The Forbidden Circle (10 page)

Ellemir’s face was stubborn. She said, “How do we know that it is not
his
people who have imprisoned Callista? He comes to us with a wild story that Callista has somehow reached him, guided him when he was lost in the mountains, and saved him from the storm. Are you trying to make me believe that Callista could reach this outworlder, this stranger, when you could not find her in the overworld, and when she could not come through to me, her twin sister? I’m sorry, Damon, I simply cannot believe it.”

Carr looked straight at the girl. He said, “If you’re going to call me a liar, do it
to
me, not over my head. This story of mine, as you call it, is no pleasure to be telling. Do you think I like to sound like a madman? At first I thought the girl was a ghost, as I told you; or that I was dead already and seeing whatever it is that comes after. But when she saved me from falling with the plane, and then when she guided me to a safe place to wait out the storm, I believed that she was real. I
had
to believe it. I don’t blame you for doubting me. I doubted myself, long enough. But it’s true. And I suppose you are Callista’s kinsfolk; heaven knows you look enough like her for a twin.”

Too bad
, he found himself thinking,
that this one hasn’t a little of Callista’s sweet disposition
. Well, at least the man seemed to believe his story.

Damon stood up, leaving the fire to fend for itself now that it was burning well, and turned to Carr. He said, “I apologize for my cousin’s lack of courtesy, stranger. She has endured some difficult days since her sister was taken away, in the night and unseen. It is not easy for her to accept what you say, that Callista could reach your mind when she could not reach her own twin; the bond of the twin-born is believed to be the strongest bond known. I cannot explain it either, but I am old enough to know that there are too many things in this life for any man, or any woman either, to understand them all. Perhaps you can tell us more.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” Carr said. “I don’t understand it either.”

“Perhaps you know something you don’t realize you know,” Damon said. “But for now, stop badgering him, Ellemir. Whoever and whatever he is, or whatever the many truths of all this may be, he is a guest, and weary and cold, and until he has had his fill of warmth and food, and sleep if he needs it, it is a failure in hospitality to question him. You do the Alton Domain no honor, kinswoman.”

Carr followed all this sketchily; there were words that he only partially understood, though in Thendara he had been taught to speak the
lingua franca
of the Trade City, and he could make himself understood well enough. Nevertheless, he realized that Damon was upbraiding the girl who looked like Callista; and she flushed to the roots of her coppery hair. She said (speaking slowly, so that he would be sure to understand), “Stranger, I meant no offense. I am sure that any misunderstandings will become clear in time. For now, accept the hospitality of our house and Domain. Here is fire; food will be brought to you as soon as it is cooked. Have you any other need I have neglected to supply?”

“I’d like to get out of this wet coat,” Carr said. It was beginning to steam and drip in the growing warmth of the fire. Damon came to help him unwrap it, and laid it aside. He said, “None of your clothing is fit for the storms of our mountains, and those shoes, now, are fit only for the trashpile. They were never built for traveling in the mountains.”

Carr said, with a wry grimace, “I wasn’t exactly planning on this trip. As for this coat, it belongs to a dead man, but I was damned glad to have it.”

Damon said, “I was not intending to insult your manner of dress, stranger. The fact remains that you are unsuitably clothed, even indoors, and dangerously ill-clad for any return journey. My own clothes would hardly fit you”—Damon looked up with a laugh at the tall Earthman, a head taller than he was and probably half again his weight and girth—“but if you have no objection to wearing the clothes of a servant or one of the stewards, I think I can find something which will keep you warm.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Andrew Carr said. “I’ve been wearing these since the crash, and a change wouldn’t feel bad at all. I could use a wash, too.”

“I don’t doubt it. Very few, even of those who live in the mountains, survive being caught out in our mountain storms,” Damon said.

“I wouldn’t have lived through it, if it hadn’t been for Callista,” he answered.

Damon nodded. “I believe it. The very fact that you, a stranger to our world, survived one of our storms, says much for the truth of what you have told us. Come with me, and I’ll find you fresh clothes and a bath.”

