Allira smiled a wavering smile. “The amulet didn’t protect me, did it? Maybe it will do better for you. Lucky charms protect you only if you have your own luck.” She pulled off the long chain, looping it twice and put it over Melitta’s head. Melitta clutched at the small amulet, suddenly touched—Allira had worn it since she was three years old; it had been their mother’s and grandmother’s.
She said quietly, “I’ll bring it back,” gave Allira a quick kiss, and without another word, plunged into the long deep stairwell. She heard Allira sob softly, as above her the passage darkened and the light went out.
She was alone in the depths of the castle.
* * *
V
« ^ »
WE SHOULD reach Armida by nightfall.” Colryn drew his horse to a walk in the neck of the narrow pass, waiting for the others to draw abreast of them, and looked across at Barron with a brief smile. “Tired of travelling?”
Barron shook his head without answering. “Good thing, because, although the Comyn Lord may want us to break our journey there for a day or two, after that we start into the hills.”
Barron chuckled to himself. If, according to Colryn, they started into the hills tomorrow, he wondered what they had been travelling for these past four days. Every day since they had left the plains where the Terran Trade City lay, they had been winding down the side of one mountain and up along the side of another, till he had lost count of the peaks and slopes.
And yet he was not tired. He was hardened now to riding, and sat his horse easily; and, although he would not have known how to say so, every inch of the road had held him in a sort of spell he did not understand and could not explain.
He had expected to travel this road filled with bitterness, resentment and grim resignation—he had left behind him everything he knew: his work, such friends as he had, the whole familiar world made by the men who had spanned great giant steps across the Galaxy. He had been going into exile and strangeness.
Yet—how could he explain it even to himself?— the long road had held him almost in a dream. It had been like learning a language once known but long forgotten. He had felt the strange world reach out and grip him fast and say “Stranger, come; you are coming home.” It gave him a sensation, of riding through a dream, or under water, with everything that happened insulated by a curtain of unreality.
Now and then, as if surfacing from a very long dive, the old self he had been, during those years when he sat at the dispatcher’s board in the Terran Trade City would come to the surface and sit there blinking. He tried, once, to make it clear to himself.
Are you falling in love with this world, or something? He would breathe the cold, strangely scented air, and listen to the slow fall of his horse’s hooves on the hard-frozen road, and think, What’s wrong? You’ve never been here before, why does it all seem so familiar? But familiar was the wrong word, it was as if, in another life, he had ridden through hills like these, breathed the cold air and smelled the incense that his companions burned in their campfires in the chilly fog of evening before they slept. For it was new to his eyes, and yet—it’s as if I were a blind man, newly seeing, and everything strange and beautiful and yet just the way I knew it would be…
During these brief interludes when the old Barron came to life in his mind, he realized that this sense of déjà vu, of living in a dream, must be some new form of the same hallucinated madness that had cost him his job and his reputation. But these interludes were brief. The rest of the time he rode in the strange dream and enjoyed the sense of suspension between his two worlds and the two selves which he knew he was becoming.
Now the journey would break, and he wondered briefly if the spell would break with it. “What is Armida?”
Colryn said, “The estate of the lord Valdir Alton, the Comyn lord who sent for you. He will be pleased that you speak our language fluently, and he will explain to you just what he wishes.” He looked down into the valley, shading his eyes with his hand against the dimming sunlight, and pointed. “Down there.”
The thick trees, heavy, gray-blue conifers that cast dark spice-smelling small cones on the ground, thinned as they rode downward, and here and there in the underbrush some small bird called with perpetual plaintiveness. Thin curls of mist were beginning to take shape in the lowlands, and Barron realized that he was glad they would be indoors before the nightly rain began. He was tired of sleeping on the ground under tarpaulins, though he knew that the climate was mild at this season and that they were lucky it was only rain and not snow. He was tired, too, of food cooked over open fires. He would be glad to sleep under a roof again.
He guided his horse with careless expertness down the slope, letting his eyes fall shut, and drifted off into a brief daydream. I do not know the Alton lords, and I must keep my real purpose secret from them, until I am certain they would help and not hinder. Here, too, I can find some information about roads and the best way to travel—snow will close the passes soon, and before then I must somehow find the best road to Carthon. The way to the world’s end…
He jerked himself out of his dream. He wondered what rubbish was he daydreaming. Where was Carthon, for that matter, what was Carthon? As far as he knew, it might be the name of one of the moons!
Oh, hell, maybe I’ve seen it on a survey map somewhere. He did look at such things now and then when he had nothing better to do. Perhaps his unconscious—they said the unconscious mind never forgets anything—was weaving dreams with these half-forgotten fragments.
If this went on, he’d be ready for Bedlam. Ready? Hell, I’m going Tom-o-Bedlam one better! His brain juggled with scraps of a song learned years ago on another world; it was about the world’s end.
“I summoned am to journey
Three leagues beyond the wild world’s end,
Methinks it is no journey…”
No, that’s wrong. He frowned, trying to recapture the words; it fixed his mind on something other than the strangeness around him.
Lerrys drew his horse even. “Did you say something, Barron?”
