Traitor's Sun (4 page)

M
arguerida Alton-Hastur sat at her desk and stared out the narrow window, unsettled for no reason she could put a name to. A glorious early autumn sky, with several interesting cloud shapes in it, filled the opening. She decided one resembled a camel, an animal that had never existed on Darkover and was now alive only in a few wild-life refuges, and remembered how much fun she had had when the children were little, trying to decide what clouds looked like. Once, several clouds had seemed to her gaze to be a pod of delfins frolicking in the seas of Thetis, the planet on which she had grown up. Marguerida had been unable to explain her sudden flood of tears, nor the nature of the images. Her children had never seen the sea, let alone bathed in it, and they could not understand her aching desire for warm oceans and balmy breezes. Funny—she had not thought of that day in ages. She must be getting old, wallowing in memories.

The children were all much too grown up for cloud-gaz ing now, even Yllana, the youngest, at eleven, and she rather missed the innocent game. Last Midsummer, Domenic, her eldest, had been declared his father’s heir designate, despite the very vocal protects of Javanne Hastur, her difficult mother-in-law. It hardly seemed possible—the time had passed so quickly. Before long she might become a mother-in-law herself, and then a grandmother! She hoped that she would like her yet undiscovered daughter-in-law more than Javanne liked her, that she would be kinder, or at least more polite.
But not too soon,
she whispered to herself. As difficult as being a parent had turned out to be, she was in no hurry to have her children leave her.

She looked around the small office she kept in her suite of rooms in Comyn Castle. The hearth was ablaze, and the cozy room was fragrant with the smell of burning balsam. The paneled walls shone, reflecting the dancing light from the fire, and the colors in the pattern of the rug on the stone floor pleased her. The tang of fall penetrated even through the thick walls of Comyn Castle, a fresh smell that never failed to liven her mind. It had taken a long while to get used to the weather on Darkover, for Thetis was almost an endless summer. But now she actually looked forward to changing seasons and the festivals which punctuated them.

From the next room, she could hear the delightful tinkle of a clavier, where Ida Davidson was giving Yllana her music lesson. She smiled at the sound. It was not a syn theclavier of the sort which Ida had used when Marguerida had lived in her house during her years at the University. Such a device was prohibited on Darkover, since it used the advanced technologies of the Federation. Instead, it was a reasonable imitation of the noble ancestor of that instrument, crafted wholly on Darkover, of native woods and rare Darkovan metals, made from drawings Marguerida had obtained with great difficulty from the University archives. There had never been such a keyboard instrument on Darkover before, but now, after the struggle to create the first one, there were six in Thendara. Members of the Musicians Guild were writing music specifically for them. Yllana was not playing any of these home-grown compositions, but one of the Klieg Variations from the twenty-fourth century—formal, structured and a challenge for ten small fingers.

There was nothing whatever to disturb the serenity of the moment, as a speedy mental sweep of Comyn Castle assured her. Her
laran,
which she had resented so bitterly when she first discovered she had it, had turned out to have its uses, one of which was the ability to scan the environment around her. Perhaps she was just being anxious for no reason. It had been a troubling year, with a summer that was the warmest in recent memory. The farmers had fretted over the possibility of drought, and the fire danger in the hills had been very great. There had been disturbances of another kind as well—some small riots in the markets of Thendara and reports of an uprising in Shainsa in the Dry Towns. But the rains had come in from the west at last, the balmy, near-sixty degree temperatures had vanished, and there had not been any outbreak of large fires.

She really must get down to work! This woolgathering was wasting valuable time, and her time was at a premium just now. Marguerida looked down at the stack of pages in front of her. They were staff sheets, covered with musical notation and accompanying lyrics. After nearly two decades of doubt and hesitation, she had finally succumbed to her great, secret ambition and written an opera. It had taken all of her nerve and a great deal of encouragement from Ida to get started. But once she began, it had been nearly impossible to stop. Mikhail Hastur, her beloved companion and husband of nearly sixteen years, had complained that her composing was a greater rival than any living man could be, and Marguerida knew he was only half joking.

Writing the music had been fairly easy, but finding the time—the peace and quiet to do so—had been difficult. She had a great many duties, as wife of the heir designate to Regis Hastur, and the mother of three children. Somewhat reluctantly, Marguerida had also taken over some of the task of running Comyn Castle from Lady Linnea Storn-Lanart, Regis’ consort. In the years since she had been married to Mikhail Hastur, she had done so many things she had never imagined doing when she had been a young career academic. Foremost among these things, she had learned how to manage her unique and potentially dangerous
laran
talents, guided by the Keeper Istvana Ridenow. Her friend and confidant had come to Thendara from Neskaya to help her and Mikhail right after they were married, to train them and teach them. Istvana had remained in the city for eleven years, and they had been wonderful ones for Marguerida. But now she was back in her own Tower, pursuing her own calling, and Marguerida still had to work hard at not missing her.

Reflecting for a moment on years past, she decided she had not done so badly in facing her challenges. She had read ancient texts written in the rounded alphabet of Darkover with one hand while she cradled a baby at the breast with the other. She had learned to sit through Comyn Council meetings without losing her fearsome temper, even in the presence of her mother-in-law, Javanne Hastur, who remained an enduring thorn in her side. The shadow matrix which was blazed upon her left hand, the thing she had wrested from a Tower in the overworld, still remained something of an enigma, but she had found ways to control it so that she was no longer afraid of it. It remained beyond the considerable knowledge that had been amassed over the centuries by the
leroni
of Darkover, a thing which was both real and unreal at the same time. She could heal with it, and she could kill as well, and coming to grips with both extremes had been very difficult. The years had been hard, but she had accomplished things she had never dreamed of, and she had a deep sense of satisfaction in that.

