Stormqueen!

  “I will come, Father. Believe me, I have no wish to anger you.”

  “Nor I to threaten you, lad.” Dom Stephen held out his arms. “Do you know, we have not yet greeted one another as kinsmen? Do these cristoforos bid you renounce kin-ties, son?”

  Allart embraced his father, feeling with dismay the bony fragility of the old man’s body, knowing that the appearance of domineering anger masked advancing weakness and age. “All the gods forbid I should do so while you live, my father. Let me go and make ready to ride.”

  “Go, then, my son. For it displeases me more than I can say, to see you in this garb so unfitting for a man.”

  Allart did not answer, but bowed and went to change his clothes. He would go with his father, yes, and present the appearance of a dutiful son. With certain limits, he would be so. But now he knew what Father Master had meant. Changes were needful in his world, and he could not make them behind monastery walls.

  He could see himself riding forth, could see a great hawk hovering, the face of a woman… a woman. He knew so little of women. And now they meant to deliver up to him not one but three, drugged and complaisant… that he would fight to the end of his will and conscience; he would be no part of this monstrous breeding program of the Domains. Never. The monkish garb discarded, he knelt briefly, for the last time, on the cold stones of his cell.

  “Holy Bearer of Burdens, strengthen me to bear my share of the world’s weight…” he murmured, then rose and began to clothe himself in the ordinary dress of a nobleman of the Domains, strapping a sword at his side for the first time in over six years.

  “Blessed Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows, grant I may bear it justly in the world…” he whispered, then sighed, and looked for the last time on his cell. He knew, with a sorrowful inner knowledge, that he would never set eyes on it again.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  « ^ »

  The chervine, the little Darkovan stag-pony, picked its way fastidiously along the trail, tossing its antlers in protest at the new fall of snow. They were free of the mountains now, Hali no more than three days’ ride away. It had been a long journey for Allart, longer than the seven days it had taken to ride the actual distance; he felt as if he had traveled years, endless leagues, great chasms of change; and he was exhausted.

  It took all the discipline of his years at Nevarsin to move securely through the bewilderment of what he now saw, legions of possible futures branching off ahead of him at every step, like different roads he might have taken, new possibilities generated by every word and action. As they traveled the dangerous mountain passes, Allart could see every possible false step which might lead him over a precipice, to be smashed, as well as the safe step he actually took. He had learned at Nevarsin to thread his way through his fear, but the effort left him weak and weary.

  And another possibility was always with him. Again and again, as they traveled, he had seen his father lying dead at his feet, in an unfamiliar room.

  I do not want to begin my life outside the monastery as a patricide! Holy Bearer of Burdens, strengthen me… ! He knew he could not deny his anger; that way lay the same paralysis as in fear, to take no step for fear it would lead to disaster.

  The anger is mine, he reminded himself with firm discipline. I can choose what I will do with my anger, and I can choose not to kill. But it troubled him to see again and again, in that unfamiliar scene which grew familiar as he traveled with the vision, the corpse of his father, lying in a room of green hangings bordered with gold, at the foot of a great chair whose very carvings he could have drawn, so often had he seen it with the sight of his laran.

  It was hard, as he looked upon the face of his living father, not to look upon him with the pity and horror he would feel for the newly and shockingly dead: and it was a strain on him to show nothing of this to Lord Elhalyn.

  For his father, as they traveled, had put aside his words of contempt for Allart’s monkish resolution, and ceased entirely to quarrel with him about it. He spoke only kindly to his son, mostly of his childhood at Hali before the curse had descended on Allart, of their kinfolk, the chances of the journey. He spoke of Hali, and the mining done in the Tower there, by the powers of the matrix circle, to bring copper and iron and silver ore to the surface of the ground; of hawks and chervines, and the experiments which his brother had made breeding, with cell-deep changes, rainbow-colored hawks, or chervines with fantastic jewel-colored antlers like the fabled beasts of legend.

