It was nearing sunset. Clouds massed on the heights beyond Castle Aldaran, tall stormclouds piling higher and higher, but where Donal soared the sky was blue and cloudless. His slight body lay stretched along a wooden framework of light woods, between wide wings of thinnest leather built out on a narrow frame. Borne up by the currents of air, he soared, dipping a hand to either side to balance on the strong gusts to left or to right. The air bore him aloft, and the small matrix-jewel fastened along the crosspiece. He had made the levitation glider himself, with only a little help from the stable-men. Several of the boys in the household had such toys, as soon as their training in the use of the star-stones was such as to maintain their levitation skills without undue danger. But most of the lads in the household were at their lessons; Donal had slipped away to the castle heights and soared away alone, even though he knew that the penalty would be to forbid him the use of the glider, perhaps for days. He could feel the stresses, the fear, everywhere in the castle.
A traitor executed, dying before touched, a death-spell on her. She had cursed Lord Aldaran’s manhood…
Gossip had run around Castle Aldaran like wildfire, fueled by the few women who had actually been in Aliciane’s chamber and seen anything; they had seen too much to keep silent, too little to give a true account.
She had flung curses at the little barragana and Aliciane of Rockraven had fallen down in labor. She had cursed Lord Aldaran’s manhood—and it was true that he had taken no other to his bed, he who had always before taken a new woman with every change of the moons in the sky. A new, ominous question in the gossiping made Donal shiver: Was it the Lady of Rockraven who had spelled his manhood so he would desire no other, that she might keep her place in his arms and in his heart?
One of the men, a coarse man-at-arms, had laughed, a deep, suggestive laugh, and said, “That one needs no spells; if Lady Aliciane cast her pretty eyes on me, I would gladly pawn my manhood,” but the arms-master said firmly, “Be still, Radan, Such talk is unseemly among young lads, and look, you—see who stands among them? Go to your work; do not stand here and gossip and tell dirty tales.” When the man had gone, the arms-master said kindly, “Such talk is unseemly, but it is only jesting, Donal; he is distressed because he has no woman of his own, and would speak so of any fair woman. He means no disrespect to your mother, Donal. Indeed, there will be great rejoicing at Aldaran if Aliciane of Rockraven gives him an heir. You must not be angry at unthinking speech; if you listen to every dog that barks, you will have no leisure to learn wisdom. Go to your lessons, Donal, and do not waste time resenting what ignorant men say of their betters.”
Donal had gone, but not to his lessons; he had taken his glider to the castle heights and soared out on the air currents, and now rode them, distressing thoughts left behind, memory in abeyance, wholly caught up in the intoxication of soaring, bird-fashion, now swooping to the north, now turning back west to where the great crimson sun hung low on the peaks.
A hawk must feel like this, hovering… Under his sensitive fingertips, the wood-and-leather wing tilted downward faintly, and he focused on the current, letting it bear him down the draft. His mind sunk into the hyperawareness of the jewel, seeing the sky not as blue emptiness but as a great net of fields and currents which were his to ride, now floating down, down until it seemed he would strike on a great crag and be dashed asunder, then at the last minute letting a sharp updraft snatch him away, hovering down the wind… He floated, mindless, soaring, wrapped in ecstasy.
The green moon, Idriel, hung low, a gibbous semi-shape in the reddening sky; the silver crescent of Mormallor was the palest of shadows; and violent Liriel, the largest of the moons, near to full, was just beginning to float up slowly from the eastern horizon. A low crackle of thunder from the massy clouds hanging behind the castle roused memory and apprehension in Donal. He might not be chastised for slipping away from lessons at a time like this, but if he remained out after sunset he would certainly be punished. Strong winds sprang up at sunset, and about a year ago, one of the pageboys at the castle had smashed his glider and broken an elbow on one of the rocks below. He had been lucky, they knew, not to kill himself. Donal cast a wary eye back at the walls of the castle, seeking for an updraft that would carry him to the heights—otherwise he must drift down to the slopes below the castle and carry his glider, which was light but hugely awkward, all the way up again. Feeling the faintest of air pressures, magnified through the awareness of the matrix, he caught an updraft which, if he rode it carefully, would carry him above and behind the castle, and he could float down to the roofs.
