At Winter's End

10 The River and the Precipice

Koshmar said, “So it is to be Lakkamai for you, is it?”

It was the third day since the end of the time of rains. Koshmar and Torlyri were together in the house they shared, at nightfall, after dinner, when all the tribe had gathered to observe the midwinter ceremony of the Provider: all but the mysteriously absent Sachkor, for whom daily searches were now being undertaken.

Torlyri, who had been lounging, sat swiftly upright. Koshmar had never seen such an expression on Torlyri’s face before: fear, and a kind of sheepish guilt, and something close to defiance, all mixed together.

“You know?” she said.

Koshmar laughed harshly. “Who doesn’t? Do you think I’m a child, Torlyri? The two of you making eyes at each other all over the settlement for weeks — and you, mentioning Lakkamai’s name in every third thing you say, you who could go a year and a half without ever once having occasion to speak of him—”

Torlyri looked down, abashed. “Are you angry with me, Koshmar?”

“Do I sound angry? That you should be happy?” But in fact Koshmar was troubled more than she had imagined she would be. She had known for a long while that something like this was coming, and had told herself that she would be strong when it did. But now that it was here, it was like a huge weight on her heart. She said, after a moment, “You’ve been coupling with him already, have you?”

“Yes.” Torlyri could barely be heard.

“You used to do that, a long time ago, when we were girls. It was Samnibolon you did it with, I recall. Minbain’s Samnibolon, am I right?”

Torlyri nodded. “And one or two others, yes. But I was very young then. It has been an extremely long time.”

“And you find pleasure in it?”

“I do now,” said Torlyri softly. “There was nothing for me in it, those times long ago. But there is now.”

“Great pleasure?”

“Sometimes,” said Torlyri, huskily, guiltily.

“I am very glad for you,” Koshmar said, her voice high and tight. “I never could see the sense of coupling, you know. But they tell me it has its rewards.”

“Perhaps it must be done with just the right person.”

Koshmar snorted. “For me there is no right person, and you know it! If you were a man, Torlyri, I’d couple gladly with you, I think. But we have our twining, you and I. We have our twining, and that’s sufficient for me. A chieftain doesn’t need coupling.”

Nor does an offering-woman, Koshmar added silently.

She glanced away so that Torlyri would not see the thought in her eyes. She had sworn not to interfere with what Torlyri was doing, however painful it might become for her.

Torlyri said, “Speaking of twining—”

“Yes, speak of twining, Torlyri! Speak of it anytime.” Sudden eagerness made Koshmar’s breath come quickly. The deeper Torlyri’s involvement with Lakkamai became, the more eager Koshmar was for any token of affection from her. “Now? Right now? Certainly. Come.”

Torlyri looked surprised and perhaps not pleased. “If you wish, of course, Koshmar. But that was not what I was starting to say.”

“Oh?”

“It’s time for Hresh’s twining-day, is what I was beginning to tell you. If I can manage to get him away from his machines and his Wonderstone long enough, I have to take him aside for his initiation.”

“Already,” Koshmar said, shaking her head. “Hresh’s twining-day.”

That was one of the offering-woman’s tasks, to initiate the young people into the way of twining, and Torlyri had always performed it with great care and love. Koshmar had never minded all those shared twinings, though twining was so much more intimate than coupling. Initiating the young was Torlyri’s god-given task. If any of this made sense, Koshmar thought, I should be more troubled by her twining with Hresh than by her coupling with Lakkamai. Yet it is the other way around. Torlyri’s twining with the young was no threat to her. But her coupling with Lakkamai — her coupling with Lakkamai—

Coupling is nothing, Koshmar thought angrily.

She told herself that she was being illogical. And then she told herself that all these matters were far beyond logic. The heart has a logic of its own, she told herself.

“Taniane has had her first twining, and Orbin, and now it is Hresh’s time,” Torlyri said. “And then Haniman.”

“How fast time moves. Sometimes I still think of him as that mischievous boy who tried to slip past you through the hatch, that day when the ice-eaters came and the Dream-Dreamer awoke. That strange day seems terribly long ago. And so does Hresh’s boyhood.”

“This has all been so odd,” said Torlyri. “For the old man of the tribe to have been someone not even old enough to twine.”

“Do you think it will change him, once he begins?”

“Change him? How so?”

“We depend on him so much,” Koshmar said. “There’s such wisdom in that strange little head of his. But children change, sometimes, when they first begin to twine. Have you forgotten that, Torlyri? And Hresh is only a child still. That is something we must never let ourselves forget. Once he finds a twining-partner he may give himself up to nothing but twining for many months, and what will happen to the exploration of Vengiboneeza? He might even begin showing interest in coupling.”

Torlyri said, with a shrug, “And if he did? Would that be so bad?”

“He has responsibilities, Torlyri.”

“He’s a boy just becoming a man. Do you mean to take his youth away from him? Let him twine all he likes. Let him couple, if that’s what he wants. Let him mate, even.”

“Mate? The chronicler, taking a mate?”

“This is the New Springtime, Koshmar. There’s no need to hold him to old customs.”

“The old man should not mate,” Koshmar said stiffly. “No more than the chieftain or the offering-woman. Twine, yes. Couple, if coupling is desired. But take a mate ? How can that be? We are selected by the gods as people apart from others.” Koshmar shook her head. “We’ve strayed from our subject. How soon are you planning to do Hresh’s initiation?”

“Two days. Three. If he has no duties which will get in the way.”

