A Time of Changes

10

After my brother Stirron became septarch in Salla, I went, as you know, to the province of Glin. I will not say that I fled to Glin, for no one openly compelled me to leave my native land; but call my departure a deed of tact. I left in order to spare Stirron the eventual embarrassment of putting me to death, which would have weighed badly upon his soul. One province cannot hold safely the two sons of a late septarch.

Glin was my choice because it is customary for exiles from Salla to go to Glin, and also because my mother’s family held wealth and power there. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I might gain some advantage from that connection.

I was about three moontimes short of the age of thirteen when I took my leave of Salla. Among us that is the threshold of manhood; I had reached almost my present height, though I was much more slender and far less strong than I would soon become, and my beard had only lately begun to grow full. I knew something of history and government, something of the arts of warfare, something of the skills of hunting, and I had had some training in the practice of the law. Already I had bedded at least a dozen girls, and three times I had known, briefly, the tempests of unhappy love. I had kept the Covenant all my life; my soul was clean and I was at peace with our gods and with my forefathers. In my own eyes at that time I must have seemed hearty, adventurous, capable, honorable, and resilient, with all the world spread before me like a shining highway, and the future mine for the shaping. The perspective of thirty years tells me that that young man who left Salla then was also naive, gullible, romantic, over-earnest, and conventional and clumsy of mind: quite an ordinary youth, in fact, who might have been skinning seapups in some fishing village had he not had the great good fortune to be born a prince.

The season of my going was early autumn, after a springtime when all Salla had mourned my father and a summer when all Salla had hailed my brother. The harvest had been poor — nothing odd in Salla, where the fields yield pebbles and stones more graciously than they do crops — and Salla City was choked with bankrupt husbandmen, hoping to catch some largess from the new septarch. A dull hot haze hung over the capital day after day, and above it lay the first of autumn’s heavy clouds, floating in on schedule from the eastern sea. The streets were dusty; the trees had begun to drop their leaves early, even the majestic firethorns outside the septarch’s palace; the dung of the farmers’ beasts clogged the gutters. These were poor omens for Salla at the beginning of a septarch’s reign, and to me it seemed like a wise season for getting out. Even this early Stirron’s temper was fraying and unlucky councilors of state were going off to dungeons. I was still cherished at court, coddled and complimented, plied with fur cloaks and promises of baronies in the mountains, but for how long, how long? Just now Stirron was troubled with guilt that he had inherited the throne and I had nothing, and so he treated me softly, but let the dry summer give way to a bitter winter of famine and the scales might shift; envying me my freedom from responsibility, he might well turn on me. I had studied the annals of royal houses well. Such things had happened before.

Therefore I readied myself for a hasty exit. Only Noim and Halum knew of my plans. I gathered those few of my possessions that I had no wish to abandon, such things as a ring of ceremony bequeathed by my father, a favorite hunting jerkin of yellow leather, and a double-cameo amulet bearing the portraits of my bondsister and bondbrother; all my books I relinquished, for one can get more books wherever one goes, and I did not even take the hornfowl spear, my trophy of my father’s death-day, that hung in my palace bedchamber. There was to my name a fairly large amount of money, and this I handled in what I believed was a shrewd manner. It was all on deposit in the Royal Salla Bank. First I transferred the bulk of my funds to the six lesser provincial banks, over the course of many days. These new accounts were held jointly with Halum and Noim. Halum then proceeded to make withdrawals, asking that the money be paid into the Commercial and Seafarers Bank of Manneran, for the account of her father Segvord Helalam. If we were detected in this transfer, Halum was to declare that her father had undergone financial reverses and had requested a loan of short duration. Once my assets were safely on deposit in Manneran, Halum asked her father to transfer the money again, this time to an account in my name in the Covenant Bank of Glin. In this zigzag way I got my cash from Salla to Glin without arousing the suspicions of our Treasury officials, who might wonder why a prince of the realm was shipping his patrimony to our rival province of the north. The fatal flaw in all this was that if the Treasury became disturbed about the flow of capital to Manneran, questioned Halum, and then made inquiries of her father, the truth would emerge that Segvord prospered and had had no need of the “loan,” which would have led to further questions and, probably, to my exposure. But my maneuvers went unnoticed.

Lastly I went before my brother to ask his permission to leave the capital, as courtly etiquette required.

This was a tense affair, for honor would not let me lie to Stirron, yet I dared not tell him the truth. Long hours I spent with Noim, first, rehearsing my deceptions. I was a slow pupil in chicanery; Noim spat, he cursed, he wept, he slapped his hands together, as time and again he slipped through my guard with a probing question. “You were not meant to be a liar,” he told me in despair.