Riding up it, he could see, with a shiver, the swollen naked figure of the woman who hung there, her face already torn by the kyorebni who hovered and swooped there. Already she was unrecognizable, and Donal shuddered. Mayra had been kind to him in her own way. Had she truly cursed his mother? He shuddered with his first real awareness of death.
People die. They really die and are pecked to bits by birds of prey. My mother could die in childbirth, too… His body twitched in sudden terror and he felt the fragile wings of the glider, released from control of his mind and body, flutter and slip downward, falling… Swiftly he mastered it, brought it up, levitating his body until he caught a current again. But now he could feel the faint tension and shock in the air, the building static.
Thunder crackled above him; a bolt of lightning flashed to the heights of Castle Aldaran, leaving a smell of ozone and a faint burned smell in Donal’s nostrils. Behind the deafening roar, Donal saw without hearing the flare and play of lightning in the massed clouds above the castle. In sudden fright, he thought, I must get down, out of here; it is not safe to fly in an oncoming storm. … He had been told again and again to scan the sky for lightning in the clouds before letting his glider take off.
A sudden violent downdraft caught him, sent the fragile wood-and-leather apparatus plummeting down; Donal, really frightened, clung hard to the handholds, with sense enough not to try to fight it too soon. It felt as if it would smash him down on the rocks, but he forced himself to lie limp along the struts, his mind searching ahead for the crosscurrent. At just the right moment he tensed his body, focusing into the matrix awareness, felt levitation and the crosscurrent carry him up again.
Now. Quickly, and carefully. I must get up to the level of the castle, catch the first current that glides down. There is no time to waste, … But now the air felt heavy and thick and Donal could not read it for currents. In growing dread, he sent his awareness out in all directions, but he sensed only the strong magnetic charges of the growing storm.
This storm is wrong, too! It’s like the one the other day. It’s not a real storm at all, it’s something else. Mother! Oh, my mother! It seemed to the frightened child, clinging to the struts of the glider, that he could hear Aliciane crying out in terror, “Oh, Donal, what will become of my boy,” and he felt his body convulse in terror, the glider slipping from his control, falling… falling… If it had been less light, less broad-winged, it would have smashed onto the rocks, but the air currents, even though Donal could not read them, bore him along. After a few moments his fall stopped, and he began to drift sideways again. Now, using laran—the levitational strength given body and mind by the matrix jewel— and his trained awareness searching for the traces of currents through the magnetic storm, Donal began to fight for his life. He forced away the voice he could almost hear, his mother’s voice crying out in terror and pain. He forced away the fear which let him see his own body lying broken into bits on the crags below. He forced himself to submerge wholly into his own heightened laran, making the wood-and-leather wings extensions of his own outstretched arms, feeling the currents that blew and battered at them as if they buffeted his own hands, his own legs.
Now… ride it upward… just so far … try to gain a few lengths toward the west… He forced himself to go limp as another smashing bolt of lightning leaped from a cloud, feeling it burst beyond him. No control… it isn’t going anywhere… it h
as no awareness… and the maxims of the kindly leronis who had taught him what little he knew: The trained mind can always master any force of nature… Ritually, Donal reminded himself of that.
I need not fear wind or storm or lightning, the trained mind can master… But Donal was only ten years old, and resentfully he wondered if Margali had ever flown a glider in a thunderstorm.
A deafening crash socked him momentarily mindless; he felt the sudden drench of rain along his chilled body, and fought to stop the trembling which sought to wrest control of the fluttering wings from his mind.
