanding, seemed to echo inside his head—she gestured, and drops of Light rained from her fingertips, striking the Darkness and banishing it back to the realm from which it had been evoked. Once more Colin could sense the green life that surrounded them.

  The austere and majestic pride of a parent filled him at Leslie’s action. Though she was young upon the Path, she would grow strong and straight and true to the armies of Light.

  If she lived past today.

  They had reached the door of the Sanctuary. Leslie touched the knob and drew back without turning it, believing, as Colin well knew, that the door was still locked, as it had been all month. But Colin knew that for Simon’s ritual to proceed, certain conditions must be met, and they did not include the security of a locked door. When Colin put his hand on the knob, it turned freely, and the door opened.

  He sketched a Sign in the air to breach the Wards, and it was answered with a crackle of Astral Flame. Behind him, he heard Leslie whimper.

  Inside the studio the air was thick with incense, and Simon stood within that diagram which is the six-pointed star drawn with but a single line.

  Chrissy Hamilton lay upon the double-cube altar, still wearing her mundane clothes, but Simon and Emily were both garbed in ritual dress—Simon, naked beneath the Black Adept’s red cloak, and Emily, as his Sacred Harlot, seated upon a stool in a white gown that left her breasts bare. They did not react to the breaching of their Temple, but Emily was in trance and Colin did not think that Simon’s mind was in this world at all.

  Simon reached for the knife that lay upon the altar.

  “In the name of Almighty God and the Light into Whose Presence I first brought you, Simon, Pilgrim, Magister, servant of God—I say no!” Colin shouted with all of his strength. In his state of heightened awareness, Colin could feel the forces of heaven grinding unstoppably forward like great millstones.

  At last Simon reacted to their presence. His face contorted with a fury from which everything human had long been banished, and he clutched the Red Knife as if it were a weapon.

  Lords of Light, if it is Your will to take me in this way, let it be so. What I give up today, I surrender freely; let it be used for the Light—

  Again, Colin made the Sign. Its very presence in this room was enough to cause Simon exquisite physical pain, debased as his nature was now: it paralyzed him, allowing Colin to cross the space between them and step into the circle chalked upon the floor.

  The seconds in which he had to work were trickling away. With one great gesture he kicked over the altar, and the sound of his boot against the wood resounded like a strike upon a great drumhead. The burning incense jumped from the dish and smoldered in a sticky spill upon the cement floor, and Colin crushed the lamp beneath his foot, extinguishing its flame.

  Simon leaped up, the knife flashing in his hand as he rushed forward. Colin did not move, calling out to Simon’s True Self in that terrible moment with all the force he possessed.

  Simon Anstey, remember who you are!

  He felt the Power descend upon him: once more, in this bright instant, Colin MacLaren became the Sword of the Order. Simon struck with the knife, but it fell away from Colin’s chest without penetrating. Colin made the Sign for the third time—and felt a great silence spread around him as the Still Point of the Equinox was reached.

  And now there were two Simon Ansteys here in the room: the gibbering, blood-soaked creature of rage and pain and appetite, and the merely human man who had been tempted beyond his strength—but who had not killed.

  “I was mad. Surely I was mad,” Simon said in a numb, dazed voice. “What have I done—what will I do?” He looked toward Colin with agonized eyes, and in the secret chambers of his heart Colin wept for the boy he had once known.

  “Simon! Oh, my love—” Leslie cried, reaching for him.

  But Colin held her back. Simon had not chosen. Those who walked in the Shadow might be honestly pained by their own actions—but still choose to commit them.

  “Simon, you stand at the crossroads. If you hope to walk in the Light again, there is still a sacrifice to be made,” Colin told him. “What will you sacrifice, and what will you do with the power which must be dispelled from this place?” Colin moved his hand, and the ghostly Astral Lightning followed his gesture. For an instant, the gates of memory opened to Colin MacLaren.

  So had he stood, once, in a Temple that had been ashes for ten thousand years, and listened as these words were said to him. He had been offered redemption and had spurned it in the dust, and he had been tied to the Wheel ever since, expiating that arrogance.

  Just as Simon would be, if Colin could not save him now.

  He felt a crushing pain grow in his chest. The power in the room built, and the Wheels of Time slid forward. In a moment all would be lost—they would all go on, forward through Time, and Simon would find some other way to commit his crime.

  “Quickly, Simon!” Colin said urgently. “Time is running out! Choose darkness or light—and be forever bound by your choice!” Remember that you are a being of Light, that you chose this destiny for yourself. Remember—and be proud.

  Simon drew a deep breath, and Colin felt the agony in his own chest.

  “I will not—” Simon said hoarsely. “I renounce the Darkness forever—my power—and what I could have been. I renounce it forever, and that power I give to Emily—”

  He rose from his beastlike crouch and kissed Emily gently upon the lips, then turned to. the altar before which the child still lay.

