Robert Silverberg: A Time of Changes

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.

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.

I insisted on opening myself to a drainer before leaving Salla City. I had not planned on doing so, and it irritated Noim that I took the time for it; but an uncontrollable yearning for the comforts of religion rose up in me as we neared the outskirts of the capital.

We had been traveling almost an hour. The rain had thickened, and gusty winds slammed it against the windscreens of our groundcars, so that cautious driving was in order. The cobbled streets were slippery. Noim drove one of the cars, I sitting sullenly beside him; the other, with our servants, followed close behind. The morning was young and the city still slept. Each passing street was a surgery to me, for a segment of my life was ripped off by it: there goes the palace compound, there go the spires of the House of Justice, there the university’s great gray blocky buildings, there the godhouse where my royal father brought me into the Covenant, there the Museum of Mankind that I visited so often with my mother to stare at the treasures from the stars. Circling through the fine residential district that borders the Skangen Canal, I even spied the ornate townhouse of the Duke of Kongoroi, on whose handsome daughter’s silken bedsheets I had left my virginity in a clammy puddle, not too many years before. In this city I had lived all my life, and I might never see it again; my yesterdays were washing away, like the topsoil of Salla’s sad farms under the knives of the winter rains. Since boyhood I had known that one day my brother would be septarch and this city would cease to have a place for me, but yet I had denied that to myself, saying, “It will not happen soon, perhaps it will not happen at all.” And my father lay dead in his firethorn coffin, and my brother crouched beneath the awful weight of his crown, and I was fleeing from Salla before my life had fairly begun, and such a mood of self-pity came over me that I did not dare even to speak to Noim, though what is a bondbrother for if not to ease one’s soul? And when we were driving through the ramshackle streets of Salla Old Town, not far from the city walls, I spied a dilapidated godhouse and said to Noim, “Pull up at the corner here. One must go within to empty himself.”