Now. Firmly. Down, and down, along this current…right to the ground, along the slope … no time to play with another updraft. Down here I will be safe from the lightning…
His feet had almost touched the ground when another harsh upcurrent seized the wide wings and flung him upward again, away from the safety of the slopes. Sobbing, fighting the mechanism, he fought to force it down again, throwing himself over the edge and hanging vertically, grasping the struts over his head, letting the wide wings slow his fluttering fall. He sensed, through his skin, the lightning bolt and all his strength went out to divert it, to thrust it elsewhere. His hands clung frantically to the struts above his head as he heard the lightning and the deafening blast, saw with dazed eyes one of the great standing rocks on the slope split asunder with a great crashing roar. His feet touched ground; he fell hard, rolling over and over, feeling the glider’s struts smash and break to splinters. Pain cannoned through his shoulder as he fell, but he had enough strength and awareness left to go limp, as he had been taught to do in arms-practice, to fall without the muscular resistance which could break bones. Alive, bruised, sobbing, he lay stunned on the rocky slope, feeling the currents of lightning darting, aimlessly, around him, thunder rolling from peak to peak.
When he had recovered his breath, he picked himself up. Both wing-struts of the glider were smashed, but it could be repaired; he was lucky that his arms were not smashed like the struts. The sight of the splintered rock turned him sick and dizzy, and his head throbbed; but he realized that with all this, he was lucky to be alive. He picked up the broken toy, letting the splintered wings hang folded, and began slowly to trudge up the slope toward the castle gates.
“She hates me,” Aliciane cried in terror. “She does not want to be born!”
Through the darkness that seemed to hover around her mind she felt Mikhail catch and hold her flailing hands.
“My dearest love, that is folly,” he murmured, holding the woman against him, firmly controlling his own fears. He, too, sensed the strangeness of the lightning which flashed and crackled around the high windows, and Aliciane’s terror reinforced his own dread. It seemed there was another in the room, besides the frightened woman, besides the calm presence of Margali, who sat with her head bent, not looking at either of them, her face blue-lighted with the glimmer of the matrix stone. Mikhail could feel the soothing waves of calm Margali sent out, trying to surround them all with it; he tried to let his own mind and body surrender to the calm, relax to it. He began the deep rhythmic breathing he had been taught for control, and after a little he felt Aliciane, too, relax and float with it
Where, then, whence the terror, the struggle…
It is she, the unborn… it is her fear, her reluctance ...
Birth is an ordeal of terror; there must be someone to reassure her, someone who awaits her with love… Aldaran had done this service at the birth of all his children; sensing the formless fright and rage of the unformed mind, thrust by forces it could not comprehend. Now, searching his memories (had any of Clariza’s children been so strong? Deonara’s babes, none of them had been able even to fight for their lives, poor little weaklings… ), he reached out, searching for the unfocused thoughts of the struggling child, torn by awareness of the mother’s pain and fright. He sought to send out soothing thoughts of love, of tenderness; not in words, for the unborn had no knowledge of language, but he formed them into words for his own sake and Aliciane’s, to focus their emotions, to give a feeling of warmth and welcome.
You must not be afraid, little one; it will soon be over… you will breathe free and we will hold you in our arms and love you… you are long awaited and dearly loved… He sought to send out love and tenderness, to banish from his mind the frightening thought of the sons and daughter he had lost, when all his love could not follow them into the darkness their developing laran had cast on their minds. He tried to blot out memory of the weak and pitiful struggles of Deonara’s children, who had never lived to draw breath… Did I love them enough? If I had loved Deonara more, would her children have fought harder to live?
“Draw the curtains,” he said after a moment, and one of the women in the chamber tiptoed to the window and closed out the darkening sky. But the thunder roared in the room, and the flare of the lightning could be seen even through the drawn curtains.
“See how she does, the little one,” the midwife said, and Margali rose quietly, came to lay gentle hands around Aliciane’s body, sinking her awareness into the woman, to monitor her breathing, the progress of the birth. A woman with laran, bearing a child, could not be physically examined or touched, for fear of hurting or frightening the unborn with a careless pressure or touch. The leronis must do this, using the perception of her own telepathic and psychokinetic powers. Aliciane felt the soothing touch, and her troubled face relaxed, but as Margali withdrew she cried out in sudden terror.