  Colin felt Time slip from his grasp, moving onward into the Waning Tide, and with it went all the Panoply of the Light. All of them within these walls were merely human once more, not angels or archetypes.

  The child sat up and began to cry for her mother, human understanding flooding her eyes at last.

  “And lest I be tempted again—” Simon raised his damaged hand, and brought it down upon the edge of the overturned altar. Colin felt as well as heard the sickening crunch as fragile bone gave way, and Simon wept as waves of uncontrollable agony jolted through his body. His skill was lost forever. There would be no second miracle for Simon Anstey.

  “Emily—” he gasped, sinking to his knees. “You-shall be my hands … .”

  Leslie ran to him, and this time Colin did not stop her. Simon’s choice was made. The Light had won its victory.

  He did not hear her cry out to him as sagged to his knees.

  TWENTY

  SAN FRANCISCO, 1985

  Be near me when my light is low,

  When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

  And tingle; and the heart is sick,

  And all the wheels of Being slow.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  SIMON AND LESLIE WERE MARRIED THE MOMENT SIMON GOT OUT of the hospital, then had traveled for several months. While he and Leslie were gone, Emily’s commitment to Frodo deepened, and it became tacitly understood that they, too, would eventually marry. The thought of Simon and Frodo as brothers-in-law caused Claire a great deal of quiet amusement, a distraction she sorely needed in the weeks that followed.

  Colin’s battle with the Shadow had wasted him as if it were a high fever, and through the dark winter months he was nearly frail, moving with the stiff caution of the aged. Knowledge of his own mortality was constantly with him like an old well-loved friend. He recovered his old e
nergy more slowly than he liked, and Claire fussed over him like a nervous mother hen.

  He had said he would make any sacrifice to gain the redemption of Simon’s soul, but like every man, when he spoke he had not believed that the Powers Above would accept what he had so freely offered. Slowly, as the weeks of slow recuperation passed, Colin came to realize that the battle for Simon’s soul might well have been the last such battle he would ever fight. He was in his late sixties, and while the trained Will of the Adept only grew stronger with age and study, the physical stamina—me energy, the vril—required for some acts of magick could vanish overnight, blighted as by a killing frost, leaving the Adept as powerless as an ordinary man.

  But if the Lords of Karma had taken his power at last, so be it. He would hold himself obedient to Their Will, and strive to conduct himself, always, in the Light. If he were to be only a spectator to the Great Battle in these last years of his life, he would strive to learn all he could from watching the workings of the Lords of Karma upon this plane.

  Though some of those lessons were bitter ones.

  The world went on, moving faster and faster, as though it, too, were eager for the millennium. While Colin slowly mended, the year ended on a bizarre grace note, where a man called Bernhard Goetz opened fire upon his young attackers in a New York subway—and the world cheered.

  The love of violence was in the air. Everywhere, war seemed not only possible, but inevitable, and Colin awoke one morning with the sudden understanding that it was not only men who were moral … dreams were mortal as well. Dreams could die.

  Thirty years ago they’d all lived in a wonderful dream … the fantasy that governments waged war, that people, left alone, would choose peace. But in the last three decades, as the world had slowly darkened and the violence of the great wars of the past had decayed into constant acts of random violence, the dreamers slowly realized that they’d been wrong all those years ago. There would always be war, because war came from the people. Not from the government, or the military, or the industrialists. War began with the stick, the thrown bottle, the firebomb. War began with a riot in the street … your street. And war would not be extinguished until the last human being was dead.

  But just as eternal war seemed inevitable, there came some fugitive rays of hope. In the spring of 1985 the Soviet Union began to soften its eternal opposition to the West. With the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as premier, the unremitting winter of the Cold War seemed at last to be ready for its own spring. That autumn, the Soviet premier and the American president met, and the world held its breath.

  And then, as if some dark force were mocking their hopes, the second half of the eighties began with the death of another dream: the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

  They were black, white, Asian … men, women—and one special woman named Christa McAuliffe. The explosion tore the heart out of an America that refused any longer to invest its soul in leaders; of an America that had grown to distrust promises and only believed in deeds. An America that had learned to believe that promises were lies.

  Colin thought of that, as he watched Ronald Reagan offer words of expertly-crafted commiseration to a grieving nation—topspin from a president hypocritical enough to have publicly honored Nazi dead only six months before. It made Colin angry in a dull, quiet way: nearly four decades had passed since V-E Day, and this was to have been the world in which all men were free.

  But the victory that Colin had waited for—that clear-cut, shining moment—had never really come. It was always just one more fight away, somewhere in the glittering future.

  Wearily the nation bound up its wounds and went on. When the scandal that the newspapers, with a fine sense of history, called variously “Irangate” and “Contragate” erupted that fall, Colin didn’t even bother to follow the coverage on CNN.

  What did it matter? They would learn nothing new from it. America’s leaders were corrupt—the country had known that since Watergate, since Chicago, since Kent State. It would take two years to bring home indictments against Colonel Oliver North and his coconspirators, and in his heart Colin knew that the judgment did not matter.

