A Time of Changes

by Robert Silverberg

  But he amazed me at the finish of his rambling oration; for it had taken him clear across the room, to an alcove hung with dangling silver chains, and at the end, suddenly bunching the chains and yanking a dozen of them from their mountings, he swung round to face me and cried hoarsely, “Give your pledge, Kinnall, that you will come back from the north in time to attend the royal wedding!”

  I was doubly pronged. For the last several minutes I had begun to make plans on the basis of staying in Salla City; now I found I could depart after all, and was not sure I should, in view of Stirron’s deterioration. And then too he demanded from me a promise of swift return, and how could I give the septarch such a promise without lying to him, a sin I was not prepared to commit? So far all that I had told him was the truth, though only part of the truth; I did plan to travel north with Noim to visit his father, I would remain in northern Salla until winter’s first snow. How though could I set a date for my coming back to the capital?

  My brother was due to marry, forty days hence, the youngest daughter of Bryggil, septarch of Salla’s southeastern district. It was a cunning match. So far as the traditional order of primacy went, Bryggil stood seventh and lowest in the hierarchy of Salla’s septarchs, but he was the oldest, the cleverest, and the most respected of the seven, now that my father was gone. To combine Bryggil’s shrewdness and stature with the prestige that accrued to Stirron by virtue of his rank as prime septarch would be to cement the dynasty of our family to the throne. And no doubt sons would shortly come marching out of Bryggil’s daughter’s loins, relieving me of my position as heir apparent: her fertility must have passed the necessary tests, and of Stirron’s there could be no question, since he had already scattered a litter of bastards all over Salla. I would have certain ceremonial roles to play at the wedding as brother to the septarch.

  I had wholly forgotten the wedding. If I skipped out of Salla before it came about, I would wound my brother in a way that saddened me. But if I stayed here, with Stirron in this unstable state, I had no guarantee of being a free man when the nuptial day arrived, or even of still owning my head. Nor was there any sense in going north with Noim if I bound myself to return in forty days. It was a hard choice: to postpone my departure and run the risks of my brother’s royal whims, or to leave now, knowing I was taking on myself the stain of breaking a pledge to my septarch.

  The Covenant teaches us that we should welcome dilemmas, for it toughens character to grapple with the insoluble and find a solution. In this instance events made a mockery of the Covenant’s lofty moral teachings. As I hesitated in anguish, Stirron’s telephone summoned him; he snatched its handpiece, jabbed at the scrambler, and listened to five minutes of gibberish, his face darkening and his eyes growing fiery. At length he broke the contact and peered up at me as though I were a stranger to him. “They are eating the flesh of the newly dead in Spoksa,” he muttered. “On the slopes of the Kongoroi they dance to demons in hopes of finding food. Insanity! Insanity!” He clenched his fists and strode to the window, and thrust his face to it, and closed his eyes, and I think forgot my presence for a time. Again the telephone asked for him. Stirron jerked back like one who has been stabbed, and started toward the machine. Noticing me standing frozen near the door, he fluttered his hands impatiently at me and said, “Go, will you? Off with your bondbrother, wherever you go. This province! This famine! Father, father, father!” He seized the handpiece. I started to offer a genuflection of parting, and Stirron furiously waved me from the room, sending me unpledged and unchecked toward the borders of his realm.

  11

  NOIM AND I set forth three days afterward, just the two of us and a small contingent of servants. The weather was bad, for summer’s dryness had given way not merely to the thick dreary gray clouds of autumn but to a foresampling of winter’s heavy rains. “You’ll be dead of the mildew before you see Glin,” Halum told us cheerfully. “If you don’t drown in the mud of the Grand Salla Highway.”

  She stayed with us, at Noim’s house, on the eve of our departure, sleeping chastely apart in the little chamber just under the roof, and joined us for breakfast as we made ready to go. I had never seen her looking lovelier; that morning she wore a bloom of shimmering beauty that cut through the murk of the drizzly dawn like a torch in a cave. Perhaps what enhanced her so greatly then was that she was about to pass from my life for an unknown length of time, and, conscious of my self-inflicted loss, I magnified her attractiveness. She was clad in a gown of delicate golden chainmesh, beneath which only a gossamer wrap concealed her naked form, and her body, shifting this way and that under its flimsy coverings, aroused in me thoughts that left me drenched in shame. Halum then was in the ripeness of early womanhood, and had been for several years; it had already begun to puzzle me that she remained unwed. Though she and Noim and I were of the same age, she had leaped free of childhood before us, as girls will do, and I had come to think of her as older than the two of us, because for a year she had had breasts and the monthly flow, while Noim and I were still without hair on cheek or body. And while we had caught up to her in physical maturity, she was still more adult in her bearing than my bondbrother or I, her voice more smoothly modulated, her manner more poised, and it was impossible for me to shake off that notion that she was senior sister to us. Who soon must accept some suitor, lest she become overripe and sour in her maidenhood; I was suddenly certain that Halum would marry while I was off hiding in Glin, and the thought of some sweaty stranger planting babies between her thighs so sickened me that I turned away from her at the table, and lurched to the window to gulp the humid air into my throbbing lungs.

