“ Valdir Alton of the Comyn Council,” Lerrys said briefly. Even Barron had heard of the Comyn—the hereditary caste of Darkovan rulers—and it silenced him. If the Comyn had anything to do with this and wanted him to wear Darkovan clothes, there was no use arguing.
After a brief period of spirited bargaining of which Barron—who knew considerable of the Darkovan language, more because he was quick and fluent at languages than because he had been interested— could follow very little, Lerrys said, “I hope these will meet with your approval. I knew you would not care to wear bright colors; I do not myself.” He handed Barron a pile of clothing, mostly in dark fabrics that looked like linen, with a heavy fur jacket like the one he himself was wearing. “It’s hard to manage a cloak, riding, unless you grew up wearing one.” There was also a pair of high boots.
“Better try the boots for fit,” he suggested.
Barron bent and slipped off his sandals. The clothing seller chuckled and said something Barron couldn’t follow about sandals and Lerrys said fiercely, “The chaireth is Lord Alton’s guest!” The merchant gulped, muttered some phrases of apology and fell silent. The boots fitted as if they had been made for him, and though they felt strange along his ankles and calves, Barron had to admit they were comfortable. Lerrys picked up the sandals and stuck them in Barron’s pocket. “You could wear them indoors, I suppose.”
Barron would have answered, but before the words reached his lips a curious dizziness swept over him.
He was standing in a great, vaulted hall, lighted only by a few flickering torches. Below him he could hear the shouts of drunken men; and he could smell torches, roasting meat, and an odd acrid odor that confused him and made him feel sick. He grasped at a ring in the wall, found that it was not there; the wall was not there.
He was back in the blowing wind and cloudy sunlight of the fenced compound, his pile of clothing fallen to the grass at his feet, and young Lerrys staring up at him, shaken and puzzled.
“Are you all right, Barron? You looked—a bit odd.”
Barron nodded, glad to conceal his face by stooping to gather up his clothing. He was relieved when Lerrys left him in the shelter and he could sink down on the rough floor and lean against the wall, shuddering.
That again! Was he going mad? If it had been due to the stress of his job, now that he had been removed from the dispatch board it should have stopped. Yet, although brief, this time had been more vivid than the others. Shivering, he shut his eyes and tried not to think until Colryn, coming to the edge of the open wall of the shelter, called to him.
Two or three men in rough, dark clothing were moving around the fire; Colryn did not introduce them. Barron, in response to gestures, joined Gwynn and Lerrys at the trough where men were washing. It was growing dusky and the icy evening wind was coming up, but they all washed long and thoroughly. Barron was shivering uncontrollably and thinking with some longing of the Darkovan fur jacket, but he took his turn and washed face and hands more than he’d normally have done; he didn’t want them to think Terrans were dirty—and in any case riding had left him dirtier than pushing buttons and watching circuit relays. The water was bitterly cold, and he shook with the chill, his face bitten by the bitter wind.
They sat around the fire out of the wind, and after murmuring a brief formula, Gwynn began handing food around. Barron accepted the plate he was given, which held some sweet boiled grain covered with a splash of acrid sauce, a large lump of meat and a small bowl of thick bittersweet stuff vaguely like chocolate. It was all good, although it was hard to manage the tough meat which the others sliced into paper-thin slices with the knives in their belts; it had been salted and dried in some manner and was almost like leather. Barron pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pockets and lighted one, drawing the smoke gratefully into his mouth; it tasted ambrosial.
Gwynn scowled at him and said in an undertone to Colryn, “First the sandals and now this—” looking with direct rudeness at Barron, he asked a question of which Barron could make out only the unfamiliar word embredin. Lerrys raised his head from his plate, saw Barron’s cigarette and shook his head slightly, then said “Chaireth” again, rather deprecatingly, to Gwynn and got up to drop down beside Barron.
“I wouldn’t smoke here if I were you,” he said. “I know it is your custom, but it is offensive among the men of the Domains.”
“What was he saying?”
