At Winter's End

1 The Hymn of the New Springtime

It was a day like no day that had ever been in all the memory of the People. Sometimes half a year or more might go by in the cocoon where the first members of Koshmar’s little band had taken refuge against the Long Winter seven hundred centuries ago, and there would be not one single event worthy of entering in the chronicles. But that morning there were three extraordinary happenings within the span of an hour, and after that hour life would never again be the same for Koshmar and her tribe.

First came the discovery that a ponderous phalanx of ice-eaters was approaching the cocoon from below, out of the icy depths of the world.

It was Thaggoran the chronicler who came upon them. He was the tribe’s old man: it was his title as well as his condition. He had lived far longer than any of the others. As keeper of the chronicles it was his privilege to live until he died. Thaggoran’s back was bowed, his chest was sunken and hollow, his eyes were forever reddened at the rims and brimming with fluid, his fur was white and grizzled with age. Yet there was vigor in him and much force. Thaggoran lived daily in contact with the epochs gone by, and it was that, he believed, which sustained and preserved him: that knowledge of the past cycles of the world, that connection with the greatness that had flourished in the bygone days of warmth.

For weeks Thaggoran had been wandering in the ancient passageways below the tribal cocoon. Shinestones were what he sought, precious gems of high splendor, useful in the craft of divination. The subterranean passageways in which he prowled had been carved by his remote ancestors, burrowing this way and that through the living rock with infinitely patient labor, when they first had come here to hide from the exploding stars and black rains that destroyed the Great World. No one in the past ten thousand years had found a shinestone in them. But Thaggoran had dreamed three times this year that he would add a new one to the tribe’s little store of them. He knew and valued the power of dreams. And so he went prowling in the depths almost every day.

He moved now through the deepest and coldest tunnel of all, the one called Mother of Frost. As he crept cautiously on hands and knees in the darkness, searching with his second sight for the shinestones that he hoped were embedded in the walls of the passageway somewhere close ahead, he felt a sudden strange tingling and trembling, a feathery twitching and throbbing. The sensation ran through the entire length of his sensing-organ, from the place at the base of his spine where it sprouted from his body all the way out to its tip. It was the sensation that came from living creatures very near at hand.

Swept by alarm, he halted at once and held himself utterly still.

Yes. He felt a clear emanation of life nearby: something huge turning and turning below him, like a thick sluggish auger drilling through stone. Something alive, here in these cold lightless depths, roaming the mountain’s bleak dark heart.

“Yissou!” he muttered, and made the sign of the Protector. “Emakkis!” he whispered, and made the sign of the Provider. “Dawinno! Friit!”

In awe and fear Thaggoran put his cheek to the tunnel’s rough stone floor. He pressed the pads of his fingers against the chilly rock. He aimed his second sight outward and downward. He swept his sensing-organ from side to side in a wide arc.

Stronger sensations, undeniable and incontrovertible, came flooding in. He shivered. Nervously he fingered the ancient amulet dangling on a cord about his throat.

A living thing, yes. Dull-witted, practically mindless, but definitely alive, throbbing with hot intense vitality. And not at all far away. It was separated from him, Thaggoran perceived, by nothing more than a layer of rock a single arm’s-length wide. Gradually its image took form for him: an immense limbless thick-bodied creature standing on its tail within a vertical tunnel scarcely broader than itself. Great black bristles thicker than a man’s arm ran the length of its meaty body, and deep red craters in its pale flesh radiated powerful blasts of nauseating stench. It was moving up through the mountain with inexorable determination, cutting a path for itself with its broad stubby boulderlike teeth: gnawing on rock, digesting it, excreting it as moist sand at the far end of a massive fleshy body thirty man-lengths long.

Nor was it the only one of its kind making the ascent. From the right and the left now Thaggoran pulled in other heavy pulsing emanations. There were three of the great beasts, five, maybe a dozen of them. Each was confined in its own narrow tunnel, each embarked upon an unhurried journey upward.

Ice-eaters, Thaggoran thought. Yissou! Was it possible?

Shaken, astounded, he crouched motionless, listening to the pounding of the huge animals’ souls.

Yes, he was certain of it now: surely these were ice-eaters moving about. He had never seen one — no one alive had ever seen an ice-eater — but he carried a clear image of them in his mind. The oldest pages of the tribal chronicles told of them: vast creatures that the gods had called into being in the first days of the Long Winter, when the less hardy denizens of the Great World were perishing of the darkness and the cold. The ice-eaters made their homes in the black deep places of the earth, and needed neither air nor light nor warmth. Indeed they shunned such things as if they were poisons. And the prophets had said that a time would come at winter’s end when the ice-eaters would begin to rise toward the surface, until at last they emerged into the bright light of day to meet their doom.

Now, it seemed, the ice-eaters had commenced their climb. Was the endless winter at last reaching its end, then?

Perhaps these ice-eaters merely were confused. The chronicles testified that there had been plenty of false omens before this. Thaggoran knew the texts well: the Book of the Unhappy Dawn, the Book of the Cold Awakening, the Book of the Wrongful Glow.

But it made little difference whether this was the true omen of spring or merely another in the long skein of tantalizing disappointments. One thing was sure: the People would have to abandon their cocoon and go forth into the strangeness and mystery of the open world.

For the fullness of the catastrophe was at once apparent to Thaggoran. His years of roving these dark abandoned passageways had inscribed an indelible map of their intricate patterns in lines of brilliant scarlet on his mind. The upward route of these vast indifferent monsters drilling slowly through earth and rock would in time carry them crashing through the heart of the dwelling-chamber where the People had lived so many thousands of years. There could be no doubt of that. The worms would be coming up right below the place of the altarstone. And the tribe was no more capable of halting them in their blind ascent than it would be of trapping an onrushing death-star in a net of woven grass.

Far above the cavern where Thaggoran knelt eavesdropping on the ice-eaters, Torlyri the offering-woman, who was the twining-partner of Koshmar the chieftain, was at that moment nearing the exit hatch of the cocoon. It was the moment of sunrise, when Torlyri went forth to make the daily offering to the Five Heavenly Ones.

Tall, gentle Torlyri was renowned for her great beauty and sweetness of soul. Her fur was a lustrous black, banded with two astonishing bright spirals of white that ran the whole length of her body. Powerful muscles rippled beneath her skin. Her eyes were soft and dark, her smile was warm and easy. Everyone in the tribe loved Torlyri. From childhood on she had been marked for distinction: a true leader, one to whom others might turn at any time for counsel and support. But for the mildness of her spirit, she might well have become chieftain herself, and not Koshmar; but beauty and strength alone are insufficient. A chieftain must not be mild.