  “Are you unwell?” Halum asked.

  “One feels a certain tension, bondsister.”

  “Surely there’s no danger. The septarch’s permission has been granted for you to go north.”

  “There is no document to show it,” Noim pointed out.

  “You are a septarch’s son!” Halum cried. “What guardian of the roads would dare to trifle with you?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “There is no cause for fear. One feels only a sense of uncertainty. One is beginning a new life, Halum.” I forced a faint smile. “The time of going must be here.”

  “Stay a while longer,” Halum begged.

  But we did not. The servants waited in the street. The groundcars were ready. Halum embraced us, clasping Noim first, then me, for I was the one who would not be returning, and that called for a longer farewell. When she came into my arms I was stunned by the intensity with which she offered herself: her lips to my lips, her belly to my belly, her breasts crushed against my chest. On tiptoes she strained to press her body into mine, and for a moment I felt her trembling, until I began myself to tremble. It was not a sisterly kiss and certainly not a bondsisterly kiss; it was the passionate kiss of a bride sending her young husband off to a war from which she knows there is no coming back. I was singed by Halum’s sudden fire. I felt as though a veil had been ripped away and some Halum I had not known before had flung herself against me, one who burned with the needs of the flesh, one who did not mind revealing her forbidden hunger for a bondbrother’s body. Or did I imagine those things in her? It seemed to me that for a single protracted instant Halum repressed nothing and allowed her arms and lips to tell me the truth about her feelings; but I could not respond in kind—I had trained myself too well in the proper attitudes toward one’s bondsister—and I was distant and cool as I clasped her. I may even have thrust her back a little, shocked by her forwardness. And, as I say, there may have been no forwardness at all except in my overwrought mind, but only legitimate grief at a parting. In any event the intensity went quickly from Halum; her embrace slackened and she released me, and she appeared downcast and chilled, as if I had rebuffed her cruelly by being so prim when she was giving so much.

  “Come now,” Noim said impatiently, and, trying somehow to rescue the situation, I lifted Halum’s hand and touched my palm lightly to her cool palm, and smiled an awkward smile, and
she smiled even more awkwardly, and perhaps we would have said a stumbling word or two, but Noim caught me by the elbow and stolidly led me outside to begin my journey away from my homeland.

  12

  I INSISTED on opening myself to a drainer before leaving Salla City. I had not planned on doing so, and it irritated Noim that I took the time for it; but an uncontrollable yearning for the comforts of religion rose up in me as we neared the outskirts of the capital.

  We had been traveling almost an hour. The rain had thickened, and gusty winds slammed it against the windscreens of our groundcars, so that cautious driving was in order. The cobbled streets were slippery. Noim drove one of the cars, I sitting sullenly beside him; the other, with our servants, followed close behind. The morning was young and the city still slept. Each passing street was a surgery to me, for a segment of my life was ripped off by it: there goes the palace compound, there go the spires of the House of Justice, there the university’s great gray blocky buildings, there the godhouse where my royal father brought me into the Covenant, there the Museum of Mankind that I visited so often with my mother to stare at the treasures from the stars. Circling through the fine residential district that borders the Skangen Canal, I even spied the ornate townhouse of the Duke of Kongoroi, on whose handsome daughter’s silken bedsheets I had left my virginity in a clammy puddle, not too many years before. In this city I had lived all my life, and I might never see it again; my yesterdays were washing away, like the topsoil of Salla’s sad farms under the knives of the winter rains. Since boyhood I had known that one day my brother would be septarch and this city would cease to have a place for me, but yet I had denied that to myself, saying, “It will not happen soon, perhaps it will not happen at all.” And my father lay dead in his firethorn coffin, and my brother crouched beneath the awful weight of his crown, and I was fleeing from Salla before my life had fairly begun, and such a mood of self-pity came over me that I did not dare even to speak to Noim, though what is a bondbrother for if not to ease one’s soul? And when we were driving through the ramshackle streets of Salla Old Town, not far from the city walls, I spied a dilapidated godhouse and said to Noim, “Pull up at the corner here. One must go within to empty himself.”

  Noim, fretful, did not want to spare the time, and made as if to drive on. “Would you deny one the godright?” I asked him hotly, and only then, simmering and cross, did he halt the car and back it up to let me out by the godhouse.

  Its façade was worn and peeling. An inscription beside the door was illegible. The pavement before it was cracked and tilted. Salla Old Town has a pedigree of more than a thousand years; some of its buildings have been continuously inhabited since the founding of the city, though most are in ruins, for the life of that district ended, in effect, when one of the medieval septarchs chose to move his court to our present palace atop Skangen Hill, much to the south. At night Salla Old Town comes alive with pleasure-seekers, who guzzle the blue wine in cellar cabarets, but at this misty hour it was a grim place. Blank stone walls faced me from every building: we have a fashion of making mere slits serve for windows in Salla, but here they carried it to an extreme. I wondered if the godhouse could have a scanning machine in working order to watch my approach. Yes, as it happened. When I neared the godhouse door, it swung partly open, and a scrawny man in drainer’s robes looked out. He was ugly, of course. Who ever saw a handsome drainer? It is a profession for the ill-favored. This one had greenish skin, heavily pocked, and a rubbery snout of a nose, and a dimness in one eye: standard for his trade. He gave me a fishy stare and, by his wariness, seemed to be regretting having opened the door.

