A Time of Changes Read online

  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.

  66

  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 last scraps of flesh; I could see traces of their 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—”

  67

  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 and said it was a female thing, an unimportant thing—women weep all the time, she said, and need give no explanations. And she smiled again and closed the door. But that look in her eyes—it wa
s 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?

  68

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON such few possessions as I had were packed. I asked Noim for the loan of a groundcar, and he granted it with a brusque wave of his fingers. There was no question of remaining here any longer. Not only were there echoes of Halum resonating everywhere about, but also I had to go apart, into some place where I could think undisturbed, and examine all that I had done and that I hoped to do. Nor did I wish to be here when the district police carried out their inquest into Halum’s death.

  Had she been unable to face me again, the morning after having given her soul away? She had gone gladly enough into the sharing of selves. But afterward, in that rush of guilty reappraisal that often follows the first opening, she may have felt another way: old habits of reticence reasserting themselves, a sudden cascading sense of horror at what she had revealed. And the quick irreversible decision, the frozen-faced trek to the stormshield pens, the ill-considered passing of the final gate, the moment of regret-within-regret as the animals pounced and she realized she had carried her atonement too far. Was that it? I could think of no other explanation for that plunge from serenity to despair, except that it was a second thought, a reflex of shock that swept her to doom. And I was without a bondsister, and had lost bondbrother too, for Noim’s eyes were merciless when he looked at me. Was this what I had intended, when I dreamed of opening souls?

  “Where will you go?” Noim asked. “They’ll jail you in Manneran. Take one step into Glin with your drug and you’ll be flayed. Stirron will hound you out of Salla. Where, then, Kinnall? Threish? Velis? Or maybe Umbis, eh? Dabis? No! By the gods, it will be Sumara Borthan, won’t it? Yes. Among your savages, and you’ll have all the selfbaring you’ll need there, yes? Yes?”

  Quietly I said, “You forget the Burnt Lowlands, Noim. A cabin in the desert—a place to think, a place of peace—there is so much one must try to understand, now—”

  “The Burnt Lowlands? Yes, that’s good, Kinnall. The Burnt Lowlands in high summer. A fiery purge for your soul. Go there, yes. Go.”

  69

  ALONE, I drove northward along the flank of the Huishtors, and then westward, on the road that leads to Kongoroi and Salla’s Gate. More than once I thought of swerving the car and sending it tumbling over the highway’s rim, and making an end. More than once, as the first light of day touched my eyelids in some back-country hostelry, I thought of Halum and had to struggle to leave my bed, for it seemed so much easier to go on sleeping. Day and night and day and night and day, and a few days more, and I was deep into West Salla, ready to go up the mountains and through the gate. While resting one night in a town midway into the uplands I discovered that an order was out in Salla for my arrest. Kinnall Darival, the septarch’s son, a man of thirty years, of this height and having these features, brother to the Lord Stirron, was wanted for monstrous crimes: selfbaring, and the use of a dangerous drug, which against the explicit orders of the septarch he was offering to the unwary. By means of this drug the fugitive Darival had driven his own bondsister insane and in her madness she had perished in a horrible way. Therefore all citizens of Salla were enjoined to apprehend the evildoer, for whom a heavy reward would be paid.

  If Stirron knew why Halum had died, then Noim had told him everything. I was lost. When I reached Salla’s Gate, I would find officers of the West Sallan constabulary waiting for me, for my destination was known. Yet in that case why had the announcement not informed the populace that I was heading for the Burnt Lowlands? Possibly Noim had held back some of what he knew, so that I could make an escape.

  I had no choice but to go forward. It would take me days to reach the coast, and I would find all of Salla’s ports alerted for me when I got there; even if I slipped on board a vessel, where would I go? Glin? Manneran? Similarly it was hopeless thinking of getting somehow across the Huish or the Woyn, into the neighboring provinces: I was already proscribed in Manneran, and surely I would find a chilly greeting in Glin. The Burnt Lowlands it would have to be, then. I would stay there some while, and then perhaps try to make my way out via one of the Threishtor passes, to start a new life on the western coast. Perhaps.

