A time of changes, p.21
A Time of Changes, page 21
She had by then entered her thirtieth year. Our women marry between fourteen and sixteen, are done bearing their children by twenty-two or twenty-four, and at thirty have begun to slide into middle age, but time had left Halum untouched. Not having known the tempests of marriage and the travails of motherhood, not having spent her energies on the grapplings of the conjugal couch or the lacerations of childbed, she had the supple, pliant body of a girl: no fleshy bulges, no sagging folds, no exploded veins, no thickening of the frame. She had changed only in one respect, for in recent years her dark hair had turned silvery. This was but an enhancement, however, since it gleamed with dazzling brilliance, and offered agreeable contrast to the deep tan of her youthful face.
In her luggage was a packet of letters for me from Manneran: messages from the duke, from Segvord, from my sons Noim and Stirron and Kinnall, from my daughters Halum and Loimel, from Mihan the archivist, and several others. Those who wrote did so in tense, self-conscious style. They were the letters one might write to a dead man if one felt guilty at having survived him. Still, it was good to hear these words out of my former life. I regretted not finding a letter from Schweiz; Halum told me she had heard nothing from him since before my indictment, and thought he might well have left our planet. Nor was there any word from my wife. “Is Loimel too busy to write a line or two?” I asked, and Halum, looking embarrassed, said softly that Loimel never spoke of me these days: “She seems to have forgotten that she was married.”
Halum also had brought a trove of gifts for me from my friends across the Woyn. They were startling in their opulence: massy clusters of precious metals, elaborate strings of rare gems. “Tokens of love,” Halum said, but I was not fooled. One could buy great estates with this heap of treasure. Those who loved me would not humiliate me by transferring cash to my account in Salla, but they could give me these splendors in the ordinary way of friendship, leaving me free to dispose of them according to my needs.
“Has it been very sad for you, this uprooting?” Halum asked. “This sudden going into exile?”
“One is no stranger to exile,” I told her. “And one still has Noim for bondlove and companionship.”
“Knowing that it would cost you what it did,” she said, “would you play with the drug a second time, if you could turn time backward by a year?”
“Beyond any doubt.”
“Was it worth the loss of home and family and friends?”
“It would be worth the loss of life itself,” I replied, “if only one could be assured by that that all of Velada Borthan would come to taste the drug.”
That answer seemed to frighten her: she drew back, she touched the tips of her fingers to her lips, perhaps becoming aware for the first time of the intensity of her bondbrother’s madness. In speaking those words I was not uttering mere rhetorical overstatement, and something of my conviction must have reached Halum. She saw that I believed, and, seeing the depth of my commitment, feared for me.
Noim spent many of the days that followed away from his lands, traveling to Salla City on some family business and to the Plain of Nand to inspect property he was thinking of buying. In his absence I was master of the estate, for the servants, whatever they might think of my private life, did not dare to question my authority to my face. Daily I rode out to oversee the workers in Noim’s fields, and Halum rode with me. Actually little overseeing was demanded of me, since this was midway in the seasons between planting and harvest, and the crops looked after themselves. We rode for pleasure, mainly, pausing here for a swim, there for a lunch at the edge of the woods. I showed her the stormshield pens, which did not please her, and took her among the gentler animals of the grazing fields, who came up and amiably nuzzled her.
These long rides gave us hours each day to talk. I had not spent so much time with Halum since childhood, and we grew wonderfully close. We were cautious with one another at first, not wishing to get too near the bone with our questions, but soon we spoke as bond-kin should. I asked her why it was she had never married, and she answered me simply, “One never encountered a suitable man.” Did she regret having gone without husband and children? No, she said, she regretted nothing, for her life had been tranquil and rewarding; yet there was wistfulness in her tone. I could not press her further. On her part she questioned me about the Sumaran drug, trying to learn from me what merits it had that had led me to run such risks. I was amused by the way she phrased her inquiries: trying to sound earnest and sympathetic and objective, yet nonetheless unable to hide her horror at what I had done. It was as though her bondbrother had run amok and butchered twenty people in a marketplace, and she now wished to discover, by means of patient and good-humored questioning, just what had been the philosophical bases that had led him to take up mass murder. I also tried to maintain a temperate and dispassionate manner, so that I would not sear her with my intensity as I had done in that first interchange. I avoided all evangelizing, and, as calmly and soberly as I could, I explained to her the effects of the drug, the benefits I gained from it, and my reasons for rejecting the stony isolation of self that the Covenant imposes on us. Shortly a curious metamorphosis came over both her attitude and mine. She became less the highborn lady striving with well-meant warmth to understand the criminal, and more the student attempting to grasp the mysteries revealed by an initiated master. And I became less the descriptive reporter, and more the prophet of a new dispensation. I spoke in flights of lyricism of the raptures of soulsharing; I told her of the strange wonder of the early sensations, as one begins to open, and of the blazing moment of union with another human consciousness; I depicted the experience as something far more intimate than any meeting of souls one might have with one’s bond-kin, or any visit to a drainer. Our conversations became monologues. I lost myself in verbal ecstasies, and came down from them at times to see Halum, silver-haired and eternally young, with her eyes sparkling and her lips parted in total fascination. The outcome was inevitable. One scorching afternoon as we walked slowly through the aisles in a field of grain that rose chest-high on her, she said without warning, “If the drug is available to you here, may your bondsister share it with you?” I had converted her.
