They walked together, hearing the whispering sound of the soft cloud-waves. Allart had grown up on the shores of Hali, and had heard it all his life, but now he seemed to hear it freshly through Renata’s ears.
“I never tire of this sound. It is so like, and so unlike, water. I suppose no one could swim in this lake?”
“No, you would sink. Slowly, it is true, but you would sink; it will not hold you up. But you can breathe it, you know, so it does not matter if you sink. Many times in my boyhood I have walked along the lake-bottom to watch the strange things within it.”
“You can breathe it? And you will not drown?”
“No, no, it is not water at all—I do not know what it is. If you breathe it too long, you will become faint, and feel too weary even to take breaths, and there is some danger that you will become unconscious and die without remembering to breathe. But for a little while it is exhilarating. And there are strange creatures. I do not know whether to call them fish or bird, nor could I say whether they swim in the cloud or fly through it, but they are very beautiful. They used to say that to breathe the cloud of the lake conferred long life and that was why we Hasturs are long-lived. They say, too, that when Hastur, the son of the Lord of Light, fell to the shores at Hali, he gave immortality to those who dwelt there, and that we Hasturs lost that gift because of our sinful lives. But these things are all fairy tales.”
“You think so being a cristoforo?”
“I think so being a man of reason,” Allart said, smiling. “I cannot conceive of a god who would meddle with the laws of the world he created.”
“Yet the Hasturs are long-lived, in truth.”
“I was told at Nevarsin that all those of the blood of Hastur bear chieri blood; and the chieri are all but immortal.”
Renata sighed. “I have heard, too, that they are emmasca, neither man nor woman, and thus free of the perils of being either. I think I envy them that.”
It struck Allart that Renata gave tirelessly of her own strength; yet there was none to care if she herself was overwearied.
“Go and rest, kinswoman. Whatever you have to say to me, it cannot be so urgent that it cannot wait till you have had the food and rest to which you were so quick to send my dear lady.”
“But I would rather say it while Cassandra is sleeping. I must say it to one of you, and though I know you will think it an intrusion, you are older than Cassandra and better able to endure what I must say. Well, enough of apology and preamble… You should not have come here with Cassandra new-made a bride and your marriage still unconsummated.”
Allart opened his mouth to speak, but she gestured him to silence. “I warned you, remember, that you would think it an intrusion of your privacy and hers. I have been in the Tower since I was fourteen; I know the courtesies of such things. But also I am monitor here, and responsible for the well-being of everyone in the Tower. Anything which interferes— no, hear me out, Allart—anything which impairs your functioning, disrupts us all. I knew before you had been here three days that your bride was virgin still, but I did not intrude, not then. I thought perhaps you had been married for political reasons and did not like one another. But now, after half a year, it is obvious that you are madly in love. The tension between you is disrupting us all, and making Cassandra ill. She is so tense all the time that she cannot even properly monitor the state of her own nerves and body, which she should be able to do by now. I can do it for her, a little, when you are in the circle, but I cannot do it all the time and I ought not to do for her what she should learn to do for herself. Now, I am sure you had some good reason for coming here in this state, but whatever your reasons, you knew too little of how a Tower circle must function. You can endure this; you have had the Nevarsin training and you can function even when you are unhappy. Cassandra cannot. It is as simple as that.”
Allart said defensively, “I did not think Cassandra was so unhappy.”
Renata looked at him and shook her head. “If you do not know, it is only that you have not allowed yourself to know. The wisest thing would be to take her away until things are settled between you; then, if you wish, you can return. We are always in need of trained workers, and your training at Nevarsin is very valuable. As for Cassandra, I think she has the talent to become a monitor, even a technician if the work interests her. But not now. This is a time for the two of you to be alone, not disrupting us all with your unsolaced needs.”
Allart listened, cold with dismay. His own life had been lived so long under iron discipline that it had never occurred to him that his own needs, or Cassandra’s unhappiness, could interfere to a hair’s weight with the circle. But of course he should have known.
“Take her away, Allart. Tonight would not be too soon.”
Allart said through mounting misery, “I would give all I possess, I think, if I were free to do that. But Cassandra and I have pledged one another—”
He turned away, but the thoughts were clear in his mind, and Renata looked at him in dismay.
“Cousin, what could prompt you to a vow so rash? I do not speak only of your duty to kinsmen and clan.”
“No,” said Allart. “Don’t speak of that, Renata, not even in friendship. I have heard all too much of that and I need no one to remind me. But you know what kind of laran I have and what a curse it has been to me. I would not perpetuate it in sons and grandsons. This breeding program among those families with laran, which prompts you to speak of duty to caste and kin, it is wrong, it is evil. I will not pass it on!” He spoke vehemently, trying to blot out the sight of Renata’s face, not as it was, grave with kindly concern, but as it might be, all pity wakened, tenderness and passion.
“A curse indeed, Allart! I, too, have many fears and doubts about the breeding program. I do not think any woman in the Domains is ever free of them. Yet, Cassandra’s unhappiness, and yours, is needless.”
