Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover Worlds Divided 03 - The Blo

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THE BLOODY SUN

A World Divided 03 - A Darkover Novel

To Keep the Oath

a renunciate short story

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Contents

•THE BLOODY SUN - A Darkover Novel

o Prologue: Darkover

o Chapter One: The Terran

o Chapter Two: The Matrix

o Chapter Three: The Strangers

o Chapter Four: The Search

o Chapter Five: The Technician

o Chapter Six: Re-Exile

o Chapter Seven: Homecoming

o Chapter Eight: The World Outside

o Chapter Nine: Challenge to Arilinn

o Chapter Ten: The Way of Arilinn

o Chapter Eleven: Shadows on the Sun

o Chapter Twelve: The Trap

o Chapter Thirteen: Exile

o Chapter Fourteen: Doorway to the Past

o Chapter Fifteen: Through the Barrier

o Chapter Sixteen: The Broken Tower

o Chapter Seventeen: The Conscience of a Keeper

•TO KEEP THE OATH -a Renunciate short story

Jeff Kerwin walked swiftly now through the dark, deserted streets of Thendara. He heard a step

behind him—a slow, purposeful step, but told himself not to be suspicious; he wasn’t the only man who

might have a good reason to be out in the rain tonight! The step kept pace with him, then quickened to

overtake him, and Kerwin stepped side to let the follower pass in the narrow street.

That was a mistake. Kerwin felt a searing pain; then the top of his head exploded and from

somewhere he heard a voice crying out strange words:

Say to the son of the barbarian that he shall come no more to the plains of Arilinn! The

Forbidden Tower is broken and the Golden Bell is avenged!

THE BLOODY SUN

PLUSTo Keep the Oath —a new Free Amazon story never before published anywhere!

Ace Books by

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

ENDLESS UNIVERSE

FALCONS OF NARABEDLA

The Darkover Novels:

THE BLOODY SUN

STAR OF DANGER

THE WINDS OF DARKOVER

THE SWORD OF ALDONES

THE PLANET SAVERS

THE WORLD WRECKERS

From Ace Science Fiction

THE BLOODY SUN

TO KEEP THE OATH

the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

An ACE Book

Cover art by Michael Whelan

This Ace printing: April 1980

Printed in U.S.A.

For showing me universes without number; in loving memory, Henry Kuttner.

The stranger who comes home does not make himself at home but makes home strange.

Prologue: Darkover

^»

The Leronis

Leonie Hastur was dead.

The ancientleronis , sorceress of the Comyn, Keeper of Arilinn, telepath, trained with all the powers

of the matrix sciences of Darkover, died as she had lived, alone, sequestered high in the Tower of Arilinn.

Not even her priestess-novice-apprentice, Janine Leynier of Storn, knew the hour when death came

quietly into the Tower and took her away into one of the other worlds she had learned to walk as

skillfully as within her own enclosed garden.

She died alone; and she died unmourned. For, although Leonie was feared, revered, worshipped

almost as a Goddess throughout all the Domains of Darkover, she was not loved.

Once she had been greatly loved. There had been a time when Leonie Hastur had been a young

woman, beautiful and chaste as a distant moon, and poets had written of her glory, comparing her to the

exquisitely shining face of Liriel, the great violet moon of Darkover; or to a Goddess come down to live

among men. She had been adored by those who lived under her rule at Arilinn Tower. Once, despite the

austerity of the vows under which she lived (which would have made it blasphemy unspeakable for any

man to touch her fingertips) Leonie had been loved. But that had been long ago.

And now, as the years had passed over her head, leaving her more and more alone, further from

humanity, she was loved less; and feared and hated more. The old Regent Lorill Hastur, her twin brother

(for Leonie had been born into the royal house of the Hasturs of Hastur, and if she had not chosen the

Tower, she would have stood higher than any Queen in the land), was long dead. A nephew she had

seen but a few times stood behind the throne of Stefan Hastur-Elhalyn and was the real power in the

Domains. But to him Leonie was a whisper, an old tale and a shadow.

And now she was dead and lay, as the custom was, in an unmarked grave within the walls of Arilinn,

where no human being save those of Comyn blood might ever come; in death no more secluded than in

life. And there were few left alive to weep.

