Marion Bradley - The Forbidden Tower

“But you know something of horse-breaking—”

Andrew laughed. “Yes, and in the Terran Zone that was considered an anachronism, a useless skill. I used to take Dad’s saddle horses and break them, but I thought when I left Arizona that I’d never ride again.”

“Does everyone on Terra walk, then?”

He shook his head. “Motor transit. Slidewalks. Horses were an exotic luxury for rich eccentrics.” He went to the window and looked out on the sunlit landscape. “Strange, that of all the known worlds of the Terran Empire, I should have come here .” A faint shudder went through him at the thought of how narrowly he could have missed what now seemed his fate, his life, the true purpose for which he had been born.

He wanted desperately to reach out and draw Callista into his arms, but as if his thought had somehow reached her, she went tense and white. He sighed and stepped a pace away from her.

She said, as if completing a thought that no longer interested her much, “Our horse-handler is already an old man, and without Father at hand, it may be up to you to teach the younger ones.” Then she stopped and looked up at him, twisting the end of one long braid.

“I want to talk to you,” she said abruptly.

He had never decided whether her eyes were blue or gray; they seemed to vary with the light, and in this light they were almost colorless. “Andrew, will this be too hard on you? To share a room when we cannot — as yet — share a bed?”

He had been warned of this when they first discussed marriage, that she had been conditioned so deeply that it might be a long time before they could consummate their marriage. He had promised her then, unasked, that he would never hurry her or try to put any pressure on her, that he would wait as long as necessary. He said now, touching her fingertips lightly, “Don’t worry about it, Callista. I promised you that already.”

Faint color crept slowly across her pale cheeks. She said, “I have been taught that it is… shameful to arouse a desire I will not satisfy. Yet if I stay apart from you, and do not rouse it, so that in turn your thoughts may act on me, then things may never be different at all. If we are together, then, slowly perhaps, things may be different. But it will be so hard on you, Andrew.” Her face twisted. She said, “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

Once, once only, and with great constraint, and briefly, he had spoken of this with Leonie. Now, as he stood looking down at Callista, that brief meeting, difficult on both sides, came back to his mind as if again he stood before the Comyn leronis . She had come to him in the courtyard, saying quietly, “Look at me, Terran.” He had raised his eyes, unable to resist. Leonie was so tall that their eyes were on a level. She had said, in a low voice, “I want to see to what manner of man I am giving the child I love.” Their eyes had met, and for a long moment Andrew Carr felt as if every thought of his entire life had been turned over and rummaged through by the woman, as if in that one glance, and not a long one, she had drawn the very inmost part from him and left it to dangle there, cold and withering. Finally — it had not been more than a second or two, but it had seemed an age — Leonie had sighed and said, “So be it. You are honest and kind and you mean well, but have you the faintest idea of what a Keeper’s training means, or how hard it will be for Callista to lay it down?”

He had wanted to protest, but instead he had only shaken his head and said humbly, “How can I know? But I will try to make it easy for her.”

Leonie’s sigh had seemed ripped up from the very depths of her being. She had said, “Nothing you could do, in this world or the next, could make it easy for her. If you are patient and careful — and lucky — you may make it possible . I do not want Callista to suffer. And yet in the choice she has made, there will be much suffering. She is young, but not so young that she can put aside her training without pain. The training that makes a Keeper is long; it cannot be undone in a little while.”

Andrew had protested. “I know—” and Leonie had sighed again. “Do you? I wonder. It is not only a matter of delaying the consummation of your marriage for days, or perhaps for seasons; that will be only the beginning. She loves you, and is eager for your love—”

“I can be patient until she is ready,” Andrew had sworn, but Leonie had said, shaking her head, “Patience may not be enough. What Callista has learned cannot be unlearned. You do not want to know about that. Perhaps it is better for you not to know too much.”

He had said again, protesting, “I’ll try to make it easy for her,” and again Leonie had shaken her head and sighed, repeating, “Nothing you could do could make it easy. Chickens cannot go back into eggs. Callista will suffer, and I fear you will suffer with her, but if you are — if you both are lucky, you may make it possible for her to retrace her steps. Not easy. But possible.”

Indignation had burst out of him then. “How can you people do this to young girls? How can you destroy their lives this way?” But Leonie had not answered, lowering her head; and moving noiselessly away from him. When he blinked she was gone, as swiftly as if she had been a shadow, so that he began to doubt his sanity, began to wonder if she had ever been there at all, or if his own doubts and fears had constructed an hallucination.

Callista, standing before him in the room that — tomorrow — would be theirs to share, raised her eyes again, slowly, to his. She said in a whisper, “I did not know Leonie had come to you that way,” and he saw her hands clench tightly, so tightly that the small knuckles were white as bone. Then she said, looking away from him, “Andrew, promise me something.”

“Anything, my love.”

“Promise me. If you ever… desire some woman, promise me you will take her and not suffer needlessly…”

He exploded. “What kind of man do you think I am? I love you! Why would I want anyone else?”

“I cannot expect — It is not right or natural…”

“Look here, Callista,” and his voice was gentle, “I’ve lived a long time without women. I never found it did me all that much harm. A few, here and there, while I was knocking around the Empire on my own. Nothing serious.”

She looked down at the tips of her small dyed-leather sandals. “That’s different, men alone, living away from women. But here, living with me, sleeping in the same room, being near me all the time and knowing…” She ran out of words. He wanted to take her into his arms and kiss her till she lost that rigid, lost look. He actually laid his hands on her shoulders, felt her tense under the touch, and let his hands drop to his sides. Damn anyone who could built pathological reflexes into a young girl this way! But even without the touch, he felt the grief in her, grief and guilt. She said softly, “You have no bargain in a wife, Andrew.”

He replied gently, “I have the wife I want.”

Damon and Ellemir came into the room. Ellemir’s hair was tousled, her eyes shining; she had that glassy-eyed look which he associated with women aroused, excited. For the first time since he had seen the twins, he saw Ellemir as a woman, not merely as Callista’s sister, and found her sensually attractive to him. Or was it that for a moment he saw in her the way Callista might, one day, look at him? He felt a flicker of guilt. She was his promised wife’s sister, in a few hours she would be his best friend’s wife, and of all women, she was the one at whom he should not look with desire. He looked away as she collected herself, slowly coming back to ordinary awareness.

She said, “Callie, we must have new curtains brought in; these have not been aired or washed, since — since” — she groped for analogy — “since the days of Regis the Fourth.” Andrew knew that she had been in close contact with Damon, and smiled to himself.