It was a role I welcomed. All my life I had been overshadowed by one man or another, so that for all my strength of body and ability of mind I had come to seem second-rate to myself. Perhaps that is a natural defect of being born a septarch’s second son. First there had been my father, whom I could never hope to equal in authority, agility, or might; then Stirron, whose kingship brought only exile for me; then my master in the Glinish logging camp; then Segvord Helalam; then Schweiz. All of them men of determination and prestige, who knew and held their places in our world, while I wandered in frequent bewilderment. Now, in the middle of my year’s, I could at last emerge. I had a mission. I had purpose. The spinners of the divine design had brought me to this place, had made me who I was, had readied me for my task. In joy I accepted their command.

46

There was a girl I kept for my sport, in a room on the south side of Manneran, in the tangle of old streets back of the Stone Chapel. She claimed to be a bastard of the Duke of Kongoroi, spawned when the duke was on a state visit to Manneran in the days of my father’s reign. Perhaps her story was true. Certainly she believed it. I was in the habit of going to her twice or thrice each moontime for an hour of pleasure, whenever I felt too stifled by the routine of my life, whenever I felt boredom’s hand at my throat. She was simple but passionate: lusty, available, undemanding. I did not hide my identity from her, but I gave her none of my inner self, and none was expected; we talked very little, and there was no question of love between us. In return for the price of her lodgings, she let me make occasional use of her body, and the transaction was no more complex than that: a touching of skins, a sneeze of the loins. She was the first to whom I gave the drug. I mixed it with golden wine. “We will drink this,” I said, and when she asked me why, I replied, “It will bring us closer together.” She asked, in no great curiosity, what it would do to us, and I explained, “It will open self to self, and make all walls transparent.” She offered no protests—no talk of the Covenant, no whining about privacy, no lectures of the evils of selfbaring. She did as she was told, convinced I would bring no harm to her. We took the dose, and then we lay naked on her couch waiting for the effects to begin. I stroked her cool thighs, kissed the tips of her breasts, playfully nibbled her earlobes, and soon the strangeness started, the buzzing and the rush of air, and we began to detect one another’s heartbeats and pulse. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, one feels so peculiar!” But it did not frighten her. Our souls drifted together and were fused in the clear white light coming from the Center of All Things. And I discovered what it was like to have only a slit between my thighs, and I learned how it is to wriggle one’s shoulders and have heavy breasts slap together, and I felt eggs throbbing and impatient in my ovaries. At the height of our voyage we joined our bodies. I felt my rod slide into my cavern. I felt myself moving against myself. I felt the slow sucking oceanic tide of ecstasy beginning to rise somewhere at my dark hot moist core, and I felt the hot prickling tickle of impending ecstasy dancing along my tool, and I felt the hard hairy shield of my chest crushing against the tender globes of my breasts, and I felt lips on my lips, tongue on my tongue, soul in my soul. This union of our bodies endured for hours, or so it seemed. And in that time my self was open to her, so that she could see in it all she chose, my boyhood in Salla, my flight to Glin, my marriage, my love for my bondsister, my weaknesses, my self-deceptions, and I looked into her and saw the sweetness of her, the giddiness, the moment of first finding blood on her thighs, the other blood of a later time, the image of Kinnall Darival as she carries it in her mind, the vague and unformed commandments of the Covenant, and all the rest of her soul’s furniture. Then we were swept away by the storms of our senses. I felt her orgasm and mine, mine and mine, hers and hers, the double column of frenzy that was one, the spasm and the spurt, the thrust and the thrust, the rise and the fall. We lay sweaty and sticky and exhausted, the drug still thundering through our joined minds. I opened my eyes and saw hers, unfocused, the pupils dilated. She gave me a lopsided smile. “I—I—I—I—I,” she said. “I!” The wonder of it seemed to daze her. “I! I! I!” I planted a kiss between her breasts and felt the brush of my lips myself. “I love you,” I said.

47

There was a clerk in the Port Justiciary, a certain Ulman, half my age and clearly a man of promise, whom I had come to like. He knew my power and my ancestry and showed no awe of me over that; his respect for me was based entirely on my skills in evaluating and handling the problems of the Justiciary. I kept him late one day and called him into my office when the others were gone. “There is this drug of Sumara Borthan,” I said, “that allows one mind freely to enter another.” He smiled and said that he had heard of it, yes, but understood it was difficult to obtain and dangerous to use. “There is no danger,” I answered. “And as for the difficulty of obtaining it—” I drew forth one of my little packets. His smile did not fade, though dots of color came into his cheeks. We took the drug together in my office. Hours later, when we left for our homes, I gave him some so that he could take it with his wife.

48

In the Stone Chapel I dared to reach out to a stranger, a short, thickbodied man in princely clothes, possibly a member of the septarch’s family. He had the clear serene eyes of a man of good faith and the poise of one who has looked within himself and is not displeased by what he has seen. But when I spoke my words to him, he shoved me away and cursed me with such fury that his anger became contagious; maddened by his words, I nearly struck him in blind frenzy. “Selfbarer! Selfbarer!” The shout echoed through the holy building, and people emerged from rooms of meditation to stare. It was the worst shame I had known in years. My exalted mission came into another perspective: I saw it as filthy, and myself as something pitiful, a creeping slinking dog of a man driven by who knew what compulsion to expose his shabby soul to strangers. My anger drained from me and fear flowed in: I slipped into the shadows and out a side door, dreading arrest. For a week I walked about on tiptoe, forever looking back over my shoulder. But nothing pursued me except my panging conscience.

49

The moment of insecurity passed. Again I saw my mission whole, and recognized the merit of what I had pledged myself to do, and felt only sorrow for the man in the Stone Chapel who had spurned my gift. And in a single week I found three strangers who would share the drug with me. I wondered how I could ever have doubted myself. But other seasons of doubt lay ahead.