At Winter's End

12 The Strangeness of Their Absence

That day was known ever after as the Day of the Breaking Apart. Eleven adults had departed, and two children; and for a long time thereafter the strangeness of their absence resounded in the city like a great gong.

It was some weeks before Hresh could bring himself even to enter the event in the chronicles. He knew that he was being remiss in his duty, but still he avoided the task, until one morning he realized that he was not sure whether it was ten adults that had gone, or seven. Then he saw that he must set down an account of what had taken place before he lost a clear sense of it. He owed that to those who would read the chronicles in the times to come. And so he opened the book and pressed his fingerpads against the cool vellum of the first blank page and said what he had to say, which was that Harruel the warrior had rebelled against the authority of the chieftain Koshmar and departed from the city, taking with him the men Konya, Salaman, Nittin, Bruikkos, and Lakkamai, and the women Galihine, Nettin, Weiawala, Thaloin, Minbain—

The hardest thing was entering his mother’s name. When he attempted it, it would not come out right, and he put down Mulbome and then, erasing it, Mirbale, before he was able to make the true name appear on the page. He sat a long time staring at the jagged brown lettering, when he had finally done it, putting his fingers to it again and again to read and reread what he had written.

I will never see my mother again, he told himself. But he could not quite comprehend the meaning of those words, no matter how many times he spoke them in his mind.

Sometimes Hresh wondered whether he should have gone with her. When he had looked at her, at that moment when Harruel was asking him to come, he had seen the silent urging in her eyes. And it had been painful to turn away from her and refuse. The choice had been an agonizing one; but even if it meant parting from his mother, how could he leave the tribe, and everything that was yet undone in Vengiboneeza, and all that he might learn from these Helmet People, and Taniane — yes, and Taniane! — to follow the brute Harruel and his handful of followers into the wilderness? That was not the destiny he saw for himself.

Minbain’s was the only loss that stung Hresh deeply. He felt sorry for Torlyri, losing her mate; but Lakkamai had meant very little to him, or Salaman, or Bruikkos, or any of the others who went with Harruel. They were just people, familiar faces, parts of the tribe. He had never been close to them, though, as he had been close to Torlyri, or Taniane, or Orbin, or even Haniman. None of those had gone, or he would have been badly hurt by their going. But Minbain had been a part of himself, and he a part of Minbain, and all that was sundered now. Hresh had seen dark clouds forming ever since Harruel had taken Minbain for his mate. Whatever Harruel touched, he changed, and eventually he absorbed.

How strange it was that Harruel was no longer there. He had occupied a huge place in the tribe — a somber, moody presence, and an increasingly frightening one — and now, suddenly, that place was empty. It was as if the great green mountain that rose above the city had abruptly disappeared. One might not like the mountain, one might think it overwhelming and ominous, but one grew used to seeing it there and if it vanished it would leave a disturbing sense of emptiness behind it.

If it was disturbing to have the tribe so dramatically reduced in size in a single hour, it was more unsettling still to have such a horde of strangers coming to live close at hand.

Within hours after Harruel’s secession the entire Beng tribe had entered the city, riding on the great red beasts that they called vermilions. There were more of the helmeted ones than the People had suspected: well over a hundred, including thirty or so who looked to be warriors. They had eighty or ninety vermilions, too, some to ride on and some that carried baggage. Other pack-animals, smaller blue-green ones with odd big-jointed legs, followed along in the train. It took all day for the whole Beng procession to pass through the gates.

Koshmar offered them the Dawinno Galihine district to settle in. It was an attractive part of the city, well preserved, with fountains and plazas and tile-roofed buildings, at a considerable distance from the settlement of the People. Hresh was unhappy about giving them that district, since there were things there that he had not properly explored. But Koshmar chose Dawinno Galihine for the Bengs because it was an isolated sector, connected to the main part of the city only by a narrow avenue bordered closely on both sides by fragile, tottering buildings. She believed that if hostilities were to spring up between the two tribes the People would be able to pin the Bengs down by toppling those flimsy buildings and blocking the road with rubble.

It was Haniman who brought news of that to Hresh, who shook his head. “She’s making a big mistake if she thinks that’s true,” he said. “The Bengs have three times as many warriors as we have. And those monstrous trained beasts. There’s no way we could ever blockade them inside Dawinno Galihine.”

“But if the old buildings fell, how would they get out?”

Hresh smiled. “They’d use the vermilions to push the debris aside. You think that would be hard for them? And then they’d come rumbling out right into our own settlement and trample everything that was in their way.”

Haniman made a string of holy signs in the air. “Yissou protect us, do you think it would come to that?”

With a shrug Hresh said, “They are many and we are few, and we’ve just lost most of our best warriors. If I were Koshmar, I’d be very amiable in my dealings with the Bengs, and hope for the best.”

In fact the Bengs did not seem interested in warfare. As they promised, they invited the People to a feast on the first night, and made generous offerings of meat and fruit and wine. Their meat came from animals Hresh had never seen before, short-legged plump ones that had flat black noses and thick woolly coats of gray striped with red, and the fruits the Bengs had brought with them were strange too, bright yellow, with three swollen nippled lobes that looked like breasts, and a sweet, musky flavor.

There were other feasts after that first one, and general efforts at what seemed like friendliness, though there was not much warmth about it. Often four or five helmeted Bengs came to the settlement of the People and stood about, staring, pointing, trying to make conversation. But what they said in that barking tongue of theirs made no sense to anyone, not even Hresh.

Sometimes Hresh would go with a few companions to return these visits. The Helmet People had settled down in Dawinno Galihine as though they found it perfect for their needs, and had set about clearing away rubble and restoring damaged structures with astonishing vigor and swiftness. They were always bustling around feverishly within their sector, digging, hammering, repairing. The newcomers seemed far more energetic and venturesome to Hresh than his own people did, though he was willing to allow that he had a certain prejudice in favor of the exotic and unfamiliar. One building in particular seemed to be the center of their toil, a narrow black stone spire, gleaming as though it were wet, that was ringed with rows of open galleries along its outer wall. Hresh felt a pang, seeing the Beng workers swarming over that intricate tapering tower, for it was one that he had never managed to explore. When he approached it now, the Bengs eyed him uneasily, and a sharp-faced captain in a ponderous bronze helmet spoke out with brusque jabbing gestures that did not seem like an invitation to enter.

As ever, Hresh was hungry for knowledge of these new people. He wanted to know their history and to learn of all the things they had seen in the course of their journey across the world to Vengiboneeza. He wondered if they had been able to find out more about the time of the Great World than he had managed to discover. He was eager to hear about their god, Nakhaba, and how he differed from the gods of his own tribe. Fifty other questions bubbled in his mind. He wanted to know everything. Everything, everything, everything!

But where to begin? How?

Since he was still unable to make much sense of the Beng language, Hresh tried pantomime. He drew aside a square-faced, chunkily built Helmet Man who seemed to have an easy, open look about him, and laboriously tried to ask him in gestures where they had lived in their previous days. The Beng responded with barking laughter and wild rollings of his scarlet eyes. But after a little while he appeared to get the drift of Hresh’s elaborate miming, and he began to make signs of his own. His arms waved impressively, his gleaming eyes rolled from side to side. Hresh had the impression that he was being told that the Bengs had come from the south and west, near the edge of a great ocean. But he was not entirely sure of that.

The language barrier was a serious problem. Through covert use of his second sight Hresh obtained a feel for the rhythm and weight of Beng speech, and it almost seemed to him that he was comprehending the meanings as well. But seeming to understand meanings was not the same thing as actually understanding them. Whenever he tried to translate a Beng phrase into his own language he faltered and failed.

Koshmar ordered Hresh to devote himself to learning the Beng tongue. “Penetrate the secret of their words,” she said, “and do it quickly. Otherwise we’re helpless before them.”

He went about the job zealously and with confidence. If someone like Sachkor could learn their language, he supposed, then he should have no difficulty with it.

But it proved to be more of a chore than he expected. Noum om Beng was the one to whom he turned, since the frail, dry-bodied old man held the same rank in the Beng tribe that Hresh did in his. He had taken up residence in a labyrinthine building that might have been a palace in the time of the Great World, just across the way from the spiral tower, and here, seated on a black stone bench covered with an ornate many-colored weaving, he held court all day long in the deepest and least accessible chamber of the building, a stark white-walled room without furniture, without ornament.

He seemed willing enough to give instruction, and they spent hours at a time together, Noum om Beng speaking and Hresh listening carefully, trying with more hope than success to seize meanings out of the air.