So it was to Koshmar and not Torlyri that they had come, on that day, nine years earlier, when the old chieftain Thekmur had reached the limit-age. “This is my death-day,” sinewy little Thekmur had announced to Koshmar. “And so this is your crowning-day,” said Thaggoran. Thus Koshmar was made chieftain, as it had been agreed five years before that. For Torlyri a different destiny had been decreed. When, not long afterward, it was the time of Gonnari the offering-woman to pass through the hatch as Thekmur had, Thaggoran and Koshmar came to Torlyri to place the offering-bowl in her hands. Then Koshmar and Torlyri embraced, with warm tears in their eyes, and went before the tribe to accept the election; and a little later that day they celebrated their double accession more privately, with laughter and love, in one of the twining-chambers.

“Now it is our time to rule,” Koshmar told her that day. “Yes,” Torlyri said. “At last, our time is here.” But she knew the truth, which was that now it was Koshmar’s time to rule, and Torlyri’s time to serve. Yet were they not both servants of the People, chieftain as well as offering-woman?

Each morning for the past nine years Torlyri had made the same journey, when the silent signal came through the eye of the hatch to tell her that the sun had entered the sky: out of the cocoon by the sky-side, up and up through the interior of the cliff along the winding maze of steep narrow corridors that led toward the crest, and at last to the flat area at the top, the Place of Going Out, where she would perform the rite that was her most important responsibility to the People.

There, each morning, Torlyri unfastened the exit hatch and stepped across the threshold, cautiously passing a little way into the outer world. Most members of the tribe crossed that threshold only three times in their lives: on their naming-day, their twining-day, and their death-day. The chieftain saw the outer world a fourth time, on her crowning-day. But Torlyri had the privilege and the burden of entering the outer world each morning of her life. Even she was permitted to go only as far as the offering-stone of pink granite flecked with sparkling flakes of fire, six paces beyond the gate. Upon that holy stone she would place her offering-bowl, containing some little things of the inner world, a few glowberries or some yellow strands of wall-thatching or a bit of charred meat; and then she would empty yesterday’s bowl of its offerings and gather something of the outer world to take within, a handful of earth, a scattering of pebbles, half a dozen blades of redgrass. That daily interchange was essential to the well-being of the tribe. What it said to the gods each day was: We have not forgotten that we are of the world and we are in the world, even though we must live apart from it at this time. Someday we will come forth again and dwell upon the world that you have made for us, and this is the token of our pledge.

Arriving now at the Place of Going Out, Torlyri set down her offering-bowl and gripped the handwheel that opened the hatch. It was no trifling thing to turn that great shining wheel, but it moved easily under her hands. Torlyri was proud of her strength. Neither Koshmar nor any man of the tribe, not even mighty Harruel, the biggest and strongest of the warriors, could equal her at arm-standing, at kick-wrestling, at cavern-soaring.

The gate opened. Torlyri stepped through. The keen, sharp air of morning stung her nostrils.

The sun was just coming up. Its chilly red glow filled the eastern sky, and the swirling dust motes that danced on the frosty air seemed to flare and blaze with an inner flame. Beyond the ledge on which she stood, Torlyri saw the broad, swift river far below, gleaming with the same crimson stain of morning light.

Once that great river had been known as the Hallimalla by those who lived along its banks, and before that it had been called the Sipsimutta, and at an even earlier time its name was the Mississippi. Torlyri knew nothing of any of that. To her, the river was simply the river. All those other names were forgotten now, and had been for hundreds of thousands of years. There had been hard times upon the earth since the coming of the Long Winter. The Great World itself was lost; why then should its names have survived? A few had, but only a few. The river was nameless now.

The cocoon in which the sixty members of Koshmar’s tribe had spent all their lives — and where their ancestors had huddled since time out of mind, waiting out the unending darkness and chill that the falling death-stars had brought — was a snug cozy burrow hollowed out of the side of a lofty bluff rising high above that mighty river. At first, so the chronicles declared, those people who had survived the early days of black rains and frightful cold had been content to live in mere caves, eating roots and nuts and catching such meat-creatures as they could. Then the winter had deepened and the plants and wild animals vanished from the world. Had human ingenuity ever faced a greater challenge? But the cocoon was the answer: the self-sufficient buried enclosure, dug into hillsides and cliffs well above any likely snow line. Small groups of people, their numbers strictly controlled by breeding regulations, occupied the cocoon’s insulated chambers. Clusters of luminescent glow-berries afforded light; intricate ventilation shafts provided fresh air; water was pumped up from underground streams. Crops and livestock, having been elegantly adapted to life under artificial illumination by means of magical skills now forgotten, were raised in surrounding chambers. The cocoons were little island-worlds entirely complete in themselves, each as isolated as though it were bound on a solitary voyage across the deep night of space. And in them the survivors of the world’s great calamity waited out the time, by centuries and tens of centuries, until the day when the gods would grow weary of hurling death-stars from the sky.

Torlyri went to the offering-stone, set down her bowl, looked in each of the Five Sacred Directions, spoke in turn the Five Names.

“Yissou,” she said. “Protector.

“Emakkis. Provider.

“Friit. Healer.

“Dawinno. Destroyer.

“Mueri. Consoler.”

Her voice chimed and echoed in the stillness. As she picked up yesterday’s bowl to empty it, she looked past the rim of the ledge and downward toward the river. Along that bare steep slope, where only gnarled and twisted little woody shrubs could grow, brittle whitened bones lay scattered and tumbled everywhere like twigs idly strewn. The bones of Gonnari were there, and of Thekmur, and of Thrask, who had been chronicler before Thaggoran. Torlyri’s mother’s bones lay in those scattered drifts, and her father’s, and those of their fathers and mothers. All those who had ever left the hatch had perished here, on this plunging hillside, struck down by the angry kiss of the winter air.

Torlyri wondered how long they lived, those who came forth from the cocoon when their appointed death-day at last arrived. An hour? A day? How far were they able to roam before they were felled? Most, Torlyri expected, simply sat and waited for the end to come to them. But had any of them, overtaken by desperate curiosity in the last hours of their lives, tried to strike out into the world beyond the ledge? To the river, say? Had anyone actually lasted long enough to make it down to the river’s edge?

She wondered what it might be like to clamber down the side of the cliff and touch the tips of her fingers to that mysterious potent current.