One of the few who wept was Damon Ridenow, who had married years ago into the Domain of

Alton, and briefly been Warden of that Domain for the young Heir to Alton, Valdir of Armida.*This

story is told inThe Forbidden Tower.When Valdir had come of age and taken a wife, Damon and all his

household, which was large, had removed to the estate of Mariposa Lake, which lay in the pleasant

upland country in the foothills of the Kilghard Hills. When Leonie was young, and Damon was young,

and he a mechanic in the Tower of Arilinn, he had loved Leonie; loved her chastely, with never a touch

or a kiss or any thought of breaking the vows that bound her. But he had loved her, nonetheless, with a

passion that had given form and color to all his life afterward; and when he heard of her death, he went

apart to his own study and there he shed the tears he would not shed before his wife or his wife’s sister,

who had once been Leonie’s novice-Keeper at Arilinn, or before any of his household. But if they knew

of his grief—and in a household of Comyn telepaths such things could not well be hidden—no one

would speak of it; not even his grown sons and daughters asked why their father grieved in secret.

Leonie, to them, of course, was only a legend with a name.

And so, when the news spread throughout the Domains, there was much excited speculation, even in

this most distant of remote corners in the Domains, about the question that now quickened and burned

all over the Domains, from the Hellers to the Plains of Arilinn:Who now will be Keeper of Arilinn ?

And to Damon, one day soon after that, in the privacy of his own study, came his youngest daughter

Cleindori.

She had been given the old-fashioned name, legendary and traditional, of Dorilys:Golden-flower .

But as a child her hair had been pale sunny gold, and her eyes so big and blue that her nurses dressed

her always in blue frocks and blue ribbons; her foster-mother, Damon’s wife Ellemir, said that she

looked like a blue bell of thekireseth flower, covered with its golden pollen. So they had nicknamed her,

when she was only a toddler, Cleindori,Golden Bell , which was the common name for thekireseth

flower: And as the years passed, most people had all but forgotten that Dorilys Aillard (for her mother

had been anedestro daughter of that powerful Domain) had ever borne any other name but Cleindori.

She had grown into a tall, shy, serious young woman, thirteen years old now, her hair sunny,

copper-golden. There was Drytown blood in the Ridenow clan, and her mother’s father, too, had been,

it was whispered, a Drytown bandit from Shainsa; but that old scandal had been long forgotten. Damon,

looking up at the womanly body and serious eyes of his last-born daughter, felt for the first time in his life

that he was approaching old age.

“Have you ridden all the way from Armida today, my child? What had your foster-father to say to

that?”

Cleindori smiled and went to kiss her father on the cheek. “He said nothing, for I did not tell him,”

she said gaily, “but I was not alone, for my foster-brother Kennard rode here with me.”

Cleindori had been sent to fosterage at nine years old, as the custom was in the Domains, to grow to

womanhood under a hand less tender than that of a mother. She had been fostered by Valdir, Lord

Alton, whose lady, Lori, had only sons and longed for a daughter to rear. There was a distant

understanding that when Cleindori was old enough to marry, she might be wedded to Lord Alton’s elder

son, Lewis-Arnad; but as yet, Damon supposed, there was no thought in Cleindori of marriage; she and

Lewis and Valdir’s youngest son Kennard were sister and brothers. Damon greeted Kennard, who was

a sturdy, broad-shouldered, grey-eyed boy a year younger than Cleindori, with a kinsman’s embrace,

and said, “So I see my daughter was well-guarded on her way here. What brings you here, children?

Were you hawking and late returning, and chose to ride this way, thinking there would be cakes and

sweets for runaways here when there would be only the bread and water of punishment at home?” But

he was laughing.

“No,” Kennard said seriously. “Cleindori said she must see you; and my mother gave us leave to

ride, but I do not think she knew fully what we asked or what she answered, for there was such

hullabaloo at Armida on this day, ever since the news has come.”

“What news?” Damon asked, leaning forward, but already he knew, and felt his heart sink. Cleindori

curled herself up on a cushion at his feet, looking up at him. She said, “Dear Father, three days ago the

Lady Janine of Arilinn came riding to Armida on her search for one to bear the name and dignity of the

Lady of Arilinn who is dead; theleronis Leonie.”

