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Silverberg Robert - A Time of Changes

sf_socialRoger SilverbergTime of ChangesBest Novel Winner (1972)Hugo Best Novel Nominee (1972)Locus Awards Best Novel Nominee [#3] (1972)Ditmar Awards International SF Nominee (1972)Prometheus Awards Hall of Fame Nominee (2005)1.0. The text is still not read through. The cover is added (this cover does not correspond to this book edition). SilverbergTime of ChangesTerry and Carol Carronce wrote, so I am told, a novel that contains no word that uses the letter “e.” When I first heard about it, the idea gave me the shivers; for writing novels is hard enough work using one’s free range of vocabulary, and tossing in a handicap like that is enough to guarantee a case of terminal hiccups, at the very least. Spare me from the urge to attempt such stunts, I prayed.then, years later, I found myself embarked on a novel in which it was forbidden for any character to refer to himself in the first person.had been working on it for a week or so, struggling against the strange constraint of avoiding the vertical pronoun, when I remembered that “e”-less novel. I broke into a sweat and wondered how I would ever get to the other end of my book with my sanity reasonably intact; and then I took a deep breath, told myself that I was writing my book this way neither as a stunt nor as an act of penance, and got back to work. And eventually finished the novel and had it published and won a Nebula award for it as the best science fiction book of 1971, and lived happily ever after, and I’ll never ask of myself a similar exercise again.purpose of avoiding the use of “I” in A Time of Changes is not to show my own cleverness, of course, but to represent, by a grammatical approximation in an equivalent language, the linguistic practices of an extraterrestrial culture so repressed, so enchained by rigorous self-effacement, that all references to self are taboo and must be handled euphemistically. It was not a particularly original notion—there are existing cultures on our own world, notably among the Eskimo, where first person singular is considered improper usage—but I thought it was reasonably new to science fiction. In this I was wrong, naturally. (Absolutely new ideas in science fiction are a lot less common than is generally suspected. I mean altogether new ideas, not merely ingenious variants on familiar ones; the last one of these I can think of is Bob Shaw’s “slow glass” concept, and that was a dozen years ago. It will probably turn out that something much like slow glass figures in an 1883 Jules Verne novel, anyway.) My central situation in A Time of Changes had at least one well-known previous use—in a book that I had read in 1953 and long since forgotten. This was Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a short novel first published in 1946 and dedicated to Rand’s usual theme, “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” In the dystopian world of Anthem the collective society has triumphed, and the first person singular pronoun has been abolished; the narrator speaks of himself as “we,” as does everyone else in that society, but eventually he discovers the Unspeakable Word and launches a revolution intended to restore the sacred rights of the individual ego. This is not quite what I was doing in A Time of Changes, where the problem is not all-engulfing collectivist socialism but rather a dour, ritualized, formalized pseudo-modesty that conceals ferocious macho self-assertiveness. But the narrative effect is the same. Rand’s character and mine struggle toward liberation of self, moving through grammatical thickets, hers speaking of himself as “we” and mine speaking of himself as “one,” and there is a similar rigid courtliness to the style. What struck me as eerie, though, was the similarity between Rand’s opening lines and my own. When I rediscovered Anthem in 1972, almost twenty years after I had last read or thought of it, and several years after I had written A Time of Changes, this, to my astonishment, was its opening paragraph:is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven! (…)is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our one head.look at the opening page of A Time of Changes. The resemblance is startling—Rand’s narrator alone in a tunnel, mine in a desert shack, each beginning his tale by speaking of transgressions against a rigid society. I had forgotten even the existence of her book when I began my own, and unless you would argue that whatever we read is permanently recorded in some cerebral niche and is apt to come floating to consciousness at any time subsequent, the similarity can only be considered coincidence, but a strange one. (The rest of my book is scarcely at all like Rand’s—thank goodness.)wrote A Time of Changes in the summer of 1970, and it was, I suppose, my response to all that had happened in the last few years of the 1960’s, that time of changes for so many of us. I had been as rigid and controlled as anyone else in the old pre-Beatle, pre-psychedelic, pre-revolutionary world of the Eisenhower years, and I had been rocked by transformations in the crazy decade that followed, transformations that had altered my attitude toward life, my way of dress, my work, and just about everything else. In 1970 I hovered emotionally and spiritually somewhere between New York and California, between the old life and the new, and I oscillated uncertainly, not yet having opted fully for California; and A Time of Changes is the record of that inner upheaval, altered by the metaphors of science fiction but thoroughly recognizable for what lay behind them. (Some of my more straight friends misunderstood the book, thinking it was merely a tract urging wider and wilder use of psychedelic drugs. That wasn’t my intention at all, but it was hard to convince them.)novel was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, my main magazine publisher at that time, and early in 1971 was published in a hardcover edition by the Science Fiction Book Club, with the first paperback edition appearing that summer. In April of 1972 the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America awarded it a Nebula as best novel of the year—and, a few days after I had begun my new existence in the San Francisco area, I flew down to the awards ceremony in Los Angeles to collect my handsome lucite trophy. There was something deliriously appropriate, I think, about being handed a Nebula for A Time of Changes the very week that I had broken from my old confined life in New York to breathe the fresher, stranger air of California.



–Robert Silverberg Oakland, California May 1978

am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself.statement is so strange to me that it screams in my eyes. I look at it on the page, and I recognize the hand as my own—narrow upright red letters on the coarse gray sheet—and I see my name, and I hear in my mind the echoes of the brain-impulse that hatched those words. I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. Incredible.is to be what the Earthman Schweiz would call an autobiography. Which means an account of one’s self and deeds, written by one’s self. It is not a literary form that we understand on our world—I must invent my own method of narrative, for I have no precedents to guide me. But this is as it should be. On this my planet I stand alone, now. In a sense, I have invented a new way of life; I can surely invent a new sort of literature. They have always told me I have a gift for words.I find myself in a clapboard shack in the Burnt Lowlands, writing obscenities as I wait for death, and praising myself for my literary gifts.am Kinnall Darival.! Obscene! Already on this one sheet I have used the pronoun “I” close to twenty times, it seems. While also casually dropping such words as “my,” “me,” “myself,” more often than I care to count. A torrent of shamelessness. I I I I I. If I exposed my manhood in the Stone Chapel of Manneran on Naming Day, I would be doing nothing so foul as I am doing here. I could almost laugh. Kinnall Darival practicing a solitary vice. In this miserable lonely place he massages his stinking ego and shrieks offensive pronouns into the hot wind, hoping they will sail on the gusts and soil his fellow men. He sets down sentence after sentence in the naked syntax of madness. He would, if he could, seize you by the wrist and pour cascades of filth into your unwilling ear. And why? Is proud Darival in fact insane? Has his sturdy spirit entirely collapsed under the gnawing of mindsnakes? Is nothing left but the shell of him, sitting in this dreary hut, obsessively titillating himself with disreputable language, muttering “I” and “me” and “my” and “myself,” blearily threatening to reveal the intimacies of his soul?. It is Darival who is sane and all of you who are sick, and though I know how mad that sounds, I will let it stand. I am no lunatic muttering filth to wring a feeble pleasure from a chilly universe. I have passed through a time of changes, and I have been healed of the sickness that affects those who inhabit my world, and in writing what I intend to write I hope to heal you as well, though I know you are on your way into the Burnt Lowlands to slay me for my hopes.be it.am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself.