“No,” I agreed, “this one never was meant to be a liar.”

Stirron received me in the northern robing chamber, a dark and somber room of rough stone walls and narrow windows, used mainly for audiences with village chieftains. He meant no offense by it, I think; it was merely where he happened to be when I sent in my equerry with word that I wished a meeting. It was late afternoon; a thin greasy rain was falling outside; in some far tower of the palace a carillonneur was instructing apprentices, and leaden bell-tones, scandalously awry, came humming through the drafty walls. Stirron was formally dressed: a bulky gray robe of stormshield furs, tight red woolen leggings, high boots of green leather. The sword of the Covenant was at his side, the heavy glittering pendant of office pressed against his breast, rings of title cluttered his fingers, and if memory does not deceive me, he wore yet another token of power around his right forearm. Only the crown itself was missing from his regalia. I had seen Stirron garbed this way often enough of late, at ceremonies and meetings of state, but to find him so enveloped in insignia on an ordinary afternoon struck me as almost comical. Was he so insecure that he needed to load himself with such stuff constantly, to reassure himself that he was indeed septarch? Did he feel that he had to impress his younger brother? Or did he, childlike, take pleasure in these ornaments for pleasure’s own sake? No matter which, some flaw in Stirron’s character was revealed, some inner foolishness. It astounded me that I could find him amusing rather than awesome. Perhaps the genesis of my ultimate rebellion lies in that moment when I walked in on Stirron in all his splendor and had to fight to hold my laughter back.

Half a year in the septarchy had left its mark on him. His face was gray and his left eyelid drooped, I suppose from exhaustion. He held his lips tightly compressed and stood in a rigid way with one shoulder higher than the other. Though only two years separated us in age, I felt myself a boy beside him, and marveled how the cares of office can etch a young man’s visage. It seemed centuries since Stirron and I had laughed together in our bedchambers, and whispered all the forbidden words, and bared our ripening bodies to one another to make the edgy comparisons of adolescence. Now I offered formal obeisance to my weary royal brother, crossing my arms over my breast and flexing my knees and bowing my head as I murmured, “Lord Septarch, long life be yours.”

Stirron was man enough to deflect my formality with a brotherly grin. He gave me a proper acknowledgment of my greeting, yes, arms raised and palms turned out, but then he turned it into an embrace, swiftly crossing the room and seizing me. Yet there was something artificial about his gesture, as though he had been studying how to show warmth to his brother, and quickly I was released. He wandered away from me, eyeing a nearby window, and his first words to me were, “A beastly day. A brutal year.”

“The crown lies heavy, Lord Septarch?”

“You have leave to call your brother by his name.”

“The strains show in you, Stirron. Perhaps you take Salla’s problems too closely to heart.”

“The people starve,” he said. “Shall one pretend that is a trifling thing?”

“The people have always starved, year upon year,” I said. “But if the septarch drains his soul in worry over them—”

“Enough, Kinnall. You presume.” Nothing brotherly about the tone now; he was hard put to hide his irritation with me. He was plainly angered that I had so much as noticed his fatigue, though it was he who had begun our talk with lamenting. The conversation had veered too far toward the intimate. The condition of Stirron’s nerves was no affair of mine: it was not my place to comfort him, he had a bondbrother for that. My attempted kindness had been improper and inappropriate. “What do you seek here?” he asked roughly.

“The lord septarch’s leave to go from the capital.”

He whirled away from the window and glared at me. His eyes, dull and sluggish until this moment, grew bright and harsh, and flickered disturbingly from side to side. “To go? To go where?”

“One wishes to accompany one’s bondbrother Noim to the northern frontier,” I said as smoothly as I could manage. “Noim pays a call on the headquarters of his father, General Luinn Condorit, whom he has not seen this year since your lordship’s coronation, and one is asked to travel northward with him, for bondlove and friendship.”

“When would you go?”

“Three days hence, if it please the septarch.”

“And for how long a stay?” Stirron was virtually barking these questions at me.

“Until the first snow of winter falls.”

“Too long. Too long.”

“One might be absent then a shorter span,” I said.

“Must you go at all, though?”

My right leg quivered shamefully at the knee. I struggled to be calm. “Stirron, consider that one has not left Salla City for so much as an entire day since you assumed the throne. Consider that one cannot justly ask one’s bondbrother to journey uncomforted through the northern hills.”

“Consider that you are the heir to the prime septarchy of Salla,” Stirron said, “and that if misfortune comes to your brother while you are in the north, our dynasty is lost.”