“It took her long enough to come to Armida,” Damon commented with a curl of his lip. “No doubt

she had tested in all the Domains before this.”

Cleindori nodded. “I think so,” she said, “for after she knew who I was, she looked at me as if she

smelled something bad, and said, ‘Since you are from the Forbidden Tower, have you been taught in

any of their heresies?’ For when Lady Lori told her my name, she was angry, and I had to tell her that

my mother had given me the name of Dorilys. But Janine said, ‘Well, by law I am required to test you for

laran . I cannot deny you that.’ ”

She screwed up her face in imitation of theleronis , and Damon put his hand across the lower part of

his face, as if in thought, but actually to conceal a grin; for Cleindori had a knack for mimicry and she

had caught the sour tone and disapproving stare of theleronis Janine. Damon said, “Aye. Janine was

among those who would have had me burned alive or blinded when I fought with Leonie for the right to

use thelaran the gods had given me as I myself chose, and not only as Arilinn demanded. It would not

make her love you, child, that you are my daughter.”

Cleindori smiled again, gaily. “I can live well enough without her love; I can well believe that she has

never loved even a pet kitten! But I was trying to tell you, Father, what she said to me and what I said to

her… she seemed pleased when I told her that you had taught me nothing as yet, and that I had been

fostered since I was nine at Armida; and so she gave me a matrix and tested me forlaran . And when

she had done, she said that she wanted me for Arilinn; and then she frowned and told me that she would

not have chosen me for this, but that there were few others who could bear the training; and that she

wished to train me as Keeper.”

Damon’s breath caught in his throat; but the cry of protest died unspoken, for Cleindori was looking

up at him with her eyes shining. “Father, I told her, as I knew I must, that I could not enter a Tower

without my father’s consent; and then I rode away here to ask for that consent.”

“Which you shall not have,” said Damon harshly, “not while I am above ground and unburied. Or

after, if I can prevent it.”

“But Father—to be Keeper of Arilinn! Not even the Queen—”

Damon’s throat tightened. So after all these years the hand of Arilinn was reaching out again toward

one that he loved. “Cleindori, no,” he said and reached out, touching her fair curls, which shone with the

light of alloyed copper and gold. “You see only the power. You do not know the cruelty of that training.

To be Keeper—”

“Janine told me. She said that the training is very long and very cruel and very difficult to bear. She

told me something of what I must vow and what I must give up. But she said also that she thought I was

capable of it.”

“Child—” Damon swallowed hard. He said, “Human flesh and blood cannot endure it!”

“Now that is foolish,” Cleindori said, “for you endured it, Father. And so did Callista, who was once

Leonie’s novice-Keeper at Arilinn.”

“Have you any idea what it cost Callista, child?”

“You made sure I should know, before I was out of childhood,” Cleindori said. “And so, too, did

Callista, telling me before I had come to womanhood what a cruel and unnatural life it was. I cut my

teeth on that old tale of how you and Callista fought Leonie and all of Arilinn in a duel that lasted

nightlong…”

“Has the tale grown so much?” Damon interrupted with a laugh. “It was less than a quarter of an

hour; though indeed the storm seemed to rage through many days. But we fought Arilinn; and won the

right to uselaran as we would and not as Arilinn should decree.”

“But I can see, too,” Cleindori argued, “that you, who were trained in Arilinn, and Callista, too,

trained in the Way of Arilinn, are superbly skilled; while those who have been taughtlaran here have

fewer skills and are clumsy in the use of their gifts. And I know, too, that all the other Towers in this land

still hold to the Way of Arilinn.”

“These powers and skills—” Damon paused and collected himself, trying to speak calmly, for he was

shouting. Then he said, “Cleindori, since I was a young man I have believed that the Way of Arilinn—

and of all the other Towers on whom the people of Arilinn force their will—is cruel and inhuman. I

believed this;, and I fought, laying my life as forfeit, so that men and women in the Towers need not give

up all their lives to a living death, sealed within Tower walls. Such skills as we have can be learned by

any man or woman, Comyn or Commoner, if they possess the inborn talent. It is like playing the lute;

one is born with an ear for music and can learn the way of plucking the strings, but even for that difficult

vocation no one should be asked to give up home and family, life or love. We have taught much to

others; and we have won the right to teach them without penalty. A day will come, Cleindori, when the

ancient matrix sciences of our world will be free to any who can use them, and the Towers will be no

more needed.”