It was easy enough for Hresh to learn the names of things: all Noum om Beng had to do was point and speak. But when it came to abstract concepts Hresh found the going much harder. He began to think that Sachkor’s claim of possessing knowledge of the Beng language had been one part easy words, three parts guesswork, and six parts boastfulness.

The Beng language and theirs were related, Hresh was sure. Phrases were put together in similar ways, and certain Beng words seemed like dreamlike distortions of words in the People’s language. Perhaps both languages were descended from a single tongue that everyone had spoken in the world before the coming of the death-stars. But it seemed that during the many thousands of years of isolation when the tribes had taken refuge from the Long Winter in cocoons, each tribe had begun subtly to alter the way that it spoke, until one little alteration and another and another had produced, in time, entirely different vocabularies and grammatical forms.

Hresh felt agonies of despair over his slow progress. He had abandoned nearly all of his other research so that he could devote his full time to the study of Beng. But after many weeks he understood very little. Speaking with Noum om Beng was like trying to see when you had a thick black cloth wrapped around your head. It was like trying to hear the sound of the wind when you were buried in a dark pit far underground.

He knew fifty or sixty simple words, but that was not speaking their language. He still had no way of putting those few words together usefully to transmit information, or to gain it. And the rest of the language was so much smoke and dust to him. Noum om Beng’s dry whispery voice went on and on and on, and for all Hresh knew he was speaking of things of the highest importance, but Hresh was unable to grasp more than one word in a thousand. The old man was courteous and patient. But he seemed unaware of how little Hresh actually understood.

“You might try twining with him,” Haniman suggested one day.

Hresh was thunderstruck. “But I don’t even know whether they twine at all!”

“They have sensing-organs, don’t they?”

“Well, yes, but suppose they use them only for second sight? Suppose twining is considered an abomination among them?”

The whole topic of twining was a sensitive one for Hresh. The memory of his disastrous attempt to twine with Taniane still burned in his soul. Since that day he had not been able to speak more than a few hasty words with her, or to look her in the eye, or to think of twining with anyone else. Nor did Hresh see how he could possibly find the audacity to offer to twine with old Noum om Beng. It was such an intimate thing, such a private thing! Maybe three or four years ago he might have tried to suggest such a crazy scheme; but he had less appetite for the outrageous now that he was older.

“You ought to try it,” Haniman insisted. “Who knows? It might give you the way into their language that you’re looking for.”

The prospect of lying down in the embrace of gaunt and withered Noum om Beng, of feeling his stale dry breath against his cheek, of making sense-organ contact with him, did not fill Hresh with joy. If that was what he needed to do in order to gain the key to the mysteries of the language of the Bengs, though—

But Hresh could not bring himself to make the bizarre request directly. It seemed too embarrassing, too blatant. Instead, fumbling with his little stock of Beng words, he tried to explain that he wished he could find some quicker and more direct way to learn to speak the language. And he looked toward Noum om Beng’s sensing-organ, and then toward his own. But the old Helmet Man seemed not to notice the broad hint.

Perhaps there was some other way. Second sight? Now and then Hresh had tried a cautious little probe of some Helmet Man’s mind, never pushing very deeply. But he had never dared to probe Noum om Beng at all. Hresh remembered all too well how that first Beng scout long ago had taken his own life when Hresh had tried to use second sight on him. Noum om Beng was too shrewd for Hresh to think he could probe him unawares, and he had no way of knowing how the old man would react to a mental intrusion.

That left the Barak Dayir. His talisman, his magic key to everything. Very possibly that was his one real hope of attaining any significant knowledge of the Beng language.

The next time Hresh went to pay a call on Noum om Beng, the Wonderstone went with him, snug in its worn old velvet pouch.

He sat at Noum om Beng’s feet for an hour or more, listening to the old man’s incomprehensible monologue. The few words that he understood floated maddeningly by, like bright bubbles in a dark cloud of gas, and as usual he could make no sense out of anything Noum om Beng said. Finally the emaciated old Helmet Man halted and looked toward Hresh as if expecting him to make an equally long speech in return.

Instead Hresh drew forth the Barak Dayir and let it tumble from its pouch into the palm of his hand. Golden light and faint warmth came from it. He murmured the names of the Five and made the signs with his other hand and held the tapered piece of polished stone out where Noum om Beng could see it.

The old man’s reaction was immediate and dramatic, as if thirty or forty years had been stripped from his age in a moment. His red eyes glowed with sudden scarlet brilliance and blazing vigor. He made a harsh coughing sound and rose from his chair, and dropped down on his knees before Hresh’s outstretched hand so suddenly that the long purple wings of his helmet came close to striking Hresh in the face.

Noum om Beng looked awed and astounded. A stream of babbling words poured from his lips, of which Hresh was able to understand only one, which Noum om Beng repeated many times.

“Nakhaba! Nakhaba!”

Great God! Great God!

Often in those strange early weeks after the departure of Harruel from the tribe Taniane found herself wishing that she had gone with him.

She surely would have, if Hresh had chosen to go. In that moment when Harruel, glaring so fiercely, had ordered Hresh to choose between his tribe and his mother, Taniane had held her breath, knowing that her own fate was being decided. But Hresh had refused to go; and Taniane, letting her breath out slowly, had wiped from her mind the declaration that she would have made a moment later, the one renouncing her people and her life in Vengiboneeza.

So she was still here. But why? To what purpose?

If she had gone, a new and difficult life would have unfolded for her. She already knew about the hardships of the world outside the city. She could imagine what new hardships the reign of King Harruel would bring.

He was rough, crude, cruel, dangerous. He was cold of soul and hot of temper. Perhaps he had not always been that way, but she had watched him change since the Time of Going Forth, more and more becoming a law unto himself. Growling and scowling, objecting to all of Koshmar’s decisions, setting out into the hill country on solitary journeys whenever he pleased, organizing his own little army of defense without even asking Koshmar’s permission, finally challenging the chieftain outright — and forcing Kreun, that too, simply throwing her down and using her against her will—

Well, that was the way Harruel was. Probably now out there in the wilderness he was coupling with all the women who had gone, not just his mate Minbain but Thaloin too, and Weiawala, and Galihine, and Nittin. He was king now. He could do as he pleased. He would be coupling with me, Taniane thought, if I had gone. But you could do worse than couple with a king.

She wondered why Kreun had refused him. Probably because her head was so full of Sachkor, that was why. Forcing someone was not right, but ordinarily no one needed to be forced. One needed only to be asked in a courteous way. Taniane would have coupled with Harruel in the settlement, if he had asked. But he had never asked. He had always kept to himself, forever muttering and glowering. It struck her that perhaps he had thought she was too young, though she was not much younger than Kreun, and Kreun had caught his fancy. Kreun is very beautiful, Taniane thought; but they say I am beautiful too.

The idea of coupling with Harruel excited her. To feel all that strength, all that dark force of his, between her legs! To hear him grunt in pleasure! To have him dig his fingers deep into the flesh of her arms!

Yes, but Harruel was out there in the wilderness now, and she was still in Vengiboneeza, waiting to grow older, waiting for her time to come. It might never come. Koshmar was full of vigor. There was no longer a limit-age. Taniane had dreamed of becoming chieftain someday; now she saw the realization of that dream receding farther and farther into the future.

“And would you become chieftain if you were with Harruel now?” Haniman asked, giving her a skeptical look. Haniman was her main friend these days, and her coupling-partner. He wanted to twine with her too, but Taniane had never granted him that. “Harruel is chieftain himself. That’s what ‘king’ means. And he has a mate, besides. There’d be no place for you.”

“Minbain is getting old. Life in the wild country is harsh. She might die in another year or two.”

“And Harruel would choose you? Well, he might. Or take Weiawala away from Salaman, or Thaloin from Bruikkos. Harruel is king. He does as he pleases.”

“I think he would choose me.”

Haniman smiled. “So you would be the mate of the king. Would that give you any power? Has it given Minbain any power?”

“I am not like Minbain.”

“That is indeed so. You think you’d be able to wangle a share in Harruel’s authority, is that it?”

“I might be able to do that,” said Taniane.

“As Hresh would say, you might also be able to learn how to fly by flapping your arms, if you worked at it long enough. But that’s not wonderfully likely.”

“Not flying, no. But I could have found my way around Harruel.” Taniane grinned slyly. “And Harruel won’t live forever. It’s dangerous in the wild country. Do you remember the rat-wolves? The bloodbirds? If something happened to Harruel, would Konya become king, do you think? Or would the ones who had left the city prefer the old custom and choose a woman to be chieftain, perhaps?”