It would burn like fire, Torlyri thought. But it would be cool fire, a purifying fire. She imagined herself wading out into the dark river, knee-deep, thigh-deep, belly-deep, feeling the cold blaze of the water swirling up over her loins and her sensing-organ. She saw herself then setting out through the turbulent flow, toward the other bank that was so far away she could barely make it out — walking through the water, or perhaps atop it as legend said the water-strider folk did, walking on and on toward the sunrise land, never once to see the cocoon again—

Torlyri smiled. What foolishness it was to indulge in these fantasies!

And what treason to the tribe it would be, if the offering-woman herself were to take advantage of her hatch-freedom and desert the cocoon! But she felt a strange pleasure in pretending that she might someday do such a thing. One could at least dream of it. Almost everyone, Torlyri suspected, now and then looked with longing toward the outer world and had a moment’s dream of escaping into it, though surely few would admit to that. She had heard that there were those over the centuries who, growing weary of cocoon life, actually had slipped through the hatch and down to the river and into the wild lands beyond — not expelled from the cocoon as one was on one’s death-day, but voluntary sojourners, setting forth into that frigid unknowability of their own will simply to discover what it was like. Had anyone in truth ever chosen such a desperate course? So it was said; but if it had happened, it had not been in the lifetime of anyone now living. Of course those who might have gone forth in that way could never have returned to tell the tale; they would have died almost at once in that harsh world out there. To go outside was madness, she thought. But a tempting madness.

Torlyri knelt to collect what she needed for the inward offering.

Then out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of movement. She whirled, startled, turning back toward the hatch just in time to see the small slight figure of a boy dart through it and race across the ledge to the rim.

Torlyri reacted without thinking. The boy had already begun scrambling over the side of the ledge; but she pivoted, moved to her left, grabbed at him fiercely, managed to catch him by one heel before he disappeared. He yowled and kicked, but she held him fast, hauling him up, throwing him down onto the ledge beside her.

His eyes were wide with fright, but there was boldness and bright audacity in them too. He was looking past her, trying to get a glimpse of the hills and the river. Torlyri stood poised over him, half expecting him to make another desperate lunge around her.

“Hresh,” she said. “Of course. Hresh. Who else but you would try something like this?”

He was eight, Minbain’s boy, wild and headstrong all his life. Hresh-full-of-questions, they called him, bubbling as he was with unlawful curiosity. He was small, slender, almost frail, a wriggling little rope of a boy, with a ghostly face, triangular and sharply tapering from a wide brow, and huge dark eyes mysteriously flecked with scarlet specks. Everyone said of him that he had been born for trouble. But this was no trifling scrape he had gotten himself into now.

Torlyri shook her head sadly. “Have you gone crazy? What did you think you were doing?”

Softly he said, “I only wanted to see what’s out here, Torlyri! The sky. The river. Everything.”

“You would have seen all that on your naming-day.”

He shrugged. “But that’s a whole year away! I couldn’t wait that long.”

“The law is the law, Hresh. We all obey, for the good of all. Are you above the law?”

Sullenly he said, “I only wanted to see. Just for a single day, Torlyri!”

“Do you know what happens to those who break the law?”

Frowning, Hresh said, “Not really. But it’s something bad, isn’t it? What will you do to me?”

“Me? Nothing. It’s up to Koshmar.”

“Then what will she do to me?”

“Anything. I don’t know. People have been put to death for doing what you tried to do.”

“Death?”

“Expelled from the cocoon. That’s certain death. No human could last out there alone for very long. Look there, boy.”

She pointed down the slope, at the field of bleached bones.

“What are those?” Hresh asked at once.

Torlyri touched his thin arm, pressing against the bone within. “Skeletons. There’s one inside you. You’ll leave your bones on that hill if you go outside. Everyone does.”

“Everyone who’s ever gone outside?”

“They all lie right there, Hresh. Like pieces of old wood tossed about by the winter storms.”

He trembled. “There aren’t enough of them,” he said with sudden defiance. “All those years and years and years of death-days — the whole hill ought to be covered with bones, deeper than I am high.”

Despite herself Torlyri felt a grin coming on, and looked away a moment. There was no one else like this child, was there? “The bones don’t last, Hresh. Fifty, a hundred years, perhaps, and then they turn to dust. Those you see are just the ones who have been cast out most recently.”

Hresh considered that a moment.

In a hushed voice he said, “Would they do that to me ?”

“Everything is in Koshmar’s hands.”

There was a sudden flash of panic in the boy’s strange eyes. “But you won’t tell her, will you? Will you, Torlyri?” His expression grew guileful. “You don’t have to say anything, do you? You almost didn’t notice me, after all. Another moment and I’d have been past you and over the edge, and I would have just stayed out till tomorrow morning, and nobody would have been the wiser. I mean, it isn’t as though I hurt anybody. I only wanted to see the river.”

She sighed. His frightened, beseeching look was hard to resist. And, truly, what harm had he done? He hadn’t managed to get more than ten paces outside. She could understand his yearning to discover what lay beyond the walls of the cocoon: that boiling curiosity, that horde of unanswered questions that must rage in him all the time. She had felt something of that herself, though her spirit, she knew, had little of the fire that must possess this troubled boy. But the law was the law, and he had broken it. She could ignore that only at the peril of her own soul.

“Please, Torlyri, please—”

She shook her head. Without taking her eyes from the boy, she scooped together what she needed for the inward offering. She glanced once more in each of the Five Sacred Directions. She spoke the Five Names. Then she turned to the boy and indicated with a brusque gesture that he was to precede her through the hatch. He looked terrified. Gently Torlyri said, “I have no choice, Hresh. I have to take you to Koshmar.”

Long ago, someone had mounted a narrow strip of glossy black stone at eye level along the central chamber’s rear wall. No one knew why it had been put there originally, but over the years it had come to be sacred to the memory of the tribe’s departed chieftains. Koshmar made a point of brushing her fingertips across it and quickly whispering the names of the six who had ruled most recently before her, whenever she felt apprehensive over the future of the People. It was her quick way of invoking the power of her predecessors’ spirits, asking them to enter into her and guide her to do the right thing. Somehow calling upon them seemed more immediate, more useful, than to call upon the Five Heavenly Ones. She had invented the little rite herself.

Lately Koshmar had begun touching the strip of black stone every day, and then two or three times each day, while saying the names:

— Thekmur Nialli Sismoil Yanla Vork Lirridon —

She was having premonitions: of what, she could not say, but she felt that some great transformation must be descending upon the world, and that she would stand soon in need of much guidance. The stone was comforting in such moments.

