A Time of Changes

29

When Schweiz was gone I sat a long while with my back to my desk, closing my eyes and replaying in my mind the things we had just said to one another. How readily he had slipped past my guard! How quickly we had begun to speak of inner matters! True, he was an otherworlder, and with him I did not feel entirely bound by our customs. Yet we had grown dangerously close so extraordinarily fast. Ten minutes more and I might have been as open as a bondbrother to him, and he to me. I was astounded and dismayed by my easy dropping of propriety, by the way he had drawn me slyly into such intimacy.

Was it wholly his doing? I had sent for him, I had been the first to ask the close questions. I had set the tone. He had sensed from that some instability in me, and he had seized upon it, quickly flipping the conversation about, so that I was the subject and he the interrogator. And I had gone along with it. Reluctantly but yet willingly, I had opened to him. I was drawn to him, and he to me. Schweiz the tempter! Schweiz the exploiter of my weakness, hidden so long, hidden even from myself! How could he have known I was ready to open?

His high-pitched rapid speech still seemed to echo in the room. Asking. Asking. Asking. And then revealing. Are you a religious man? Do you believe in literal gods? If only I could find faith! How I envy you. But the flaws of your world. The denial of self. Would you be so free with a citizen of Manneran? Speak to me, your grace, Open to me. I have been alone here so long.

How could he have known, when I myself did not know?

A strange friendship had been born. I asked Schweiz to dine at home with me; we feasted and we talked, and the blue wine of Salla flowed and the golden wine of Manneran, and when we were warmed by our drinking we discussed religion once more, and Schweiz’s difficulties with faith, and my convictions that the gods were real. Halum came in and sat with us an hour, and afterward remarked to me on the power of Schweiz to loosen tongues, saying, “You seemed more drunk than you have ever been, Kinnall. And yet you shared only three bottles of wine, so it must have been something else that made your eyes shine and your words so easy.” I laughed and told her that a recklessness came over me when I was with the Earthman, that I found it hard to abide by custom with him.

At our next meeting, in a tavern by the Justiciary, Schweiz said, “You love your bondsister, eh?”

“Of course one loves one’s bondsister.”

“One means, though, you love her.” With a knowing snigger.

I drew back, tense. “Was one then so thoroughly wined the other night? What did one say to you of her?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “You said it all to her. With your eyes, with your smile. And no words passed.”

“May we talk of other things?”

“If your grace wishes.”

“This is a tender theme, and painful.”

“Pardon, then, your grace. One only meant to confirm one’s guess.”

“Such love as that is forbidden among us.”

“Which is not to say that it doesn’t sometimes exist, eh?” Schweiz asked, and clinked his glass against mine.

In that moment I made up my mind never to meet with him again. He looked too deep and spoke too freely of what he saw. But four days afterward, coming upon him on a pier, I invited him to dine a second time. Loimel was displeased by the invitation. Nor would Halum come, pleading another engagement; when I pressed her, she said that Schweiz made her uncomfortable. Noim was in Manneran, though, and joined us at the table. We all drank sparingly, and the conversation was a stilted and impersonal one, until, with no perceptible shifting of tone, we found ourselves telling Schweiz of the time when I had escaped from Salla in fear of my brother’s jealousies, and Schweiz was telling us of his departure from Earth; when the Earthman went home that night, Noim said to me, not altogether disapprovingly, “There are devils in that man, Kinnall.”