vestiges of the customs against which I rebel still plague me. Perhaps you can begin to comprehend what an effort it is for me to frame my sentences in this style, to twist my verbs around in order to fit the first-person construction. I have been writing ten minutes and my body is covered with sweat, not the hot sweat of the burning air about me but the dank, clammy sweat of mental struggle. I know the style I must use, but the muscles of my arm rebel against me, and fight to put down the words in the old fashion, saying, One has been writing for ten minutes and one’s body is covered with sweat, saying, One has passed through a time of changes, and he has been healed of the sickness that affects those who inhabit his world. I suppose that much of what I have written could have been phrased in the old way, and no harm done; but I do battle against the self-effacing grammar of my world, and if I must, I will joust with my own muscles for the right to arrange my words according to my present manner of philosophy.any case, however my former habits trick me into misconstructing my sentences, my meaning will blaze through the screen of words. I may say, “I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself,” or I may say, “One’s name is Kinnall Darival and he means to tell you all about himself,” but there is no real difference. Either way, the content of Kinnall Darival’s statement is—by your standards, by the standards I would destroy—disgusting, contemptible, obscene.

I am troubled, at least in these early pages, by the identity of my audience. I assume, because I must, that I will have readers. But who are they? Who are you? Men and women of my native planet, perhaps, furtively turning my pages by torchlight, dreading the knock at the door. Or maybe otherworlders, reading for amusement, scanning my book for the insight it may give into an alien and repellent society. I have no idea. I can establish no easy relationship with you, my unknown reader, When I first conceived my plan of setting down my soul on paper, I thought it would be simple, a mere confessional, nothing but an extended session with an imaginary drainer who would listen endlessly and at last give me absolution. But now I realize I must take another approach. If you are not of my world, or if you are of my world but not of my time, you may find much here that is incomprehensible.I must explain. Possibly I will explain too much, and drive you off by pounding you with the obvious. Forgive me if I instruct you in what you already know. Forgive me if my tone and mode of attack show lapses of consistency and I seem to be addressing myself to someone else. For you will not hold still for me, my unknown reader. You wear many faces for me. Now I see the crooked nose of Jidd the drainer, and now the suave smile of my bondbrother Noim Condorit, and now the silkiness of my bondsister Halum, and now you become the tempter Schweiz of pitiful Earth, and now you are my son’s son’s son’s son’s son, not to be born for a cluster of years and eager to know what manner of man your ancestor was, and now you are some stranger of a different planet, to whom we of Borthan are grotesque, mysterious, and baffling. I do not know you, and so I will be clumsy in my attempts to talk to you., by Salla’s Gate, before I am done you will know me, as no man of Borthan has ever been known by others before!

am a man of middle years. Thirty times since the day of my birth has Borthan traveled around our golden-green sun, and on our world a man is considered old if he has lived through fifty such circuits, while the most ancient man of whom I ever heard died just short of his eightieth. From this you may be able to calculate our spans in terms of yours, if otherworlder you happen to be. The Earthman Schweiz claimed an age of forty-three years by his planet’s reckoning, yet he seemed no older than I.body is strong. Here I shall commit a double sin, for not only shall I speak of myself without shame, but I shall show pride and pleasure in my physical self. I am tall: a woman of normal height reaches barely to the lower vault of my chest. My hair is dark and long, falling to my shoulders. Lately streaks of gray have appeared in it, and likewise in my beard, which is full and thick, covering much of my face. My nose is prominent and straight, with a wide bridge and large nostrils; my lips are fleshy and give me, so it is said, a look of sensuality; my eyes are deep brown and are set somewhat far apart in my skull. They have, I am given to understand, the appearance of the eyes of one that has been accustomed all his life to commanding other men.back is broad and my chest is deep. A dense mat of coarse dark hair grows nearly everywhere on me. My arms are long. My hands are large. My muscles are well developed and stand out prominently beneath my skin. I move gracefully for a man my size, with smooth coordination; I excell in sports, and when I was younger I hurled the feathered shaft the entire length of Manneran Stadium, a feat that had never been achieved until then.women find me attractive—all but those who prefer a flimsier, more scholarly looking sort of man and are frightened of strength and size and virility. Certainly the political power I have held in my time has helped to bring many partners to my couch, but no doubt they were drawn to me as much by the look of my body as by anything more subtle. Most of them have been disappointed in me. Bulging muscles and a hairy hide do not a skilled lover make, nor is a massive genital member such as mine any guarantee of ecstasy. I am no champion of copulation. See: I hide nothing from you. There is in me a certain constitutional impatience that expresses itself outwardly only during the carnal act; when I enter a woman I find myself swiftly swept away, and rarely can I sustain the deed until her pleasure comes. To no one, not even a drainer, have I confessed this failing before, nor did I ever expect that I would. But a good many women of Borthan have learned of this my great flaw in the most immediate possible way, to their cost, and doubtless some of them, embittered, have circulated the news in order that they might enjoy a scratchy joke at my expense. So I place it on the record here, for perspective’s sake. I would not have you think of me as a hairy mighty giant without also your knowing how often my flesh has betrayed my lusts. Possibly this failing of mine was among the forces that shaped my destinies toward this day in the Burnt Lowlands, and you should know of that.

