shred of sympathy. Not an atom of warmth.
SIXTY-FOUR
AT THE CREST of the summer Halum came unexpectedly to visit us. The day of her arrival, I had gone riding far out across Noim’s land, following the track of a male stormshield that had burst from its pen. An accursed vanity had led Noim to acquire a clutch of these vicious furbearing mammals, though they are not native to Salla and thrive poorly there: he kept twenty or thirty of them, all claws and teeth and angry yellow eyes, and hoped to breed them into a profitable herd. I chased the escaped male through woods and plain, through morning and midday, hating it more with each hour, for it left a trail of the mutilated carcasses of harmless grazing beasts. These stormshields kill for sheer love of slaughter, taking but a bite or two of flesh and abandoning the rest to scavengers. Finally I cornered it in a shadowy box-canyon. “Stun it and bring it back whole,” Noim had instructed me, conscious of the animal’s value: but when trapped it rushed at me with such ferocity that I gave it the full beam, and gladly slew it. For Noim’s sake I took the trouble to strip off the precious hide. Then, weary and depressed, I rode without stopping back to the great house. A strange groundcar was parked outside, and beside it was Halum. “You know the summers in Manneran,” she explained. “One planned to go as usual to the island, but then one thought, it would be good to take a holiday in Salla, with Noim and Kinnall.”
She had by then entered her thirtieth year. Our women marry between fourteen and sixteen, are done bearing their children by twenty-two or twenty-four, and at thirty have begun to slide into middle age, but time had left Halum untouched. Not having known the tempests of marriage and the travails of motherhood, not having spent her energies on the grapplings of the conjugal couch or the lacerations of childbed, she had the supple, pliant body of a girl: no fleshy bulges, no sagging folds, no exploded veins, no thickening of the frame. She had changed only in one respect, for in recent years her dark hair had turned silvery. This was but an enhancement, however, since it gleamed with dazzling brilliance, and offered agreeable contrast to the deep tan of her youthful face.
In her luggage was a packet of letters for me from Manneran: messages from the duke, from Segvord, from my sons Noim and Stirron and Kinnall, from my daughters Halum and Loimel, from Mihan the archivist, and several others. Those who wrote did so in tense, self-conscious style. They were the letters one might write to a dead man if one felt guilty at having survived him. Still, it was good to hear these words out of my former life. I regretted not finding a letter from Schweiz; Halum told me she had heard nothing from him since before my indictment, and thought he might well have left our planet. Nor was there any word from my wife. “Is Loimel too busy to write a line or two?” I asked, and Halum, looking embarrassed, said softly that Loimel never spoke of me these days: “She seems to have forgotten that she was married.”
Halum also had brought a trove of gifts for me from my friends across the Woyn. They were startling in their opulence: massy clusters of precious metals, elaborate strings of rare gems. “Tokens of love,” Halum said, but I was not fooled. One could buy great estates with this heap of treasure. Those who loved me would not humiliate me by transferring cash to my account in Salla, but they could give me these splendors in the ordinary way of friendship, leaving me free to dispose of them according to my needs.
“Has it been very sad for you, this uprooting?” Halum asked. “This sudden going into exile?”
“One is no stranger to exile,” I told her. “And one still has Noim for bondlove and companionship.”
“Knowing that it would cost you what it did,” she said, “would you play with the drug a second time, if you could turn time backward by a year?”
“Beyond any doubt.”
“Was it worth the loss of home and family and friends?”
“It would be worth the loss of life itself,” I replied, “if only one could be assured by that that all of Velada Borthan would come to taste the drug.”
That answer seemed to frighten her: she drew