  Day by day Allart recaptured some of his childhood love for his father, from the days before his laran and the cristoforo faith had separated them, and again he felt the agony of mourning, seeing that accursed room with the green hangings and gold, the great carven chair, and his father’s face, white and stark and looking very surprised to be dead.

  Again and again on this road other faces had begun to come out of the dimness of the unknown into the possible future. Most of them Allart ignored as he had learned in the monastery, but two or three returned repeatedly, so that he knew they were not the faces of people he might meet, but people who would come into his life; one, which he dimly recognized, was the face of his brother Damon-Rafael, who had called him sandal-wearer and coward, who had been glad to be rid of his rivalry, that he alone might be Elhalyn’s heir.

  I wish that my brother and I might be friends and love one another as brothers should. Yet I see it nowhere among all the possible futures…

  And there was the face of a woman, returning continually to the eyes of his mind, though he had never seen her before. A small woman, delicately made, with eyes dark-lashed in her colorless face and hair like masses of spun black glass; he saw her in his visions, a grave face of sorrow, the dark eyes turned to him in anguished pleading. Who are you? he wondered. Dark girl of my visions, why do you haunt me this way?

  Strange for Allart after the years in the monastery, he had begun to see erotic visions, too, of this woman, see her laughing, amorous, her face lifted to his own for a caress, closed under the rapture of his kiss. No! he thought. No matter how his father should tempt him with the beauty of this woman, he would hold firm to his purpose; he would father no child to bear this curse of his blood! Yet the woman’s face and presence persisted, in dreams and waking, and he knew she was one of those his father would seek as a bride for him. Allart thought it would indeed be possible that he would be unable to resist her beauty.

  Already I am half in love with her, he thought, and I do not even know her name!

  One evening, as they rode down toward a broad green valley, his father began to speak again of the future.

  “Below us lies Syrtis. The folk of Syrtis have been Hastur vassals for centuries; we will break our journey there. You will be glad to sleep in a bed again, I suppose?”

  Allart laughed. “It is all one, Father. During this journey I have slept softer than ever I did at Nevarsin.”

  “Perhaps I should have had such monkish discipline, if old bones are to make such journeys! I will be glad of a mattress, if you will not! And now we are but two days’ ride from home, and we can plan for your wedding. You were handfasted at ten years old to your kinswoman Cassandra Aillard, do you not remember?”

  Try as he might, Allart could remember nothing but a festival where he had had a suit of new clothes and had been made to stand for hours and listen to long speeches by the grown-ups. He told his father so, and Dom Stephen said, genial once more, “I am not surprised. Perhaps the girl was not even there; I think she was only three or four years old then. I confess I, too, had doubts about this marriage. Those Aillards have chieri blood, and they have an evil habit of bearing, now and then, daughters who are emmasca—they look like beautiful women, but they never become ripe for mating, nor do they bear children. Their laran is strong, though, so I risked the handfasting, and when the girl had become a woman, I had our own household leronis examine her in the presence of a midwife, who gave it as her opinion that the girl was a functioning female and could bear ch
ildren. I have not seen her since she was a tiny girl, but I am told she has grown up to be a fine-looking maiden; and she is Aillard, and that family is a strong alliance to our clan, one we need greatly. You have nothing to say, Allart?”

  Allart forced himself to speak calmly.

  “You know my will on that matter, Father. I will not quarrel with you about it, but I have not changed my mind. I have no wish to marry, and I will father no sons to carry on this curse in our blood. I will say no more.”

  Again, shockingly, the room with the green and gold hangings, and his father’s dead face, swam before his mind, so strongly that he had to blink hard to see his father riding at his side.

  “Allart,” his father said, and his voice was kind, “during these days when we have journeyed together, I have come to know you too well to believe that. You are my own son, after all, and when you are back in the world where you belong, you will not long keep these monkish notions. Let us not speak of it, kihu caryu, until the time is upon us. The gods know I have no will to quarrel with the last son they have left me.”

  Allart felt his throat tighten with grief.

