A Time of Changes

18

The cottage was one large room, divided by flimsy curtains into areas. Stumwil put up a new curtain, gave me straw for my mattress, and I had my living quarters. There were seven of us under that roof: Stumwil and myself, and Stumwil’s wife, a weary wench who I could have been persuaded was his mother, and three of their children — two boys some years short of manhood and a girl in mid-adolescence — and the bondsister of the girl, who was lodging with them that year. They were sunny, innocent, trusting folk. Though they knew nothing about me, they all instantly adopted me as a member of the family, some unknown uncle unexpectedly returned from far voyaging. I was not prepared for the easy way they accepted me, and credited it at first to some net of obligation in which my former employer had bound them to me, but no: they were kindly by nature, unquestioning, unsuspicious. I took my meals at their table; I sat among them by their fire; I joined in their games. Every fifth night Stumwil filled a huge dented tub with hot water for the entire family, and I bathed with them, two or three of us in the tub at once, though it disturbed me inwardly to rub up against the plump bare bodies of Stumwil’s daughter and her friend. I suppose I could have had the daughter or the bondsister if I had cared to, but I kept back from them, thinking such a seduction would be a breach of hospitality. Later, when I understood more about peasants, I realized that it was my abstinence that had been a breach of hospitality, for the girls were of age and surely willing, and I had disdained them. But I saw that only after I had left Stumwil’s place. Those girls now have adult children of their own. I suppose by this time they have forgiven me for my lack of gallantry.

I paid a fee for my lodging, and I helped also with the chores, though in winter there was little to do except shovel snow and feed the fire. None of them showed curiosity about my identity or history. They asked me no questions, and I believe that no questions ever passed through their minds. Nor did the other townspeople pry, though they gave me the scrutiny any stranger would receive.

Newspapers occasionally reached this village, and those that did went from hand to hand until all had read them, when they were placed on deposit at the wineshop at the head of the main village thoroughfare. I consulted them there, a file of stained and tattered scraps, and learned what I could of the events of the past year. I found that my brother Stirron’s wedding had taken place on schedule, with appropriate regal pomp; his lean troubled face looked up out of a blurry, grease-splotched bit of old paper, and beside him was his radiant bride, but I could not make out her features. There was tension between Glin and Krell over fishing rights in a disputed coastal area, and men had died in border skirmishes. I pitied General Condorit, whose patrol sector was at the opposite end of the boundary, almost, from the Krell-Glin line, and who therefore must have missed the fun of somehow involving Salla in the shooting. A sea monster, golden-scaled and sinuous, more than ten times the length of a man’s body, had been sighted in the Gulf of Sumar by a party of Mannerangi fishermen, who had sworn a mighty oath in the Stone Chapel as to the authenticity of their vision. The prime septarch of Threish, a bloody old brigand if the tales they tell of him are true, had abdicated, and was dwelling in a godhouse in the western mountains not far from Stroin Gap, serving as a drainer for pilgrims bound to Manneran. Such was the news. I found no mention of myself. Perhaps Stirron had lost interest in having me seized and returned to Salla.

It might therefore be safe for me to try to leave Glin.

Eager as I was to get out of that frosty province, where my own kin rebuffed me and only strangers showed me love, two things held me back. For one, I meant to stay with Stumwil until I could help him with his spring planting, in return for his kindness to me. For another, I would not set forth undrained on so dangerous a journey, lest in some mishap my spirit go to the gods still full of poisons. This village of Klaek had no drainer of its own, but depended for its solace on itinerant drainers who passed now and then through the countryside. In the winter these wanderers rarely came by, and so perforce I had gone undrained since the late summer, when a member of that profession had visited the logging camp. I felt the need.

There came a late-winter snow, a storm of wonders that coated every branch with a fiery skin of ice, and immediately thereafter there came a thaw. The world melted. Klaek was surrounded by oceans of mud. A drainer driving a battered and ancient groundcar came to us through this slippery sea and set up shop in an old shack, doing fine business among the villagers. I went to him on the fifth day of his visit, when the lines were shorter, and unburdened myself for two hours, sparing him nothing, neither the truth about my identity nor my subversive new philosophy of kingship nor the usual grimy little repressed lusts and prides. It was more of a dose, evidently, than a country drainer expected to receive, and he seemed to puff and swell as I poured out my words; at the end he was shaking as much as I, and could barely speak. I wondered where it was that drainers went to unload all the sins and sorrows they absorbed from their clients. They are forbidden to talk to ordinary men of anything they have learned in the confessional; did they therefore have drainer-drainers, servants of the servants, to whom they might deliver that which they could not mention to anyone else? I did not see how a drainer could carry such a bundle of sadnesses for long unaided, as he got from any dozen of his customers in a day’s listening.

With my soul cleansed, I had only to wait for planting-time, and it was not long in coming. The growing season in Glin is short; they get their seeds into the ground before winter’s grip has fully slipped, so that they can catch every ray of spring sunlight. Stumwil waited until he felt certain that the thaw would not be followed by one last tumult of snow, and then, with the land still a sucking quagmire, he and his family went out into the fields to plant breadseed and spiceflower and blueglobe.

The custom was to go naked to the planting. On the first morning I looked out of Stumwil’s cottage and beheld the neighbors on all sides walking bare toward the furrows, children and parents and grandparents stripped to the skin with sacks of seed slung over their shoulders — a procession of knobby knees, sagging bellies, dried-out breasts, wrinkled buttocks, illuminated here and there by the smooth firm bodies of the young. Thinking I was in some waking dream, I looked around and saw Stumwil and his wife and their daughter already disrobed, and beckoning to me to do the same. They took their sacks and left the cottage. The two young sons scampered after them, leaving me with the bondsister of Stumwil’s daughter, who had overslept and had just appeared. She shucked her garments too; a supple saucy body she had, with small high dark- nippled breasts and slender well-muscled thighs. As I dropped my clothes I asked her, “Why is it done to be naked outdoors in such a cold time?”

“The mud gives cause for slipping,” she explained, “and it is easier to wash raw skin than garments.”

There was truth enough in that, for the planting was a comic show, with peasants skidding in the tricky muck every tenth step they took. Down they went, landing on hip or haunch and coming up smeared with brown; it was a matter of skill to grasp the neck of one’s seed-sack as one toppled, so that no precious seeds would be scattered. I fell like the rest, learning the knack of it quickly, and indeed there was pleasure in slipping, for the mud had a voluptuous oozy feel to it. So we marched on, staggering and lurching, slapping flesh to mud again and again, laughing, singing, pressing our seeds into the cold soft soil, and not one of us but was covered from scalp to tail with muck within minutes. I shivered miserably at the outset, but soon I was warmed by laughter and tripping, and when the day’s work was done, we stood around shamelessly naked in front of Stumwil’s cottage and doused one another with buckets of water to clean ourselves. By then it seemed reasonable to me that they should prefer to expose their skins rather than their clothing to such a day’s labor, but in fact the girl’s explanation was incorrect; I learned from Stumwil later that week that the nakedness was a religious matter, a sign of humility before the gods of the crops, and nothing else.

Eight days it took to finish the planting. On the ninth, wishing Stumwil and his people a hearty harvest, I took my leave of the village of Klaek, and began my journey to the coast.