“Not really. It would be hard to translate unless—do you understand the Terran language?”
“Well enough,” Lerrys said with a grin.
Barron whistled a scrap of the melody, then sang in a somewhat hoarse but melodious voice:
“With a host of furious fancies
whereof I am commander,
With a burning spur and a horse of air,
Through the wilderness I wander;
By a queen of air and darkness
I summoned am to tourney
Three leagues beyond the wild world’s end;
Methinks it is no journey.”
Lerrys nodded. “It does seem a little like that sometimes,” he said. “I like that; so would Valdir. But Armida isn’t quite at the wild world’s end—not yet.”
As he spoke, they rounded a bend; a faint smell of wood smoke and damp earth came up to them from the valley, and through the thin mist they saw the great house lying below them.
“Armida,” said Lerrys, “my foster father’s house.”
Barron did not know just why he had expected it to be a castle, set high among impassable mountain crags, with eagles screaming around the heights. On the downslope, the horses neighed and picked up speed, and Lerrys patted his beast’s neck.
“They smell their home and their stable-mates. It was a good trip; I could have come alone. This is one of the safest roads; but my foster father was afraid of dangers by the way.”
“What dangers?” Barron asked. I must know what I may face on the long road to Carthon.
Lerrys shrugged. “The usual things in these hills: catmen, wandering nonhuman bands, occasional bandits—though they usually prefer wilder country than this, and in any case we aren’t enough to tempt the more dangerous ones. And if the Ghost Wind should blow—but I’ll be frightening you away.” He laughed. “This part of the world is peaceful.”
“Have you travelled much?”
>
“Not more than most,” Lerrys said. “I crossed the Kilghard Hills leading out of the Hellers with my foster brother, when I was fifteen; but it wasn’t any pleasure trip, believe me. And once, I went with a caravan into the Dry Towns, crossing the passes at High Kimbi, beyond Carthon—”
Carthon! The word rang like a bell, kicking something awake in Barron and sending a jolt of adrenalin into his system; he physically twitched, missing the next sentence or two. He said, cutting almost rudely through the younger man’s reminiscences, ”Where and what is Carthon?“
Lerrys looked at him strangely. “A city, or it used to be; it lies well to the east of here. It’s almost a ghost town now; no one goes there, but caravans go through the passes; there’s an old road, and a ford of the river. Why?”
“I—seem to have heard the name somewhere,” said Barron lamely, and lowered his eyes to his saddle, using as his excuse the horse’s increasing pace as the road levelled and led toward the low ramparts of Armida.
Why had he expected it to be a castle? Now that he was at the gates, it seemed reasonable that it should be a wide-flung house, sheltered by walls against the fierce winds from the heights. It was built of blue-gray stone with wide spaces of translucence in the stone walls, behind which lights moved in undefined patches of color and brilliance. They rode through a low arch and into a warm, sheltered courtyard; Barron gave up his horse to a small, swart man clad in fur and leather, who took the reins with a murmured formula of welcome. The Terran slid stiffly to the ground.
Shortly afterward he was beside a high blazing fire in a spacious, stone-flagged hall; lights warred with the dark behind the translucent stone walls and the wind safely shut outside. Valdir Alton, a tall, spare, sharp-eyed man, welcomed Barron with a bow and a few brief formal words; then paused a minute, his eyes resting on the Terran with a sudden, sharp frown.
He said, “How long have you been on Darkover?”
“Five years.” Barron asked, “Why?”
“No particular reason, except that—perhaps it is that you speak our language well for such a newcomer. But no man is so young he cannot teach, or so old he cannot learn; we shall be glad to know what you can teach us about the making of lenses. Be welcome to my hearth and my home.” He bowed again and withdrew. Several times during that long evening, the warm and plentiful meal, and the long, lazy period by the fire—which came between the end of supper and the time they were shown to their beds—the Terran felt that the Darkovan lord’s eyes were resting on him with a curious intentness.
Some Darkovans are mind-readers, I’ve heard. If he’s read my mind, he must have seen some damn funny things in it. I wonder if there are loose hallucinations running around the planet and I’ve simply caught a few somehow.
Nevertheless, his sense of confusion did not keep him from eating hugely of the warm, good meal served for the travellers, and enjoying the strange green, resinous wine they drank afterward. The fuzziness from the strong wine seemed to make him less confused about the fuzziness which blurred his surprise at all things Darkovan, and after a while it was pleasant to feel simply drunk instead of feeling that he was watching the scene through two sets of eyes. He sat and sipped the wine from the beautifully carved, green crystal of the goblet, listening to Valdir’s young foster daughter Cleindori playing a small harp which she held on her lap, and singing in a soft pentatonic scale some endless ballad about a lake of cloud where stars fell on the shore and a woman walked, showered in stars.
It was good to sleep in the high room hung with translucent curtains and filled with shifting lights; Barron, accustomed to sleeping in a dark room, looked for twenty minutes for a switch to shut them off, then gave up, got into bed and lay watching them drowsily. The shifting colors shifted his mind into neutral gear, and produced colored patterns even behind his closed eyelids, until he slept.
