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Dawn was near. I could make out the shape of the Sallan side of the river. We pulled up at a dock that jutted out of a grassy bank, plainly some nobleman’s private landing. Now I felt my first alarm. In a moment I would step ashore in Salla. Where would I find myself? How would I reach some settled region? I was no boy, to beg rides from passing trucks. But all this had been settled for me hours before. As the boat bumped the shoulder of the pier, a figure emerged in the dimness and extended a hand: Noim. He drew me forth and clasped me in a tight hug. “I know what has happened,” he said. “You will stay with me.” In his emotion he abandoned polite usage with me for the first time since our boyhood.
60
At midday, from Noim’s estate in southwestern Salla, I phoned the Duke of Sumar to confirm my safe arrival—it was he, of course, who had arranged for my bondbrother to meet me at the border—and then I put through a call to Halum. Segvord had told her just a few hours earlier of the reasons for my disappearance. “How strange this news is,” she said. “You never spoke of the drug. Yet it was so important to you, for you risked everything to use it. How could it have had such a role in your life, and yet be kept a secret from your bondsister?” I answered that I had not dared to let her know of my preoccupation with it, for fear I might be tempted to offer it to her. She said, “Is opening yourself then to your bondsister so terrible a sin?”
61
Noim treated me with every courtesy, indicating that I could stay with him as long as I wished—weeks, months, even years. Presumably my friends in Ma
“One has heard of no such cases, Noim.”
“Here’s a case, then. One who woke up drenched with chilly sweat night after night, for weeks after we shared the drug in Ma
“What kind of dreams?” I asked.
“Ugly things. Monsters. Teeth. Claws. A sense of not knowing who one is. Pieces of other minds floating through one’s own.” He gulped at his wine. “You take the drug for pleasure, Ki
“For knowledge.”
“Knowledge of what?”
“Knowledge of self, and knowledge of others.”
“One prefers ignorance, then.” He shivered. “You know, Ki
“Impossible for you,” I said. “Others cherish it.”
“One leans toward the Covenant,” said Noim. “Privacy is sacred. One’s soul is one’s own. There’s a dirty pleasure in baring it.”
“Not baring. Sharing.”
“Does it sound prettier that way? Very well: there’s a dirty pleasure in sharing it, Ki
“There need be no guilt, Noim. One gives, one receives, one comes forth better than one was—”
“Dirtier.”
“Enlarged. Enhanced. More compassionate. Speak to others who have tried it,” I said.
“Of course. As they come streaming out of Ma
I saw the torment in his eyes. He wanted still to love me, but the Sumaran drug had shown him things—about himself, perhaps about me—that made him hate the one who had given the drug to him. He was one for whom walls are necessary; I had not realized that. What had I done, to turn my bondbrother into my enemy? Perhaps if we could take the drug a second time, I might make things more clear to him—but no, no hope of that. Noim was frightened by inwardness. I had transformed my blaspheming bondbrother into a man of the Covenant. There was nothing I could say to him now.
After some silence he said, “One must make a request of you, Ki
“Anything.”
“One hesitates to place boundaries on a guest. But if you have brought any of this drug with you from Ma
Never in my life had I lied to my bondbrother. Never. With the jeweled case the Duke of Sumar had given me blazing against my breastbone, I said solemnly to Noim, “You have nothing to fear on that account.”
62
Not many days later the news of my disgrace became public in Ma