At Winter's End

14 The Time of Last Times

This was an ecstatic time for Hresh, bringing the fulfillment of many dreams, and of much that he had never expected to attain.

Taniane was his twining-partner and his coupling-partner both. Now that all barriers were down between them, he had come to realize that throughout all their childhood and young adulthood she had looked constantly to him in love and desire. While he, blind to that, lost in his studies of the chronicles and then of ruined Vengiboneeza, had completely failed to perceive the nature of her feelings for him, or even his own feelings for her.

Haniman had been only a diversion for her. He had been a standby lover, to fill her time and perhaps to awaken jealousy in Hresh. Hresh had badly misread the nature of that relationship, to everyone’s cost.

But all that was remedied now. All night long, night after night, Taniane and Hresh lay together, breast against breast, sensing-organ touching sensing-organ, in a union of body and mind so intense that he was dazed with wonder at it. As soon as he found the courage, he meant to ask Koshmar to let him take Taniane as his mate. He had not been able to find any precedent in the chronicles for that, the old man of the tribe taking a mate, but there was nothing prohibiting it, either. Torlyri had mated with Lakkamai; and if an offering-woman now could mate, why not a chronicler also?

Hresh knew also of the ambitions that blazed within Taniane: that she saw Koshmar as old, defeated, burned-out, that she yearned to be chieftain in Koshmar’s place.

Taniane made no attempt to hide her vision of the tribe’s future from him. “We’ll rule together, you and I! I’ll be the chieftain and you’ll be old man; and when our children are born, we’ll raise them to govern after us. How could anyone excel a child of ours? A child that would have your wisdom and stubbornness, and my strength and energy? Oh, Hresh, Hresh, how wonderfully everything has worked out for us!”

“Koshmar is still chieftain,” he reminded her soberly. “We’re not yet even mated. And there’s work for us to do in Vengiboneeza.”

Though Koshmar had angrily rejected his contention that the tribe must go forth from the city, and had not reopened the discussion, Hresh knew that their departure was inevitable. Sooner or later Koshmar would see that the People were stagnating in Vengiboneeza and that in any case the Bengs were making their position impossible here. And then, without warning — Hresh knew Koshmar well — she would give the order for packing up and clearing out. It was essential, then, for him to ransack the ruins of the city for anything else that might be of value, while he still had time.

For fear of encountering Beng patrols he went exploring now only by night. When the settlement grew dark and quiet, he and Taniane rose and went out into Vengiboneeza, hand in hand, running on tiptoes. They scarcely ever slept now and their eyes were bright with fatigue. The excitement of the task kept them going.

Three times he tried to reach the underground cache in the place where he had seen the repair-machines at work, but each time he spied Beng sentries nearby, and could not get close. Quietly he cursed his bad luck. He imagined the Bengs prowling around in there, plundering the relics themselves, seizing things of the highest importance, and felt a keen stab of pain that cut through his soul like a blade. But there was no end of other sites to explore. Using the treasure-map of the inter-locking circles and the points of red light as their guide, they rushed through corridors, vaults, galleries, buried chambers, and tunnels, moving at a breathless pace until dawn, then sometimes collapsing in each other’s arms for an hour or two of sleep before returning to the settlement.

They made many discoveries. But hardly anything seemed to be of immediate or even potential value.

In a great limestone-walled chamber in the part of the city known as Mueri Torlyri they came upon a solitary machine ten times their own height, perfectly preserved, a domed and gleaming thing of pearly-white metal with bands of colored stone set in it, and pulsating ovals of green and red light, and rounded arms that looked ready to move in many directions at the touch of a switch. It seemed almost like some kind of gigantic idol, that machine. But of what use was it?

Another cavern, lined on all sides by inscriptions in a writhing, bewildering script that made the eye ache to follow it, held shining glass cases that contained cubes of dark metal from which waves of shimmering light would burst at the sound of a voice. The cubes were small, no wider across than Hresh’s two hands side by side, but when he opened one of the cases and tried to draw a cube out it would not come. The metal of which the cube was made evidently was so dense that it was beyond his strength to lift.

A long noble gallery that had been partly destroyed by the incursion of an underground river still displayed, though it was badly encrusted by mineral deposits, a sort of large metal mirror rising on three sharp-pronged legs. Taniane approached it and let out a cry of amazement and dismay.

“What have you found?” Hresh called.

She pointed. “There’s my reflection, in the middle. But on this side — look, that’s me when I was a child. And on the right side, that bent and withered old woman — Hresh, is that supposed to be me when I’m old?”

As she spoke, a babbling tumult of sound came from the mirror, which after a moment she recognized, or thought she did, as her own voice distorted and amplified; but she was speaking some unknown tongue, perhaps that of the sapphire-eyes. In another moment the mirror went dull and the sound ceased, and the smell of burning rose to their nostrils. They shrugged and moved on.

Later that night, Hresh came upon a silver globe small enough to fit comfortably in one hand. When he touched a stud on its upper surface it came suddenly to life, emitting a keen piercing sound and steady pulses of cool green light. Boldly he put his eye to the tiny opening from which the light was coming, and a vivid scene out of the time of the Great World sprang to view.

He saw half a dozen sapphire-eyes standing on some bright platform of white stone in a sector of the city that he did not recognize. The sky looked strangely bleak and leaden, and angry spirals of agitated clouds moved through it as though some terrible storm were under way; yet the sapphire-eyes were turning calmly toward one another and ponderously bowing in a sort of tranquil ritual.

The device thus seemed to replicate on a much smaller scale the images of Great World life that the huge device of levers and knobs in the plaza of the thirty-six towers had been showing him. Hresh stowed the little globe in his sash, to be studied more carefully later.

The next night, working in a rubble-filled vault on the opposite side of the city entirely, where it sloped upward toward the foothills of the mountain, it was Taniane’s turn to make an extraordinary discovery, in a dank, mildewy cistern five levels down from the surface. She stumbled into it in the most literal way, tripping and sprawling against a stone block that went swinging to one side to reveal a secret chamber.

“Hresh!” she called. “Here! Quickly!”

The hidden room had blossomed into brilliant golden light the moment the door opened. In its center, mounted on a dais of jade, stood a metal tube with a round hooded opening at its top, from which flashes of dazzling color came in flickering bursts. She started toward it, but Hresh seized her sharply by the wrist and held her back.

“Wait,” he said. “This thing is dangerous.”

“You know what it is?”

“I’ve seen them in — in visions,” he told her. “I watched the sapphire-eyes using them.”

“For what?”

“To take their own lives.”

Taniane gasped as though he had struck her.

“To take their lives ? Why would they do that?”

“I can’t imagine. But I saw them doing it. That glowing opening at the top — it’s capable of absorbing anything that comes near it, no matter how big. There’s a blackness inside that’s some sort of gate to another place, or perhaps to no place at all. They would walk up to it and practically stick their noses inside it, and suddenly it would swoop them up, I don’t begin to know how, and they’d be gone. It’s an eerie thing, and very seductive. In my vision I walked up to it myself and it would have had me too, except I was only seeing it in a vision. But this is a real one.”

He released her wrist and walked slowly toward it.

“Hresh — no, don’t—”

He laughed. “I only want to test it.”

Picking up a small chunk of broken statuary, he hefted it a couple of times and tossed it underhand toward the glowing hood. It hovered an instant as if suspended in the air just outside the zone of flickering, hissing light; and then it disappeared. Hresh stood expectantly, waiting to hear the thump of the stone fragment falling to the floor. But the thump never came.

“It works! It still works!”

“Try it again.”

“Right.” He found another piece of stone, a slender one as long as his arm, and in a gingerly way he held it up to the mouth of the device. There was a tingling sensation in his hand and forearm, and abruptly he was holding nothing at all. He stared at his fingers.

He went closer.

What if I poke my hand inside it? he asked himself.

He hovered in place before the metal column, leaning forward on the balls of his feet, frowning, considering it. It was an astonishingly powerful temptation. The thing was insidious. He remembered those immense booming mouth-things, long ago on the great sandy plain, drawing him toward them with their inexorable drumming. This was like that. He could feel it pulling him inward. He was half willing to let it. More than half, perhaps. The thing might offer him … answers. It might offer him … peace. It might …

Taniane must have guessed what was passing through his mind, for she came up to him quickly and caught him by the shoulder, drawing him back.

“What were you thinking just then?” she asked.

Hresh shuddered. “Just being curious. Maybe too curious.”

“Let’s get out of here, Hresh. One of these days you’ll be much too curious for your own good.”

“Wait,” he said. “Let me check just one more thing.”

“It’s deadly, Hresh.”

“I know that. Wait. Wait.”

“Hresh—”

“I’ll be more careful this time.”

He shuffled forward in a half-crouch, averting his eyes from the zone of brightness at the summit of the column. Bending forward, he slipped his arm around the middle of the metal tube and, as he had somehow expected, lifted it easily from its platform of green stone. It was warm to the touch, and it was hollow; he could probably have crushed it with a light pressure of his arm. Without difficulty he carried it across the room and set it down against the wall. The flickering lights of the hood, which had gone out when he lifted the thing, immediately returned.

“What are you doing, Hresh?”

“It’s portable, do you see?” he said. “We can take it with us.”

“No! Let it be. Hresh, it frightens me.”

“It frightens me, too. But I want to know more about it.”

“You always want to know more about everything. This one will kill you. Leave it, Hresh.”

“Not this. It may be the only one of its kind that remains in all the world. Do you want the Bengs to get it?”

“If it would eat them the way it ate the stone you fed it, that might not be so bad an idea.”

“And if they didn’t let it harm them, and found some use for it?”

“It has no use except to destroy, Hresh. If you’re worried about the Bengs getting it, then drop a heavy rock on it and maybe it’ll smash. But let’s clear out of here.”

He gave her a long searching look.

“I promise you, Taniane, that I’ll take care with this thing. But I mean to bring it along.”

She sighed.

“Hresh,” she said, shaking her head in resignation. “Oh, Hresh! Oh, you!”

Harruel lay dreaming, lost in rapture. The world was carpeted in flowers of a hundred subtle colors, and their soft perfume filled the air like music. He was lying in a smooth stone tub with Weiawala in one arm and Thaloin in the other, and warm sweet golden wine covered all three of them, lapping at his chin. All about him stood the sons of his flesh, a dozen of them, tall splendid warriors identical to him in face and virtue, singing his praises with lusty voices.

“Harruel!” they cried. “Harruel, Harruel, Harruel!”

And then somehow a discordant note crept in, someone singing in a creaky rusty screech of a voice:

“ Harruel! Harruel!”

“No, not you,” he said thickly. “You’re spoiling everything. Who are you, anyway? No son of mine, with a voice like that! Get away! Get away!”

“Harruel, wake up!”

“Stop bothering me. I’m the king.”

“Harruel!”

There was a hand at his throat, fingers digging in deep. He sat up instantly, roaring in rage, as the dream dissolved in shards about him. Weiawala gone, Thaloin gone, the lusty chorus of tall sons all gone, gone, gone. A gray, gritty film of wine covered his brain and shrouded his spirit. He ached in ten places, and someone had been eating turds with his mouth. Minbain stood above him. She had grasped him not by the throat but by the side of his neck: he could still feel the imprint of her fingers. She looked wild and fluttery with some urgent matter.

Angrily he rumbled, “How dare you disturb me when—”

“Harruel, the city is under attack.”

“—I’m trying to rest after—” He caught his breath. “What? Attack? Who? Koshmar? I’ll kill her! I’ll roast her and eat her!” Harruel struggled to his feet, bellowing. “Where is she? Bring me my spear! Call Konya! Salaman!”

“They’re already out there,” Minbain said, fretfully wringing her hands. “It isn’t Koshmar. Here, Harruel. Your spear, your shield. The hjjk-men, Harruel! That’s who it is. The hjjk-men?”

He rose and went stumbling toward the door. From without came the sounds of clamor, cutting through the fog that blanketed his perceptions.

Hjjk-men? Here?

Salaman had said something the other day about fearing an attack of an army of hjjk-men. Some vision he had had, some wild dream. Harruel had been able to make little sense of it. But it seemed to him that Salaman had said the invasion was far away, not to come for many months. That will teach him to trust visions, Harruel thought.

His head ached. The situation demanded clarity of mind. Pausing by the door, he scooped up the bowl of wine that always stood there and put it to his lips. It was more than half full, but he drained it in four robust gulps.

Better. Much better.

He stepped outside.

There was chaos out there. For a moment he had difficulty focusing his eyes. Then the wine took hold and he saw that the city was in the greatest peril. A building was on fire. The animals from the enclosure were loose, dashing in all directions, whinnying and baying. He heard shouts, screams, the cries of children. Just beyond the perimeter of the settled area was a swarm of hjjk-men, ten, fifteen, two dozen of them, armed with weapons that were too short to be swords, too long to be knives. Each tall, angular, many-armed hjjk-man held at least two blades, some three or even four, with which they flailed the air in ominous stabbing gestures. They danced ‘round and ‘round, making the dry chuttering sounds that gave them their name. Harruel saw a dead child lying in a pitiful heap, bloodied animals nearby, tribal possessions scattered everywhere.

“Harruel!” he shouted, running into the midst of the fray. “Harruel! Harruel! Harruel!”

Salaman, Konya, and Lakkamai already were hard at work, poking and prodding with long spears. Bruikkos had somehow acquired two hjjk blades, one in each hand, and he was right in the midst of the attacking force, leaping and cavorting like a madman, slashing at the orange breathing-tubes that ran beside each hjjk-man’s head. Nittin too was fighting, and even the women, furiously swinging poles, brooms, hatchets, anything.

Harruel’s sudden presence in the midst of them fired them all onward. He felt a stirring, a warlike frenzy, among the defenders.

He caught sight of his son Samnibolon on the front line. Though hardly more than a child, Samnibolon was wielding a pruning-hook with which he cut without mercy at the hard, many-jointed legs of the hjjk-men. Harruel let out a cry of delight at this proof of the boy’s warlike nature, and another when Samnibolon sent one of the enemy tottering. Galihine struck the wounded hjjk-man athwart his back with a knob-ended club, and Bruikkos, turning in an offhand way, delivered the fatal blow with a quick flick of one of his knives.

Pride and wine inflamed Harruel’s battle-lust. He laid about him with savage pleasure. As he battled his way toward Salaman’s side he used his size and weight to great advantage, kicking and jostling the hjjk-men to throw them off balance and send them scrabbling down on their many knees before he speared them. The best place for that, he discovered, was in the joint where the legs were attached to the hard carapace: the spear went in easily there, and he struck again and again, with great precision of aim and lethal effect.

He reached Salaman’s side, and together they advanced toward a group of three hjjks who stood back to back, waving their little swords as though they were stingers.

“Where did they come from?” Harruel asked. “Is this the vision you had?”

“No,” Salaman said. “What I saw was a great herd of vermilions — and a vast army of the insect-men—”

“And how many are these?”

“Twenty, perhaps. No more than that. A scouting party for the main force, I think. Lakkamai and Bruikkos blundered upon them by accident in the woods, and they came charging down into the city all at once.”

“We’ll kill them all,” Harruel said.

Already he saw eight or ten of the insect-creatures lying dead, perhaps more.