“Oh, Donal, Donal—what will become of my boy?”
Lady Deonara Ardais-Aldaran, a slight aging woman, tiptoed to Aliciane’s side, and took the slender fingers in hers. She said soothingly, “Do not fear for Donal, Aliciane. Avarra forbid it should be needful, but I swear to you that I will, from this day forth, be foster-mother to him, as tenderly as if he were one of my own sons.”
“You have been kind to me, Deonara,” Aliciane said, “and I sought to take Mikhail from you.”
“Child, child—this is no time to think of this; if you can give Mikhail what I could not, then you are my sister and I will love you as Cassilda loved Camilla, I swear it.” Deonara bent and kissed Aliciane’s pale cheek. “Set your mind at rest, breda; think only of this little one who comes to our arms. I will love her too.”
Held tenderly in the arms of her child’s father, of the woman who had sworn to welcome her child as her own, Aliciane knew that she should be comforted. Yet, as lightning flared on the heights and rumbled around the walls of the castle, she felt terror all through and pervading her. Is it the child’s terror or mine? Her mind swam into darkness under the soothing of the leronis, under the flooding reassurances of Mikhail, pouring out love and tenderness. Is it for me or only for the child? It no longer seemed to matter; she could see no further. Always before, she had had some faint sense of what would come after, but now it seemed there was nothing in the world but her own fear, the child’s fear, the formless, wordless rage. It seemed to her that the rage focused with the thunder, that the birth pains tearing her were brightening and darkening as the lightning came and went… thunder crashing not on the heights outside but in and around her own violated body… terror, rage, fury expending itself within her… the lightning bringing fury and pain. She struggled for breath and cried out and her mind sank, almost with relief, into dark, and silence, and nothingness…
“Ai! She is a little fury,” the midwife said, gingerly holding the struggling child. “You must calm her, domna, before I cut her life from her mother’s, or she will struggle and bleed overmuch—but she is strong, a hearty little woman!”
Margali bent over the shrieking infant. The face was dark red, contorted into a furious scream of rage; the eyes, squinted almost shut, were a blazing blue. The round little head was covered with thick red fuzz. Margali laid her slender hands along the naked body of the child, crooning softly to her. Under the touch the baby calmed a little and stopped fighting; and the midwife was able to sever the umbilical cord and tie it. But when the woman took the infan
t and wrapped her in a warmed blanket, she began to shriek again and struggle and the woman laid her down, drawing back a shocked hand.
“Ai! Evanda have mercy, she is one of those! Well, when she is grown, the little maiden need not fear rape, if she can strike already with laran. I have never heard of this in a babe so young!”
“You frightened her,” Margali said, smiling; but as she took the child, her smile slid off. Like all of Deonara’s women, she had loved the gentle Aliciane. “Poor child, to lose so loving a mother, so soon!”
Mikhail of Aldaran knelt, his face drawn with anguish, beside the body of the woman he had loved. “Aliciane! Aliciane, my beloved,” he mourned. Then he raised his face, in bitterness. Deonara had taken the wrapped infant from Margali and was holding it, with the fierce hunger of thwarted motherhood, to her meager breast.
“You are not ill content, are you, Deonara—that none will vie with you to mother this child?”
“That is not worthy of you, Mikhail,” Deonara said, holding Aliciane’s child close. “I loved Aliciane well, my lord; would you have me cast aside her child, or can I best show my love by rearing her as tenderly as if she were my own? Take her, then, my husband, until you find another love.” Try as she would, Lady Aldaran could not keep the bitterness from her voice. “She is your only living child. And if already she has laran, she will need much care to rear her. My poor babes never lived even this long.” She put the child into Dom Mikhail’s arms, and he stood looking down, with infinite tenderness and grief, at his only child.
Mayra’s curse rang in his mind: You will take no other to your bed… your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree. As if his own dismay communicated itself to the infant in his arms she began to struggle again and shriek in the blanket. Beyond the window the storm raged.