“There is more, and worse,” Allart said desperately. “At the end of every road I can foresee, it seems, Cassandra lies dead in bearing my child. Even if I could compromise my conscience to father a child who might bear this curse, I could not bring that fate on her. So we have pledged to live apart.”
“Cassandra is very young and a virgin,” Renata said, “and may be excused for knowing no better than that, though it seems wicked to me to keep a woman in ignorance of anything which may so closely affect her life. But surely the choice you have made is too extreme, since it is apparent even to outsiders that you love each other. You can hardly be unaware that there are ways—” She turned her face away, embarrassed, as she spoke. Such things were not spoken of much even between husband and wife. Allart was embarrassed, too.
She cannot be older than Cassandra! In the name of all the gods, how does a young woman, gently reared, of good family and still unmarried, come to know of such things?
The thought was very clear in his mind, and Renata could not help picking it up. She said dryly, “You have been a monk, cousin, and for that reason alone I am willing to admit that perhaps you really do not know the answer to that question. Perhaps you still believe that it is men alone who have such needs, and that women are immune to them. I do not want to scandalize you, Allart, but women in the Tower need not, and cannot, live by the foolish laws and customs of this time, which pretend that women are no more than toys to serve men’s desires, with none of their own, save to breed sons for their clans. I am no virgin, Allart. Any one of us— man or woman—must learn, before we have been long in the circle, to face our own needs and desires, or we cannot put all our strength into the work we do. Or, if we try, such things happen as befell this morning—or worse, much worse.”
Allart looked away from her, embarrassed. His first, almost automatic thought was pure reaction to his childhood teachings. The men of the Domains know this, and still let their women come here?
Renata shrugged, answering the unspoken question.
“It is the price they pay for the work we do—that we women shall to some extent be freed, for
our term here, of the laws which emphasize inheritance and breeding. I think most of them choose not to inquire too closely. Also, it is not safe for a woman working in the circles to interrupt her term with pregnancy.” She added after a moment, “If you wish, Mira can instruct Cassandra—or I myself. Perhaps she would take it more easily from a girl her own age.”
If anyone had told me, while I dwelt at Nevarsin, that there was any woman alive with whom I could speak openly of such things, and that woman neither wife nor kinswoman, I would never have believed it. I had never thought there could be simple honesty between man and woman, this way.
“That would solve our worst fears, indeed, while we dwelt in the Tower. Perhaps we can have—this much. Indeed, we spoke of this, a little.” Cassandra’s words echoed in his mind as if they had been spoken only moments ago, not half a season gone by:
“I can bear it, as things are now, Allart, but I do not know if I could hold to such a resolve. I love you, Allart. I cannot trust myself. Sooner or later I would want your child, and it is easier this way, without the possibility and the temptation…”
Hearing the echo in his mind, Renata said indignantly, “Easier for her, perhaps—” and stopped herself. “Forgive me, I have no right. Cassandra, too, is entitled to her own needs and desires, not to what you or I think she ought to feel. When a girl has been taught, since she was old enough to understand the words, that a woman’s reason for living is to bear children to her husband’s caste and clan, it is not easy to change that, or to find some other purpose for living.” She fell silent, and Allart thought her voice sounded too bitter for her youth. He wondered how old she was, and they were so close in rapport that Renata answered the unspoken question.
“I am only a month or two older than Cassandra. I am not yet free of the desire to bear a child someday, but I had fears very like yours about this breeding program. Of course it is only men who are allowed to voice such fears and qualms; women are not supposed to think of such things. I sometimes feel that women in the Domains are not supposed to think at all! But my father was indulgent with me, and I won the promise that I should not marry till I was twenty, and that I might have training in a Tower, and I have learned much. For instance, Allart, if you and Cassandra chose to have a child, and she became pregnant, then with the aid of a monitor she could probe the unborn deeply, into the very germ plasm. If it should bear the kind of laran you fear, or any lethal recessive which could kill Cassandra in bearing it, she need not bring it to birth.”
Allart said violently, “It is evil enough that we Hasturs meddle with the stuff of life of breeding riyachiyas and such abominations by genetic manipulation of our seed! But to do that with my own sons and daughters? Or to destroy, willingly, a life I myself have given? The thought sickens me!”
“I am not the keeper of your conscience, or of Cassandra’s,” Renata said. “This is only one choice; there must be others more to your liking. Yet I think it a lesser evil. I know that someday I shall be forced to marry, and if I am pledged to bear children to my caste, I will find myself caught between two choices which seem to me almost equally cruel: to bear, perhaps, monsters of laran to my caste, or to destroy them unborn in my womb.” Allart saw her shudder.
“It was for this I became a monitor, that I might not contribute, unknowing, to this breeding program which has brought these monstrosities into our race. Now, knowing what I must do has made it the less endurable; I am not a god, to determine who will live and who will die. Perhaps you and Cassandra have done right after all, to give no life you must take away again.”