He sprang forward and jammed his spear into the clustering group of hjjk-men, forcing them to move apart from one another. Salaman at the same time set upon the leftmost one of the three, beating him to the ground with fierce prods of his weapon. Turning, Harruel plunged his spear into the fallen creature’s black-and-yellow carapace and felt a satisfying crunching.

Before he could withdraw it, though, the second hjjk-man ran toward him and drew a line of fire along his arm with what Harruel realized was his beak, not his blade. Harruel winced and grunted. He raised his leg in a tremendous kick that shattered the hjjk-man’s jaw. Nittin came from somewhere and cut through the hjjk’s breathing-tubes. It fell over dead.

“We’re getting there,” Salaman said, between thrusts of his spear. “Must be no more than six or seven of them left. They’re mean, but they don’t really know how to fight, do they?”

“They fight in swarms,” said Nittin. “Ten to your one, that’s how they like to do it, Hresh told me. But they didn’t send enough this time. Behind you, Harruel!”

Turning, Harruel saw two hjjks coming at once. He knocked them both down with a sweeping swing of his spear and thrust its butt end into one narrow, fragile, exposed throat. Salaman disposed of the other attacker.

Harruel grinned. He could foresee the end of the battle now, and already he was looking forward to the wine that waited for him in the celebration of victory.

Lakkamai was chasing a frantically scuttling hjjk-man up the trail to the crater’s rim. Konya and Galihine had another cornered near Nittin’s house. A third had fallen into Salaman’s infernal trench and two of the women were jabbing at its claws as it tried to climb out.

Harruel rested on his spear. It is all over, he realized joyously.

But his elation was short-lived. Fatigue and pain overwhelmed him. There was a terrible pounding in his chest, and the fiery wound in his arm was throbbing and streaming blood. The wine that had sustained him through the heat of the battle had burned away now, leaving him grim and weary.

Looking back now at the city, Harruel saw that it was the palace that was burning. The animals had all escaped. He could not tell which child it was that had died; and now he saw one of the women dead too, or badly wounded. So it was not as great a victory as it had seemed.

Bleakness swept in upon him.

This is the punishment of the gods upon me, he thought.

For all my sins. For my forcing of Kreun, and for my other cruelties and rages, and for every unworthy thought, and for my arrogance. For raising my hand to Minbain. And for filling my head with too much wine. The hjjks have come to destroy this city that I have built, which was to have been my monument. We have killed these few, but what of the vast army that Salaman saw in his vision? How will we hold them away? How will we fend off those monstrous vermilions when they come trampling through our streets? How will we survive at all, when the main army comes?

It was another warm night and the air was heavy and close. It was warm all the time nowadays. The cold, harsh time just after the end of the Long Winter was only a dim memory. Yet despite the clinging warmth of the evening Koshmar felt a chill that grew from her bones and spread outward through her whole body, running between her fur and her skin. That chill never left her now.

Restlessly she prowled the settlement. She rarely slept at all any longer, but wandered far into the night, drifting in a lightheaded way from building to building. Sometimes she imagined that she was her own ghost, floating about weightlessly, invisible, silent. But the pain always remained with her to remind her of the burdens of the flesh.

She had said no more to anyone about leaving Vengiboneeza. That had been only a bluff, designed to elicit the truth from Torlyri about whether she would go or stay; and, having had the truth now — for she was sure of it, that Torlyri would never abandon her Helmet Man — Koshmar could not bring herself to issue the order to go. Nor had Hresh said anything to her about it again, or Torlyri. The plan remained in limbo. Is it because my illness has made me too weak to deal with the task of organizing the withdrawal? she wondered. Or is it only that I know our departure would mean the end for me with Torlyri, and I’m unable to face that?

She could not tell which it was. Personal griefs had become hopelessly entangled with public duty. She was weary, weary, weary, profoundly troubled, profoundly confused. All that she could do was wait and hope that time would take care of things. Perhaps this illness would go from her and her strength would return. Or perhaps Torlyri would grow tired of her infatuation with that Beng. Time will solve everything, Koshmar thought. Time is the only ally that I have.

Sudden brightness caught her eye. A single gleam of light came from one of the unused buildings on the far side of the plaza, near the southern edge of the settlement. Then all was dark again, as if a shutter had been hastily closed. Koshmar frowned. No one had any business over there, especially at this hour. All the People were asleep, except only Barnak, who was on sentry duty, and Koshmar had seen him just a little while ago, patrolling the settlement’s northern border.

She went to investigate, wondering if a party of Beng spies had slipped in and was hiding right here in the tribe’s own territory. What a troublesome folk they were! She had never trusted them, despite their smiles and their feasts. They had taken Torlyri from her. Soon they would have Vengiboneeza too. Dawinno shrivel them!

The building was a five-sided one-story structure of pinkish stone that had the sleekness of metal, or perhaps it was of a metal that had the texture of fine stone. A single triangular window was cut into each of its five faces, and these were covered over by awnings that had the texture of fine gauze but the solidity of wood. Koshmar pushed gently against one. It would not give. She went to another, pushing with more force. It yielded just a crack, enough to let a shaft of yellow light escape. She held her breath and opened it a bit wider, and leaned forward to look inside.

She saw one large room, set deep so that its floor was well below the level of the plaza. The sooty light of animal-fat lamps provided the only illumination. In the center of the room stood a statue carved from white stone, the figure of a tall long-limbed figure, angular and slim, with a high-domed head and no sensing-organ at all: a statue of Ryyig Dream-Dreamer, from the looks of it. About the statue were arranged the leafy boughs of trees, heaps of fruit, a few small animals in wicker cages. Five of the People were crouched beside these offerings, heads bowed, whispering softly. By the dim light Koshmar could make out Haniman, Kreun, Cheysz, and Delim. And that one, with his back to her — was that Preyne? No, Jalmud, she decided. Jalmud, yes.

Koshmar watched the ceremony in mounting dismay that began to grow into shock and horror. It was impossible for her to hear what they were saying, so low were their tones, but they seemed to be muttering some sort of prayers. Now and then one of them would push a bundle of twigs or a clump of fruit closer to the statue of the Dream-Dreamer. Cheysz had her head pressed right against the room’s unpaved floor; Kreun too was bowed far down, while Haniman bobbed back and forth in a rocking movement that had an almost hypnotic rhythm. He seemed to be the leader; he spoke and the others repeated.

When she was able to pull herself away, Koshmar turned and ran toward the temple. Heart beating furiously, she hurried to Hresh’s chambers and hammered on the door.

“Hresh! Hresh, wake up! It’s Koshmar!”

He peered out. “I’m working with the chronicles.”

“That can wait. Come with me. There’s something that you have to see.”

Together they hurried back across the plaza. Barnak, having finally become aware of Koshmar’s movements, appeared from somewhere and made a gesture of inquiry, but she waved him fiercely away. The fewer of the People that saw this, the better. Leading Hresh to the five-sided building, she signaled him to silence and pulled him up against the window that she had pushed ajar. He stared in; after a moment his hands gripped the sill with sudden excitement; he drew himself up, thrust his head nearly inside the window frame. When he stepped down again a little while later his eyes were wide with surprise and his breath was coming in tense gusts.

“Well? What do you think they’re doing in there?”

“A religious rite is what it looks like to me.”

Koshmar nodded vigorously. “Exactly! Exactly! But which god are they worshipping, do you think?”

“No god at all,” said Hresh. “That’s a statue of a human — of a Dream-Dreamer—”

“A Dream-Dreamer, yes. They’re worshipping a Dream-Dreamer, Hresh! What is this? What new kind of worship has sprung up here?”

As though in a daze, Hresh said, “They think the humans are gods — they’re praying to the humans—”

“To the Dream-Dreamers. We are the humans, Hresh.”

Hresh shrugged. “Whatever you say. But those five have a different idea, I think.”

“Yes,” said Koshmar. “They’re willing to turn themselves into monkeys, just as you seem to be. And to kneel down and pray to that ancient chunk of stone.” Koshmar turned away suddenly and sat, cradling her head in her arms in despair. “Ah, Hresh, Hresh, how wrong I was not to listen to you! We are losing our humanity in Vengiboneeza. Our very selves, Hresh. We are becoming mere animals. I have no doubt now that you were correct. We have to leave this place at once.”

“Koshmar—”

“At once! I’ll make the proclamation in the morning. We pack and we go, in two weeks or less. Before this poison spreads any further among us.” She rose unsteadily. In the strongest tone she could summon she added, “And say nothing of what you’ve seen to anyone!”

It was what Hresh had wanted, and his soul should have surged with joy at Koshmar’s decision. For the awakening world in all its brightness and wonder lay before him, and he was eager to go forth into it and penetrate its infinite mysteries.

But at the same time he was struck with a powerful sense of loss and sadness. He had not finished his work in Vengiboneeza. Koshmar’s decision fell now like a blade across his soul, cutting him off from all in this city that he was yet to unearth and recover. Whatever relics of the Great World they left behind, he knew, would ultimately fall into the hands of the Bengs.

The settlement stirred with frantic bustle. The livestock had to be gathered and made ready for the march; crops must be harvested; all the possessions of the tribe had to be packed. There was scarcely any time for rest, with the departure date only a matter of days away. Now and then Bengs came to call at the settlement, and looked on in perplexity at what was taking place. Koshmar rushed from task to task, so harried and depleted that her condition was a matter of common discussion. Torlyri was rarely seen in this time, and those in need of comfort and calming ways turned instead to Boldirinthe, who offered herself in Torlyri’s place. When Torlyri did appear, she, too, had an unaccustomed dark and tense look to her.

Hresh heard people wagering that the departure could not possibly be achieved by Koshmar’s deadline, that it would be postponed a week, a month, a season. Yet the frantic work went on and no postponements were announced.

To Taniane he said, “This is our last chance. We have to get the Seekers together and search out as much as we can find and carry away.”

“But Koshmar wants us to drop everything else so we can get ready for the march.”

Hresh scowled. “Koshmar doesn’t understand. Half the time she’s still living back in the cocoon, I think.”

Though uneasy at the thought of defying Koshmar, Taniane yielded in the end to Hresh’s urgency. But reassembling the old team of Seekers proved difficult. Konya had departed with Harruel; Shatalgit and Praheurt, burdened with one child and shortly expecting another, had no time for extra work; cautious Sinistine cited Koshmar’s orders to halt all present projects to concentrate on the departure, and she could not be shaken from that.

That left only Orbin and Haniman. Haniman brusquely told them that he had no interest in exploring with them, and would not stay for further discussion. Orbin, like Sinistine, said he meant to abide by Koshmar’s decree.

“But we need you,” Hresh said. “There are places where the walls have fallen in, where heavy slabs block our way. The best artifacts may be in those difficult places. Your strength will be useful to us, Orbin.”

Orbin said, shrugging, “The settlement has to be dismantled. My strength will be useful in that, too. And Koshmar says—”

“Yes, I know. But this is more important.”

“To you.”

“I beg you, Orbin. We were friends once.”

“Were we?” said Orbin impassively.

The thrust was a painful one. Childhood playmates, yes, they had been that; but that was years ago, and what had Orbin been to him, or he to Orbin, since that time? They were strangers now, Hresh the wily wise man of the tribe, Orbin simply a warrior, useful perhaps for his muscles but not otherwise. Hresh gave up the attempt. He and Taniane would have to do the final exploring alone.

Once more they slipped off under cover of darkness. The place where he had found the repair artificials at work was Hresh’s goal once again; and this time he carried the Barak Dayir with him.

“Look there,” Taniane cried. “A Beng mark on the wall!”

“Yes. I see it.”

“Should we be trespassing here?”

“Trespassing?” he said hotly. “Who was in Vengiboneeza first, we or the Bengs?”

“But we turned back at this point all the other times we saw signs of the Bengs nearby.”

“Not this time,” said Hresh.

They continued forward. The great pyramidal mound of broken columns came into view. Beng ribbons dangled on the facade of the shattered temple across the way. Two repair artificials wandered past, paying no heed to Hresh and Taniane as they went about their solemn work of poking through the rubble and shoring up the swaying walls.

“Over there, Hresh,” said Taniane quietly.

He glanced to his left. By moonlight the terrible shadows of two Beng helmets rose like monstrous stains on the side of a building of white stone. The Bengs themselves, two husky warriors who had been riding a single vermilion, were standing beside their beast, talking calmly.

“They don’t see us,” Taniane said.

“I know.”

“Can we slip around past them somehow?”

Hresh shook his head. “We’ll let them see us.”

“What?”

“We have to.” He drew forth the Wonderstone and let it rest a moment in the palm of his hand. Taniane stared at it with mingled fear and fascination evident on her face. He felt sudden fear himself: not for the sight of the Barak Dayir, but for the risks and complexities of what he was about to do.

He reached down and let his sensing-organ take the talisman. The music of the Wonderstone began to rise in his soul. It calmed him and soothed him some. Beckoning to Taniane to follow him, he stepped into the open, walking toward the Bengs, who looked toward him in surprise and displeasure.

To achieve control, now, without harming them, certainly without taking their lives—

Lightly Hresh touched their souls with his. He felt the two Bengs recoil, felt them angrily struggling to free themselves of his intrusion. Trembling, Hresh kept the contact from breaking. He could not forget that first Helmet Man long ago, who had died rather than let himself be entered this way. Perhaps my touch was too heavy that time, Hresh thought. He must not kill these two. Above all, he must not kill them. But the Barak Dayir guided him now.

The Bengs squirmed and fought, and then they eased and went slack, and stood gaping at him like dumb beasts of the jungle. Hresh let his tightly drawn breath escape. It was working! They were his!

“I have come to explore this place,” he told them.

The Bengs’ eyes were bright with tension. But they could not break his grip. First one, then the other, nodded to him.

“You will give me any assistance I require,” said Hresh. “Is that understood?”

“Yes.” A harsh, angry, reluctant whispered assent.

A flood of relief cascaded through him. He held them as though in a harness. But they would not suffer harm.

Taniane glanced at him in wonder. He smiled and touched one finger to his lips.

Then he looked toward one of the repair artificials nearby, and summoned it. Its small mechanical mind responded unhesitatingly, and it swung around and began to move quickly toward the red stone doorway in the pavement that Hresh had seen before. One of its metal arms unreeled and touched the door, which immediately slid back along its track.

“Come,” Hresh said to Taniane.

They went down into the brilliantly lit subterranean chamber that lay open to him. A profusion of complex and intricate machines stood before them, gleaming, perfect. A dozen or more of the small repair artificials moved through the rows of devices, evidently performing minor maintenance jobs; and at the far side of the huge room Hresh saw one of the repair machines at work on another of its own that stood motionless. So that was how these things had endured for so many thousands of years! One artificial repairs another, Hresh thought. They could last forever like that.

To the one that had opened the doorway for him Hresh said, “Tell me the functions of these devices.”

By way of reply it opened a niche in the wall and drew out a golden-bronze globe small enough for Hresh to hold in his hand. Its metal skin was translucent, and he could see a smaller globe of shining imperishable quicksilver rolling about within it. There was no control stud on it, or any other visible means of operating it. But when he touched it with his mind, amplified as it was by the Barak Dayir, the soul of the little globe opened to him as though swinging back on hinges, and he plunged forward into dizzying realms of knowledge.