Haniman laughed, a sharp snorting kind of laugh. “How marvelous you are, Taniane. Out of nothing at all, you conjure up a role for yourself as Harruel’s mate in place of Minbain, and as Harruel’s master when you are his mate, and then as Harruel’s successor after he dies. But meanwhile you are here and he is somewhere far from here, and getting farther every day.”

“I know,” she said, looking away.

Haniman’s hand came to rest suddenly on her knee, and moved a short way up her thigh toward the meeting-place of her legs. Taniane let it remain there.

Her thoughts turned darker. She was here, and Harruel was there, and, as Haniman had pointed out, she was conjuring great things for herself out of nothing at all. She had made her choice; now she had to live with it.

If only Hresh were not such a fool!

She still winced at his stupidity, that day that he had come rushing up to her idiotically begging her to twine with him. Of course she had wanted to twine with him! But she had felt compelled to say no to him. If she had given in to him so readily, right then and there, she would have had no hope of gaining him in the way she wanted him. He would twine with her, yes, and then he would go off, caught up in the frenzy that comes over one in one’s first twining days, and twine perhaps with Bonlai or Sinistine or Thaloin — or with Haniman, for all anybody knew — and eventually the frenzy would pass and he would settle into some sort of a regular twining partnership with someone. With anyone. Not necessarily her. What she had wanted, when she refused him, was for him to go off and gain some twining experience and return to her in a more seemly way, wanting her all the more. And she would have accepted him gladly. But he hadn’t done that. Instead he had barely spoken to her ever since; he had kept his distance from her as though it would burn him just to look at her.

The fool! Wisest one in the tribe, and a fool all the same!

Haniman’s hand moved farther up Taniane’s thigh. The other one began to caress her shoulder. It glided toward her breast.

“Couple with me?” he asked.

She nodded, still thinking of Hresh, how she might have become twining-partner with the sharpest mind of the tribe and gained all manner of wisdom that way: how she might even have mated with him, if custom now allowed the old man to mate. Custom had changed enough to allow the offering-woman to mate with Lakkamai, hadn’t it? Though a lot of good that had done Torlyri when Harruel had split the tribe apart. If I were Hresh’s mate, Taniane thought, then I would hold power just below that of Koshmar, and if Koshmar died—

“And twine with me afterward?” Haniman asked.

“No,” Taniane said. “I don’t want to twine with you.”

“Not now, or not ever?”

“Not now. Maybe not ever.”

“Ah,” he said. “Too bad. But you’ll couple with me?”

“Of course.”

“What if I asked you to be my mate, too?”

Taniane gave him a long steady look.

“Let me think about that one,” she said. “Meanwhile let’s just couple, all right?”

For Torlyri it was a dark and anguished time. She felt that the light had gone out of her soul, that she had turned to a lump of black ash.

All that pain over a man!

How quickly, how deeply, she had become dependent on Lakkamai! How vulnerable she had left herself to his leaving her! She barely recognized herself in this strange shattered woman who could not awaken in the morning without reaching toward the empty place where Lakkamai had slept beside her, and without hearing in her mind his echoing voice, calmly telling Harruel that he too would join the party that was going from Vengiboneeza.

Torlyri had lived satisfactorily enough for thirty years and some without any great need of men. Her love for Koshmar and her responsibilities as offering-woman had made a sufficient life for her. But then had come the New Springtime, then had come the Going Forth, and everything had changed. Suddenly everyone was coupling, suddenly everyone was mating, suddenly new children were being brought into the world in unprecedented numbers. In that great flowering of the tribe Torlyri had felt herself blossoming, opening, ripening. Changing. She too yearned now for coupling, even for mating. So she had given herself to Lakkamai; and now Lakkamai had gone off with Harruel; and Torlyri found herself desolate, although she tried to tell herself that she was no worse off than before she had become entangled with Lakkamai.

“Come to me,” Koshmar said. “Twine with me.”

“Yes,” Torlyri said. “Gladly!”

Koshmar was a great comfort to her in these difficult days. They twined often, far more often than they had for years, and at each twining Torlyri could feel Koshmar pouring strength, warmth, love into her soul.

Torlyri knew that Koshmar had been deeply hurt by her infatuation with Lakkamai. Koshmar had never said it in so many words, but there was no way for her to hide her true feelings from Torlyri, in twining or outside of it, after all their years together. Still, Koshmar had stood aside, allowing Torlyri to do as she wished. And now that it was over, now that Lakkamai had casually allowed Torlyri to fall from his grasp, Koshmar offered no recriminations, no smugness, no cruelty: only love, warmth, strength.

That could not be easy for her. Yet she did it.

And did it, Torlyri knew, at a time when she herself was undergoing great stress. The secession of Harruel had been a powerful blow to her. Koshmar had never had to face such mockery before. No chieftain had. To be scorned in front of her entire tribe, to be reviled, to be rejected — for eleven of her own people to turn their backs on her — what humiliation, what a lessening of her! And then to have this great horde of Helmet People swarming into the city, with all their bustle and energy, their colossal smelly beasts, their strange costumes, their alien ways. Once upon a time the cocoon had been an entire world, and Koshmar had been supreme ruler of that world; but now the People had come forth into a much bigger world and she was nothing more than the chieftain of a small splintered tribe occupying one small corner of a large city, with a much larger tribe nearby, pressing close, impinging, encroaching.

These things threatened to eclipse the bright sun of Koshmar’s power. They struck at her prestige, at her confidence, at her spirit itself. But Koshmar in her extraordinary resilience had withstood all these blows. And had strength left over to share with her beloved Torlyri, for which Torlyri was powerfully grateful.

As they lay together Koshmar’s fingers dug lovingly into Torlyri’s dense black fur. The familiar warmth of her close at hand was comforting. Torlyri felt Koshmar trembling, and smiled at her.

“You,” Koshmar whispered. “My dearest friend. My only love.”

Their sensing-organs touched. Their souls slipped into communion.

Torlyri asked herself then how she could ever have wanted Lakkamai more than she did Koshmar.

Afterward, though, when she lay back in the calmness that comes after twining, she knew that that was an idle question. The thing she had received from Lakkamai was altogether different from the love she shared with Koshmar. From Lakkamai had come passion, turbulence, mystery. There had been a communion with him, which she had mistaken for communion of the soul, but she realized now that it had been only a communion of the body: strong, yes, intensely strong, but not a lasting thing. A true thing, but not a lasting one. He had wanted her, and she had wanted him, and for a time they had eased those wants in each other. And then he had ceased to want her, or had wanted something else more keenly, and when Harruel had called for companions to join him in the conquest of the wild country Lakkamai had stepped forward without a glance in her direction, without a thought for her. Nor had he asked her to go with him. Perhaps he had thought she would not — that she would inevitably remain loyal to her duties as offering-woman here. Or perhaps he had not cared. Perhaps be simply had had whatever it was that he had wanted from Torlyri, and was done with her now, and was ready for a new adventure.

Torlyri wondered whether she would have gone, giving up tribe and duties and Koshmar and all, if Lakkamai had asked her.

She could not bring herself to answer that question. She was glad that it had not been asked.

Harruel walked ahead of the others when they were on the march, going by himself, surrounding himself in a mantle of kingly isolation. It was a way of emphasizing his power and his separateness. And it gave him a chance to think.

He knew that he had no real plan, except to march onward and onward until the gods showed him the destiny they had in mind for him. Vengiboneeza, for all the comfort and ease that it provided, had not been that destiny. Vengiboneeza was a dead place and it had belonged to other peoples. All it was was a place to hide and wait: but wait for what? For nothing, he thought. For the whitened ruins to tumble and choke them in clouds of powder? And even if Vengiboneeza could be brought back to life of some sort, the buildings repaired, the machines somehow made to run again, it would not be their life. He detested the idea of living in someone else’s old abandoned city. It was like sleeping in someone else’s dirty bedclothes. No, Vengiboneeza was no place for him.

He was unsure where the place for him was. He meant to keep moving until he discovered it.

But they had gone as far as they could go this day. Night was near. They had entered a cheerful terrain of gentle undulating valleys, rich with dense carpets of new grass both green and red. Just ahead the land dropped away sharply, and what lay before them down there struck Harruel as being strangely beautiful, and beautifully strange.

At the heart of the broad meadow below them was an enormous circular basin, broad and shallow, with a clearly demarcated rim around it. Its center was thickly wooded, a dark grove of mysteries, which promised an abundance of game.

The basin looked too symmetrical to be natural. Harruel wondered about it. Who could possibly have built so huge a thing? And why? If it was some city or ceremonial center out of the Great World, how was it that he could see no trace of ruined buildings? All that was apparent from above was a vast shallow depression, nearly as big across as Vengiboneeza itself, perfectly circular, surrounded by a rim and heavily overgrown with shrubs. Well, whatever it was, it was preferable to where they had just been.

