When had they abandoned it? Even more, why had they abandoned it? At some time during the Ages of Chaos had it become a kind of debauchery? For whatever reasons, good or bad, it was gone, and with it the knowledge of how to unlock the channels frozen for psi work at such a high level. So the Keepers, no longer neutered, had been forced to rely on a kind of training basically inhuman, and the power of the Keepers lay in the hands of such women who were capable of withdrawing themselves thus completely from their instincts and desires.
It seemed to Damon, as he traversed the years, that he could feel within himself all the suffering of these men and women, alienated, despairing, many failing because they could not so fully separate themselves from the human lot. And those who succeeded had had to adopt impossible standards for themselves, training of an inhuman rigor, total alienation even from their own circles. But what choice had they had?
But now they would rediscover what the old rite could have done…
He was not looking at Callista but he felt her frozen decorum dissolving, felt the lessening physical rigidity, tension running out of her like running water. She had dropped into a chair. He turned and saw her smiling, stretching like a cat, holding out her arms to Andrew. Andrew went and knelt beside her, and Damon watched, thinking with longing of a lovely child in the Tower, all her exquisite spontaneity leaving her day by day, slowly changing to a prim tense silence. Now, his heart aching, he could see a little of that child in the sweet smile Callista gave Andrew. Andrew kissed her hesitantly, then with growing passion. As the fourfold rapport began to weave among them again, they all shared, for a moment, in the kiss. But Andrew, his own inhibitions broken by the kireseth, moved a little too quickly. His arms tightened around Callista, crushing her against him, and the growing demand of his kisses frightened her. In sudden panic she broke away from him, thrusting him away with the full strength of her arms, her eyes wide with dread.
Damon felt the double texture of her fear: partly she feared that what had happened before would happen again, that the reflex she could not control would strike Andrew, hurt him, kill him; partly she feared her own arousal, strange, unfamiliar. She looked at Andrew with something like terror, stared at Damon with a numb, trapped look which bewildered him.
Ellemir’s thoughts moved quickly through the growing rapport. Have you forgotten how young she is?
Andrew stared at her without comprehension. After all, Callista was Ellemir’s twin!
Yes, and after so many years as a Keeper, in some ways she is older, but all of that is gone from her mind now. She is, essentially, the little girl of thirteen who went to the Tower. For her, sex is still a memory of terror and pain, and how she nearly killed you. She has nothing good to remember except a few kisses among the flowers. Leave her to me for a little, Andrew.
Reluctantly Andrew drew away from Callista, and Ellemir put an arm around her twin’s shrinking shoulders. None of them needed to speak aloud now, and didn’t bother.
Come with me, darling, it won’t hurt them to wait until you are ready. She led her into the inner room, telling her, This is your real wedding night, Callista, and there will be no crude horseplay and jokes.
Pliant as a child, and to Ellemir she seemed almost like a child, Callista allowed her twin to undress her, to remove the paint with which she had concealed the red marks on her face, to brush out her long hair over her shoulders, put her into a nightgown. The touch laid them open to one another, Ellemir’s guard also going down under the growing influence of the kireseth. She felt the flood of memories her twin had not been able to share when they had tried, on the night before their wedding, to exchange hesitant confidences.
Ellemir felt and experienced, with Callista, the conditioning to withdrawal, the harsh discipline against even a random touch of any other human hand. With overwhelming horror, she looked at the small healed scars on Callista’s wrists and hands, awash with the physical and emotional anguish of those first terrible years in the Tower. And Damon had a part in this! For a moment she shared Callista’s agonized resentment, the rage never given voice or outlet, poured into a tension and force whose only outlet was through the focused energy of the matrix screens and relays.
She reexperienced with Callista the slow, inexorable deadening of normal physical responses, the numbing of bodily reflexes, the hardening of tensions in mind and body into a rigid armoring. Callista, by the third year in Arilinn, had no longer been lonely, had no longer craved human contact or emotional nourishment.
She was a Keeper.
It was a miracle, Ellemir realized, that she had any human compassion, any real feeling left at all. In a few more years it would have been too late; even kireseth could not have dissolved away the hard armor of the years, the imprint in the mind of so much tension.
But the kireseth had dissolved the patterning in Callista, leaving her a trembling child. Her mind was freed, and her body was no longer bound by the inexorable reflexes of the training, but with it had gone all the intellectual acceptance and maturity with which Callista had overlaid her inexperience, and she was a frightened little girl. Essentially, Ellemir thought with deep compassion, Callista was younger than she herself had been when she took her own first lover.
After being freed like this, Callista should have had a year or two to grow up normally, to come first to emotional and then to physical awareness of love. But she did not have that much time. She had only tonight, to cross a gulf of years.
With anguished empathy, cradling the shaking girl in her arms, Ellemir wished she could give Callista some of her own acceptance. Callista did not lack courage — no one who had been able to endure that kind of training could be thought lacking in courage. She would harden herself, go through with the consummation, so that she could face the Council tomorrow and swear that it had been done, but, Ellemir feared, it would be an ordeal, a test of courage, not the joyous thing it should have been.
It was cruel, Ellemir decided. They were asking a child to consent to her own rape — for in essence that was what it would be!
She would not be the first. So many women of Comyn were married, almost as children, to men they hardly knew and did not love. Callista had courage, so she would not rebel. And she really loved Andrew. But still, Ellemir thought, it would be a wretched wedding night for her, poor child.
Time was the one thing she needed, and the one thing Ellemir could not give her.
She felt Callista’s tentative touch on her mind, a reaching for reassurance, and suddenly realized that there was a way to share her own experience with her twin. They were both telepaths. Ellemir had always been doubtful, hesitant about her own laran, but under the kireseth she too was discovering a new potential, a new growth.
Confidently, holding Callista’s hands in hers, she let her mind drift back to her fifteenth year, the time of Dorian’s pregnancy, her growing closeness to Dorian’s young husband, the agreement of the sisters that Ellemir should take Dorian’s place in his bed. Ellemir had been a little afraid, not of the experience itself, but that Mikhail might think her ignorant or childish, too young, too inexperienced, not a fit substitute for Dorian. When he first came to her, and Ellemir had not remembered this in years, she had been paralyzed with fright, almost as frightened as Callista was now. Would he find her awkward, ugly?
And yet how easy it had been, how simple and pleasant, after all, how foolish her apprehension had seemed. When Dorian’s child was born and the time was at an end, she had regretted it.