Starfire Saga, page 33
“The last time there were Severance Storms, I was only five or six,” Shenefta said, “and I can’t remember getting out of the house at all that winter.”
“You can’t remember what you did yesterday,” Pepali teased. Sejineth ordered everyone back to work.
“I’ll saddle Rocky,” I told him, and he nodded and returned to his own chores, taciturn now. Shenefta watched him walk away, pressing her lips together. “His claim went back to the house of women before the storm. He’s not happy about that.”
I refrained from saying that I didn’t think I’d ever seen Sejineth happy. Instead I went to the nearest tackroom, hauled out saddle and bridle, and took them to the shed gate, where Rocky was already waiting, as if he had known I was coming for him. Beyond the fence, I saw Tynnanna pacing back and forth, which explained why all the other tivongs were at the far end of the pen. I glanced over at them as I flung the saddle on the top rail, out of the way until I had bridled Rocky.
Tynnanna had finally been accepted by the Boru who had not seen him join me on the Plain of Convalee, but it hadn’t happened quickly. He had to hunt by night for more than a tenday, without ever touching a tivong, a dralg, or any of the fowls, before the most outspoken of his critics admitted that he did not appear to be doing any harm.
I finished securing the bridle and was reaching for the saddle when something I’d seen in the herd registered, and I looked back again. Vrand was there, tall against the others, watching Tynnanna calmly but warily. Jemeret was back, and I hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t come to find me, or reached out to touch me with the sting to let me know he had returned. And Vrand wasn’t in the pen for new returnees, but in with the herd itself, which meant he’d been here for several hours, long enough to be cleaned and pronounced unsullied by parasites.
For a moment I was tempted to skip the ride and go looking for Jemeret, but Tynnanna roared impatiently, and Rocky was tossing his head and turning himself to remind me I was supposed to be putting the saddle on him. I didn’t want to leave him standing there, looking after me with hurt and bewilderment in those gorgeous eyes. So I went on with my plans as if I did not know that my lord was once again in the village. And while I was riding, I thought about my progress with the shields.
Until Jemeret had made me aware of it, I’d never realized that my reflexive snapping up of the shields had not been by my conscious choice. The shields never went up unless I needed them, and when I was safe from whatever psychological danger had caused me to raise them, I could lower them easily because they slid all the way back down.
In the first few hours of practice, the shields’ strength made them too slippery for me to hold in the center of their range, but by the second day, I was finding fingerholds. By the third practice session, I’d discovered that the shields yielded to my deliberate choices for them, and while my control was no more subtle than my initial experience with any of my talent had been, I could feel the growing potential for some finesse.
Tynnanna must have sensed the presence of some game in the canyons at the foot of Marlith, for with a sharp, barklike noise he split off from us and vanished into one of the arroyos which led to the forested outskirts of the mountain. I knew he’d be back later.
I kept Rocky on the flats at the edge of the valley floor and gave him his head, enjoying his energy as he ran. He slowed himself when he was ready, and I turned him back toward the village, feeling contented with the day, which was now drawing toward the early winter dusk. I was also excited at the idea that Jemeret was back.
By the time I’d rubbed Rocky down and returned his saddle and bridle to the tackroom, it was nearly dark. I turned him out of the returnee paddock into the herd paddock, then put on my cloak against the increasing cold and ran back across the village toward the chief’s house, toward what I had begun to think of as home.
He must have felt me approaching.
I looked up, slowing, as the house came into sight. Jemeret was waiting for me on the porch, and there was a peculiar tension in his stance, on his face, that I didn’t think I had ever seen before. I had been improving steadily in my ability to read people in normal ways, but with Jemeret, my abilities seemed much greater. I was never certain if that was because he signaled to me or because I had simply spent more time with him than with anyone else. The tension made me wary, and the wariness was not dispelled by his smile. If he was reading me, he knew of it, but he seemed not to be reacting to it. He held out his hand to me. Walking slowly, I climbed the steps to the porch. Before he could speak, I asked, “What is it?”