For close to a week now they had been tramping through a grim zone of disheartening forests where the branches were knotted tightly together overhead by tangled black glossy vines so that the sun could never get through. The forest floor was dry and barren, covered with powdery duff. The only thing that would grow there was a large pale dome-shaped plant, fleshy and somber, which sprouted without warning in a matter of moments, erupting from the ground with incredible speed. It was sticky, and if you touched it it burned your hand. Yet eerie long-legged blue-furred little animals went loping through the forest at night-fall in search of these squat solemn things, and when they found one they would burrow right into its center to devour it from the inside out. The creatures were hard to catch unless you came upon them while they were feeding, when they were utterly lost in the heat of their gluttony and you could seize them by their legs. But then they gave no joy in the eating, for their flavor when roasted was even less palatable than when you ate them raw. Harruel was glad to be leaving that place behind.

He turned and looked back along the broad ridge that he had just crossed, peering into the late-afternoon darkness that was descending upon them from the east. The sky was almost black, except where a single shaft of golden light struck a towering wall of fiery-edged clouds. He saw Konya and Lakkamai not far behind him and the rest of his people straggling, stretched out at wide intervals halfway back to the forest.

Cupping his hand, Harruel shouted back to Konya, “We’ll camp here. Pass it on!”

A warm wind was blowing out of the south. It carried the promise of rain. Large gawky gray-plumaged birds with bright silvery necks that were long and coiling and scaly, like serpents, came fluttering out of the treetops and took off in a great flock, heading northeast. They were disagreeable-looking, but they sang like a chorus of gods as they flew away. A week or two ago, on the other side of the forest, Harruel had seen flocks of small delicate birds with green-and-blue wings that glittered like a handful of jewels when they flew, and they had screeched like devils. He wondered why such mismatches of voice and beauty existed.

If Hresh were here, Harruel would have asked him that. But Hresh was not here.

He stood with his arms folded until Konya and Lakkamai came up to him. “There’s good water here,” Harruel said. “And plenty of fruit on those bushes. And I think we’ll find lots of game down there tomorrow.” He pointed toward the basin below. “Look there, down ahead. What do you make of that?”

Konya walked to the edge of the ridge, where the land dropped away. He stared outward into the misty green declivity.

“Strange,” he said after a moment. “Like a big round bowl. I never saw such a thing.”

“No, nor I,” Harruel said.

“Bound to have a world of game living in it. You see there, where the edges rise like a curving barrier? The animals can get in, but they won’t find it easy to leave. So they’ll stay and thrive.”

“A city,” Lakkamai said, peering solemnly. “That must have been a city in the old times.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I think this is something the gods made. But we’ll see tomorrow.”

The others were coming up now. Harruel moved to one side while they went about the business of pitching camp.

That would have been another thing to ask Hresh about, that huge shallow basin down in the valley. Why it was there, how it had been formed. You could always depend on Hresh to give you some sort of answer. Sometimes he was just guessing, but more often than not he could provide you with real truths. His books told him almost everything, and he had witch-powers besides, or maybe god-powers, to allow him to see beyond ordinary sight and even beyond second sight.

Though Harruel had no liking for Hresh, though the boy had always seemed to him troublesome, sneaky, even dangerous, still there was no denying the power of Hresh’s strange mind, and the depth of the knowledge that he had gleaned from the casket of the chronicles. As it had turned out, Hresh did not choose to come. Harruel had thought for an instant of compelling him, that day when the tribe was splitting up; but he had decided that that was unwise, and perhaps impossible. Koshmar might have intervened. Or Hresh himself might have worked some mischief of his own to keep from coming. Nobody had ever been able to make Hresh do anything he didn’t want to do, not even Koshmar.

But Harruel had marched on all the same, choosing a route without benefit of Hresh’s wisdom. They were going south and west, following the sun all day long and until it set. There was no sense in going the other way, for that was the way they had come, and there was nothing back there but empty plains, rusted mechanicals, and wandering armies of hjjk-men. This way had the promise of the unknown. And it was a green and fertile land that seemed to be throbbing and bursting with the vitality of the New Springtime.

Each day he had set the pace and the others had made shift to keep up with him. He walked quickly, though not as quickly as he would have if he had been traveling by himself. Minbain and Nettin had babes in arms to deal with, after all. Harruel meant to be a strong king but not a foolish one. The strong king, he believed, demands more of his people than they are likely to give without being asked, but he does not demand more than they are capable of giving.

Harruel knew that they feared him. His size and strength and the somber nature of his soul assured that. He wanted them also to love him, or at least to revere him. That might not be easy; he suspected that most of them thought of him as a wild, brutish creature. Probably the forcing of Kreun was responsible for that. Well, that had been a moment of madness, and he was not proud of himself for having done it; but what was done was done. He thought better of himself than they did, because he knew himself better. They could not see his inner complexities, only his hard, savage exterior. But they would come to know him, Harruel thought. They would see that in his way he was remarkable, a strong and shrewd leader, a man of destiny, a fitting king. Not a beast, not a monster: strong, but also wise.

For an hour, until it was too dark to see, the men hunted and the women gathered small hard azure berries and round prickle-skinned red nuts. Then they settled by the campfire to eat. Nittin, who had never had a warrior’s training but who was turning out to be surprisingly quick with his hands, had caught a creature by the stream that crossed the ridge, a sleek agile fish-hunting beast with a long slender purple body and a thick mane of stiff yellow hair along its neck. Its hands, on pudgy little arms, seemed almost human, and its eyes were bright with intelligence. There was just enough meat on it to feed them all, and not a scrap went to waste.

Afterward it was the coupling-time.

Things were different now from the old days, the cocoon days, when people had coupled with whomever they pleased, though usually only the mated people, the breeding pairs, had any interest in it as a frequent activity. That had changed in Vengiboneeza, where nearly everyone had begun to mate and breed. There a new custom had sprung up in which the mated people normally coupled only with their mates. Harruel himself had abided by that until the day of his encounter with Kreun when he came down from the mountain.

But here on the trek Lakkamai had no mate, for he had not brought Torlyri the offering-woman along with him from Vengiboneeza. That did not seem to trouble him particularly, to be unmated here when everyone else was. But Lakkamai rarely complained about anything. He was a silent man. All the same, Harruel doubted that Lakkamai would be content to go the rest of his life without coupling, and there was no one here for him to couple with except other men’s mates and the infant Tramassilu, who would not reach the lawful age of coupling for many years.

It was also the case that Harruel, now that he had discovered a keen appetite for coupling himself, did not care to confine himself merely to Minbain to the end of his days. As she aged, she was losing what remained of her beauty, and the effort of nursing the child Samnibolon was a drain on her vigor. Whereas Konya’s Galihine was still in the prime of her womanhood, and the maidens Thaloin and Weiawala had the heat of youth about them, and even Nettin had some juice in her. So one night early in the trek Harruel had announced the new custom, and he had taken Thaloin that night to couple with.

If Minbain had any objections, she kept them to herself, as did Thaloin’s mate, Bruikkos.

“We will couple as we please,” Harruel declared. “All of us, not only the king!” He had learned from the Kreun experience that he must be careful in taking special privileges for himself: he could go so far, but no farther, and then they might rise up and overthrow him, or fall upon him in his sleep.

He was not delighted when Lakkamai and Minbain went off to couple a few nights later. But it was the rule, and he could hardly speak against it. Harruel swallowed his displeasure. In time he grew used to the other men coupling with Minbain; and he himself coupled as he wished.

By now no one gave the matter of coupling a second thought. At coupling-time this night Harruel selected Weiawala. Her fur was soft and glossy, her breath was warm and sweet. If she had a fault, it was only that she was too passionate, throwing herself against him again and again, until he had to push her aside in order to get a little rest.

Far-off animals chattered and boomed and sang shrilly in the night. Then the rain arrived, warm and torrential, putting out their fire. They all huddled morosely together, getting drenched. Harruel heard someone mutter on the far side of the heap that at least in Vengiboneeza they had had roofs over their heads. He wondered who that was: a potential troublemaker, maybe. But Weiawala, clinging to him, distracted him. Harruel forgot about the muttering. After a time the down-pour slackened and he slipped into sleep.

In the morning they broke camp and descended the ridge, stumbling and sliding on a trail made slick by the rain. Those who had paid little attention to the great basin in the meadow the night before now studied it with interest as they approached it. Salaman in particular seemed fascinated by it, pausing more than once to stare.