Lerrys flushed. “He was asking, to put it in the simplest possible terms, if you were an—an effeminate. It was partly those damned sandals of yours, and partly—well, as I say, men do not smoke here. It is reserved for women.”
With an irritable gesture Barron ground out his cigarette. This was going to be worse than he thought. “What’s that word you used—chaireth?”
“Stranger,” Lerrys said. Barron picked up a lump of meat again, and Lerrys said, almost apologizing, “I should have provided you with a knife.”
“No matter,” Barron said, “I wouldn’t know how to use it anyway.”
“Nevertheless—” Lerrys began again, but Barron did not hear him. The fire before them slid away—or rather, flared up, and in the midst of the flames, tall, bluish, and glowing, he saw—
A woman.
A woman again, standing in the midst of flames. He thought he cried out in the moment before the figure changed, grew and was, again, the great chained Being, regal, burning, searing her beauty into his heart and brain.
Barron gripped his hands until the nails bit into the palms.
The apparition was gone.
Lerrys was staring at him, white and shaken.
“Sharra,” he breathed, “Sharra, the golden-chained—”
Barron reached out and grabbed him. He said, hoarsely, disregarding the men at the fire, which was once again the tiny, cooking fire, “You saw it? You saw it?”
Lerrys nodded without speaking. His face was so white that small freckles stood out. He said at last with a gasp, “Yes, I saw. What I can’t understand is—how you saw! What in the Devil’s name are you?”
Barron, almost too shaken to speak, said, “I don’t know. That keeps happening. I have no idea why. I’d like to know why you can see it, too.”
Struggling for composure, Lerrys said, “What you saw—it is a Darkovan archetype, a Goddess form. I don’t completely understand. I know that many Terrans have some telepathic power. Someone must be broadcasting these images and somehow you have the power to pick them up. I—” He hesitated. “I must speak to my foster father before I tell you more.” He fell silent, then said with sudden resolution; “Tell me, what would you rather be called?”
“Dan will do,” Barron said.
“Dan then. You are going to have trouble in the mountains; I thought you would be an ordinary Terran, and not aware—” He stopped, biting his lip. “I am under a pledge,” he said at last, “and I cannot break it even for this. But you are going to have trouble and you will need a friend. Do you know why no one would lend you a knife?”
Barron shook his head. “Never occurred to me to ask. Like I said, I can’t use one anyway.”
“You are a Terran,” Lerrys said. “By custom and law here—a knife or any other weapon must never be lent or given, except between sworn friends or kin-folk. To say ‘my knife is yours’ is a pledge. It means that you will defend the other—therefore, a knife or any weapon, must be bought, or captured in battle, or made for you. Yet,” he said, with a sudden laugh, “I will give you this—and I have my reasons.” He stooped down and drew a small sharp knife from the pocket in his boot. “It is yours,” he said, suddenly very serious. “I mean what I say, Barron. Take it from me, and say ‘yours and mine.’
Barron, feeling embarrassed and strange, fumbled at the hilt of the small blade. “Mine, then, and yours. Thank you, Lerrys.” The intensity of the moment caught him briefly up into it, and he found himself staring into the younger man’s eyes almost as if words passed between them.
The other men around the fire were sta
ring at them, Gwynn frowning in surprised disapproval, Colryn looking puzzled, and vaguely—Barron wondered how he knew—jealous.
Barron fell to his food, both puzzled and relieved. It was easier to eat with the knife in his hand; later he found it fitted easily into the little pocket at the top of his boot. Lerrys did not speak to him again, but he grinned briefly at Barron now and then, and Barron knew that, for some reason, the young man had adopted him as a friend. It was a strange feeling. He was not a man to make friends easily—he had no close ones—and now a young man from a strange world, guessing at his confusion, had thrust unexpected friendship on him. He wondered why and what would happen next.
He shrugged, finished his meal, and followed Colryn’s gestured directions—to rinse his plate and bowl and pack them with the others and to help with the spreading of blankets inside the shelter. It was very dark now; cold rain began to spray across the compound; and he was glad to be inside. There was, he realized, a subtle difference in the way they treated him now; he wondered why, and though he told himself it made no difference, he was glad of it.
