“Oh, is it so?” she flared. “While I do your will at all times, we are as equals, but when our wills clash, you say only, I am master of this house and you are no more than a woman?”
He lowered his head. “I say not so, Marilla, Evanda forbid—but sister, will you not be kind to my friend for love of me?”
She said crossly, “It is for love of you that I would show him the door,” but when her brother spoke in that tone, she could only grant him what he wished. She said, “I neither like nor approve of the man. But you must do as you will,” and turned away from him.
~o0o~
Lord Dyan, she thought, was rather like a hawk: proudly poised head, lean to emaciation, high-bridged nose, and now and again, when he laughed, the far hint of wildness in the harsh sound. His manner to her was delicately punctilious; he called her, not damisela, but Domna Marilla, in recognition that she was chatelaine of Lindirsholme. In the evenings when they sat in the hall or danced to the sound of the house-minstrel, he was always first to ask her to dance, and even courteous to her lady-companion and the elderly chaperone who had been her governess and Merryl’s.
During the days he was out with Merryl, hunting or hawking, or simply riding across the broad lands. In the evenings, sometimes, he borrowed a harp from one of the singing-women and sang to them himself, strange sorrowful ballads older than the hills themselves, in a voice well-trained and musical, though without much tone. Once he said, with a faint, rueful shrug, “A boy’s tragedy is always this—that no matter how beautiful his voice before it breaks, there is no way to tell whether his mature voice will be anything but another well-trained croaker.”
“Yet the songs are beautiful,” Marilla said, truthfully, and he nodded.
“I had them from my mother. She spent years studying under one of the great minstrels of the mountains; of course my father could not abide music, so she sang only to me. And I learned more in Nevarsin.”
“Were you destined then for a monk, Lord Dyan?” she asked him. He laughed, that harsh bird-sound.
“Not I! I have no call to fasting and prayer, and less, perhaps, to the way of the ascetic. I like good food and warm beds and the company of those who can dance and sing . . . only the music kept me there; I would have endured more than that for such learning. No, I was apprenticed to be a healer, and now—” he shrugged. “I have scarce enough skill in these to set a broken bone for a dog.” He stared at the long delicate fingers which moved so skillfully on the harp. They were still fine, but the joints showed lumps and knots and calluses from sword and reins. “For one of our kind, there is no task worthy of a man, they say, but the sword. Duty called me there, and I did what I was bound in honor to do. How lucky you are—” his eyes sought Merryl’s, “that you escaped this destiny.”
“At the cost of manhood,” Merryl said bitterly.
“Faugh!” Dyan made a harsh, guttural exclamation. “If that is manhood, perhaps ’twould be a saner world if we all put skirts about our knees, lad!”
Marilla asked him, “Do you truly think women are better off than men?”
He shook his head. “Perhaps not, Lady Marilla—I am no judge; my grandmother Rohana ruled the Ardais lands better than any man could do, and my father—” he shrugged. “I never saw him sober, or sane, after my thirteenth year. My sister was Keeper, leronis at Arilinn, and no man could be her master, yet she gave that up to die in trying thrice to bear a child to her Terran-reared lover. My mother endured my father’s madness and folly till she died of it. My grandmother lived all her life subject to a man who was scarce her equal, yet she treated him always as her better. Can you blame me for saying I understand not women? Nor, for that matter men . . . even you, lad—” his smile at Merryl was so frank, so warm and tender, that Marilla winced, “you have escaped the worst of what your clan demanded of you, yet you pine as if you had been forbidden something splendid! I would have given much for just such incapacity as yours, so that I might have had my own choice . . .” and he sighed. “No matter. The world goes as it will . . . .” And he bent his head to the harp and began to play a merry and not too decorous drinking-song about a most inept crew of raiders from the mountains.
“We have to tell them again and again,
Rape the women, and kill the men,
I think sometimes they’ll never learn,
First you plunder and then you burn.”
Not long afterward, Marilla rose, with chaperone and lady-companion, and withdrew. Merryl embraced his sister, and Dyan bent over her hand; for an instant she was shocked, wondering at herself, Did I want an embrace from him, too?