When they were not far above it, so near to it that they could no longer make out the entire bowl-shape but could only see the curve of the closest section of the rim, Salaman said suddenly, “I know what it is.”

“Do you, now?” said Harruel.

“It must be a place where a death-star struck the earth.”

Harruel laughed harshly. “O far-seeing one! O keeper of wisdom!”

“Mock me if you like,” said Salaman. “I think it’s the truth, all the same. Here, look at this.”

There was a low place in the path before them that had held the rain, and now was little more than a pool of soft gray mud. Salaman scooped up a rock so heavy he could scarcely lift it, and tossed it forward with all his strength on a high arc, so that it landed with a great plop in the middle of the pool. Splashes of mud were flung up far and wide, landing on Nittin and Galihine and Bruikkos.

Salaman ignored their angry protests. He ran forward and pointed to the place where the rock had fallen. It lay half buried in the soft ground, and everywhere about it the mud had been displaced in an equal way to form a circular crater with a distinct rim clearly outlined.

“Do you see?” he said. “The death-star lands in the middle of the meadow. The ground is flung up around it on all sides. And this is what results.”

Harruel looked at him, astounded.

He had no way of knowing whether what Salaman had said was true or not. Who could tell what had actually happened here hundreds of thousands of years ago? What amazed and troubled him was the keenness of Salaman’s reasoning. To have thought everything through like that, to visualize the crater, to guess how it might have been formed, to realize that he could create the same effect by heaving a rock into the mud — why, that was the sort of thing Hresh might have done. But no one else. Salaman had never shown signs of such sharpness of intellect before. He had been just one more quiet young warrior, obediently going about his tasks.

Harruel told himself it would be wise to keep closer watch on Salaman. He could be very valuable. He could also be a problem.

Konya said, “We can see the rock lying in the mud. Why can’t we see the death-star still there in front of us? There’s nothing in the center of this thing but greenery.”

“It’s been many years,” said Salaman. “Perhaps the death-star disappeared long ago.”

“While the crater itself remained?”

Shrugging, Salaman said, “Death-stars might have been made of some material that doesn’t last long. They could have been huge balls of ice, perhaps. Or solid masses of fire. How would I know? Hresh might know such a thing, but not I. All I tell you is that I think that is how the bowl in front of us was formed. You may agree with me or not, as you wish, Konya.”

They went closer. When they were near the rim Harruel saw that it was not a tenth as sharply outlined as it had seemed from above. It was worn and rounded, and barely apparent in some places. From the ridge it had stood out because of its contrast to the meadow around it, but down here he could see how the storms of time had smoothed and eroded it. That gave Harruel all the more respect for Salaman’s theory, and for Salaman.

Konya said, “If a death-star really did land here, we should not enter.”

Harruel, standing on the rim looking down into the dense shrubbery beyond, where he could already see plump animals moving about, glanced back at him.

“Why not?”

“It is a place cursed by the gods. It is a place of death.”

“It looks pretty lively to me,” said Harruel.

“The death-stars were sent as a sign of the anger of the gods. Should we go near the place where one lies buried? The breath of the gods is on this place. There is fire here. There is doom here.”

Harruel considered that a moment.

“Let’s go around it,” Konya said.

“No,” said Harruel finally. “This is a place of life. Whatever anger the gods may have had, it was intended for the Great World, not for us. Else why would the gods have seen us through the Long Winter? The gods meant to take the world from those who used to live upon it and give it to us. If a death-star struck here, this is a holy place.”

He was impressed with his own cunning reasoning, and his surprising burst of eloquence, which had made his head throb from the effort. And he knew that he could not let Konya’s caution rule him here. The thing to do was to go forward, always to go forward. That was what kings did.

Konya said, “Harruel, I still think we should—”

“No!” cried Harruel. He scrambled up the side of the crater’s rim and over the edge, down into the green basin below. The animals that were grazing there gazed calmly at him, unafraid. Possibly they had never seen human beings before, or enemies of any kind. This was a sheltered place. “Follow me!” Harruel called. “There’s meat for the taking here!” And he plunged forward, with all the rest, even Konya, losing no time in coming after him.

There was rage burning in Koshmar’s breast all the time now; but she kept it hidden, for the tribe’s sake, and Torlyri’s, and her own.

There was no hour when she did not relive the Day of the Breaking Apart. It obsessed her by day and it came back to haunt her by night. “The rule of women is over,” she heard Harruel saying, again and again. “From this day forth I am king.” King! Nonsensical word! Man-chieftain! Man-chieftains were for creatures like the Bengs, not for the People! “Who will come with me?” Harruel asked. His harsh voice echoed and echoed and echoed within her. “This city is a sickness, and we must leave it! Who will join me in founding a great kingdom far from here? Who will go with Harruel? Who? Who?”

Konya. Salaman. Bruikkos. Nittin. Lakkamai.

“Who will go with Harruel? Who? Who? Be chieftain all you like, Koshmar. The city is yours. I will go from it and cease to trouble you any longer.”

Minbain. Galihine. Weiawala. Thaloin. Nettin.

One by one going to Harruel’s side, while she stood like a woman of stone, letting them go, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop them.

The names of those who had gone were a burning rebuke to her. She had thought of asking Hresh not to enter them, or any of this, in the chronicles. And then she had realized that it must be entered, all of it, the splitting of the tribe, the defeat of the chieftain. For that was what it was, a defeat, the worst defeat any chieftain of the tribe had ever suffered. The chronicles must not be only a record of triumph. Koshmar told herself sternly that they must hold the truth, the totality of the truth, if they were to have any value for those who will read them in ages yet unborn.

One adult out of every six had chosen to turn away from her rule. Now the tribe was strangely and sadly shrunken, some of its boldest warriors gone, and promising young women, and two babes, the hope of the future. Hope? What hope could there be now? “The city is yours,” Harruel had said, but then he had gone on to say, “Or rather, it belongs to the Helmet People, now.” Yes. That was the truth. They swarmed in Vengiboneeza. They were everywhere. It was truly their city now. When they encountered members of the People in some outlying district there were angry glares, sometimes, and harsh words, as though the Bengs resented such an intrusion on their domain. Only occasionally now did Hresh and his Seekers go out to roam the ruins in search of the treasures of the Great World, though Hresh still seemed to go fairly often into the Beng sector for his meetings with their old man. That relationship appeared to have an existence of its own, wholly outside the tensions that were building up between the two peoples. But otherwise the tribe had pulled back, staying close to its settlement, licking the wounds that the Day of the Breaking Apart had inflicted.

Koshmar wondered now and then whether the thing to do was to get out of Vengiboneeza altogether, to return to the open country and begin all over again. But whenever the thought arose in her she choked it back. In this city they were supposed to find their destiny: that was what the Book of the Way said. And what kind of destiny was it to go slinking away like beasts, relinquishing the city to another tribe? The People had come here for a purpose, and that purpose was not yet fulfilled. Therefore we must stay, Koshmar thought.

If ever I see Harruel again, she told herself, I will kill him with my own hands. Whether he is awake or asleep when I find him, I will kill him.

“Are you in pain?” Torlyri asked her one afternoon.

“Pain? What pain?”

“You had the side of your mouth pulled in in a strange way. As though something was hurting you, and you were struggling with it.”

Koshmar laughed. “A piece of food, stuck between my teeth. Nothing more than that, Torlyri.”

She allowed no one to see the torment within her. She went about the settlement with her head held high and her shoulders squared, as though nothing had happened. When she twined with Torlyri — and they twined often now, for Torlyri had been badly hurt by the defection of Lakkamai, and was in great need of Koshmar’s love and support — she worked hard to conceal the troubles of her spirit. When she went among tribesfolk, she radiated cheer, optimism, goodwill. She had to. They were all shaken by the Breaking Apart and by the coming of the Helmet People. A delayed reaction had set in, and it affected almost everyone. These people who throughout all their time in the cocoon had been the only people in their world now had strangers virtually in their midst, and that was not easy to swallow. They felt the pressure of the Helmet People’s souls nearby, pushing against their own spirits like the close, dense air that weighs heavy before a summer storm. And the loss of the Eleven — the ripping apart of the fabric of the tribe, the breaking of friendships and family ties that had endured all their lives, the sheer impact of change on such a scale — oh, that was hard too, that was very hard.

With such pain on all sides Koshmar could not permit her own to weaken her. But she went often to her little chapel, and knelt and spoke with the spirit of Thekmur and with those of other former chieftains, and took what comfort she could from the wisdom they offered her. She had found a certain aromatic herb that grew in the crevices of the walls of the city, and when she burned it in her altar-fire it made her dizzy, and then she could hear the voices of Thekmur and Nialli and Sismoil and the others who had gone before her. They showed no disdain for her, gods be thanked! They were merciful and kind, even though she had failed as chieftain. Even though she had failed.

