The Forbidden Tower

  She hugged her and said, “I hope we can find our way back to each other!”

  Callista tolerated the gesture, though she did not return it. “So do I, Ellemir.”

  “It seems dreadful, to think you have never been in love.”

  Her sister said lightly, “Oh, it is not as bad as that. We were so close in the Towers that I suppose, in one way or another, we were always in love.” It was too dark to see Callista’s face, but Ellemir sensed the smile as she added. “What if I should tell you that when I first came to Arilinn, Damon was still there, and for a little I fancied myself in love with him? Are you very jealous, Ellemir?”

  Ellemir laughed. “No, not very.”

  “He was a senior technician, he taught me monitoring. Of course, I was not a woman to him, just one of the little girls in training. Of course for him there was no woman alive, save for Leonie—” She stopped herself and said quickly, “That is long over, of course.”

  Ellemir laughed aloud. “I know Damon’s heart is all mine. How could I be jealous of such love as a man can give a Keeper, a pledged virgin?” Ellemir heard her own words and broke off in consternation. “Oh, Callista, I did not mean—”

  “I think you did,” Callista said gently, “but love is love, even without any hint of the physical. If I had not known that before, I would have learned it in the caves of Corresanti, when I came to love Andrew. It is love, and it was real, and if I were you I would not smile at it, nor scorn Damon’s love for Leonie, as if it were a boy’s green fancy.” She thought, but did not say, that it had been real enough to disturb Leonie’s peace, even if no one but Callista herself had ever guessed it.

  She did right to send Damon away…

  “It seems strange to me to love without desire,” Ellemir said, “and not quite real, whatever you say.”

  “Men have desired me,” Callista said quietly, “in spite of the taboo. It happens. Most of the time it aroused nothing in me, it only made me feel as if… as if dirty insects were crawling on my body. But there were other times when I almost wished I knew how to desire them in return.”

  Suddenly her voice broke. Ellemir heard a wild note in it, very like terror. “Oh, Ellemir, Elli, if I shrink even from your touch—if I shrink from the touch of my twin-born sister— what will I do to Andrew? Oh, merciful Avarra, how much will I have to hurt him?”

  “Breda, Andrew loves you, surely he will understand—”

  “But it may not be enough to understand! Oh, Elli, even if it were someone like Damon, who knows the ways of the Towers, knows what a Keeper is, I would be afraid! And Andrew does not know, or understand, and there are no words to tell him! And he too has abandoned the only world he has ever known, and what can I give him in return?”

  Ellemir said gently, “But you have been freed from a Keeper’s oath.” The habit of many years, she knew, could not be broken in a day, but once Callista freed herself from her fears, surely all would be well! She held Callista close, saying with quiet tenderness, “Love is nothing to fear, breda, even if it seems strange to you, or frightful.”

  “I knew you did not understand,” Callista said, sighing. “There were other women in the Towers, women who did not live by a Keeper’s laws, who were free to share the closeness we all shared. There was so much… so much love among us, and I knew how happy it made them, to love, or even to satisfy desire, when there was not love but only… need, and kindness.” She sighed again. “I am not ignorant, Ellemir,” she said with a curious, forlorn dignity, “inexperienced, yes, because of what I am, but not ignorant. I have learned ways to… not to be much aware of it. It was easier that way, but I knew, oh, yes, I knew. Just as I knew, for instance, that you had lovers before Damon.”

  Ellemir laughed. “I never made any secret of it. If I did not speak of it to you, it was because I knew the laws under which you lived—or knew as much as any outsider can know—and that seemed a barrier between us.”

  “But you must surely have known that I envied you that,” Callista said, and Ellemir sat up in bed, looking at her twin in surprise and shock. They could see one another only dimly; a small green moon, the dimmest of crescents, hung outside their window. At last Ellemir said, hesitating, “Envy… me? I had thought… thought surely… that a Keeper, pledged so, would surely despise me, or think it shameful, that I—that a comynara should be no different than a peasant woman, or some female animal in heat.”

