Seeing such an arrest as the most probable next development, I wondered how to elude the government agents. Now I sorely felt the absence of my bondbrother and bondsister, for where else could I turn for help and advice? Nowhere in Glin was there anyone to whom I might say, “One is frightened, one is in grave peril, one asks assistance of you.” Everyone’s soul was walled against me by stony custom. In all the world were only two whom I could regard as confidants, and they were far away. I must find my own salvation.
I would go into hiding, I decided. The innkeeper granted me a few hours to prepare myself. I shaved my beard, traded my royal cloak for the dim rags of another lodger nearly my height, and arranged the pawn of my ring of ceremony. My remaining possessions I bundled together to serve as a hump on my back, and I hobbled out of the hostelry doubled up, with one eye sealed shut and my mouth twisted far around to one side. Whether it was a disguise that could have fooled anyone, I cannot say; but no one waited to arrest me, and thus uglified I walked out of Glain under a cold, thin rain that soon turned to snow.
17
Outside the city’s northwestern gate (for it was there my feet had taken me) a heavy truck came rumbling by me, and its treads rolled through a pool of half-frozen slush, spraying me liberally. I halted to scrape the chilly stuff from my leggings; the truck halted too, and the driver clambered down, exclaiming, “There is cause for apology here. It was not intended to douse you so!”
This courtesy so astounded me that I stood to my full height, and let the distortions slip from my features. Evidently the driver had thought me a feeble, bent old man; he showed amazement at my transformation, and laughed aloud. I knew not what to say. Into my gaping silence he declared, “There is room for one to ride, if you have the need or the whim.”
Into my mind sprang a bright fantasy: he would drive me toward the coast, where I would sign on aboard a merchant vessel bound for Manneran, and in that happy tropical land I would throw myself on the mercies of my bondsister’s father, escaping all this harassment.
“Where are you bound?” I asked.
“Westward, into the mountains.”
So much for Manneran. I accepted the ride all the same. He offered me no contract of defined liabilities, but I let that pass. For some minutes we did not speak; I was content to listen to the slap of the treads on the snowy road, and think of the distance growing between myself and the police of Glain.
“Outlander, are you?” he said at length.
“Indeed.” Fearing that some alarm might be out for a man of Salla, I chose belatedly to adopt the soft slurred speech of southern folk, that I had learned from Halum, hoping he would come to believe that I had not spoken first to him with Sallan accents. “You travel with a native of Manneran, who finds your winter a strange and burdensome thing.”
“What brought you north?” he asked.
“The settlement of one’s mother’s estate. She was a woman of Glain.”
“Did the lawyers treat you well, then?”
“Her money melted in their hands, leaving nothing.”
“The usual story. You’re short of cash, eh?”
“Destitute,” I admitted.
“Well, well, one understands your situation, for one has been there oneself. Perhaps something can be done for you.”
I realized from his phrasing, from his failure to use the Glinish passive construction, that he too must be an outlander. Swinging round to face him, I said, “Is one right that you likewise are from elsewhere?”
“This is true.”
“Your accent is unfamiliar. Some western province?”
“Oh, no, no.”
“Not Salla, then?”
“Manneran,” he said, and burst into hearty laughter, and covered my shame and confusion by telling me, “You do the accent well, friend. But you needn’t make the effort longer.”
“One hears no Manneran in your voice,” I mumbled.
“One has lived long in Glin,” he said, “and one’s voice is a soup of inflections.”
I had not fooled him for a moment, but he made no attempt to penetrate my identity, and seemed not to care who I might be or where I came from. We talked easily a while. He told me that he owned a lumber mill in western Glin, midway up the flanks of the Huishtors where the fall yellow-needled honey-trees grow; before we had driven much farther along he was offering me a job as a logger in his camp. The pay was poor, he said, but one breathed clean air there, and government officials were never seen, and such things as passports and certificates of status did not matter.
Of course I accepted. His camp was beautifully situated, above a sparkling mountain lake which never froze, for it was fed by a warm spring whose source was said to be deep beneath the Burnt Lowlands. Tremendous ice-topped Huishtor peaks hung above us, and not far away was Glin Gate, the pass through which one goes from Glin to the Burnt Lowlands, crossing a bitter corner of the Frozen Lowlands on the way. He had a hundred men in his employ, rough and foul-mouthed, forever shouting “I” and “me” without shame, but they were honest and hardworking men, and I had never been close to their sort before. My plan was to stay there through the winter, saving my pay, and go off to Manneran when I had earned the price of my passage. Some news of the outer world reached the camp from time to time, though, and I learned in this way that the Glinish authorities were seeking a certain young prince of Salla, who was believed to have gone insane and was wandering somewhere in Glin; the septarch Stirron urgently wished the unhappy young man to be returned to his homeland for the medical care he so desperately needed. Suspecting that the roads and ports would be watched, I extended my stay in the mountains through the spring, and, my caution deepening, I stayed the summer also. In the end I spent something more than a year there.
It was a year that changed me greatly. We worked hard, felling the huge trees in all weathers, stripping them of boughs, feeding them to the mill, a long tiring day and a chilly one, but plenty of hot wine at night, and every tenth day a platoon of women brought in from a nearby town to amuse us. My weight increased by half again, all of it hard muscle, and I grew taller until I surpassed the tallest logger in the camp, and they made jokes about my size. My beard came in full and the planes of my face changed as the plumpness of youth went from me. The loggers I found more likable than the courtiers among whom all my prior days had been passed. Few of them were able even to read, and of polite etiquette they knew nothing, but they were cheerful and easy-spirited men, at home in their own bodies. I would not have you think that because they talked in “I” and “me” they were open-hearted and given to sharing of confidences; they kept the Covenant in that respect, and might even have been more secretive than educated folk about certain things. Yet they seemed more sunny of soul than those who speak in passives and impersonal pronouns, and perhaps my stay among them planted in me that seed of subversion, that understanding of the Covenant’s basic wrongness, which the Earthman Schweiz later guided into full flowering.
I told them nothing of my rank and origin. They could see for themselves, by the smoothness of my skin, that I had not done much hard labor in my life, and my way of speaking marked me as an educated man, if not necessarily one of high birth. But I offered no revelations of my past, and none were sought. All I said was that I came from Salla since my accent marked me as Sallan anyway; they granted me the privacy of my history. My employer, I think, guessed early that I must be the fugitive prince whom Stirron sought, but he never queried me about that. For the first time in my life, then, I had an identity apart from my royal status. I ceased to be Lord Kinnall, the septarch’s second son, and was only Darival, the big logger from Salla.