A Time of Changes

15

Over a week passed before I found the courage to call upon my mother’s kin. I strolled the city for hours every day, keeping my cloak wrapped close against the winds and marveling at the ugliness of all I beheld, people and structures. I located the embassy of Salla, and lurked outside it, not wishing to go in but merely cherishing the link to my homeland that the squat grim building provided. I bought heaps of cheaply printed books and read far into the night to learn something of my adopted province: there was a history of Glin, and a guidebook to the city of Glain, and an interminable epic poem dealing with the founding of the first settlements north of the Huish, and much else. I dissolved my loneliness in wine — not the wine of Glin, for none is made there, but rather the good sweet golden wine of Manneran, that they import in giant casks. I slept poorly. One night I dreamed that Stirron had died of a fit and a search was being made for me. Several times in my sleep I saw the hornfowl strike my father dead; this is a dream that still haunts me, coming twice or thrice a year. I wrote long letters to Halum and Noim, and tore them up, for they stank of self-pity. I wrote one to Stirron, begging him to forgive me for fleeing, and tore that up too. When all else failed, I asked the innkeeper for a wench. He sent me a skinny girl a year or two older than I, with odd large breasts that dangled like inflated rubber bags. “It is said you are a prince of Salla,” she declared coyly, lying down and parting her thighs. Without replying I covered her and thrust myself into her, and the size of my organ made her squeal with fear and pleasure both, and she wriggled her hips so fiercely that my seed burst from me within half a moment. I was angered at myself for that, and turned my wrath on her, pulling free and shouting, “Who told you to start moving? I wasn’t ready to have you move! I didn’t want you to!” She ran from my room still naked, terrified more, I think, by my obscenities than by my wrath. I had never said “I” in front of a woman before. But she was only a whore, after all. I soaped myself for an hour afterward. In my naiveté I feared that the innkeeper would evict me for speaking so vulgarly to her, but he said nothing. Even in Glin, one need not be polite to whores.

I realized that there had been a strange pleasure in shouting those words at her. I yielded to curious reveries of fantasy, in which I imagined the big-breasted slut naked on my bed, while I stood over her crying, “I! I! I! I! I!” Such daydreams had the power to make my maleness stand tall. I considered going to a drainer to get rid of the dirty notion, but instead, two nights later, I asked the innkeeper for another wench, and with each jab of my body I silently cried, “I! Me! I! Me!”

Thus I spent my patrimony in the capital of puritan Glin, wenching and drinking and loitering. When the stench of my own idleness offended me, I put down my timidity and Went to see my Glainish relatives.

My mother had been a daughter of a prime septarch of Glin; he was dead, as was his son and successor; now his son’s son, Truis, my mother’s nephew, held the throne. I seemed too forward to me to go seeking preferment from my royal cousin directly. Truis of Glin would have to weigh matters of state as well as matters of kinship, and might not want to aid the runaway brother of Salla’s prime septarch, lest it lead him into friction with Stirron. But I had an aunt, Nioll, my mother’s younger sister, who had often been in Salla City in my mother’s lifetime, and who had held me fondly when I was a babe; would she not help me?

She had married power to power. Her husband was the Marquis of Huish, who held great influence at the septarch’s court, and also — for in Glin it is not thought unseemly for the nobility to dabble in commerce — controlled his province’s wealthiest factor-house. These factor-houses are something akin to banks, but of another species; they lend money to brigands and merchants and lords of industry, only at ruinous rates, and always taking a slice of ownership in any enterprise they aid; thus they insinuate their tentacles into a hundred organizations and attain immense leverage in economic matters. In Salla the factor-houses were forbidden a century ago, but in Glin they thrive almost as a second government. I had no love for the system, but I preferred joining it to begging.

Some inquiries at the inn gained me directions to the palace of the marquis. By Glainish standards it was an imposing structure of three interlocking wings beside a mirror- smooth artificial lake, in the aristocrats’ sector of the city. I made no attempt to talk my way inside; I had come prepared with a note, informing the marquise that her nephew Kinnall, the septarch’s son of Salla, was in Glain and wished the favor of an audience; he could be found at such-and-such a hostelry. I returned to my lodgings and waited, and on the third day the innkeeper, popeyed with awe, came to my room to tell me I had a visitor in the livery of the Marquis of Huish. Nioll had sent a car for me; I was taken to her palace, which was far more lavish within than without, and she received me in a great hall cunningly paneled with mirrors set at angles to other mirrors to create an illusion of infinity.

She had aged greatly in the six or seven years since I had last seen her, but my amazement at her white hair and furrowed face was swallowed up in her astonishment over my transformation from tiny child to hulking man in so short a time. We embraced in the style of Glin, fingertips to fingertips; she offered condolences on the death of my father, and apologies for not having attended Stirron’s coronation; then she asked me what brought me to Glin, and I explained, and she showed no surprise. Did I propose to dwell permanently here? I did, I said. And how would I support myself? By working in the factor-house of her husband, I explained, if such a position could be procured for me. She did not act as though she found my ambition unreasonable, but merely asked if I had any skills that might recommend me to the marquis. To this I replied that I had been trained in the lawcodes of Salla (not mentioning how incomplete my training was) and might be of value in the factor-houses’s dealings with that province; also, I said, I had connections of bonding to Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port of Manneran, and could serve the firm well in its Manneran business; lastly, I remarked, I was young and strong and ambitious, and would place myself wholly in the service of the factor-house’s interests, for our mutual advantage. These statements seemed to sit smoothly with my aunt, and she promised to gain for me an interview with the marquis himself. I left her palace much pleased with my prospects.

Several days later came word to the hostelry that I should present myself at the offices of the factor-house. My appointment, however, was not with the Marquis of Huish; rather, I was to see one of his executives, a certain Sisgar. I should have taken that as an omen. This man was smooth to the point of oiliness, with a beardless face and no eyebrows and a bald head that looked as if it had been waxed, and a dark green robe that was at once properly austere and subtly ostentatious. He questioned me briefly about my training and experience, discovering in some ten queries that I had had little of the former and none of the latter; but he exposed my failings in a gentle and amiable way, and I assumed that despite my ignorance, my high birth and kinship to the marquise would gain me a post. Alas for complacency! I had begun to hatch a dream of climbing to great responsibilities in this factor-house when I caught with only half an ear the words of Sisgar, telling me, “Times are hard, as surely your grace comprehends, and it is unfortunate that you come to us at a time when retrenching is necessary. The advantages of giving you employment are many, yet the problems are extreme. The marquis wishes you to know that your offer of service was greatly appreciated, and it is his hope to bring you into the firm when economic conditions permit.” With many bows and a pleasant smile of dismissal he drove me from his office, and I was on the street before I realized how thoroughly I had been destroyed. They could give me nothing, not even a fifth assistant clerkship in some village office! How was this possible? I nearly rushed back within, planning to cry, “This is a mistake, you deal with your septarch’s cousin here, you reject the nephew of the marquise!” But they knew those things, and yet they shut their doors to me. When I telephoned my aunt to express my shock, I was told she had gone abroad, to pass the winter in leafy Manneran.