Marion Bradley - The Forbidden Tower

“He’ll have a hell of a lot of pain,” Damon said, bending to touch one of the smaller toes, where the nails had sloughed away with the broken and blackened skin, “and he might still lose a toe or two; the nerves were dead there, and I couldn’t do much. But he’ll recover, and he’ll have the use of his feet and hands. And he was the worst.” He tightened his mouth, sobered by the responsibility, and knew, ashamed of himself, that he had almost, somewhere inside himself, hoped for failure. It was too much, he thought, this kind of responsibility. But he could do it, and there were other men in the same danger. And now that he knew he could save them… He made his voice deliberately harsh as he turned to Dezi and Andrew.

“Well, what are we waiting for? We’d better get on to the others.”

Again, the picked-up threads of rapport. Andrew had the knack of it now, knew just how and when to flood Damon with his own strength when the other man faltered. They were working as a team, as Damon sank his consciousness into the second man’s feet and legs, and Andrew, some small part of him still apart from this, felt the walls enclosing them so that no random thought from outside intruded. He felt with Damon the descent, cell by slow cell, through the layers of flesh and skin and nerves and bone, gently stimulating, sloughing aside, reawakening. It was more effective than a surgeon’s knife, Andrew thought, but what a cost! Twice more the descent into raw, blackened frozen flesh before Damon finally let the last rapport go, separating them, and An-drew felt as if they had slipped outside an enclosed space, a surrounding wall. But four men lay sleeping, their legs and feet raw, sore, damaged, but healing. Definitely healing, without danger of blood poisoning or infection, clean and healthy wounds that would mend as quickly as possible.

They left the men sleeping, warning Ferrika to stay near them, and went back to the lower hall. Damon staggered, and Andrew reached out and supported him physically, feeling that he was repeating, in the physical world, what he had done so often in thought during the long rapport. Not for the first time, he had the feeling that Damon, so much older, was somehow the younger, to be protected.

Damon sat on the bench, exhaustedly leaning back against Andrew, the dead weariness and draining of matrix work settling down over him. He picked up some bread and fruit which had been left on the table after the evening meal, and chewed at it with ravenous hunger, feeling his depleted body demanding a renewal of energy. Dezi too had begun to eat hungrily.

Damon said, “You should eat something too, Andrew; matrix work depletes your energies so much, you’ll collapse.” He had almost forgotten that terrible drained feeling, as if his very life had gone out of him. At Arilinn he had been given technical explanations about the energy currents in the body, the channels of energy which carried physical as well as psychic strength. But he was too weary to remember them long.

Andrew said, “I’m not hungry,” and Damon replied with the ghost of a smile, “Yes you are. You just don’t know it yet.” He put out his hand to stop Dezi as the boy poured a cup of wine. “No, that’s dangerous. Drink water, or fetch some milk or soup from the kitchens, but no drink after something like this. Half a glass will make you drunk as a monk at Midwinter feast!”

Dezi shrugged and went off to the kitchen, returning with a jug of milk which he poured all around. Damon said, “Dezi, you were at Arilinn, so you don’t need explanations, but Andrew should know: you should eat about twice as much as usual, for a day or so, and if you have any dizziness, nausea, anything like that, come and tell me. Dezi, do they keep kirian here?”

Dezi said, “Ferrika does not make it, and with Domenic and myself both past threshold sickness, and Valdir in Nevarsin, I do not think anyone here has had need of it.”

Andrew asked, “What’s kirian ?”

“A psychoactive drug which is used in the Towers, or among telepathic families. It lowers the resistance to telepathic contact, but it can also be helpful in cases of overwork or telepathic stresses. And some developing telepaths have a lot of sickness at adolescence, physical and psychic, when all the development is taking place at once. I suppose you’re too old for threshold sickness, Dezi?”

“I should think so,” the boy said scornfully. “I had outgrown it before I was fourteen.”

“Still, being away from matrix work since you left Arilinn, you might have a touch of it when you try to go back to it,” Damon warned. “And we still don’t know how Andrew will react.” He would ask Callista to try to make kirian . There should be some kept in every household of telepaths, against emergencies.

He put aside his cup of milk, half finished. He was deathly weary. “Go and rest, Dezi lad… you are worthy of Arilinn training, believe me.” He gave the boy a brief embrace and watched him go off toward his room near Dom Esteban’s, hoping the old man would sleep through the night so the boy could rest undisturbed.

Whatever Dezi’s faults, Damon considered, at least he had nursed the old man as filially as an acknowledged son would have. Was it affection, he wondered, or self-interest?

He let himself lean on Andrew as they climbed the stairs, making a rueful apology, but Andrew brushed it aside. “Forget it. You think I don’t know you pulled the whole weight of that?” So Damon let Andrew help him up the stairs, thinking, I lean on you now as I did in the matrix .…

In the outer room of their suite he hesitated a moment. “You aren’t Tower-trained, so you should be warned of this, too: matrix work… you’ll be impotent for a day or two. Don’t worry about it, it’s temporary.”

Andrew shrugged, with a twist of wry amusement, and Damon, remembering abruptly the real state of affairs between Andrew and Callista, knew that a word of apology would only reemphasize the tactlessness of his words. He asked himself how in hell he could have been groggy enough to have forgotten that.

In their room, Ellemir lay half asleep on the bed, wrapped in a fleecy white shawl. She had taken down her braids and her hair was scattered like light on the pillow. As Damon looked down at his wife, she sat up, blinking sleepily, then, as Ellemir always did, moving- from sleep to waking without transition, she held out her arms. “Oh, Damon, you look so weary, was it very terrible?”

He sank down beside her, resting his head against her breast. “No. Only I am no longer used to this work, and there is such a need for it, such a terrible need! Elli—” He sat bolt upright, looking down at her. “So many people here on Darkover are dying, when they should not die, suffering, being crippled, dying of minor injuries. It should not be so. We do not have the kind of medical services Andrew tells me that his Terrans have. But there are so many things that a man — or a woman — with a matrix can heal. And yet how are the injured to be taken to Arilinn or Neskaya or Dalereuth or Hali, to be treated in the Towers there? What do the matrix circles in the great Towers care for a poor workman’s frostbite, or some poor hunter clawed by a hunting-beast or kicked in the head by an oudrakhi ?”

“Well,” said Ellemir, puzzled, but trying to follow his vehemence, “in the Towers they have other things to do. Important things. Communications. And… and mining, and all of those things. They would have no time to look after wounds.”

“That’s true. But listen, Elli, all over Darkover there are men like Dezi, or women like Callista, or like you. Women and men who cannot, do not want to spend their lives in a Tower, away from the ordinary lives of humankind. But they could do any of these things.” He sank down on the bed beside Ellemir, realizing he was more fatigued than after any battle he had fought in the Guards. “One need not be Comyn, or have enormous skill, to do these things. Anyone with a little laran could be trained so, to help, to heal, and no one does!”