A Time of Changes

11

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.