father was hereditary septarch of the province of Salla on our eastern coast. My mother was daughter of a septarch of Glin; he met her on a diplomatic mission, and their mating was, it was said, ordained from the moment they beheld one another. The first child born to them was my brother Stirron, now septarch in Salla in our father’s place. I followed two years later; there were three more after me, all of them girls. Two of these still live. My youngest sister was slain by raiders from Glin some twenty moontimes ago.knew my father poorly. On Borthan everyone is a stranger to everyone, but one’s father is customarily less remote from one than others; not so with the old septarch. Between us lay an impenetrable wall of formality. In addressing him we used the same formulas of respect that subjects employed. His smiles were so infrequent that I think I can recall each one. Once, and it was unforgettable, he took me up beside him on his rough-hewn blackwood throne, and let me touch the ancient yellow cushion, and called me fondly by my child-name; it was the day my mother died. Otherwise he ignored me. I feared and loved him, and crouched trembling behind pillars in his court to watch him dispense justice, thinking that if he saw me there he would have me destroyed, and yet unable to deprive myself of the sight of my father in his majesty.was, oddly, a man of slender body and modest height, over whom my brother and I towered even when we were boys. But there was a terrible strength of will in him that led him to surmount every challenge. Once in my childhood there came some ambassador to the septarchy, a hulking sun-blackened westerner who stands in my memory no smaller than Kongoroi Mountain; probably he was as tall and broad as I am now. At feasting-time the ambassador let too much blue wine down his throat, and said, before my father and his courtiers and his family, “One would show his strength to the men of Salla, to whom he may be able to teach something of wrestling.”

“There is one here,” my father replied in sudden fury, “to whom, perhaps, nothing need be taught.”

“Let him be produced,” the huge westerner said, rising and peeling back his cloak. But my father, smiling—and the sight of that smile made his courtiers quake—told the boastful stranger it would not be fair to make him compete while his mind was fogged with wine, and this of course maddened the ambassador beyond words. The musicians came in then to ease the tension, but the anger of our visitor did not subside, and, after an hour, when the drunkenness had lifted somewhat from him, he demanded again to meet my father’s champion. No man of Salla, said our guest, would be able to withstand his might.the septarch said, “I will wrestle you myself.”night my brother and I were sitting at the far end of the long table, among the women. Down from the throne-end came the stunning word “I” in my father’s voice, and an instant later came “myself.” These were obscenities that Stirron and I had often whispered, sniggering, in the darkness of our bedchamber, but we had never imagined we would hear them hurled forth in the feasting-hall from the septarch’s own lips. In our shock we reacted differently, Stirron jerking convulsively and knocking over his goblet, myself letting loose a half-suppressed shrill giggle of embarrassment and delight that earned me an instant slap from a lady-in-waiting. My laughter was merely the mask for my inner horror. I could barely believe that my father knew those words, let alone that he would say them before this august company. I will wrestle you myself. And while the reverberations of the forbidden forms of speech still dizzied me, my father swiftly stepped forward, dropping his cloak, and faced the great hulk of an ambassador, and closed with him, and caught him by one elbow and one haunch in a deft Sallan hold, and sent him almost immediately toppling to the polished floor of gray stone. The ambassador uttered a terrible cry, for one of his legs was sticking strangely out at a frightening angle from his hip, and in pain and humiliation he pounded the flat of his hand again and again against the floor. Perhaps diplomacy is practiced in more sophisticated ways now in the palace of my brother Stirron.septarch died when I was twelve and just coming into the first rush of my manhood. I was near his side when death took him. To escape the time of rains in Salla he would go each year to hunt the hornfowl in the Burnt Lowlands, in the very district where now I hide and wait. I had never gone with him, but on this occasion I was permitted to accompany the hunting party, for now I was a young prince and must learn the skills of my class. Stirron, as a future septarch, had other skills to master; he remained behind as regent in our father’s absence from the capital. Under a bleak and heavy sky bowed with rainclouds the expedition of some twenty groundcars rolled westward out of Salla City and through the flat, sodden, winter-bare countryside. The rains were merciless that year, knifing away the precious sparse topsoil and laying bare the rocky bones of our province. Everywhere the farmers were repairing their dikes, but to no avail; I could see the swollen rivers running yellow-brown with Salla’s lost wealth, and I nearly wept to think of such treasure being carried into the sea. As we came into West Salla, the narrow road began to climb the foothills of the Huishtor range, and soon we were in drier, colder country, where the skies gave snow and not rain, and the trees were mere bundles of sticks against the blinding whiteness. Up we went into the Huishtors, following the Kongoroi road. The countryfolk came out to chant welcomes to the septarch as he passed. Now the naked mountains stood like purple teeth ripping the gray sky, and even in our sealed groundcars we shivered, although the beauty of this tempestuous place took my mind from my discomforts. Here great flat shields of striated tawny rock flanked the rugged road, and there was scarcely any soil at all, nor did trees or shrubs grow except in sheltered places. We could look back and see all of Salla like its own map below us, the whiteness of the western districts, the dark clutter of the populous eastern shore, everything diminished, unreal. I had never been this far from home before. Though we were now deep into the uplands, midway, as it were, between sea and sky, the inner peaks of the Huishtors still lay before us, and to my eye they formed an unbroken wall of stone spanning the continent from north to south. Their snow-crowned summits jutted raggedly from that continuous lofty breastworks of bare rock; were we supposed to go over the top, or would there be some way through? I knew of Salla’s Gate, and that our route lay toward it, but somehow the gate seemed mere myth to me at that moment.and up and up we rode, until the generators of our groundcars were gasping in the frosty air, and we were compelled to pause frequently to defrost the power conduits, and our heads whirled from shortness of oxygen. Each night we rested at one of the camps maintained for the use of traveling septarchs, but the accomodations were far from regal, and at one, where the entire staff of servants had perished some weeks before in a snowslide, it was necessary for us to dig our way through mounds of ice in order to enter. We were all of us in the party men of the nobility, and all of us wielded shovels except the septarch himself, for whom manual labor would have been sinful. Because I was one of the biggest and strongest of the men, I dug more vigorously than anyone, and because I was young and rash, I strained myself beyond my strength, collapsing over my shovel and lying half dead in the snow for an hour until I was noticed. My father came to me while they were treating me, and smiled one of his rare smiles; just then I believed it was a gesture of affection, and it greatly sped my recovery, but afterward I came to see it was more likely a sign of his contempt.smile buoyed me through the remainder of our ascent of the Huishtors. No longer did I fret about getting over the mountains, for I knew that I would, and on the far side my father and I would hunt the hornfowl in the Burnt Lowlands, going out together, guarding one another from peril, collaborating ultimately on the tracking and on the kill, knowing a closeness that had never existed between us in my childhood. I talked of that one night to my bondbrother Noim Condorit, who rode with me in my groundcar, and who was the only person in the universe to whom I could say such things. “One hopes to be chosen for the septarch’s own hunt-group,” I said. “One has reason to think that one will be asked. And an end made to the distance between father and son.”