“But we are still outcaste,” argued Cleindori. “Father, if you had seen Janine’s face when she spoke

of you, calling it the Forbidden Tower…”

Damon’s face tightened. “I do not love Janine so much that her evil opinion of me will lose me any

sleep of nights.”

“But Cleindori is right,” Kennard said. “We are renegades. Here in the countryside people hold to

your ways; but all over the Domains they turn only to the Towers to know oflaran . I too am to go to a

Tower, Neskaya perhaps, or perhaps to Arilinn itself, when I have done my three years’ service in the

Guards; if Cleindori goes to Arilinn, they said I could not go until she had completed her years of

seclusion, for a Keeper in training cannot have a foster-brother near, or anyone to whom she is bound

by affection—”

“Cleindori is not going to Arilinn,” Damon said, “and there’s an end of it.” And he repeated, even

more vehemently, “Human flesh and blood cannot endure the Way of Arilinn! ”

“And again I say that is foolish,” Cleindori said, “for Callista endured it; and the lady Hilary of Syrtis;

and Margwenn of Thendara; and Leominda of Neskaya; and Janine of Arilinn; and Leonie’s self; and

nine-hundred-and-twenty-odd Keepers before her, so they say. And what they endured, I can endure if

I must.”

She leaned her chin on her folded hands, looking up at him seriously. “You have told me often

enough, since I was only a child, that a Keeper is responsible only to her own conscience. And that

everywhere, among the best of women and men, conscience is the only guide for that they do. Father, I

feel it is laid upon me to be a Keeper.”

“You can be Keeper among us, when you are grown,” said Damon, “without such torment as you

must endure at Arilinn.”

“Oh!” She rose angrily to her feet and began to pace in the chamber. “You are my father, you would

keep me always a little girl! Father, do you think I do not know that without the Towers of the Domains,

our world is dark with barbarism? I have not been very far abroad, but I have been to Thendara, and I

have seen the spaceships of the Terrans there, and I know that we have resisted their Empire only

because the Towers give our world what we need, with our ancient matrix sciences. If the Towers go

dark, Darkover falls into the hands of the Empire like a ripe plum, for the people will cry out for the

technology and the trade of the Empire! ”

Damon said quietly, “I do not think that this is inevitable. I have no hatred for the Terrans; my closest

friend was Terran-born, your uncle Ann’dra. But it is for this I am working, that when every Tower is

dark, there will be enoughlaran among the populace of the Domains that Darkover may be independent,

and not go begging to the Terrans. That day will come, Cleindori. I tell you, a day will come when every

Tower in the Domains stands bare and empty, the haunt of evil birds of prey—”

“Kinsman! ” Kennard protested swiftly, and made a quick sign against evil. “Do not say such things!”

“It is not pleasant hearing,” Damon said, “but it is true. Every year there are fewer and fewer of our

sons and daughters with the power or the will to endure the old training and give themselves over to the

Towers. Leonie once complained to me that she had trained six young girls and of them all, only one

could complete the training to be Keeper; this was theleronis Hilary, and she sickened and would have

died if they had not sent her from Arilinn. Three of the Towers—Janine would not tell you this, Cleindori,

but I who am Arilinn-trained know it well— three of the Towers are working with a mechanic’s circle

because they have no Keeper, and their foolish laws will not allow them to take a Keeper to their circles

unless she is willing to be a cloistered symbol of virginity. They say her strength and herlaran powers are

less important than that she should be a virgin goddess, sequestered and held in superstitious awe. There

are, at a guess, a hundred women or more in the Domains who could do the work of a Keeper, but they

see no reason to undergo a training that will make them, not women, but machines for the transmission of

power! And I do not blame them! The Towers will go. They must go. And when they are gone, standing

bare as ruined monuments to the pride and the madness of the Comyn, thenlaran power, and the matrix

stones that help us to use it, can be used as they were meant to be used; science, not sorcery! Sanity,

not madness! I have worked for this all my life, Cleindori.”