  “Despise you? Never,” Callista said. “If we do not talk much about it, it is for fear we would not be able to endure our differences. Even the other women in the Towers, who do not share our isolation, look on us as alien, almost inhuman… Separateness, pride, become our only defense, pride, as if to conceal a wound, conceal our own… our own incompletion.”

  Her voice sounded shaken, but Ellemir thought that her sister’s face, in the dim moonlight, was inhumanly impassive, like something carved in stone. It seemed that Callista was almost heartbreakingly distant, that they were trying to talk across a great and aching chasm which lay between them.

  All her life Ellemir had been taught to think of a Keeper as something remote, far above her, to be revered, almost worshiped. Even her own sister, her twin, was like a goddess, far out of reach. Now for a moment she had an almost dizzying sense of reversal, shaking her certainties; now it was Callista who looked up to her, envied her, Callista who was somehow younger than herself and far more vulnerable, not clothed in the remote majesty of Arilinn, but a woman like herself, frail, unsure… She said in a whisper, “I wish I had known this about you before, Callie.”

  “I wish I had known it about myself,” Callista said with a sad smile. “We are not encouraged to think much about such things, or about much of anything but our work. I am only beginning to discover myself as a woman, and I… do not quite know how to begin.” It seemed to Ellemir an incredibly sad confession. After a moment Callista said softly in the darkness, “Ellemir, I have told you what I can of my life. Tell me something of yours. I don’t want to pry, but you have had lovers. Tell me about that.”

  Ellemir hesitated, but sensed that there was more behind the question than simple sexual curiosity. There was that too, and considering the way in which Callista had been forced to stifle this kind of awareness during her years as Keeper, it was a healthy sign and augured well for the coming marriage. But there was more too, a desire to share something of Ellemir’s life during the years of their separation. Responding impulsively to that need, she said, “It was the year Dorian was married. Did you meet Mikhail at all?”

  “I saw him at the wedding.” Their older sister Dorian had married a nedestro cousin of Lord Ardais’. “He seemed a kind, well-spoken young man, but I exchanged no more than a few dozen words with him. I had seen Dorian so seldom since childhood.”

  “It was that winter,” said Ellemir. “Dorian begged me to come and spend the winter with her; she was lonely, and already pregnant, and had made few friends of the mountain women. Father gave me leave to go. And later in the spring, when Dorian grew heavy, so it was no pleasure to her to share his bed, Mikhail and I had grown to be such friends that I took her place there.” She giggled a little, reminiscently.

  Callista said, startled, “You were no more than fifteen!”

  Ellemir answered, laughing, “That is old enough to marry; Dorian had been no more. I would have been married, had Father not wanted me to stay home and keep his house!”

  Again Callista felt the cruel envy, the sense of desperate alienation. How simple it had been for Ellemir, and how right! And how different for her! “Were there others?”

  Ellemir smiled in the darkness. “Not many. I learned there that I liked lying with men, but I did not want to be gossiped about as they whisper scandal about Sybil-Mhari—you have heard that she takes lovers from Guardsmen or even grooms—and I did not want to bear a child I would not be allowed to rear, though Dorian pledged that if I gave Mikhail a child she would foster it. And I did not want to be married off in a hurry to someone I
did not like, which I knew Father would do if there was scandal. So there are not more than two or three men who could say, if they would, that they have had more of me than my fingers to kiss at Midsummer night. Even Damon. He has waited patiently—”

  She gave an odd, excited little laugh. Callista stroked her twin’s soft hair.

  “Well, now the waiting is nearly over, love.”

  Ellemir cuddled close to her sister. She could sense Callista’s fears, her ambivalence, but she still misunderstood its nature.

  She has been pledged virgin, Ellemir thought, she has lived her life apart from men, so it is not surprising that she should be afraid. But once she has come to understand that she is free, Andrew will be kind to her, and patient, and she will come at last to happiness… happiness like mine… and Damon’s.