“You dream,” said Noim Condorit. “You live in fantasies.”

“One could wish,” I replied, “for warmer encouragement from one’s bondbrother.”was ever a pessimist; I took his dourness in stride, and counted the days to Salla’s Gate. When we reached it, I was unprepared for the splendor of the place. All morning and half an afternoon we had been following a thirty-degree grade up the broad breast of Kongoroi Mountain, shrouded in the shadow of the great double summit. It seemed to me we would climb forever and still have Kongoroi looming over us. Then our caravan swung around to the left, car after car disappearing behind a snowy pylon on the flank of the road, and our car’s turn came, and when we had turned the corner, I beheld an astonishing sight: a wide break in the mountain wall, as if some cosmic hand had pried away one corner of Kongoroi. Through the gap came daylight in a glittering burst. This was Salla’s Gate, the miraculous pass across which our ancestors came when first they entered our province, so many hundreds of years back, after their wanderings in the Burnt Lowlands. We plunged joyously into it, riding two and even three cars abreast over the hardpacked snow, and before we made camp for the night we were able to see the strange splendor of the Burnt Lowlands spread out astonishingly below us.the next day and the one that followed we rode the switchbacks down Kongoroi’s western slope, creeping at a comical pace along a road that had little room to spare for us: a careless twitch of the stick and one’s car would tumble into an infinite abyss. There was no snow on this face of the Huishtors, and the raw sunpounded rock had a numbing, oppressive look. Ahead everything was red soil. Down into the desert we went, quitting winter and entering a stifling world where every breath tingled in the lungs, where dry winds lifted the ground in clouds, where odd twisted-looking beasts scampered in terror from our oncoming cavalcade. On the sixth day we reached the hunting-grounds, a place of ragged escarpments far below sea level. I am no more than an hour’s ride from that place now. Here the hornfowl have their nests; all day long they range the baking plains, seeking meat, and at twilight they return, collapsing groundward in weird spiraling flight to enter their all but inaccessible burrows. the dividing of personnel I was one of thirteen chosen for the septarch’s companions. “One shares your joy,” Noim told me solemnly, and there were tears in his eyes as well as in mine, for he knew what pain my father’s coldness had brought me. At daybreak the hunt-groups set out, nine of them, in nine directions.take a hornfowl near its nest is deemed shameful. The bird returning is usually laden with meat for its young, and it therefore is clumsy and vulnerable, shorn of all its grace and power. Killing one as it plummets is no great task, but only a craven selfbarer would attempt it. (Selfbarer! See how my own pen mocks me! I, who have bared more self than any ten men of Borthan, still unconsciously use the term as a word of abuse! But let it stand.) I mean to say that the virtue in hunting lies in the perils and difficulties of the chase, not in the taking of the trophy, and we hunt the hornfowl as a challenge to our skills, not for its dismal flesh.hunters go into the open Lowlands, where even in winter the sun is devastating, where there are no trees to give shade or streams to ease the thirst. They spread out, one man here, two men there, taking up stations in that trackless expanse of barren red soil, offering themselves as the hornfowl’s prey. The bird cruises at inconceivable heights, soaring so far overhead that it can be seen only as a black scratch in the brilliant dome of the sky; it takes the keenest vision to detect one, though a hornfowl’s wingspread is twice the length of a man’s body. From its lofty place the hornfowl scans the desert for incautious beasts. Nothing, no matter how small, escapes its glossy eyes; and when it detects good quarry, it comes down through the turbulent air until it hovers house-high above the ground. Now it commences its killing-flight, flying low, launching itself on a series of savage circles, spinning a death-knot around its still unsuspecting victim. The first swing may sweep over the equivalent of half a province’s area, but each successive circuit is tighter and tighter, while acceleration mounts, until ultimately the hornfowl has made itself a frightful engine of death that comes roaring in from the horizon at nightmarish velocity. Now the quarry learns the truth, but it is knowledge not held for long: the rustle of mighty wings, the hiss of a slim powerful form cleaving the hot sluggish air, and then the single long deadly spear sprouting from the bird’s bony forehead finds its mark, and the victim falls, enfolded in the black fluttering wings. The hunter hopes to bring down his hornfowl while it cruises, almost at the limits of human sight; he carries a weapon designed for long-range shooting, and the test is in the aim, whether he can calculate the interplay of trajectories at such vast distances. The peril of hunting hornfowl is this, that one never knows if one is the hunter or the hunted, for a hornfowl on its killing-flight cannot be seen until it strikes its stroke.I went forth. So I stood from dawn to midday. The sun worked its will on my winter-pale skin, such of it as I dared to expose; most of me was swaddled in hunting clothes of soft crimson leather, within which I boiled. I sipped from my canteen no more often than survival demanded, for I imagined that the eyes of my comrades were upon me and I would reveal no weaknesses to them. We were arrayed in a double hexagon with my father alone between the two groups. Chance had it that I drew the point of my hexagon closest to him, but it was more than a feathered shaft’s toss from his place to mine, and all the morning long the septarch and I exchanged not a syllable. He stood with feet planted firm, watching the skies, his weapon at ready. If he drank at all as he waited, I did not see him do it. I too studied the skies, until my eyes ached for it, until I felt twin strands of hot light drilling my brain and hammering against the back wall of my skull. More than once I imagined I saw the dark splinter of a hornfowl’s shape drifting into view up there, and once in sweaty haste I came to the verge of raising my gun to it, which would have brought me shame, for one must not shoot until one has established priority of sighting by crying one’s claim. I did not fire, and when I blinked and opened my eyes, I saw nothing in the sky. The hornfowl seemed to be elsewhere that morning.noon my father gave a signal, and we spread farther apart over the plain, maintaining our formation. Perhaps the hornfowl found us too closely clustered, and were staying away. My new position lay atop a low earthen mound, in the form almost of a woman’s breast, and fear I took hold of me as I took up my place on it. I supposed myself to be terribly exposed and in imminent peril of hornfowl attack. As fright crept through my spirit, I became convinced that a hornfowl was even now flying its fatal circuits around my hammock, and that at any moment its lance would pierce my kidneys while I gazed stupidly at the metallic sky. The premonition grew so strong that I had to struggle to hold my ground; I shivered, I stole wary peeks over my shoulders, I clenched the stock of my gun for comfort, I strained my ears for the sound of my enemy’s approach, hoping to whirl and fire before I was speared. For this cowardice I reproached myself severely, even offering thanks that Stirron had been born before me, since obviously I was unfit to succeed to the septarchy. I reminded myself that not in three years had a hunter been killed in this way. I asked myself if it was plausible that I should die so young, on my first hunt, when there were others like my father who had hunted for thirty seasons and gone unscathed. I demanded to know why I felt this overwhelming fear, when all my tutors had labored to teach me that the self is a void and concern for one’s person a wicked sin. Was not my father in equal jeopardy, far across the sun-smitten plain? And had he not much more than I to lose, being a septarch and a prime septarch at that, while I was only a boy? In this way I cudgeled the fear from my damp soul, and studied the sky without regard for the spear that might be aimed at my back, and in minutes my former fretting seemed an absurdity to me. I would stand here for days, if need be, unafraid. At once I had the reward of this triumph over self: against the shimmering fierceness of the sky I made out a dark floating form, a notch in the heavens, and this time it was no illusion, for my youthful eyes spied wings and horn. Did the others see it? Was the bird mine to attempt? If I made the kill, would the septarch pound my back and call me his best son? All was silence from the other hunters.

