Exile's Song

  Margaret had arrived at University a naive little Colonial of sixteen. It had been very strange, very alien, and she had hated it until Ivor had found her and given her both a home and a direction for her life. She had never imagined how ignorant she was until she began to meet the students from other worlds of the Federation, all with their own customs and assumptions. And every one of them had been as provincial as she, as certain that the way they did things at home was the right way.

  The difference between Thetis and the University was the difference between country and city. Margaret hadn’t suspected she was a country mouse, that even the daughter of a Senator could be an idiot under certain circumstances. What a revelation it had been! She had been so frightened, and when she found Ivor and Ida Davidson, they had made her so welcome. She could feel both the terrible aloneness of that time, and the pleasure of being rescued by the kindly Davidsons.

  For a moment, she relaxed into the warmth and safety of her treasured memories. But her sense of outrage persisted, like a heated brick just beneath her sternum. She couldn’t hold the pleasant feelings in her mind, because her fury kept bubbling up, no matter how hard she tried to prevent it. Why was she so angry? She was a logical person, a trained scholar, wasn’t she? Worse, why did she feel angry at Ivor? How disgusting!

  Margaret experienced a sense of urgency now, a need to discover the source of her anger, to define it, package it up neatly, and thrust it away from her. No one close to her had ever died before. She was sure of that. She sat up in the bed, put her elbows on her bent knees, and rested her chin on her palms, frowning.

  Except the feelings refused to allow themselves to be nicely analyzed and tucked away. They seemed like a bag of cats, all howling and scratching. And all of them had a claw in her belly. It was more than Ivor, wasn’t it? Someone else had died, someone she cared for? Margaret thought, but she couldn’t imagine who, except perhaps her real mother, her father’s first wife. She rarely thought about that woman. The few times she had, and had asked Dio about her, the look of pain and distress she had seen had made her wish she had kept silent. Or that other woman, that Thyra person, whom she was sure was part of the puzzle. Was she dead? Master Everard spoke of her in the past tense, so she supposed she was.

  Ugh! She stank of sweat and dirt and misery and the Goddess knew what else. Margaret couldn’t bear that a moment longer, so she pushed the covers aside and looked for her clothes. Her uniform was nowhere to be seen, but the soft Darkover clothing she had purchased was hanging in the little closet. It felt wonderful under her fingertips, comforting and safe.

  Margaret pinned back her hair and removed her sleeping clothes. She looked at the light, and realized she must have slept the clock around, and lost a day. She found her chronometer, and, indeed, a day had passed. No wonder she felt as if her head were stuffed with weeds. She shivered all over and pulled a robe out of the closet, tugging it across her naked skin, then headed for the huge tub she knew waited across the long hall. Darkover might lack electricity and landcars, but at least they were extremely civilized about bathing.

  Margaret almost smiled, and found that the muscles of her face were so stiff that it was nearly painful. She never wanted to smile again! She felt stupid, then. She was still angry, and was probably going to be for a long time—even if she couldn’t find a specific reason to be raging. It would not go away for wishing. And she would smile again, and even laugh—Ivor would have wanted her to do that. But not right now. For the present, she was going to have to cope with having several strong emotions all at the same time, and none of them very pleasant. She sighed deeply, and a part of her chided herself for being so very dramatic. She felt as if some stranger had invaded her body while she slept, some other Margaret that she had known was lurking in her mind, waiting for the opportunity to escape and take over her body. Foolish, of course, but that was the truth of it.

  Sinking into the heated depths of the bath, she reached for a green jar that stood on the side of the tub. Pouring some of the contents into the tub, she was overwhelmed by the scent. It was sweet and flowery—and somehow familiar. That little door in her dream came back to her, vividly. She stopped moving, remembering. What lay behind it? It was not an actual door, but she knew it had some meaning.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and the sweet scent of the flowers seemed to calm her. She was small again, a child’s body somehow superimposed over her own. She was sitting in a tub of warm water, scented with this same green mixture. Graceful arms had lowered her in.