SIXTY-FIVE
THAT NIGHT I DISSOLVED some pinches of the powder in two flasks of wine. Halum looked uncertain as I handed one to her, and her uncertainty rebounded to me, so that I hesitated to go through with our project; but then she gave me a magical smile of tenderness and drained her flask. “There is no flavor of it,” she said, as I drank. We sat talking in Noim’s trophy-hall, decked with hornfowl spears and draped with stormshield furs, and as the drug began to take effect Halum started to shiver; I pulled a thick black hide from the wall and draped it about her shoulders, and through it I held her until the chill was past.
Would this go well? Despite all my propagandizing I was frightened. In every man’s life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure. So with me and Halum and the Sumaran drug. But my fear ebbed as the drug took hold. Halum was smiling. Halum was smiling.
The wall between our souls became a membrane, through which we could slide at will. Halum was the first to cross it. I hung back, paralyzed by prudery, thinking even now that it would be an intrusion on my bondsister’s maidenhood for me to enter her mind, and also a violation of the commandment against bodily intimacies between bond-kin. So I dangled in this absurd trap of contradictions, too inhibited to practice my own creed, for some moments after the last barriers had fallen; meanwhile Halum, realizing at last that nothing prevented her, slipped unhesitatingly into my spirit. My instant response was to try to shield myself: I did not want her to discover this or this or that, and particularly to learn of my physical desire for her. But after a moment of this embarrassed flurrying I ceased trying to plaster my soul with figleaves, and went across into Halum, allowing the true communion to begin, the inextricable entanglement of selves.
I found myself—it would be more accurate to say, I lost myself—in corridors with glassy floors and silvered walls, through which there played a cool sparkling light, like the crystalline brightness one sees reflected from the white sandy bottom of a shallow tropical cove. This was Halum’s virginal inwardness. In niches along these corridors, neatly displayed, were the shaping factors of her life, memories, images, odors, tastes, visions, fantasies, disappointments, delights. A prevailing purity governed everything. I saw no trace of the sexual ecstasies, nothing of the fleshly passions. I cannot tell you whether Halum, out of modesty, took care to shield the area of her sexuality from my probings, or had thrust it so far from her own consciousness that I could not detect it.
She met me without fear and joined me in joy. I have no doubt of that. When our souls blended, it was a complete union, without reservation, without qualification. I swam through the glittering depths of her, and the grime of my soul dropped from me: she was healing, she was cleansing. Was I staining her even as she was refining and purifying me? I cannot say. I cannot say. We surrounded and engulfed one another, and supported one another, and interpenetrated one another; and here mingling with myself was the self of Halum, who all my life had been my staff and my courage, my ideal and my goal, this cool incorruptible perfect incarnation of beauty; and perhaps as this corruptible self of mine put on incorruption, the first corrosive plague sprouted on her shining incorruptibility. I cannot say. I came to her and she came to me. At one point in our journey through one another I encountered a zone of strangeness, where something seemed coiled and knotted: and I remembered that time in my youth, when I was setting out from Salla City on my flight into Glin, when Halum had embraced me at Noim’s house, and I had thought I detected in her embrace a tremor of barely suppressed passion, a flicker of the hunger of the body. For me. For me. And I thought that I had found that zone of passion again, only when I looked more closely at it, it was gone, and I beheld the pure gleaming metallic surface of her soul. Perhaps both the first time and the second it was something I manufactured out of my own churning desires, and projected on her. I cannot say. Our souls were twined; I could not have known where I left off and Halum began.
We emerged from the trance. The night was half gone. We blinked, we shook our foggy heads, we smiled uneasily. There is always that moment, coming out of the drug’s soul-intimacy, when one feels abashed, one thinks one has revealed too much, and one wants to retract what one has given. Fortunately that moment is usually brief. I looked at Halum and felt my body afire with holy love, a love that was not at all of the flesh, and I started to say to her, as Schweiz had once said to me, I love you. But I choked on the word. The “I” was trapped in my teeth, like a fish in a weir. I. I. I. I love you, Halum. I. If I could only say it. I. It would not come. It was there, but could not get past my lips. I took her hands between mine, and she smiled a serene moonlike smile, and it would have been so easy then to hurl the words out, except that something imprisoned them. I.I. How could I speak to Halum of love, and couch my love in the syntax of the gutter? I thought then that she would not understand, that my obscenity would shatter everything. Foolishness: our souls had been one, how then could a mere phrasing of words disturb anything? Out with it! I love you. Faltering, I said, “There is—such love in one—for you—such love, Halum—”
She nodded, as if to say, Don’t speak, your clumsy words break the spell. As if to say, Yes, there is in one such love for you also, Kinnall. As if to say, I love you, Kinnall. Lightly she got to her feet, and went to the window: cold summer moonlight on the formal garden of the great house, the bushes and trees white and still. I came up behind her and touched her at the shoulders, very gently. She wriggled and made a little purring sound. I thought all was well with her. I was certain all was well with her.