“Good,” said Koshmar. “Do it as soon as you can. Tell me when you do. And then we must watch him, to see that he does not change.”

Torlyri said, smiling, “I’m sure he’ll be no different afterward. Remember that he has the Barak Dayir, Koshmar. What can twining do for him that the Wonderstone has not already done fiftyfold?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

There was a long moment of awkward silence.

“Koshmar?” said Torlyri, at last.

“Yes?”

Torlyri hesitated. “Do you still want to twine?”

“Of course,” said Koshmar, softening, becoming eager.

“Before we do, one more question.”

“Go on.”

“The offering-woman, you said, should not mate.”

Koshmar stared. This was something entirely new. She had not realized the situation was so bad.

“It has never been done,” she said coolly. “Not the chieftain, nor the old man, nor the offering-woman. Coupling, yes, if they wished. And twining, certainly. But never mating. Never. We are people apart.”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

There was a silence again, an ugly one.

Koshmar said at length, “Are you asking for permission to take Lakkamai as your mate, Torlyri?”

“We would like to take each other as our mates, yes,” said Torlyri cautiously.

“You are asking permission of me.”

Torlyri regarded her with a steady gaze. “It is the New Springtime, Koshmar.”

“Do you mean to say that you think not even my permission is needed? Say what’s on your mind, Torlyri! Say what is in your soul!”

“I have never felt things like this before.”

“No doubt that’s true,” said Koshmar sharply.

“What shall I do, Koshmar?”

“Perform your services to the gods and to the people,” Koshmar said. “Take Hresh for his initiation. Make the daily offerings. Bring your goodness to those about you, as you always have.”

“And Lakkamai?”

“Do as you wish with Lakkamai.”

A third time Torlyri fell into silence. Koshmar allowed it to go on and on. Finally Torlyri said, “Do you want to twine with me now, Koshmar?”

“Another time,” Koshmar said. “In truth I’m very weary this evening, and I think it would not be a good twining.” She turned away. Bleakly she said, “I wish you joy, Torlyri. You understand that, don’t you? I wish you nothing but joy.”

Now Hresh began going into the ruins by himself, as if daring Koshmar to object; but she seemed not to care, or perhaps not even to notice. More often than not the Great World was his destination. The squat many-levered machine in the vault beneath the tower in the plaza of the thirty-six towers held an irresistible appeal.

By now he knew that the floating slab of stone that took him down to the lower-level vault would return automatically to the level above after a certain span of time; and so he no longer needed to bring Haniman or anyone else with him to operate the mechanism when he made his descents. Whatever risks there might be, he was willing to accept them for the sake of keeping others from sharing his journeys to the distant past. The Great World was his private treasure-trove, to mine as he pleased.

The procedure was the same every time. Activate the black stone stab; descend to the machine; grasp the Barak Dayir with his sensing-organ; seize the levers. And the Great World would spring to life, vivid and astonishing.

He never entered it at the same point twice. The physical structure of the city was different every time. It was as though all the long history of fabulous Vengiboneeza lay stored up in the machine, all its hundreds of thousands of years of growth and transformation, and it would randomly offer him any slice of the past that it wished, sometimes an early Vengiboneeza barely beginning its glittering expansion, sometimes a version of the city that surely must date from one of the final years, so close to the layout of the ruins was it.

There was no better evidence of how energetic and dynamic a place Vengiboneeza had been than the constant change Hresh observed in it. Only occasionally did he see any familiar landmarks — the waterfront boulevards, the thirty-six towers of the plaza, the tower that had become the temple of the People, the districts of villas on the mountainsides. Sometimes they were there, sometimes not. The squat potent Citadel was the only changeless and invulnerable place, whenever Hresh’s soul soared back across the gulf of the ages.

On one occasion he might vanish into a time when tall white palisades rose like spears along the streets of the lower part of town, and the city was full of sea-lords, parading up from the quay by the scores in their gleaming silver chariots. Another time, banners of some intangible force, a crackling tumult of colored lights, would be whirling overhead, and a vast procession of hjjk-folk would be winding down into the mountain, unimaginable millions of them filing one by one into the city, which absorbed them as though its capacity were infinite. Or there would be some convocation of humans in progress — he grudgingly conceded now that that was what they were, for he saw little alternative, though still he hoped desperately that he had misinterpreted the evidence he had found — seventy or eighty of the hairless thin-limbed ones sitting in a wide circle in a central plaza of the city just below the Citadel. They were exchanging silent thoughts from which he was utterly excluded, however hard he tried to penetrate their mysteries.

But mainly Vengiboneeza was a city of the sapphire-eyes. They dominated it. For every ten members of the other races that Hresh saw, there might be a hundred of the reptilians, or a thousand. He saw them wherever he looked, heavy-thighed, long-jawed, monstrous of form, brilliant of eye, radiating strength and wisdom and contentment.

It was easy enough for Hresh to enter into conversations with those he met in Vengiboneeza, even sea-lords, even humans. Everyone understood him and everyone was unfailingly courteous. But gradually he came to understand that these were not real conversations. They were polite illusions engendered by the machine that was his gateway to the past. He was not actually there in the Great World that had died seven hundred thousand years before under the onslaught of the death-stars, but was, rather, enmeshed in some projection, some facsimile, which had all the semblance of life and which drew him into itself as though he were an actual wayfarer in that huge city.