Koshmar wondered if her successor too would observe this custom of touching the stone when her soul was troubled. It was almost time, Koshmar knew, to begin thinking of a successor. She would be thirty this year. Five years more and she would reach the limit-age. Her death-day would come, as it had come for Thekmur and Nialli and Sismoil and all the rest, and they would take her to the exit hatch and send her outside to perish in the cold. It was the way, unalterable, unanswerable: the cocoon was finite, food was limited, one must make room for those who are to come.

She closed her eyes and put her fingers to the black stone and stood quietly, a husky, broad-shouldered, keen-eyed woman at the height of her strength and power, praying for help.

Thekmur Nialli Sismoil Yanla —

Torlyri burst into the chamber just then, dragging Minbain’s unruly brat Hresh, the one who was forever sneaking around poking his nose into this place and that one where he had no business. The boy was howling and squirming and frantically writhing in Torlyri’s grasp. His eyes were wild and shining with fear, as though he had just seen a death-star plummeting down toward the roof of the cocoon.

Koshmar, startled, swung around to face them. In her irritation her thick grayish-brown fur rose like a cloak about her, so that she seemed to swell to half again her true size.

“What’s this? What has he done now?”

“I went outside to make the offering,” Torlyri began, “and an instant later out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of—”

Thaggoran entered the chamber at that moment. To Koshmar’s amazement he looked nearly as wild-eyed as Hresh. He was waving his arms and sensing-organ around in a peculiar crazed way, and his voice came in such a thick blurting rush that Koshmar could make out mere fragments of what he was trying to tell her.

“Ice-eaters — the cocoon — right underneath, coming straight up — it’s the truth, Koshmar, it’s the prophecy—”

And all the while Hresh continued to whimper and yowl, and soft-voiced Torlyri went steadily on with her story.

“One at a time!” Koshmar cried. “I can’t hear anything that anybody’s saying!” She glared at the withered old chronicler, white-furred with age and bowed as though weighed down by the precious deep knowledge of the past that he alone carried. She had never seen him looking so deranged. “Ice-eaters, Thaggoran? Did you say ice-eaters?”

Thaggoran was trembling. He muttered something murmy and faint that was drowned out by Hresh’s panicky outcries. Koshmar looked angrily toward her twining-partner and snapped, “Torlyri, why is that child in here?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you. I caught him trying to slip through the hatch.”

“What?”

“I only wanted to see the river!” Hresh howled. “Just for a little while!”

“You know the law, Hresh?”

“It was just for a little while!”

Koshmar sighed. “How old is he, Torlyri?”

“Eight, I think.”

“Then he knows the law. All right, let him see the river. Take him upstairs and put him outside.”

Shock registered on Torlyri’s gentle face. Tears glistened in her eyes. Hresh began to scream and howl again, even louder. But Koshmar had had enough of him. The boy had long been a nuisance, and the law was clear. To the hatch with him, and good riddance. She made an impatient sweeping gesture of dismissal and swung back to face Thaggoran.

“All right. Now: what’s this about ice-eaters?”

In a shaky voice the chronicler launched a bewildering tale, raggedly told and difficult to follow, something about searching for shinestones in the Mother of Frost, and picking up a sense of something alive nearby, something big, moving in the rock, something digging a tunnel. “I made contact,” Thaggoran said, “and I touched the mind of an ice-eater — I mean, one can’t really speak of ice-eaters having minds, but in a manner of speaking they do, and what I felt was—”

Koshmar scowled. “How far away from you was it?”

“Not far at all. And there were others. Perhaps a dozen, all told, close at hand. Koshmar, do you know what this means? It must be the end of winter! The prophets have written, ‘When the ice-eaters begin to rise—’ ”

“I know what the prophets have written,” Koshmar said sharply. “These things are coming right up under the dwelling-chamber, you say? Are you sure?”

Thaggoran nodded. “They’ll smash right through the floor. I don’t know how soon — it could be a week from now, or a month, or maybe six months — but beyond any doubt they’re heading straight for us. And they’re enormous, Koshmar.” He stretched his arms out as far as they could reach. “They’re this wide around — maybe even bigger—”

“Gods spare us,” Torlyri murmured. And from the boy Hresh came short sharp panting sounds of astonishment.

Koshmar whirled, exasperated. “Are you two still here? I told you to take him to the hatch, Torlyri! The law is clear. Venture outside the cocoon without lawful leaving-right, and you are forbidden to enter it again. I tell you one last time, Torlyri: take him to the hatch.”

“But he didn’t really leave the cocoon,” said Torlyri quietly. “He stepped out just a little way, and—”

“No! No more disobedience! Say the words over him and cast him out, Torlyri!” Once again she turned to Thaggoran. “Come with me, old man. Show me your ice-eaters. We’ll be waiting for them with our hatchets when they break through. Big as they are, we’ll cut them to pieces as they rise, a slice and a slice and a slice, and then—”

She cut herself short as suddenly a strange hoarse sound, a rasping strangled gurgling sound, came from the far side of the chamber:

“Aaoouuuaaah!”

It went on and on, and then it died away into an astounded silence.

“Yissou and Mueri! What was that?” Koshmar muttered, amazed.

It was a sound such as she had never heard before. An ice-worm, perhaps, stirring and yawning just below as it made ready to smash through the wall of the chamber? Bewildered, she stared into the dimness. But all was still. Everything seemed to be as it should be. There was the tabernacle, there was the casket in which the book of the chronicles was kept, there was the Wonderstone in its niche and all the old shinestones around it, there was the cradle where Ryyig Dream-Dreamer slept his eternal sleep—

“Aaoouuuaaah!” Again.

“It’s Ryyig!” Torlyri exclaimed. “He’s waking up!”

“Gods!” cried Koshmar. “He is! He is!”

Indeed so. Koshmar felt awe flooding her spirit, making her legs go weak. Overwhelmed by sudden vertigo, she had to grasp the wall, leaning against the strip of black stone and whispering again and again, Thekmur Nialli Sismoil, Thekmur Nialli Sismoil. The Dream-Dreamer was sitting bolt upright — when had that ever happened before? — and his eyes were open — no one in the memory of the tribe had ever seen the eyes of Ryyig Dream-Dreamer — and he was crying out, he who had never been known to make any sound more vehement than a snore. His hands raked the air, his lips moved. He seemed to be trying to speak.

“Aaoouuuaaah!” cried Ryyig Dream-Dreamer a third time.

Then he closed his eyes and sank back into his unending dream.

In the high-roofed, brightly lit growing-chamber, warm and humid, the women were at work plucking the unwanted flowers from the greenleaf plants and pruning the tendrils of the velvetberry vines. It was quiet work, steady and pleasant.