  I cannot help it. I have come to love my father. Is this how he will break my will at last, not with force but with kindness? And again he looked on his father’s dead face in the room hung with gold and green, and the face of the dark maiden of his visions swam before his blurring eyes.

  Syrtis Great House was an ancient stone keep, fortified with moat and drawbridge, and there were great outbuildings of wood and stone, and an elaborate courtyard, under shelter of a glasslike canopy of many colors; underfoot were colored stones, laid together with a precision no workman could have accomplished, so that Allart knew the Syrtis folk were of the new-rich, who could make full use of the ornamental and difficult matrix technology to have such beautiful things constructed. How can he find so many of the laran-gifted to do his will?

  The old lord Syrtis was a plump soft man, who came into the courtyard himself to welcome his overlord, falling to his knees in fawning politeness, rising with a smile that was almost a smirk when Dom Stephen drew him into a kinsman’s embrace. He embraced Allart, too, and Allart flinched from the man’s kiss on his cheek.

  Ugh, he is like a fawning house cat!

  Dom Marius led them into his Great Hall, filled with sybaritic luxury, seated them on cushioned divans, called for wine. “This is a new form of cordial, made from our apples and pears; you must try it… I have a new amusement; I will talk of it when we have dined,” Dom Marius of Syrtis said, leaning back into the billowy cushions. “And this is your younger son, Stephen? I had heard some rumor that he had forsaken Hali and become a monk among the cristoforos, or some such nonsense. I am glad it is only a vicious lie; some people will say anything.”

  “I give you my word, kinsman, Allart is no monk,” Dom Stephen said. “I gave him leave to dwell at Nevarsin to recover his health; he suffered greatly in adolescence from threshold sickness. But he is well and strong, and came home to be married.”

  “Oh, is it so?” Dom Marius said, regarding Allart with his wide, blinking eyes, encased in wide pillows of fat. “And is the fortunate maiden known to me, dear boy?”

  “No more than to me,” Allart said in grudging politeness. “I am told she is my kinswoman Cassandra Aillard; I saw her but once, when she was a baby girl.”

  “Ah, the domna Cassandra! I have seen her in Thendara; she was present at the Festival Ball in Comyn Castle,” Dom Marius said with a leer.

  Allart, thought, disgusted, He only wants us to know he is important enough to be invited there!

  Dom Marius called servants to bring their supper. He followed the recent fad for nonhuman servants, cralmacs, artificially bred from the harmless trailmen of the Hellers, with matrix-modified genes by human insemination. To Allart the creatures seemed ugly, neither human nor trailman. The trailmen, strange and monkeylike though they were, had their own alien beauty. But the cralmacs, handsome though some of them undeniably were, had for Allart the loathsomeness of something unnatural.

  “Yes, I have seen your promised bride; she is fair enough to make even a true monk break his vows,” Dom Marius sniggered. “You will have no regrets for the monastery when you lie down with her, kinsman. Though all those Aillard girls are unlucky wives, some being sterile as riyachiyas and others so fragile they cannot carry a child to birth.”

  He is one of those who like to foretell catastrophe, too, Allart thought. “I am in no great hurry for an heir; my elder brother is alive and well and has fathered nedestro sons. I will take what the gods send.” Eager to change the subject, he asked, “Did you breed the cralmacs on your own estate? Father told me as we rode of my brother’s experiments in breeding ornamental chervines through matrix-modification; and your cralmacs are smaller and more graceful than those bred at Hali. They are good, I remember, only for mucking out stables and such heavy work, things it would be unsuitable to ask one’s human vassals to do.”

  He said this with a sudden pang—How quickly I forget!—remembering that in Nevarsin he had been taught that no honest work was beneath the dignity of a man’s own hands. But the words had diverted Dom Marius again into boasting.