This became apparent because he went among its inhabitants full of questions, as usual. But somehow the answers that he received had no substance. They appeared to hold meaning, but it would slip away into nothingness even as it entered his mind, like the food one enjoys in the banquets of dreams. He could not learn anything by questioning those whom he encountered on the streets of lost Vengiboneeza. It was truly lost, and cut off from him by the terrible barrier of time.

Still, what he saw dazzled and enriched him, and filled him with awe for the splendor of what had been.

The sapphire-eyes seemed to appear and disappear in old Vengiboneeza as they pleased, winking in and out of being with astonishing ease. Pop and they were here, pop and they were gone again.

For travel outside the city they had another wondrous thing, sky-chariots like shimmering pink-and-gold bubbles that came floating down without a sound and released their passengers from hatches opening magically in their sides. Hresh saw hundreds of these bubbles overhead, moving silently and swiftly. They never collided, though they often seemed to come close. Within them sat sapphire-eyes, in positions of ease.

A third means of travel — if indeed travel was what it was — was available at enigmatic devices mounted on small platforms of sleek green stone. These were narrow vertical tubes of dark metal, about as tall as a full-grown man, widening at their upper ends into hooded open-faced spheres no larger than a man’s head. A strange fierce light, blue and red and green, played about the openings of these spheres as though emanating from some powerful apparatus within.

From time to time a sapphire-eyes, moving even more sedately and calmly than usual, would approach one of the platforms on which these tubes were stationed. Generally others of its kind would accompany it, walking close alongside, sometimes letting their little forearms rest against its heavy body. But always these companions would move away, allowing the departing sapphire-eyes to ascend the platform alone. It would draw near the sphere atop the tube until its great-jawed face was shining with the light that came from it; and then it would suddenly be drawn inside. Hresh could not see how that was accomplished, nor how there might be room for the immense bulk of a sapphire-eyes within that small glowing sphere. Never could he detect the moment when the transition was made, when the sapphire-eyes that stood peering into the sphere was swept from sight.

Whatever voyage the sapphire-eyes had undertaken was evidently a one-way journey: many went into the spheres atop the tubes, but Hresh never saw anyone emerge.

It appeared that none of these devices had survived into the modern-day Vengiboneeza. Hresh saw them only in his visions. In the real ruined Vengiboneeza he was unable even to find traces of the green stone platforms on which the tubes had been mounted.

After observing the rite of the hooded sphere many times, Hresh finally resolved to approach one of them himself. His dreaming spirit entered a deserted plaza on a moonless night. A tree stood nearby, its branches bowed down under the weight of enormous wedge-shaped brown nuts, each one bigger across than the span of his two hands. He made a heap of these, piling them high enough so that he could see into the sphere’s opening. It was a difficult business. The nuts, packed edge to edge, kept slipping and sliding beneath him, and he had to grip the hood of the sphere to keep from falling. Holding tight, he put his head close to the opening.

He knew there was danger in this. He might be drawn in and swept away — where? To another world? To the home of the gods? Or he might be destroyed altogether, for he had begun to suspect that the sapphire-eyes used these devices to end their lives, when their death-day finally had come. But the temptation to look within one was irresistible. And he told himself that this was only a vision. How could he be harmed by a device that had no real existence, that had ceased to exist at least seven hundred thousand years before he was born?

But if you are not really here, a voice within him said, then how is it you were able to pull those nuts from the tree and pile them up like this?

Hresh brushed the question aside and looked within.

There was a strange thing at the heart of the hooded sphere: a zone of utter darkness, so black that it gave off a kind of light beyond light. He stared at it, dazzled, and knew that he was looking not merely into another world but into some other universe, something outside the domain of the gods entirely. Though the black zone was very small — he supposed that he could enclose it in the palm of one hand — there was a great power to it. They have captured little pieces of that other universe, he imagined, and installed them in these round metal containers; and when they wish to leave the realm of the gods they approach one of the containers and the blackness scoops them up and carries them off.

He waited calmly for it to carry him off. The spell of the thing held him completely. Let it take him where it would.

But it took him nowhere. He stared at it until his eyes hurt; and then two figures appeared out of the shadows, a sapphire-eyes and a vegetal, and beckoned to him.

“Come away from there,” the vegetal said, in its whispering, rustling way. “There’s danger there, little one.”

“Danger? Where? I can put my head right in it, and nothing happens.”

“Come away, all the same.”

“I will, if you’ll explain to me what this is.”

The vegetal folded its petals; the sapphire-eyes laughed its hissing laugh. Then they explained the device to him, both of them speaking at once, and he understood perfectly what they said, at least so long as they were speaking. What they told him left him rapt with wonder; but it was like everything else he heard while visiting the Great World, no more nourishing than dream-food, and such meaning as it might have had in the first moment of its telling slipped away from him at once, hard as he struggled to hold to it.

He stepped down from the platform, and they led him away toward a place of lights and singing. The only thing he could remember afterward was something he had concluded for himself, and not anything they had told him. Which was that these were the devices that the people of the Great World employed to end their lives, when they knew that the time had come for them to die.

Why would they want to die? he asked himself. And had no answer.

Then he thought: they knew the death-stars were coming. And yet they stayed here, and let them come.

Why would they have done that?

And had no answer for that, either.

