Part 25 (2/2)
'You rather stretched yourself, destroying Sodan,' Isthia said.
'But you did get him, you know.' 'I can't remember,' Damia groaned, blinking away tears so she could at least see clearly.
'Every rating in FT&T does.' 'Oh, my head. It's all blank and there's something I've got to do, Isthia.' Damia tried to rise but, though Isthia exerted little pressure, she sank weakly back into the bed. 'I've got something I must do only I can't remember what it is.' 'You did do what you must, dear, I a.s.sure you. But you've suffered a tremendous trauma, and you must rest,' Isthia said, her voice in the croon that had soothed Damia as a rebellious child. Cool hands stroked her face and she welcomed the relief for her skin felt so hot and hard.
Each caress seemed to lessen the terrible pain inside her skull.
'I'm putting you back to sleep now, love,' and Damia felt the coolness of an injection pop into her arm. 'We're very proud of you but you must sleep. Only sleep can heal your mind.' ”Great nature's second course, that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.” What's knitting, Isthia? I've never known.' Even Damia recognized that she was babbling as the cool scalliony taste in her throat heralded the spread of the drug.
Again, after what seemed no pa.s.sage of time at all, Damia was inexorably forced to consciousness by her indefinably relentless need.
'I can't understand it,' came Isthia's voice. This time it did not reverberate across Damia's pained mind like tympani in a closet.
'That last dose was enough to put a city to sleep.' 'She's worrying at something and probably won't rest until she's resolved it.
Let's wake her up and find out.' The second voice was masculine and sounded vaguely familiar, also vaguely annoyed. With a grateful smile, she labelled it 'Dad'. She felt her face gently slapped and, opening her eyes, saw her father's face swimming out of an indistinct background.
'Dad,' she pleaded, not because he had slapped her but because she had to make him understand.
'Dear Damia,' he said with such loving pride that she almost lost the tenuous thought she tried to hold.
Her body strained with the effort to reach out only a few inches a mind that once had blithely coursed light-years, but she soon managed to communicate her crime.
Larak and Afra! They were ahead of me in the focus. I killed them when I had to destroy Sodan. I must have killed them because I'm still alive!
Behind Jeff she heard her mother's cry and Isthia's exclamation.
'No, no,' Jeff said gently, shaking his head. He placed her hands on his forehead to let her feel the honesty of his denial. 'You're not at fault, dear Damia. Yes, you drew power through the Larak-focus to destroy Sodan and succeeded. Only you were capable of such a magnificent thrust! Furthermore, without you to throw us into high gear, Sodan could have destroyed every Prime in FT&T.
And that's the truth your mother will verify.' Damia heard the Rowan murmur affirmatively.
'But I can't hear anything right now,' and in spite of herself, Damia felt her chin quiver and tears of pure terror welled out of her eyes. 'Have I lost my mind?' to 'Of course you haven't,' and the elbowed Jeff her hair back from her flushed and tear-stained face.
'You saved us, you know. You really did.' Isthia moved the Rowan gently but firmly to one side.
'You must go knit some more sleeves of ravelled care, Damia,' Isthia said with therapeutic asperity. 'You knit like this,' and she inserted a visual demonstration of the technique of knitting into Damia's mind. It was an adroit gambit, designed to fragment concentration but Damia saw it for the evasion it was.
'I must be told all that happened, she demanded imperiously. A wisp of memory nagged at her and she caught it. 'I remember. Sodan made one last thrust at us. She closed her eyes against that recall, remembering too, that she had tried to intercept it and, 'Larak died,' she said in a flat voice. 'And Afra. I couldn't s.h.i.+eld in time.' 'Afra lives,' the Rowan said in a steady voice.
'But Larak doesn't. Why Larak?' Damia demanded, desperately striving to uncover what she felt they were still hiding from her.
'Your brother was the focus, Damia,' the Rowan said softly, knowing, too, that Damia would never absolve herself of Larak's death.
'Afra was supposed to be the focus, being the experienced mind, but the old bond between you and Larak snapped into effect. You tried to s.h.i.+eld Larak but he couldn't draw sufficient help from you. Your father and I also tried to support him but he was the focus. Without you to help, we couldn't even have cus.h.i.+oned Afra in time. Sodan's was truly a powerful mentality.' Damia looked from her mother's face to her father's and knew that they spoke the truth. But a reservation hovered in their eyes and their manner.