The essential thing now was to learn to live with the Helmet People. To resist their encroachments by any means short of war. To work out a division of the city that would not be a humiliating quarantine: their sector, our sector, the shared sector.

But it seemed that the Bengs had other ideas.

“They don’t want us going here any more,” Orbin reported, pulling out a tattered copy of the map Hresh had made, and indicating a quadrant of the city far to the northeast, against the bulwark of the mountain. “They’ve got a cord stretched across the entrance to the whole district, and when Praheurt went near it yesterday they shouted at him and waved him away.” Haniman had a similar story to tell. “Here,” he said. “Along the water’s edge. They’re putting up some kind of idols made of wood covered with mats of fur, and they look annoyed if we come too close.”

“Count them,” said Koshmar. “I want to know exactly how many Bengs there are. Make a list, write every one down by the shape of his helmet.” She paused. “You know how to write?”

“Hresh has taught me a little of the art,” Haniman said.

“All right. Take a count. If we have to fight them, we need to know what we’re actually up against.”

“You would fight them, Koshmar?” said Haniman.

“Can we let them tell us where we can go and where we may not go?”

“There are so many, though! And Harruel and Konya are no longer with us!”

Koshmar glared. “Those names are never to be mentioned, boy. Were they our only warriors? We can handle ourselves in any sort of struggle. Go and count the Bengs. Go and count them.”

Haniman and Orbin reported, after a few days, that there were a hundred and seventeen of them, including the women and children, but possibly not some of the infants inside the houses. At least forty appeared to be warriors. Koshmar contemplated those numbers uneasily. The People had eleven warriors left, not all of them in prime fighting shape. Forty was a weighty presence indeed.

And the Bengs’ beasts, their vermilions, rambling and snuffling around at will — they were weighty too, in another way. They went wherever they pleased in Vengiboneeza, and frequently strayed right into the People’s own settlement, damaging small buildings, scattering and breaking things that had been left out in the sun to dry, terrorizing the children. In any battle, Koshmar knew, her warriors would face Beng warriors mounted on those monsters. Such combat would be absurd.

There is no way we can fight these people, she thought.

They will take Vengiboneeza from us without raising a finger.

We should leave this place at once, regardless of the prophecy in the Book of the Way.

No. No. No.

“You must teach the Beng language to us all,” Koshmar told Hresh. If they were indeed to be the People’s enemies — and that was far from certain; in many ways they were still taking pains to be courteous and even friendly — then it was necessary to be able to spy on them and understand what they were saying. Hresh had found a way to master it, as she had known he would. But he said he was not yet ready to teach it to others. He needed a deeper grounding in it first, and more time to analyze and classify his knowledge of it, before he could impart what he knew to the tribe.

It was clear to her that Hresh was lying: that he was simply concealing from her and from Torlyri how fluent he was in the Beng language. He had always been like that, enhancing his own prestige and power by keeping special knowledge to himself. But now it was proper for him to share what he knew with the others, and she let him see that she was on to his game.

“Just another few sessions with Noum om Beng,” he promised. “And then I’ll hold classes, Koshmar. I’ll teach it to everyone.”

“Will we be able to learn it?”

“Oh, yes, yes. There’s nothing really difficult about it, once you grasp the basic principles.”

“For you, perhaps, Hresh.”

“We will all speak Beng like Bengs,” he said. “Just give me a little more time to grow familiar with it, and then I’ll share what I know with everyone. I promise you that.”

Koshmar smiled and embraced him. Splendid Hresh! Indispensable Hresh! No one else could have carried them through these difficult times. What a calamity it would have been if Hresh had followed his mother Minbain and gone off with Harruel! But Koshmar knew that she would never have let him go. There she would have drawn the line; there she would have fought, even if it had meant her death, the deaths of them all. Without Hresh the tribe was lost. She knew that.

They spoke for a while of the Beng encroachment, of the barriers that had gone up here and there around the city. It was Hresh’s opinion that the Bengs were marking certain places off for purely religious reasons, rather than to protect their claim to any Great World machines they might contain. But he was far from certain of that, he said, and eager to return to his own explorations as soon as conditions in the city became more stable again, lest the Bengs find things that could be of value to the People.

They fell silent. But there was another thing Koshmar meant to discuss with him.

“Tell me,” she said after a time. “There’s trouble between you and Taniane, isn’t there, Hresh?”

“Trouble?” he said, not meeting her eyes. “What kind of trouble do you mean?”

“You want to twine with her.”

“Perhaps.” His voice was very low.

“Have you asked her?”

“Once. I went about it badly.”

“You should ask her again.”

Hresh looked intensely uncomfortable. “She couples with Haniman.”

“Coupling and twining have nothing to do with one another.”

“She’s going to mate with Haniman, isn’t she?”

“Neither one has said anything about that to me.”

“They will. Everyone mates nowadays. Even—”

He cut himself short.

“Go on, Hresh.”

“Even Torlyri mated for a while,” he said, looking miserable. “I’m sorry, Koshmar. I didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t need to be so apologetic. Do you think I didn’t know about Torlyri and Lakkamai? But that’s my point exactly. Even if Taniane does mate with Haniman, and I’m not saying that she will, mating has nothing to do with twining, any more than coupling does. She can still be your twining-partner, if that’s what you want. But you have to ask. She won’t ask you, you know.”

“I told you, I asked her once. It didn’t go well.”

“Ask her again, Hresh.”

“It won’t go well the second time either. If she’s willing to twine with me, why doesn’t she let me know it somehow?”

“She’s afraid of you,” Koshmar said.

He looked up at her, his huge eyes bright with surprise. “Afraid?”

“Don’t you know how extraordinary you are? Don’t you think that your mind frightens people? And twining — a meeting of the minds—”

“Taniane has a strong mind herself,” said Hresh. “She has nothing to fear from twining with me.”

“Yes, she’s strong.” Strong enough to be a chieftain someday, Koshmar said to herself. Though not as soon as she’d like to be. “But she doesn’t know she could match you in a twining. I think she’d be willing to chance it, if you asked again.”

“You think so, Koshmar?”

“I think so, yes. But she’s never going to come to you first. You have to be the one who does the asking.”

He nodded. She could see the thoughts running wildly around behind his eyes.

“I will, then! And I thank you, Koshmar! I will twine with her! I will!”

He started swiftly away from her, glowing, impatient.

“Hresh?”

“Yes?” he said, halting.

“Ask her, but not today, you understand? Not while the idea’s still bubbling like this in your mind. Stop and think about it first. Stop and think.”

Hresh smiled. “Yes,” he said. “You’re a shrewd one, Koshmar. You understand these things so much better than I do.” He took her hands in his and squeezed them. Then he went running away across the plaza.

Koshmar watched him go. He is so wise, she thought. And yet still so young, still practically a boy, so earnest, so foolish. But everything will work out well for him.

It is so easy, she thought, to help others in these matters.

She caught sight of Torlyri standing near the corner of the temple. A Helmet Man had appeared from somewhere and was trying to talk to her, the two of them conducting an animated pantomime, with much laughter and, so it seemed, very little communication. Torlyri appeared to be enjoying herself, at any rate. She was beginning now, Koshmar saw, to come out of the deep depression that had engulfed her after Lakkamai’s departure. Her duties as offering-woman must be a great consolation to her, not only the ritual things but the giving of comfort to others, the easing of the fears and confusions that the Breaking Apart and the coming of the Helmet People had caused.

“Look at them!” Koshmar said to Boldirinthe, who had come by just then, and gestured toward Torlyri and the Helmet Man. “I haven’t seen her look that lively in months.”

“Can she speak their language now?” Boldirinthe asked.

Koshmar chuckled. “I don’t think either one has the slightest idea of what the other one’s trying to say. But that doesn’t matter. She’s enjoying herself, isn’t she? I like that. I like to see Torlyri happy.”

“Helping others lifts you out of yourself,” said Boldirinthe. “It takes your mind from your own pain.”

“Yes,” said Koshmar. “It does that.”

The Helmet Man was one she had not noticed before, a lean and sturdy one something like that first one, the scout, of long ago. Perhaps this was his brother. There was a long bare place on his right shoulder going around to his neck, as though he had had some terrible wound when he was much younger. His helmet was less frightful than most, no horns on it, no jutting blades, no glaring monsters, only a simple high-crowned bowl of gilded metal covered by thin red plates in the form of rounded leaves.