“Not to overthrow the Towers, Uncle!” Kennard sounded shocked.

“No. Never that. But to be there when they have been abandoned or forsaken, so that ourlaran

sciences need not perish for lack of Towers to work them.”

Cleindori stood beside him, her hand lightly on his shoulder. She said, “Father, I honor you for this.

But your work is too slow, for they still call you outcaste and renegade and worse things. And that is

why it is so much more important that young people like I, and like my half-sister Cassilde, and Kennard

—”

Damon said, shocked, “Is Cassilde, too, going into Arilinn? It will kill Callista!” For Cassilde was

Callista’s own daughter, four or five years older than Cleindori.

“She is too old to need consent,” Cleindori said. “Father, it is necessary that the Towers shall not die

until the time has come, even if the day must come when they are no longer needed. And I feel it laid

upon my conscience to be Keeper of Arilinn.” She held out her hand to him. “No, Father, listen to me. I

knowyou are not ambitious; you flung away the chance to command the City Guard; you could have

been the most powerful man in Thendara; but you threw it away. I am not like that. If mylaran is as

powerful as the Lady of Arilinn told me, I want to be Keeper in a way that will let medo something

useful with it; more than ministering to the peasants and teaching the village children! Father, I want to be

Keeper of Arilinn!”

“You would put yourself into that prison from which we freed Callista at such great price! ” Damon

said, and his voice was unspeakably bitter.

“That washer life,” Cleindori flared, “this ismine ! But listen to me, Father,” she said, kneeling beside

him again. The anger was gone from her voice and a great seriousness had taken its place. “You have

told me, and I have seen, that Arilinn declares the laws by whichlaran is used in this land, save for you

few here who defy Arilinn.”

“They may be doing things otherwise in the Hellers or at Aldaran and beyond,” Damon qualified. “I

know little of that.”

“Then— ” Cleindori looked up at him, her round face very serious. “If I go to Arilinn and learn to be

Keeper, by their own rules the most orthodox of the ways by whichlaran can be used—if I am Keeper

by the Way of Arilinn, then I can change those laws, can I not? If the Keeper of Arilinn makes the rules

for all the Towers, then, Father, I can change them, I can declare the truth; that the Way of Arilinn is

cruel and inhuman—and because I have succeeded at it, they cannot say I am simply a failure or an

outcaste attacking what I myself cannot do. I can change these terrible laws and cast down the Way of

Arilinn. And when the Towers no longer give men and women over to a living death, then the young men

and women of our world will flock to them, and the old matrix sciences of Darkover will be reborn. But

these laws will never be changed—not until a Keeper of Arilinn can change them!”

Damon looked at his daugher, shaken. It was indeed the only way in which Arilinn’s cruel laws could

be changed; that a Keeper of Arilinn should herself declare a new decree that should be binding on all

the Towers. He had tried his best, but he was renegade, outcaste; he could do nothing from outside the

walls of Arilinn. He had accomplished little—no one knew better than he how little he had accomplished.

“Father, it is fated,” Cleindori said, and her young voice trembled. “After all Callista suffered, after all

you suffered, perhaps it was all for this, that I should go back and free those others. Now that you have

proven that they can be freed.”

“You are right,” Damon admitted, slowly. “The Way of Arilinn will never be thrown down until the

Keeper of Arilinn herself shall throw it down. But— oh, Cleindori, not you!” Agonized, despairing, he

clasped his daughter to him. “Not you, darling!”

Gently she freed herself from his embrace, and for a moment it seemed to Damon that she was

already tall, impressive, aloof, touched with the alien strength of the Keeper, clothed in the crimson

majesty of Arilinn. She said, “Father, dear Father, you cannot forbid me to do this; I am responsible only

to my own conscience. How often have you said to all of us, beginning with my foster-father Valdir, who

never tires of repeating it to me, that conscience is the only responsibility? Let me do this; let me finish

the work you have begun in the Forbidden Tower. Otherwise, when you die, it will all die with you, a

little band of renegades and their heresies perishing unseen and good riddance. But I can bring it to

Arilinn, and then all over the Domains; for the Keeper of Arilinn makes the laws for all the Towers and

all the Domains. Father, I tell you, it is fated. Imust go to Arilinn.”