The coldness of his voice, and the ferocity with which he had questioned me a moment earlier, threw me into panic. Would he oppose my going? My fevered mind invented a dozen reasons for his hostility. He knew of my transfers of funds, and had concluded I was about to defect to Glin; or he imagined that Noim and I, and Noim’s father with his troops, would stir up an insurrection in the north, the aim being to place me on the throne; or he had already resolved to arrest and destroy me, but the time was not yet ripe for it, and he wished not to let me get far before he could pounce; or — but I need not multiply hypotheses. We are a suspicious people on Borthan, and no one is less trusting than one who wears a crown. If Stirron would not release me from the capital, and it appeared that he would not, then I must sneak away, and I might not succeed at that.

I said, “No misfortunes are probable, Stirron, and even so, it would be no large task to return from the north if something befell you. Do you fear usurpation so seriously?”

“One fears everything, Kinnall, and leaves little to chance.”

He proceeded then to lecture me on necessary caution, and on the ambitions of those who surrounded the throne, naming a few lords as possible traitors whom I would have placed among the pillars of the realm. As he spoke, going far beyond the strictures of the Covenant in exposing his uncertainties to me, I saw with amazement what a tortured, terrified man my brother had become in this short time of septarchy; and I realized, too, that I was not going to be granted my leave. He went on and on, fidgeting as he spoke, rubbing his talismans of authority, several times picking up his scepter from where it lay on an ancient wood-topped table, walking to the window and coming back from it, pitching his voice now low and now high as though searching for the best septarchical resonances. I was frightened for him. He was a man of my own considerable size, and at that time much thicker in body and greater in strength than I, and all my life I had worshiped him and modeled myself upon him; and here he was corroded with terror and committing the sin of telling me about it. Had just these few moontimes of supreme power brought Stirron to this collapse? Was the loneliness of the septarchy that awful for him? On Borthan we are born lonely, and lonely we live, and lonely we die; why should wearing a crown be so much more difficult than bearing the burdens we inflict upon ourselves each day? Stirron told me of assassins’ plots and of revolution brewing among the farmers who thronged the town, and even hinted that our father’s death had been no accident. I tried to persuade myself that hornfowl could be trained to slay a particular man in a group of thirteen men, and would not swallow the notion. It appeared that royal responsibilities had driven Stirron mad. I was reminded of a duke some years back who displeased my father, and was sent for half a year to a dungeon, and tortured each day that the sun could be seen. He had entered prison a sturdy and vigorous figure, and when he emerged he was so ruined that he befouled his own clothes with his dung, and did not know it. How soon would Stirron be brought to that? Perhaps it was just as well, I thought, that he was refusing me permission to go away, for it might be better that I remain at the capital, ready to take his place if he crumbled beyond repair.

But he amazed me at the finish of his rambling oration; for it had taken him clear across the room, to an alcove hung with dangling silver chains, and at the end, suddenly bunching the chains and yanking a dozen of them from their mountings, he swung round to face me and cried hoarsely, “Give your pledge, Kinnall, that you will come back from the north in time to attend the royal wedding!”

I was doubly pronged. For the last several minutes I had begun to make plans on the basis of staying in Salla City; now I found I could depart after all, and was not sure I should, in view of Stirron’s deterioration. And then too he demanded from me a promise of swift return, and how could I give the septarch such a promise without lying to him, a sin I was not prepared to commit? So far all that I had told him was the truth, though only part of the truth; I did plan to travel north with Noim to visit his father, I would remain in northern Salla until winter’s first snow. How though could I set a date for my coming back to the capital?

My brother was due to marry, forty days hence, the youngest daughter of Bryggil, septarch of Salla’s southeastern district. It was a cunning match. So far as the traditional order of primacy went, Bryggil stood seventh and lowest in the hierarchy of Salla’s septarchs, but he was the oldest, the cleverest, and the most respected of the seven, now that my father was gone. To combine Bryggil’s shrewdness and stature with the prestige that accrued to Stirron by virtue of his rank as prime septarch would be to cement the dynasty of our family to the throne. And no doubt sons would shortly come marching out of Bryggil’s daughter’s loins, relieving me of my position as heir apparent; her fertility must have passed the necessary tests, and of Stirron’s there could be no question, since he had already scattered a litter of bastards all over Salla. I would have certain ceremonial roles to play at the wedding as brother to the septarch.

I had wholly forgotten the wedding. If I skipped out of Salla before it came about, I would wound my brother in a way that saddened me. But if I stayed here, with Stirron in this unstable state, I had no guarantee of being a free man when the nuptial day arrived, or even of still owning my head. Nor was there any sense in going north with Noim if I bound myself to return in forty days. It was a hard choice: to postpone my departure and run the risks of my brother’s royal whims, or to leave now, knowing I was taking on myself the stain of breaking a pledge to my septarch.

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.