Koshmar watched them for a little while. Then she turned away.

Harruel’s voice spoke within her, as it so often did when she least wanted to hear it, saying, “The rule of women is over. From this day forth I am king. Who will join with me in founding a great kingdom far from here? Who will go with Harruel? Who? Who?”

I think I will go to my chapel now, Koshmar thought. I think I will light the fire and breathe the aromatic fumes, and speak now with Thekmur or Nialli.

It was the Barak Dayir that had opened the way between Hresh and Noum om Beng.

Obviously he had known what it was from the first moment he had seen it. That blaze of excitement, the only excitement Hresh had ever seen Noum om Beng display, was evidence of that. To the old Helmet Man the Wonderstone was a gift of the gods — was, in a way, a thing that was divine in itself. He knelt before it a long while; and then at last he turned to Hresh with a long cool inquiring look that said, as if in words, Do you know how to make use of this thing?

By way of answer Hresh pantomimed taking hold of the Wonderstone with his sensing-organ. With gestures he mimicked a sudden eruption of energy and perception in the air around his head. Noum om Beng indicated that he should do that now; and Hresh, after a moment’s hesitation, enfolded the Barak Dayir in the curling tip of his sensing-organ and felt its revelatory power immediately possess and expand his spirit.

An instant later Noum om Beng put his own sensing-organ close to Hresh’s — not touching it, but so close that there was barely a flicker of light visible in the open space between — and a joining of their minds took place.

It was not like the joining that comes of second sight, nor that of twining, nor even like anything Hresh had previously known in his experiments with the Wonderstone. Noum om Beng’s mind did not lie open to his. But he was able to took within it, the way one may look within a treasure-chamber from the outside. Hresh saw what seemed to his mind to be compartments inside, and what seemed to be sealed parcels meticulously arrayed within the compartments. He knew that these were not actual compartments, not actual parcels, only mind-images, mind-equivalents.

A bleak chill wind blew from the entrance to Noum om Beng’s mind. It was an icy place, as cold as the dark ancient caverns below the old tribal cocoon where Hresh had occasionally wandered when he was a child.

“This is for you,” said Noum om Beng. And gravely he handed Hresh one of the smallest of the neatly wrapped packages from one of the uppermost compartments. “Open it,” Noum om Beng said. “Go on. Open it! Open it!” Hresh’s trembling fingers plucked at the wrapping. Finally he managed to pull the package apart. Within lay a box carved from a single gleaming translucent green jewel. Noum om Beng gestured brusquely. Hresh lifted the lid of the box.

Jewel and wrapping and treasure-chamber and all else vanished at once. Hresh found himself squatting alone in darkness, blinking, confused. The Barak Dayir was tightly clutched in his sensing-organ. After a time he became aware of Noum om Beng sitting quietly on the far side of the room, watching him.

“Release the amplifier,” Noum om Beng said. “It will injure you if you continue to hold it.”

“The — amplifier?”

“What you call the Barak Dayir. Let go of it! Unwind your stupid tail from it, boy!”

Noum om Beng’s voice, thin and sharp and reedy, crackled and snapped like a whip. Hresh obeyed at once, uncurling his sensing-organ and letting the Wonderstone go skittering to the floor.

“Pick it up, boy! Put it back in its pouch!”

He realized that Noum om Beng was speaking in the Beng tongue, and that he was able to understand what Noum om Beng was saying, even without making use of the Barak Dayir.

He knew the meaning of the words and he knew how each word the old man uttered was related to the words about it.

Somehow Noum om Beng had sent the Helmet People’s language all at once into Hresh’s head. With trembling hands Hresh put the stone away. The old man continued to stare. His strange red eyes were cold, dispassionate, severe. There is no love anywhere in him, Hresh thought. Not for me, not for anyone. Not even for himself.

“You called it an amplifier?” Hresh said, using Beng words that came readily to his lips as he summoned them. “I have never heard that word before. What does it mean? And what is it, our Wonderstone? Where did it come from? What is it meant to do ?”

“You will call me Father.”

“How can I do that? I am the son of Samnibolon.”

“So you are. But you will call me Father. Hresh-of-the-answers, that is what you call yourself, eh? But you have few answers in your head, boy, and many questions.”

“Hresh-full-of-questions is what they called me when I was younger.”

“And so you still are. Come here. Closer. Closer.”

Hresh crouched at the old man’s feet. Noum om Beng studied him a long while in silence. Then, suddenly, astonishingly, his clawlike hand lashed out and struck Hresh across the cheek, just as Harruel had done that time on the Day of the Breaking Apart. The blow was totally unexpected, and it had unexpected force behind it. Hresh’s head snapped back sharply. Tears came to his eyes, and anger just after the tears, so that it was all he could do to keep himself from instantly returning the blow. He clenched his fists, he tightened his jaws, he clamped his knees together, until the spasm of rage had passed.

I must never strike him, whatever the provocation, Hresh told himself. I would kill him if I struck him the way he struck me. I would snap his neck like a dry twig.

And then he thought, No, that would not happen. For I would be dead before my hand reached his face.

“Why did you hit me?” Hresh asked in wonder.

For answer, Noum om Beng hit him again on the other side of his face. This blow was as hard as the first, but it came as less of a surprise, and Hresh rode with it, lessening the impact.

Hresh stared.

“Have I displeased you?” he asked.

“I have just struck you a third time,” said Noum om Beng, though his hand had not moved at all.

The calm flat statement left Hresh mystified for a moment. But only for a moment; and then he realized what his error must have been.

“I am sorry to have given offense, Father,” he said quietly.

“Better. Better.”

“From now on I will show respect,” said Hresh. “Forgive me, Father.”

“I will strike you many times,” Noum om Beng said.

He was true to his word, as Hresh found him to be in all other things. Scarcely a meeting between them went by when Noum om Beng did not lift his hand to Hresh, sometimes lightly and almost mockingly, sometimes with astonishing power, and always when Hresh least expected it. It was stern and bewildering discipline, and often Hresh’s lip would swell or his eye would throb or his jaw would ache for days afterward. But he never struck back, and after a while he came to see the blows as an essential part of Noum om Beng’s method of discourse, a kind of punctuation or emphasis, to be accepted naturally and without demur. Though Hresh rarely understood at the moment what it was that he had said to merit a blow, he would usually comprehend later, perhaps half an hour afterward, perhaps not for several days. It was always some stupidity of his that was being called violently to his attention in this way, some error of reasoning, some shortsightedness, some failure of intellectual etiquette.

Eventually Hresh was bothered less by the blows themselves than by the awareness of inadequacy that they conveyed. What Noum om Beng showed him, as the months passed, was that he was clever but that the powers of his mind, in which he had always taken such great pride, had their limitations. It was a painful revelation. And so he sat tense and stiff through each of his meetings with the old man of the Helmet People, waiting gloomily for the next sudden proof that he had failed to come up to whatever mark it was that Noum om Beng had set for him.

“But what do you discuss with him?” Taniane asked, for now he and Taniane had begun to speak with each other again, though cautiously and without ever once referring to the ill-starred invitation he had offered her.

“He does most of the talking. Nearly all, in fact. And most of it is philosophy.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“Ideas about ideas. Very remote, very cloudy. I don’t understand a tenth of what he tells me.” Noum om Beng, he said, set all the themes and would not be led in any path that he had not chosen himself. Hresh longed to ask him about the origin and history of the Helmet People, about the downfall of the Great World, about conditions elsewhere in the world at this time, and many other things. Now and then Noum om Beng gave him tantalizing hints, but little more. “He’s let me know that the Helmet People have been out in the world much longer than we have,” Hresh told Taniane. “That there are many other tribes out there too, and that much of the world is ruled by the hjjk-men. But I get these things from him in a cloudy way, by listening for the answers behind the answers.” Indeed most of Hresh’s questions simply went unanswered; a few earned him blows, presumably for impertinence, though Hresh was never able to see a pattern in the things he said that led Noum om Beng to strike him. An inquiry into the nature of the gods might get him a slap one day, and a trivial and innocent question about the habits of vermilions might draw one the next. Perhaps it was that Noum om Beng preferred never to be questioned about anything; or perhaps he simply wanted to keep Hresh off balance. Certainly he succeeded in doing that.

“He hits you?” Taniane asked in amazement.

“It’s part of the instruction. There’s nothing personal in it.”

“But it’s such an insult. To have someone actually strike you with his hand—”

“It’s just a kind of philosophical statement,” said Hresh.

“You and your philosophy!” But she said it kindly, and her smile was a warm one. Then she added, “This is changing you, Hresh. These talks with that old man.”