Once in the night, wrapped in fur blankets, surrounded by sleeping men, he woke to stare at nothingness and feel his body gripped with weightlessness and cold winds again. Lerrys, sleeping a few feet away, stirred and murmured, and the sound brought Barron back to the moment.
It was going to be one hell of a trip if this keeps on happening every few hours.
And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
* * *
IV
« ^ »
A VOICE called in Melitta’s dreams.
“Melitta! Melitta, sister, breda, wake! Listen to me!”
She sat up in the dark, desperately grasping at the voice. “Storn,” she gasped, half aloud, “is it you?”
“I can speak to you only a little while like this, breda, so listen. You are the only one who can help me. Allira cannot hear, and in any case she is too frail and timid, she would die in the hills. Edric is wounded and prisoned. It must be you, little one. Dare you help me?”
“Anything,” she whispered, her heart pounding. Her eyes groped at the dark. “Are you here? Can we escape? Shall I make a light?”
“Hush. I am not here; I speak to your mind only. I have tried to waken hearing in you for these last four days and at last you hear me. Listen, sister—you must go alone. You are only lightly guarded; you can shake them off. But you must go now, before snow closes the passes. I have found someone to help you. I will send him to you at Carthon.”
“Where…”
“At Carthon,” the fading voice whispered and was silent. Melitta whispered aloud, “Storn, Storn, don’t go,” but the voice had failed and faded into exhaustion. She was alone in the darkness, her brother’s voice still ringing like an echo in her ears.
Carthon—but where was Carthon? Melitta had never been more than a few miles from her home; she had never been beyond the mountains and her ideas of geography were hazy. Carthon might be over the next ridge, or it might be at the world’s end.
She flung agonized queries into the darkness. How can I, where shall I go? But there was no answer, only darkness and silence. Had it been a dream born of her frenzy to escape, or had her brother in his magical trance, somehow managed to reach her mind in truth? If it were so, then she could do nothing but obey.
Melitta of Storn was a mountain girl with all that implied. The prime root of her being was the clan loyalty to Storn, not only as her elder brother, but as the head of his house. That he was blind and incapacitated, that he could not have defended her and her sister and younger brother—not to mention their people—in this crisis, made no difference. She did not censure him even in her thoughts and believed, when Allira did so, that the girl’s sufferings at Brynat’s hands had turned her brain. Now he had laid the task on her to escape and find help, and it never occurred to her not to obey.
She rose from her bed, pulled a fur robe around her shoulders—for the night was bitterly cold and the stone floors had never known fire—and thrust her feet into furry socks, then, moving surely in the dark, found flints and tinder and struck a small lamp—so small that the light was not much bigger than the head of a pin. She sat down before the light, cheered a little by the tiny flame, and began to plan what she could do.
She knew already what she must do—escape from the castle before snow closed the passes, and somehow make her way to Carthon, where her brother would send someone to help her. But how this could be accomplished, she found it hard to imagine.
Guards still followed her at a respectful distance, everywhere she went through the halls. Dark and late though it was, she was sure that even if she left her room they would rouse from where they slept and follow. They feared Brynat more than they longed for sleep. Their fear of him was made clear to her when she realized that not one of them had ventured to lay a hand on her. She wondered if she should be grateful for this, and thrust the thought aside. That was to fall into his trap.
Like all mountain girls, Melitta was enough of a realist to think the next logical step: could she seduce one of the guards into letting her escape? She thought it unlikely. They feared Brynat, and he had ordered them to let her alone. More likely the guard would accept her advances, take what she offered, then go directly to Brynat with the story and win approval of his chief as well. After which, Bryant might well punish her by turning her over to the outlaws for a plaything. That was a blind alley—she could have made herself do it, but it would probably be no use.
She went to the window, pulling her furs closer about her, and leaned out. You must be gone before the snow closes the passes. She was a mountain girl, with weather and storms in her blood. It seemed to Melitta that she could almost smell from afar, borne on the chill night wind, the smell of far-off clouds pregnant with snow.