During those years of study and motherhood, however, there had been no time for the music which had once defined her life and still remained her ruling passion. Instead, she had channeled her considerable energies into less personal efforts. With the help of Thendara House, the Renunciate center in the city, she had founded a small printing house, and several schools for the children of tradesmen and crafts people. She had helped the Musicians Guild get permission to erect a new performance hall much larger than anything which had existed before, and encouraged the preservation of the fine musical tradition of Darkover in any way she could.

Marguerida’s choices had been neither altruistic nor uncomplicated. When she had returned to the world of her birth over sixteen years before, there had been a great vogue for everything concerning the Terran Federation, a condition which perturbed not only the more conservative rulers of several Domains, but bothered the craftsmen and tradesmen as well. They feared their way of life would be lost in a flood of Terran technology, and had gone so far as to petition Regis Hastur to restore the Comyn Council, which had been disbanded two decades earlier. Their demand had been unprecedented in the history of Darkover, and Regis had listened to their arguments, and restored the Council. This had kept Darkover on a path that satisfied most of its inhabitants.

But a complete return to the pre-Federation past was impossible, although there were a few members on the Council who sincerely believed otherwise. Javanne, for instance, seemed consumed with the idea that if everyone would just do things as she wished, and make a real effort, then somehow the glories of an earlier time would reappear, and the Federation would cease to trouble their minds. Francisco Ridenow, the head of the Ridenow Domain, was almost as bad.

Marguerida understood both her mother-in-law’s curious nostalgia for a time which she had never actually known—for the Terrans had arrived four decades before Javanne had been born—and her almost atavistic fear of change. She also knew it was much too late to turn back, and that Darkover needed increased knowledge, not unlettered ignorance, in order to prosper. The Federation was not going to go away just because Javanne Hastur wished it to, although there seemed no way to make the woman grasp this fact.

The space madness which had possessed the previous generation of youngsters had faded, however, and the populace had returned to their normal pursuits, with, Marguerida was sure, a silent sigh of relief. The number of young men and women who wanted to learn the intricacies of Federation technologies had diminished, too, and while there was always a pool of adolescents eager to obtain employment at Federation Headquarters, they were principally the offspring of Federation people who had married Darkovans.

The Federation itself was responsible for this. The political body she had been familiar with during her years at University was gone, replaced by a tangle of bureaucracies, each jealously guarding its own privileges, and unwilling to welcome newcomers into its ranks. This reorganization, which had taken place twelve years before, had brought them Lyle Belfontaine, the Station Chief at Headquarters. She had never actually met him, but her father had, and Lew Alton had given her a very poor impression of the man. Belfontaine had made it quite clear that he regarded the Darkovans as backward and useless. The organizational shift in the Federation had made him the most powerful Terran on the planet, superseding even the Planetary Administrator, who, while he still retained his position, had no voice in the actual running of things. Belfontaine had closed the old John Reade Orphanage, out of pique at a decision of Regis’, and then closed down the Medical Center to any except Federation employees as well.

Much of this had passed by Marguerida unnoticed until recently. She had been much too busy rearing her three children, and studying with Istvana. She had found an unexpected kind of satisfaction in both activities, and had been happily willing to leave larger matters to her father, Lew, to Regis, and to Mikhail. It had been enough, with her other more public activities. But now, finding that she could compose music with the same hand that was her curse and her blessing, she had discovered a depth of pleasure that nothing else afforded her.

She had never wanted to participate in the administration of Comyn Castle, but Lady Linnea had persuaded her that she must. Eventually it would become her job, in some misty future time when Regis Hastur had gone to his rest, or his consort was too old to continue. The idea remained unreal in her mind, as if she could not bear the idea of their inevitable ends.

She had tackled her new duties as she had approached everything else in her life—by learning everything she could as quickly as possible. It had helped that she had spent ten years assisting Ivor Davidson, her long-dead mentor, on his journeys around the backwaters of the Federation in search of indigenous music history and tradition. More, Marguerida had the advantage of knowing Comyn Castle in a way that no one else did. She had ancient memories of the building imprinted in her mind, a leftover from her overshadowing by the long dead Keeper, Ashara Alton. These ancient memories had cursed her youth and adolescence, appearing in dreams and nightmares. Only her return to the planet of her birth had released her from the torment of inexplicable thoughts and images, although for a time it had given her more problems than she had ever imagined. She had nearly died from adult-onset threshold sickness—an experience Marguerida had mercifully almost forgotten.

Ashara had been present at the construction of Comyn Castle, and after she had died, her shade had remained present in the now ruined Old Tower that stood on one side of the castle. So there were forgotten byways and unre membered rooms and passages that were as familiar to Marguerida as her own hand. It was a disquieting knowledge, one that she had to take pains to conceal because it made the servants uneasy. Dealing with them had been a real challenge, since she was more accustomed to doing things herself than to ordering them done. And the actual administration of Comyn Castle was a much larger project than keeping travel papers and baggage in order. In many ways the building was a self-contained small town, with its own brewery, bakery, and even a small weaving loft. It was always stocked as if for a siege, and one of her duties had been to keep it ready for any eventuality.