Damon bowed his head, still reluctant, but unable to speak against her young and innocent sureness.

It seemed to him that already the walls of Arilinn were closing around her. And so they parted, not to

meet again until the hour of her death.

Chapter One: The Terran

«^»

Forty Years Later

This is the way it was.

You were an orphan of space. For all you knew, you might have been born on one of the Big Ships;

the ships of Terra; the starships that made the long runs between stars doing the business of the Empire.

You never knew where you had been born, or who your parents had been; the first home you knew was

the Spacemen’s Orphanage, almost within sight of the Port of Thendara, where you learned loneliness.

Before that somewhere there had been strange colors and lights and confused images of people and

places that sank into oblivion when you tried to focus on them, nightmares that sometimes made you sit

up and shriek out in terror before you got yourself all the way awake and saw the clean quiet dormitory

around you.

The other children were the abandoned flotsam of the arrogant and mobile race of Earth, and you

were one of them, with one of their names. But outside lay the darkly beautiful world you had seen, that

you still saw, sometimes, in your dreams. You knew, somehow, that you were different; you belonged to

that world outside, that sky, that sun; not the clean, white, sterile world of the Terran Trade City.

You would have known it even if they hadn’t told you; but they told you, often enough. Oh, not in

words; in a hundred small subtle ways. And anyway you were different, a difference you could feel all

the way down to your bones. And then there were the dreams.

But the dreams faded; first to memories of dreams, and then to memories of memories. You only

knew thatonce you had remembered something other than this.

You learned not to ask about your parents, but you guessed. Oh, yes, you guessed. And as soon as

you were old enough to endure the thrust of a spaceship kicking away from a planet under interstellar

drives, they stuck your arm full of needles and they carried you, like a piece of sacked luggage, aboard

one of the Big Ships.

Going home, the other boys said, half envious and half afraid. Only you had known better; you were

going into exile. And when you woke up, with a fuzzy sick headache, and the feeling that somebody had

sliced a big hunk out of your life, the ship was making planetfall for a world called Terra, and there was

an elderly couple waiting for the grandson they had never seen.

They said you were twelve or so. They called you Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, Junior. That was what

they’d called you in the Spacemen’s Orphanage, so you didn’t argue. Their skin was darker than yours

and their eyes dark, the eyes you’d learned to call animal eyes from your Darkovan nurses; but they’d

grown up under a different sun and you already knew about the quality of light; you’d seen the bright

lights inside the Terran Zone and remembered how they hurt your eyes. So you were willing to believe it,

that these strange dark old people could have been your father’s parents. They showed you a picture of

a Jefferson Andrew Kerwin when he was about your age, thirteen, a few years before he’d run away as

cargo boy on one of the Big Ships, years and years ago. They gave you his room to sleep in, and sent

you to his school. They were kind to you, and not more than twice a week did they remind you, by

word or look, that you were not the son they had lost, the son who had abandoned them for the stars.

And they never answered questions about your mother, either. They couldn’t; they didn’t know and

they didn’t want to know, and what was more, they didn’t care. You were Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, of

Earth, and that was all they wanted of you.

If it had come when you were younger, it might have been enough. You were hungry to belong

somewhere, and the yearning love of these old people, who needed you to be their lost son, might have

claimed you for Earth.

But the sky of Earth was a cold burning blue, and the hills a cold unfriendly green; the pale blazing

sun hurt your eyes, even behind dark glasses, and the glasses made people think you were trying to hide

from them. You spoke the language perfectly— they’d seen tothat in the orphanage, of course. You

could pass. You missed the cold, and the winds that swept down from the pass behind the city, and the

distant outline of the high, splintered teeth of the mountains; you missed the dusty dimness of the sky, and

the lowered, crimson, blazing eye of the sun. Your grandparents didn’t want you to think about

Darkover or talk about Darkover and once when you saved up your pocket money and bought a set of

views taken out in the Rim planets, one of them with a sun like your home sun of Darkover, they took

the pictures away from you. You belonged right here on Earth, or so they told you.