“One cries claim!” I shouted jubilantly, and lifted my weapon, and eyed the sight, remembering what I had been taught, to let the inner mind make the calculations, to aim and fire in one swift impulse before the intellect, by quibbling, could spoil the intuition’s command.in the instant before I sent my bolt aloft there came a ghastly outcry from my left, and I fired without aiming at all, turning in the same instant toward my father’s place, and seeing him half hidden beneath the madly flapping form of another hornfowl that had gored him from spine to belly. The air about them was clouded with red sand as the monster’s wings furiously slapped the ground; the bird was struggling to take off, but a hornfowl cannot lift a man’s weight, though this does not prevent them from attacking us. I ran to aid the septarch. He still was shouting, and I saw his hands clutching for the hornfowl’s scrawny throat, but now there was a liquid quality about his cries, a bubbling tone, and when I reached the scene—I was the first one there—he lay sprawled and quiet, with the bird still rammed through him and covering his body like a black cloak. My blade was out; I slashed the hornfowl’s neck as if it were a length of hose, kicked the carcass aside, began to wrench desperately at the demonic head mounted so hideously upon the septarch’s upturned back. Now the others came; they pulled me away; someone seized me by the shoulders and shook me until my fit was past. When I turned to them again, they closed their ranks, to keep me from seeing my father’s corpse, and then, to my dismay, they dropped to their knees before me to do homage.of course it was Stirron and not I who became septarch in Salla. His crowning was a grand event, for, young though he was, he would be the prime septarch of the province. Salla’s six other septarchs came to the capital—only on such an occasion were they ever to be found at once in the same city—and for a time everything was feasting and banners and the blare of trumpets. Stirron was at the center of it all, and I on the margins, which was as it should be, though it left me feeling more like a stableboy than a prince. Once he was enthroned, Stirron offered me titles and land and power, but he did not really expect me to accept, and I did not. Unless a septarch is a weakling, his younger brothers had best not stay nearby to help him rule, for such help is not desired often. I had had no living uncles on my father’s side of the family, and I did not care to have Stirron’s sons be able to make the same statement; therefore I took myself quickly from Salla once the time of mourning was ended.went to Glin, my mother’s land. There, however, things were unsatisfactory for me, and after a few years I moved on to the steamy province of Manneran, where I won my wife and sired my sons and became a prince in more than name, and lived happily and sturdily until my time of changes began.