  “The peace of all gods be on you,” I said. “Here is one in need of your craft.”

  He eyed my costly costume, my leather jerkin and my heavy jewelry, and studied the size and swagger of me, and evidently concluded I was some young bully of the aristocracy out to stir trouble in the slums. “It is too early in the day,” he said uneasily. “You come too soon for comfort.”

  “You would not refuse a sufferer!”

  “It is too early.”

  “Come, come, let one in. A troubled soul stands here.”

  He yielded, as I knew he must, and with many a twitch of his long-nosed face he admitted me. Within there was the reek of rot. The old woodwork was impregnated with the damp, the draperies were moldering, the furniture had been gnawed by insects. The lighting was dim. The drainer’s wife, as ugly as the drainer himself, skulked about. He led me to his chapel, a small sweaty room off the living-quarters, and left me kneeling by the cracked and yellowing mirror while he lit the candles. He robed himself and finally came to me where I knelt.

  He named his fee. I gasped.

  “Too much by half,” I said.

  He reduced it by a fifth. When I still refused, he told me to find my priesting elsewhere, but I would not rise, and, grudgingly, he brought the price of his services down another notch. Still it was probably five times what he charged the folk of Salla Old Town for the same benefit, but he knew I had money, and, thinking of Noim fuming in the car, I could not bring myself to haggle.

  “Done,” I said.

  Next he brought me the contract. I have said that we of Borthan are suspicious people; have I indicated how we rely on contracts? A man’s word is merely bad air. Before a soldier beds a whore they come to the terms of their bargain and scrawl it on paper. The drainer gave me a standard form, promising me that all I said would be held in strictest confidence, the drainer merely acting as intermediary between me and the god of my choice, and I for my part pledging that I would hold the drainer to no liability for the knowledge he would have of me, that I would not call him as witness in a lawsuit or make him my alibi in some prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. I signed. He signed. We exchanged copies and I gave him his money.

  “Which god would you have preside here?” he asked.

  “The god who protects travelers,” I told him. We do not call our gods aloud by their names.

  He lit a candle of the appropriate color—pink—and put it beside the mirror. By that it was understood that the chosen god would accept my words.

  “Behold your face,” the drainer said. “Put your eyes to your eyes.”

  I stared at the mirror. Since we shun vanity, it is not usual to examine one’s face except on these occasions of religion.

  “Open now your soul,” the drainer commanded. “Let your griefs and dreams and hungers and sorrows emerge.”

  “A septarch’s son it is who flees his homeland,” I began, and at once the drainer jerked to attention, impaled by my news. Though I did not take my eyes from the mirror, I guessed that he was scrabbling around to look at the contract and see who it was that had signed it. “Fear of his brother,” I continued, “leads him to go abroad, but yet he is sore of soul as he departs.”

  I went on in that vein for some while. The drainer made the usual interjections every time I faltered, prying words out of me in his craft’s cunning way, and shortly there was no need for such midwifery, for the words gushed freely. I told him how close I had come to lying to Stirron; I confessed that I would miss the royal wedding and give my brother injury thereby; I admitted several small sins of self-esteem, such as anyone commits daily.

  The drainer listened.

  We pay them to listen and to do nothing but listen, until we are drained and healed. Such is our holy communion, that we lift these toads from the mud, and set them up in their godhouses, and buy their patience with our money. It is permitted under the Covenant to say anything to a drainer, even if it is drivel, even if it is a shameful catalog of throttled lusts and hidden filth. We may bore a drainer as we have no right to bore our bond-kin, for it is the drainer’s obligation by contract to sit with the patience of the hills as we speak of ourselves. We need not worry what the drainer’s problems may be, nor what he thinks of us, nor whether he would be happier doing something else. He has a calling and he takes his fee, and he must serve those who have need of him. There was a
time when I felt it was a miraculously fine scheme, to give us drainers in order that we might rid our hearts of pain. Too much of my life was gone before I realized that to open oneself to a drainer is no more comforting than to make love to one’s own hand: there are better ways of loving, there are happier ways of opening.

  But I did not know that then, and I squatted by the mirror, getting the best healing that money could buy. Whatever residue of wrongness was in my soul came forth, syllable smoothly following syllable, the way sweet liquor will flow when one taps the thorny flanks of the gnarled and repellent-looking flesh-trees that grow by the Gulf of Sumar. As I spoke the candles caught me in their spell, and by the flickering of them I was drawn into the curved surface of the mirror so that I was drawn out of myself; the drainer was a mere blur in the darkness, unreal, unimportant, and I spoke now directly to the god of travelers, who would heal me and send me on my way. And I believed that this was so. I will not say that I imagined a literal god-place where our deities sit on call to serve us, but I had then an abstract and metaphorical understanding of our religion by which it seemed to me, in its way, as real as my right arm.