Robert Silverberg: A Time of Changes

“Kinnall,” she whispered, and in my dream I imagined that my sleeping dream-self awoke, propping himself upon his elbows, with Halum kneeling close beside his cot. She leaned forward until her breasts brushed the shaggy chest of that man who was I, and touched her lips to mine in a flick of a caress, and said, “You look so weary, Kinnall.”

“You should not have come here.”

“One was needed. One came.”

“It is not right. To enter the Burnt Lowlands alone, to seek out one who has brought you only harm—”

“The bond that links one to you is sacred.”

“You’ve suffered enough for that bond Halum.”

“One has not suffered at all,” she said, and kissed my sweaty forehead. “How you must suffer, hiding in this dismal oven!”

“It is no more than one has earned,” I said.

Even in my dream I spoke to Halum in the polite grammatical form. I had never found it easy to use the first person with her; certainly I never used it before my changes, and afterward, when no reason remained for me to be so chaste with her, I still could not. My soul and my heart had yearned to say “I” to Halum, and my tongue and lips were padlocked by propriety.

She said, “You deserve so much more than this place. You must come forth from exile. You must guide us, Kinnall, toward a new Covenant, a Covenant of love, of trust in one another.”

“One fears he has been a failure as a prophet. One doubts the value of continuing such efforts.”

“It was all so strange to you, so new!” she said. “But you were able to change, Kinnall, and to bring changes to others—”

“To bring grief to others and to oneself.”

“No. No. What you tried to do was right. How can you give up now? How can you resign yourself to death? There’s a world out there in need of being freed, Kinnall!”

“One is trapped in this place. One’s capture is inevitable.”

“The desert is wide. You can slip away from them.”

“The desert is wide, but the gates are few, and all of them are watched. There’s no escape.”

She shook her head, and smiled, and pressed her hands urgently against my hips, and said, in a voice thick with hope, “I will lead you to safety. Come with me, Kinnall.”

The sound of that I and the me that followed it, out of Halum’s imagined mouth, fell upon my dreaming soul like a rainfall of rusted spikes, and the shock of hearing those obscenities in her sweet voice nearly awakened me. This thing I tell you to make it clear that I am not fully converted to my own changed way of life, that the reflexes of my upbringing still govern me in the deepest corners of my soul. In dreams we reveal our true selves, and my reaction of numb dismay to the words that I had placed (for who else could have done it?) in the dream-Halum’s mouth told me a great deal about my innermost attitudes. What happened next was also revealing, though far less subtle. To urge me from my cot Halum’s hands slipped over my body, working their way through the tangled thatch over my gut, and her cool fingers seized the stiffened rod of my sex. Instantly my heart thundered and my seed spurted, and the ground heaved as though the Lowlands were splitting apart, and Halum uttered a little cry of fear. I reached for her, but she was growing indistinct and insubstantial, and in one terrible convulsion of the planet I lost sight of her and she was gone. And there was so much I had wanted to say to her, so many things I had meant to ask. I woke, coming up through the levels of my dream. I found myself alone in the hut, of course, sticky-skinned with my outpourings and sickened by the villainies that my shameful mind, allowed to roam the night unfettered, had concocted.

“Halum!” I cried. “Halum, Halum, Halum!”

My voice made the cabin quiver, but she did not return. And slowly my sleep-fogged mind grasped the truth, that the Halum who had visited me had been unreal.

We of Borthan do not take such visions lightly, however. I rose, and went from my cabin into the darkness outside, and walked about, scuffing at the warm sand with my bare toes as I struggled to excuse my inventions to myself. Slowly I calmed. Slowly I came to equilibrium. Yet I sat by my doorstep unsleeping for hours, until dawn’s first green fingers crept upon me.

Beyond doubt you will agree with me that a man who has been apart from women some time, living under the tensions I have known since my flight into the Burnt Lowlands, will occasionally experience such sexual eruptions in his sleep, nor is there anything unnatural about them. I must maintain also, though I have little enough evidence to prove it, that many men of Borthan find themselves giving way in slumber to expressions of desire for their bondsisters, simply because such desires are so rigidly repressed in the waking time. And further, although Halum and I enjoyed intimacies of soul far beyond those which men customarily enjoy with their bondsisters, never once did I seek her physically, nor did such a union ever occur. Take this on faith, if you will: in these pages I tell you so much that is discreditable to me, making no attempt to conceal that which is shameful, that if I had violated Halum’s bond I would tell you that as well. So you must believe that it was not a deed I did. You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.

Nevertheless I held myself guilty through the waning of the night and into this morning, and only as I purge myself now by putting the incident on paper does the darkness lift from my spirit. I think what has really troubled me these past few hours is not so much my sordid little sexual fantasy, for which even my enemies-would probably forgive me, as it is my belief that I am responsible for Halum’s death, for which I am unable to forgive myself.

Possibly I should say that every man of Borthan, and by the same token every woman, is sworn at birth or soon thereafter to a bondsister and bondbrother. No member of any such tripling may be blood-kin to any other. The bondings are arranged soon after a child is conceived, and often are the subject of intricate negotiation, since one’s bondbrother and bondsister are customarily closer to one than one’s own family-by-blood; hence a father owes it to his child to make the bondings with care.

Because I was to be a septarch’s second son, arranging my bondings was a matter of high circumstance. It might have been good democracy, but poor sense, to bond me to a peasant’s child, for one must be reared on the same social plane as one’s bond-kin if any profit is to come from the relationship. On the other hand I could not be bonded to the kin of some other septarch, since fate might one day elevate me to my father’s throne, and a septarch must not be tangled in ties of bonding to the royal house of another district lest he find his freedom of decision circumscribed. Thus it was necessary to make bondings for me with the children of nobility but not of royalty.

The project was handled by my father’s bondbrother, Ulman Kotril; it was the last aid he ever gave my father, for he was slain by bandits from Krell not long after my birth. To find a bondsister for me, Ulman Kotril went down into Manneran and obtained bonding with the unborn child of Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port. It had been determined that Helalam’s child was to be female; hence my father’s bondbrother returned to Salla and completed the tripling by compacting with Luinn Condorit, a general of the northern patrol, for his coming son.

Noim, Halum, and I were born all the same week, and my father himself performed the service of bonding. (We were known by our child-names then, of course, but I ignore that here to simplify things.) The ceremony took place in the septarch’s palace, with proxies standing in for Noim and Halum; later, when we were old enough to travel, we repledged our bonds in each other’s presence, I going to Manneran to be bonded to Halum. Thereafter we were only infrequently apart. Segvord Helalam had no objection to letting his daughter be raised in Salla, for he hoped she would strike a glittering marriage with some prince at my father’s court. In this he was to be disappointed, for Halum went unmarried, and, for all I know, virgin, to her grave.