And late in the night she woke, shocked, from a dream such as had seldom come to her. She was held in someone’s arms, caressed tenderly, mind and body touched in such depths that her whole body seemed to melt into a jelly of delight . . . . She woke in startled amazement, feeling arms still about her, the pleasuring touch still lingering in her body . . . but she was alone, and then, catching her breath in dismay, she slammed down a barrier; but it was Dyan’s hands, Dyan’s arms in the dream . . . or was it a dream? And slowly, shamingly, she knew what she had shared . . . she had guessed, of course, that Dyan shared her brother’s bed, and the bond of the twin-born was stronger than any other telepathic bond . . . .
But I knew not that it was like this . . . Merryl has this and I, ah, merciful Evanda, I am virgin and I lie alone . . . till my family gives some man rights over my body without my will . . . and Dyan, Dyan wants no woman, he would turn from me in scorn, turn to my brother . . . .
The barrier was in place again. In her cold and lonely bed, Marilla wept herself to sleep. And in the morning she sent down word by her chaperone that she was ill in bed; she could not face Merryl, she could not face Dyan . . . certainly he had known that they had touched her . . . .
I never want to see him again. I will stay here in this bed until he has gone away, and damn him, he can take Merryl away with him, I never want to see either of them again! But she knew that she was lying.
The next day, self-possession armoring her again, and chill irony, she managed to come down and be civil, to endure Merryl’s and Dyan’s kind inquiries about her illness. But she held herself tightly with dread, and watched, with something she now knew was envy, as Dyan and Merryl walked arm in arm. And once, when she sat among her women, sewing, she heard one of them giggling and speculating.
“What in hell’s name can two men do with one another? It seems silly, doesn’t it? And what a waste! I’ve heard that the Comhi-Letzii take one another to bed like lovers, but I’ve never been able to figure that out either . . . maybe they don’t know what they’re missing—”
“Maybe,” Marilla said coldly, “they have more imagination than you do, Margalys,” and left the room, hearing their curious chattering voices rise behind her.
It was that night, as they sat at music, that Merryl took the harp and began to sing, but broke off in a fit of coughing; and Marilla reached for his hand; it was hot as fire.
“You have fever,” she said accusingly.
“Well, there is fever in the village, and I went to see how many of the farm-people would be away from the harvest,” Merryl said, sighing. “True ’tis, that old saying, lie down with dogs and you will rise up with fleas . . . . I will be well enough, sister.” He struck her hand away. “You are not our mother, to coddle me now!”
Dyan reached for Merryl’s forehead, touching it expertly. “No, now, lad,” he said. “Away to your bed; you have fever-bark? And if you are not well in the morning, we will ride another time, but you must not endanger yourself.”
Merryl colored, but he rose and signaled to his body-servant, taking leave of Dyan with an embrace. He looked sick and flushed.
“I will see you, then, in the morning—it will be well enough,” he said crossly. “Marilla is like all women; she likes having men sick and under her control.”
“Only because men are too much fools to admit when they need care,” said Marilla, just
as crossly, and frowned. But as she climbed the stairs, to search out fever-bark from the stillroom and pour a dose into the protesting Merryl, she had already formed the plan in her mind.
~o0o~
She had still the riding-breeches of Merryl’s which their mother, four years ago, had forbidden her to wear; and Merryl’s tunics were only a little too broad for her shoulders. She slipped into Merryl’s room where he lay restlessly tossing about with fever, and slid his sword from the rack, belting it about her waist. She had had enough training to walk without bumping it on things; and she took his cloak and slid her feet into his boots. They were too big for her; she pulled on another pair of thick socks so she could walk in them without blistering her heels. In the stable, Dyan was already saddled and waiting.
“Well! You look well recovered,” he said gaily. “Did not that sister of yours jump at the chance to keep you abed like a child?”