“Hresh?” Taniane asked. “Hresh, are you all right?”

He nodded. He felt dazed, awed, astounded. In a swift, intoxicating rush of data the globe told him what uses the things he saw before him had. This device here: it was a wall-builder. This one: it paved streets. This one measured the depth and stability of foundations. This one erected columns. This one cut through rock. This one transported debris. This one — this one — this one—

He had seen devices something like these long before, during his first explorations of the ruins. He remembered how they had run amok when he tried to operate them, wildly building walls and erecting bridges and digging pits and demolishing buildings as if operating by their own whim and fancy alone. He had had to hide those machines away, for they were worse than useless: they were dangerous, they were destructive, they were uncontrollable.

But this little golden globe of quicksilver in his hand — it must be the master control device, Hresh realized, the one that all the others obeyed. With its aid, he could build an entire Vengiboneeza with these machines! A purposeful mind, focused through the globe, could direct this host of city-building machines in anything that needed to be done. No more bridges from nowhere to nowhere, no more walls running in lunatic profusion up the middle of boulevards — but only orderly construction, in accordance with whatever plan he chose. He would be the master, and this globe the foreman, and these other machines the builders.

“What do you have, Hresh? What is all this?”

“Miracles and wonders,” he said in a hushed voice. “Miracles and wonders!”

He gestured to the two Bengs, who were looking on from outside the doorway as though stupefied. Though they still strained against his control, they could not break it.

“You!” he called. “In here! Start carrying this stuff out and loading it on your vermilion!”

It took a dozen trips back and forth before everything that seemed to Hresh to be important had been transported to the settlement of the People. Just before dawn Hresh sent the two Helmet Men on their way, with his warmest thanks, and their minds wiped clean of all that they had done that night.

Within the temple Torlyri worked with frantic zeal by fluttering candle-light, packing all the holy things for the journey they would be making. Now and then she paused and stood leaning against the cool stone wall, breathing deeply. Sometimes she began to tremble uncontrollably. Only a few days remained before the departure from Vengiboneeza.

Hresh would take care of the chronicles and everything that was associated with them. The rest, all that the tribe had accumulated in its thousands of years of secluded existence, fell to her responsibility. Little carved amulets, and bowls and statuettes sacred to this god or that, and wands used in the healing of disease, and bright polished pebbles whose origin and purpose had been forgotten but which had been handed down from offering-woman to offering-woman as cherished talismans.

Boldirinthe had helped her with the task the past two nights. But yesterday, while they were working, she had turned to her suddenly and said, “Are you weeping, Torlyri?”

“Am I?”

“I see the tears on your cheeks.”

“From weariness, Boldirinthe. Only weariness.”

“It makes you sad to think of leaving here, eh, Torlyri? We were happy in Vengiboneeza, weren’t we?”

“The gods decree. The gods provide.”

“If I could be of any comfort to you—”

“To comfort the comforter? No, Boldirinthe. Please.” Torlyri laughed. “You misunderstand what you see. There’s no sadness in me. I’m very tired, that’s all.”

Tonight Torlyri worked by herself. She felt the tears pressing close behind her eyes and knew that they would flow freely at the slightest spur; and she could not bear to be the recipient of Boldirinthe’s compassion, or anyone’s. If she broke down, she must do it alone.

With trembling fingers she wrapped the sacred things in bits of fur or woven containers and laid them away in the baskets that would be carried with the tribe on the trek. Sometimes she kissed one before she put it away. These were the things that had been the tools of her trade throughout her life, by which Torlyri had ensured the continued kindness of the gods. They were only little objects of stone or bone or wood or metal, but they had godliness in them, and power. And more than that: she had lavished her love upon them. They were as familiar to her as her own hands. Now, one by one, they disappeared into their baskets.

As the shelves emptied she could feel her fate rushing headlong toward her. Time was growing very short.

She heard footsteps outside the sanctuary. She looked up, frowning.

“Torlyri?”

Boldirinthe’s voice. She has come anyway, Torlyri thought in irritation. Going to the door, she thrust her head out and said, “I told you, I had to work alone tonight. Some of these talismans only I may behold, Boldirinthe.”

“I know,” said Boldirinthe gently. “It’s not my wish to trouble you at your work, Torlyri. But I bring a message for you, and I thought you would want to have it.”

“From whom?”

“Your Helmet Man. He is here and wishes to see you.”

“Here?”

“Just outside the temple. In the shadows.”

“No Beng may enter this building,” said Torlyri, growing flustered. “Tell him to wait. I’ll come out to him. No, no, I don’t want anyone to see us together tonight.” She knotted her hands tensely and moistened her lips. “You know where the storehouse is, on the other side of the building, where Hresh keeps the things he’s dug up in the city? See if there’s anyone in there now, and if it’s free, take him there. Then come back and let me know.”

Boldirinthe nodded and disappeared.

Torlyri attempted to return to her work, but it was hopeless; she fumbled things, she nearly dropped them, she could not remember the blessings she was supposed to utter as she lifted them from their places. After a few minutes she gave up entirely and knelt at her little altar, elbows forward on its edge, head downward, praying for calmness.

“He’s waiting for you,” Boldirinthe said softly behind her.

Torlyri closed the cabinet of holies and snuffed the candle. In the darkness she paused to give Boldirinthe a tender embrace and a light kiss, and to whisper her thanks. Then she stepped through the passageway that led to the plaza, and went around the side of the many-angled building to Hresh’s storeroom.

It was a warm mild night, with no breeze stirring, and bands of bright-edged clouds lying across the moon. Yet Torlyri shivered. She felt a tightness in her belly.

Trei Husathirn, a single glowberry cluster in his hand to light his way, was pacing like a caged creature in the storeroom when Torlyri entered. He was wearing his helmet, and he seemed bigger than Torlyri remembered. She had not seen him for some days now; there was simply too much work to do at the settlement. He prowled about, poking here and there at the collection of devices that Hresh and his Seekers had assembled. Hearing Torlyri, he whirled and threw up his arms as if to defend himself.

“It’s only me,” she said, smiling.

They rushed toward each other. His arms encircled her and he pulled her tight, nearly crushing the breath from her. She felt his body quivering. After a moment they parted. His face looked drawn and tense.

“What are these machines?” he asked.

Torlyri said, shrugging, “You’d have to ask Hresh. He uncovered them all over the city. They’re Great World things.”

“Do they work?”

“How would I know?”

“And will he take them with him when you leave?”

“As many as he can, if I know Hresh.” Torlyri wondered if it had been wrong to allow Trei Husathirn to enter here. Perhaps he should not see these things. He was her mate, yes, or something like her mate, but still he was a Beng, and these were secret things of the tribe.

His voice, hard and anxious, troubled her also. He seemed almost frightened.

She reached for his hand and held it.

“Do you know how much I’ve missed you?” she asked.

“You could have come to me.”

“No. No. It was impossible. Everything must be properly packed — there are blessings to say — it’s a job that should take weeks and weeks. I don’t know how I can ever finish it in time. You shouldn’t have come tonight, Trei Husathirn.”

“I had to talk to you.”

That sounded wrong. He should have said, I had to see you, I wanted to see you, I couldn’t stay away from you. But he had to talk to her? About what?

She released his hand and drew back, uncertain, uneasy.

“What is it?” she asked.

He was silent a moment. Then he said, “Has there been any change in the day of departure?”

“None.”

“So it is just a few more days.”

“Yes,” Torlyri said.

“What shall we do?”

She wanted to look away, but she kept her eyes steadily on him. “What do you want to do, Trei Husathirn?”

“You know what I want. To come with you.”

“How could you?”

“Yes,” he said. “How could I? What do I know of your ways, your gods, your language, your anything? All I know of your people is you. I would never fit in.”

“In time you might,” she said.

“Do you think so?”

Now she did look away.

“No,” she told him, barely able to make the single word emerge from her lips.

“So I conclude, after asking myself the question a thousand times. I have no place with Koshmar’s tribe. I would always be a stranger. An enemy, even.”

“Surely not an enemy!”

“An enemy, to Koshmar, and to others, I think.” Suddenly he crushed the glowberry cluster in his hand and threw it to the floor. In the darkness Torlyri felt unexpected fear of him. What did he have in mind? To kill them both, out of thwarted love? But all he did was take her hands in his and draw her close again, and hold her in a tight embrace. Then he said, in a hollow, distant voice, “And also I would have to leave my helmet-brothers, my chieftain, my gods. I would have to leave Nakhaba!” He was shivering. “I would leave everything. I would no longer know myself. I would be lost.”

Her hand stroked his ear, his cheek, the bare scarred place along his shoulder. By some strand of fugitive light she saw his face, and a track of tears glistening on it. She thought that the sight would make her own tears flow, but no, no, she had no tears at all any longer.

“What shall we do?” he asked again.

Torlyri caught hold of his hand and pressed it to her breast. “Here. Lie down with me. On the floor, in front of all these preposterous machines. That is what we will do. Lie down. Here, Trei Husathirn. With me. With me.”

Morning had come. Hresh looked down lovingly at Taniane, who lay sleeping deeply, exhausted by their night’s foraging. Quietly he went from their room into the open. All was still. There was a rich heavy sweetness in the air, as if some night-blooming flower had opened just a little while before.

It had been a night of wonder. The last barriers to the departure from Vengiboneeza had fallen. The little ball of golden-bronze metal ensured that.

Now Hresh held in one hand a different ball, the silvery sphere that they had found some nights earlier. He had not managed to find time before this to examine it properly, but in this misty dawn, after a night without sleep, a night when sleep had been unthinkable, a night of heroic endeavor, the small sphere weighed profoundly upon his soul. It seemed to be calling to him. He looked around, but no one was in sight. The settlement still slept, Hresh hid himself away in a crevice between two mighty alabaster statues of sapphire-eyes who had lost their heads and touched the stud that activated the sphere.

For a moment nothing happened. Had he burned the sphere out, that one time that he had used it? Or perhaps he had not pressed the stud hard enough just now. He cupped it in his palm, wondering. Then there came from it that sharp high sound that it had made before, and pulses of cool green light shot from it again.

Hastily he put his eye to its tiny viewing hole, and the Great World once again was made visible to him.

This time there was music as well as vision. Out of nowhere came a slow, heavy melody, three strands wound one about another, one that was of a dull gray tonality, one that reached his soul in the hue of deep blue, and the third a hard, aggressive orange. The music had the character of a dirge. Hresh understood that it was music fit to signify the last days of the Great World.

Through that tiny hole Hresh found that he had access to a vast and sweeping panorama of the city.

All Vengiboneeza was displayed to him in its final hours. It was a fearful sight.

The sky over the city is black, and terrible black winds sweep through it, creating patterns of turbulence that are black on black. A shroud of dust chokes the air. Feeble beams of sunlight dance erratically through it, falling weakly to the ground rather than striking it. A faint rime of frost is beginning to form on the tips of plants, on the edges of ponds, on windows, on the air itself.

A death-star has lately fallen, Hresh knows. One of the first ones, or even the very first.

With an impact that made all the world shudder, the death-star has plummeted to earth somewhere close by Vengiboneeza — or perhaps not there, perhaps on the other side of the world altogether — and a great black cloud of debris has risen higher than the highest mountains. The air is dense with it. All the sun’s warmth is cut off. The only light that breaks through is a pale wintry gleam. The world is beginning to freeze.

This is only the beginning. One by one the death-stars will fall, every fifty years, every five hundred, who knows how often, and each one will bring new calamity over the interminable length of the Long Winter to come.

But for the Great World the first impact will be the fatal one. The sapphire-eyes and the vegetals and the sea-lords and the rest inhabit a world where the air is mild and gentle and winter never comes. Winter is only a faint memory out of prehistoric antiquity, a mere ancestral dream. And now winter returns; and of the Six Peoples only the hjjk-folk and the mechanicals will be capable of surviving it without special protection, though the mechanicals will choose, Hresh cannot understand why, to let themselves perish.

For the Great World it is the time of last times.

A bitter wind blows. A few swirling white flakes dance in the air. Already the new cold has brought frightened beasts sweeping in a wild migration toward the shelter that Vengiboneeza affords. Hresh sees them everywhere, hooves and horns and tendrils and fangs, a horde of shining terrified eyes and gaping mouths and sweat-flecked jaws.

The harsh winds are a mighty drum overhead, beating out the solemn rhythm that commands the animals to seek refuge here. Under the force of that horrific gale they run on and on and on. They swarm in the streets of the city, racing to and fro as if frantic activity by itself will keep them warm enough to live. The wondrous white villas of Vengiboneeza are beset. Wherever the vision lets Hresh look, animals of a thousand kinds climb walls, slither across thresholds, burrow into bed-chambers. Great snuffling herds of massive quadrupeds plunge and stampede in the boulevards. The raucous cries of the four-legged invaders cruelly punctuate the serene music that streams from the silvery sphere.

And yet, and yet, and yet—

The sapphire-eyes—

Hresh sees them going steadily about their business in the midst of the madness. The huge crocodilians are calm, terribly calm. It is as though nothing more serious than a light summer rainstorm has begun to fall.

All about them, fear-maddened creatures of the wilds boil and writhe and leap and prance. And calmly, calmly, never betraying the slightest sense of alarm or dismay, the sapphire-eyes pack away their treasures, dictate instructions for their care, perform their regular obeisances to the gods who even now are sending doom.

Hresh sees them gathering in placid groups to listen to music, to watch the play of colors on giant crystals set in the walls of buildings, to indulge in quiet, reasonable discussions of abstruse issues. In all ways, their normal life continues. A few, but only a few, go to the machines of the hooded lights and are swallowed up; but perhaps this too is normal, and has nothing to do with the advancing catastrophe.

Yet they know that doom is here. They must! They must! They simply do not care.

The cold deepens. The wind becomes more fierce. The sky is starless, moonless, a black beyond black. A chilling rain has begun to fall, and it turns to snow and then to hard particles of ice before it reaches the ground. A deadly shining transparent jacket coats every tree, every building. The world has taken on the glitter of mortality.

The other peoples are responding now to the devastation, each in its own way.

The hjjks are leaving the city. They have arrayed themselves in an endless double file, yellow and black, yellow and black, and are marching out via the southern gate. They are unhurried, perfectly disciplined, totally and monstrously orderly in their evacuation.

The sea-lords are leaving too, and they show no panic either as they go down to the waterfront and slip away from shore. But the lake is beginning to freeze even as they enter it, and there is no doubt that they are going to their deaths. They must know that.

The mechanicals also are departing, by way of the grand avenue that winds through the foothills of the mountain wall and up and over it toward the east. The gleaming dome-headed machines move in a quick, jerky way. Perhaps they are bound for the rendezvous point in the far-off plains where Hresh and his tribe will find them, dead and covered with the rust of millennia, one day in the very distant future.

There is no exodus for the vegetals. They are already dying. They crumple where they stand, poor blasted flowers, slender stems and limbs turning black, withered petals folding over and into themselves. As they topple, mechanicals which have not yet left the city appear and sweep them up. The city will be maintained to the last.