I should set down some words concerning my world’s geography.are five continents on our planet of Borthan. In this hemisphere there are two, Velada Borthan and Sumara Borthan, which is to say, the Northern World and the Southern World. It is a long sea journey from any shore of these continents to the continents of the opposite hemisphere, which have been named merely Umbis, Dabis, Tibis, that is, One, Two, Three.those three distant lands I can tell you very little. They first were explored some seven hundred years ago by a septarch of Glin, who laid down his life for his curiosity, and there have not been five seeking-parties to them in all the time since. No human folk dwell in that hemisphere. Umbis is said to be largely like the Burnt Lowlands, but worse, with golden flames bursting from the tormented land in many places. Dabis is jungles and fever-ridden swamps, and someday will be full of our people hoping to prove manhood, for I understand it is thick with dangerous beasts. Tibis is covered with ice.are not a race afflicted with the wanderlust. I myself was never a voyager until circumstances made me one. Though the blood of the ancient Earthmen flows in our veins, and they were wanderers whose demons drove them out to prowl the stars, we of Borthan stay close to home. Even I who am somewhat different from my comrades in my way of thinking never hungered to see the snowfields of Tibis or the marshes of Dabis, except perhaps when I was a child and eager to gobble all the universe. Among us it is considered a great thing merely to journey from Salla to Glin, and rare indeed is the man who has crossed the continent, let alone ventured to Sumara Borthan, as I have done.I have done.Borthan is the home of our civilization. The mapmakers’ art reveals it to be a large squarish landmass with rounded corners. Two great V-shaped indentations puncture its periphery: along the northern coast, midway between the eastern and western corners, there is the Polar Gulf, and, due south on the opposite coast, there is the Gulf of Sumar. Between those two bodies of water lie the Lowlands, a trough that spans the entire continent from north to south. No point in the Lowlands rises higher above sea level than the height of five men, and there are many places, notably in the Burnt Lowlands, that are far below sea level.is a folktale we tell our children concerning the shape of Velada Borthan. We say that the great iceworm Hrungir, born in the waters of the North Polar Sea, stirred and woke one day in sudden appetite, and began to nibble at the northern shore of Velada Borthan. The worm chewed for a thousand thousand years, until it had eaten out the Polar Gulf. Then, its voracity having made it somewhat ill, it crawled up on the land to rest and digest what it had devoured. Uneasy at the stomach, Hrungir wriggled southward, causing the land to sink beneath its vast weight and the mountains to rise, in compensation, to the east and west of its resting-place. The worm rested longest in the Burnt Lowlands, which accordingly were depressed more deeply than any other region. In time the worm’s appetite revived, and it resumed its southward crawl, coming at last to a place where a range of mountains running from east to west barred its advance. Then it chewed the mountains, creating Stroin Gap, and proceeded toward our southern coast. In another fit of hunger the worm bit out the Gulf of Sumar. The waters of the Strait of Sumar rushed in to fill the place where the land had been, and the rising tide carried Hrungir to the continent of Sumara Borthan, where now the iceworm lives, coiled beneath the volcano Vashnir and emitting poisonous fumes. So the fable goes.long narrow basin that we think of as Hrungir’s track is divided into three districts. At the northern end we have the Frozen Lowlands, a place of perpetual ice where no man is ever seen. Legend has it that the air is so dry and cold that a single breath will turn a man’s lungs to leather. The polar influence reaches only a short distance into our continent, however. South of the Frozen Lowlands lie the immense Burnt Lowlands, which are almost totally without water, and on which the full fury of our sun constantly falls. Our two towering north-south mountain ranges prevent a drop of rain from entering the Burnt Lowlands, nor do any rivers or streams reach it. The soil is bright red, with occasional yellow streaks, and this we blame on the heat of Hrungir’s belly, though our geologists tell another tale. Small plants live in the Burnt Lowlands, taking their nourishment from I know not where, and there are many kinds of beasts, all of them strange, deformed, and unpleasant. At the southern end of the Burnt Lowlands there is a deep east-west valley, several days’ journey in breadth, and on its far side lies the small district known as the Wet Lowlands. Northerly breezes coming off the Gulf of Sumar carry moisture through Stroin Gap; these winds meet the fierce hot blasts out of the Burnt Lowlands and are forced to drop their burden not far above the Gap, creating a land of dense, lush vegetation. Never do the water-laden breezes from the south succeed in getting north of the Wet Lowlands to bathe the zone of red soil. The Frozen Lowlands, as I have said, go forever unvisited, and the Burnt Lowlands are entered only by hunters and those who must travel between the eastern and western coasts, but the Wet Lowlands are populated by several thousand farmers, who raise exotic fruits for the city folk. I am told that the constant rain rots their souls, that they have no form of government, and that our customs of self-denial are imperfectly observed. I would be among them now, to discover their nature at first hand, if only I could slip through the cordon that my enemies have set up to the south of this place.Lowlands are flanked by two immense mountain ranges: the Huishtors in the east, the Threishtors in the west. These mountains begin on Velada Borthan’s northern coast, virtually at the shores of the North Polar Sea, and march southward, gradually curving inland; the two ranges would join not far from the Gulf of Sumar if they were not separated by Stroin Gap. They are so high that they intercept all winds. Therefore their inland slopes are barren, but the slopes facing the oceans enjoy fertility.in Velada Borthan has carved out its domain in the two coastal strips, between the oceans and the mountains. In most places the land is at best marginal, so that we are hard put to have all the food we need, and life is constant struggle against hunger. Often one wonders why our ancestors, when they came to this planet so many generations ago, chose Velada Borthan as their settling-place; the farming would have been far easier in the neighboring continent of Sumara Borthan, and even swampy Dabis might have offered more cheer. The explanation we are given is that our forefathers were stern, diligent folk who relished challenge, and feared to let their children dwell in a place where life might be insufficiently harsh. Velada Borthan’s coasts were neither uninhabitable nor unduly comfortable; therefore they suited the purposes. I believe this to be true, for certainly the chief heritage we have from those ancient ones is the notion that comfort is sin and ease is wickedness. My bondbrother Noim, though, once remarked that the first settlers chose Velada Borthan because that was where their starship happened to come down, and, having hauled themselves across all the immensities of space, they lacked the energy to travel onward even one more continent in quest of a better home. I doubt it, but the slyness of the idea is characteristic of my bondbrother’s taste for irony.firstcomers planted their initial settlement on the western coast, at the place we call Threish, that is, the place of the Covenant. They multiplied rapidly, and, because they were a stubborn and quarrelsome tribe, they splintered early, this group and that going off to live apart. Thus the nine western provinces came into being. To this day there are bitter border disputes among them.time the limited resources of the west were exhausted, and emigrants sought the eastern coast. We had no air transport then, not that we have a great deal now; we are not a mechanically minded people, and we lack natural resources to serve as fuel. Thus they went east by groundcar, or whatever served as groundcars then. The three Threishtor passes were discovered, and the bold ones bravely entered the Burnt Lowlands. We sing long mythic epics of the hardships of these crossings. Getting over the Threishtors into the Lowlands was difficult, but getting out on the far side was close to impossible, for there is only one route over the Huishtors out of the red-soil country fit for humans, and that is by way of Salla’s Gate, the finding of which was no small task. But they found it and poured through, and established my land of Salla. When the quarreling came, a good many went north and founded Glin, and later others went south to settle in holy Manneran. For a thousand years it was sufficient to have but three provinces in the east, until in a new quarrel the small but prosperous maritime kingdom of Krell carved itself out of a corner of Glin and a corner of Salla.also were some folk who could not abide life in Velada Borthan at all, and put to sea from Manneran, sailing off to settle in Sumara Borthan. But one need not speak of them in a geography lesson; I will have much to say of Sumara Borthan and its people when I have begun to explain the changes that entered my life.

cabin where I hide myself now is a shabby thing. Its clapboard walls were indifferently put together to begin with, and now are crazed, so that gaps yawn at the joins and no angle is true. The desert wind passes through here unhindered; my page bears a light coating of red soil, my clothes are caked with it, even my hair has a red tinge. Lowlands creatures crawl freely in with me: I see two of them moving about the earthen floor now, a many-legged gray thing the size of my thumb and a sluggish two-tailed serpent not so long as my foot. For hours they have circled one another idly, as though they wish to be mortal foes but cannot decide which of them is to eat the other. Dry companions for a parched time.should not mock this place, though. Someone troubled to drag its makings here, in order that weary hunters might have shelter in this inhospitable land. Someone put it together, doubtless with more love than skill, and left it here for me, and it serves me well. Perhaps it is no fit home for a septarch’s son, but I have known my share of palaces, and I no longer need stone walls and groined ceilings. It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself. In this our world we are forbidden by custom to make our souls known to others, yes, but why has no one before me observed that that same custom, without intending it, keeps us from coming to know ourselves? For nearly all my life I kept the proper social walls between myself and others, and not till the walls were down did I see I had walled myself away from myself as well. But here in the Burnt Lowlands I have had time to contemplate these matters and to arrive at understanding. This is not the place I would have chosen for myself, but I am not unhappy here.do not think they will find me for some while yet.it is too dark in here to write. I will stand by the cabin door and watch the night come rolling across the Lowlands toward the Huishtors. Perhaps there will be hornfowl drifting through the dusk, heading home from an empty hunt. The stars will blaze. Schweiz once tried to show me the sun of Earth from a mountaintop in Sumara Borthan, and insisted he could see it, and begged me to squint along the line of his pointing hand, but I think he was playing a game with me. I think that that sun may not be seen at all from our sector of the galaxy. Schweiz played many a game with me when we traveled together, and perhaps he will play more such games one day, if ever we meet again, if still he lives.