“Do you think I would let her?” Marilla blessed the deep contralto of her voice; she could never have carried this off if her voice had been high and light like her companion’s. She was glad to realize that she could, in breeches and boots, jump into the saddle as lightly as Merryl himself; only once had Dyan seen her ride and then she had been cumbered with riding-skirts and a lady’s saddle which was, Marilla had always felt, an insult to a self-respecting horse.
“You said I might fly Skyclimber,” Dyan said. “Have you a hawk chosen?”
Marilla nodded. She said, wondering at her own calm, “My sister told me that Wind Demon is not being flown enough, and she is too busy to ride; she asked me to handle her today.”
Bold as she was, she would not venture to handle Merryl’s hawk, Racer; Racer was a nervous haggard who let no one but Merryl himself touch her.
But with Wind Demon on her saddle, she felt competent to match Dyan himself at hawking. She rode in the crimson sunrise, feeling the dawn wind in her face with excitement, the delight of freedom; how long it had been since she rode like this, forgetting the household duties which lay behind her! Surely she would be missed, but what did that matter? There were plenty to care for Merryl and for the household, and if she could not have one day of absolute freedom, what good was it that she was Lady of Lindirsholme?
~o0o~
The sun had begun to angle downward from the zenith, and noon was far past. Dyan began to loosen the hawk again from the saddle, then shrugged.
“We do not need any more birds,” he said, “and the hawks, too, are full-fed; do we need to take more? You promised we should ride one day to the waterfall; is there time before sundown?”
“I think so,” Marilla said, and beckoned to the hawk-master who rode far enough behind them not to interfere, but close enough to take charge of the birds if he was needed. “Take them back to the castle, and the game too, Rannan.”
“Certainly, vai dom,” Rannan said, “but ye’re not going to ride farther this day, are ye? Lord Ardais, ye wouldn’t be takin’ the boy all that way with fever just past and a storm comin’ on?”
“Storm? I see no sign of storm,” Dyan said, “but if Merryl wishes to return—”
Marilla sniffed the wind; it did not seem to her to smell like storm. Rannan had always pampered Merryl. She said coldly, “You are not now in my mother’s pay, to keep me housebound. Take the birds and go.”
The man ducked his head and rode away, and Dyan chuckled.
“When I was a lad, they used to have a saying for a boy growing up—‘Well, lad, ye’ll be a man before yer mother will’” he said, imitating, with a droll twist of his mouth, the country accent of the man. “You may have been kept from manhood much of your life, but you make up for lost time now. But are you sure you are not wearied with riding? It is true we have come a long way, and no doubt the waterfall will wait on our pleasure.”
Marilla was not accustomed to this much riding; she ached and was saddlesore. But she would not yield before this man! She hardly knew why she had come; perhaps, she thought, I wished to know what Merryl sees in him . . . .
And she knew; a charming companion, ready with jest and game, now and again tactfully suggesting a better way to handle the hawk . . . though, indeed, earlier he had said: “You grow better at this than you were; last time we went hawking, you did not handle Racer so well as this—”
Marilla had said lightly, “I have learned from your company and example, my lord.”
Dyan smiled and leaned close and said, “I thought we agreed you were to call me only Dyan—or, if you will—bredhyu—” and she felt the questing touch of his mind, but she kept her barrier in place; she could not pretend to be her brother, not now . . . but still she could read Dyan, a little.
I like it that he is still shy, that he does not presume nor grow bold . . . .
“The waterfall lies beyond this ridge,” she said, and set her teeth, racing ahead. How dared Merryl share this with Dyan? That had been their own private place, their rendezvous, the place where they went to share confidences from early childhood; and now Merryl would bring this man here? She felt simmering resentment; and yet . . .
I can see it now, she thought, why Merryl loves him so well.
The sky was darkening with cloud when they came in sight of the waterfall, and a few drops of rain had begun to fall. Yet the rushing cataract drowned out all thought, all sound, all speech; and Dyan, staring with delight at the great jagged cliffs with rushing water, was silent, too. He stood there without words, looking downward at the torrent, and after a time she could read his thoughts again.
Now do I know why you brought me here. There are not many who will own to their love of such beauty. Nor do I—much—when there are others near. It is the second—nay, the third most beautiful thing I have seen at Lindirsholme.