Minbain straightened abruptly and peered around, frowning, holding her head to one side at a steep angle.

“Is something wrong?” Galihine asked.

“Didn’t you hear anything?”

“Me? Not a thing.”

“A peculiar sound,” said Minbain. She looked from one woman to the other, to Boldirinthe, to Sinistine, to Cheysz, to Galihine again. “Like a groan, it was.”

“Harruel, snorting in his sleep,” Sinistine suggested.

“Koshmar and Torlyri, having a good twine,” said Boldirinthe.

They laughed. Minbain tightened her lips. She was older than the rest of them, and at the best of times she felt distant from them. It was because she had once been a breeder-woman, and after the death of her mate Samnibolon she had become a worker-woman. That was an uncommon thing to do. She suspected that they thought she was strange. Perhaps they believed that the mother of a strange child like Hresh must herself be a little odd. But what did they understand of such things? Not one of the women in the room with her had ever been mated at all, nor borne a child, nor did they know what it was to raise one.

“There,” Minbain said. “There it goes again! You didn’t hear it?”

“Harruel, definitely,” said Sinistine. “He’s dreaming of coupling with you, Minbain.”

Boldirinthe giggled. “Now there’s a match! Minbain and Harruel! Oh, I envy you, Minbain! Think of how he’ll grab you and push you down, and how—”

“Hssh!” Minbain cried. She snatched up her basket of greenleaf blossoms and hurled it at Boldirinthe, who managed barely to deflect it with her elbow. It bounced upward and away, turning upside down, and a mass of the sticky yellow blossoms came tumbling from it, scattering over Sinistine and Cheysz. The women stared. Such a show of temper was a rarity indeed. “Why did you do that?” Cheysz asked. She was a small, sweet-souled woman and she seemed altogether astounded by Minbain’s angry outburst. “Look, they’re stuck to me all over,” Cheysz said, and seemed almost ready to burst into tears. Indeed, the pale chartreuse blossoms, rich with their thick shining nectar, were clinging to her fur in clusters and patches, giving her a bizarre mottled look. Sinistine too was covered with the things, and as she tried to pull one away the fur began to come with it, making her howl with pain. Her pale blue eyes glinted icily with wrath, and, seizing a stout black velvetberry tendril that was lying at her feet, she advanced toward Minbain, wielding it as she would a whip.

“Stop it!” Galihine shouted. “Have you all gone crazy?”

“Listen,” said Minbain. “There’s that sound once more.”

They all fell silent.

“I heard it this time,” said Cheysz.

“Me too,” said Sinistine, staring in wonder. She tossed the velvetberry tendril aside. “Like a groan, yes. Just as you said, Minbain.”

“What could it have been?” Boldirinthe asked.

“Perhaps it’s some god walking around just outside the hatch,” Minbain said. “Emakkis, looking for a lost sheep, maybe. Or Dawinno trying to clear his nose.” She shrugged. “Strange. Very strange. We should remember to tell Thaggoran about it.” Then she turned to Cheysz, smiling apologetically. “Here. Let me help you get those things out of your fur.”

Ryyig had been awake only a moment; the whole thing had come and gone so swiftly that even those who had witnessed it could not fully believe they had seen what they had seen and heard what they had heard. And now the Dream-Dreamer was lost once more in his mysteries, eyes shut, breast rising and falling so slowly that he seemed almost to be carved of stone. But his crying out was significant enough, coming so soon after Thaggoran’s discovery of the ascent of the ice-eaters. These were omens. These were definite harbingers.

To Koshmar they were signs that the new springtime of the world was nearly at hand. Perhaps the time had not yet arrived, but surely it was coming.

Even before this day of strange events, Koshmar had felt changes beginning to develop in the rhythm of the tribe’s life. Everyone had. There had been a stirring in the cocoon, a ferment of the spirits, a sense of new beginnings about to unfold. The old patterns, which had held for thousands upon thousands of years, were breaking up.

Sleep-times had been the first thing to change. Minbain had remarked on that. “I never seem to sleep any more,” she said, and her friend Galihine had nodded, saying, “Nor I. But I’m not tired. Why is that?” It had been the custom among the people of the cocoon to spend more of their time asleep than awake, lying coiled together by twos and threes in intricate furry tangles, lost in hazy dream-fables. No longer. Now everyone seemed strangely alert, restless, active, troubled by the need to fill the extra hours of the day.

The young ones were the worst. “These children!” the gruff warrior Konya had grumbled. “If they’re going to be wild like this, we should put them to military drills!” Indeed they were shattering the tranquillity of the cocoon with their frenzies, Koshmar thought, especially strange little Hresh and lovely sad-eyed Taniane and that brawny, deep-chested Orbin and even plump clumsy Haniman. Young ones were supposed to be lively, but no one could remember anything like the maniacal energy that those four displayed: dancing maddeningly in circles for hour after hour, singing and chanting long skeins of nonsense, clambering hand over hand up the shaggy walls of the cocoon and swinging from the ceiling. Only last week, when Koshmar had been trying to celebrate the rite of Lord Fanigole’s Day, they had had to be ordered into silence, and even then they had been slow to obey. Hresh trying to get outside this morning — it was all part of the same wildness.

Then the breeding pairs had caught the fever, Nittin and Nettin, Jalmud and Valmud, Preyne and Threyne. Plainly enough, all three pairs had accomplished their season’s work — there was no question of it, you could see their swelling bellies — and yet there they were, coupling zealously the whole day long anyway as though someone might accuse them of defaulting on their duty.

And at last the older members of the tribe had been infected by the new restlessness: Thaggoran sniffing around the old deep tunnels for shinestones, burly red-bearded Harruel climbing the walls like a boy, Konya flexing his muscles and pacing back and forth. Koshmar felt it herself. It was like an itch deep down, beneath her fur, beneath the skin itself. Even the ice-eaters were rising. Great changes were coming. Why else would Ryyig Dream-Dreamer have awakened this morning, even for a moment, and cried out that way?

“Koshmar?” Thaggoran said finally, when they had all been silent a long while.

She shook her head. “Let me be.”

“You said you wanted to go to the ice-eaters, Koshmar.”

“Not now. If he’s awakening, I have to stay by him.”

“Can it be?” Torlyri asked. “Awakening now, do you think?”

“How would I know? You heard what I heard, Torlyri.” Koshmar realized that the boy Hresh was still in the room, silent now, motionless, frozen with awe. She glowered at him. Then her eyes went to Torlyri’s, and she saw the soft pleading there.

