A Time of Changes

40

Our ship rode at anchor, a small squat craft, twin screws, auxiliary sail, hull painted blue and gold. We presented ourselves to the captain — Khrisch was his name — and he greeted us blandly by the names we had assumed. In late afternoon we put out to sea. At no time during the voyage did Captain Khrisch question us about our purposes, nor did any of his ten crewmen. Surely they were fiercely curious about the motives of anyone who cared to go to Sumara Borthan, but they were so grateful to be out of their escrow even for this short cruise that they were chary of offending their employers by too much prying. The coast of Velada Borthan dipped from sight behind me and ahead lay only the grand open sweep of the Strait of Sumar. No land at all could be seen, neither aft nor fore. That frightened me. In my brief career as a Glinish seaman I had never been far from the coast, and during stormy moments I had soothed myself with the comforting deceit that I might always swim to shore if we capsized. Here, though, the universe seemed all to be of water. As evening approached, a gray-blue twilight settled over us, stitching sky seamlessly to sea, and it became worse for me: now there was only our little bobbing, throbbing ship adrift and vulnerable in this directionless, dimensionless void, this shimmering anti-world where all places melted into a single nonplace. I had not expected the strait to be so wide. On a map I had seen in the Justiciary only a few days before, the strait had had less breadth than my little finger; I had assumed that the cliffs of Sumara Borthan would be visible to us from the earliest hours of the voyage; yet here we were amid nothingness. I stumbled to my cabin and plunged face first onto my bunk, and lay there shaking, calling upon the god of travelers to protect me. Bit by bit I came to loathe myself for this weakness. I reminded myself that I was a septarch’s son and a septarch’s brother and another septarch’s cousin, that in Manneran I was a man of the highest authority, that I was the head of a house and a slayer of hornfowl. All this did me no good. What value is lineage to a drowning man? What use are broad shoulders and powerful muscles and a skill at swimming, when the land itself has been swallowed up, so that a swimmer would have no destination? I trembled. I think I may have wept. I felt myself dissolving into that gray-blue void. Then a hand lightly caught my shoulder. Schweiz. “The ship is sound,” he whispered. “The crossing is a short one. Easy. Easy. No harm will come.”

If it had been anyone else who had found me like that, any other man except perhaps Noim, I might have killed him or myself, to bury the secret of my shame.

I said, “If this is what it is like to cross the Strait of Sumar, how can one travel between the stars without going mad?”

“One grows accustomed to travel.”

“The fear — the emptiness—”

“Come above.” Gently. “The night is very beautiful.”

Nor did he lie. Twilight was past and a black bowl pocked with fiery jewels lay over us. Near cities one cannot see the stars so well, because of the lights and the haze. I had looked upon the full glory of the heavens while hunting in the Burnt Lowlands, yes, but then I had not known the names of what I saw. Now, Schweiz and Captain Khrisch stood close alongside me on deck, taking turns calling out the names of stars and constellations, vying with each other to display their knowledge, each one pouring his astronomy into my ear as though I were a terrified child who could be kept from screaming only by a constant flow of distractions. See? See? And see, there? I saw. A host of our neighboring suns, and four or five of the neighboring planets of our system, and even a vagrant comet that night. What they taught me stayed with me. I could step out of my cabin now, I believe, here in the Burnt Lowlands, and call off the stars the way Schweiz and the captain called them off to me aboard ship in the Strait of Sumar. How many more nights do I have, I wonder, on which I will be free to look at the stars?

Morning brought an end to fear. The sun was bright, the sky was lightly fleeced, the broad strait was calm, and it did not matter to me that land was beyond sight. We glided toward Sumara Borthan in an almost imperceptible way; I had to study the surface of the sea with care to remind myself we were in motion. A day, a night, a day, a night, a day, and then the horizon sprouted a green crust, for there was Sumara Borthan. It provided a fixed point for me, except that we were the fixed point, and Sumara Borthan was making for it. The southern continent slid steadily toward us, until at last I saw a rim of bare yellow-green rock stretching from east to west, and atop those naked cliffs rose a thick cap of vegetation, lofty trees knitted together by heavy vines to form a closed canopy, stubbier shrubs clustering in the darkness below, everything cut down the side as if to reveal the jungle’s edge to us in cross-section. I felt not fear but wonder at the sight of that jungle. I knew that not one of those trees and plants grew in Velada Borthan; the beasts and serpents and insects of this place were not those of the continent of my birth; what lay before us was alien and perhaps hostile, an unknown world awaiting the first footstep. In a tumble of tangled imaginings I dropped down the well of time, and saw myself as an explorer peeling the mystery from a newly found planet. Those gigantic boulders, those slender, high-crowned trees, those dangling snaky vines, all were products of a raw, elemental mystery straight out of evolution’s belly, which now I was about to penetrate. That dark jungle was the gate to something strange and terrible, I thought, yet I was not frightened so much as I was stirred, deeply moved, by the vision of those sleek cliffs and tendriled avenues. This was the world that existed before man came. This was as it was when there were no godhouses, no drainers, no Port Justiciary: only the silent leafy paths, and the surging rivers scouring the valleys, and the unplumbed ponds, and the long heavy leaves glistening with the jungle’s exhalations, and the unhunted prehistoric beasts turning in the ooze, and the fluttering winged things that knew no fear, and the grassy plateaus, and the veins of precious metals, a virgin kingdom, and over everything brooding the presence of the gods, of the god, of the god, waiting for the time of worshipers. The lonely gods who did not yet know they were divine. The lonely god.