So close they were, so deeply sharing the silence, that for a moment Marilla was tempted to open her mind to him; she did not want to deceive him, let him show the tenderness he meant only for Merryl. But the thought of his rage and fury at being deceived kept her barriered tightly, and after a little Dyan sighed and turned away, and again she could read his thoughts. Still he defends himself against me, but perhaps tonight when we are together he will not barricade his thoughts from me.
In a wild confusion of feeling, dread and shame and some unidentifiable thing, she turned quickly away and hurried to her horse. Dyan turned in surprise and looked up, troubled, but she said swiftly, “Look, we cannot stay here . . . look at the sky. Rannan was right about the storm.”
Within minutes, she knew, it would break, and they would be drenched. Dyan threw himself into his saddle and was off after her, racing . . . . He drew angrily abreast and said, “You are a child indeed. If you knew this storm would break, and if your clothes are soaked to the skin again, you will have fever worse than ever—are you always going to act like a child or a silly girl? This is such a trick as your sister might have played! Is there any place we can shelter from this, out of the rain for a little?”
“You are like my mother,” Marilla snarled in Merryl’s voice. “Think you I will melt in the rain?”
“Nay, but I hunted in these hills before you were more than a gleam in your father’s eye,” said Dyan, and again Marilla caught a picture in his mind, two lads racing over the hills breakneck on their horses . . . . Who was the other boy, younger than Merryl was now? She neither knew nor cared. Dyan said, “I know how quickly this rain can turn to sleet or ice at these latitudes . . . even now, feel that,” and Marilla was aware of the sting of sleet against her cheeks. “We cannot reach Lindirsholme without freezing; must I seek a cave or ditch as we were taught to do at Nevarsin against bad weather?”
She said, shivering against her will, “There is a—a shepherd’s hut.” It had stood unused for years, since their father had sold his sheep and turned to breeding the black horses of the Leyniers. She and Merryl had kept childish treasures there, when they rode to the waterfall, and brought food and drink for out-of-door meals away from governess and tutors.
N
o doubt Merryl would have shared this, too. He cares nothing for our old secrets now, only for Dyan. Well, let it be so.
Even Dyan was blue with cold by the time they forced the hut’s stiff door open, and knelt at once to make a fire. When it was blazing up, he unsaddled the horses, brushing away Marilla’s attempt to help.
“Stay by the fire, lad, you are chilled through, and I have not just risen from a fever-bed!” He laid the saddle blankets down beneath his outer cloak, pushed Marilla down on it. “Nor need we go supperless to bed, I kept the last bird, thinking we might cook our dinner out of doors.”
She knelt upright on the blankets and said, “Let me then spit the bird for roasting while you deal with the horses.” Her hands were too cold and stiff still to do much at plucking it; she finally held it to the fire to singe the feathers away. He came when she had half finished, and took it away from her.
“Here could you use some of your sister’s housewifely skills,” he said, laughing. “Plaster it in mud and ashes, lad, and the feathers will break away when ’tis baked. Did she learn your skills of riding and hawking without teaching you such things as this?”
Marilla flared at him. “Would you have me learn to cook and sew? Already I was womanly enough, was I not?” And as she spoke she knew she was speaking the very words Merryl would have spoken, the rage and resentment at never sharing a man’s life . . . well enough it was to bring Marilla into a man’s world, but if he had tried to enter hers, then he would have been ridiculed or worse . . . .
Dyan said, still laughing, “In the Cadets I learned to cook or go hungry, even if it was no more than grain-porridge and such field cookery as this; there are no cook-maids on the battlefield, lad. And my paxman darns my socks and mends my cloak—it is the price I pay for having no woman about me.” As he talked, he was plastering mud and ashes on the bird; now he thrust it into the coals. “Leave it there to cook, and get out of your wet cloak, lad.” He pulled it from her shoulders. His hand lingered at the nape of her neck. “Such fine hair—’tis pity you cannot let it grow long like your sister’s . . . .”