Of all the Six Peoples only the humans cannot be seen. Hresh scans the whole city for the pale, elongated creatures with the somber eyes and the high-vaulted heads, but no, no, there is not a single one to be found. They are gone already, it seems: shrewd anticipators, bound on their journey — where? — to safety? To a quiet death elsewhere, as the sea-lords and mechanicals will have? Hresh cannot say. He is baffled and numbed by the sight of the end of Vengiboneeza. He is mesmerized by those black winds sweeping across the black sky, by the somber death-music, by the migrations of the Great World beings outward and of the wild forest denizens into the city. And by that incomprehensible acceptance that the sapphire-eyes unanimously display as the time of last times descends upon them.

He watches until he can bear to watch no more. To the end, the sapphire-eyes show indifference to their doom.

At last he presses the stud with a trembling finger and the vision ceases, the music dies away. He falls to his knees, stunned, overwhelmed.

He knew that he did not understand a thing of what he had seen.

As never before, his soul churned and bubbled with questions; and he had no answers for them, not one, nothing at all.

In the morning when Koshmar tried to rise from her couch a powerful unseen hand pressed itself between her breasts and hurled her back down. She was alone. Torlyri had gone to the temple the night before to continue her task of packing the holy things, and she had never returned. Gone off to her Beng, Koshmar thought. She lay quietly for a moment, panting, wincing, rubbing her breastbone, making no effort to get up. Something was burning within her chest. My heart is on fire, she thought. Or it could be my lungs. I am consumed in fire from within.

Carefully she attempted to sit up again. This time no hand pushed her back, but still it was a slow process, with much shivering and shaking, and several long pauses while she balanced herself on the tips of her fingers and struggled not to slip backward. She felt very cold. She was grateful that Torlyri was not here to see her weakness, her illness, her pain. No one must see; but especially not Torlyri.

By second sight she groped outside her house and became aware of Threyne passing by, with her boy Thaggoran. Shakily Koshmar called to her, and stood in her doorway, grasping the frame, holding her shoulders back, fighting to make it seem that all was well with her.

“You summoned me?” Threyne said.

“Yes.” Koshmar’s voice sounded husky and quavering in her own ears. “I need to speak with Hresh. Will you find him and send him here to me?”

“Of course, Koshmar.”

But Threyne hesitated, not going off to do as Koshmar had bidden her. Her eyes were veiled and troubled. She sees that I am ill, Koshmar thought. But she doesn’t dare ask me what the matter is.

Koshmar glanced at young Thaggoran. He was a sturdy boy, long-limbed, bright-eyed, shy. Though he was past seven he stood half-hidden behind his mother, peering uncertainly at the chieftain. Koshmar smiled at him.

“How tall he’s grown, Threyne!” she exclaimed, with all the heartiness she could manage to muster. “I recall the day he was born. We were just outside Vengiboneeza, then, near the place of the water-strider, when your time came. And we made a bower for you and Torlyri saw you through your time of delivery, and Hresh came to give the boy his birth-name. You remember that, do you?”

Threyne gave Koshmar a strange look, and Koshmar felt a new stab of pain.

She must think my mind has softened, Koshmar thought, to be asking her if she remembers the day her own firstborn came into the world. With a hand that she struggled desperately to keep from shaking she reached out and stroked the boy lightly along his cheek. He shrank back from her.

“Go,” Koshmar said. “Get me Hresh!”

Hresh was a strangely long time in coming. Maybe he is off rummaging in the ancient ruins one last time, Koshmar thought. Desperately trying to grab whatever he can still find before the tribe leaves Vengiboneeza. Then she reminded herself that Hresh was mated now, or almost so, and perhaps he was simply deep in coupling or twining with Taniane just now and unwilling to be disturbed. It was odd to think of Hresh as being mated, or twining, or doing any of the things that went with those things. For her he would always be that wild boy who had tried to slip out of the cocoon for a look at the river valley one morning long ago.

Finally he came. He had a rough-eyed, ragged look about him, the look of one who has had no sleep at all. But the moment he saw Koshmar he caught his breath and became suddenly alert, as though the sight of her had shocked him into full wakefulness.

“What has happened to you?” he demanded instantly.

“Nothing. Nothing. Come inside.”

“Are you ill?”

“No. No!” Koshmar swayed and nearly fell. “Yes,” she said, half-whispering it. Hresh seized her by the arm as she tottered, and guided her to a stone bench covered with furs. For a long while she sat there with her head down, while waves of pain and fever went rolling through her. After a time she said, very quietly, “I’m dying.”

“It can’t be.”

“Step inside my spirit for a moment and feel what I feel, and you’ll know the truth.”

Hresh said, agitated, “Let me go for Torlyri.”

“No! Not Torlyri!”

“She knows the healing arts.”

“I’m aware of that, boy. I’m not interested in having her practice her arts on me.”

Hresh crouched before her and tried to look her in the face, but she would not meet his eyes.

“Koshmar, no! No! You’re still strong. You can be healed, if you’ll only allow—”

“No.”

“Does Torlyri know how sick you are?”

Koshmar shrugged. “How can I say what Torlyri knows or does not know? She’s a wise woman. I’ve never spoken of this with anyone. Certainly not with her.”

“How long have you been like this?”

“Some time,” said Koshmar. “It has come upon me slowly.” Now she did raise her head, and summoned some of the vigor that once had been hers. In a louder voice she said, “But I didn’t summon you here to talk about my health.”

Angrily Hresh shook his head. “I know some healing arts myself. If you don’t want Torlyri to know, fine. Torlyri doesn’t have to know a thing. But let me cast the disease from you. Let me invoke Mueri and Friit and do what you need to have done for you.”

“No.”

“No?”

“My time has come, Hresh. Let it be as it must be. I won’t be leaving Vengiboneeza when the tribe departs.”

“Of course you will, Koshmar.”

“I command you to cease telling me what I will do!”

“But how can we leave you behind?”

“I will be dead,” Koshmar said. “Or nearly so. You will say the death-words over me and you will put me in a peaceful place, and then you will all march away. Is that understood, Hresh? It is my last order, that the tribe is to go forth from this city. But I give it knowing that I will not be among you when you leave. You have spent your entire life disobeying me, but perhaps this one time you’ll grant me the right to have my own wishes followed. I want no grief and I want no noise made over me. I am at the limit-age; I am at my death-day.”

“If only you would tell me what troubles you, so that I could do a healing—”

“What troubles me, Hresh, is being alive. The cure will soon be offered me. One more word from you of this sort and I’ll dismiss you from your post, while I’m still chieftain. Will you be quiet now? There are things I must tell you before I lose the strength.”

“Go on,” Hresh said.

“The journey the tribe will be taking will be a very long one. That I foresee with death-wisdom, that it will carry you to the far places of the world. You can’t make such a journey bearing everything on your backs, as we did when we came here from the cocoon. Go to the Bengs, Hresh, and ask them for four or five young vermilions to be beasts of burden for us. If they are our friends, as they claim so loudly to be, then they’ll give them. If they won’t give them to you, then ask Torlyri to have her Beng lover steal some, and so be it. Be sure that the ones you get are both male and female, so that in times to come we can propagate our own.”

Hresh nodded. “That shouldn’t be very difficult.”

“No, not for you. Next: there must be a new chieftain. You and Torlyri will choose her. You should pick someone fairly young, and strong-willed, and strong-bodied as well. She will have to guide the tribe through many difficult years.”

“Is there anyone you would suggest, Koshmar?”

Koshmar contrived a flickering smile. “Ah, Hresh, Hresh, you are sly to the end! With such respect you ask the dying Koshmar to make the choice, when I know already that the choice is made!”

“I asked you in all honor, Koshmar.”

“Did you, now? Well, then: I answer you as you ask, and tell you what you already know. There’s only one woman of the tribe who is of the proper age and the proper strength of mind. Taniane is to succeed me.”

Hresh once again caught his breath, and bit his lip, and looked away.

“Does the choice displease you?”

“No. Not at all. But it makes what’s happening more real. It makes me see more clearly than I would like to that you’ll no longer be chieftain, that someone else, that Taniane—”

“Everything changes, Hresh. The sapphire-eyes no longer rule the world. Now, a third thing: will you and Taniane be mated?”

“I’ve been searching in the chronicles for precedent that would allow the old man of the tribe to take a mate.”

“No need for further searching. No need for precedent. You are the precedent. She is your mate.”

“Is she, then?”

“Bring her to me when you return from the Beng settlement, and I will say the words.”

“Koshmar, Koshmar—”

“But tell her nothing about the chieftainship. It is not hers yet, not until you and Torlyri bestow it on her. These things must be done properly. There can be no new chieftain while the old one is still alive.”

“Let me try to heal you, Koshmar.”

“You annoy me. Go to the Bengs and beg some vermilions of them, boy.”

“Koshmar—”

“Go!”

“Allow me to do one thing for you, at least.” With fumbling fingers Hresh unfastened some small object that he had around his throat, and pressed it into her hand. “This is an amulet,” he said, “that I took from Thaggoran as he lay dead after the rat-wolves attacked us. It is very ancient, and it must have some strong powers, though I have never been able to learn what they are. When I feel that I need Thaggoran beside me, I touch the amulet, and his presence is close. Keep it in your hand, Koshmar. Let Thaggoran come to you and guide you to the next world.” He folded her fingers about it. It was hard-edged and warm against her palm. “He had great love and respect for you,” Hresh said. “He told me that many times.”

Koshmar smiled. “I thank you for this amulet, which I will keep by me until the end. And then it is yours again. You will not be long deprived of it, I think.” She gestured impatiently. “Go, now. Go to the Bengs and ask them for a few of their beasts. Go. Go, Hresh.” Then, softening, she touched her hand to his cheek. “My old man. My chronicler.”

Noum om Beng appeared to have been expecting him. At least, he showed no surprise when Hresh appeared, breathless, sweaty, having come at a trot all the way from his own tribe’s settlement to the Beng village at Dawinno Galihine. The old Helmet Man was in his bare stark chamber, sitting facing the entrance as though anticipating the arrival of a visitor.

A remorseless hammering pounded Hresh’s skull from within. His soul was aching from too great a buffeting within too small a compass. His mind whirled from all that had happened in these past few frantic days. And now he must come before old Noum om Beng in what would probably be his final opportunity to speak with him, and there was so much yet to learn. The questions kept multiplying; the answers only retreated.

“Sit,” Noum om Beng said, pointing to a place beside him on his stone bench. “Rest. Draw breath, boy. Take the air far down into yourself. Take it deep.”

“Father—”

“Rest!” said Noum om Beng sharply. Hresh thought he was going to strike him, as he had so often in the early days of his tutelage. But the old man remained perfectly still. Only his eyes moved, compelling Hresh to motionlessness with a steely glare.

Slowly Hresh drew in his breath, held it, released it, breathed again. In a little while the pounding of his heart diminished and the storm in his mind showed signs of dying down. Noum om Beng nodded. Quietly he said, “When do you leave the city, boy?”

“A day or two more.”

“Have you learned all you need to know here, then?”

“I have learned nothing,” Hresh said. “Nothing at all. I take in information, but the more I know, the less I understand.”

“It is the same with me,” said Noum om Beng gently.

“How can you say that, Father? You know everything that there is to be known!”

“Do you think so?”

“So it seems to me.”

“In truth I know very little, boy. Only what has come down to me in the chronicles of my tribe, and what I have been able to learn by myself, both in my wanderings and in the application of my thoughts. And it is not enough. It is not nearly enough. It can never be enough.”

“This is the last time we will meet, Father”

“Yes. I know.”

“You have taught me many things. But all of them indirect, all of them the things that lie behind things. Perhaps the meanings of them will burst into life in my head as I grow older, as I reflect on all you have said here. But today I pray we may speak more directly of the great matters that perplex me.”

“We have spoken very directly all the time, boy.”

“It does not seem that way to me, Father.”

In times gone past such a flat contradiction would have brought him a stinging slap. Hresh waited for one now. He would even have welcomed one. But Noum om Beng remained still. After a lengthy silence he said, as though speaking from a distant mountain, “Then tell me, Hresh: what are these things that perplex you?”

Hresh could not recall another time when Noum om Beng had called him by his name.

Out of the myriad questions that came boiling up out of his mind he sought to choose one, the most important one, before the offer should be withdrawn. But it was impossible to choose. Then Hresh saw on the screen of his mind a gray featureless sea that spread to the horizon and beyond it into the stars, a sea that covered all the universe, a sea that gleamed with a pearly light of its own amid utter darkness. There was a sudden bright spark of flame upon the bosom of the waters.

He stared at Noum om Beng.

“Tell me who created us, Father!”

“Why, the Creator did.”

“Nakhaba, do you mean?”

Noum om Beng laughed, that strange parched rasping laugh that Hresh had heard only two or three times before. “Nakhaba? No, Nakhaba is not the Creator, any more than you or I. Nakhaba is the Interceder. Have I not made that clear?”

Hresh shook his head. Interceder? What did he mean?

“Nakhaba is the highest god we know,” said Noum om Beng. “But he is not the highest god of all. The highest god, the Creator-god, is unknown, and must always be. Only the gods may know that god.”

“Ah. Ah,” Hresh said. “And Nakhaba? Who is he, then?”

“Nakhaba is the god who stands between our people and the humans, and speaks with them on our behalf when we have failed to meet the demands of our destiny.”

Hresh felt himself lost in realms beyond realms.

Despair, disbelief, confusion threatened to overwhelm him.

“A god who stands between us and the humans? Then the humans are higher than the gods?”

“Higher than our gods, boy. Higher than Nakhaba, higher than the Five. But not higher than the Creator, who made them as well as us and all else. Do you see the hierarchy?” Noum om Beng drew vast structures in the air with the tip of a finger. The Creator here, at the highest place, the great Sixth of whom Hresh had once speculated; and here the humans, some distance below; and here Nakhaba; and here the Five; and here, lower than all the others though higher than the wild beasts, at least, were the common folk of the world, the cocoon-folk, the furry-folk.

Hresh stared. He had asked for revelation, and Noum om Beng had given him revelation unstinting. But he could not absorb it; he could not digest it.

Seeking some familiar corner, he said, “So you accept the Five? They are gods for you as well as for us?”

“Of course they are. We give them other names, but we accept them, for how could we not? There must be a god who protects, and a god who provides, and a god who destroys. And a god who heals, and a god who comforts. And also a god who intercedes.”

“A god who intercedes, yes. I suppose.”

“That is the one god you came to forget, your people. The one who stands above the other five and reaches higher yet, and speaks on our behalf with them. ”

“Are the humans gods too, then?”

“No. No, I do not think so,” said Noum om Beng. “But who is to say? Only Nakhaba has ever seen a human.”

“I think I have,” said Hresh.

Noum om Beng chuckled in his rasping way. “Madness, boy.”

“No. In our cocoon, during the days of the Long Winter, there was one who always slept, who lay by himself in a cradle in the central chamber. Ryyig Dream-Dreamer is what we called him. He was very long and very pale and pink, without any fur, and his head rose high above his forehead, and his eyes were purple, with a strange glow. It was said that he had always lived with us, that he had come into the cocoon on the first day of the Long Winter, in the time when the death-stars began to fall, and that he would sleep until the day the winter ended; and then he would sit up and open his eyes and prophesy that we must go forth into the world. After that he would die. So it was said, long ago, and written in the books of our chronicles. And all this actually came to pass, Father. I saw him. I was there on the day he awoke.”

