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.