“I thought you content with power and reverence, Leonie, with the highest place of all, equal to any Comyn lord — Leonie of Arilinn, Lady of Darkover.”
She said, the words coming from immense distances, “Had you known I rebelled, then would I have been a failure, Damon. My very life, my sanity, my place as Keeper, depended on that, that I should hardly know it myself. Yet I tried again and again to train another to take my place, so I could lay down a burden too heavy for me. Always when I had trained a Keeper, some other Tower would discover that their Keeper had chosen to leave them, or that her training had failed and she was fit for nothing but to leave and marry. A fine lot of weak and aimless women they were, none with the strength to endure. I was the only Keeper in all the Domains who held my office past twenty years. And even when I began to grow old, three times I gave up my own successor, twice to go to Dalereuth and once to Neskaya, and I who had trained a Keeper for every Tower in the Domains wished to train one for Arilinn, so that I might have some rest. You were there, Damon, you saw what happened. Six young girls, each with the talent to work as Keeper. But three were already women and, young as they were, had known some sexual wakening. Their channels were already differentiated and could not carry such strong frequencies, though two of them later became monitors and technicians, in Arilinn or in Neskaya. Then I began to choose younger and younger girls, almost children. I came near to success with Hilary. Two years she worked with me as underKeeper, rikhi, but you know what she endured, and at last I felt I must take pity on her and let her go. Then Callista—”
“And you made sure she would not fail,” Damon said, enraged, “by altering her channels so she could not mature!”
“I am a Keeper,” Leonie said angrily, “and responsible only to my own conscience! And she consented to what was done. Could I foresee that her fancy would light on this Terranan, and her oath would be as nothing to her?”
Before Damon’s accusing silence she added, defensively, “And even so, Damon, I love her, I could not bear her unhappiness! Had I believed it only a childish fancy, I would have brought her back here to Arilinn with me. I would have showered her with so much love and tenderness that she would never regret her Terran lover. And yet… and yet she made me believe…” In the fluid levels of the overworld, Damon could see and share with Leonie the image Leonie had seen in Callista’s mind: Callista lying in Andrew’s arms, spent and vulnerable, as he carried her from the caves of Corresanti.
Now that he had seen her, if only reflected in Leonie’s mind, as she might have been, undamaged, unchanged — having once seen Callista like that — he knew he would never be content until he had seen her so again. He said quietly, “I cannot believe you would have done this if you did not believe it could be undone.”
“I am a Keeper,” she repeated indomitably, “and responsible only to my own conscience.”
This was true. By the law of the Towers, a Keeper was infallible, her lightest word law where every member of her circle was concerned. Yet Damon persisted.
“If it was so, why did you not neuter her, and have done with it?” She was silent. At last she said, “You speak so because you are a man, Damon, and to you a woman is nothing but a wife, an instrument to give you sons, to pass on your precious Comyn heritage. I have other purposes. Damon, I was so weary, and I felt I could not bear to spend my energy and strength, to put all my heart into her for years and years, and then watch her waken, and go from me into some man’s arms. Or, like Hilary, to sicken and suffer the tortures of a damned soul with every waxing moon. It was not selfishness, Damon! It was not only a longing to lay down my own work and have rest! I loved her as I had never loved Hilary. I knew she would not fail, but I feared she was too strong to give way, even under such suffering as Hilary’s, that she would endure it — as I did, Damon — year after long year. So I spared her this, as I had the right to do.” She added defiantly, “I was her Keeper!”
“And you removed her right to choose!” .
“No woman of the Comyn has choice,” Leonie said almost in a whisper, “not truly. I did not choose to be Keeper, or to be sent to a Tower. I was a Hastur, and it was my destiny, just as the destiny of my playmates was to marry and bear sons to their clans. And it was not irrevocable. In my own childhood I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she told me it was reversible. She told me it was lawful, where neutering was not, so that women might be reclaimed, if their parents chose, for those dynastic marriages so dear to Comyn hearts, and there was no chance of impairing the precious fertility of a Comyn daughter!” The sarcasm in her voice was so bitter that Damon quailed.
“It is reversible — how?” Damon demanded. “Callista cannot live like this, neither Keeper nor free.”
“I do not know,” Leonie said. “When it was done, I never believed it would have to be reversed, and so I made no plans for this day. But I was glad — as near as anything could make me glad — when she told me I had wrought less well than I thought.” Again he shared with Leonie the brief vision of Callista in Andrew’s arms as he carried her from Corresanti. “But it seems she was mistaken.”
Leonie looked wrung and exhausted. “Damon, Damon, let her come back to us! Is it so evil a thing, that she should be Lady of Arilinn? Why should she give that up, to be wife to some Terranan and bear his half-caste brats?”
Damon answered, and knew his voice was shaking, “If she wished to be Lady of Arilinn, I would lay down my life defending her right to remain so. But she has chosen otherwise. She is wife to an honorable man I am proud to call brother, and I do not want to see their happiness destroyed. But even if Andrew were not my friend, I would defend Callista’s right to order her life as she will. To lay down the title of Lady of Arilinn, if she so desires, to be wife to a charcoal-burner in the forest, or to take up sword like the Lady Bruna her foremother and command the Guards in her brother’s place! It is her life, Leonie, not mine or yours!”
Leonie buried her face in her hands. Her voice was sick and choked. “Be it so, then. She shall have choice, though I had none, though you had none. She shall choose what you men of Darkover have called the only fit life for a woman! And it is I who must suffer for her choice, bearing the weight of Arilinn till Janine is old enough and strong enough to bear the burden.” Her face was so old and bitter that Damon shrank from her.
But he thought that it was no true burden to her. Once, perhaps, she might have laid it down. But now she had nothing else, and it was everything to her, to have this power of life and death over them all, all the poor wretches who gave their lives for the Towers. It meant much to her, he knew, that Callista had to come to her and beg for what should be hers by right!
He said, making his voice hard, “It has always been the law. I have heard you say that the life of a Keeper is too hard to be borne unconsenting. And it has always been so, that a Keeper is freed when she can no longer do her work in safety. You said it, yes, you are a Keeper and responsible only for your own conscience. But what is it to be a Keeper, Leonie, if the conscience of a Keeper does not demand an honesty worthy of a Keeper, or of a Hastur!”
There was another long silence. At last she said, “On the word of a Hastur, Damon, I do not know how it is to be undone. All my search of the records has told me only that in the old days, when this was commonly done — it was done after the Towers had ceased to neuter their Keepers, so that the sacred fertility of a Comynara need not suffer even in theory — such Keepers were sent to Neskaya. So I sought there for the records. Theolinda, at Neskaya, told me that all the manuscripts were destroyed when Neskaya was burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos. And so, although I still feel Callista should return to us, there is only one way to rediscover what must be done for Callista. Damon, do you know what is meant by Timesearch?”