Marion Bradley - The Forbidden Tower

A long time later Callista knew she was drowsing, in tremendous content, still surrounded by them all. Ellemir was asleep with her head on Andrew’s shoulder. Callista felt weary, strange, and blissful, dropping now into Damon’s consciousness, now into Andrew’s, now submerging for minutes at a time into Ellemir’s sleep. Drifting between past and future, aware of her own body as she had never been since childhood, she knew she would be able to go into Council and swear her marriage had been consummated, and then, with a reluctance which actually made her laugh a little, that she had come from this night pregnant. She did not really want a child, not yet. She had wanted a little time to learn about herself, to know the kind of growth Ellemir had known, to explore all the new and unexplained dimensions in her life.

But I’ll live through it, women do , she thought with secret laughter, and the laughter spilled over to Damon. He reached out, enlacing her fingers with his.

Thank the Gods you can laugh about it, Callie!

It isn’t as if it had to be a choice, as I feared. As if I could never use my own particular skills again. It’s a broadening of what I am, not a narrowing of choices.

She still resented the need to have a child by the Council’s choice and not her own — she would never forgive the Council for their attitude — but she accepted the necessity and knew she would easily manage to love the unwanted child, enough to hope that the coming daughter would not know, until she was old enough to understand, just how very much she had been unwanted.

But I want never to know who fathered it… Please, Elli, even in monitoring, never, never let me be sure . And they promised one another, silently, that they would never try to know whether the child conceived this night was Damon’s daughter or Andrew’s. They might suspect, but they would never know for certain.

For hours they lay dozing, resting, sharing the fourfold rapport, feeling it come and go. Although all the others had drifted into sleep toward morning, Damon found himself wakeful and a little fearful. Had he weakened them, or himself, for the coming battle? Could Callista clear her channels quickly enough?

And then, dropping into Callista’s consciousness, he knew that they would always be wholly clear, for whichever force she chose to use them. She would not need the kireseth; now she knew within herself how it felt to switch them over from sexual messages to the full strength of laran . And Damon knew, with surging confidence, that he could meet whatever came.

And then he knew, reluctantly, why the use of kireseth had been abandoned. As a rare and sacramental rite, it was safe and necessary, helping the Keepers reaffirm their common humanity, reaffirming the close bond of the old Tower circles, the closest bond known, closer than kin, closer than sexual desire.

But it could all too easily become an escape, an addiction. Would men, with this freedom accessible, ever accept the occasional periods of impotence after demanding work? Would women accept the discipline of learning to keep the channels clear? Kireseth , with overuse, was dangerous. A thousand stories of the Ghost Winds in the Hellers made that clear. And the temptation to overuse it would be almost irresistible.

So it had first fallen into a taboo, for rare and sacramental use, later the taboo being enlarged to total disuse and disrepute. With regret for what he would always remember as one of the peak experiences of his life, Damon knew that even as a Year’s End ritual it might be too tempting. It had brought them, undamaged, through the last barrier to their completion, but in future they must rely on discipline and self-denial.

Self-denial? Never, when they had one another.

And yet, if all of time coexisted at once, this magical hour would always be present and real to them as it was now.

Sadly, lovingly, feeling their presence all around him and regretting the necessity to separate, he sighed. One by one, he woke them.

“Sunrise is near,” he said soberly. “They will observe the terms precisely, but they will not give us a moment’s advantage, so we must be ready for them. It is time to prepare for the challenge.”

It was the thin darkness which preceded the dawn. Damon, standing at the still-dark window, not even grayed with the coming light, felt ill at ease. The exultation was still with him, but there was a small gnawing insecurity.

Had this, after all, been the wrong thing to do? By all the laws of Arilinn, this should have weakened them, made them unfit for the coming conflict. Had he made the most tragic, and irrevocable of all mistakes? Had he, loving all of them, condemned them to death and worse?

No. He had staked all their lives on the rightness of what they were doing. If the old laws of Arilinn were right after all, then they all deserved to die and he would accept that death, if not gladly, at least with a sense of justice. They were working in a new tradition, less cruel and crippling than the one he had rejected, and his belief that they were right must triumph.

He had wrapped himself in a warm robe against the cold of the overworld. Callista had done the same, and had wrapped a fluffy shawl around Ellemir’s shoulders. Andrew, shrugging into his fur riding cloak, asked, “What exactly is going to happen, Damon?”

“ Exactly ? There’s no way I can tell you that,” Damon said. “It is the old test for a Keeper: we will build our Tower in the overworld, and they will try to destroy it, and us with it. If they cannot destroy it, they must acknowledge that it is lawful and has a right to be there. If they destroy it… well, you know what will happen then. So we must not allow them to destroy it.”

Callista was looking pale and frightened. He took her face gently between his hands.

“Nothing can hurt us in the overworld unless you believe that it can.” Then he knew what was troubling her: all her life she had been conditioned to believe that her power rested in her ritual virginity.

“Take your matrix,” he commanded gently.

She obeyed hesitantly.

“Focus on it. See?” he told her, as the lights slowly gathered in the stone. “And you know your channels are clear.”

They were. And it was not only the kireseth . Freed of the enormous tensions and armoring of the Keeper’s training, the channels were no longer frozen. She could command their natural selectivity. But why had no instinct told her this?

“Damon, how and why could they allow a secret like this to be forgotten?”

It meant that no one ever had to make the cruel choice Leonie had forced on her as a child, which other Keepers for ages past had accepted in selfless loyalty to Comyn and Towers.

“How could they abandon this ” — her words took in all the wonder and discovery of the night just past — “for that !”

“I do not know,” Damon said sadly, “nor do I know if they will accept it now. It threatens what they have been taught, makes their sacrifices and their suffering useless, an act of folly.”

And he felt a clutch of pain at his heart, knowing that in what he did, as with all great discoveries, there were the seeds of bitter conflict. Men and women would die to champion one or the other side in this great struggle, and he knew, with a great surge of anguish, that a daughter of his own, with the face and the name of a flower, a daughter born to him by neither of these women here in this room, would be brutally murdered for daring to try to bring this knowledge into Arilinn itself. Mercifully the knowledge blurred again; the time was now , and he dared not concern himself with past or future.