“Not quite.” But her voice shook. “Not in quite… quite the same way. We can’t help, all we can do is… stay out of it. And I’m not… used to being shut out this way.” She blinked ferociously.
So like Callista and so unlike, Andrew thought. He’d grown so used to thinking of her as stronger than Callista, yet Callista had lived through that ordeal in the caves. She was no fragile maiden in distress, not half as frail as he thought she was. No Keeper could be weak. It was a different kind of strength. Even now, refusing the drug Damon offered to give her.
Ellemir said, sipping the fiery stuff, “Damon has always hated this work. But he’ll do it for Callie’s sake. And,” she added after a moment, “for yours.”
He replied in a low voice, “Damon’s been a good friend to me. I know it.”
“You seem to find it hard to show it,” Ellemir said, “but I suppose that is the way you were taught to react to people in your own world. It must be very hard for you,” she added. “I don’t suppose I can even imagine how hard it is for you here, to find everyone thinking in strange ways, with every little thing different. And I suppose the little things are harder to get used to than the big ones. The big ones you get used to, you make up your mind to them. The little things come along unexpectedly, when you aren’t thinking about them, aren’t braced against them.”
How perceptive of her to see that, Andrew thought. It was, indeed, the little things. Damon’s — and Ellemir’s own — careless nudity which made him awkward and self-conscious as if all the unthinking habits of a lifetime were constrained and somehow rude; the odd texture of the bread; Damon kissing Dom Esteban, without self-consciousness, in greeting; Callista, in the early days when they had shared a room, not embarrassed when he saw her half dressed about the room or once, by accident, wholly naked in her bath, but coloring and stammering with embarrassment when once he came up behind her and lifted up the long strands of loosened hair from her bare neck. He said in a low voice, “I’m trying to get used to your customs…”
She said, refilling his glass, “Andrew, I want to talk to you.”
It was Callista’s own phrase, and it made him somehow braced and wary. “I’m listening.”
“Callista told you that night” — instantly he knew the night she meant — “what I had offered. Why did it make you angry? Do you really dislike me as much as that?”
“Dislike you? Of course not,” Andrew said, “but—” and he stopped, literally speechless. “It hardly seems fair for you to tempt me like this.”
“Have you been fair to any of us?” she exclaimed. “Is it fair for you to insist on remaining in such a state when we all have to share it, like it or not? You are — you have been for a long time — in an appalling state of sexual need. Do you think I don’t know it? Do you think Callista doesn’t know it?”
He felt stung, invaded. “What business is that of yours?”
She flung her head back and said, “You know perfectly well why it is my affair. Yet Callista said you refused…”
Damn it, it had been an outrageous suggestion, but Callista at least, had had the decency to be a little diffident about it! And Ellemir was so like Callista that he could hardly help reacting to her very presence. He set his mouth and said tersely, “I can control it. I’m not an animal.”
“What are you? A cabbage plant? Control it? Maybe I wasn’t suggesting that otherwise you might go out and rape the first woman you see. But that doesn’t mean the need isn’t there. So in essence you are lying to us with everything you do, everything you are.”
“God almighty!” he exploded. “Is there no privacy here?”
“Of course. Have you noticed? My father hasn’t been asking any questions that would make any of us feel awkward. It really isn’t his business, you see. He won’t pry. None of us will ever know whether he knows anything about this at all. But the four of us — it’s different, Andrew. Can’t you be honest with us, at least?”
“What am I supposed to do then? Torment her for what she can’t give me?” He remembered the night when he had done just that. “I can’t do that again!”
“Of course not. But can’t you see that’s part of what’s hurting Callista? She was terribly aware of your need, so that at last she risked… what finally did happen, because she knew your need, and that you couldn’t accept anything else. Are you going to go on like that, adding to her guilt… and ours?”
Sleeplessness, worry and fatigue, and the strong cordial on an empty stomach, had hit Andrew hard, blurring his perceptions till the outrageous things Ellemir was saying almost made sense. If he had done what Callista asked, it would never have come to this…
It wasn’t fair. So like Callista and so terribly unlike… you could strike sparks off this one! “I am Damon’s friend. How could I do that to him?”
“Damon is your friend,” she retorted, real anger in her voice. “Do you think he enjoys your suffering? Or are you arrogant enough to think” — her voice shook — “that you could make me care less for Damon because I do for you what any decent woman would want to do, seeing a friend in such a state?”
Andrew met her eyes, matching her anger. “Since we’re being so overwhelmingly honest, did it occur to you that it isn’t you I want?” Even now it was only because she was there, so like Callista as she should have been.
Her anger was suddenly gone. “Dear brother” — bredu was the word she used — “I know it is Callista you love. But it was I in your dream.”
“A physical reflex,” he said brutally.
“Well, that’s real too. And it would mean, at least, that you need no longer torment Callista for what she cannot give you.” She reached to refill his glass. He stopped her.
“No more. I’m already half drunk. Damn it, does it matter whether I torment her that way, or by going off and falling into bed with someone else?”
“I don’t understand.” He felt that Ellemir’s confusion was genuine. “Do you mean that a woman of your people, if she could not for some reason share her husband’s bed, would be angry if he found… comfort elsewhere? How strange and how cruel!”
“I guess most women think that if they… if they have to asbtain for some reason, it’s only fair for the man to share the… the abstention.” He fumbled. “Look, if Callista’s unhappy too, and I go off to get myself laid — oh, hell, I don’t know the polite words — isn’t it pretty rotten of me to act as if her unhappiness doesn’t matter, as long as my own needs are met?”
Ellemir laid a gentle hand on his arm. “That does you credit, Andrew. But I find it hard to imagine that a woman who loved a man wouldn’t be glad to know he was satisfied somehow.”
“But wouldn’t she feel as if I didn’t love her enough to wait for her?”
“Do you think you would love Callista less if you were to lie with me?”
He returned her gaze steadily. “Nothing in this world could make me love Callista less. Nothing.”
She shrugged slightly. “So how could she be hurt? And think about this, Andrew. Suppose that someone other than yourself could help Callista break the bonds she did not seek and cannot break. Would you be angry with her, or love her less?”
Touched on the raw, Andrew remembered the moment when it seemed that Damon had come between them, his almost frantic jealousy. “Do you expect me to believe a man wouldn’t mind that, here?”
“You told me only now that nothing could make you love her less. Would you forbid her, then?”
“Forbid her? No,” Andrew said, “but I might wonder how deep her love went.”