Collected Short Fiction, page 804
“The peace of all gods be on you,” I said. “Here is one in need of your craft.”
He eyed my costly costume, my leather jerkin and my heavy jewelry, studied the size and swagger of me and evidently concluded I was some young bully of the aristocracy out to stir trouble in the slums.
“It is to early in the day,” he said uneasily. “You come too soon for comfort.”
“You would not refuse a sufferer.”
“It is too early.”
“Come, come, let one in. A troubled soul stands here.”
HE YIELDED, as I knew he must, and with many a twitch of his longnosed face he admitted me. Within there was the reek of rot. The old woodwork was impregnated with the damp, the draperies were moldering, the furniture had been gnawed by insects. The lighting was dim. The drainer’s wife, as ugly as the drainer himself, skulked about. He led me to his chapel, a small sweaty room off the living-quarters, and left me kneeling by the cracked and yellowing mirror while he lit the candles. He robed himself and finally came to me where I kneeled. He named his fee. I gasped.
“Too much by half,” I said.
He reduced it by a fifth. When I still refused, he told me to find my priesting elsewhere, but I would not rise and, grudgingly, he brought the price of his services down another notch. Still it was probably five limes what he charged the folk of Salla Old Town for the same benefit, but he knew I had money and, thinking of Noim fuming in the car, I could not bring myself to haggle.
“Done,” I said.
Next he brought me the contract. I have said that we of Borthan are suspicious people; have I indicated how we rely on contracts?. A man’s word is merely bad air. Before a soldier beds a whore they come to the terms of their bargain and scrawl it on paper. The drainer gave me a standard form, promising me that all I said would be held in strictest confidence, the drainer merely acting as intermediary between me and the god of my choice and I, for my part, pledging that I would hold the drainer to no liability for the knowledge he would have of me, that I would not call him as witness in a lawsuit or make him my alibi in some prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. I signed. He signed. We exchanged copies and I gave him his money.
“Which god would you have preside here?” he asked.
“The god who protects travelers,” I told him. We do not call our gods aloud by their names.
He lit a candle of the appropriate color pink—and put it beside the mirror. By that it was understood that the chosen god would accept my words.
“Behold your face,” the drainer said. “Put your eyes to your eyes.”
I stared at the mirror. Since we shun vanity, it is not usual to examine one’s face except on these occasions of religion.
“Open now your soul,” the drainer commanded. “Let your griefs and dreams and hungers and sorrows emerge.”
“A septarch’s son it is who flees his homeland,” I began and at once the drainer jerked to attention, impaled by my news. Though I did not take my eyes from the mirror, I guessed that he was scrabbling around to look at the contract and see who had signed it. “Fear of his brother,” I continued, “leads him to go abroad, but yet he is sore of soul as he departs.”
I went on in that vein for some while. The drainer made the usual interjections every time I faltered, prying words out of me in his craft’s cunning way. But shortly there was no need for such mid-wivery, for the words gushed freely. I told him of my desire for my bondsister and how her embrace had unsettled me; I told him how close I had come to lying to Stirron; I confessed that I would miss the royal wedding and give my brother injury thereby; I admitted several small sins of self-esteem, such as anyone commits daily.
The drainer listened.
We pay them to listen and to do nothing but listen, until we are drained and healed. Such is our holy communion that we lift these toads from the mud, set them up in their godhouses and buy their patience with our money. It is permitted under the Covenant to say anything to a drainer, even if it is drivel, even if it is a shameful catalog of throttled lusts and hidden filth. We may bore a drainer as we have no right to bore our bondkin, for it is the drainer’s obligation by contract to sit with the patience of the hills as we speak of ourselves. We need not worry what the drainer’s problems may be, nor what he thinks of us, nor whether he would be happier doing something else. He has his calling and he takes his fee and he must serve those who have need of him. A time was when I felt it was a miraculously fine scheme to give us drainers in order that we might rid our hearts of pain. Too much of my life was gone before I realized that to open one’s self to a drainer is no more comforting than to make love to one’s own hand: there are better ways of loving, there are happier ways of opening.
But I did not know that then and I squatted by the mirror, getting the best healing that money could buy. Whatever residue of wrongness was in my soul came forth, syllable smoothly following syllable, the way sweet liquor will flow when one taps the thorny flanks of the gnarled and repellent-looking flesh-trees that grow by the Gulf of Sumar. As I spoke the candles caught me in their spell and by the flickering of them I was drawn into the curved surface of the mirror so that I was drawn out of myself; the drainer was a mere blur in the darkness, unreal, unimportant, and I spoke now directly to the god of travelers, who would heal me and send me on my way. And I believed that this was so. I will not say that I imagined a literal god-place where our deities sit on call to serve us, but I had then an abstract and metaphorical understanding of our religion by which it seemed to me, in its way, as real as my right arm.