We held no post-mortems on what had taken place between us this evening. That, too, seemed to threaten a puncturing of the mood. We could discuss our trance tomorrow, and all the tomorrows beyond that. I went with her back to her room, not far down the hallway from my own, and kissed her timidly on the cheek, and had a sisterly kiss from her; she smiled again, and closed the door behind her. In my own room I sat awhile awake, reliving everything. The missionary fervor was kindled anew in me. I would become an active messiah again, I vowed, going up and down this land of Salla spreading the creed of love; no more would I hide here at my bondbrother’s place, broken and adrift, a hopeless exile in my own nation. Stirron’s warning meant nothing to me. How could he drive me from Salla? I would make a hundred converts in a week. A thousand, ten thousand. I would give the drug to Stirron himself, and let the septarch proclaim the new dispensation from his own throne! Halum had inspired me. In the morning I would set out, seeking disciples.
There was a sound in the courtyard. I looked out and saw a groundcar: Noim had returned from his business trip. He entered the house; I heard him in the hallway, passing my room; then there came the sound of knocking. I peered into the corridor. He stood by Halum’s door, talking to her. I could not see her. What was this, that he would go to Halum, who was nothing but a friend to him, and fail to greet his own bondbrother? Unworthy suspicions woke in me—unreal accusations. I forced them away. The conversation ended; Halum’s door closed; Noim, without noticing me, continued toward his own bedroom.
Sleep was impossible for me. I wrote a few pages, but they were worthless, and at dawn I went out to stroll in the gray mists. It seemed to me that I heard a distant cry. Some animal seeking its mate, I thought. Some lost beast wandering at daybreak.
SIXTY-SIX
I WAS ALONE AT BREAKFAST. That was unusual but not surprising: Noim, coming home in the middle of the night after a long drive, would have wanted to sleep late, and doubtless the drug had left Halum exhausted. My appetite was powerful, and I ate for the three of us, all the while planning my schemes for dissolving the Covenant. As I sipped my tea one of Noim’s grooms burst wildly into the dining-hall. His cheeks were blazing and his nostrils were flared, as if he had run a long way and was close to collapse. “Come,” he cried, gasping. “The stormshields—” He tugged at my arm, half dragging me from my seat. I rushed out after him. He was already far down the unpaved road that led to the stormshield pens. I followed, wondering if the beasts had escaped in the night, wondering if I must spend the day chasing monsters again. As I neared the pens I saw no signs of a breakout, no clawed tracks, no torn fences. The groom clung to the bars of the biggest pen, which held nine or ten stormshields. I looked in. The animals were clustered, bloody-jawed, bloody-furred, around some ragged meaty haunch. They were snarling and quarreling over the feast scattered across the ground. Had some unfortunate farm beast strayed among these killers by darkness? How could such a thing have happened? And why would the groom see fit to haul me from my breakfast to show it to me? I caught his arm and asked him what was so strange about the sight of stormshields devouring their kill. He turned a terrible face to me and blurted in a strangled voice, “The lady—the lady—”
SIXTY-SEVEN
NOIM WAS BRUTAL with me. “You lied,” he said. “You denied you were carrying the drug, but you lied. And you gave it to her last night. Yes? Yes? Yes? Don’t hide anything now, Kinnall. You gave it to her!”
“You spoke with her,” I said. I could barely manage words. “What did she tell you?”
“One stopped by her door, because one thought one heard the sound of sobbing,” Noim answered. “One inquired if she was well. She came out: her face was strange, it was full of dreams, her eyes were as blank as pieces of polished metal, and yes, yes, she had been weeping. And one asked what was wrong, whether there had been any trouble here. No, she said, all was well. She said you and she had talked all evening. Why was she weeping, then? She shrugged and smiled again and closed the door. But that look in her eyes—it was the drug, Kinnall! Against all your vows, you gave it to her! And now—and now—”
“Please,” I said softly. But he went on shouting, loading me with accusations, and I could not reply.
The grooms had reconstructed everything. They had found the path of Halum’s feet in the dew-moist sandy road. They had found the door ajar of the house that gives access to the stormshield pens. They had found marks of forcing on the inner door that leads to the feeding-gate itself. She had gone through; she had carefully opened the feeding-gate, and just as carefully closed it behind her, to loose no killers on the sleeping estate; then she had offered herself to the waiting claws. All this between darkness and dawn, perhaps even while I strolled in a different part. That cry out of the mists—Why? Why? Why? Why?
SIXTY-EIGHT