Andrew followed Damon through the broad corridors and spacious rooms and up a long flight of shallow stairs. He conducted him at last into a suite of rooms with wide windows, covered with heavy woven draperies against the cold. Opening from one of the rooms was a large bathroom with a huge stone tub, sunk deep in the floor. Steam was rising from a fountain in the middle of the room.

“Have a hot bath, and wrap up in a blanket or something,” Damon said. “I’ll go wake up a few more of the servants, and find some clothes to fit you. Shall I send someone to help you bathe, or can you manage by yourself? Ellemir keeps few servants, but I am sure I can find someone to wait on you.”

Andrew assured Damon that he was accustomed to bathing himself without assistance, and the young man withdrew. Andrew took a long, luxurious bath, soaking to the neck in the scalding hot water
(And I thought this place was primitive, good God!)
, meanwhile wondering a little about the heating system. The ancient Romans and Cretans on Earth managed to have the most elaborate baths in history, so why shouldn’t these people? Downstairs they’d been lighting wood fires, but why not? Fireplaces were considered the height of luxury even in some societies that didn’t need them. Maybe they used natural hot springs. Anyhow, the hot water felt good, and he lingered, soaking out the stiffness of days spent sleeping on stone floors, clambering around in the mountains. Finally, feeling incredibly refreshed, he climbed out of the deep tub, dried himself, and wrapped himself in a blanket.

Soon afterward Damon returned. He looked as if he, too, had taken advantage of the time to bathe and put on fresh clothes; he looked younger and less exhausted and spent. He brought an armful of clothing, saying almost in apology, “These are poor enough garments to offer a guest; it is the hall-steward’s holiday suit.”

“At least they’re dry and clean,” Andrew said, “so thank him for me, whoever he is.”

“Come down to the hall when you’re ready,” Damon said. “There will be food cooked by then.”

Left alone, Andrew got himself into the “hall- steward’s holiday suit.” It consisted of a shirt and knee-length underdrawers of coarse linen; over which went suedelike breeches, flared somewhat from knee to ankle; a long-sleeved finely embroidered shirt with wide sleeves gathered in at the wrist; and a leather jerkin. There were knitted stockings that tied at the knee, and over them low felt boots lined with fur. In this outfit, which was more comfortable than he had thought when he looked at it, he felt warm for the first time in days. He was hungry, too, and when he opened his door to go downstairs, it was only necessary to follow the good smell of food that was rising. He did wonder, a little tardily, if this would take him, not to the hall, but to the kitchens; but the stairway ended in a corridor from which he could see the door to the Great Hall, where he had been welcomed.

Damon and Ellemir were seated at a small table, and a third chair, empty, was drawn up before it. Damon raised his head in welcome and said, “Forgive us for not waiting for you. But I was awake all night, and very hungry. Come and join us.”

Andrew took the third chair. Ellemir looked him over with mild surprise as he sat down, and said, “In those clothes you look quite like one of us. Damon has been telling me a little about your people from Terra. But I had thought that men from another world would be very different from us, more like the nonhumans in the mountains. Are you human in every way?”

Andrew laughed “Well, I seem human enough to myself,” he said. “It would seem more rational for me to ask, are
you
people human too? Most of the worlds of the Empire are inhabited by people who seem to be more or less human, at least as far as the casual observer can tell. Most people believe that all the planets were colonized by a common human stock, a few million years ago. There’s been plenty of adaptation to environment, but on planets like Terra, the human organism seems to stay fairly stable. I’m not a biologist, so I can’t answer for things like chromosomes and such, but I was told before I came here that the dominant race on Cottman Four was basically human, though there were a couple of sapient peoples that weren’t.” With a shock, he remembered what Callista had said: that she was in the hands of nonhumans. Surely she would want her kinsfolk to know. But should he spoil their breakfast? Time enough to tell them later.

Damon held a dish toward him, and he served himself with what looked—and later, tasted—like an omelet. It had herbs and unfamiliar vegetables in it, but it was good. There were fruits—the nearest analogy to what he was accustomed to were apples and plums—and a drink he had tasted in the Trade City, with the taste of bitter chocolate.

