Marion Bradley - The Forbidden Tower

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.