  By the late spring—six months after his collapse—Colin had resumed most of his regular activities, though he had little heart for them. Emily and Frodo married in a Wiccan ceremony held in Mount Tamalpais Park, with Cassilda Chandler officiating. During his convalescence, Colin had sold his interest in the Ancient Mysteries Bookshop to Cassie, and she and Claire managed it together. He’d set the price deliberately low: his real estate investments brought in an income sufficient to his needs, and Colin was not a greedy man.

  Cassie was fulfilling her early promise as an occultist and teacher. Though the path she followed through the Light was far from Colin’s own, he could find it within himself to be joyful that she was on the journey.

  And slowly it began to seem, now, that every worldly loss was balanced by a gain, in a subtle playing-out of some great chess match. The Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, bringing a measure of peace to that oft-disputed country, but at the same time the U.S. was taking the first steps toward an armed clash with Iran. The Chinese massacred students demonstrating for freedom in Tiananmen Square, but in Poland, the worker’s union known as Solidarity was providing the first substantial challenge to Russian communism since the end of World War II. Two and a half years after the Challenger disaster, the Discovery launched successfully—and deaths from AIDS topped fifty thousand a year, as many as were killed in a single holiday weekend by drunk drivers.

  Weeks turned to months, months to years. And on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

  Colin watched it, alone, in his apartment. The men and women who could have known what this moment meant to him were all dead, or scattered beyond any hope of recall. None of his present circle of friends, dear though he held them, could have understood. Not even Claire.

  We won. This means we won.

  As a young man, Colin had thought he was a realist—now, having reached the threshold of his seventies, he was beginning to understand what the word really meant. To be a realist, one needed a certain perspective.

  It was night in Berlin, the live televised image carried to him by far-distant cameras. Gone were the days when film had to be flown out of the war zone and developed for the six o’clock news—“and now, the news”-gone the days when news was a voice carried by transatlantic cable to the parlor radio—“This is London calling.” Now the minicam and the satellite uplink brought the events into homes all over the world at the moment they happened—the announcers sounding giddy and drunk with the enormity of what they were watching, the Berliners in ordinary clothes, carrying sledgehammers and spray cans to smash and deface the Wall that had scarred two postwar generations.

  This shows that we’ve won. A battle, at least, if not the war. And so long as the war continues, there is hope.

  It was a block party on an unimaginable scale; an entire city turning out to rejoice in freedom in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate and the symbol of Cold War oppression. Soon Checkpoint Charlie would be no more than a legend, fast becoming a myth. And future generations would never understand that tyranny had once had a visible face.

  Perhaps it is better that way, Colin thought. He watched the distant images of the night from a room where sunlight still streamed through the windows. It seemed, as the years passed, that he understood himself better than before, and with more emotional distance he could be saddened by the passionate follies of his animal nature, but no longer surprised by them. Perhaps the best thing to do with victories is to forget them. He raised his glass of wine and silently toasted the television screen.

  There was a new emotion growing in his chest, something that had been unfamiliar to him for many years. A fierce, pure hope, a stainless joy. He had looked too long into the Darkness, counting up its victories as if they were his own. But the Light won its victories as well, and they were just as real.<
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  He watched the broadcast a while longer, as it cut back and forth between live footage and talking heads in the studio At last, the channel switched to other coverage and Colic turned it off. He sat quietly on his couch for almost an hour, basking in this rediscovered sense of grace, then picked up the phone and dialed a familiar number.

  “Nathaniel? This is Colin. Give me work.”

  INTERLUDE #7

  SAN FRANCISCO, 1990

  IT WAS ONLY IN LOOKING BACK ACROSS THE EIGHTIES THAT I REALIZE how complacent I became. For a few terrible months after Simon’s redemption, I thought I had lost Colin—if not forever, then at least for the rest of this life. But as he grew stronger, my fears eased. I realized that the dark shadow that had haunted Colin’s life during his Taghkanic years seemed to have lifted. For the first time since I had known him—and how many years that was, now!—Colin seemed content to live in the moment, taking each day as it came.

  It was true that he had sold Cassie his interest in the bookstore and spent more and more time away from it, but I paid no attention to that. It was as if I believed that all those things which had been so much a part of Colin’s life for so long had simply … stopped.

  I realize now that it was because I was the one who wished them to stop. Fortune had brought me a full life, and I had no desire to “rock the boat.” Cassie Chandler’s strength and energy took much of the burden of running the bookstore from my shoulders—a good thing, since by then I’d taken the degree in psychology that I’d worked toward for so long and was working as. a counselor at a local Planned Parenthood Clinic.

  I found great contentment in helping those whose lives I touched through the bookstore and the clinic, and there was nothing more—so I thought—that I wanted out of life. Shortly after Frodo married Emily—with Simon giving away the bride, something I thought I’d never see—Frodo and Cassie began running a coven together.