There was a place in the city of Hresh’s visions where the whole world stood portrayed against the sky. A flat metal disk of a bright silvery metal was mounted at an angle in the outer wall of a low ten-sided building; and when he touched a knob beside it a shaft of piercing brightness came down out of somewhere and struck it, and a huge globe of the world sprang into brilliant life before him. He knew at once that this was the world, because he had seen pictures of it in the chronicles. Those pictures were flat, and this was round, but he knew it was the world because that was how the chronicles said the world really was. Hresh had never imagined there would be so much of it. He could walk completely around the globe that represented it, and there were places on every side. He saw four great landmasses, separated by vast seas. Vast sprawling cities were shown, laced with highways like rivers of light, and lakes and rivers, and mountains and plains. Even though this was only an image in the air, Hresh could feel the surging power of the mighty seas and the immense weight of the mountains, and when he looked at the representations of the cities he had the illusion that he saw tiny figures moving about on tiny streets.

One of the landmasses was gigantic, filling nearly an entire face of the world. When he went around to the globe’s other side he saw two more, one above the other, and the fourth was at the bottom of the world, an icy place from which came a perceptible chill.

“Where is Vengiboneeza?” Hresh asked, and a dazzling green light appeared near the left-hand side of the uppermost landmass on the side of the globe that had two.

“And Thisthissima?” he asked. “Mikkimord? Tham?”

As fast as he could name other cities of the Great World, they sprang into light, and the globe turned to display them. Then his little store of names was exhausted, and he ordered the globe to show him every city all at once. It obeyed instantly; and so many blazing points of light sprang out on the globe, and it turned so rapidly, that he shrank back, blinded for the moment, covering his eyes in terror. When he dared to look again the globe was gone.

He never tried to summon it a second time. But the image of that round world with its immense seas and its colossal landmasses speckled everywhere with the blinding light of a myriad cities would remain with him forever. And he understood how great the Great World in fact had been.

Something else that showed him the immensity of what had been lost was a structure that he guessed to be the Tree of Life, of which Thaggoran had sometimes spoken.

It was not really a tree at all, but more of a tunnel, or set of tunnels, for it lay horizontally upon the ground for many hundreds of paces in an open parklike space. Its floor was below ground level, and it was roofed over with arches of some absolutely clear material, so that it did not appear to have a roof at all. A great central gallery was at its core, from which smaller passageways branched, and even smaller ones from those.

At the tip of each branch was a round chamber; and in each of those chambers a little family of animals lived, each in what must have been its natural surroundings, for some chambers were dry and desertlike, others were lush with moist foliage. It was possible to walk through the Tree of Life past branch after branch without disturbing the creatures in it in any way.

Hresh had seen no animals like these when the tribe was crossing the plains. But they resembled some that he had seen depicted in the Book of the Beasts in the chronicles. So these must be the creatures that had dwelled in the world before the coming of the death-stars: the lost animals, the vanished denizens of the former world.

There were huge slow ambling black-and-red ones with horns like trumpets that opened into wide bells at the tips, and there were delicate long-legged ones with pale yellow fur and round, startled eyes as big across as Hresh’s hand, and there were fierce little low squat ones that seemed to be all snout and teeth and claws. There was something tawny with black stripes that waded in a marsh, standing high above it on four scrawny legs, and swooped down with its long neck and long toothy beak to snatch hapless green creatures from the mud.

There were round drumlike animals that made jovial booming sounds with their distended blue bellies. There were snakelike things with triple heads. There were shy huge-eared little beasts that were covered with green moss and thickets of small flat leaves, so that Hresh could not tell whether they were animals or plants.

He wandered wonderstruck through all these chambers, astounded by the abundance and complexity. A deep sadness came over him at the thought that all these beasts probably were gone from the world now, unless somehow they had been set aside in some cocoon to wait out the cold centuries. He doubted that. They all were gone, gone with the sapphire-eyes.

In a chamber near the uttermost tip of the Tree of Life he came to something that took him totally by surprise: a group of what seemed to be people of his kind, going about their lives in what appeared to be a miniature version of his old tribal cocoon.

They were not exactly like him. At first glance they seemed the same; but when Hresh looked more carefully he saw that their sensing-organs were thinner and hung at a different angle, that their ears were large and set back on their heads in a way that looked very odd to him, that their fur was exceptionally dense and very coarse. The adults were shorter than the adults of his tribe and their bodies were not as stocky. Their hands joined their wrists at a strange angle and had fingers that were long and black and palms that were bright red, not pink as Hresh’s were.

He felt his chest constrict. This was a devastating revelation.

It was as though they were an earlier version of the People, a first attempt. They were as much unlike him as they were like. But he could not deny the similarities. The kinship. These were people of his own kind. They had to be. But they were ancient. This was the way the People had looked in the time of the Great World.

It said in the Book of the Beasts that Dawinno the Destroyer constantly altered the forms of all the creatures of the world. The changes were so small that from one generation to the next they could scarcely be observed, but over the great span of time they mounted up into significant differences. Now Hresh saw the proof of that. The race that had emerged from the cocoons at the end of the Long Winter was much different from the one that had entered them seven hundred thousand years before.

A deeper and more staggering truth lay behind that one. He would have hidden from it if he could. But it was inescapable.

Beyond much doubt the Tree of Life was nothing more than a collection of animals, assembled here, perhaps, for the amusement of the citizens of Vengiboneeza. There were no sea-lords here, no hjjks, no vegetals, none of any of the civilized peoples of the Great World: only simple beasts. And his own ancestors were here among those beasts.