“I was beginning to think you weren’t going to come back,” he said, his eyes fastened on me.
“I live here,” I said lamely.
He pulled me against him, kissing me with a peculiar intensity that seemed not to be sexual. Then he took me by the shoulders, spun me around so that he was behind me, and walked me into the house.
There was a man sitting on one of the couches with a goblet in his hand. He was wearing one of Jemeret’s tunics, and it was too big for him. When he looked up as he heard us come in, I had to suppress a scream. Jemeret’s hands clamped down on my shoulders.
The man on the couch rose, smiling a little crookedly, and said, “Hi, Ronnie.”
It was Coney.
I thought I would fly into a million pieces, and Jemeret, sensing it, stung me gently, calming me. He let go of my shoulders when he felt I was back in control of my nerves, but he didn’t stop stinging me.
“What the hell did you do to get sent here?” The question was out of me in a flash, sounding more belligerent than I might have intended.
Coney shrugged and flushed, the smile fading. “I don’t think I want to talk about it,” he said softly, looking away from me.
I glanced at Jemeret, whose face had hardened perceptibly. I couldn’t imagine what Coney could possibly have done wrong, but then, I didn’t know what I had done either.
“When did you get here?” I asked him.
And, looking back at me, Coney said, “It’s good to see you, Ronnie.”
I realized with a blush I didn’t even try to hide how unwelcoming and rude I’d just been. “It’s good to see you, too,” I said to him, “though I’d rather it wasn’t here.” And that, too, sounded awful.
Coney glanced quickly at Jemeret’s stony face, then looked back at me.
He cleared his throat. “So—you don’t like it much here?” He tried to make it a statement, but the rising note at the end gave it away.
I realized what my words had implied. “That’s not it, Coney,” I said quickly. “I love it here. I guess you will, too. It’s just that—” The words died in my mouth.
“Just that what?” That was Jemeret, his voice held expressionless.
For all its feeling, it came out of me as a whisper: “I’m nothing here, not compared to what I was supposed to be there.”
Before Jemeret could respond, Coney spoke. “I don’t intend to be nothing here, even if I wasn’t what you were, Ronnie.”
“I wasn’t what I was.” The words emerged quickly, almost without my willing them to. “Nobody could be, except for Jasin Lebec, and I don’t know how he does it. Do you remember being sent here?”
Coney glanced again at Jemeret, and something in the look disturbed me, but I couldn’t place it. Then the pale brown eyes turned back on me. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it, he said firmly. After a moment he smiled. “Tell me what it’s like here.”
Words failed me. How could I describe the overwhelming sexuality, or Jemeret’s love and support, without reminding him of the wrong I’d done him? How could I do for him what I had so wanted someone to do for me when I first arrived, bewildered and angry—neither of which emotions he seemed to be feeling at all? It was the recognition at last that he seemed so at ease here that made me uncomfortable. I wished fervently that I could probe him, to try to see what wasn’t right. Granted, I had not fully expected him to react as I had, but he wasn’t reacting at all as I might have expected him to act. Coney was an acceptor, but not necessarily of the catastrophic.
Then I felt a suspicion rise, and I frowned at him and said slowly, “They oriented you, didn’t they?” He seemed surprised by the question, and once again his gaze slid for a split second to my lord, still standing behind me. I wondered if Jemeret was stinging him to provoke a specific reaction. “The Com told you what to expect before they sent you here!” I went on.
It was accusatory, but I was angry now, and I was unwilling to try to control it. Before Coney could speak, however, it flowed through me and left me wondering. “Did they orient me, too? Is it part of what I’ve forgotten?”
“I’m not going to talk about the past,” Coney said carefully. “I gave my word not to. Don’t ask me to break it, Ronnie.”