But you knew better than that. And as soon as you were old enough, you left. You knew that you

were breaking their hearts all over again, and in a way it wasn’t fair because they had been kind to you,

as kind as they knew how to be. But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff

Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, thefirst Jeff Kerwin, your father,

hadn’t been that boy either, and that was whyhe had left. They loved something they had made up for

themselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and no

real boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.

First there was a civilian’s job in the Space Service on Earth, and you worked hard and kept your

tongue between your teeth when the arrogantTerranan stared at your height or made subtle jokes about

the accent you’d never—quite—lost. And then there was the day when you boarded one of the Big

Ships, awake this time, and willingly, and warranted in the Civil Service of the Empire, skylifting for stars

that were names in the roll call of your dreams. And you watched the hated sun of Earth dwindle to a

dim star, and lose itself in the immensity of the big dark, and you were outward bound on the first

installment of your dream.

Not Darkover. Not yet. But a world with a red sun that didn’t hurt your eyes, for a subordinate’s job

on a world of stinks and electric storms, where albino women were cloistered behind high walls and you

never saw a child. And after a year there, there was a good job on a world where men carried knives

and the women wore bells in their ears, chiming a wicked allure as they walked. You had liked it there.

You had had plenty of fights, and plenty of women. Behind the quiet civil clerk there was a roughneck

buried; and on that world he got loose now and then. You’d had good times. It was on that world that

you started carrying a knife. Somehow it seemed right to you; you felt a sense of completion when you

strapped it on, as if somehow, until now, you had been going around half dressed. You talked this over

with the company Psych, and listened to his conjectures about hidden fears of sexual adequacy and

compensation with phallic symbols and power compulsions; listened quietly and without comment, and

dismissed them, because you knew better than that. He did ask one telling question.

“You were brought up on Cottman Four, weren’t you, Kerwin?”

“In the Spacemen’s Orphanage there.”

“Isn’t that one of the worlds where grown men wear swords at all times? Granted, I’m no

comparative anthropologist, but if you saw men going around wearing them, all the time…”

You agreed that probably that was it, and didn’t say any more, but you kept on wearing the knife, at

least when you were off duty, and once or twice you’d had a chance to use it, and proved quietly and to

your own satisfaction that you could handle yourself in a fight if you had to.

You had good times there. You could have stayed there and been happy. But there was still a

compulsion driving you, a restlessness, and when the Legate died and the new one wanted to bring in his

own men, you were ready to leave.

And by now the apprentice years were over. Until now you’d gone where they told you. Now they

asked you, within reason, where you wanted to go. And you never hesitated.

“Darkover.” And then you amended: “Cottman Four.”

The man in Personnel had stared awhile. “God in heaven, why would anyone want to gothere ?”

“No vacancies?” By now you were half resigned to letting the dream die.

“Oh, hell, yes. We can never get volunteers to go there. Do you know what the place islike ? Cold

as sin, among other things, and barbaric—big sections of it barred off to Earthmen, and you won’t be

safe a step outside the Trade City. I’ve never been there myself, but the place, from what I hear, is

always in an uproar. Added to which, there’s practically no trade with the Darkovans.”

“No? Thendara Spaceport is one of the biggest in the Service, I heard.”

“True.” The man explained gloomily, “It’s located between the upper and lower spiral arms of the

Galaxy, so we have to recruit enough personnel to staff a major re-routing station. Thendara’s one of the

main stops and transfer points for passengers and cargo. But it’s a hell of a place; if you go there, you

might be stuck for years before they could locate a replacement for you, once you get tired of it. Look,”

he added persuasively, “you’re getting on too well to throw yourself away out there. Rigel 9 is crying out

for good men, and you could really get ahead there— maybe work up to Consul or even Legate, if you

wanted to get into the Diplomatic branch. Why waste yourself on a half-frozen lump of rock way out at

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THEBLOODYSUNAWorldDivided03-ADarkoverNovelToKeeptheOatharenunciateshortstoryMarionZimmerBradleyContents· THEBLOODYSUN-ADarkoverNovelo Prologue:Darkovero ChapterOne:TheTerrano ChapterTwo:TheMatrixo ChapterThree:TheStrangerso ChapterFour:TheSearcho ChapterFive:TheTe...

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