Hresh’s muscles writhed in angry protest. But there was no way he could reject the evidence. Step by step, this city had forced him to admit the thing that he had been struggling to deny since the People first had come to Vengiboneeza: that in the time of the Great World his own race had not been considered human at all, but mere beasts, not to be ranked with the Six Peoples. Superior beasts, perhaps. But beasts nevertheless, that could be kept on display like this, one exhibit among many in this place where all the animals of the ancient world had been displayed.

He felt stunned and shaken and crushed. For a long time he stood in numb silence, staring. The people in the chamber — the creatures in the chamber — those beasts who were his kin — ignored him. Perhaps none of the animals on exhibit in the Tree of Life were able to see those who came to see them.

He waved to them. He drummed on the clear wall of their chamber. In a hoarse, ragged, defiant voice he called to them, “I am Hresh your brother! I have come to tell you good tidings, that your children’s children’s children will inherit the world!” But the words came out in a jumble, and the creatures in the chamber never once looked up.

After a time he crept away and wandered outside to the boulevard. He saw the green Citadel of the Dream-Dreamer folk crouching above him on the hill. Somber as it was, it blazed at him now with the fury of a thousand suns. He turned away from it, flinching. That was a place for humans. He knew that beyond question now. Their temple, their hostelry, their special headquarters, whatever. Their place, he thought. Not ours. A place for humans. And whatever we may think we are, we are not that.

Once more he imagined that he heard the awful hissing laughter of the guardians of the city gate.

Little monkey. Little monkey. Never confuse yourselves with humans, child.

He let the vision fade, and came up out of old Vengiboneeza like a drowning man flailing his way to the surface of the water.

When he returned to the settlement be said nothing to anyone, not even Taniane, about what he had seen. But he felt strangely transparent to her. She stared at him from a distance in a remote, veiled way, as though telling him, There’s a terrible secret that you don’t dare share with me, but I know it anyway. In his confusion and grief he kept his distance from her for several days, and when they spoke again it was of trivial things only, a vague and carefully circumscribed conversation. He was unable to bear anything else just now, and she appeared to know that.

A few days later the wild monkeys of the jungle swept through the settlement again, howling and shrieking, smashing windows, hurling gobbets of mud and dung and more of the nests of the stinging insects. Hresh glared at the intruders with loathing and fury. Everything within his soul cried out against the idea that the People and these dirty screaming animals could possibly be close kin, as the sapphire-eyes artificials had claimed. But when Staip and Konya went to a rooftop and speared half a dozen of them Hresh turned away, shivering in shock, fighting back tears. He could not bear to see them killed like that. It seemed like murder. He did not know what to think. It seemed to him that he was unable to understand anything any more.

Minbain was at work in the fields, setting out the new season’s young flameseed plants, when Torlyri came up to her and said, “I’m trying to find Hresh. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

Minbain laughed. “On the moon, maybe. Or swimming from one star to the next. Who knows where Hresh takes himself? Not me, Torlyri.”

“I suppose he’s wandering around in the ruins again.”

“I suppose. I haven’t laid eyes on him in two or three days.” Minbain had long since ceased to think of Hresh as any child of hers. He was a being beyond her comprehension, as swift and strange and unpredictable as the lightning. She returned her attention to the flameseed bed. After a moment she looked up again and said, “You haven’t seen Harruel, by any chance, have you? It’s been a while since I’ve laid eyes on him, too.”

“Doesn’t he spend a lot of time patrolling in the hills?”

“Too much,” Minbain said. “If he’s with me one night out of five, that’s a lot. There’s something bad brewing in that man.”

“Shall I speak with him? If I can help him in any way—”

“Be wary if you try it. He frightens me these days. Anger comes boiling out of him when you’re least expecting it. And stranger things. He moans in his sleep, he thrashes about, he calls out to the gods. I tell you, Torlyri, he frightens me. And yet I wish he’d spend more of his nights at home.” With a grin she said, “There are some things about him I miss very much.”

“I think I know what you mean,” said Torlyri, smiling.

“Why do you want Hresh? Has he done something wrong again?”

“It’s his twining-day,” Torlyri said.

“His twining-day!” Minbain looked up, astonished. “Imagine that! So Hresh is old enough to twine already! How time moves along! And I paid no attention.” Then she shook her head. “Ah, Torlyri, Torlyri — if Hresh is old enough to twine, how old I must be getting, then!”

“Don’t give it any thought. You carry your years well, Minbain.”

“Yissou be praised for that.”

Once more Minbain returned to her task.

Torlyri said, “If I run into Harruel, I’ll tell him you’d like to see him now and then.”

“And I’ll do the same, if I run into Hresh.”

The wound that had been inflicted on him at the Tree of Life was a long time healing. Hresh told himself that he would never go to the vault of the thirty-six towers again, that he would make no more journeys to the living Vengiboneeza. But as the days passed his innate curiosity began gradually to reassert itself, and he knew he would not keep his vow for long; but he swore that if he happened to stumble upon the Tree of Life a second time when he did go back, he would not set foot in it. He had no desire ever again to see that place where his ancestors had been penned like the beasts that they were, for the delight and instruction of civilized people.

When he did go back, he saw no sign of the place where the Tree of Life had been. Once again the city was much transformed, and of buildings that he recognized from his earlier visits there were only the Citadel and a handful of others. He felt great relief at that; for he suspected that if he had found the Tree of Life again, he would have entered it, despite his oath, despite everything.

Torlyri said, “There you are! I’ve been hunting for you all morning!”