  Whose? Margaret was almost certain those arms belonged to the red-haired woman who haunted her nightmares. And there was someone else, too, someone she could not see. The silver-haired man?

  And abruptly Margaret remembered another night before she left Thetis, a night she had shut away in her mental closet with all the others. For days before she left she had been too excited to sleep much, had packed and unpacked half a dozen times, trying to decide what to take with the small weight allowance permitted. At last she had gone downstairs to find something dull to read, to put her to sleep.

  The Old Man was sitting before the fire, a glass in his hand. Her memory reconstructed every line of his face; the dark coarse beard, the deep furrows between his brows, and the scars he covered with flesh-colored makeup when he was outside his own house. She had often asked him, when she was small, how his face had become so scarred, but he had never answered her. Later, she had learned not to ask questions, not to remember, and never to disobey his strange orders.

  He looked up and part of a smile touched his mouth. “Marja.” He had always called her that. Her passport named her “Margaret,” but Dio and the Senator always called her Marja.

  “Excited?”

  “A little. I couldn’t sleep. I suppose I’ll get some rest on the ship.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “When we left . . . when we came here, you were so sick. You appear to have inherited my allergies to most of the hyperspace drugs, though they have developed some new ones since then. Marja, do you remember anything at all from before you came here?”

  For some reason, though he had spoken gently, the question made her chest tighten with terror. “Not much,” she said, “I was almost a baby.”

  “But you weren’t. You were nearly six, and that’s old enough to remember a lot. Nothing? Not even in dreams?”

  “Not really,” she replied. Six? Surely he was mistaken. How could she have forgotten six years of her life? Margaret felt angry and cheated. It was an old and bitter anger, one she wished she did not have. It came up at odd times, when Dio tried to explain the odd ways in which the Senator behaved toward her, or when she asked questions and was told to be quiet. “Dreams? Of course I dream . . . everyone does.”

  “What about?” he asked instantly.

  “Oh, the usual rubbish,” she said casually. The few months of the year when the three of them were together, when the Senator was not away doing whatever it was that he did, they kept such distance between them that they had nothing like a family life. His question made her feel as if the privacy they had long established between them had been violated, and she squirmed and wished she had stayed in her room. “You know. Stuff. Symbolic things. Locked rooms. Doors, walls. Something very valuable is locked up behind one door.”

  His eyes brightened as she said this. “Like what?”

  “A big—well, a jewel,” she said uncomfortably. “Does it matter?”

  “It might. Is there anything more?”

  “No, not really.” But there was.

  Some awareness must have reached him, because he said, quite gently, “Tell me, child.”

  “Oh, nothing. Sometimes I dream about a little door that seems very dreadful. I cry and bang on the door, but I can’t get in. Or maybe I cannot get out. Who knows in dreams. I’m very small, but the door’s smaller, and then—” She stopped, overcome by an emotion she could not put a name to. “Then you and Dio are there, the way you always are.” But you weren??
?t there when I was locked away! It was remarkable how angry she felt when she thought about the dream. She hoped he had not heard her thoughts—sometimes it seemed as if he could—because she did not want him to know how angry she was.

  Apparently he had not caught the strong emotions that rattled her adolescent mind, or he was too far gone with drink to notice. “Come. Sit here, Marja; on the floor beside me, as you did when you were very small.”

  For a second the offer was tempting. She had loved to curl up beside him before the fire when she was young, but now it made her feel stupid. “I’m not your puppy dog.”

  “No,” he retorted, his quiet mood vanishing suddenly and inexplicably, the way it often did when he was drinking. “You’re a hellish redheaded bitch—just like your mother.”

  “That is a fine way to talk about your dead wife!” she flared. Then she shivered. It was dangerous to provoke him when he was like this.