  “I have a leronis from the Ridenow, captured in battle, who is skillful with such things. She thought I was kind to her, when I assured her she would never be used against her own people—but how could I trust her in such a battle?—and she made no trouble about doing other work for me. She bred me these cralmacs, more graceful and shapely indeed than any I had before. I will give you breeding stock, male and female, if you will, for a wedding gift, Dom Allart; no doubt your lady would welcome handsome servants. Also the leronis bred for me a new strain of riyachiyas; will you see them, cousin?”

  Lord Elhalyn nodded, and when they finished the meal the promised riyachiyas were brought in. Allart looked on them with an inner spasm of revulsion: exotic toys for jaded tastes. In form they were women, fair of face, slender, with shapely breasts lifting the translucent folds of their draperies, but too narrow of hip and slender of waist and long of leg to be genuine women. There were four of them, two fair-haired, two dark; otherwise identical. They knelt at Dom Marius’s feet, moving sinuously, the curve of their slender necks, as they bowed, swanlike and exquisite, and Allart, through his revulsion, felt an unaccustomed stirring of desire.

  Zandru’s hells, but they are beautiful, as beautiful and unnatural as demon hags!

  “Would you believe, cousin, that they were borne in cralmac wombs? They are of my seed, and that of the leronis,” he said, “so that a fastidious man, if they were human, might say they were my daughters, and indeed, the thought adds a little—a little something,” he said, sniggering. “Two at a birth—” He pointed to the fair-haired pair and said, “Leila and Rella; the dark ones are Ria and Tia. They will not disturb you with much speech, though they can talk and sing, and I had them taught to dance and to play the rryl and to serve food and drink. But, of course, their major talents are for pleasure. They are matrix-spelled, of course, to draw and bind—I see you cannot take your eyes from them, nor”—Dom Marius chuckled— “can your son.”

  Allart started and angrily turned away from the horribly enticing faces and bodies of the inhumanly beautiful, lust-inspiring creatures.

  “Oh, I am not greedy; you shall have them tonight, cousin,” Dom Marius said, with a lewd chuckle. “One or two, as you will. And if you, young Allart, have spent six years of frustration in Nevarsin, you must be in need of their services. I will send you Leila; she is my own favorite. Oh, the things that riyachiya can do, even a sworn monk would yield to her touch.” He grew grossly specific, and Allart turned away.

  “I beg you, kinsman,” he said, trying to conceal his loathing, “do not deprive yourself of your favorite.”

  “No?” Dom Marius’s cushiony eyes rolled back, in feigned sympathy. “Is it so? After so many years in a monastery, do you prefer the pleasures to be found among the brethren? I myself seldom desire
a ri’chiyu, but I keep a few for hospitality, and some guests desire a change now and then. Shall I send you Loyu? He is a beautiful boy indeed, and I have had all of them modified to be almost without response to pain, so that you can use him any way you choose, if you desire.”

  Dom Stephen said quickly, seeing that Allart was about to explode, “Indeed, the girls will do well enough for us. I compliment you on the skill of your leronis at breeding them.”

  When they had been taken to the suite of rooms allotted to them, Dom Stephen said, enraged, “You will not disgrace us by refusing this courtesy! I will not have it gossiped here that my son is less than a man!”

  “He is like a great fat toad! Father, is it a reflection on my manhood that the thought of such filth overwhelms me with loathing? I would like to fling his foul gifts in his sniggering face!”

  “You weary me with your monkish scruples, Allart. The leroni never did better than when they bred us the riyachiyas; nor will your wife-to-be thank you if you refuse to have one in your household. Can you be so ignorant as not to know that if you lie with a breeding woman, she may miscarry? It is part of the price we pay for our laran, which we have bred with such difficulty into our line, that our women are fragile and given to miscarry, so that we must spare them when they are with child. If you turn your desires on a riyachiya only she need not be jealous, as if you had given your affections to a real girl who would have some claim on your thoughts.”

  Allart turned his face away; in the Lowlands this kind of speech between the generations was the height of indecency, had been from the days when group marriage was commonplace and any man of your father’s age could be your father, any woman of an age to be your mother could have been your mother indeed; so that the sexual taboo was absolute between generations.