Hresh, muddy and disheveled, came ambling toward her down the wide curving boulevard that led from the Emakkis Boldirinthe sector in the northern part of the city. He wore a remote, abstracted expression, the look of someone who was half in this world and half in some other.

He turned toward Torlyri as if he had no idea who she was. His eyes did not quite meet hers. “Am I late for something?”

“Do you know what day this is?”

“Friit?” he said hazily. “No, it’s Mueri. I’m sure it’s Mueri.”

“It’s your twining-day,” Torlyri said, laughing.

“Today?”

“Today, yes.” She held her arms out to him. “It’s that unimportant to you, is it?”

Hresh hung back, looking down at his feet. He began to inscribe patterns in the soft earth with his left big toe. “I thought tomorrow was the day,” he said in a low, anguished voice. “Honestly. Honestly, Torlyri!”

She recalled him that time on the ledge outside the hatch of the cocoon, trembling in the cold air, begging her not to tell Koshmar that he had tried to slip outside. He was years older now, very different, sobered by his responsibilities within the tribe; and yet he really had not changed at all, had he? Not in any essential way. He was almost a man, no longer a wild frightened boy, Hresh-of-the-answers now, keeper of the chronicles, leader of the Seekers, surely the wisest member of the tribe, and yet he remained Hresh-full-of-questions too, willful, unpredictable, ungovernable. Forgetting his own twining-day! Only Hresh would be capable of something like that.

She had told him, three days before, to make himself ready for his final initiation into adulthood. That meant fasting, purging, chanting, contemplation. Had he done any of that? Probably not. Hresh’s priorities were determined only by Hresh.

If he has not made himself ready, she thought, how can he hope to attempt his first twining? Even he, even Hresh, must prepare himself properly. Even he.

She said, “You look strange. You’ve been using the Great World’s machines again, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

“And seen some disturbing things?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you want to tell me about them?”

Quickly Hresh shook his head. “Not really.”

He still had that not-entirely-here expression in his eyes. His gaze was aimed at a point somewhere beyond her left shoulder, as though he were politely tolerating this conversation without being in any significant way part of it. He was lost in some pain Torlyri could not begin to comprehend. She became more and more certain that it would be a mistake to take him for his first twining today.

But she could try to ease his pain, at least.

She reached toward him, touched him, sent energy and warmth to him. Hresh continued to look off into the distance. Something was twitching and throbbing in one of his cheeks.

After a moment he said, as though speaking from very far away, “I can see the past all around me as we stand here. The old Vengiboneeza that was. Vengiboneeza of Great World times.” His voice was oddly husky. His lower lip trembled. For the first time now he looked straight at her, and she saw strangeness in his eyes, and fear such as she had never seen in them before. “Sometimes, Torlyri, I don’t know where I am. Or when. The ancient city lies over this one like a mask. It rises like a vision, like a dream. And I become frightened. I’ve never been really frightened by anything before, do you know, Torlyri? I just want to learn things. There can’t be anything frightening about that. But sometimes I see things when I go into Vengiboneeza that — that—” He faltered. “The ancient city comes to life for me. When it does that it lies over the ruined one like a shining golden mask, a mask so beautiful that it terrifies me. Then I return to this city, the ruined one, and it lies over the ancient one like a skull above a face.”

“Hresh—” she said softly, taking him against her breast.

“I want to learn things, Torlyri. To learn everything about everything that ever was. But sometimes — sometimes the things that I find—”

He slipped free of her embrace and moved a few steps away, and stood with his back to her, staring toward the mountain.

“Maybe we should let your first twining wait for another time,” she said after a while.

“No. Today is the proper day.”

“Your soul is deeply troubled today.”

“Still, we should do it on the proper day.”

“If you’re so distracted by other things that you’re unable to enter the twining state—”

“I feel myself growing calmer already,” Hresh said. “Simply from being near you. Talking with you.” He swung around to face her. His back straightened. Abruptly he spoke in a deeper voice, quivering with determination. “Come. Come, Torlyri. It’s growing late, and we have important things to do.”

“You truly think we should?”

“Absolutely!”

“Ah, but have you done the preparations? Everything you were supposed to do?”

“Enough of it,” said Hresh. He offered her a quick flashing smile. He looked suddenly eager, alert, animated. “So, now, Torlyri, we should go to your chamber. This is my twining-day! Will you forgive me for letting it slip my mind? You know I have many things to think about. But who could overlook his own twining-day? Come, now, teach me the art, Torlyri! I’ve waited all my life for this day to arrive!”

It was as though he had awakened between one moment and the next from a sleep, or risen from an illness. In an instant all his gloom and confusion seemed gone from him. Was it so, she wondered, or was this only a pretense? In truth he appeared swiftly restored to his usual self, the ebullient, impatient Hresh, Hresh-full-of-questions, hungry as ever for new experiences. Perhaps this morning among the mysteries of old Vengiboneeza he had had one experience too many; but whatever cloud had settled upon him there seemingly had lifted from him just now.

Still, she was uneasy about him.

“There’s no harm in waiting another day,” she said.

“Today, Torlyri. Today is the day.”

She smiled and embraced him again. Hresh was irrepressible. How could she refuse him?

“Well, then, come. So be it: today is the day.”

In the cocoon, twining had always been performed in special small chambers, set a little way apart from the main dwelling-chamber. It was a private thing, the most intimate act there was. Even coupling might be done in view of others without occasioning surprise, but never twining, no.