night in a dream my bondsister Halum Helalam came to me.her there can never be more games, and only through the slippery-walled tunnel of dreams is she apt to reach me. Therefore while I slept she glowed in my mind more brightly than any star that lights this desert, but waking brought me sadness and shame, and the memory of my loss of her who is irreplaceable.of my dream wore only a light filmy veil through which her small rosy-tipped breasts showed, and her slim thighs, and her flat belly, the belly of an unchilded woman. It was not the way she often dressed in life, especially when paying a call on her bondbrother, but this was the Halum of my dream, made wanton by my lonely and troubled soul. Her smile was warm and tender and her dark shining eyes glistened with love.dreams one’s mind lives on many levels. On one level of mine I was a detached observer, floating in a haze of moonlight somewhere near the roof of my hut, looking down upon my own sleeping body. On another level I lay asleep. The dream-self that slept did not perceive Halum’s presence, but the dream-self that watched was aware of her, and I, the true dreamer, was aware of them both, and also aware that all I saw was coming to me in a vision. But inevitably there was some mingling of these levels of reality, so that I could not be sure who was the dreamer and who the dreamed, nor was I certain that the Halum who stood before me in such radiance was a creature of my fantasy rather than the living Halum I once had known.

“Kinnall,” she whispered, and in my dream I imagined that my sleeping dream-self awoke, propping himself upon his elbows, with Halum kneeling close beside his cot. She leaned forward until her breasts brushed the shaggy chest of that man who was I, and touched her lips to mine in a flick of a caress, and said, “You look so weary, Kinnall.”

“You should not have come here.”

“One was needed. One came.”

“It is not right. To enter the Burnt Lowlands alone, to seek out one who has brought you only harm—”

“The bond that links one to you is sacred.”

“You’ve suffered enough for that bond Halum.”

“One has not suffered at all,” she said, and kissed my sweaty forehead. “How you must suffer, hiding in this dismal oven!”

“It is no more than one has earned,” I said.in my dream I spoke to Halum in the polite grammatical form. I had never found it easy to use the first person with her; certainly I never used it before my changes, and afterward, when no reason remained for me to be so chaste with her, I still could not. My soul and my heart had yearned to say “I” to Halum, and my tongue and lips were padlocked by propriety.said, “You deserve so much more than this place. You must come forth from exile. You must guide us, Kinnall, toward a new Covenant, a Covenant of love, of trust in one another.”

“One fears he has been a failure as a prophet. One doubts the value of continuing such efforts.”

“It was all so strange to you, so new!” she said. “But you were able to change, Kinnall, and to bring changes to others—”

“To bring grief to others and to oneself.”

“No. No. What you tried to do was right. How can you give up now? How can you resign yourself to death? There’s a world out there in need of being freed, Kinnall!”

“One is trapped in this place. One’s capture is inevitable.”

“The desert is wide. You can slip away from them.”

“The desert is wide, but the gates are few, and all of them are watched. There’s no escape.”shook her head, and smiled, and pressed her hands urgently against my hips, and said, in a voice thick with hope, “I will lead you to safety. Come with me, Kinnall.”sound of that I and the me that followed it, out of Halum’s imagined mouth, fell upon my dreaming soul like a rainfall of rusted spikes, and the shock of hearing those obscenities in her sweet voice nearly awakened me. This thing I tell you to make it clear that I am not fully converted to my own changed way of life, that the reflexes of my upbringing still govern me in the deepest corners of my soul. In dreams we reveal our true selves, and my reaction of numb dismay to the words that I had placed (for who else could have done it?) in the dream-Halum’s mouth told me a great deal about my innermost attitudes. What happened next was also revealing, though far less subtle. To urge me from my cot Halum’s hands slipped over my body, working their way through the tangled thatch over my gut, and her cool fingers seized the stiffened rod of my sex. Instantly my heart thundered and my seed spurted, and the ground heaved as though the Lowlands were splitting apart, and Halum uttered a little cry of fear. I reached for her, but she was growing indistinct and insubstantial, and in one terrible convulsion of the planet I lost sight of her and she was gone. And there was so much I had wanted to say to her, so many things I had meant to ask. I woke, coming up through the levels of my dream. I found myself alone in the hut, of course, sticky-skinned with my outpourings and sickened by the villainies that my shameful mind, allowed to roam the night unfettered, had concocted.

“Halum!” I cried. “Halum, Halum, Halum!”voice made the cabin quiver, but she did not return. And slowly my sleep-fogged mind grasped the truth, that the Halum who had visited me had been unreal.of Borthan do not take such visions lightly, however. I rose, and went from my cabin into the darkness outside, and walked about, scuffing at the warm sand with my bare toes as I struggled to excuse my inventions to myself. Slowly I calmed. Slowly I came to equilibrium. Yet I sat by my doorstep unsleeping for hours, until dawn’s first green fingers crept upon me.doubt you will agree with me that a man who has been apart from women some time, living under the tensions I have known since my flight into the Burnt Lowlands, will occasionally experience such sexual eruptions in his sleep, nor is there anything unnatural about them. I must maintain also, though I have little enough evidence to prove it, that many men of Borthan find themselves giving way in slumber to expressions of desire for their bondsisters, simply because such desires are so rigidly repressed in the waking time. And further, although Halum and I enjoyed intimacies of soul far beyond those which men customarily enjoy with their bondsisters, never once did I seek her physically, nor did such a union ever occur. Take this on faith, if you will: in these pages I tell you so much that is discreditable to me, making no attempt to conceal that which is shameful, that if I had violated Halum’s bond I would tell you that as well. So you must believe that it was not a deed I did. You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.I held myself guilty through the waning of the night and into this morning, and only as I purge myself now by putting the incident on paper does the darkness lift from my spirit. I think what has really troubled me these past few hours is not so much my sordid little sexual fantasy, for which even my enemies-would probably forgive me, as it is my belief that I am responsible for Halum’s death, for which I am unable to forgive myself.