  The Senator looked startled. “Marjorie? Why would you think I meant her? I loved her more than words can say,” he answered, a little more kindly. “But she wasn’t your real mother, curse the gods!”

  “Dio is all the mother I have ever known. But I thought my biological mother was your first wife, even though you never talked about her. I just thought you loved her so much you couldn’t.” The words spilled out, even as she tried to hold them back. Margaret knew how dangerous it was to confront the Old Man, and she was surprised at herself. Everything had become confusing since she had decided to go off to University. He still wasn’t happy about her choice, but he would never say why.

  Secrets sometimes seemed to fill the airy house with a vapor, the smell of ancient rage and sorrow. Margaret was so accustomed to it that she rarely asked questions. She tried to guess his mood, and failed, biting her lower lip and shifting from foot to foot.

  “Marjorie?” he said unguardedly. “No. Your mother was Marjorie’s sister, Thyra.”

  Margaret tried to digest this new, and unwelcome, bit of information. Who? She knew that name—sometimes he shouted it in his sleep. It always gave her the shivers. She wanted to leave the room now, but her curiosity got the better of her. “I’ve heard of some pretty weird marriage customs, but that is a new one! Is the first child always born by the wife’s sister?” She was being sarcastic, and she knew it, but she would have died before she let her father know that she was interested.

  He didn’t laugh. “It wasn’t deliberate,” he said, looking bleak. Margaret was just old enough to think she understood and be embarrassed, whether for him or herself she was not sure.

  “Does Dio know?”

  “Yes, of course; I told her the whole thing when—when I found out myself,” he said. “Did you know Dio and I once had a child?” The pain in his voice made her wince.

  “No,” she said, a little more gently. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s why—Dio was so glad to have you.”

  “But why did you never have others?” She had longed for sisters and brothers, for the sorts of large, bustling families she saw among the Thetans. Margaret had always felt a little cheated in being an only child.

  “I didn’t dare,” he said roughly. A terrifying picture flashed into her mind, of a wretched infant too deformed to survive. “I couldn’t make her face that . . . again. No man would.” He hesitated. “Dio said you should be told, but I’ve always been too cowardly. Our son—died. Then I found you. You were such a wonderful little girl, and Dio wanted a child of mine so much. I think she’s been a good mother.”

  “She is. I never questioned that.” But where—and who—is Thyra—my own mother?

  “Dio should have had half a dozen children. She would have liked to,” her father said, “but I just could not risk it.” Margaret could not contradict him. But why was it a secret? And why had she always felt it was somehow her fault, some failure of hers, that there were no other children?

  “No,” he said gently, and she knew he had heard her, in that strange way he had sometimes. She had never been able to figure out how he did it—as if he could read her mind. She was sure that was impossible. Certainly it was unthinkable—people should not be able to invade the minds of others. “It had nothing to do with you—though at your age, I know that is really difficult for you to believe. When I was your age, I thought everything that went wrong with my father was my fault, and I expect you are the same.” Since Margaret could not imagine her father as ever having been young, let alone being wrong, she had withdrawn before he said anything more. She remembered going back to her room, and then shutting his words away, making herself forget what he had said. She had done that other times, she realized now. Whenever anything frightened her, or was too painful, she sent the memory away into a place in her mind that was locked and hidden.

  Now, in the warm waters of the bath, she wondered if the red-haired, screaming woman in her dreams was this Thyra. If she was, Margaret hated to think about it. And who was that man she kept getting glimpses of? If only she had told the Old Man the truth, all those years before, about her dreams. But, she hadn’t trusted him enough to disclose her dreams. And there was no use thinking about the past. It was gone, and it really did not matter to her.

  Was the Thyra who had owned that ryll the same woman? It seemed likely, but there wasn’t anyone she could ask about it. She noticed her fingers were starting to get all prunish from the water, and that was such a normal thing that she felt better in spite of herself. Margaret shoved aside this riddle she would probably never solve, and finished her bath.