Since the tribe had lived in Vengiboneeza the old custom of maintaining distinct twining-chambers had fallen into disuse. One could always twine privately in one’s own chambers, or in some abandoned building of the city. The chances were slight that anyone would intrude. But a first twining was a delicate thing, and Torlyri kept a chamber of her own for that, in a gallery below the temple, where there was no possibility of an accidental interruption. She led Hresh toward it now.

As they entered the main level of the temple, the tall slender figure of Kreun stepped from the shadows of the Mueri chapel. When she was close she halted and turned to Torlyri as though about to speak; but all that came from her lips was a sort of sob, and then she moved hurriedly onward. In a moment she was out of sight.

Torlyri shook her head. The girl had become very strange in the past few weeks. Of course she was deeply disturbed by the disappearance of Sachkor, who was to have been her mate: gone off into thin air, was Sachkor, and no one could find him anywhere in the city. Hresh, using his Wonderstone, had determined that Sachkor must still be alive. But even Hresh had no idea where Sachkor might be. That was odd; but the degree to which Kreun had retreated into herself seemed even more peculiar. Grief alone did not seem enough to account for it. She was a different person now, edgy, silent, brooding. She kept to herself, and wept a great deal. This had gone on much too long. Torlyri resolved to draw her aside and try, if she could, to ease whatever burden lay upon her.

But not today. This day belonged to Hresh.

A broad, winding stone ramp of the sort so often favored by the sapphire-eyes architects led down to Torlyri’s twining-chamber. Bunches of glowberries set in sconces lit the way with pale orange light.

As they began to descend the ramp Hresh said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking about the gods, Torlyri.”

She was taken by surprise by that. He should have twining on his mind now, and not such things as this. But her surprise did not surprise her. Many of the things Hresh said took her by surprise. Hresh rarely did as anyone expected.

“Have you?” she asked mildly.

“I saw a thing in my exploring,” he said, “a machine of the ancients, that showed me animals which lived in the time of the Great World. Some of them were very much like animals of today, and yet they were different. In little ways or great, the animals that have survived down through the ages since Great World times have undergone many changes.”

“Perhaps so,” said Torlyri, wondering where any of this might be leading.

“I asked myself which god it is who brings about such changes,” Hresh went on. “It’s Dawinno who has changed them. He’s the one, isn’t he, Torlyri, who transforms all kinds of beings as the years pass? Dawinno makes new forms out of old.”

Torlyri paused on the ramp, studying Hresh in puzzlement. To be only a boy, just becoming a man today, and to have such thoughts swarming in his head — surely there was no one rise like Hresh, and surely there had never been another like him!

“Dawinno takes away the old, yes,” Torlyri said cautiously. “He makes room for the new.”

“He brings forth the new out of the old.”

“Is that your understanding of it, Hresh?”

“Yes. Yes. Dawinno is the transformer of forms!”

“Very well,” Torlyri said, feeling more and more lost.

“But transformation is only transformation,” said Hresh. “It isn’t creation.”

“I suppose that that’s so.”

His eyes were bright, almost feverish-looking, now.

“Where does it all start, then? Consider, Torlyri, the gods we worship. We worship the Provider, and the Consoler, and the Healer. And the Protector and the Destroyer. But there’s no god that we call the Creator. Who do we owe our lives to, Torlyri? Who is the maker of the world? Is it Yissou?”

Torlyri had been troubled since the beginning of this discussion; but now her uneasiness began swiftly to deepen.

“Yissou is the Protector,” she said.

“Exactly. But not the Creator. We don’t know who the Creator is. We never even think about that. Have you ever thought on these things, Torlyri? Have you?”

“I perform the rites. I serve the Five.”

“And the Five must serve a Sixth! But who is he? Why do we have no name for him? Why are there no rites to honor him? He made the world and everything in it. Dawinno merely reshapes that world. Seeing the evidence of his reshaping, I began to wonder about the first shaping, do you see? There’s a higher god than Dawinno, and we know nothing of him. Do you see, Torlyri? Do you see? He keeps himself hidden from us. But his is the greatest power. He has the power of creation. He can make something out of nothing. And he can transform anything into anything else. Why, it might be that he’s capable of taking beasts as stupid and nasty as these monkeys that have been plaguing us and turning them into something that’s almost human. He can do anything, Torlyri. He is the Creator! Why, he might even have made the Five themselves!”

She stared at Hresh in shock.

She was not an unintelligent woman, but there were certain areas that she did not choose to explore. No one did. One did not speculate on the nature of the gods; one simply did their bidding. All her life that was what she had done, faithfully and well. The Five ruled the world; the Five were sufficient.

Now here was Hresh proposing things that were profoundly disturbing to her. A Creator, he said. Well, obviously there must have been a beginning to all things, now that she stopped to think about it, but it must have happened a long time ago, and what bearing could it have on those who lived today? It was folly to think about such matters. The notion that there might have been a time when the Five themselves did not exist, that they could have been summoned into existence by someone else, made Torlyri dizzy. If the Five had had a Creator, then the Creator might have had one too, and that Creator might have been created by some god even higher up the scale, and — and—

There was no end to it. Her head was spinning.

And then this business of turning monkeys into humans. What sense did that make?

Oh, Hresh, Hresh, Hresh!

Quietly but firmly she said, “Let’s put our minds to twining, Hresh.”

“If you wish.”

“Not just because I wish it. But because it’s why we are here.”

“All right,” he said. “Today we twine, Torlyri.”

