Darkover: First Contact (55 page)

Three days later, Alaric-Rafael, heir to Asturias, was solemnly crowned in the regency of his father. Bard repeated in public the oath he had sworn to his brother, and Alaric presented him with a beautifully worked heirloom sword—Bard knew it was one his father had kept for many years, hoping that his one legitimate son would bear it into battle one day. But it was abundantly clear that King Alaric, whatever kind of ruler he might be, would not be a great warrior; so Bard accepted the sword from his brother’s hands, and with it the command of all the armies of Asturias and all her subject kingdoms.

And as general of Marenji, he thought, he was legally entitled to go into that country and deal with those damned women on the Island of Silence!

I could declare them a treasonable assembly, and give them notice to quit the island!
He was sure the people of Marenji would consider this a blasphemy, at present. But he asked Alaric to issue a proclamation that the people of Marenji were believed to be hiding the handfasted wife of Bard di Asturien; and that any person concealing the whereabouts of Carlina di Asturien would be considered a traitor and subjected to the extreme penalties of the law.

Alaric issued the proclamation, but in private he expressed dismay to Bard.

“Why do you want a woman who doesn’t want you? I think you ought to marry Melisendra. She’s very nice, and she’s the mother of your son, and Erlend ought to be legitimate, he’s a fine boy, and
laran
-gifted. Marry her, and I’ll give you a fine wedding.”

Bard said firmly that his brother and his lord ought not to talk about things he would not understand until he was older.

“Well, if I were ten years older, I’d marry Melisendra myself, so there,” Alaric said. “I like her. She’s good to me, she never makes me feel like a cripple.”

“She had better not,” Bard growled. “If she dared to be rude to you, I’d break her neck, and she knows it!”

“Well, I
am
a cripple, and I must learn to live with it,” said Alaric, “and Lady Hastur, the
leronis
who cared for me at Neskaya, who helped me to talk again, taught me that it does not matter if my body is lamed. And Geremy—he is crippled, and yet he is a fine man, strong and honorable—it will be very hard for me to learn to think of the Hasturs as enemies,” he added with a sigh. “I find it hard to understand politics, Bard. I wish there could be peace among all people, and then we could be friends with the Lord Varzil, who has been like a foster father to me. But I am used to being treated like a cripple, because I
am,
and I must have help to dress myself, and walk—but someone like Melisendra, she helps me not to mind so much, because she helps me to feel, even when she is helping to tie me into my leg brace, that I am no worse off than anyone else.”

“You are the king,” Bard said, but Alaric sighed, a resigned sigh.

“You don’t know what I mean
at all
, do you, Bard? You’re so strong, and you’ve never been really sick, or frightened, so how could you know? Do you know what it’s like to be really
scared
, Bard? When I first had the fever, and I couldn’t even
breathe
. . . Geremy, and three of Ardrin’s healer-women, sat up with me all night with their starstones, for seven nights, just helping me to breathe when I couldn’t.”

Bard thought against his will of the terror that had gripped him on the shores of the Lake of Silence when the eerie faces in the fog had drifted around him, turning his bowels to water . . . but even to his brother he would not confess that. “I was afraid when I rode first into battle,” he said. That he did not mind saying.

Alaric sighed enviously. “You were no older than I am now, and you were made King Ardrin’s banner bearer! But it’s different, Bard; you had a sword, you could
do
something against your fear, and I could—could only lie there and wonder if I was going to die, and know I had no way to help it, one way or the other, I was wholly helpless. And after that you—you always know that it can happen again, that you can die, or be destroyed. No matter how brave I am, I know, now, that there will always be something I can’t fight,” Alaric said. “And with some people, I feel like that all the time, that poor, sick, paralyzed coward. And some, like Varzil, and Melisendra, remind me that I don’t have to be that way, that life is really not so terrible—do you know what I mean, Bard? Even a little?”

Bard looked at the boy and sighed, knowing that his brother was pleading for understanding, and not knowing how to give it to him. He had seen soldiers like this, wounded almost to death, and when they lived, after all, something had happened within them that he did not understand. That had happened to Alaric, but it had happened to him before he was old enough to face it.

“I think you are alone too much,” he said, “and it makes you fanciful. But I am glad Melisendra is kind to you.”

Alaric sighed and held out his hand, small and white, to Bard, who engulfed it in his huge browned one. Bard, he thought, didn’t understand him at all, but he loved him, and that was just as good.

“I hope you get your wife back, Bard. It’s very wicked of people to keep her from you.”

Bard said, “Alaric, Father and I must be away from court for a few days. Father and I and some of his
leroni
. Dom Jerral will be here to advise you, if you need him.”

“Where are you going?”

“Father knows of someone who would be a great help in commanding the armies, and we are going to find him.”

“Why not simply order him to come to court? The regent can command anyone to come.”

“We do not know where he lives,” Bard said. “We must find him by
laran
.” That, he thought, was quite explanation enough.

“Well, if you must go, you must. But please, can Melisendra stay with me?” he asked, and Bard, though he knew Melisendra was one of the most skilled
leroni,
decided not to refuse his brother.

“If you want Melisendra,” he said, “she shall certainly stay with you.”

He had braced himself for an argument with his father, but to his surprise, Dom Rafael nodded.

“I had not intended to bring Melisendra in any case; she is the mother of your son.”

Bard wondered what difference that made, but he did not bother to ask. It was enough for him that his brother wanted Melisendra’s company.