Noum om Beng was staring at him with a strange fixity of vision, his whole face rigid, his red eyes gleaming. The old Helmet Man’s harsh breathing seemed to grow louder and louder, until it sounded like the panting of some approaching beast.

Hresh said, “I think the Dream-Dreamer was a human. That he was sent to live with us, to watch over us, through all the Long Winter. And that when the winter ended his work was done, and he was summoned by his people.”

“Yes,” Noum om Beng said. He was quivering like a bowstring drawn overtaut. “So it must have been, and why did I not see it? Boy, shall I tell you something? There was a Dream-Dreamer in our cocoon too. We had no idea what sort of creature he was, but we had one just as you did. Long ago, before I was born, if you can imagine a time so long ago. And we had what you call a Barak Dayir also. There are tales of such things in our chronicles. But our Dream-Dreamer awoke early, while ice still held the world. He led us forth and he perished, and our Wonderstone was taken by the hjjks. Nakhaba has guided us well and we have achieved greatness despite our loss, with greater things yet to come: for all the world will be Beng, boy, that much I see clearly. Yet our task has been much heavier because we have not had a Barak Dayir in these later years. Whereas your people — you, boy — having possession of that magical thing—”

Noum om Beng’s voice trailed away. He stared at the floor.

“Yes? Yes? What is the destiny of my people?”

“Who knows?” the old Helmet Man said, sounding suddenly very weary. “Not I. Not even Nakhaba, perhaps. Who can read the book of destiny? I see our own: yours is unclear to me.” He shook his head. “I never thought that our Dream-Dreamer might have been a human, yet now I see that your guess has much strength, that your guess has virtue. That must be what he was.”

“I know that he was, Father.”

“How can you know that?”

“By a vision I had, using a machine I found in Vengiboneeza, that showed me the Great World. It showed me sapphire-eyes and vegetals and all the other races. And it showed me humans, too, walking these very streets; and they looked just like our Dream-Dreamer Ryyig.”

“If that is so, then I understand many things that were unclear to me before,” Noum om Beng said.

That astounded Hresh, that he should be the one to make things known to Noum om Beng, and not the other way around. But still he was baffled. He sat in silence, trembling.

Noum om Beng said, “Guard your stone, boy. Swallow it, if you are endangered. It is an essential thing. We have had to struggle twice as hard for our greatness, or more, because we have been careless of ours.”

“And what is the Barak Dayir, then? I had heard it was a thing made in the stars.”

“No. It is a human-thing,” Noum om Beng said. “That is all I can tell you. Something older even than the Great World. A device that the humans made, so I realize now, and gave to our kind, to use in many ways. But what those ways are, I have never known, and you have only begun to learn.”

Hresh reached for the amulet of Thaggoran at his throat, for he felt great tension and fear oppressing him. But then he remembered that he had given the amulet to Koshmar, to see her through her dying hours.

He said, “I wish we were not leaving Vengiboneeza so soon, Father.”

“Why? The world is waiting for you.”

“I want to stay here with you, and learn all that you can teach me.”

Noum om Beng laughed again. Without warning his thin stem of an arm came up and he dealt Hresh an open-handed slap that bruised his lip and numbed his cheek.

“ Thatis all I can teach you, boy!”

Hresh licked at a sweet spot of blood on his lower lip. Softly he said, “Shall I go now, then? Is that what you want?”

“Stay as long as you wish.”

“But you will answer no more of my questions?”

“You have more questions, do you?”

Hresh nodded, but said nothing.

“Go on. Ask.”

“I must be tiring you, Father.”

“Ask. Ask. Anything, boy.”

Hesitantly Hresh said, “You told me once that the gods repay all our striving by sending death-stars, so that nothing has any meaning. I called this a flaw in the universe, but you said no, no, the universe is perfect, and we are the ones who are flawed. But it still seems like a flaw in the universe to me. And you said also that we must go on striving anyway, though you did not know why. You told me that I must find that out, and when I did I should come and tell you what I had learned. Do you remember, Father?”

“Yes, boy.”

“Not long ago I had another vision of the Great World, using a different device from the one that showed me the humans, I had that vision only this night past, Father. What I saw was the last day of the Great World, when the first death-star came and the sky turned black and the air grew cold. The humans were already gone, I could not tell you where, and the hjjks were heading for the hills, and the vegetals were dying and the sea-lords were about to die and the mechanicals were going off to die elsewhere. But the sapphire-eyes, though they knew they were coming to the end of their time, were altogether untroubled by what was happening around them. They showed no fear and they showed no distress. Nor did they do the slightest thing to deflect the falling death-stars from the world, though surely that must have been within their power. I am unable to understand that, Father. If I knew why the sapphire-eyes were able to accept their doom without seeming to care, I might be able to tell you why we must strive ever onward even though the gods will some day destroy all we have built.”

Noum om Beng said, “What is the name by which you call your god who is the Destroyer?”

Hresh blinked in surprise. “Dawinno.”

“Dawinno. What do you understand of Dawinno, then? Do you think that he is an evil god?”

“How can a god be evil, Father?”

“You have answered your own question, boy.”

Hresh did not see that he had. He sat blinking, waiting for some further illumination. But none was forthcoming. Noum om Beng was smiling at him amiably, almost smugly, as if quite certain that he had given Hresh the key to all that troubled him.

Behind his smile the old Helmet Man’s face was gray with fatigue; and Hresh himself felt the strength of his mind taxed to its limit. He dared not ask for further explanation. Here I will stop, Hresh thought. Already he had burdened himself with so much that it would take him years, so it seemed to him then, to comprehend it all.

He rose to go. “I should leave now, Father, and let you rest.”

“I will not see you again,” Noum om Beng said.

“No, I think not.”

“We have done good work together, boy. Our minds were well met.”

“Yes,” Hresh said. There was a strange ring of finality in Noum om Beng’s tone that made Hresh wonder how much longer the old Helmet Man could hope to live. From him radiated an awareness of imminent death, and a deep acceptance of it, too, that made him as tranquil as any sapphire-eyes who had watched the sky grow black with the rain of dust that the death-star had flung up. Hresh, who only this morning had heard Koshmar speak so blandly of her oncoming end, felt himself surrounded on all sides by mortality today. How could they be so accepting, these dying folk? How could they shrug their shoulders in the face of oblivion?

Uncertainly Hresh moved toward the door, not really wanting to leave so soon, but knowing he must.

Noum om Beng said, “Was there not another errand for which you came here this morning, other than to speak with me?”

Yissou! The vermilions!

Hresh’s face blazed with shame. “There was, yes,” he said lamely. “Koshmar asked me — our chieftain — she wondered if — whether we could have — if it would be possible to have—”

“Yes,” Noum om Beng said. “We foresaw the need. It is already arranged. Four young vermilions are yours, two males, two females, our parting gift. Trei Husathirn will bring them an hour from now, and he will instruct your people in how to control them, and how they are bred. That was all, was it not, boy?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Come here, Hresh.”

Hresh went forward and knelt before the old Helmet Man. Noum om Beng raised his hand as though to strike one last blow; but then he smiled, and softened the movement of his arm, and touched his hand lightly to Hresh’s cheek in an unmistakable gesture of the deepest affection. With the slightest of nods he indicated that this was the moment for Hresh to take his leave. No other word was said between them; and when Hresh paused at the door to look back and his eyes met the red ones of Noum om Beng it seemed to him that Noum om Beng no longer saw him, that he no longer had any idea who Hresh might be.

It was midday by the time Hresh reached the settlement. The sun hovered in a cloudless sky. Hresh felt the full heat of the day settling upon him like a blanket. The wintertime of frost and cold winds was lost in the infinitely remote past. His fur was dusty and sweaty from his hasty journeys between the settlement and Dawinno Galihine, his head throbbed, his eyes were raw. It seemed to him that he had not slept for a month.

There was furious activity in the plaza, for the dismantling of the settlement was nearing its climax. Parcels were being dragged from the houses, crates were being hammered shut, the wheels of the newly constructed wagons were being oiled. He saw Orbin tottering under three immense bundles, Haniman hammering like a madman, Thhrouk smashing a hole through the wall of a building half as old as time so that some parcel too wide for the door could be shoved through the opening. Though there had been some murmuring against the decision to depart — Haniman seemed to be the chief opponent of the idea, and some of the others whom Hresh had seen that night kneeling to the Dream-Dreamer statue — no one was holding back from the work of making ready for the trek. The People’s instincts of cooperation were too deeply engrained.

Taniane stepped out of Koshmar’s house and waved to him from the threshold.

“Hresh! Hresh, here!”

He went to her. She was holding herself strangely, as if she had injured her back: her shoulders were pushed up high, her elbows were close to her sides. Her lips were quivering. She was wearing a blood-red sash that he had never seen before.

“What is it?” Hresh said. “What’s wrong?”

“Koshmar—”

“Yes, I know. She’s very ill.”

“She’s going to die. If she hasn’t died already. Torlyri is with her. She wants you in there too.”

“Are you all right, Taniane?”

“This frightens me. It’ll pass. Are you all right?”

“I’ve had no sleep. I’ve been to the Bengs to ask them to give us vermilions. Trei Husathirn will be bringing them in a little while.”

“Who?”

“Torlyri’s man. Let me go in.”

She held him a moment, her hands to the insides of his arms where they bent at the elbow. The embrace, glancing though it was, sent a hot current of energy flowing between them. He felt the strength of her love and it sustained him in his weariness. Then Taniane stepped aside and Hresh entered the chieftain’s little cottage.

Torlyri sat beside Koshmar. The offering-woman’s head was bowed, and she did not look up as Hresh came up behind her. Koshmar’s eyes were closed; her arms were crossed over her breasts; she still held Thaggoran’s amulet gripped tightly in her clenched fingers. She appeared to be breathing. Hresh let his hand rest on Torlyri’s shoulder.

The offering-woman said, “It is all my fault. I never knew she was this ill.”

“I think the disease came upon her very swiftly.”

“No. She must have had it a long while. It was eating her from within. And I knew nothing of it until today. How could I have failed to see it, even when we twined? How could I have been so negligent of her?”

“Torlyri, these are not useful questions now.”

“In just this past hour she has begun to slip away. She was still conscious this morning.”

“I know,” Hresh said. “I was here to speak with her, early this morning. She seemed ill then, but nothing like this.”

“You should have found me and told me!”

“She said no one was to know, Torlyri. In particular you were not to know.”

Torlyri looked up at that, her eyes wild, frenzied, in a way that was almost impossible for Hresh to associate with the calm gentle Torlyri he had known all his life. Angrily she said, “And you did as she ordered you!”

“Should I not obey my chieftain? Especially when it’s her dying wish?”

“She is not going to die,” Torlyri said firmly. “We’ll heal her, you and I. You know the arts. You will add your skill to mine. Go: get the Barak Dayir. There must be some way it can be used too to help us save her.”

“She’s beyond our help,” said Hresh as gently as he could.

“No! Get the Wonderstone!”

“Torlyri—”

She glared fiercely at him. The hardness and determination went suddenly from her then, and she began to sob. Hresh crouched down by her side, putting one arm across her shoulders. Koshmar made a far-off sighing sound. Perhaps it is the last murmur of her life, Hresh thought. He found himself hoping that it was. Koshmar had suffered enough.

Torlyri said, not looking at him, “I came to her this morning and I saw she was ill, and I said that I would do a healing with her, and she denied that anything was troubling her. Too weak to stand, and she said it was nothing, that I should go elsewhere and see if anyone needed my services! I reasoned with her. I argued with her. I told her that this was not her time to die, that she had many years yet to live. But no, no, she would have none of it. She ordered me away. There was no way I could sway her. She is Koshmar, after all: she is an unstoppable force, she will have whatever she must have. Even if what she must have is death.” Lifting her head, Torlyri turned tormented eyes on Hresh and said, “Why does she want to die?”

“Perhaps she is very tired,” Hresh suggested.

“I could do no healing on her against her will, not while she was conscious. But now she can’t resist, and you and I, working together — get the Wonderstone, Hresh, get the Wonderstone!”

Koshmar’s clenched hand opened and the amulet of Thaggoran fell from it to the floor.

Hresh shook his head. “You want a miracle, Torlyri.”

“She can still be saved!”

“Look at her,” he said. “Is she breathing?”

“Very faintly, but yes, yes—”

“No, Torlyri. Look more closely. Or use your second sight.”

Torlyri stared. She rested her hand a moment on Koshmar’s chest. Then she seized Koshmar by both her shoulders and pressed her cheek where her hand had been, calling the dead chieftain’s name over and over. Hresh stepped back, wondering if he should leave but fearing the extent of Torlyri’s grief. After a while he came forward again and delicately lifted Torlyri from Koshmar’s body, and stood holding her, letting her sob.

The offering-woman grew calm sooner than Hresh expected. Her sobs ceased, her breathing became regular again. She lifted her head and nodded at Hresh, and smiled.

“Is Taniane outside?” she asked.

“She was. I think she’s still there.”

“Get her,” Torlyri said.

Hresh found her waiting on the porch, still standing in that odd huddled way. “It’s over,” he said.

“Gods!”

“Come in. Torlyri wants you.”

They entered the house together. Torlyri stood by the wall where the masks of the chieftains were hung. She had taken down Koshmar’s own mask, made of a shining gray wood with the eye-slits painted dark red, and held it in her left hand. In her right was Koshmar’s wand of office.

“We have much to do today,” Torlyri said. “We must devise a new rite, for this is the first time in memory that a chieftain has died other than by coming to her limit-age, and we will need words to send her on to the next world. I will attend to that. And also we must invest a new chieftain. Taniane, this wand is yours. Take it, girl! Take it!”

Taniane looked dazed. “Shouldn’t there be — an election?”

“You have already been chosen. Koshmar herself accepted you as her successor, and made that known to us. This is your crowning-day. Take Koshmar’s mask and put it on. Here, take it! And the wand. And now we must go forth, all three of us, so that everyone will know what has happened, and what will happen next. Come. Now.”

Torlyri looked back quickly at Koshmar. Then she slipped one hand into the crook of Taniane’s arm and the other into Hresh’s, and drew them both from the death-chamber. She moved briskly, with an assurance and a firmness that Hresh had not seen in her for a long while. They stepped outside into the brilliant midday sunlight, and instantly all work stopped, all eyes turned toward them. There was an eerie silence in the plaza.

And then the tribesfolk came running, Threyne and Shatalgit and Orbin, Haniman and Staip, Kreun and Bonlai, Tramassilu, Praheurt, Thhrouk, Threyne and Thaggoran, Delim, Kalide, Cheysz, Hignord, Moarn, Jalmud, Sinistine, Boldirinthe — everyone, the oldest and the youngest, some with tools in their hands, some carrying babes, some clutching their midday meals, and threw themselves down before Taniane, calling her name as she held her wand of office high. Torlyri did not relinquish her hold on Taniane and Hresh. She clung with all her strength, and her grip was a painful one. Hresh wondered if she held this tightly to keep from falling.

But after a little while she released them and pushed Taniane forward to move among the tribe.

Taniane was glowing.