“Changing me?”

“You keep to yourself so much. You hardly speak to me, or anyone else in the tribe, any more. When you aren’t with Noum om Beng you’re off alone in your room, or, I suppose, wandering around in the back streets of Vengiboneeza. And you don’t go out with the Seekers any more.”

“Koshmar doesn’t want us going out until we understand what the Bengs are up to.”

“But you do go out. I know you do. You go alone, though, and you don’t seem to be looking for anything. You’re wandering without purpose.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because once or twice I’ve followed you,” said Taniane, and gave him a shameless grin.

He shrugged and would not ask her why, and the conversation trickled toward a halt. But he couldn’t deny the truth of what she had said. There were changes going on within his soul that he felt he was unable to share with anyone, for he hardly understood them himself. They had to do with the revelation of the Tree of Life, which had so conclusively shown Hresh that the People had no claim to calling themselves human, and with the coming of the Bengs, and the departure of Harruel, and with the whole situation that the tribe found itself in in Vengiboneeza, and with many other things, not the least of them his own relationship, or lack of one, with Taniane. But these were too many things to grapple with all at once. As Torlyri once had told him, nobody can deal with more than one enormous thing at a time.

Now he was approaching the chambers of Noum om Beng once more, and he felt a band of uneasiness across the chest, a squirming in his stomach. These visits were becoming increasingly tense for him.

It had not been that way at the beginning, many months before. Noum om Beng had seemed just a strange-looking shriveled old man then, frail and remote and alien. To Hresh he had been nothing but a repository of new knowledge, a kind of casket of chronicles waiting to be opened and read. But now that they were able to speak one another’s language and Hresh was coming to have some truer understanding of Noum om Beng’s nature, he saw the depth and power of the man, and the chilly austerity of him, and he could not help a feeling of dismay at the thought of baring his mind to him. Not since Thaggoran had been alive had Hresh known anyone remotely like Noum om Beng; and Thaggoran had been too familiar a figure, and Hresh had been too young, for there to have been anything frightening about their conversations. It was different with Noum om Beng. He opened incomprehensible worlds to Hresh, and that was terrifying.

“You look troubled today,” Noum om Beng said, as Hresh entered his chambers on this dry, hot midsummer day. The offhand statement was almost as unexpected as one of the blows Noum om Beng dispensed so freely. Rarely did Noum om Beng show much awareness of Hresh’s state of mind, nor interest in it.

Taking his seat before the old man’s stone bench, Hresh said, “Koshmar has asked me once again to teach the Beng language to our people, Father.”

“Teach it, then! Why have you hesitated so long?”

Hresh felt his face growing warm. “The knowledge is my special possession. I feel jealous of it, Father.”

Noum om Beng laughed. It was a laugh much like a cough.

“Do you think you can keep it all to yourself? Teach it, boy, teach it! The day will come when all the world speaks in the Beng way: prepare your people, let them be ready for that.”

Hresh moistened his lips. “Do you mean to say that all the world will be Beng, Father?”

“All that is not hjjk.”

Hresh thought of Harruel, building his little kingdom in the wilderness, and wondered how he would fit into such a scheme of things. Or Koshmar, for that matter. But he said none of this to Noum om Beng.

“Then you believe that when the gods destroyed the Great World, it was to clear a way for the supremacy of the Bengs?”

“Who knows,” said Noum om Beng, “the purposes of the gods? The gods are harsh. All striving is repaid in the end with a hail of death-stars. So it has happened again and again, and so it will happen yet again in times to come. We can never comprehend the reasons for this; all we can do is strive ever onward, struggling in the face of everything, to survive and then to grow and then to conquer. In the end we perish. To comprehend this is unimportant. To survive and grow and conquer is all there is.”

Never before had Noum om Beng made so explicit a statement of his philosophy. Hresh, taking it in as though it had been a rain of blows, sat trembling, struggling to come to terms with what he had just heard.

“Will the death-stars come again to destroy us?” he asked finally.

“Not for a very long time. We are safe from them now, and for so much time to come that it is impossible to comprehend it. But they will come, when you and I have been long forgotten. It is the way of the gods, to send the death-stars to the world time after time. It has been that way since the beginning.”

“Am I to understand from what you say that the death-stars that destroyed the Great World were not the first that came to the world?”

“That is so. Millions of years go by between each visit of the death-star swarms. This I know, boy. This knowledge comes to me from the ancient ones. The death-stars fell upon the Great World, and they fell upon the world that existed before the Great World ever was. And upon the world before that.”

Hresh stared and could not say a word.

Noum om Beng said, “We know nothing of those older worlds. The past is always lost and forgotten, no matter how hard we strive to save it. It survives only in shadows and dreams and faint images. But the Great World people knew how to read those images, and so did the humans before them.”

“The humans — before them—”

“Of course. The humans were old when the Great World was born. But the death-stars are older still. There were no humans when the death-stars fell, the time before the last time; or if the humans did exist, they were only little simple creatures such as we are now, with everything still ahead for them, and they lived through that time of death-stars just as we have lived through this one.”

Hresh could not even blink as Noum om Beng uttered these words, which fell upon him like the final strokes of the ax that cuts through the mightiest of trees.

“Once very long ago the humans had their time of greatness and ruled the world,” Noum om Beng went on, “and I think that they remembered the death-stars that had fallen when they were young, or else they rediscovered the memory of them, I cannot tell you which. And the time of greatness of the humans, long though it was, ran its whole course in the time between the swarms. The humans’ greatness came and went in that time. And then the Great World arose and flourished, and it was upon the Great World that the most recent death-stars fell. Now the world is ours and we will build something great in it, as the humans did and the Great World peoples did after them; and one day, millions of years from now, the death-stars will come again. This is truth. This is the way of the world, as it has been since the beginning.”

Hresh sat quietly, struggling with the horror of what he had just heard, trembling under the weight of the unimaginable past, which rose above him like one tower piled upon another all the way to the stars.

After a very long time he said, “If that is so, Father, then it makes no difference, does it, what we do? We may grow and flourish and build something greater than the Great World; and when the wheel turns ‘round again, whatever we have built will be destroyed as the Great World was. Nor should we think that when the destruction comes it is coming for punishment’s sake, to destroy a wicked civilization. Whether we are good or evil, whether we keep the ways of the gods or spurn them, the death-stars will come all the same. They come and come and come, when the appointed time arrives, and they fall upon the wicked and the virtuous alike, on the lazy and the industrious alike, on the cruel and the gentle alike. We might just as well not build at all, for whatever we build will be destroyed. That is the world the gods have devised for us. It seems terribly harsh to us; but the gods are beyond our comprehension. Is this what you say, Father?”

“This is what I know to be true.”

“No,” Hresh said. “It is too cruel a belief. It says that there is a flaw in the universe, that things are fundamentally wrong at the heart.”

Noum om Beng sat quietly, nodding. Something almost like a smile passed across his wizened face.

“We die, do we not?” he asked.

“At the end of our days, yes.”

“Is it as punishment?”

“It is because we have come to our end. The wicked sometimes live long, the good die young: so death is not punishment, except that we are all punished the same way.”

“Precisely, boy. There is no sense to it; so how can we hope to understand it? The gods have decreed death for us, each of us as a single mortal being. They decreed death also for the Great World; they have decreed death also for the world of hjjk-folk who rule now, and for the Beng world that will follow after. If you call this a flaw in the universe you are wrong. It is the way of the universe. The universe is perfect; it is we who are flawed. The gods know what they are doing. We never will. But that does not mean that there can be an end to our striving.”

Hresh shook his head. “If there’s no point to anything, if death comes for each of us and death-stars come for our civilizations, then we might as well live like beasts. But we don’t. We do keep striving. We plan, we dream, we build.” Caught up in his own fervor, he cried, “I mean to know why. I will devote my life to finding out why.”

He realized that he was speaking very loudly. He realized too that it was some time since he had remembered to call Noum om Beng “Father,” as the old Helmet Man insisted. Yet he had not been struck. Truly this was an unusual day.

Noum om Beng stood up, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding to his full great height, and filling the room in his fragile way like some papery-bodied water-strider that had taken on another form. From far above he looked down at Hresh, and it was impossible to fathom the thoughts that were crossing his face, though Hresh knew they must be powerful ones.

At last Noum om Beng said, “Yes. Devote your life to finding out why. And then come to me, and tell me your answer. If I am still alive, I will very much want to know.” Noum om Beng laughed. “When I was your age I was troubled by the same question, and I too sought the answer. You see that I failed. Perhaps it will be otherwise for you. Perhaps, boy. Perhaps.”