My flow of words halted and the drainer made no attempt to renew the outpour. He murmured the phrases of absolution, snuffed the god-candle between two fingers and rose to doff his robes. Still I kneeled, weak and quivering from my draining, lost in reveries. I felt cleansed and purified, stripped of my soul’s grit and debris and, in the music of that moment, was only dimly aware of the squalor about me. The chapel was a place of magic and the drainer was aflame with divine beauty.
“Up,” he said, nudging me with the tip of his sandal. “Out. Off about your journeys.”
The sound of his splintery voice doused all the wonder. I stood up, shaking my head to cure it of its new lightness, while the drainer pushed me into the corridor. He was no longer afraid of me, that ugly little man, even though I might be a septarch’s son and could kill him with one wad of my spittle, for I had told him of my cowardice, of my forbidden hunger for Halum, of all the cheapnesses of my spirit. And that knowledge reduced me in his eyes: no man newly drained can awe his drainer.
The rain was even worse when I left the building. Noim sat scowling in the car, his forehead pressed to the steering stick. He looked up and tapped his wrist to tell me I had dallied too long at the godhouse.
“Feel better now that your bladder’s empty?” he asked.
“What?”
“That is, did you have a good soul-pissing in there?”
“A foul phrase, Noim.”
“One grows blasphemous when his patience is extended too far.”
He kicked the starter and we rolled forward. Shortly we were at the ancient walls of Salla City, by the noble tower-bedecked opening known as Glin Door, which was guarded by four sour-faced and sleepy warriors in dripping uniforms. They paid no heed to us. Noim drove through the gate and past a sign welcoming us to the Grand Salla Highway. Salla City dwindled swiftly behind us; northward we rushed toward Glin.
THE Grand Salla Highway passes through one of our best farming districts, the rich and fertile Plain of Nand, which each spring receives a gift of topsoil stripped from the skin of West Salla by our busy streams. At that time the septarch of the Nand district was a notorious coinclutcher and, thanks to his penury, the highway was in poor repair there, so, as Halum had predicted in jest, we were hard put to wallow through the mud that clogged the road. It was good to finish with Nand and enter North Salla, where the land is a mixture of rock and sand and the people live on weeds and on scuttling things that they take from the sea. Groundcars are unusual sights in North Salla and twice we were stoned by hungry and sullen townsfolk, who found our mere passage through their unhappy place an insult. But at least the road was free of mud.
Noim’s father’s troops were stationed in extreme North Salla, on the lower bank of the River Huish. This is the grandest of Velada Borthan’s rivers. It begins as a hundred trifling brooks trickling down the eastern slopes of the Huishtors in the northern part of West Salla; these brooks merge in the foothills to become a swift stream, gray and turbulent, that rushes through a narrow granite canyon marked by six great steplike plunges. Emerging from those wild cascades onto its alluvial plain, the Huish proceeds more serenely on a northeastern course toward the sea, growing wider and wider in the flatlands and splitting ultimately so that, at its broad delta, it gives itself to the ocean through eight mouths. In its rapid western reaches the Huish forms the boundary between Salla and Glin; at its placid easternmost end it divides Glin from Krell.
For all its length the great river is unbridged and one might think little need exists to fortify its banks against invaders from the far side. But many times in Salla’s history have the men of Glin crossed the Huish by boat to make war and just as many times have we of Salla gone to ravage Glin, nor is the record of neighborliness between Glin and Krell any happier. So all along the Huish sprout military outposts, and generals like Luinn Condorit consume their lives studying the riverfogs for glimpses of the enemy.
I stayed a short while at Noim’s father’s camp. The general was not much like Noim, being a large-featured, heavy man whose face, eroded by time and frustration, was like a contour map of bouldery North Salla. Not once in fifteen years had there been any significant clash along the border he guarded and I think that idleness had chilled his soul; he said little, scowled often, turned every statement into a bitter grumble and retreated speedily from conversation into private dreams. They must have been dreams of war; no doubt he could not glance at the river without wishing that it swarmed with the landing-craft of Glin.
A dull time we had of it there. Noim was bound by filial ties to call upon his father, but they had nothing to say to one another and the general was a stranger to me. I had told Stirron I would stay with Noim’s father until the first snow of winter fell and I was true to my word, yet, luckily it was no lengthy visit I made; winter comes early in the north. On my fifth day there white sprinkles fluttered down and I was released from my self-imposed pledge.