Torlyri made the sign of Mueri at her, gentle Mueri, Mueri the Mother, Mueri the Consoler, Mueri the goddess to whom Torlyri was particularly consecrated.

“All right,” Koshmar said at last, with a sigh of acquiescence. “I pardon him, yes. We can’t cast anyone out on the day the Dream-Dreamer awakens, I suppose. But get him out of here this minute. And make sure he knows that if he misbehaves again I’ll — I’ll — oh, get him out of here, Torlyri! Now!”

In the chamber of the warriors Staip paused in his drills and looked up, frowning.

“Did you hear something just then?”

“I hear the sound of shirking,” Harruel grunted.

Staip let the insult pass. Harruel was big and dangerous; one did not challenge him lightly. “An outcry of some sort,” he said. “Very like a howl of pain.”

“Drill now. Talk later,” said Harruel.

Staip turned to Konya. “You heard it?”

“I was at my task,” Konya said quietly. “My attention was where it belonged.”

“As was mine,” Staip retorted, with some heat. “But I heard a terrible cry. Twice. Perhaps three times. Something may be happening out there. What do you think? Konya? Harruel?”

“I heard nothing,” Harruel said. He was at the Wheel of Dawinno, rolling the great heavy spool around and around. Konya held the spindles of the Loom of Emakkis. Staip had been doing his turn on Yissou’s Ladder. They were the three senior warriors of the tribe, strong and somber men, and this was how they burned off their surging energies each day, day after day, in the long sweet isolation of the cocoon.

Staip stared bleakly at them. He saw the mockery in their eyes, and it maddened him. He had been working just as hard at his drills as they. If they hadn’t heard those three frightful screams, what fault was it of his? They had no right to jeer at him. He felt anger rising. There was a pounding in his chest. So proud of their diligent drilling, they were. Calling him a shirker, accusing him of letting his attention wander—

Was it his imagination, he wondered, or had they both been aiming little jabs at him for some weeks now? They had said things which he had let slide by, but now, as he thought it over, it seemed to him that in many ways they had been telling him that he was lazy, that he was stupid, that he was slow.

Life was more difficult these days. There was a new mood to everyone: keener, more alert, more prickly, everyone on edge. Staip had found it hard to sleep of late; so, apparently, had the others. There was more bickering than before. Tempers flared easily.

But still — these insults — they had no right—

His anger overflowed and he stepped toward them, intent on a challenge. He started toward Konya, and was already beginning to go into kick-wrestling stance when he checked himself and swung away. He and Konya were about an even match. There would be no satisfaction in that. Harruel was the one he would fight. Great towering arrogant Harruel, the top man of all — yes, yes, that was the way! Knock him down and they’d all understand that Staip was no one to trifle with! “Come on,” he said, glaring up at Harruel and balancing in the posture known as the Double Assault. “Wrestle with me, Harruel!”

Harruel seemed unperturbed. “What’s the matter with you, Staip?” he asked calmly.

“You know what the matter is. Come. Now. Fight me.”

“We have our drills to do. I have the Ladder yet to go, and the Loom, and then an hour of leaps and bends—”

“Are you afraid of me?”

“You must be out of your mind.”

“You’ve insulted me. Fight me. Your drills can wait.”

“The drills are our sacred duty, Staip. We are warriors.”

“Warriors? For what war do you prepare yourself, Harruel? If you call yourself a warrior, fight me. Fight me or by Dawinno I’ll knock you down whether you take the stance or not!”

Harruel sighed. “Drills first. We can fight afterward.”

“By Dawinno—” Staip said thickly.

There was a sound behind him. Into the chamber of warriors came Lakkamai, a wiry dark-furred man with an austere, remote manner, who was given to uttering few words. Silently Lakkamai walked past them and took his seat at the Five Gods, most taxing of all the drilling devices they used. Then, as if noticing for the first time the tensions in the chamber, he looked up and said, “What are you two doing?”

“He said he heard a strange sound,” Harruel replied. “Like a cry of pain, he said, repeated two or three times.”

“And so you are going to fight?”

“He called me a shirker,” Staip said. “And there were other insults.”

“All right, Staip,” Harruel said. “Come. If you need a beating, I’ll give you one, and a good one. Come, and let’s get it over with,”

“Fools,” Lakkamai said under his breath, and thrust his arms into the coils of the Five Gods.

Staip advanced toward Harruel again. Then he paused, abashed, wondering why he was doing this. Lakkamai’s cool disdain had sent all the rage whistling from his inflamed spirit as though from a punctured air-bladder. Harruel seemed puzzled too, and they looked at each other, baffled. After a moment Harruel turned as though nothing had happened, and returned to his drill. Staip stared, wondering if he should go through with the challenge all the same, but the impulse had passed. Lamely he went back to his own drill. From the far side of the room came the sounds of Konya hard at work once more on the Loom.

For a long while the four men went at their drills, none of them saying a word. Staip still felt a dull angry throbbing in his forehead. He was not sure whether he had won or lost in his interchange with Harruel, but it had not left him with any sense of triumph. To ease his soul he worked with triple ferocity at the drilling machines. He had spent his whole life at these machines, training his body, tuning his muscles, for it was a warrior’s duty to make himself strong, no matter how peaceful the life of the cocoon might be, and peaceful it always was. A time would come, so it was said, when the People must leave the cocoon for the world outside; and when that time came, the warriors needed to be strong.

After a very long while Lakkamai said, in response to no one’s query, “That sound Staip heard was the Dream-Dreamer. He is waking up, so I hear.”

“What?” Konya cried.

“You see?” Staip said. “You see?”

And Harruel, jumping down from Yissou’s Ladder, rushed forward in amazement, demanding to know more. But Lakkamai merely shrugged and went on with his drill.

All day long Koshmar stood beside the Dream-Dreamer’s cradle, watching his eyes moving beneath his pale pink lids. How long, she wondered, had he slept like this? A hundred years? A thousand? According to the tradition of the tribe he had closed his eyes on the first day of the world’s long winter and he would not open them again until winter’s end; and it had been prophesied that the winter would last seven hundred thousand years.

Seven hundred thousand years! Had the Dream-Dreamer slept that long, then?

So it was asserted. It might even be so.