The night was not far advanced. Idriel and Liriel swung in the sky; Mormalor, faint and pearly, hung half-shadowed on the shoulder of the mountain. If she could manage somehow to leave the castle before dawn…
She could not go now. Brynat’s men were still at their nightly drinking party in the great hall; Allira might send for her still, and she dared not be found absent. But in the hours between deep night and dawn, when even the air was sluggish, she might devise a plan, and be far away before mid-morning discovered that she was not in her room. She closed the window, cuddling herself in the furs, and went back to make plans.
Once out of the castle she wondered where she could go. It would be to Carthon, wherever that was, eventually. But she could not make Carthon in a single night; she would need shelter and food, for it might be a journey halfway to the world’s end. Once clear of Castle Storn, perhaps some of her brother’s vassals would shelter her. Although they were without power to protect against Brynat’s attack, she knew that they loved Storn and many of them knew and loved her. They would at least let her hide among them for a day or two until the hue and cry died down; they might help provide her with food for the journey, and it might be that one of them could set her on the road to Carthon.
The nearest of the great lords were the Aldarans, of Castle Aldaran near High Kimbi; they had, as far as she knew, no blood feud with Storns and no commitment to Brynat, but it seemed unlikely that they would, or could, come to the aid of Storn at this time. Her grandmother’s kinfolk had been Leyniers, related to the great Comyn Domain of Alton, but even the Comyn Council’s writ did not run here in the mountains.
It did not occur to Melitta to censure her brother, but it did occur to her that, knowing himself weak, he might well have attempted to place himself under the protection of one of the powerful mountain lords. But always before, the chasms and crags surrounding Storn had made them impregnable; and—a Storn swear fealty to another house? Never!
He could have married Allira—or me—to some son of a great house. Then we would have blood kin to protect us—bare is the back with no brother to guard it!
Well, he had not, and the time for fretting wa
s long past—chickens can’t be put back into eggs! The evil bird that had hatched from this oversight was out and flying, and only Melitta had the freedom and the strength to save something from the wreck.
Carrying the tiny lamp, she went to her chests. She could not go in long skirts and mantles. At the bottom of her chest was an old riding cloak, woven of thick heavy fabric from the valley and lined with fur; it was not rich enough to rouse greed in anyone she passed, but it was warm and durable. There was an old and shabby pair of her brother’s riding breeches, patched with leather, which she had worn for riding about the estate; it was a wiser choice than her own long, loose riding mantle. She added a knitted blouse, a long, thick, lined tunic, socks knitted from the spun fur of the forge folk, and her fur boots. She made a small parcel of a change of linen and some small trinkets, which she might sell or barter for help on the way. Finally she braided her hair and tied it into a woolen cap. This done, she put out the lamp and went to the balcony again. Until this moment, the actual preparation for the journey had obscured the really basic fact: exactly how was she to get out of the castle?
There were secret passages. She knew some of them. There was one, for instance, leading from the wine cellars near the old dungeon. The only thing necessary was to get into the wine cellar so that she could get into the secret passage. Perfectly simple. And what would her guards be doing while she descended the stairs and went into the wine cellar, conveniently managing to leave them outside? Drinking wine? That might be fine, if she could get them drunk enough, but they would certainly be suspicious at anything she offered them, on guard for a trick.
Another exit from the castle—calling it secret was a mere technicality, a way of saying that it had been unused for years and nobody bothered guarding it any more—was the passageway that led down into the cliffs and the abandoned forges where, in an earlier day of Darkover, the dark, stunted mountain people had worshipped the fires that lit their forges. There they had made the ancient swords and the strangely propertied artifacts which those who had never seen them used, called magical. The fires and forges had been silent for centuries, the little people withdrawn into the deeper hills; the Storns had come long after they were gone. As a child Melitta, with her brothers and sister, had explored the caves and abandoned dwellings of the forge folk. But they and all their magic, were gone. Their poor and scattered remnants now dwelt in villages near Storn, and they had been captured and driven along with the farm folk; they were more helpless than Melitta herself.