Ferries, shuttling between terminals in three places, link Salla to Glin, except in time of war. Noim drove me to the nearest terminal one black dawn and solemly we embraced and made our farewells. I said I would send my address, when I had one in Glin, so that he could keep me informed of doings in Salla. He promised to look after Halum. We talked vaguely of when he and she and I would meet again; perhaps they would visit me in Glin next year, perhaps we would all three go on holiday in Manneran. We made these plans with little conviction in our voices. Then we had no words left.
The ferry beckoned me with a bellow of its horn.
I clasped Noim’s arm and we made farewells, hurriedly. The last thing I said to him was, “When you see the septarch, tell him that his brother loves him.” Then I went aboard.
The crossing was too quick. Less than an hour and I found myself on the alien soil of Glin. The immigration officials examined me brusquely, but they thawed at the sight of my passport, bright red to denote my place in the nobility, with a golden stripe to show that I was of the septarch’s family. At once I had my visa, good for an indefinite stay. Such officials are a gossipy sort; beyond question they were on the telephone the instant I left them, sending word to their government that a prince of Salla was in the land—and I suppose that not much later that bit of information was in the hands of Salla’s diplomatic representatives in Glin, who would relay it to my brother for his displeasure.
Across the way from the customs shed I came upon a branch of the Covenant Sank of Glin and exchanged my Salla money for the currency of the northerners. With my new funds I hired a driver to take me to the capital city, which they call Glain, half a day’s journey north of the border.
The road was narrow and winding and traversed a bleak countryside where winter’s touch had long ago pulled the leaves from the trees. Dirty snow was banked high. Glin is a frosty province. It was settled by men of a puritan nature, who found the living too easy in Salla and felt that if they remained there they might be tempted away from the Covenant; failing to reform our forefathers into greater piety, they left, crossing the Huish by rafts to hack out a livelihood in the north. Hard folk for a hard land; however poor the farming is in Salla it is twice as unrewarding in Glin; there people live mainly by fishing, by manufacturing, by the jugglements of commercial dealings and by piracy. But that my mother had sprung from Glin, I would never have chosen it for my place of exile. Not that I gained anything from my family ties.
V
NIGHTFALL saw me in Glain.
A walled city it is, like Salla’s capital, but otherwise not much like it. Salla City has grace and power; its buildings are made of great blocks of substantial stone, black basalt and rosy granite quarried in the mountains, and its streets are wide and sweeping, affording noble vistas and splendid promenades. Our custom of letting narrow slits stand in place of true windows apart, Salla City is an open, inviting place, the architecture of which announces to the world the boldness and self-sufficiency of its citizens. But that dismal Glain! Oh!
Glain is fashioned of scruffy yellow brick, here and there trimmed with miserable poor pink sandstone that rubs to particles at a finger’s nudge. It has no streets, only alleyways; the houses jostle one another as if afraid that some interloper may try to slip between them if they relax their guard. An avenue in Glain would not impress a gutter in Salla. And the architects of Glain have created a city fit only for a nation of drainers, since everything is lopsided, awry, uneven and coarse. My brother, who had once been to Glain on a diplomatic errand, had described the place to me, but I put his harsh words off to mere patriotic prejudice; now I saw that Stirron had been too kind.
Nor were the folk of Glain more lovely than their city. On a world where suspicion and secrecy are godly virtues one expects to find charm in short supply; yet I found the Glainish virtuous beyond all necessity. Dark clothes, dark frowns, dark souls, closed and shrunken hearts. Their speech itself displays their constipation of spirit. The language of Glin is the same as that of Salla, though the northerners have pronounced accents, clipping their syllables and shifting their vowels. That did not disturb me, but their syntax of self-effacement did. My driver, who was not a city man and therefore seemed almost friendly, left me at a hostelry where he thought I would have kind treatment.
I entered and said, “One would have a room for tonight and for some days beyond this one, perhaps.”
The innkeeper stared balefully at me as if I had said, “I would have a room or something equally filthy. Later I discovered that even our usual polite circumlocution seems too vain for a northerner; I should not have said, “One would have a room—” but rather, “Is there a room to be had?” At a restaurant it is wrong to say, “One will dine on thus and thus—”but rather, “These are the dishes that have been chosen.” And so on and so on, twisting everything into a cumbersome passive form to avoid the sin of acknowledging one’s own existence.
For my ignorance the innkeeper gave me his meanest room and charged me twice the usual tariff. By my speech I had branded myself a man of Salla; why should he be courteous? But in signing the contract for my night’s lodgings I had to show him my passport, which made him gasp when he saw that he was host to a visiting prince; he softened more than a little, asking me if I would have wine sent to my room, or maybe a buxom Glainish wench. I took the wine but declined the wench, for I was very young and overly frightened of the diseases that might lurk in foreign loins. That night I sat alone in my room, watching snowflakes drowning in a murky canal below my window and feeling more isolated from humanity than ever before, ever since.
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, 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.