And all that time, while he slept, his dreaming mind had roved the heavens, seeking out the blazing death-stars that journeyed toward the earth trailing rivers of light and observing them through all their long trajectories; and he would sleep on and on and on, so it was said, until the last of those frightful stars had fallen from the sky and the world had grown warm again and it had become safe for human folk to come forth from their cocoons. Now he had opened his eyes, though only for a moment, and had begun to speak, or at least to make the attempt to speak. What else could be have been doing, if not proclaiming the end of winter? That strangled gurgling sound: surely it heralded the coming of the new age. Torlyri had heard it, and Thaggoran, and Hresh, and Koshmar herself. But could that grotesque sound be trusted? Was this really winter’s end? So the omens portended. There was the evidence of the ice-eaters; there was the evidence of the odd restlessness that had afflicted the tribe. Now this. Ah, let it be so, Koshmar prayed. Yissou, let it happen in my time! Let me be the one to lead the people forth into sunlight!

Koshmar peered around warily. It was forbidden to disturb Ryyig Dream-Dreamer in any way. But many things that had been forbidden seemed permissible now. She was alone in the chamber. Gently she put her hand to the Dream-Dreamer’s bare shoulder. How strange his skin felt! Like an old worn piece of leather, terribly soft, delicate, vulnerable. His body was not like any of theirs: he was altogether without fur, a naked pink creature with long slender arms and frail little legs that could never have carried him anywhere. And he had no sensing-organ at all.

“Ryyig? Ryyig?” Koshmar whispered. “Open your eyes again! Tell me what you are meant to tell!”

He seemed to wriggle a bit in his cradle, as though annoyed that she was trespassing on his slumber. His bare forehead furrowed; through his thin lips came a faint little whistling sound. His eyes remained closed.

“Ryyig? Tell me: is the time of falling stars over? Will the sun shine again? Is it safe for us to go outside?”

Koshmar thought that his eyelids might be flickering. Boldly she rocked him by the shoulder, and then more boldly still, as if she meant to pull him awake by force. Her fingers dug deeply into his sparse flesh. She felt the frail bones just beneath. Would Thekmur have taken such risks? she wondered. Would Nialli? Perhaps not. No matter. Koshmar shook him again. Ryyig uttered a little mewing noise and turned his head away from her.

“You tried to say it before,” Koshmar whispered fiercely. “Say it! The winter is over. Say it! Say it!”

Suddenly the thin pale lids pulled back. She found herself staring into strange haunting eyes of a deep violet hue, shrouded by dreams and mysteries of which she knew she could never comprehend a thing. The impact of those eyes, at this close range, was so overwhelming that Koshmar fell back a pace or two. But she recovered quickly.

“Come!” she called. “Everyone, come! He’s waking up again! Come! Come quickly!”

The slender fragile figure in the cradle seemed to be struggling once more to a sitting position. Koshmar slipped her arm behind his back and drew him upward. His head wobbled, as if too heavy for his neck. Once more that gurgling sound came from him. Koshmar bent low, putting her ear to his mouth. The People were entering from both sides of the chamber now, gathering close around her. She saw Minbain, and little Cheysz, and the young warrior Salaman. Harruel came in grandly, pushing others aside, staring with blazing eyes at the Dream-Dreamer.

And Ryyig spoke.

“The— winter—”

His voice was feeble but the words were unmistakable.

“The— winter—”

“—is over,” Koshmar prompted. “Yes! Yes! Say it! Say, Why do you wait? The winter is over!”

A third time: “The— winter—”

The thin lips worked convulsively. Muscles flickered in the fleshless jaws. Ryyig’s body sagged against her arm; his shoulders rippled strangely; his eyes went dull and lost their focus.

“Is he dead?” Harruel asked. “I think he is. The Dream-Dreamer’s dead!”

“He’s only gone back to sleep,” said Torlyri.

Koshmar shook her head. Harruel was right. There was no life to Ryyig at all. She put her face close to his. She touched his cheek, his arm, his hand. Dead, yes. Cold, limp, dead. That must surely mean the end of one age, the beginning of another. Koshmar lowered his flimsy form to the cradle and turned triumphantly to her people. Her breast throbbed in exultation. The moment had come. Yes, and it had come in the chieftainship of Koshmar, as she had long prayed it would.

“You heard him!” she declared. “ ‘Why do you wait?’ is what he said. ‘The winter is over!’ he said. We will leave our cocoon. We will leave this mountain: let the stinking ice-eaters have it, if that is what they want. Come, we should begin collecting our possessions. We have to make ready for the journeying! This is the day we go outside!”

Torlyri said in her mild way, “All I heard him say was ‘the winter,’ Koshmar. Nothing more than that.”

Koshmar stared at her, amazed. Now she was certain that this was truly a time of great changes, for twice this day the gentle Torlyri had put her will in opposition to that of her twining-partner. Holding back her temper, for she loved Torlyri dearly, Koshmar said, “You heard wrong. His voice was very faint, but I have no doubt of his words. What do you say, Thaggoran? Is this not the Time of Going Forth? And you? And you?”

She looked about the chamber sternly. No one dared to meet her gaze.

“Then you agree,” she said. “The winter is over. No more stars will fall. Come, now. The dark time has ended and now by grace of Yissou and Dawinno we humans reclaim our world.”

She lashed her thick, strong sensing-organ from side to side in great sweeping thumping movements of authority. Those fierce movements defied them all to speak against her. And no one spoke. Koshmar saw the boy Hresh gazing fixedly at her, eyes gleaming with intense excitement. It was agreed, then. This was the day. She would have to consult Thaggoran about the actual procedure, which she knew was going to be elaborate and time-consuming. But the preparations for departure, the complex round of rites and ceremonies and all the rest, would begin as soon as possible. And then the people of Koshmar’s cocoon would go forth to take possession of the world.

From the niche where the shinestones were kept Thaggoran took the five oldest, the ones known as Vingir, Nilmir, Dralmir, Hrongnir, and Thungvir, and placed them in the pentagram pattern on the altar. They were the holiest ones, the most effective ones. He touched each stone in turn, building the link between them that produced the divination. Their mirror-bright black surfaces gleamed brilliantly beneath the clusters of glowberries that illuminated the dwelling-chamber, a fierce hard gleam though the glowberry light itself was soft; it was as though that mild illumination from without had kindled some cool but intense fire within the shinestones themselves.

Thaggoran had come to resign himself now to the awareness that no new shinestone would be added to the collection, despite the thrice-repeated dream that told him he was destined to find one. What he had found in the maze of caverns below was ice-eaters, not a new shinestone. And there was no time now for him to continue the search.

But dreams were not always exact in their prophecies. He had had auguries of a great discovery, at least; and a great discovery was what he had made.

He touched Vingir, and Dralmir, and Thungvir, and felt the force of the gleaming black stones. He touched Nilmir. He touched Hrongnir. He began the incantation. Tell me tell me tell me tell me —

“Tell me,” said a voice behind him.

