63
I made no secret of my whereabouts in Salla, for I had no reason now to fear the jealousy of my royal brother. Stirron as a boy newly on the throne might have been driven to eliminate me as a potential rival, but not the Stirron who had ruled for more than seventeen years. By now he was an institution in Salla, well loved and an integral part of everyone’s existence, and I was a stranger, barely remembered by the older folk and unknown to the younger, who spoke with a Mannerangi accent and who had been publicly branded with the shame of selfbaring. Even if I cared to overthrow Stirron, where would I find followers?
In truth I was hungry for the sight of my brother. In times of storm one turns to one’s earliest comrades; and with Noim estranged from me and Halum on the far side of the Woyn, I had only Stirron left. I had never resented having had to flee Salla on his account, for I knew that had our ages been reversed I would have caused him to flee the same way. If our relationship had grown frosty since my flight, it was a frost of his making, arising from his guilty conscience. Some years had passed, now, since my last visit to Salla City: perhaps my adversities would open his heart. I wrote Stirron a letter from Noim’s place, formally begging sanctuary in Salla. Under Sallan law I had to be taken in, for I was one of Stirron’s subjects and was guilty of no crime committed on Sallan soil: yet I thought it best to ask. The charges lodged against me by the Grand Justiciar of Manneran, I admitted, were true, but I offered Stirron a terse and (I think) eloquent justification of my deviation from the Covenant. I closed the letter with expressions of my unwavering love for him, and with a few reminiscences of the happy times we had had before the burdens of the septarchy had descended on him.
I expected Stirron in return to invite me to visit him at the capital, so that he could hear from my own lips an explanation of the strange things I had done in Manneran. A brotherly reunion was surely in order. But no summons to Salla City came. Each time the telephone chimed, I rushed toward it, thinking it might be Stirron calling. He did not call. Several weeks of tension and gloom passed; I hunted, I swam, I read, I tried to write my new Covenant of love. Noim remained aloof from me. His one experience at soul sharing had thrust him into so deep an embarrassment that he hardly dared to meet my eyes, for I was privy to all his innerness, and that had become a wedge between us.
At last came an envelope bearing the septarch’s imposing seal. It held a letter signed by Stirron, but I pray it was some steely minister, and not my brother, who composed that pinch-souled message. In fewer lines than I have fingers, the septarch told me that my request for sanctuary in the province of Salla was granted, but only on the condition that I forswear the vices I had learned in the south. If I were caught just once spreading the use of selfbaring drugs in Salla, I would be seized and driven into exile. That was all my brother had to say. Not a syllable of kindness. Not a shred of sympathy. Not an atom of warmth.
64
At the crest of the summer Halum came unexpectedly to visit us. The day of her arrival, I had gone riding far out across Noim’s land, following the track of a male stormshield that had burst from its pen. An accursed vanity had led Noim to acquire a clutch of these vicious furbearing mammals, though they are not native to Salla and thrive poorly there: he kept twenty or thirty of them, all claws and teeth and angry yellow eyes, and hoped to breed them into a profitable herd. I chased the escaped male through woods and plain, through morning and midday, hating it more with each hour, for it left a trail of the mutilated carcasses of harmless grazing beasts. These stormshields kill for sheer love of slaughter, taking but a bite or two of flesh and abandoning the rest to scavengers. Finally I cornered it in a shadowy box-canyon. “Stun it and bring it back whole,” Noim had instructed me, conscious of the animal’s value: but when trapped it rushed at me with such ferocity that I gave it the full beam, and gladly slew it. For Noim’s sake I took the trouble to strip off the precious hide. Then, weary and depressed, I rode without stopping back to the great house. A strange groundcar was parked outside, and beside it was Halum. “You know the summers in Manneran,” she explained. “One planned to go as usual to the island, but then one thought, it would be good to take a holiday in Salla, with Noim and Kinnall.”
She had by then entered her thirtieth year. Our women marry between fourteen and sixteen, are done bearing their children by twenty-two or twenty-four, and at thirty have begun to slide into middle age, but time had left Halum untouched. Not having known the tempests of marriage and the travails of motherhood, not having spent her energies on the grapplings of the conjugal couch or the lacerations of childbed, she had the supple, pliant body of a girl: no fleshy bulges, no sagging folds, no exploded veins, no thickening of the frame. She had changed only in one respect, for in recent years her dark hair had turned silvery. This was but an enhancement, however, since it gleamed with dazzling brilliance, and offered agreeable contrast to the deep tan of her youthful face.
In her luggage was a packet of letters for me from Manneran: messages from the duke, from Segvord, from my sons Noim and Stirron and Kinnall, from my daughters Halum and Loimel, from Mihan the archivist, and several others. Those who wrote did so in tense, self-conscious style. They were the letters one might write to a dead man if one felt guilty at having survived him. Still, it was good to hear these words out of my former-life. I regretted not finding a letter from Schweiz; Halum told me she had heard nothing from him since before my indictment, and thought he might well have left our planet. Nor was there any word from my wife. “Is Loimel too busy to write a line or two?” I asked, and Halum, looking embarrassed, said softly that Loimel never spoke of me these days: “She seems to have forgotten that she was married.”
Halum also had brought a trove of gifts for me from my friends across the Woyn. They were startling in their opulence: massy clusters of precious metals, elaborate strings of rare gems. “Tokens of love,” Halum said, but I was not fooled. One could buy great estates with this heap of treasure. Those who loved me would not humiliate me by transferring cash to my account in Salla, but they could give me these splendors in the ordinary way of friendship, leaving me free to dispose of them according to my needs.
“Has it been very sad for you, this uprooting?” Halum asked. “This sudden going into exile?”
“One is no stranger to exile,” I told her. “And one still has Noim for bondlove and companionship.”
“Knowing that it would cost you what it did,” she said, “would you play with the drug a second time, if you could turn time backward by a year?”
“Beyond any doubt.”
“Was it worth the loss of home and family and friends?”
“It would be worth the loss of life itself,” I replied, “if only one could be assured by that that all of Velada Borthan would come to taste the drug.”
That answer seemed to frighten her: she drew back, she touched the tips of her fingers to her lips, perhaps becoming aware for the first time of the intensity of her bondbrother’s madness. In speaking those words I was not uttering mere rhetorical overstatement, and something of my conviction must have reached Halum. She saw that I believed, and, seeing the depth of my commitment, feared for me.
Noim spent many of the days that followed away from his lands, traveling to Salla City on some family business and to the Plain of Nand to inspect property he was thinking of buying. In his absence I was master of the estate, for the servants, whatever they might think of my private life, did not dare to question my authority to my face. Daily I rode out to oversee the workers in Noim’s fields, and Halum rode with me. Actually little overseeing was demanded of me, since this was midway in the seasons between planting and harvest, and the crops looked after themselves. We rode for pleasure, mainly, pausing here for a swim, there for a lunch at the edge of the woods. I showed her the stormshield pens, which did not please her, and took her among the gentler animals of the grazing fields, who came up and amiably nuzzled her.