Of course the reality was nothing so romantic. There was a place where the cliffs dipped to sea level and yielded to a crescent harbor, and here a squalid settlement existed, the shacks of a few dozen Sumarnu who had taken to living here so that they might meet the needs of such ships as occasionally did come from the northern continent. I had thought that all the Sumarnu lived somewhere in the interior, naked tribesmen camping down by the volcanic peak Vashnir, and that Schweiz and I would have to hack our way through the whole apocalyptic immensity of this mysterious land, unguided and uncertain, before we found what passed for civilization and made contact with anyone who might sell us that for which we had come. Instead, Captain Khrisch brought his little ship smartly to shore by a crumbling wooden pier, and as we stepped forth a small delegation of Sumarnu came to offer us a sullen greeting.

You know my fantasy of fanged and grotesque Earthmen. So, too, I instinctively expected these people of the southern continent to look in some way alien. I knew it was irrational; they were, after all, sprung from the same stock as the citizens of Salla and Manneran and Glin. But had these centuries in the jungle not transformed them? Had their disavowal of the Covenant not laid them open to infiltration by the vapors of the forest, and turned them into unhuman things? No and no. I They looked to me like peasants of any province’s back country. Oh, they wore unfamiliar ornaments, old jeweled pendants and bracelets of an un-Veladan sort, but there was nothing else about them, neither tone of skin nor shape of face nor color of hair, that set them apart from the men I had always known.

There were eight or nine of them. Two, evidently the leaders, spoke the dialect of Manneran, though with a troublesome accent. The others showed no sign of understanding northern languages, but chattered among themselves in a tongue of clicks and grunts. Schweiz found communication easier than I did, and entered into a long conversation, so difficult for me to follow that I soon ceased to pay attention. I wandered off to inspect the village, and was inspected in turn by goggle-eyed children — the girls here walked about naked even after they were of the age when their breasts had sprouted — and when I returned Schweiz said, “It’s all arranged.”

“What is?”

“Tonight we sleep here. Tomorrow they’ll guide us to a village that produces the drug. They don’t guarantee we’ll be allowed to buy any.”

“Is it only sold at certain places?”

“Evidently. They swear there’s none at all available here.”

I said, “How long a journey will it be?”

“Five days. On foot. Do you like jungles, Kinnall?”

“I don’t know the taste of them yet.”

“It’s a taste you’re going to learn,” said Schweiz.

He turned now to confer with Captain Khrisch, who was planning to go off on some expedition of his own along the Sumaran coast. Schweiz arranged to have our ship back at this harbor waiting for us when we returned from our trip into the jungle. Khrisch’s men unloaded our baggage — chiefly trade-goods for barter, mirrors and knives and trinkets, since the Sumarnu had no use for Veladan currency — and got their ship out into the strait before night fell.

Schweiz and I had a shack for ourselves, on a lip of rock overlooking the harbor. Mattresses of leaves, blankets of animal hide, one lopsided window, no sanitary facilities: this is what the thousands of years of man’s voyage through the stars have brought us to. We haggled over the price of our lodgings, finally came to an agreement in knives and heat-rods, and at sundown were given our dinner. A surprisingly tasty stew of spicy meats, some angular red fruits, a pot of half-cooked vegetables, a mug of what might have been fermented milk — we ate what was given us, and enjoyed it more than either of us had expected, though we made edgy jokes about the diseases we were likely to catch. I poured out a libation to the god of travelers, more out of habit than conviction. Schweiz said, “So you still believe, after all?” I replied that I found no reason not to believe in the gods, though my faith in the teachings of men had been greatly weakened.

This close to the equator, darkness came on swiftly, a sudden black curtain rolling down. We sat outside a little while, Schweiz favoring me with some more astronomy, and testing me on what I had already learned. Then we went to bed. Less than an hour later, two figures entered our shack; I was still awake and sat up instantly, imagining thieves or assassins, but as I groped for a weapon a stray moonbeam showed me the profile of one of the intruders, and I saw heavy breasts swinging. Schweiz, out of the dark far corner, said, “I think they’re included in tonight’s price.” Another instant and warm naked flesh pressed against me. I smelled a pungent odor, and touched a fat haunch and found it coated in some spicy oil: a Sumarnu cosmetic, I found out afterward. Curiosity warred with caution in me. As I had when a boy taking lodgings in Glain, I feared catching a disease from the loins of a woman of a strange race. But should I not experience the southern kind of loving? From Schweiz’s direction I heard the slap of meat on meat, hearty laughter, liquid lip-noises. My own girl wriggled impatiently. Parting the plump thighs, I explored, aroused, entered. The girl squirmed into what I suppose was the proper native position, lying on her side, facing me, one leg flung over me and her heel jammed hard against my buttocks. I had not had a woman since my last night in Manneran; that and my old problem of haste undid me, and I unloaded myself in the usual premature volleys. My girl called out something, probably in derision of my manhood, to her moaning and sighing companion in Schweiz’s corner, and got a giggled answer. In rage and chagrin I forced myself to revive and, pumping slowly, grimly, I ploughed her anew, though the stink of her breath nearly paralyzed me, and her sweat, mingling with her oil, formed a nauseous compound. Eventually I pushed her over the brink of pleasure, but it was cheerless work, a tiresome chore. When it was done she nipped my elbow with her teeth: a Sumarnu kiss, I think it was. Her gratitude. Her apology. I had done her good service after all. In the morning I scanned the village maidens, wondering which lass it was had honored me with her caresses. All of them gaptoothed, sagbreasted, fisheyed: let my couchmate have been none of the ones I saw. For days afterward I kept uneasy watch on my organ, expecting it each morning to be broken out in red spots or running sores; but all I caught from her was a distaste for the Sumarnu style of passion.