They left the castle that night and rode toward Bard’s old home. Three
leroni,
two woman and a man, had accompanied them, and Dom Rafael led them to a room Bard had never seen before, in an old tower room at the end of a broken staircase.

“I have not used any of these things in decades,” be said, “but
laran
-craft, once learned, is not forgotten.” He turned to the wizards and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

The man looked at the apparatus, and then at his two comrades, and Dom Rafael, in dismay. “I know, my lord. But I thought the use of such things was outlawed outside the safety of a Tower.”

“In Asturias, there is no law but mine! Can you use it?”

The
laranzu
glanced again, uneasily, at the women. He said, “A duplicate under Cherillys’ Law? I suppose so. But of what or whom?”

“Of my son here; the commander of King Alaric’s armies.”

One of the women looked at Bard and he caught the ironic flicker of her thought.
Another of the Kilghard Wolf? I should think one of him to be more than abundance!
He supposed she was a friend of Melisendra’s. But they shrugged, quickly shielded again, and said, “Yes, my lord, if that is your wish.”

He could sense their surprise, distaste, wonder; but they made no audible protest, making their preparations, setting seals on the room so that no alien presences could enter and no other
leroni
spy on them from elsewhere.

When all was prepared, Dom Rafael signaled to Bard to take his place before the screen, to remain silent and motionless. He obeyed, kneeling silently. He was so placed that he could not see his father, nor any of the three telepaths, but he sensed them near him. Bard did not think he had much
laran,
and what he did have had never been properly trained. He had always rather despised the art of sorcery, thinking it a skill or craft for women; he felt a little frightened as the almost tangible web of their thoughts tightened around him. He sensed that they were extending their thoughts
into
him, deep into brain and body, seeking out the very pattern of his being; he thought, fancifully, that they were seeking out his very soul, tying it up tight and imprisoning it in that glassy screen there.

He could not move a finger or a foot. He felt a moment of paralyzed panic . . . no. This was a perfectly ordinary piece of
laran
sorcery, with nothing to fear; his father would not let anything harm him.

He remained motionless, looking at his reflection in the glassy surface. Somehow he knew it was not only the reflected shadow on glass but
himself
there in that multilayered screen, reinforced at all levels with starstone crystals which resonated to the starstones of the
leroni
around him. He felt the combined web of their layered thoughts swing out over vast gulfs of empty space, extending, searching, searching to find something to fit that pattern, fit it
exactly
. . . something came near, close to touching . . . near to captive . . . no. It was not a duplicate, a resemblance, touching perhaps at ninety out of a hundred, but not the exact duplicate which alone could be captured within the screen. He felt the
other
slide away, vanish, as the search swung out again.

(Far away in the Kilghard hills, a man named Gwynn, an outlaw and fatherless—although his mother had told him he had been fathered in the sack of Scathfell by Ansel, son of Ardrin the first of Asturias, thirty years ago—woke from an evil dream in which faces had swung around him, circling, swooping like hawks on their prey, and one of the faces was like his own as twin to twin . . . .)

Again the web swung out, this time over greater gulfs, starless night, a tremendous void beyond space and time, with swirling, nightmarish vortexes of terrible nothingness. Again a shadow formed behind Bard on the screen, shimmered, wavered, twitched, struggled as a sleeper struggles to wake from nightmare; somewhere a spark flared in Bard’s brain; myself, or the
other?
He did not know, could not guess. It struggled for freedom but they held it, imprisoned in their web, moving from point to point of the pattern encased in the screen . . . searching to see that every atom, every trifle was congruent, identical....

Bard saw in his mind before his eyes saw the flare of lightnings in the room, a searing shock as the
other
was torn loose from the shadow in his mind, the pattern doubled and breaking, splitting apart . . . terror flamed in him; was it his own fear, or the terror of the
other
, unimaginably hurled across that great gulf of space. . . . He caught a glimpse of a great yellow sun, hurling worlds, stars flaming across the dark void, galaxies spinning and drifting in shock. . . . Lightning crashed through his brain and he lost consciousness.

He stirred, conscious now of savage headaches, pain, confusion. Dom Rafael was lifting him, feeling his pulse. Then he let him go and went past, and Bard, sick and stunned with the lightning, followed with his eyes; and the
leroni,
behind him, watching, looked dazed too. He caught a wisp of thought from one of them,
I don’t believe it. I did it, I was part of it but still I don’t believe it. . . .

Lying on the floor at the opposite pole of the great screen lay the naked body of a man. And Bard, though he had been prepared intellectually for this, felt a surge of gut-wrenching terror.

For the man lying on the floor was himself.

Not someone very much like him. Not an accidental or close family resemblance.
Himself.

Broad-shouldered, and halfway between them, the blackish blotch of a birthmark which he had seen only in a mirror. The muscles bunching in his sword arm, the same dark-reddish patch of hair at the loins, the same crooked toe on the left foot.

Then he began to see differences. The hair was cut a little shorter, though at the crown of his head there was the same unruly whorl. There was no scar across the knee; the double had not been at the battle of Raven’s Glen and did not have the sword-slash he had taken there. The other did not have the thick callous at the inside of the elbow where the shield strap rested. And these little differences somehow made it worse. The man was not simply a magical duplicate created somehow by the
laran
of the screen; be was a real human being, from
somewhere else,
who was, none the less, precisely and exactly Bard di Asturien.