He smiled tenderly and took both of her hands in his. Now it seemed to her suddenly that she was the novice and he the one who would give instruction. She found it eternally bewildering to deal with this boy. Torlyri reminded herself that a boy was all that he was, that he was only thirteen and stood barely breast-high next to her, that what they had come here for was his first twining, not hers.

Together they proceeded on downward until they came to the low stone-walled gallery with the pointed arch that led to her little twining-chamber. As they made their way through the narrow passageway, she stooping a little to clear its roof, Torlyri became aware of a change in his scent, and knew that another subtle shifting of the situation was taking place. From the moment they had entered this place he had taken command. But at last, she realized, it might be starting to sink in that he was actually about to twine for the first time. The event was becoming real for him. That was the scent of apprehension about him. Hresh the chronicler he might be, Hresh the wise, but he was also only a mere boy, and he was beginning to remember that now.

The twining-chamber had twelve sides, each set off by a rib of blue stone; the ribs met overhead in a complex groined vault that was half hidden by shadows. It was a small room, perhaps once a storeroom for the sapphire-eyes; surely it must have been too tiny for such bulky folk as they had been. But there was space enough in it for her purposes. She had fashioned a couch of piled furs, and there were niches in the walls in which she had placed certain holy objects. Glowberry sconces cast a flickering greenish-yellow light, faint but sufficient.

“Lie down and make your calmness,” Torlyri told him. “I have observances to perform.”

She went from niche to niche, invoking each of the Five in turn. The holy amulets and talismans in the niches were old and familiar ones, things she had brought from the cocoon, greasy and smooth with much handling. It was essential to obtain the favor of the gods for a first twining: the novice would be wide open to forces from without, and if the gods did not enter him, then other powers might. Torlyri had no idea what those powers might be, but she took care to leave no opportunity for them.

So she moved about the room, making the signs, murmuring the words. She asked Yissou to protect Hresh from harm when his soul lay open. She called upon Mueri to take from the boy the anguish that seemed to trouble his spirit, and Friit to heal whatever scars his turmoil might have left upon him, and Emakkis to give him strength and resilience. She paused a long while at the altar of Dawinno, for she knew that the Destroyer was a god to whom Hresh had specially consecrated himself; and if indeed Dawinno was the Transformer, as Hresh had argued, then it would be good to summon his particular grace for the transformation about to take place.

The niches had been carved in every other facet of the twelve-sided chamber, and so there were six in all. Torlyri, having never found a use for the sixth one, had left it empty. But as she completed the circuit of the room she halted before it now, and to her astonishment she found herself invoking a god she did not know, the mysterious Sixth of whom Hresh had spoken a little while before.

“Whoever you may be,” she whispered, “if indeed you exist at all, hear the words of Torlyri. I ask you to watch over this strange boy who loves you, and to make him strong, and to preserve him for all that he must do upon the face of this your world. That is what Torlyri wishes of you, in the name of the Five who are yours. Amen.”

And she stared, amazed at what she had done, into the shadowy recess of the sixth niche.

She turned, then, and knelt beside Hresh on the furs. He was watching her, wide-eyed, intent.

“Have you made your calmness?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“You aren’t sure?”

“I have made my calmness, yes.”

Torlyri doubted that very much. The dreaminess that should have been in his eyes was not there. Probably he had not even studied the technique, though she had instructed him in it and told him to practice. But perhaps the mind of Hresh was equal to entering into twining even when not fully calm. There was never any telling about anything, when you were dealing with Hresh.

She had taken a sacred object from the niche of Dawinno, a smooth white stone tied round its middle with a wisp of tough green fiber. Now she pressed it into Hresh’s left hand for a talisman, and folded his fingers about it. It would serve to focus his concentration. He was already holding the amulet that once had been Thaggoran’s in his other hand.

Formally she said, “This is the deepest joy of our people. This is the union of souls that is our special gift. We approach our twining with reverence and awe. We approach it with eagerness and delight.”

Torlyri felt tension rising within her.

How many times she had done this, with so many of the tribe! She had instructed nearly half in their first twining; but never had she faced the prospect of joining her soul with someone like Hresh. To enter his mind, to have his mind enter hers — it filled her with unexpected disquietude. Here at the last moment she found it necessary to make a calmness herself, going through the simple exercises that ordinarily only novices would need to practice. Hresh seemed aware that she was unusually ill at ease: she saw his gleaming eyes peering at her worriedly, as if once again the balance had shifted and he was the master, she the young initiate.

The moment passed. She was calm.

She put her arms about him and they lay close together.

“Rejoice with me,” she said softly. “Rest with me.”

Their sensing-organs touched. He hesitated — she could feel it, that sudden quick rigidity of the muscles — but then he relaxed, and they began the twining.

He was awkward at first, as they always were, but in a little while he caught on to the movements, and after that it became easy. Torlyri felt the first tinglings of a communion and knew there would be no difficulty. Hresh was entering her. She was entering Hresh. The joining was unmistakable. She felt the unique texture of his soul, the color of it, the music of it.

He was even stranger than she had thought. She had expected to find great loneliness in him, and that was there, yes. But his soul had a depth and a richness and a fullness that she had never encountered before. The power of his second sight was overwhelming, even here in the first levels of the twining. And already she could sense the might he held in reserve. The force of his mind was like that of a river in full spate plunging over a titanic precipice. Could it harm her, she wondered, to join with such a mind?

No. No. No harm could ever come from Hresh.

“Twine with me,” Torlyri said, and opened fully to him.