I should say that every man of Borthan, and by the same token every woman, is sworn at birth or soon thereafter to a bondsister and bondbrother. No member of any such tripling may be blood-kin to any other. The bondings are arranged soon after a child is conceived, and often are the subject of intricate negotiation, since one’s bondbrother and bondsister are customarily closer to one than one’s own family-by-blood; hence a father owes it to his child to make the bondings with care.I was to be a septarch’s second son, arranging my bondings was a matter of high circumstance. It might have been good democracy, but poor sense, to bond me to a peasant’s child, for one must be reared on the same social plane as one’s bond-kin if any profit is to come from the relationship. On the other hand I could not be bonded to the kin of some other septarch, since fate might one day elevate me to my father’s throne, and a septarch must not be tangled in ties of bonding to the royal house of another district lest he find his freedom of decision circumscribed. Thus it was necessary to make bondings for me with the children of nobility but not of royalty.project was handled by my father’s bondbrother, Ulman Kotril; it was the last aid he ever gave my father, for he was slain by bandits from Krell not long after my birth. To find a bondsister for me, Ulman Kotril went down into Manneran and obtained bonding with the unborn child of Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port. It had been determined that Helalam’s child was to be female; hence my father’s bondbrother returned to Salla and completed the tripling by compacting with Luinn Condorit, a general of the northern patrol, for his coming son., Halum, and I were born all the same week, and my father himself performed the service of bonding. (We were known by our child-names then, of course, but I ignore that here to simplify things.) The ceremony took place in the septarch’s palace, with proxies standing in for Noim and Halum; later, when we were old enough to travel, we repledged our bonds in each other’s presence, I going to Manneran to be bonded to Halum. Thereafter we were only infrequently apart. Segvord Helalam had no objection to letting his daughter be raised in Salla, for he hoped she would strike a glittering marriage with some prince at my father’s court. In this he was to be disappointed, for Halum went unmarried, and, for all I know, virgin, to her grave.scheme of bondings allows us a small escape from the constricting solitude in which we of Borthan are expected to live. You must know by now—even if you who read this be a stranger to our planet—that it has long been forbidden by custom for us to open our souls to others. To talk excessively of oneself, so our forefathers believed, leads inevitably to self-indulgence, self-pity, and self-corruption; therefore we are trained to keep ourselves to ourselves, and, so that the prisoning bands of custom may be all the more steely, we are prohibited even from using such words as “I” or “me” in polite discourse. If we have problems, we settle them in silence; if we have ambitions, we fulfill them without advertising our hopes; if we have desires, we pursue them in a selfless and impersonal way. To these harsh rules only two exceptions are made. We may speak our hearts freely to our drainers, who are religious functionaries and mere hirelings; and we may, within limits, open ourselves to our bond-kin. These are the rules of the Covenant.is permissible to confide almost anything to a bondsister or a bondbrother, but we are taught to observe etiquette in going about it. For example, proper people consider it improper to speak in the first person even to one’s bond-kin. It is not done, ever. No matter how intimate a confession we make, we must couch it in acceptable grammar, not in the vulgarities of a common selfbarer.

(In our idiom a selfbarer is one who exposes himself to others, by which is meant that he exposes his soul, not his flesh. It is deemed a coarse act and is punished by social ostracism, or worse. Selfbarers use the censured pronouns of the gutter vocabulary, as I have done throughout what you now read. Although one is allowed to bare one’s self to one’s bond-kin, one is not a selfbarer unless one does it in tawdry blurtings of “I” and “me.”)we are taught to observe reciprocity in our dealings with bond-kin. That is, we may not overload them with our woes, while failing to ease them of their own burdens. This is plain civility: the relationship depends on mutuality, and we may make use of them only if we are careful to let them make use of us. Children are often one-sided in their dealings with bondkin; one may dominate his bondbrother, and chatter endlessly at him without pausing to heed the other’s woes. But such things usually come into balance early. It is an unpardonable breach of propriety to show insufficient concern for one’s bond-kin; I know no one, not even the weakest and most slovenly among us, who is guilty of that sin.all the prohibitions having to do with bonding the most severe is the one against physical relationships with our bond-kin. In sexual matters we are generally quite free, only we dare not do this one thing. This struck at me most painfully. Not that I yearned for Noim, for that has never been my path, nor is it a common one among us; but Halum was my soul’s desire, and neither as wife nor as mistress could she ever comfort me. Long hours we sat up together, her hand in mine, telling one another things we could tell no one else, and how easy it would have been for me to draw her close, and part her garments, and slip my throbbing flesh inside hers. I would not attempt it. My conditioning held firm; and, as I hope to survive long enough to tell you, even after Schweiz and his potion had changed my soul, still did I respect the sanctity of Halum’s body, although I was able to enter her in other ways. But I will not deny my desire for her. Nor can I forget the shock I felt when I learned in boyhood that of all Borthan’s women only Halum, my beloved Halum, was denied to me.was extraordinarily close to Halum in every but the physical way, and she was for me the ideal bondsister: open, giving, loving, serene, radiant, adaptable. Not only was she beautiful—creamy-skinned, dark-eyed and dark of hair, slender and graceful—but also she was remarkable within herself, for her soul was gentle and sleek and supple, a wondrous mixture of purity and wisdom. Thinking of her, I see the image of a forest glade in the mountains, with black-needled evergreen trees rising close together like shadowy swords springing from a bed of newly fallen snow, and a sparkling stream dancing between sun-spattered boulders, everything clean and untainted and self-contained. Sometimes when I was with her I felt impossibly thick and clumsy, a hulking lumbering mountain of dull meat, with an ugly hairy body and stupid ponderous muscles; but Halum had the skill of showing me, with a word, with a laugh, with a wink, that I was being unjust to myself when I let the sight of her lightness and gaiety lead me to wish I was woman-soft and woman-airy.the other side I was equally close to Noim. He was my foil in many ways: slender where I am burly, crafty where I am direct, cautious and calculating where I am rash, bleak of outlook where I am sunny. With him as with Halum I frequently felt awkward, not really in any bodily sense (for, as I have told you, I move well for a man my size) but in my inward nature. Noim, more mercurial than I, livelier, quicker of wit, seemed to leap and cavort where I merely plodded, and yet the prevailing pessimism of his spirit made him appear deeper than I as well as more buoyant. To give myself credit, Noim looked with envy on me just as I did on him. He was jealous of my great strength, and furthermore he confessed that he felt mean-souled and petty when he peered into my eyes. “One sees simplicity and power there,” he admitted, “and one is aware that one often cheats, that one is lazy, that one breaks faith, that one does a dozen wicked things daily, and none of these things is any more natural to you than dining on your own flesh.”must understand that Halum and Noim were no bond-kin to one another, and were linked only by way of their common relationship to m


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