“There will be a ceremony this evening,” Torlyri said in a strong, clear voice. “Meanwhile your new chieftain accepts your loyalty, and thanks you for your love. She will speak with you, one by one.” To Hresh she said more quietly, “Let us go inside again,” and drew him toward her. They reentered the cottage. Koshmar seemed merely asleep. Torlyri bent to scoop up Thaggoran’s fallen amulet, and put it in Hresh’s hands. It had not been gone from his possession more than a few hours.

“Here,” she said. “You’ll want this on the trek.”

“We should postpone the departure,” Hresh said. “Until the rites are done, until Koshmar has been decently laid to rest.”

“All that will be dealt with this evening. There should be no postponement.” Torlyri paused. “I have been teaching Boldirinthe as much as I can of the offering-woman’s duties. Tomorrow I will teach her the highest mysteries, the secret things. And then you must go.”

“What are you telling me, Torlyri?”

“That I mean to stay behind, and cast my lot with the Bengs. With Trei Husathirn.”

Hresh’s mouth opened, but there was nothing he could say.

“I might have gone, if Koshmar had lived. But she is gone and I am released, do you understand? So I will stay. The Helmet Man cannot leave his people, so I will become one of them. But I will still say the morning prayers for you, as though I made the journey with you. Wherever you go, you will know that I am watching over you, Hresh. Over you and all the tribe.”

“Torlyri—”

“Don’t. Everything is very clear, for me.”

“Yes. Yes, I understand. But it will be hard, without you.”

“Do you think it will be easy for me, without all of you?” She smiled and beckoned to him, and he stepped into her arms, and they embraced like mother and son, or perhaps even like lover and lover, a long intense embrace. She began to sob again, and then her sobbing ceased, just in time, for in another moment he would have started too.

Releasing him, Torlyri said, “Let me be alone with Koshmar a little while now. And then we must meet, and devise the rites that need to be devised. At the temple, in two hours. Will you be there?”

“At the temple, yes. In two hours.”

He left the cottage once again. Taniane, far away across the plaza, was surrounded by fifteen or twenty of the tribe. They were close to her and yet hanging back, as if fearing the flame of her sudden exaltation. Taniane still wore Koshmar’s mask. All the plaza now was bathed in fierce noon light that devoured all shadow, and the heat still seemed to be rising. Behind him Koshmar lay dead, and Torlyri beside her bowed in grief. Hresh glanced to his left and saw four immense vermilions plodding down the road into the settlement, with Trei Husathirn riding atop the lead male. Tomorrow we will leave this place, Hresh thought, and I will never see Koshmar again, or Torlyri, or Noum om Beng, or the towers of Vengiboneeza. Somehow it all seemed right to him. He had passed beyond weariness into a place of utter calm.

He went to his room. He drew the Barak Dayir from its pouch and fondled it, and asked it to give him strength. A human-thing, it was. Not a star-thing. So Noum om Beng had said. Older than the Great World, it was.

Hresh studied it, trying to read the signs of its great age in its sheen, in its pattern of intricately carved lines, in the warm glow of the light that dwelled within it. He put his sensing-organ to it and its music rose up like a column around him. It carried his mind easily and smoothly upward and outward, so that he had a view of everything that surrounded Vengiboneeza. He saw here, and he saw there, and at first it was all a marvel and a mystery to him, but then he came to see how to contain his wonder and look upon only a portion of the overwhelming whole; and then he was able to find meaning in what he beheld. He looked to the south, and saw the rim of a perfect circle rising in a meadow, and a little settlement within that circle. He saw Harruel in that settlement, and Minbain his mother, and Samnibolon who was his half brother, and all the others who had gone with Harruel on the Day of the Breaking Apart. This was their settlement, which they called the City of Yissou. Hresh knew all that by seeing with the Barak Dayir. Then Hresh looked the other way, far to the north, toward the place where he knew he must look in order to see what he must see, and he beheld a great herd of vermilions on the march, heading south, making the ground shake as though the gods were pounding it; and with the vermilions were hjjk-folk, a countless army of them, heading south also, taking a route that would bring them inevitably to the City of Yissou. Hresh nodded. Of course, he thought. The gods who rule us have devised things so this will come to pass, and who can hope to understand the gods? The hjjk-men are on the march, and Harruel’s settlement lies in their path. Very well. Very well. That was only to be expected.

He descended from the heights and released the Barak Dayir from his sensing-organ, and sat quietly for a time, thinking only that this had been a very long day, and even now it had barely reached its midpoint. Then Hresh closed his eyes, and sleep took him swiftly, like a falling sword.

Salaman had seen the assault on the City of Yissou so many times now in visions that the actual event, as it descended upon the city, seemed overfamiliar to him and roused little emotion at first in his breast. Some weeks had passed since the sudden attack by that small advance troop of hjjk-folk, that ill-fated band of forerunners; and every day since then Salaman had gone up on the high ridge with Weiawala and Thaloin to twine and cast forth his mind so that he could observe the advance of the oncoming army. Now they were almost here; and now they could be seen without the aid of second sight.

Bruikkos was the first to spy them — for lately Harruel had had sentries watching all day and all night on the rim of the crater.

“Hjjks!” he cried, running pell-mell down the crater trail into the city. “Here they come! Millions of them!”

Salaman nodded. There might have been a cold stone in his breast. He felt nothing. No fear, no joy of battle, no sense of prophecy fulfilled. Nothing. Nothing. He had lived through this moment too many times already.

Weiawala, trembling against him, said, “What will happen to us? Will we all die, Salaman?”

He shook his head. “No, love. We will each kill ten thousand thousand hjjks, and the city will be saved.” He spoke in a flat, unemotional way. “Where is my spear? Give me some wine, sweet Weiawala. Wine makes Harruel fight better; it may be the thing for me also.”

“The hjjks!” came the hoarse cry from without. Bruikkos was banging on doors, pounding on walls. “The hjjks are coming now! They’re here! They’re here!”

Salaman took a deep pull of the dark, cool wine, strapped his sword about his waist, seized hold of his spear. Weiawala too picked up weapons: there was no one who would not fight today, except the small children, who had been put in one place to look after each other. Together Salaman and Weiawala left their little house.

The day was chilly after a long spell of warm, humid weather. A strong breeze came from the north. There was a dry harsh scent riding on that breeze, hjjk-scent, oppressive and insistent, the smell of old wax and rusting metal and dead crackling leaves; and beneath that pungent odor lay another, broad and deep and full, the rich musky scent of vermilions, with which the odor of the hjjks was interwoven as scarlet threads of bright metal might be interwoven in a cloak of heavy wool.

Harruel, fully armed, came limping out of his half-charred palace. Since the day of the first hjjk attack he had gone about everywhere in that lumbering, lopsided way, although so far as Salaman knew the only wound Harruel had received had been in his shoulder. That wound had been bad enough, though Minbain had doctored it with herbs and poultices and by this time it was little more than a ragged red track through Harruel’s thick fur.

But Salaman wondered whether perhaps Harruel had had some other wound that day, a deeper one, a wound to the heart, that had crippled him somehow. Certainly he had seemed even darker and more bleak than usual ever since, and he walked in this strange new uneven manner, as though he no longer had the strength of spirit to keep his hips on a level plane.

Now, though, Harruel grinned and waved almost jovially as he caught sight of Salaman. “D’ye smell that stink? By Yissou, we’ll clear the air of it by nightfall, Salaman!”

The prospect of war seemed to have brightened Harruel’s soul. Salaman nodded an acknowledgment to him and raised his spear in a halfhearted gesture of solidarity.

Harruel must have detected Salaman’s indifferent mood. The king clumped over to Salaman and clapped him lustily on the back, a blow of such bone-shivering violence that Salaman’s eyes flashed with wrath and he came close to returning it with all his force. But it was meant merely as encouragement. Harruel laughed. His face, looming high above Salaman’s own, was flushed with excitement.

“We’ll kill them all, lad! Eh? Eh! Dawinno take them, we’ll slaughter the bugs by the millions! What d’ye say, Salaman? You saw this coming long ago, eh? Your second sight is true magic! D’ye see victory just ahead for us?” Harruel reared about and signaled to Minbain, who lurked somewhere near the portico of their house. “Wine, woman! Bring me some wine, and make a hurry of it! We’ll drink to victory!”

Weiawala, under her breath, said to Salaman, “What does he need more wine for? He’s drunk already!”

“I’m not sure that he is. I think he’s just intoxicated with the thrill of making war.”

“The thrill of dying, you mean,” Weiawala said. “How can we survive this day, any of us?”

Salaman gestured wryly. “Then it’s dying that excites him, I suppose. But this is a Harruel reborn that we see here today.”

Indeed Salaman began then to realize that he too was at last awakening to the thing that was coming upon them this day. His apathy, his torpor, was falling away. He was ready to fight, and to fight well, and if necessary to die bravely. Feeling his soul surging suddenly within him, Salaman understood some of what must be taking place within Harruel.

The first intrusion of the hjjks must have been a hard and bitter disturbance for him. Harruel’s kingship, his manhood itself, had been jeopardized. The child Therista had been slain; the woman Galihine had been wounded so gravely that she would have been better dead; the palace had been set ablaze; most of the meat-animals had been set free and it had taken forever to round them up again. Even though the enemy had been turned back in total defeat, everyone knew that a far greater army was on the way and the city could not possibly withstand it. Harruel’s little world had been impinged upon from without and soon it would be destroyed.

In these weeks just past the king had been in a somber state indeed. Harruel had steeped himself so deep in drink that the city’s stores of wine had been all but depleted by his guzzling alone. Limping and solitary he had roamed the perimeter of the crater night after night, roaring in drunken rage. He had fought a bloody fistfight with Konya, who was his most loyal and dearest follower. He had summoned every woman of the tribe to his couch, sometimes three of them at once, and yet, so the report was, he had not been able to achieve a coupling with any of them. In his more sober moments he had spoken broodingly of the sins that he had committed and of the punishment that he merited, soon to be meted out by the hjjks. Which left Salaman wondering what sins he had committed, or Weiawala, or the infant Chham; for everyone would die together when the hjjks overran the City of Yissou, the wicked and the innocent alike.

Still, they had done all they could to prepare for the hopeless struggle that was coming. There had not been time enough to complete the palisade around the crater rim, but they had built a smaller one of sharpened stakes lashed with vines that completely enclosed the city’s inhabited zone. Just within it was a wide and deep trench, bridged by planks that could be removed if the invaders came close. A narrow new trail had been cut through the underbrush from the city’s southern side to the densest part of the forest that grew on the crater’s slope; if all else failed, they could slip away by ones and twos and try to lose themselves in the woods until the hjjk-folk grew bored with the search and moved along.

More than that the defenders could not do. There were only eleven of them, of which five were women and one of those wounded, and a few half-grown children. Salaman expected this to be the last day of his life and it seemed quite clear to him that Harruel’s vigor and animation this day stemmed from the same expectation. But though Harruel had plainly grown weary of life, Salaman had not. More than once in these recent days Salaman had thought of taking Weiawala and Chham and slipping away toward Vengiboneeza and safety before the hjjks arrived. But that would be cowardly; and that was probably foredoomed, too, for it was many weeks’ march to Vengiboneeza, assuming he could find it at all, and in that great wilderness what chance did a man and a woman and a child stand against the many creatures of the wilds?

Stand and fight; fight and die. It was the only way.

Salaman doubted that the hjjks intended them any particular harm. His one encounter with the insect-folk, that time long ago in the plains just after the tribe had gone forth from the cocoon, had left him with the belief that the hjjks were remote, passionless creatures incapable of such complex irrational feelings as hatred, covetousness, or vengefulness. The ones who had attacked the city had fought in a curiously impersonal, detached way, caring very little about their lives, which had reinforced Salaman’s view of them. The hjjks were interested only in maintaining their control. In this case they seemed to be merely on some great migration, and the City of Yissou happened to be in their way, posing unknown but definite danger to their supremacy; so they would eradicate it, as an inconvenience. That was all. The hjjks would probably suffer great losses today. But because there were so many of them, they would prevail.

Harruel’s plan was for everyone but the infants and the injured Galihine to wait for the enemy on the rim of the crater. When the invaders came close, the defenders would withdraw to the forested zone just below the rim, and attempt by main force to kill every hjjk that succeeded in clambering over the hastily improvised barricade of brush and thorny vines with which the tribe had surrounded the crater. If too many hjjks got through, they were to retreat closer to the city’s inner palisade; and as the situation grew even more perilous they would either hole themselves up within the city and try to withstand the hjjk siege, or else take the southern trail into the woods and hope to remain scattered and hidden until it was safe to emerge.

All of these stratagems seemed absurd to Salaman. But he could think of nothing better himself.

“Everyone to the rim!” cried Harruel in a mighty voice. “Yissou! Yissou! The gods protect us!”

“Come,” Salaman said quietly. “To our posts, love.”

He had asked for and received the sector of the rim closest to his special place, that high place from which he had first had the vision of the onrushing horde. He felt a deep affinity for that place, and since it seemed certain to him that he would die like all the others in the first hjjk charge, he had chosen that part of the rim to be the place where he would fall. In silence he and Weiawala clambered to it now.

When they reached the rim they halted, for just beyond it was the tangle of thorny stuff that they had so painfully woven there in the past few days to slow down the hjjks’ advance. But then a strange burst of curiosity, a sudden overmastering Hreshlike impulse toward the unexpected, came over him, and he vaulted the rim and began cleaving a path for himself through the thorns.

“What are you doing?” Weiawala called. “You aren’t supposed to be out there, Salaman!”

“I have to see — one last look—”

She called out something else to him, but her voice was taken by the wind. He was past the barricade now, and running toward his high place. Breathless, stumbling, he scrambled to it.

Everything lay visible to him from here.

To the south were rounded green hills. To the west was the distant sea, a golden streak in the early afternoon sun. And to the north, where a high broad plateau stretched on and on toward the horizon, he saw the invaders. They were still perhaps an hour’s march away, maybe two, but there was no question of their direction: they were heading straight for the great meadow in which the crater lay. And they were innumerable. Vermilions and hjjks, hjjks and vermilions, an astonishing parade poured out of the north, a line of them that went beyond Salaman’s ability to see. There was a central column of vermilions, packed close together, nose of one up against the tail of the one before it; a wide column of hjjks flanked the beasts on either side; and then two more columns of vermilions made up the outer edges of the advancing force. Both the insect-beings and the giant shaggy beasts moved in rigid formation and at a steady pace.

Salaman raised his sensing-organ and reached out with second sight to enhance his perception of the oncoming force. At once it gave him the full oppressive power of the enemy, the immense weight of the numbers.

But what was this? He sensed something unanticipated, something discordant, cutting across the massive emanations coming from the invading army. He frowned. He looked to his right, into the thick forest that separated this district from the land where Vengiboneeza lay.

Someone was coming from that direction.

He strained to stretch the range of his second sight. Bewildered, astonished, he searched for the source of that unexpected sensation. He reached out — farther — farther—

Touched something radiant and powerful that he knew to be the soul of Hresh-of-the-answers.

Touched Taniane. Touched Orbin. Touched Staip. Touched Haniman. Touched Boldirinthe.

Praheurt. Moarn. Kreun.

Gods! Were they all there? The whole tribe of them, coming from Vengiboneeza this day? Marching onward toward the City of Yissou? He could not detect Torlyri, he could not detect Koshmar, and that puzzled him; but now he felt the others, dozens of them, everyone who had come from the cocoon with him at the Time of Going Forth. All of them here, all of them approaching.