I stared at him, torn. They had not tampered with his memory, only with his sense of honor, which was extreme, and he was asking me for the single thing that would be hardest for me to give. And yet, I owed it to him. After the slightest of hesitations, I bowed my head, acquiescing.
Jemeret had said nothing at all during the exchange, and I’d been barely aware of his hands still resting on my shoulders. Now he pressed tighter for a second, bent and kissed the top of my head. “I’m going to take our new arrival over to the house of men,” he said and let go of me. “You can see him in the morning.” He stepped around me as Coney rose. “We’ll need to choose a tribal name for you,” he said.
They walked toward the door. Something occurred to me, and as Coney drew on a cloak I heard myself say, a little awkwardly, “Just tell me—how is Kray?”
His hands faltered as they fumbled with the clasp. “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen him for more than two years.”
Then, while I was still reeling from that statement, the two of them were gone, and I fled to the bedroom, to the dressing area, to the mirror, staring at my reflection as I had in the tower room when I first arrived on this planet. Two years. Two years. Where had they gone? Where had I been? What had I done? And why couldn’t I remember?
The anger and frustration rose again, even more potent than they had been when I first confronted the existence of the wall in my mind.
And yet...
Slowly, watching my eyes in the polished metal, I went back over the memories that had been returning, carrying me through the graduation ceremony and the gala and back to my own rooms where, I felt certain, whatever it was that had happened—whatever it was that had caused them to send me here—had occurred. And it had occurred that very night, in those very rooms. I felt it with an absolute conviction unanchored in memory, almost cellular.
And then two years had gone by?
I felt something slipping, as if the ground under my feet had shifted, as if a ship entering roll had shuddered and failed to make the roll gradient, spinning out of control through normal space away from the roll point. Nausea almost overwhelmed me to a degree I hadn’t experienced in years, and I already knew trying to overcome it would only make me sicker. I ran to the bathroom and threw up until my exhaustion, ungathered, was too great to support even the dry heaves.
All my control was gone. Two years of my life had vanished—perhaps more, because Coney had only said he hadn’t seen Kray for two years, not how much after graduation that had been—and I couldn’t seem to get my mind to deal with that. In some ways it was worse than when I had first awakened here, because then there had been hope of rescue. Now there was none, and there was finality in that, but just as I’d begun to accept that I didn’t need rescue, that I could build a worthwhile life here, Coney had appeared and everything had come rushing back—except for those absent memories, so much greater and more perplexing than I had thought them to be.
I realized I was lying on the bathroom floor, sobbing, and I straightened up, mopping at my eyes with my hands. I made a barely thought-out decision that enough was enough. I would have to try to batter down the wall that stood between my consciousness and my absent memory, as I’d decided to do on the mountainside before the first storm. I figuratively picked up a rock and drew it back—
And Jemeret figuratively caught it, interposing his self between the wall and my blow, catching and absorbing its power so that the recoil did not hurt me, though I knew it must have staggered him. He was in the bathroom doorway, and now he bent and lifted me to my feet, holding me tightly against him. Even through my despair and anger, I could feel him trembling very slightly from the force that he’d absorbed. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that ever since you got here,” he said softly to me. “I can’t let you do it, love. You could do yourself irreparable damage.”
“—didn’t mean to hurt you,” I gasped out, clinging to him.
“I know.” He gently pushed my matted hair off my forehead and, wetting a towel, wiped my face with it, then tossed it aside and carried me to the bed. “I’m going to put you to sleep for a while,” he said. “We’ll talk when you wake up.” And before I could say anything else, I was sinking away into darkness.
I had always known—until I came onto this planet—that I had more power than anyone else alive. It was an immensely comforting thought, even though I knew that it separated me from all other human beings. From the day Jasin Lebec had to ask my permission to probe me until at least graduation, I had been, simply, the strongest person in the Com. I had not given much thought to the morality of using that power; it was simply something I was supposed to do, and nothing could stop me from doing it. Or so I thought.
