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 godplace 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.
My flow of words halted and the drainer made no attempt to renew the outpour. He murmured the phrases of absolution. I was done. He snuffed the godcandle between two fingers and rose to doff his robes. Still I knelt, weak and quivering from my draining, lost in reveries. I felt cleansed and purified, stripped of my soul’s grit and debris, and, in the music of that moment, was only dimly aware of the squalor about me. The chapel was a place of magic and the drainer was aflame with divine beauty.
“Up,” he said, nudging me with the tip of his sandal. “Out. Off about your journeys.”
The sound of his splintery voice doused all the wonder. I stood up, shaking my head to cure it of its new lightness, while the drainer half pushed me into the corridor. He was no longer afraid of me, that ugly little man, even though I might be a septarch’s son and could kill him with one wad of my spittle, for I had told him of my cowardice, of my forbidden hunger for Halum, of all the cheapnesses of my spirit, and that knowledge reduced me in his eyes: no man newly drained can awe his drainer.
The rain was even worse when I left the building. Noim sat scowling in the car, his forehead pressed to the steering-stick. He looked up and tapped his wrist to tell me I had dallied too long at the godhouse.
“Feel better now that your bladder’s empty?” he asked.
“What?”
“That is, did you have a good soul-pissing in there?”
“A foul phrase, Noim.”
“One grows blasphemous when his patience is extended too far.”
He kicked the starter and we rolled forward. Shortly we were at the ancient walls of Salla City, by the noble tower-bedecked opening known as Glin Door, which was guarded by four sour-faced and sleepy warriors in dripping uniforms. They paid no heed to us. Noim drove through the gate and past a sign welcoming us to the Grand Salla Highway. Salla City dwindled swiftly behind us; northward we rushed toward Glin.
13
The Grand Salla Highway passes through one of our best farming districts, the rich and fertile Plain of Nand, which each spring receives a gift of topsoil stripped from the skin of West Salla by our busy streams. At that time the septarch of the Nand district was a notorious coinclutcher, and thanks to his penury the highway was in poor repair there, so, as Halum had predicted in jest, we were hard put to wallow through the mud that clogged the road. It was good to finish with Nand and enter North Salla, where the land is a mixture of rock and sand and the people live on weeds and on scuttling things that they take from the sea. Groundcars are unusual sights in North Salla, and twice we were stoned by hungry and sullen townsfolk, who found our mere passage through their unhappy place an insult. But at least the road was free of mud.
Noim’s father’s troops were stationed in extreme North Salla, on the lower bank of the River Huish. This is the grandest of Velada Borthan’s rivers. It begins as a hundred trifling brooks trickling down the eastern slopes of the Huishtors in the northern part of West Salla; these brooks merge in the foothills to become a swift stream, gray and turbulent, that rushes through a narrow granite canyon marked by six great steplike plunges. Emerging from those wild cascades onto its alluvial plain, the Huish proceeds more serenely on a northeastern course toward the sea, growing wider and wider in the flatlands, and splitting ultimately so that, at its broad delta, it gives itself to the ocean through eight mouths. In its rapid western reaches the Huish forms the boundary between Salla and Glin; at its placid easternmost end it divides Glin from Krell.
For all its length the great river is unbridged, and one might think little need exists to fortify its banks against invaders from the far side. But many times in Salla’s history have the men of Glin crossed the Huish by boat to make war, and just as many times have we of Salla gone to ravage Glin; nor is the record of neighborliness between Glin and Krell any happier. So all along the Huish sprout military outposts, and generals like Luinn Condorit consume their lives studying the riverfogs for glimpses of the enemy.
I stayed a short while at Noim’s father’s camp. The general was not much like Noim, being a large-featured, heavy man whose face, eroded by time and frustration, was like a contour map of bouldery North Salla. Not once in fifteen years had there been any significant clash along the border he guarded, and I think that idleness had chilled his soul: he said little, scowled often, turned every statement into a bitter grumble, and retreated speedily from conversation into private dreams. They must have been dreams of war; no doubt he could not glance at the river without wishing that it swarmed with the landing-craft of Glin. Since men like him surely patrol the Glin side of the river as well, it is a wonder that the border guards do not trespass on one another out of sheer boredom, every few years, and embroil our provinces in pointless conflict.
A dull time we had of it there. Noim was bound by filial ties to call upon his father, but they had nothing to, say to one another, and the general was a stranger to me. I had told Stirron I would stay with Noim’s father until the first snow of winter fell, and I was true to that, yet luckily it was no lengthy visit I made; winter comes early in the north. On my fifth day there white sprinkles fluttered down and I was released from my self-imposed pledge.
Ferries, shuttling between terminals in three places, link Salla to Glin except when there is war. Noim drove me to the nearest terminal one black dawn, and solemnly we embraced and made our farewells. I said I would send my address, when I had one in Glin, so that he could keep me informed of doings in Salla. He promised to look after Halum. We talked vaguely of when he and she and I would meet again; perhaps they would visit me in Glin next year, perhaps we would all three go on holiday in Manneran. We made these plans with little conviction in our voices.
“This day of parting should never have come,” Noim said.
“Partings lead only to reunions,” I told him jauntily.
“Perhaps you could have come to some understanding with your brother, Kinnall—”
“There was never hope of that.”
“Stirron has spoken warmly of you. Is he then insincere?”
“He means his warmth, just now. But it would not be long before it became inconvenient for him to have a brother dwelling by his side, and then embarrassing, and then impossible. A septarch sleeps best when there is no potential rival of the royal blood close at hand.”
The ferry beckoned me with a bellow of its horn.
I clasped Noim’s arm and we made farewells again, hurriedly. The last thing I said to him was, “When you see the septarch, tell him that his brother loves him.” Then I went aboard.
The crossing was too quick. Less than an hour and I found myself on the alien soil of Glin. The immigration officials examined me brusquely, but they thawed at the sight of my passport, bright red to denote my place in the nobility, with a golden stripe to show that I was of the septarch’s family. At once I had my visa, good for an indefinite stay. Such officials are a gossipy sort; beyond question they were on the telephone the instant I left them, sending word to their government that a prince of Salla was in the land, and I suppose that not much later that bit of information was in the hands of Salla’s diplomatic representatives in Glin, who would relay it to my brother for his displeasure.