Andrew lay very still, rigidly forcing himself not to move physically apart from Damon. He is my friend. It isn’t that important. But the moment was gone. Damon turned away, burying his face in the pillow, and his voice came hoarsely:
“Zandru’s hells, Andrew, how long do you and I have to be afraid of each other?”
Andrew, blinking, surfaced slowly from the confusion. He realized only dimly what had happened. He turned and laid a hand on Damon’s shaking shoulder, saying awkwardly, “I’m sorry, brother. You startled me, that’s all.”
Damon had control of himself again, but he had been caught at the deepest moment of vulnerability, wholly open to all of them, and the rebuff had hurt unimaginably. Even so, he was a Ridenow, and an empath, and he grieved at Andrew’s regret and guilt. “Another of your cultural taboos?”
Andrew nodded, shaken. It had never occurred to him that anything he could do, anything, could hurt Damon so enormously. “I’m — Damon, I’m sorry. It was just sort of… sort of a reflex, that’s all.” Awkward, still scared at the immensity of what he had done to Damon, he bent and hugged him a little. Damon laughed, returned the hug, and sat up. He felt drained, aching, but the disorientation was gone.
Shock treatment, he realized. Soothing was effective in hysteria. So was a good hard slap. When he got up to wash and dress he felt gratifyingly solid, real to himself again. He thought, soberly, that it was not so bad, after all. This time, when Andrew received a shock to one of his ingrained taboos, he didn’t run away or try to shake loose. He knew he’d hurt Damon, and accepted it.
They both lingered a moment in the outer room of the suite when the women had dressed and gone. Andrew glanced at Damon with constraint, wondering if Damon was still angry with him.
“Not angry,” Damon said aloud. “I should have expected it. You have always been afraid of male sexuality, haven’t you? That first night, when you and Callista went into rapport with Ellemir and me, I sensed that. There was so much else to worry about that night, I’d forgotten, but when we touched by accident, in the link, you panicked.” He felt again Andrew’s tentative response, his troubled withdrawal. “Is it culturally necessary to regard all male sexuality except your own as a threat?”
“Not afraid,” said Andrew, with a glint of anger, “repelled when it’s directed at me.”
Damon shrugged. “Humans are not herd animals who regard every other male as a rival or a threat. Is it impossible for you to take pleasure in male sexuality?”
Andrew said, with distaste, “Hell, yes. Do you?”
“Of course,” Damon said, bewildered. “I cherish the… the awareness of your maleness as I cherish the femininity of the women. Is that so hard to understand? It makes me more aware of my own… own manhood—” He broke off with an uneasy laugh. “How can we get into a tangle like this? Even telepathy is no good, there are no mental images to go with the words.” He added, more gently, “I’m not a lover of men, Andrew. But I find it hard to understand that kind of… fear.”
Andrew muttered, not looking at him, “I guess it doesn’t matter all that much. Not here.”
Damon felt dismay that something so simple to him should cause such enormous self-doubt, real fear, in his friend. He said, troubled, “No, but Andrew, we’re married to twin sisters. We will probably spend a lot of our lives together. Am I always going to have to fear that a moment of… of affection will alienate you, upset you to the point where all of us, even the women, are hurt by it? Are you always going to fear that I will… will overstep some invisible boundary, try to force something on you which… which repels you like this? How long” — his voice broke — “how long are you going to be on guard against me?”
Andrew felt intense discomfort. He wished he were a thousand miles away, that he need not stand like this, exposed to Damon’s intensity, his closeness. He had never realized what it was to be a telepath and part of a group like this, where there was no way to hide. Every time they tried to hide from each other they got into trouble. They had to face things. Abruptly he raised his head and looked straight at Damon. He said in a low voice, “Look, you’re my friend. Anything you want is… is always going to be okay with me, I’ll try not to… get so upset about things. I” — not even their hands touched, but it felt somehow as if he and Damon were close together, embracing like brothers — “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, Damon, and if you don’t know it, you ought to.”
Damon looked up at him, tremendously touched and moved, sensing the enormous courage it had taken for Andrew to say this. An outsider; and he had come so far. Knowing that Andrew had gone more than halfway to heal the rift he had made, he touched him lightly on the wrist, the feather-touch telepaths used among themselves to intensify closeness. He said, very gently, “And I’ll try and remember that this is still strange to you. You are so much one of us now that I forget to make allowances. And now enough of that. There is work to be done. I must look everywhere in the archives of Armida to find if there is any record of the old Year’s End festival before the Ages of Chaos and the burning of Neskaya. Failing that, I must look in the records of all the other Towers, and some of that must be done through the telepath relays. I cannot travel to Arilinn and to Neskaya and to ‘Dalereuth, but truly, I think now that we will some day have the answer.”
He began to tell Andrew about it. He still felt weary and depressed, the residual fatigue from the long overworld journey overwhelming him with the inevitable reaction. He told himself that he must not blame Andrew for his own state of mind. It would be easier when they were all back to normal.
But at least, he thought, there was now something like a hope for that.
Chapter Sixteen
The search in the archives of Armida was unproductive. There were records of all kinds of festivals which had at one time or another been customary in the Kilghard Hills, but the only Year’s End festival he could discover was an old fertility ritual which had died out considerably before the time of the burning of Neskaya and which seemed to have rather less than no bearing at all on Callista’s problem. Now that the search was underway, however, she was patient, and her health continued to improve.
Her menstruation had returned twice, but although Damon insisted that she should spend a precautionary day in bed each time, and he had been prepared to clear her channels again if needed, they remained clear. It was a good sign for her physical health, but a poor one for the eventual development of normal selectivity of the channels!
The normal winter work at Armida moved on, a mild winter, toward the spring thaw. As usual in winter, Armida was isolated, with few tidings of what happened in the outside world. Small bits of news took on major importance. A brood mare in one of the lower pastures gave birth to twin foals, both fillies. Dam Esteban gave them to Callista and Ellemir, saying that they should have matched saddle horses in a few years if they chose. The old minstrel Yashri, who had played for the dancing at Midwinter, broke two fingers of his hand in a fall during a drunken birthday party in the village, and his nine-year-old grandson came proudly to Armida, carrying his grandsire’s harp — which was nearly as tall as he was — to play dances for them in the long evenings. A woman on the further edge of the estate gave birth to four children at a single birth, and Callista rode with Ferrika out to the village where it had happened, to deliver gifts and good-will wishes. An overnight storm forced her to spend two nights away from home, to Andrew’s dread and worry. When she returned and he asked why this had been necessary, she told him gently, “It is needful for the safety of the babes, my husband. In the far hills the people are ignorant. They regard such a birth as a portent of luck, evil or good, and who is to know how it will take them? Ferrika can tell them this is nonsense, but she is one of themselves and they will not listen to her, though she is a midwife trained in Arilinn, a Free Amazon, and probably much more intelligent than I am. But I am Comyn, and a leronis. When I take gifts to the children, and comforts to the mother, the people know I have them under my protection, and at least they will not treat them as some frightful omen of catastrophe to come.”