A Time of Changes

17

Outside the city’s northwestern gate (for it was there my feet had taken me) a heavy truck came rumbling by me, and its treads rolled through a pool of half-frozen slush, spraying me liberally. I halted to scrape the chilly stuff from my leggings; the truck halted too, and the driver clambered down, exclaiming, “There is cause for apology here. It was not intended to douse you so!”

This courtesy so astounded me that I stood to my full height, and let the distortions slip from my features. Evidently the driver had thought me a feeble, bent old man; he showed amazement at my transformation, and laughed aloud. I knew not what to say. Into my gaping silence he declared, “There is room for one to ride, if you have the need or the whim.”

Into my mind sprang a bright fantasy: he would drive me toward the coast, where I would sign on aboard a merchant vessel bound for Manneran, and in that happy tropical land I would throw myself on the mercies of my bondsister’s father, escaping all this harassment.

“Where are you bound?” I asked.

“Westward, into the mountains.”

So much for Manneran. I accepted the ride all the same. He offered me no contract of defined liabilities, but I let that pass. For some minutes we did not speak; I was content to listen to the slap of the treads on the snowy road, and think of the distance growing between myself and the police of Glain.

“Outlander, are you?” he said at length.

“Indeed.” Fearing that some alarm might be out for a man of Salla, I chose belatedly to adopt the soft slurred speech of southern folk, that I had learned from Halum, hoping he would come to believe that I had not spoken first to him with Sallan accents. “You travel with a native of Manneran, who finds your winter a strange and burdensome thing.”

“What brought you north?” he asked.

“The settlement of one’s mother’s estate. She was a woman of Glain.”

“Did the lawyers treat you well, then?”

“Her money melted in their hands, leaving nothing.”

“The usual story. You’re short of cash, eh?”

“Destitute,” I admitted.

“Well, well, one understands your situation, for one has been there oneself. Perhaps something can be done for you.”

I realized from his phrasing, from his failure to use the Glinish passive construction, that he too must be an outlander. Swinging round to face him, I said, “Is one right that you likewise are from elsewhere?”

“This is true.”

“Your accent is unfamiliar. Some western province?”

“Oh, no, no.”

“Not Salla, then?”

“Manneran,” he said, and burst into hearty laughter, and covered my shame and confusion by telling me, “You do the accent well, friend. But you needn’t make the effort longer.”

“One hears no Manneran in your voice,” I mumbled.

“One has lived long in Glin,” he said, “and one’s voice is a soup of inflections.”

I had not fooled him for a moment, but he made no attempt to penetrate my identity, and seemed not to care who I might be or where I came from. We talked easily a while. He told me that he owned a lumber mill in western Glin, midway up the flanks of the Huishtors where the fall yellow-needled honey-trees grow; before we had driven much farther along he was offering me a job as a logger in his camp. The pay was poor, he said, but one breathed clean air there, and government officials were never seen, and such things as passports and certificates of status did not matter.

Of course I accepted. His camp was beautifully situated, above a sparkling mountain lake which never froze, for it was fed by a warm spring whose source was said to be deep beneath the Burnt Lowlands. Tremendous ice-topped Huishtor peaks hung above us, and not far away was Glin Gate, the pass through which one goes from Glin to the Burnt Lowlands, crossing a bitter corner of the Frozen Lowlands on the way. He had a hundred men in his employ, rough and foul-mouthed, forever shouting “I” and “me” without shame, but they were honest and hardworking men, and I had never been close to their sort before. My plan was to stay there through the winter, saving my pay, and go off to Manneran when I had earned the price of my passage. Some news of the outer world reached the camp from time to time, though, and I learned in this way that the Glinish authorities were seeking a certain young prince of Salla, who was believed to have gone insane and was wandering somewhere in Glin; the septarch Stirron urgently wished the unhappy young man to be returned to his homeland for the medical care he so desperately needed. Suspecting that the roads and ports would be watched, I extended my stay in the mountains through the spring, and, my caution deepening, I stayed the summer also. In the end I spent something more than a year there.

It was a year that changed me greatly. We worked hard, felling the huge trees in all weathers, stripping them of boughs, feeding them to the mill, a long tiring day and a chilly one, but plenty of hot wine at night, and every tenth day a platoon of women brought in from a nearby town to amuse us. My weight increased by half again, all of it hard muscle, and I grew taller until I surpassed the tallest logger in the camp, and they made jokes about my size. My beard came in full and the planes of my face changed as the plumpness of youth went from me. The loggers I found more likable than the courtiers among whom all my prior days had been passed. Few of them were able even to read, and of polite etiquette they knew nothing, but they were cheerful and easy-spirited men, at home in their own bodies. I would not have you think that because they talked in “I” and “me” they were open-hearted and given to sharing of confidences; they kept the Covenant in that respect, and might even have been more secretive than educated folk about certain things. Yet they seemed more sunny of soul than those who speak in passives and impersonal pronouns, and perhaps my stay among them planted in me that seed of subversion, that understanding of the Covenant’s basic wrongness, which the Earthman Schweiz later guided into full flowering.

