Robert Silverberg: A Time of Changes

Noim, fretful, did not want to spare the time, and made as if to drive on. “Would you deny one the godright?” I asked him hotly, and only then, simmering and cross, did he halt the car and back it up to let me out by the godhouse.

Its facade was worn and peeling. An inscription beside the door was illegible. The pavement before it was cracked and tilted. Salla Old Town has a pedigree of more than a thousand years; some of its buildings have been continuously inhabited since the founding of the city, though most are in ruins, for the life of that district ended, in effect, when one of the medieval septarchs chose to move his court to our present palace atop Skangen Hill, much to the south. At night Salla Old Town comes alive with pleasure-seekers, who guzzle the blue wine in cellar cabarets, but at this misty hour it was a grim place. Blank stone walls faced me from every building: we have a fashion of making mere slits serve for windows in Salla, but here they carried it to an extreme. I wondered if the godhouse could have a scanning machine in working order to watch my approach. Yes, as it happened. When I neared the godhouse door, it swung partly open, and a scrawny man in drainer’s robes looked out. He was ugly, of course. Who ever saw a handsome drainer? It is a profession for the ill-favored. This one had greenish skin, heavily pocked, and a rubbery snout of a nose, and a dimness in one eye: standard for his trade. He gave me a fishy stare and, by his wariness, seemed to be regretting having opened the door.

“The peace of all gods be on you,” I said. “Here is one in need of your craft.”

He eyed my costly costume, my leather jerkin and my heavy jewelry, and studied the size and swagger of me, and evidently concluded I was some young bully of the aristocracy out to stir trouble in the slums. “It is too early in the day,” he said uneasily. “You come too soon for comfort.”

“You would not refuse a sufferer!”

“It is too early.”

“Come, come, let one in. A troubled soul stands here.”

He yielded, as I knew he must, and with many a twitch of his long-nosed face he admitted me. Within there was the reek of rot. The old woodwork was impregnated with the damp, the draperies were moldering, the furniture had been gnawed by insects. The lighting was dim. The drainer’s wife, as ugly as the drainer himself, skulked about. He led me to his chapel, a small sweaty room off the living-quarters, and left me kneeling by the cracked and yellowing mirror while he lit the candles. He robed himself and finally came to me where I knelt.

He named his fee. I gasped.

“Too much by half,” I said.

He reduced it by a fifth. When I still refused, he told me to find my priesting elsewhere, but I would not rise, and, grudgingly, he brought the price of his services down another notch. Still it was probably five times what he charged the folk of Salla Old Town for the same benefit, but he knew I had money, and, thinking of Noim fuming in the car, I could not bring myself to haggle.

“Done,” I said.

Next he brought me the contract. I have said that we of Borthan are suspicious people; have I indicated how we rely on contracts? A man’s word is merely bad air. Before a soldier beds a whore they come to the terms of their bargain and scrawl it on paper. The drainer gave me a standard form, promising me that all I said would be held in strictest confidence, the drainer merely acting as intermediary between me and the god of my choice, and I for my part pledging that I would hold the drainer to no liability for the knowledge he would have of me, that I would not call him as witness in a lawsuit or make him my alibi in some prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. I signed. He signed. We exchanged copies and I gave him his money.

“Which god would you have preside here?” he asked.

“The god who protects travelers,” I told him. We do not call our gods aloud by their names.

He lit a candle of the appropriate color — pink — and put it beside the mirror. By that it was understood that the chosen god would accept my words.

“Behold your face,” the drainer said. “Put your eyes to your eyes.”

I stared at the mirror. Since we shun vanity, it is not usual to examine one’s face except on these occasions of religion.

“Open now your soul,” the drainer commanded. “Let your griefs and dreams and hungers and sorrows emerge.”

“A septarch’s son it is who flees his homeland,” I began, and at once the drainer jerked to attention, impaled by my news. Though I did not take my eyes from the mirror, I guessed that he was scrabbling around to look at the contract and see who it was that had signed it. “Fear of his brother,” I continued, “leads him to go abroad, but yet he is sore of soul as he departs.”

I went on in that vein for some while. The drainer made the usual interjections every time I faltered, prying words out of me in his craft’s cunning way, and shortly there was no need for such midwifery, for the words gushed freely. I told him how close I had come to lying to Stirron; I confessed that I would miss the royal wedding and give my brother injury thereby; I admitted several small sins of self-esteem, such as anyone commits daily.

The drainer listened.

We pay them to listen and to do nothing but listen,’ until we are drained and healed. Such is our holy communion, that we lift these toads from the mud, and set them up in their godhouses, and buy their patience with our money. It is permitted under the Covenant to say anything to a drainer, even if it is drivel, even if it is a shameful catalog of throttled lusts and hidden filth. We may bore a drainer as we have no right to bore our bond-kin, for it is the drainer’s obligation by contract to sit with the patience of the hills as we speak of ourselves. We need not worry what the drainer’s problems may be, nor what he thinks of us, nor whether he would be happier doing something else. He has a calling and he takes his fee, and he must serve those who have need of him. There was a time when I felt it was a miraculously fine scheme, to give us drainers in order that we might rid our hearts of pain. Too much of my life was gone before I realized that to open oneself to a drainer is no more comforting than to make love to one’s own hand: there are better ways of loving, there are happier ways of opening.

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.”