He slept heavily, dreaming strange swooping dreams of flight, watching landscapes tipping and shifting below, and hearing a voice calling in his dreams, again and again, “Find the road to Carthon! Melitta will await you at Carthon! To Carthon… Carthon… Carthon…”
He woke once, half-dazed, the words still ringing in his ears when he thought sleep had gone. Carthon. Why should he want to go there; and who could make him go? Banishing the thought, he lay down and slept again, only to dream again of the voice that called—murmuring, beseeching, commanding—“Find the road to Carthon …”
After a long time the dream changed. He was toiling down endless stairs, breaking sharp webs with his out-stretched hands, blinded except for a greenish, phosphorescent glow from damp walls that pressed all around him. It was icy cold, and his steps came slow, and his heart beat hard, and the same question pounded in his head: “Carthon. Where is Carthon?”
With the sunrise and the thousand small amenities and strangenesses of life in a Darkovan home, he tried to drive the dream away. He wondered again, dispassionately, if he was going mad. In God’s name, what spell has this damned planet woven around me?
In an attempt to break the bondage of these compelling dreams or sorceries, half through the day, he sought out Lerrys and said to him, “Your foster father, or whatever he is, was supposed to explain my work to me, and I’m anxious to get started. We Terrans don’t like idling around when there is work to be done. Will you ask your father if he can see me now?”
Lerrys nodded. Barron had noticed before that he seemed to be more practical and forthright than the average Darkovan and less concerned with formalities. “There is, of course, no pressure on you to begin your work at once, but if you prefer it, my guardian and I are at your service whenever you wish. Shall I have your equipment brought up?”
“Please.” Something he had said touched Barron with incongruity. “I thought Valdir was your father.”
“Foster father.” Again Lerrys appeared to be on the point of saying something, but he withheld it. “Come, I’ll take you to his study.”
It was a smallish room, as Darkovans counted space. Barron thought that at home it would have been a good-sized banquet hall. It looked down on the enclosed court, with alternating layers of glass and translucent stone. It was bitterly cold, although neither Valdir nor Lerrys appeared to suffer from it; the two wore only the linen shirts Darkovan men wore beneath their fur tunics. Outside below them, men were coming and going in the courtyard; Valdir stood and watched them for some minutes, while seeming courteously not to notice how Barron hung over the one small brazier to warm his hands; then he turned back, smiling in welcome.
“Last night in the hall I could give you only formal greetings; I am very glad to see you here, Mr. Barron. It was Lerrys and I who arranged that someone from the Terran city should come to teach us something of lens grinding.”
Barron grinned a little sourly. “It’s not my regular work, but I know enough about it to show beginners. So you arranged for me to come here? I thought you people didn’t think much of Terran science.”
Valdir gave him a sharp look. He said, “We have nothing against Terran science. It is Terran technology we fear—that Darkover will become just another link in a chain of worlds, all as much alike as sands scattered on the shore, or weeds along the path of the Terrans. But these are matters of politics—or, perhaps, of philosophy, and to be discussed over good wine at night, not offhand while we work together. I think you will find us ready to learn.”
For the last several moments, while he spoke, Barron had been conscious of some low-keyed irritation, like a sound just at the edge of consciousness, which he couldn’t quite hear. It made his head ache, and made it hard to hear Valdir’s words. He looked around to identify, if he could, what was making the—noise? He couldn’t quite hear it. He tried to concentrate on what Valdir was saying; he had missed a sentence or two.
“—and so, you can see, in the foothills, the sight of a sharp-eyed man may be enough, but in the high Sierras, where it’s absolutely imperative that any trace of fire must be discovered before it gets out of hand, a lens—wh
at do you call it, a telescope?— would be an invaluable help. It could save acres and acres of timber. Fire in the dry season is such a constant hazard—” He broke off; Barron was moving his head restlessly from side to side, his hand to his forehead. The sound or vibration or whatever it was seemed to fill every crevice of his skull. Valdir said in surprise, “The telepathic damper disturbs you?”
“Telepathic which? But something seems to be making one hell of a racket in here. Sorry, sir—”
“Not at all,” Valdir said. He went to what looked like an ornamental carving and twisted a knob on it; the invisible noise slackened, and Barron’s head quieted to normal. Valdir looked surprised.
“I am sorry; not one Terran in five hundred will know such a device exists, and I had simply forgotten to disconnect it. My deepest apologies, Mr. Barron; are you well? Can I offer you anything?”
“No, I’m all right,” Barron said, realizing that he was back to normal again, and wondering what the gadget was. He had the usual Terran notion that Darkover, being a planet without a great deal of manufacturing or technology, was a barbarian one, and the idea of some sort of electronic device functioning out here well beyond the Terran Zone seemed as incongruous as a tree growing in the middle of a spaceport.
“Is this your first trip into the mountains?” Valdir asked.
“No, but the first time I had crossed the plains.” Barron caught himself. What was the matter with him? That gadget and its weird noises seemed to have unsettled his brain. “Yes, I’ve never been outside the Terran Zone before this.”
“Of course you haven’t seen any real mountains yet,” Lerrys said. “These are just foothills, really, compared to the Hellers or the Hyades or the Lorillard Ranges.”