  They were lightly in rapport, and Callista followed Ellemir’s thoughts, but she would not trouble her sister by telling her that it was not nearly as simple as that.

  “We should sleep, breda, tomorrow is our wedding day, and tomorrow night,” she added mischievously, “Damon may not let you sleep very much.”

  Laughing, Ellemir closed her eyes. Callista lay silent, her twin’s head resting on her shoulder, staring into the darkness. After a long time she sensed, as the thread of rapport between them thinned and Ellemir moved into dreams, that her sister slept. Quietly she slid from the bed and went to the window, looking out over the moon-flooded landscape. She stood there till she was cramped and cold, until the moons set and a thin fine rain began to blur the windowpane. With the hard discipline of years, she did not weep.

  I can accept this and endure it, as I have endured so much. But what of Andrew? Can I endure what it will do to him, what it may do to his love? She stood motionless, hour after hour, cramped, cold, but no longer aware of it, her mind retreating to one of the realms beyond thought which she had been taught to enter for refuge against tormenting ideas, leaving behind the cramped, icy body she had been taught to despise.

  Rain had given way to thin sleet in the dawn hours, rattling the pane. Ellemir stirred, felt about in the bed for her sister, then sat up in consternation, seeing Callista motionless at the window. She got up and went to her, calling her name, but Callista neither heard nor stirred.

  Alarmed, Ellemir cried out. Callista, hearing the voice less than the fear in Ellemir’s mind, came slowly back to the room. “It’s all right, Elli,” she said gently, looking at the frightened face turned up to hers.

  “You’re so cold, love, so stiff and cold. Come back to bed, let me warm you,” Ellemir urged, and Callista let her sister lead her back to bed, cover her warmly, hold her close. After a long time she said, almost in a whisper, “I was wrong, Elli.”

  “Wrong? How, breda?”

  “I should have gone to Andrew’s bed when first he brought me from the caves. After so much time alone in the dark, so much fear, my defenses were down.” With an aching regret she remembered how he had carried her from Corresanti, how she had rested, warm and unafraid, in his arms. How, for a little while, it had seemed possible to her. “But there was so much confusion here, Father newly crippled, the house filled with wounded men. Still, it would have been easier then.”

  Ellemir followed her reasoning, and was inclined to agree. Yet Callista was not the kind of woman who could have done such a thing in the face of her father’s displeasure, against her Keeper’s oath. And Lord Alton would have known it, as surely as if Callista had shouted it aloud from the rooftop.

  “You were ill yourself, love. Andrew surely understood.”

  But Callista wondered: had the long illness which came upon her after her rescue been somehow a reaction to this failure? Perhaps, she thought, they had lost an opportunity which might never come again, to come together when they were both afire with passion and had no room for doubts and fears. Even Leonie thought it likely that she had done so.

  Why did I not? And now, now it is too late…

  Ellemir yawned, with a smile of pure delight

  “It is our wedding day, Callista!”

  Callista closed her eyes. My wedding day. And I cannot share her gladness. I love as she loves, yet I am not glad… She felt a wild impulse to tear at herself with her nails, to beat herself with her fists, to turn on and punish the beauty which was so empty a promise, the body which looked so much like a lovely and desirable woman’s body—a shell, an empty shell. But Ellemir was looking at her in troubled question, so she made herself smile gaily.

  “Our wedding day,” she said, and kissed her twin. “Are you happy, darling?”

  And for a little while, in Ellemir’s joy, she managed to forget her own fears.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  « ^ »

  That morning Damon came to assist Dom Esteban into the rolling chair that had been made for him. “So you can be present at the wedding sitting upright, not lying flat on a wheel-bed like an invalid!”

  “It feels strange to be vertical again,” said the old man, steadying himself with both hands. “I feel as dizzy as if I were already drunk.”

  “You’ve been lying flat too long,” Damon said matter-of-factly. “You’ll soon get used to it.”

  “Well, better to sit up than go propped on pillows like a woman in childbed! And at least my legs are still there, even if I can’t feel them!”