'You haven't told me everything,' she said, fighting both immense fatigue and the drugs.
'All right, sceptic,' Jeff said, lifting her into his arms.
'Though there's nothing wrong with your hearing so why it hasn't been a.s.sailed by his snores, I do not know.
Everyone else is using ear plugs,' he added as he carried her down a dim hall.
Pausing at an open door, he swung her so she could see into the room. A night light hung over the bed, illuminating Afra's quiet face, deeply lined with fatigue and pain.
Denying even the physical evidence, Damia reached out, touching just enough for rea.s.surance the distressed mental rumble that meant Afra inhabited his body.
'Damia! Don't do that!' Jeff roared, hurting more than her ears as he bore her back down the hall to her room.
'I won't again but I had to,' she sobbed, her head ballooning with agony.
'And we'll make sure you don't until your mind is completely healed. Out you go, missy,' and she was powerless against the three minds that reinstated the welcome oblivion of sleep.
An insistent whisper nibbled at the corners of her awareness and roused Damia from restorative sleep. Cringing in antic.i.p.ation of the return of pain, she was mildly surprised to feel only the faintest discomfort. Experimentally, Damia pushed a depressant on the ache and that, too, disappeared.
Unutterably pleased by her success, she sat up in bed.
It was night and the gentle breeze wafted scents which she recognized as Denebian. She stretched until a cramp caught her in the side.
Heavens, hasn't anyone moved me in months? she asked herself, noting that her mental tone was firm. She lay back in bed, deliberating. Poor Damia, she said in a self-derisive tone, ever since that encounter with that dreadful alien mind, she's been nothing but a T4. T-9? T-3? Damia tried out the different ratings for size and then discarded them all, along with her melodrama. You idiot. You'll never know till you try.
Tentatively, without apparent effort, she reached out and counted the pulses of another - no, two other sleepers. Afra's was the faint one. But, Damia realized in calm triumph, it was there. Which brought her up sharp against the second fact.
She slid from her bed to stand by the window. Sometime during her last deep slumber, she - and Afra - had been moved to Deneb, to her grandmother's forest retreat. This room looked out on to the back of the clearing in which the house stood. Beyond the lawn of ever gra.s.s, beyond the bank of the ttn, - where the forest began her the trail led And stopped when she saw the white oblong. Instinct told her that Larak was buried there and the thought of Larak buried and his touch forever gone broke her. She wept, biting her knuckles and pressing her arms tightly into her ribs to m.u.f.fle the sound of her mourning.
Out of the night, out of the stillness, the whisper that had roused her tugged at her again. She stifled her tears to listen, trying to identify that sliver of sound. It faded before she caught it.
Resolutely now, she laid her sorrow gently in the deepest part of her soul, a part of her but apart for ever. No matter what Jeff and the Rowan said, she had caused Larak's death, and maimed Afra. Had she been less preoccupied, less self-centred, she would not have been dazzled by the fancy that Sodan was her Prince Charming, her knight in cylindrical armour.
Such a spoiled child she'd been: egotistical, arrogant, proud, making demands she had no right to request, wanting privileges she had not earned, rewards she was too immature to appreciate The whisper again, fainter but somehow surer. With a startled cry of joy, Damia whirled from her room, running on light feet down the hall. Catching at the door frame to break her headlong flight, she hesitated on the threshold.
She caught her breath as she realized that Afra was sitting up.
He was looking at her with a smile of disbelief on his face.
'You've been calling me,' she whispered, half questioning, half-stating.
'In a lame-brained way,' he replied with a wry half-smile.
'I can't seem to reach beyond the edge of the bed.' 'Don't try.
It hurts,' she said quickly, stepping into the room to pause shyly at the foot of the bed.
Afra grimaced, rubbing his temples. 'I know it hurts but I can't seem to find any balance in my skull,' he confessed, his voice uneven, worried. 'Even as a child, I always had that.' 'May I?' she asked formally, unexpectedly timid with him.
Closing his eyes, Afra nodded.
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