  I brought provisions in the town, at a place that serves the needs of hunters entering the Lowlands: dried food, some weapons, and condensed water, enough to last me by careful expansion for several moontimes. As I made my purchases I thought the townsfolk were eyeing me strangely. Did they recognize me as the depraved prince whom the septarch sought? No one moved to seize me. Possibly they knew there was a cordon across Salla’s Gate, and would take no risks with such a brute, when there were police in plenty to capture me on top of Kongoroi. Whatever the reason, I got out of the town unbothered, and set out now on the final stretch of the highway. In the past I had come this way only in winter, when snow lay deep; even now there were patches of dirty whiteness in shadowy corners, and as the road rose, the snow thickened, until near Kongoroi’s double summit everything lay mantled in it. Timing my ascent carefully, I managed things so that I came to the great pass well after sundown, hoping that darkness would protect me in case of a roadblock. But the gate was unguarded. My car’s lights were off as I drove the last distance—I half expected to go over the edge—and I made the familiar left turn, which brought me into Salla’s Gate, and I saw no one there. Stirron had not had time to close the western border, or else he did not think I would be so mad as to flee that way. I went forward, and through the pass, and slowly down the switchbacks on the western face of Kongoroi, and when dawn overtook me I was into the Burnt Lowlands, choking in the heat, but safe.

  70

  NEAR THE PLACE where the hornfowl nest I found this cabin, about where I remembered it to be. It was without plumbing, nor were the walls even whole, yet it would do. It would do. The awful heat of the place would be my purge. I set up housekeeping inside, laying out my things, unpacking the journal-paper I had bought in the town for this record of my life and deeds, setting the jeweled case containing the last of the drug in a corner, piling my clothing above it, sweeping away the red sand. On my first full day of residence I busied myself camouflaging my groundcar, so that it would not betray my presence when searchers came: I drove it into a shallow ravine, so that its top barely broke the level of the ground, and collected woody ground-plants to make a covering for it, throwing sand atop the interwoven stems of the plants. Only sharp eyes would see the car when I was done. I made careful note of the place, lest I fail to find it myself when I was ready to leave.

  For some days I simply walked the desert, thinking. I went to the place where the hornfowl struck my father down, and had no fear of the sharp-beaked circling birds: let them have me too. I considered the events of my time of changes, asking myself, Is this what you wanted, Is this what you hoped to bring about, Does this satisfy you? I relived each of my many soulsharings, from that with Schweiz to that with Halum, asking, Was this good? Were there mistakes that could have been avoided? Did you gain, or did you lose, by what you did? And I concluded that I had gained more than I had lost, although my losses had been terrible ones. My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles. If I had stayed with Halum until her uncertainties had fled, she might not have given way to the shame that destroyed h
er. If I had been more open with Noim—if I had stayed in Manneran to confront my enemies—if—if—if—and yet, I had no regrets for having done my changing, but just that I had bungled my revolution of the soul. For I was convinced of the wrongness of the Covenant and of our way of life. Your way of life. That Halum had seen fit to kill herself after two hours of experiencing human love was the most scathing possible indictment of the Covenant.

  And finally—not too many days ago—I began to write what you have been reading. My fluency surprised me; perhaps I verged even on glibness, though it was hard for me at first to use the grammar I imposed on myself. I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. So I began my memoir. Have I been true to that intent? Have I concealed anything? Day upon day my pen has scratched paper, and I have put myself down whole for you, with no cosmetic alterations of the record. In this sweatbox of a cabin have I laid myself bare. Meanwhile I have had no contact with the outside world, except for occasional hints, possibly irrational, that Stirron’s agents are combing the Burnt Lowlands for me. I believe that guards are posted at the gates leading into Salla, Glin, and Manneran; and probably at the western passes as well; and also in Stroin Gap, in case I try to make my way to the Gulf of Sumar through the Wet Lowlands. My luck has held well, but soon they must find me. Shall I wait for them? Or shall I move on, trusting to fortune, hoping to find an unguarded exit? I have this thick manuscript. I value it now more than my life itself. If you could read it, if you could see how I have stumbled and staggered toward knowledge of self, if you could receive from it the vibrations of my mind—I have put everything down, I think, in this autobiography, in this record of self, in this document unique in the history of Velada Borthan. If I am captured here, my book will be captured with me, and Stirron will have it burned.