Unbelievable. They are just in time, he thought, to be swept away with us by the hjjks. We all came forth together; and now we will all die together.

Gods! Why had they come? Why today ?

The day of departure from Vengiboneeza had finally arrived, weeks after the decision to go had been proclaimed; like a thunderclap coming long after a devastating bolt of lightning. After all the weeks of grueling toil, when it had begun to seem that the dismantling of the settlement would go on forever without end, the time of leaving was at last at hand; what was yet undone must now remain forever undone; once again the People would be making a great Going Forth.

Taniane wore the new mask that the craftsman Striinin had made, the Mask of Koshmar: powerful jaw, heavy lips, great outcurving cheeks, dark gleaming surface of burnished black wood, a likeness not of the late chieftain’s face but of her indomitable soul, through which the somber, penetrating eyes of Taniane came shining like windows that opened into a vista of windows. In her left hand Taniane held the Wand of Coming Forth, which Boldirinthe had unearthed among the relics of the trek from the cocoon; in her right was Koshmar’s obsidian-tipped spear. She turned toward Hresh.

“How much longer until sunrise?”

“Just another few minutes now.”

“The instant we see the light, I’ll raise the wand. If anyone looks hesitant, send Orbin to give them a prod.”

“He’s already back there, checking everybody over.”

“Where’s Haniman?”

“With Orbin,” said Hresh.

“Send him to me.”

Hresh beckoned down the line toward Orbin, and pointed to Haniman and nodded. The two warriors spoke briefly; then Haniman came jogging up to the front in his strangely heavy-footed way.

“You want me, Hresh?”

“Only for a moment.” Hresh’s eyes met Haniman’s and held there. “I’m aware that you aren’t eager to be going with us.”

“Hresh, I never—”

“No. Please, Haniman. It’s no secret to me that you’ve been grumbling about the Going Forth ever since Koshmar made the proclamation.”

Haniman looked uncomfortable. “But have I ever said I didn’t plan to go?”

“You haven’t said it, no. But what’s in your heart hasn’t been much of a secret. We don’t need any malcontents on this trek, Haniman. I want you to know that if you’d prefer to stay behind, then stay.”

“And live among the Bengs?”

“And live among the Bengs, yes.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Hresh. Wherever the People go, I’ll go too.”

“Willingly?”

Haniman hesitated. “Willingly,” he said.

Hresh reached out his hand. “We’ll need you, you know. You and Orbin and Staip — you’re our strong ones, now. And we have plenty of work ahead. We’re going to build a world, Haniman.”

“ Rebuild a world, you mean.”

“No. Build one from scratch. Everything’s starting over. There’s nothing left of the old one except ruins. But for millions of years humans have been building new worlds on the ruins of the old. That’s what we’ll have to do, if we want to think of ourselves as humans.”

“If we want to think of ourselves as humans ?”

“As humans, yes,” said Hresh.

The first red glow of dawnlight appeared suddenly over the crest of the mountain wall.

“Ready to march!” Taniane called. “Shape it up! Hold your places! Everyone ready?”

Haniman trotted back to his place. Taniane and Hresh stood at the front of the line, with the warriors behind them, and then the workers and the children, and to the rear were the heavily laden wagons that the huge docile vermilions would pull. Hresh glanced back at the great mist-shrouded towers of Vengiboneeza to the rear, and the vast shoulder of the mountain behind them. A few Bengs stood near the edge of the settlement, looking on in silence. Torlyri was with them. She wore a helmet, a small graceful one of red metal, gleaming mirror-bright. How strange that was, Torlyri in a helmet! Hresh saw her lift her hand in holy signs: the blessing of Mueri, the blessing of Friit, the blessing of Emakkis. The blessing of Yissou. He waited, and as she made the final blessing, that of Dawinno, their eyes met, and she sent him a warm smile of love. Then he saw tears flood her eyes, and she turned away, moving behind the helmeted Bengs and passing from sight.

“Sing!” Taniane cried. “Everyone sing! Here we go. Sing!”

That had been weeks ago. Now glorious Vengiboneeza seemed but a fading memory, and Hresh no longer mourned having left its wondrous treasures behind. He had not adapted as well to the heavy double loss of Koshmar and Torlyri. Torlyri’s warmth and Koshmar’s vigor both had been cut away as if by some dire surgery, and a great open place in the tribe remained where they had been. Hresh still sensed Torlyri’s faint presence hovering over the tribe as it moved west and south from Vengiboneeza; but Koshmar was gone, gone, utterly gone, and that was very hard.

No one questioned Taniane’s leadership, or his. They marched at the head of the tribe. Taniane gave the orders, but she consulted frequently with Hresh, who chose the line of march each day. It was easy enough for him to find the route, for, even though some four full cycles of the seasons had gone by since Harruel’s little band had passed this way, the echoes of their souls still remained in the forest, and Hresh, with only the slightest aid of the Barak Dayir, heard them without difficulty and followed their signal. Now that they were emerging from the forest he had no need of the Wonderstone to guide him to Harruel. The king’s dark soul, down there in the meadow, was sending out a strident, inescapable music.

“Only a little while longer,” Hresh said. “I feel their presence all around me.”

“The hjjks?” Taniane asked. “Or Harruel and his people?”

“Both. The hjjks in infinite numbers, to our north. And Harruel’s city straight ahead, and below us, in that circular formation on the meadow. At the center, where it’s dark with vegetation.”

Taniane stared, as though without seeing. After a time she said, “Can this succeed, Hresh? Or will we all be swallowed up by those million insects?”

“The gods will protect us.”

“Ah, and will they?”

Hresh smiled. “I have asked each one individually. Even Nakhaba.”

“Nakhaba!”

“I would ask the god of the hjjks to be kind to us too, if I knew his name. The god of the vermilions. The god of the water-striders, Taniane. The gods of the Great World. The unknown and unknowable Creator-god. One can never have too many gods on one’s side.” He caught her by the fleshy part of the arm, and pulled her close to him, so that she could see the conviction that glowed in his eyes. In a low voice he said, “All the gods will defend us today, for what we do is their bidding. But especially will we be defended by Dawinno, who cleared away an entire world so that we might inherit it.”

“You seem so certain of that, Hresh. I wish I could be as certain as you are.”

Certain? For one wild moment he felt swept with doubt, and he wondered if he believed any of what he was saying. The reality of what they had chosen to undertake seemed suddenly now to be coming home to him, and his will, which had carried them this far, seemed to be weakening. Perhaps it was the emanations of those numberless far-off hjjks that were battering his soul. Or perhaps it was simply the awareness of the unending work that must be done to create all that which he hoped to create.

He shook his head. They would prevail today, and in all the days that followed. He thought of his mother Minbain down in that meadow, and of Samnibolon his brother by Harruel, who was carrying the name of Hresh’s long-dead father into a new era. He would not let them die this day.

“Here we should make camp,” he told Taniane. “Then you and I go on alone, and set up the defensive measures.”

“And if some enemy finds us and we perish while we’re out there by ourselves, who will lead the tribe then?”

“The tribe had leaders before us. The tribe will find leaders after us. In any case, nothing will harm us while we do what must be done.” Hresh took her by the arms, as she had taken him that day of Koshmar’s death, and sent strength to her. Taniane’s shoulders straightened, her chest rose to her deepened breath. She smiled and nodded. Turning, she gave the signal to halt for the night.

It took an hour to get everything settled down. Then, leaving Boldirinthe and Staip in command, Hresh and Taniane slipped away a little to the west and from there moved to their right, edging around in a northward way toward the shovel-shaped plain that lay between the hjjk-folk and the settlement that Harruel had founded. The shadows were lengthening by the time Hresh came to the place that seemed best, where they could look down into that circular-walled place where Harruel had chosen to dwell. From this distance Hresh saw that that circular formation was a crater of some sort, very likely formed by the impact of something massive falling from a great height. In all probability, this was a place where a death-star had landed. Hresh pondered that, wondering if the substance of the death-star might even still be buried there. But he had no time to investigate that now.

They had brought with them a thing of the Great World, Hresh carrying one end and Taniane the other: that hollow tube of metal, hooded at one end, with a region of incomprehensible blackness held captive within that hood, and brilliant light sizzling and hissing at its entrance. Hresh held it by the hooded end, Taniane by the other. The metal was warm to the touch. Hresh wondered what magics were locked within this thing, and how he could ever explore them without being carried away to whatever place it was the tube sent those who approached it.

“Here, do you think?” Hresh asked.

“A little closer to the settlement,” said Taniane. “Then if this plan of yours succeeds and the hjjks are cast into confusion we can fall upon them from one side and Harruel and his warriors from the other.”

“Good,” Hresh said. “We’ll go a little closer. And the plan will succeed, Taniane. I know it will.”

They went on a short way. Now darkness was coming on. Taniane indicated a place a little higher than the rest, where there was a flat rock on which they could mount the tube, and other rocks around to prop it upright. Hresh guided it into position. The moment it was upright it came alive, crackling with light and mystery. He felt once again the insidious temptation of the thing, its artful pull. But he was ready for it and he shrugged it away. Stepping back, he tested the device by tossing a stone toward its hood. The circlet of lights flashed blue and red and wild purple, and the stone vanished in midair.

Hresh muttered thanks to Dawinno. He was grateful to the god for favors received; but also now he was beginning to grow pleased with himself. This was going well.

“What will bring the hjjks?” Taniane asked.

“Leave that to me,” said Hresh.

Harruel could not understand what was going on. All night long he and his tribe had waited on the crater’s rim, watching the hjjks come closer and closer, and then halt at sundown, with the obvious intent of marching onward toward the crater when morning came. He had expected that he would die today when the City of Yissou took the full brunt of the hjjk-folk attack, and in truth he was not only willing to die but eager, for the savor of life had gone from him. Now it was dawn-time and the attack had come, more or less. Yet he had thought, and Salaman and Konya also, that the hjjks would attack in a methodical, brutally orderly way, as mere ants might do: for that was all they were, ants of a sort, though much enlarged and with far greater intelligence.

But instead the hjjks seemed to have gone crazy.

Their route of march was leading them straight toward the heart of the crater. But now, as Harruel watched dumbfounded, they were breaking ranks. Their formation was shattering into a wild and formless swarm. He stared, bewildered, as the hjjks ran this way and that on the plain, forming little groups that instantly broke and coalesced again and broke again. All of them were milling aimlessly about one group that seemed to hold its place in the center of the entire heaving mass.

Was it a trick? To what purpose?

And the vermilions appeared to have gone berserk also. At the first light of dawn Salaman had come to him with the puzzling news that he had seen the giant beasts all go thundering off toward the west and disappearing into the rough terrain of ravines and landslides that lay out there. But a little while later it became clear that only about half the vermilions had done that. The rest had broken ranks and were wandering everywhere on the northern plain in twos or threes, or simply by themselves. Complete confusion prevailed. It was still perilous to have so many beasts of that size anywhere near the city. But one thing looked certain: the hjjks would not be able to drive an organized force of the monsters down into the crater as beasts of war. The hjjks had lost control of their vermilions entirely. And, so it seemed, they had lost control of themselves.

Harruel shook his head. “What can be doing this?” he asked Salaman.

“Hresh, I think.”

“Hresh?”

“He is somewhere nearby.”

“Have you gone mad too?” Harruel cried.

“I felt him last night,” said Salaman. “As I sat on the high place, where I first had the vision of this army that now thunders all around us. I sent out my second sight and I felt Hresh close by, and others of Koshmar’s tribe too, nearly all of them. Except only Koshmar, and Torlyri. They had followed our path through the forest and they were just east of the city.”

“You are as crazy as those hjjks,” Harruel growled. “Hresh here? The People?”

“Look out there,” Salaman said. “Who could have done this to the hjjks and their vermilions? Who but Hresh? My first vision was a true one, Harruel. Trust me on this.”

“Hresh,” Harruel muttered. “Coming here to fight our war for us? How can this be? How? How?”

He stood staring, trying as the sun rose higher to make some sense out of the incomprehensible thing that was happening to the north. The light that came rolling from the east now brightened half the plateau. There was definitely a center to the melee: the hjjks appeared all to be struggling to reach some place a little higher than the rest, where already a tremendous chaotic mass of the insect-folk had gathered. Harruel sought to find Hresh somewhere about, but of him there was no sign. Salaman must have dreamed him, Harruel thought.

Thaloin came running up from the eastern rim, gesturing in alarm.

“Harruel! Harruel! The hjjks, to our east side! Konya’s holding them off, but come! Come!”

“How many?”

“Just a few. No more than a hundred, I think.”

Salaman laughed. “A hundred is only a few, is that it?”

“Few enough, compared with what’s out there on the plateau.” Harruel seized Salaman’s shoulder roughly and shook it. “Come, let’s go to Konya’s aid! Thaloin, send the word around the rim that the hjjks are trying to break through from the east!” Turning, he rushed off toward the battle zone.

Thaloin’s estimate, Harruel found, was off by more than a little. Perhaps three hundred hjjks — a party of strays, breaking off from the confused main mass of their people — had come blundering up the side of the crater. They had a few vermilions with them, not many, but enough to trample down the breastworks of brambles that had been placed outside the rim to hold invaders back. Konya, looking immense, casting a long shadow, was ranging up and down along the rim itself, slashing at great-beaked yellow-and-black soldiers who bobbed up here and there at the edge. Nittin was with him, and, to Harruel’s surprise, so was Minbain, and their son Samnibolon. All were thrusting away vigorously at the attackers.

The king drew in his breath sharply and went plunging into the midst of the group, shouting his war-cry: “Harruel! Harruel!”

A hjjk rose up before him, waving his shining jointed limbs. Harruel cut away an arm with one quick stroke of his blade, and brought his spear around to push the hjjk back down the hill. Another appeared in its place, and Harruel cut that one down too. A third fell to Salaman, standing close by him. Harruel looked to his side and saw Samnibolon bravely hacking away. Once more he fought brilliantly for a child, with speed and agility far beyond his years.

“Harruel!” cried the king, in full heat of battle now. “Harruel! Harruel!”

He looked down, past the slope of the crater. There were hjjks straggling about everywhere along the slope, hundreds of them. But they had no plan, and they were moving in a ragged, aimless way. He had no doubt that they could be dealt with, one by one, or if necessary by twos and threes, as in that earlier battle.

The rest of the hjjks, the great preponderant mass of them, still kept converging on that high point in mid-plateau. The site was boiling like an ant-hill now. For an instant the frenzied swarms parted, and Harruel caught sight of something metallic glinting at the midst of everything, and saw a flash of harsh light of many colors; and then the hjjks went piling inward again and whatever lay at the center of the swarm-zone was once more hidden from his view. It seemed to him also that other hjjks, more distant ones, were streaming away from the site of battle now — heading back northward, or eastward into the forest, or around the side of the crater and off to the south — anywhere, so long as it was not here, so long as they could get away from this scene of madness that must be so repellent to their orderly spirits.

There was hope, then. If the defenders of the city could only hold the crater against this relative handful of hjjk warriors, they might yet get out of this day alive!

Harruel, grinning, dispatched two more hjjks that appeared like wraiths right in front of him.