  If the woman in her dreams was the same Thyra whose ryll she had played two days before, if she was indeed her mother, then the Old Man had a great deal to explain. If she saw him again—no, when—she was going to tie him to a chair and not let him go until he told her everything! The resolve heartened Margaret more than a little, for she realized she was no longer a frightened girl. Well, perhaps just a little frightened, but certainly not a child any longer.

  Bureaucracy, Margaret thought, was something invented by the devil to make the lives of people more difficult. After two days of wrestling with petty officials in the Terran Sector, she had been told that she could not send Ivor’s body home because she was not a relative. He had to be buried on Darkover, and if Ida wanted to claim the body, she would have to come there and claim it. She had called the person behind the desk several colorful and unlikely names, then stomped off with the headache she was certain was going to become a permanent fixture in her brain.

  She had telefaxed Ida—enriching the Federation’s communications system considerably, but not with any sense of satisfaction for herself—and received a sad message telling her to bury the professor on Darkover at least for the time being. Margaret had found a coffin maker, with some help from Anya, and had chosen a nice casket. It had been an almost comforting experience, because the man had wanted to know all about Ivor—what he did and what he liked. He showed her designs from his book, and she chose a guitar to be carved onto the top of the coffin.

  Now there was one spot on her brow that throbbed incessantly, and she had rubbed the skin almost raw—as raw as she felt within. Filling out forms and answering the same questions over and over had almost held her grief at bay. But in the moments when she was not busy, she felt lost and abandoned. Only the kindly presence of Master Everard and Anya kept her from surrendering completely to hopelessness. They behaved as if they had known her and Ivor all their lives, as if he were a valued friend, not a stranger who had had the poor manners to die in their house after only two days’ stay.

  Master Everard walked beside her now, along the narrow streets. The coffin was borne along by four members of the Musicians Guild, and the rest of Master Everard’s household walked behind it. Margaret carried the professor’s precious guitar in one hand. Her palm was nearly healed from where she had fallen in her wild rush to get back to the music master’s house, but the cut on her knee was scabbed and painful.

  As they approached the little cemetery which
lay at the edge of the Terran Sector, a number of people stopped and looked at the procession. Margaret, deep in her anguish, ignored the curious looks she got from Darkovans and Terrans. She was dressed in the clothing she had bought from MacEwan, for warmth and comfort, and it was all she could manage to put one foot in front of the other. She kept stumbling in the unfamiliar long skirt.

  They passed beneath a handsome stone arch and entered the walled enclosure. There were a scattering of headstones, trees here and there, and up ahead, a little huddle of figures she thought were the statues from her dream. Then one turned and she realized they were quite alive. The breeze brought the clean scent of balsam and stirred the garments of those who waited.

  “I hope you do not mind, child. I asked a few people from Music Street to join us.” Master Everard was weary, and he seemed apprehensive as he spoke.

  “No, I don’t mind. But they never knew him. It seems strange.”

  “True, but they would have wished to have known him. In the short time I had with him, I found him to be a very good man. I feel very gifted in that time, you see.”

  Margaret didn’t, but there seemed to be nothing to add, so she moved onward, her eyes burning with unshed tears, her muscles aching with fatigue. Margaret came to the grave, looked into the faces of strangers, and saw—not strangers, but friends she had not known she possessed. It gave her the strength to endure as the Terran chaplain, in his gray clericals, a sober note between the greens and blues of the Darkovans, began to read the ritual words. Ivor had not been an adherent of any one of Terra’s many faiths—if he had a religion, it was music—so the words were impersonal, almost without impact.

  The pallbearers lowered the casket into the earth, and the chaplain read from his book, a worn volume, old-fashioned and probably valuable. The words, like the book, were well worn, ages old, formal and probably as meaningless to the Darkovans as they were to her. When he was done, he bent over, cast a handful of dirt into the grave, and withdrew, his duty done.