“Were you hurt, Dio?” he asked, his hand lingering on her cheek. “There’s blood on your face.”
“It’s the bird’s blood. It’s on you too,” she said, and wiped it away. He took her hand in his and pressed the fingertips to his lips. Somehow the gesture made her want to cry again. She asked, “Were you hurt when you fell?”
“Not much,” he said, testing his muscles cautiously. “They taught me, in the Empire hospital on Terra, how to fall without hurting myself, when I was—before this healed.” Uneasily he moved the stump. “I can’t get used to the damned hand. I do better one-handed.”
She had thought he might. “Why do you wear it, then? If it’s only for looks, why do you think I would care?”
His face was bleak. “Father would care. He thinks, when I wear the empty sleeve, I am—flaunting my mutilation. Making a show of it. He hates his own lameness so much, I would rather not—not flaunt mine in his face.”
Dio thought swiftly, then decided what she could say. “You are a grown man, and so is he. He has one way of coping with his own lameness, and you have another; it is easy to see that you are very different. Would it really make him angry if you chose another way to deal with what has happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” Lew said, “but he has been so good to me, never reproached me for these years of exile, nor for the way in which I have brought all his plans to nothing. I do not want to distress him further.” He rose, went to collect the grotesque lifeless thing in its black glove, looked at it for a moment, then put it away in his saddlebag. He fumbled one-handed to pin his empty sleeve over the stump; she started to offer, matter-of-factly, to help him, and decided it was too soon. He looked into the sky. “I suppose the hawks are gone beyond recall, and we will be charged for losing them.”
“No.” She blew the silver whistle around her neck. “They are birds with brains modified so they cannot choose but come to the whistle—see?” She pointed as two distant flecks appeared in the sky, growing larger and larger; spiraling down, then landing on the saddle blocks where they sat patiently, awaiting their hoods. “Their instinct for freedom has been burnt out.”
“They are like some men I know,” said Lew, slipping the hood on his bird. Dio followed suit, but neither of them moved to mount. Dio hesitated, then decided he had probably had far too much of politely averted eyes and pretenses of courteous unawareness.
“Do you need help to mount? Can I help you, or shall I fetch someone who can?”
“Thank you, but I can manage, though it looks awkward.” Again, suddenly, he smiled and his ugly scarred face seemed handsome again to her. “How did you know it would do me good to hear that?”
“I have never been really hurt,” she said, “but one year I had a fever, and lost all my hair, and it did not grow in for half a year; and I felt so ugly you couldn’t imagine. And the one thing that bothered me worse was when everyone would say how nice I looked, tell me how pretty my dress or sash or kerchief looked, and pretend nothing at all was wrong with me. So I felt so bad about how miserable I was, as if I was making a dreadful fuss about nothing at all. So if I was—was really lamed or crippled, I think I would hate it if people made me go on acting as if nothing at all was wrong and there was nothing the matter with me. Please don’t ever think you have to pretend with me”
He drew a deep breath. “Father flies into a rage if anyone seems to notice him limping, and once or twice when I have tried to offer him my arm, he has nearly knocked me down.”
Yet, Dio thought, Kennard used his lameness, last night, to manipulate me into dancing with Lew. Why? She said, “That is the way he manages his life and his lameness. You are not your father.”
Suddenly he started shaking. He said, “Sometimes—sometimes it is hard to be sure of that,” and she remembered that the Alton gift was forced rapport. Kennard’s intense closeness to his son, his deep ambition for him, was well-known on Darkover; that closeness must become torture sometimes, make it hard for Lew to distinguish his own feelings and emotions. “It must be difficult for you; he is such a powerful telepath—”
“In all fairness,” said Lew, “it must be difficult for him too; to share everything I have lived through in these years, and there was a time when my barriers were not as strong as they are now. It must have been hell for him. But that does not make it less difficult for me.”
And if Kennard will not accept any weakness in Lew… but Dio did not pursue that. “I’m not trying to pry. If you don’t want to answer, just say so, but… Geremy lost three fingers in a duel. The Terran medics regrew them for him, as good as new. Why did they not try to do that with your hand?”
“They did,” he said. “Twice.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “Then I could bear no more. Somehow, the pattern of the cells—you are not a matrix technician, are you? It would be easier to explain this if you knew something about cell division. I wonder if you can understand—the pattern of the cells, the knowledge in the cells, that makes a hand a hand, and not an eye, or a toenail, or a wing, or a hoof, had been damaged beyond renewing. What grew at the end of my wrist was—” he drew a deep breath and she saw the horror in his eyes. “It was not a hand,” he said flatly, “I am not sure just what it was, and I do not want to know. They made a mistake with the drugs, once, and I woke and saw it. They tell me I screamed my throat raw. I do not remember. My voice has never been right since. For half a year I could not speak above a whisper.” His harsh voice was completely emotionless. “I was not myself for years. I can live with it now, because— because I must. I can face the knowledge that I am—am maimed. What I cannot face,” he said, with sudden violence, “is my father’s need to pretend that I am—am whole!”
Dio felt the surge of violent anger and was not even sure whether it was her own, or that of the man before her. She had never been so wholly aware of her own laran; the Ridenow gift, which was a sharing of emotions, full empathy, even with nonhumans, aliens— She had never had much experience with it before. Now it seemed to shake her to the core. Her voice was unsteady. “Never pretend with me, Lew. I can face you as you are—exactly as you are, always, all of you.”
He seized her in a rough grip, dragged her close. It was hardly an embrace. “Girl, do you know what you’re saying? You can’t know.”
She felt as if her own boundaries were dissolving, as if somehow she was melting into the man who stood before her. “If you can endure what you have endured, I can endure to know what it is that you have had to endure. Lew, let me prove it to you.”
In the back of her mind she wondered, why am I doing this? But she knew that when they had come into each other’s arms on the dancing floor last night, even behind the barriers of Lew’s locked defenses, their bodies had somehow made a pact. Barricade themselves from the other as they would, something in each of them had reached out to the other and accepted what the other was, wholly and forever.
She raised her face to him. His arms went round her in grateful surprise, and he murmured, still holding back, “But you are so young, chiya, you can’t know— I should be horsewhipped for this… but it has been so long, so long—” and she knew he was not speaking of the most obvious thing. She felt herself dissolve in that total awareness of him, the receding barricades… the memory of pain and horror, the starved sexuality, the ordeals which had gone on past human endurance… the black encompassing horror of guilt, of a loved one dead, self-knowledge, self-blame, mutilation almost gladly accepted as atonement for living on when she was dead—
In a desperate, hungering embrace she clasped him close, knowing it was this for which he had longed most; someone who knew all this, and could still accept him without pretense, love him nevertheless. Love; was this love, the knowledge that she would gladly take on herself all this suffering, to spare him another moment of suffering or guilt… ?