“And while we await these choices,” Allart said bitterly, “we charge batteries that idle folk may play with air-cars, and light their homes without dirtying their hands on resin and pitch, and mine metals to spare others the labor of bringing them from the ground, and we create weapons ever more fearful, to destroy lives over which we have no shadow of right.”
Renata went very white. “No! Now, that I had not heard. Allart, is this your foresight, is war to break out again?”
“I saw, and spoke unthinking,” Allart said, staring at her in dread. The sounds and sights of war were already around him, blurring her presence, and he thought, Perhaps I will be killed in battle, be spared further wrestling with destiny or conscience!
“It is your war and none of mine,” she said. “My father has no quarrel with Serrais and no allegiance to Hastur; if the war breaks out anew, he will send for me, demanding again that I return home to marry. Ah, merciful Avarra, I am filled with good advice as to how you and your lady shall conduct your marriage and I have neither courage nor wisdom to face my own! Would that I had your foresight, Allart, to know which of many evil choices would bring the least of wrong.”
“Would that I could tell you,” he said, taking her hands for a moment. With the gesture Allart’s laran clearly showed Renata and himself riding away northward together… where? For what purpose? The image faded and was gone, to be replaced by a whirl of images: The swooping flight of a great bird—or was it truly a bird? A child’s face terrified, frozen in the glare of lightnings. A rain of clingfire falling, a great tower breaking, crumbling, smashing into rubble. Renata’s face all ablaze with tenderness, her body under his own… Dazed with the swirling pictures, he struggled to shut away the crowding futures.
“Perhaps this is the answer!” Renata said with sudden violence. “To breed monsters and let them loose on our people, make weapons ever more fearful, wipe out our accursed race and let the gods make another, a people without this dreadful, monstrous curse of laran!”
In the aftermath of her outburst it was so still that Allart could hear somewhere the morning sounds of wakening birds chirping, the soft wet sounds of the cloud-waves along the shores of Hali. Renata drew a long, shuddering breath. But when she spoke again she was calm, the disciplined monitor.
“But this is afar from what it was laid on me to say to you. For the sake of our work, you and Cassandra must not again work in the same matrix circle until all is well with you; till you have given and received your love and come to terms with it, or until you have decided for all time that it shall never be so, and you can be friends without indecision or desire. For the time, perhaps, you can be placed in different circles for working; after all, there are eighteen of us here, and you can work separately. But if you do not go away together, one of you must go. Even in separate circles, there is too much tension between you for you to dwell together under this roof. I think you should be the one to go. You have had, at Nevarsin, some teaching to master your laran, and Cassandra has not. But it is for you to say, Allart. In law, your marriage has made you Cassandra’s master, and if you wish to exercise the right, the keeper of her will and conscience, too.”
He ignored the irony. “If you think it would profit my lady to remain,” he said, “then she shall stay and I will go.” Bleakness came over him. He had found happiness at Nevarsin and been driven forth, never to return. Now he had found useful work here, the full possession of his laran gift, and was he to go forth from here, too?
Is there no place for me on the face of this world? Must I forever be driven, homeless, by the winds of circumstance? Then he was wryly amused at himself. He complained because his laran showed him too many futures, now he was dismayed because he saw none. Renata, too, was driven by choices not under her own control.
“You have worked all the night, cousin,” he said, “and then you have stayed here and wrestled with my troubles and my wife’s, and taken no thought for your own weariness.”
Her smile glinted deep in her eyes, though it did not reach her mouth. “Oh, it has eased me to think of troubles other than my own; didn’t you know that? The burdens of others are light to the shoulders. But I will go and sleep. And you?”
Allart shook his head. “I am not sleepy. I think perhaps I will go and walk in the lake for a little while, look at the strange fish or birds or whatever they may be and try to decide again what they are. Did our forefathers bree
d them, I wonder, with their passion for breeding strange things? Perhaps I, too, will find peace in regarding something afar from my own troubles. Bless you, kinswoman, for your kindness.”
“Why? I solved nothing. I have given you more worries, that is all,” she said. “But I will go and sleep, and perhaps dream an answer to all our troubles. Is there such a laran as that, I wonder?”
“Probably,” Allart said, “but no doubt it has been given to someone who knows not how to use it for his own good; that is how these things happen in this world. Otherwise we might somehow find our way out of these worries and be like the game-pawn which manages to wriggle off the board without being captured. Go and sleep, Renata. All gods forbid you should bear the burden of our fears and worries, even in dreams.”
* * *
CHAPTER TWELVE
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That evening, when Allart joined the members of his circle in the lower hall at Hali, he found them all talking excitedly, the six who had worked with him that morning, and all the others. Across the room he caught Renata’s eyes; she was pale with dread. He asked Barak, who stood at the edge of the circle, “What is it, what’s happened?”
“The war is upon us again. The Ridenow have launched an attack with bowmen and clingfire arrows, and Castle Hastur, in the Kilgbard Hills, is under siege by air-cars and incendiaries. Every able-bodied man of Hastur and Aillard allegiance is out to combat the fire raging in the forests, or to defend the castle. We had word from the relays at Neskaya. Arielle was in the relay nets and heard—”