  “They are still there,” Damon assured him, “and with someone to push your chair, you can get around well enough on the ground floor.”

  “That will be a relief,” Esteban said. “I am weary of looking at this ceiling! When spring comes, I will have workmen come here, and let them do over some rooms on the ground floor for me. You two,” he added, gesturing Andrew to join them, “can have any of the large suites upstairs, for yourselves and your wives.”

  “That is generous, Father-in-law,” Damon said, but the old man shook his head.

  “Not at all. No room above ground level will ever be the slightest use to me again. I suggest you go and choose rooms for yourselves now; leave my old rooms for Domenic when he takes a wife, but any others are for your own choice. If you do it now, the women can move into their own homes as soon as they are married.” He added, laughing, “And while you do that, I shall have Dezi wheel me about down here and get used to the sight of my house again. Did I thank you, Damon, for this?”

  On the upper floor, Damon and Andrew sought out Leonie. Damon said, “I wanted to ask you, out of earshot. I understand enough to know Dom Esteban will never walk again. But otherwise how is he, Leonie?”

  “Out of earshot?” The Keeper laughed faintly. “He has laran, Damon; he knows all, though perhaps he has wisely refused to understand what it will mean to him. The flesh wound has long healed, of course, and the kidneys are not damaged, but the brain no longer communicates with legs and feet. He retains some small control over body functions, but doubtless as time passes and the lower part of his body wastes away, that will go too. His greatest danger is pressure sores. You must be sure his body-servants turn him every few hours, because, since there is no feeling, there will be no pain either, and he will not know if a fold in his clothing, or something of that sort, puts pressure on his body. Most of those who are paralyzed die when such sores become infected. This process can be delayed, with great care, if his limbs are kept supple with massage, but sooner or later the muscles will wither and die.”

  Damon shook his head in dismay. “He knows all this?”

  “He knows. But his will to live is strong, and while that remains, you can keep his life good. For a while. Years, perhaps. Afterward…” A small, resigned shrug. “Perhaps he will find some new will to live if he has grandchildren about him. But he has always been an active man, and a proud one. He will not take kindly to inactivity or helplessness.”

  Andrew said, “I’m going to need a hell of a lot of his help and advice running this place. I’ve been trying to get along without bothering him—”

  “By your leave, that is mistaken,” said
Leonie gently. “He should know that his knowledge is still needed, if not his lands and his skill. Ask him for advice as much as you can, Andrew.”

  It was the first time she had addressed him directly, and the Terran glanced at the woman in surprise. He had enough rudimentary telepathy to know that Leonie was uncomfortable with him, and was troubled to feel there was something more now in her regard. When she had gone away he said to Damon, “She doesn’t like me, does she?”

  “I don’t think it is that,” Damon said. “She would feel uneasy with any man to whom she must give Callista in marriage, I think.”

  “Well, I can’t blame her for thinking I’m not good enough for Callista; I don’t think there’s any man who is. But as long as Callista doesn’t think so…”

  Damon laughed. “I suppose no man on his wedding day feels worthy of his bride. I must keep reminding myself that Ellemir has agreed to this marriage! Come along, we must find rooms for our wives!”

  “Shouldn’t it be up to them to choose?”

  Damon recalled that Andrew was a stranger to their customs. “No, it is custom for the husband to provide a home for his wife. In courtesy Dom Esteban is giving us a way to find such a place and ready it before the wedding.”

  “But they know the house—”

  Damon replied, “So do I. I spent much of my boyhood here. Dom Esteban’s oldest son and I were bredin, sworn friends. But you, have you no kinsmen in the Terran Zone, no servants sworn to you and awaiting your return?”

  “None. Servants are a memory out of our past; no man should serve another.”

  “Still, we’ll have to assign you a few. If you’re going to be managing the estate for our kinsman”—Damon used the word usually translated as “uncle”—“you won’t have leisure to handle the details of ordinary life, and we can’t expect the women to do their own cleaning and mending. And we don’t have machines as you do in the Terran Zone.”

  “Why not?”