Then Salaman tapped his arm. “Do you see there? There, Harruel? At the edge of the forest?”

Turning to the east, Harruel stared in the direction Salaman indicated. At first he saw nothing, for he was looking into the fiery glare of the morning sun. But then he covered his eyes and tried by second sight, and yes, yes—

People there. Familiar ones. Orbin, Thhrouk, Haniman, Staip, Praheurt — warriors all. Hresh. Taniane. The People! Emerging from the forest, coming out onto the crater approach. Fighting their way toward the city, cutting down stray hjjks as they came. Allies! Reinforcements!

A mighty cry escaped Harruel’s throat.

The gods had not forsaken him! They had sent his friends to help him in this day of danger! He was forgiven for all his sins, he was redeemed, he was spared!

“Yissou!” he cried. “Dawinno!”

“On your left, Harruel,” said Salaman suddenly.

He looked around. Five hjjks, and a vermilion that loomed like a mountain. Harruel hurled himself savagely into the midst of them, laying about him on all sides. Salaman was with him too, and Konya was coming.

Something touched him like fire on the arm that had been wounded. He whirled, saw a hjjk reaching out again to rip open his flesh a second time, and slashed its throat in two. Then he felt a blow against his back. They were all around, sprouting like weeds on the hillside! Salaman called his name and Harruel turned again, striking as he moved. No use. No use. They were everywhere. The vermilion reared and snorted. When its huge feet came down they flattened a hjjk. Harruel laughed. He struck and struck again. Too soon to give up hope. One by one we will kill them all, yes! But then something jagged sliced across his back, and something else just as sharp took him in the thigh. He began to quiver in shock. He heard voices, Salaman’s, Konya’s, Samnibolon’s. His name, over and over. He swayed, nearly fell, steadied himself, took a few stumbling steps. He swung his blade, fiercely cutting air. He meant to go on fighting until he dropped. All he could do was fight. The city would survive, even if he did not. He was forgiven; he was redeemed. “Dawinno!” he cried. “Yissou! Harruel!” Blood streamed across his forehead. Now he called on Yissou no longer, but on Friit the healer; and then on Mueri who gave comfort. Still he fought on, chopping, hacking. “Mueri,” he cried, and then again, “Mueri,” more softly. There were too many of them. That was the only problem: there were too many of them. But the gods had forgiven his sins.

Hresh had never felt such confidence as he had in that moment of gathering darkness on the night before the battle, alone in that broad meadow with Taniane. He had taken the Barak Dayir from its pouch — Taniane staring close at it, her eyes glowing with that mixture of fear and keen curiosity that she had shown whenever he had bared the Wonderstone to her — and placed it in the curve of his sensing-organ.

“Be still while I do this,” he told her.

He closed his eyes. Reached out into the army of hjjks — gods, there were myriads upon myriads of them! — and searched patiently among them, picking and sorting through their dry, displeasing spirits until he found what he sought: one pair who had turned aside from the march in order that they might yield to the coupling impulse. In all that multitude there had to be at least a few who would pause to give in to that. And indeed Hresh was able to find more than a few.

One couple in particular were deeply enmeshed in the act, heart and soul, beaks and limbs and abdomens and thoraxes all convulsing as they embraced each other. Hresh shuddered. The female was larger than the male, and she held her mate in a fierce and strange grip, as though she meant not to couple with him but to devour him. From his body small swift organs had emerged and were moving over her lower part with a startling nervous quickness. It was a frightful, alien thing. And yet as he watched Hresh began to find it not so alien. Their forms and limbs and organs were very different from anything he knew, yes, but the impulse that drew them together was not too far from that which made Taniane attractive to him, or he to Taniane. The two of them emitted a potent emanation of desire for union, the hjjk equivalent of lust, Hresh thought. And a second emanation that denoted the fulfillment of desire: the hjjk equivalent of passion.

Good. Good. It was what he had hoped to find.

From those two coupling insect-beings Hresh had drawn the essence of their lust-emanation and their passion-emanation, and pulled it by way of the Barak Dayir deep into his own soul. Once he had incorporated it it no longer felt at all alien to him; he understood it, he respected it. He might just as well have been a hjjk-man himself, at that moment.

But he had not kept those essences within himself for long. He spun them forth, he wove them into a column of whirling force that rose to the heavens like a giant tower; and he set that tower in place around the metal tube that he had brought with him from Vengiboneeza.

Then he reached into the camp of the invaders a second time, and found a female vermilion who had come into heat that day. She stood with her back to a lofty tree, uttering horrifying roars and snorts of endearment and stamping her black-clawed feet and flapping her vast ears about like great sheets in the breeze. Three or four gigantic scarlet males jockeyed uneasily about her. Hresh slipped between them and took from her the essence of her heat, and drew that into himself also, and made it fifty times more intense. This he formed into a column too, and set it in place far to the west, where the plateau tumbled off into a broken area of streams and jumbled boulders.

“There,” Hresh said to Taniane. “Everything’s ready now. I’ve done all I can. The rest is in the hands of the warriors.”

That had been only a few hours ago, in the darkest of the night.

Dawn had come, and with it the battle. And now it was all over.

Hresh walked through the battlefield with Taniane at his side, and Salaman, and Minbain. No one spoke. A mist of death and confusion had settled over everything, and a great silence, and words seemed beside the point.

The hjjks were gone. Hresh could not say how many of them had vanished into the tube of strange light and even stranger darkness, but it must have been thousands of them, perhaps many thousands. In a terrible mad frenzy they had rushed toward the thing and leaped all over it, but it had engulfed them with an insatiable appetite as they came within its range of power, and they had disappeared. The rest of them, those who had not been attracted to the device or who had run from it in fear, were gone also, fled to all the corners of the earth. And those few who had tried to scale the sides of the crater had been killed by Taniane’s warriors as they came rushing past, or slain at the top by Harruel’s defenders waiting there.

The vermilions too had stampeded off elsewhere. Of all that astounding horde perhaps a dozen were still to be seen, shambling about in a lost purposeless way here and there on the plateau. Good: they could be rounded up, they could be domesticated for the tribe’s own uses. Of the others, it seemed that the males without exception had raced into the western hinterlands questing after the impassioned female that they thought to find there, and the females, puzzled or perhaps angered by that lunatic stampede, had gone off on journeys of their own, back to the wilderness from which the hjjks had taken them. In any case there were none hereabouts.

Hresh smiled. It had worked so well! It had worked perfectly!

And the little city — the City of Yissou, that was what they called it — the city was safe.

He looked around. Haniman sat quietly against a pink boulder, dabbing now and then at a cut on his forehead. He was glassy-eyed with fatigue. He had fought like a demon, had Haniman. Hresh had not known there was such strength in him. A little way from him lay Orbin, deep in sleep. He clutched the severed leg of a hjjk in one hand, a grisly trophy. Konya slept too. Staip. It had been a day of terrible conflict.

Hresh turned to Salaman. This quiet warrior whom he had scarcely known in the old days now seemed transformed, enlarged, a man of strength and wisdom and power, a giant.

“Will you be king now?” Hresh asked. “Or call yourself by some other title?”

“King, yes,” Salaman said quietly. “Over a tribe that can be numbered on the fingers of two hands. But I will be king, I think. It is a good name, king. We respect kings, in this city. And we will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me, though Yissou will still, I hope, be its protector.”

“He was the only one slain?” said Hresh.

“The only one. He went among the hjjks where they were thickest, and killed them as though he were swatting flies, until there were too many of them for him. There was no way we could get to him in time. But it was a brave death.”

“He wanted to die,” Minbain said.

Hresh turned to his mother. “You think so?”

“The gods gave him no peace. He was ever in torment.”

“He was radiant at the last moment,” said Salaman. “I saw his face. There was light coming from it. Whatever torment he was in, it had gone from him in his last moments.”

“Mueri ease his soul,” Hresh murmured.

Salaman gestured toward the city. “Will you stay with us awhile?”

“I think not,” Hresh said. “We will feast with you tonight, and then we’ll move on. This is your place. We should not occupy it long. Taniane leads us southward, and we will find a home for ourselves there, until we know where the gods mean to carry us next.”

“Taniane is chieftain, then,” said Salaman in wonder. “Well, it was what she dreamed. How did Koshmar die?”

“Of sadness, I think. And weariness. But also of knowing that she had completed her task. Koshmar lived nobly and died nobly too. She brought us out of the cocoon to Vengiboneeza, and she sent us onward from there to our next destination, as the gods meant her to do. She served them well, and us.”

“And Torlyri? Is she dead too?”

“The gods prevent it!” Hresh said. “She stayed behind of her own will, to live among the Bengs. She is a Beng now, she says. When last I saw her she wore a helmet, do you believe it? Love has transformed her.” He laughed. “Her eyes will turn red, I think, like theirs.”

Minbain came up to him. “And you, Hresh — what will you do? If you would do what will please me, you will stay behind also. Live here with us. Will you do that? This is a fine place.”

“And leave my tribe, Mother?”

“No. All of you, stay! The People reunited!”

Hresh shook his head. “No, Mother. The tribes must not be rejoined. You are all Harruel’s people now, with a destiny of your own. What it is, I cannot say. But I will follow Taniane, and we will go to the south. There is a great deal for us to do. All the world is there for us to discover and win. There is much I want to learn, still.”

“Ah. Hresh-full-of-questions!”

“Always, Mother. Always.”

“Then I will never see you again?”

“We thought we had parted once forever, and look, here we are together. I think I’ll see you once more. And my brother Samnibolon, too. But who knows when that will be? Only the gods.”

Hresh walked away from them, to be by himself for a time before the feasting began.

This has been a strange day, he thought; but, then, every day has been strange, since that first day of strangeness long ago when I took it into my head to sneak outside the cocoon, and the ice-eaters began to rise under our cavern, and the Dream-Dreamer awoke and cried out. And now Harruel is dead and Koshmar is dead and Torlyri is a Beng and Taniane is a chieftain and Salaman is a king, and I am Hresh-full-of-questions who is also Hresh-of-the-answers, the old man of our tribe. And I will continue my Going Forth, until the ends of the earth, and Dawinno will be my guardian.

The cool wind of this high country blew refreshingly about him. His mind was clear and open and peaceful. A vision arose in it as he stood by himself, a vision of the Great World, achieved now without the aid of any of the machines he had brought with him out of Vengiboneeza. He simply saw it before him, as though he had been transported to it by magic. It was a vision once again of the Great World on its last day, with darkness in the air and black winds blowing and frost overtaking everything; and he was not an observer this time, but a citizen of that lost world, a sapphire-eyes, in fact. He felt the heaviness of his great jaw, and the ponderousness of his immense thighs and tail. And he knew that this was the last day of the Great World, did that sapphire-eyes who was Hresh-full-of-questions. No sapphire-eyes would survive the time that was drawing nigh. The gods had sent a death upon their world.

And Hresh as Hresh understood that it was Dawinno the Destroyer whose day it was that day, while Hresh as sapphire-eyes waited peacefully for his end. The chill that was entering his body would travel inward until it took his life. Dawinno, yes. The god who brought death and change, and also renewal and rebirth. At last Hresh understood what Noum om Beng had been trying to tell him. It would have been a sin against Dawinno to attempt to deflect the death-stars that were heading toward the world. The sapphire-eyes had known that. They abided by the law of the gods. They had not tried to save themselves because they knew that all cycles must run their course, and they must go from the world to make room for those who were to come.

Yes. Yes, of course, Hresh thought. I should have realized that without needing so many slaps from Noum om Beng. I am very clever, he thought, but sometimes also I am very slow. Thaggoran might have explained all these matters to me, if he had lived. But Dawinno had called Thaggoran also to himself; and so I had to learn all this on my own.

He smiled. Another vision was coming alive within his soul: a shining city on a distant hillside, glowing in all the colors of the universe, blazing in light so radiant that it stunned the soul to see it. Not a city of the Great World, this one, but a new city, a city of the world yet to come, the world that he would bring into being. Deep surging music rose from the earth and enveloped him. It seemed to him that Taniane stood beside him.

“See, there,” he said. “That great city.”

“A sapphire-eyes city, is it?”

“No, a human city. Which we will build, to show that we too are human.”

Taniane nodded. “Yes. We are the humans now.”

“We will be,” Hresh said.

He thought of the golden ball of quicksilver, and the machines it controlled. Miracles, yes. And not our miracles. But we will use them in forging a miracle of our own. For us, he thought, it will be an endless Going Forth. Now the task begins, the struggle to prevail, the mastery of ancient skills and new ones, the long upward climb. He would lead the way, and he would say to the others, “Follow me there,” and they would follow.

Hresh looked toward the south. In one of the nearest hills there he made out a disturbance on one slope. He saw something huge struggling there, emerging from the earth. It looked almost as though an ice-eater was breaking through from the depths. Could it be? An ice-eater? Yes. That was what it was. An ice-eater, perhaps one of the last to get the word that the New Springtime truly had come. The monstrous creature was breaching the surface now, tossing trees and earth and great slabs of rock to this side and that. Hresh saw its blind face, its black-bristled body. And now it had broken through; and now it lay gasping in the sunlight, dying. Hresh watched, and as he watched the vast bulk of the subterranean creature split apart, and tiny creatures — or at least they seemed tiny at this distance — came from it by the dozens, by the hundreds, little shimmering things, coiling and wriggling busily, an army of small serpents born out of the great dead thing of the former world. Its young, yes. Not hideous like their colossal progenitor, but delicate and strangely beautiful, bright gleaming creatures, blue and glossy green and velvet black, moving in tracks of shining light. Rushing off into the sunlit day to take up the life that was offered them here at winter’s end. Renewal and rebirth, yes. Renewal and rebirth everywhere.

So even the ice-eaters would survive, after a fashion, in the new world. The prophecy had said they would die when the long winter ended, but the prophecy had been wrong. They would not die. They would only be transformed. Out of winter’s bleak decay new life and beauty could come. Hresh offered them a blessing, the blessing of Dawinno.

How he wished he could tell Thaggoran that!

He laughed, and took Thaggoran’s amulet in his hand.

“Oh, Thaggoran, Thaggoran, if I started telling you everything that I have learned since the night the rat-wolves came, it would take me as many years to tell you as it has taken me to live it,” he said aloud. “See? The ice-eaters — that’s what they become. And the Great World — I’ve seen it, Thaggoran, and I know why it let itself die in peace. And the Bengs — let me tell you about the Bengs, Thaggoran, and about Vengiboneeza, and—” He clutched the amulet tightly. “I’ve not done so badly, have I, Thaggoran? I’ve learned a thing or two, eh? And someday, I promise you, you’ll hear it all from me. Someday, yes. But not soon, eh, Thaggoran? We’ll sit and talk as we did in the old days. But not soon!”

Hresh turned and began to walk back toward the City of Yissou. It would be time soon for the feast. He would sit with Taniane on his right hand, and Minbain on his left, and if these people of Harruel’s had any wine in their city he would drink all he could hold, and then some more, for this was a night of celebration such as had scarcely ever been seen. Indeed. He walked more briskly, and then he began to trot, and then to run.

Behind him, ten thousand thousand newborn ice-eaters, glistening with life, glided away to celebrate their birth into the New Springtime of the world.

Visit www.fictionwise.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.