He noticed, while he ate, that Ellemir was watching him surreptitiously. He wondered if by their standards his table manners were atrociously bad, or whether it was more complicated than that.

Ellemir was still unsettling to him. She was so very like Callista, and yet in some subtle way so unlike. He could look at every feature of her face, and not see a hair’s difference from Callista: the broad high forehead, with the hair growing in small delicate tendrils at the hairline, too short to be tucked into the neat braids at the back; the high cheekbones and small straight nose with a dusting of amber freckles; the short upper lip and small determined mouth; and the small, round dimpled chin. Callista had been the first woman he had seen on this planet who had not been abundantly and warmly clad, except for the women working in the central heated spaceport offices, and those were women of the Empire.

Yes, that was the subtle difference. Callista, every time he had seen her, had been in definite undress, in her flimsy blue nightgown. He had seen almost all of her that there was to see. If any other woman had shown herself to him in that kind of attire—well, all his life Carr had been the kind of man who took his fun where he found it, without getting particularly involved. And yet when he woke and found Callista apparently sleeping at his side, and still half-sleeping had reached for her, he had been distressed and had shared her own embarrassment. Quite simply, he didn’t really want her on those terms at all. No, that wasn’t quite right. Of course he wanted her. It seemed the most natural thing that he should want her, and she had accepted it that way. But what he wanted was something more. He wanted to know her, to understand her. He wanted her to know and understand him, and care about him. At the very thought that she might have reason to fear some crude or thoughtless approach from him, Andrew had gone hot and cold all over, as if by his own clumsy reactions he might have spoiled something very sweet and precious, very perfect. Even now, when he remembered the brave little joke she had made (“Ah, this is sad! The very first time, the very first, that I lie down with any man, and I am not able to enjoy it!”), he felt a lump in his throat, an immense and completely unfamiliar tenderness.

For this girl, this Ellemir, he felt nothing of that sort at all. If he had waked up and found her asleep in his bed, he would have treated her like any other pretty girl he found there, unless she had some strenuous objection—in which case she probably wouldn’t have been there at all. But it would have meant no more than that to him, and when it was over, she would have meant no more to him than any of the various other women he had known and enjoyed for a little while. How could twins have such a subtle difference? Was it simply that intangible known as
personality?
But he hardly knew anything at all of Ellemir’s.

So how could Callista rouse in him that enormous and unqualified
yes
, that absolute self-surrender, and Ellemir simply a shrug?

Ellemir put down her spoon. She said uneasily, “Why are you
staring
at me, stranger?”

Andrew dropped his eyes. “Didn’t realize I was.”

She flushed to the roots of her hair. “Oh, don’t apologize. I was staring too. I suppose, when first I heard of men who had come here from other planets, I halfway expected them to be strange, weird, like the strange creatures of horror stories, things with horns and tails. And here you are, quite like any man from the next valley. But I am only a country girl, and not as accustomed to new things as people who live in the cities. So I am staring like any peasant who never sees anything but his own cows and sheep.”

For the first time Andrew sensed a faint, a very faint likeness to Callista: the gentle directness, the straightforward honesty, without coquetry or wariness. It warmed him to her, somehow, for all the hostility she had shown before.

Damon leaned forward, laying his hand over Ellemir’s, and said, “Child, he does not know our customs. He meant no offense. . . . Stranger, among our people it is offensive to stare at young girls. If you were one of us, I would be in honor bound to call challenge on you. Ignorance can be forgiven in a child or a stranger, but I can tell you are not a man who would deliberately offend women; so I instruct you without offense.” He smiled, as if anxious to reassure Carr that he really meant none.

Uneasily, Carr looked away from Ellemir. That was a hell of a custom; it would take some getting used to.

“I hope it’s polite to ask questions,” Andrew said. “I could use some answers. You people live here—”

“It is Ellemir’s home,” Damon said. “Her father and brothers are at Comyn Council at this season.”