I told them nothing of my rank and origin. They could see for themselves, by the smoothness of my skin, that I had not done much hard labor in my life, and my way of speaking marked me as an educated man, if not necessarily one of high birth. But I offered no revelations of my past, and none were sought. All I said was that I came from Salla since my accent marked me as Sallan anyway; they granted me the privacy of my history. My employer, I think, guessed early that I must be the fugitive prince whom Stirron sought, but he never queried me about that. For the first time in my life, then, I had an identity apart from my royal status. I ceased to be Lord Kinnall, the septarch’s second son, and was only Darival, the big logger from Salla.

From that transformation I learned much. I had never played one of your swaggering, bullying young nobles; being a second son instills a certain humility even in an aristocrat. Yet I could not help feeling set apart from ordinary men. I was waited on, bowed to, served, and pampered; men spoke softly to me and made formal gestures of respect, even when I was a child. I was, after all, the son of a septarch, that is to say a king, for septarchs are hereditary rulers and thus are part of mankind’s procession of kings, a line that goes back to the dawn of human settlement on Borthan and beyond, back across the stars to Earth itself, to the lost and forgotten dynasties of her ancient nations, ultimately to the masked and painted chieftains enthroned in prehistoric caves. And I was part of that line, a man of royal blood, somehow superior by circumstance of birth. But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank; if Stirron were to be cast down by insurrection, and in his place that loathsome drainer from Salla Old Town became septarch, would not the drainer then enter that mystic procession of kings, and Stirron be relegated to the dust? And would not that drainer’s sons become blood-proud, even as I had been, although their father had been nothing for most of his life, and their grandfather less than that? I know, I know, the sages would say that the kiss of the gods had fallen upon that drainer, elevating him and all his progeny and making them forever sacred, yet as I felled trees on the slopes of the Huishtors I saw kingship with clearer eyes, and, having been cast down by events myself, I realized that I was no more than a man among men, and always had been. What I would make of myself depended on my natural gifts and ambitions, not upon the accident of rank.

So rewarding was that knowledge, and the altered sense of self it brought me, that my stay in the mountains ceased to seem like an exile, but more like a vacation. My dreams of fleeing to a soft life in Manneran left me, and, even after I had saved more than enough to pay my passage to that land, I found myself with no impulse to move onward. It was not entirely fear of arrest that kept me among the loggers, but also a love of the crisp clear cold Huishtor air, and of my arduous new craft, and of the rough but genuine men among whom I dwelled. Therefore I stayed on, through summer and into autumn, and welcomed the coming of a new winter, and gave no thought to going.

I might be there yet, only I was forced into flight. One woeful winter afternoon, with the sky like iron and the threat of a blizzard over us like a fist, they brought the whores up from town for our regularly appointed night of frolic, and this time there was among them a newcomer whose voice announced her place of birth to be Salla. I heard her instantly as the women came cavorting into our hall of sport, and would have crept away, but she spied me and gasped and cried out on the spot: “Look you there! For sure that is our vanished prince!”

I laughed and tried to persuade everyone that she was drunk or mad, but my scarlet cheeks gave me the lie, and the loggers peered at me in a new way. A prince? A prince? Was it so? They whispered to one another, nudging and winking. Recognizing my peril, I claimed the woman for my own use and drew her aside, and when we were alone, I insisted to her she was mistaken: I am no prince, I said, but only a common logger. She would not have it. “The Lord Kinnall marched in the septarch’s funeral procession,” she said, “and this one beheld him, with these eyes. And you are he!” The more I protested, the more convinced she was. There was no shifting her mind. Even when I embraced her, she was so awe-smitten at opening herself to a septarch’s son that her loins remained dry, and I injured her in entering her.

Late that night, when the revelry had ended, my employer came to me, solemn and uneasy. “One of the girls has made strange talk about you this evening,” he said. “If the talk is true, you are endangered, for when she returns to her village she’ll spread the news, and the police will be here soon enough.”

“Must one flee, then?” I asked.

“The choice is yours. Alarms still are out for this prince; if you are he, no one here can protect you against the authorities.”

“Then one must flee. At daybreak—”

“Now,” he said. “While the girl still lies here asleep.”

He pressed money of Glin into my hand, over and beyond what he owed me in current wages; I gathered my few belongings, and we went outside together. The night was moonless and the winter wind was savage. By starlight I saw the glitter of lightly falling snow. My employer silently drove me down the slope, past the foothills village from which the whores came, and out along a back-country road which we followed for some hours. When dawn met us we were in south-central Glin, not overly far from the River Huish. He halted, at last, in a village that proclaimed itself to be Klaek, a winter-bound place of small stone cottages bordering on broad snowy fields. Leaving me in the truck, he entered the first of the cottages, emerging after a moment accompanied by a wizened man who poured forth a torrent of instructions and gesticulations; with the aid of this guidance we found our way to the place my employer was seeking, the cottage of a certain farmer named Stumwil. This Stumwil was a fair-haired man of about my own height, with washed-out blue eyes and an apologetic smile. Maybe he was some kinsman of my employer’s, or, more probably, he owed him a debt — I never asked. In any case the farmer readily agreed to my employer’s request, and accepted me as a lodger. My employer embraced me and drove off into the gathering snow; I saw him never again. I hope the gods were kind to him, as he was to me.