Awakening slowly, calmly, late into the night in our home, with Jemeret sitting in one of the chairs by the fireplace watching me, I realized consciously something that I might have suspected in other ways. It was not the Class A power or my training that gave me strength; my strength was not the ability to make things happen, but rather the ability to endure the things that happened to me. And I wasn’t doing as well at it as I might have liked.
I sat up in bed. “Are you all right?” I asked him. “You took a hell of a slam from me.”
He smiled at me, that open, completely loving smile that made me warm all over. “I’m fine,” he said. “Tell me about him.”
I knew at once that he meant Coney. I drew up my knees and circled them with my arms, wondering how I could say what Coney meant to me. He waited, the smile gone, but his eyes still glowing. At last I looked at him directly. “We grew up together,” I said. “He is a part of every one of my memories. He loved me, and—” I gasped. “—I hurt him.” I looked away then, tears starting. “I hurt everyone who ever cared about me, just like I hurt you earlier today.”
His voice surprised me with its power. “You didn’t hurt me, Ronica.” He rose and came to sit on the bed beside me, his arms around me. “You were trying to hurt yourself, and I stopped you. Look at me.”
I raised my eyes. He took my face in his hands, stroking my cheekbones with his thumbs. “Believe me, you would have hurt me far more if you’d succeeded in mangling your brain than you did when I caught the blow.”
“Two years,” I said, my voice shaking in spite of myself. “I’ve lost two years. I need to know what happened.”
He went on stroking my face. “You told me you were starting to remember.”
“Not quickly enough.”
“As quickly as possible. In the meantime, you will have to learn to live with the ambiguity. Come eat something. Numima put it on the table hours ago, and she’ll be deeply offended if we don’t eat any of it.”
He got to his feet and pulled me up. I realized I was still dressed, and though I wasn’t hungry, I went with him to the dining area and nibbled whatever it was. There was clogny, and I drank deeply, grateful for the warmth as it went down. After a few minutes I asked him, “Do you mind that he loved me?”
Jemeret set down his knife and leaned back in his chair. “He still loves you,” he said evenly. “You must know that I probed him before I brought him to the Boru. He fell in the plains between us and the Genda, and he might have gone there as well as here. But when I probed him, I found him to be a fine, strong young man, and I wanted him for us. We were almost back here to Stronghome when he asked about you.”
“He knew I was here.” It was not a question. Jemeret neither confirmed nor denied it. I thought they had told him when they oriented him, or—the notion struck me suddenly—perhaps, somehow, he was here because I was here. There had to be dozens of wilderworlds. Why would the Com have sent both of us—and Sarai—to this world, unless they wanted us to be together?
I looked at my lord. “Do you mind that he still loves me?”
He shook his head. “As I said, he’s a fine young man.”
“Then why did they send him here? If he’s not maimed, like me, they would have needed him. Kray couldn’t possibly be handling everything himself. He’s not temperamentally suited for it, and he was never—” I broke off suddenly.
“Go on,” Jemeret ordered.
I’d been very careful, since my arrival here, not to use Com jargon for talent, but Coney’s presence had disoriented me. When Jemeret told me to continue, I abandoned my caution and did so. “—he was never able to accept a Class A assignment. He hated that he couldn’t.”
Jemeret sighed and pushed his plate away. “Sandalari spoke to me once about the outside, so the words you’re using are not completely alien to me. But they’re inappropriate here. We don’t divide people by their differing levels of power. We divide only those with power—the Samothen—from those without. Your friend has power, and he belongs with us.” He had not meant Kray.
“What did you decide Coney’s name would be?”
“He chose Mekonet.” He waited to see if I’d come far enough in my understanding of the language of names to interpret it, but I shook my head. “The center of the circle.”
Considering Coney’s Epicyclism, the name actually made a great deal of sense. “I can still call him Coney,” I said, pleased.