He leaped up, stung by the way the words in his mind had burst into his hearing from without. Hresh stood at the entrance to the chamber, balancing in his strange way on one leg alone, staring wide-eyed, looking skittish, ready to flee at a frown. “Please, Thaggoran, tell me—”

“Boy, this is no moment for questions!”

“What are you doing with the shinestones, Thaggoran?”

“You didn’t understand what I said?”

“I understand,” Hresh said. His lip quivered. His huge eerie eyes grew moist. He started to back away. “Are you angry with me? I didn’t know you were doing anything important.”

“We’re getting ready to leave the cocoon, do you understand that?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And I need to seek the counsel of the gods. I need to know if our venture will succeed.”

“The shinestones will tell you that?”

“If I ask the questions the correct way, they will,” Thaggoran said.

“May I watch?”

Thaggoran laughed. “You’re insane, boy!”

“Am I, do you think?”

“Come here,” said the chronicler. He crooked his fingers beckoningly, and Hresh scampered into the holy chamber. Thaggoran slipped an arm around the boy’s waist. “When I was your age,” he said, “if you can imagine me as young once as you are now, Thrask was the chronicler. And if ever I had walked in here while Thrask was with the shinestones he would have had my hide pegged out on the wall an hour later. Lucky for you that I’m a softer man than Thrask.”

“Were you like me when you were my age?” Hresh asked.

“Nobody has ever been like you,” said Thaggoran.

“What do you mean?”

“We are quiet folk, boy. We live as we are told to live. We obey the laws of the People. You obey nothing, do you? You ask questions, and when you’re told to be quiet you ask why you should be. There was much that I too wanted to know when I was a boy, and in time I came to learn it: but no one ever caught me prying and peeping and poking where I didn’t belong. I waited until it was my proper time to be taught, which is not to say that I didn’t feel curiosity. But not the way you do. Curiosity’s a disease in you. You nearly died for that curiosity of yours the other day, do you realize that?”

“Would Koshmar have really made me go outside that time, Thaggoran?”

“I think she would.”

“And I would have died, then?”

“Most certainly you would.”

“But now we’re all going outside. Are we all going to die?”

“A boy like you, you’d never have lasted half a day by yourself. But the whole tribe — yes, yes, we’ll be all right. We have Koshmar to lead us, and Torlyri to comfort us, and Harruel to defend us.”

“And you to show us the will of the gods.”

“For a little while longer, yes,” Thaggoran said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you think I can live forever, boy?”

He heard Hresh gasp. “But you’re so old already!”

“Exactly. I’m near the end, don’t you see that?”

“No!” Hresh was trembling. “How can that be? We need you, Thaggoran. We need you. You have to live! If you die—”

“Everyone dies, Hresh.”

“Will Koshmar die? Will my mother? Will I?”

“Everyone dies.”

“I don’t want Koshmar to die, or you, or Minbain. Or anyone. Especially not me.”

“You know about the limit-age, don’t you?”

Hresh nodded solemnly. “When you come to be thirty-five, and you have to go outside. I saw the bones, when I was outside the hatch. There were bones scattered all over. They all died, everybody who had to go out there. But that was during the Long Winter. The Long Winter’s over now.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

“You aren’t sure, Thaggoran?”

“I was hoping the shinestones would tell me.”

“Then I interrupted you. I should go.”

Smiling, Thaggoran said, “Stay. A little while. There’s time yet for me to ask questions of the shinestones.”

“Will there still be a limit-age after we go from the cocoon?”

The shrewdness of the boy’s question startled the chronicler. After a moment he said, “I don’t know. Perhaps not. It’s a custom that won’t be needed, will it? It isn’t as if we’ll be crowded into this little place any longer.”

“Then we won’t have to die! Not ever!”

“Everyone dies, Hresh.”

“But why is that?”

“The body wears out. The strength goes. You see how white my fur has turned? When the color leaves, it means the life is leaving. Inside me, too, things are changing. It’s a natural thing, Hresh. All creatures experience it. Dawinno devised death for us so that we could find peace at the end of our toil. It’s nothing to fear.”

Hresh was silent, digesting that.

“I still don’t want to die,” he said, after a while.

“At your age it’s an unthinkable idea. Later you’ll understand. Don’t try to make sense of it now.”

There was another silence. Thaggoran saw the boy staring at the casket of the chronicles, which more than once he had allowed Hresh to peer into, even to touch, though it was against all propriety. The boy was eager; the boy was persuasive; there did not seem to be harm in letting him see the ancient books. Thaggoran more than once had found himself wishing that Hresh had been born earlier, or that he himself had come later to his post; for here was a natural-born chronicler, no question of it, the kind that came along once in a generation at best. And yet he was just a child, years away from any possibility of the succession. I will be long gone, Thaggoran thought, before this boy is a man. And yet — and yet—

“You should do what you have to do with the shinestones,” Hresh said finally.

“I should, yes.”

“May I stay and watch?”

“Another time, perhaps,” Thaggoran said, and smiled and touched the boy’s slender arm, and gave him the lightest of gentle pushes, and sent him from the room. Once more he turned his attention to his shinestones. Once more he touched Vingir, and then Dralmir. But something felt wrong. The tuning was discordant; the shimmer that precedes divination was absent. He looked around, and there was Hresh, peering around the edge of the chamber door. Thaggoran choked back a laugh, and said, as sternly as he could, “Out, Hresh! Out!”

By the dim sputtering light of a sooty lamp fueled with animal fat Salaman saw the dark passageways twisting and forking in front of him. Awe rose in him like a rock-serpent slithering upward within his spine. He was ten years old, nearly eleven, just approaching the first threshold of manhood. He had never been down here before; he had never actually believed these caverns existed.

“Are you afraid?” Thhrouk asked, behind him.

“Me? No. Why should I be?”

“I am,” said Thhrouk.

Salaman turned. He had not been expecting such frankness. Warriors were not supposed to admit fear. Thhrouk, like Salaman, was of the warrior class, and he was older by at least a year, perhaps more, old enough almost to be of twining-age. But his face was tense and rigid with anxiety. By the murky light of the lamp Salaman saw Thhrouk’s eyes, glistening and smarting from the smoke. They were as bright as shinestones in his head, glassy, unblinking. Bunched muscles were working in his jaws, and those of his throat were clenched, protuberant, proclaiming his uneasiness.

“What’s to worry about?” Salaman said boldly. “Anijang will get us out of here!”

“Anijang!” Thhrouk said. “A mindless old worker!”

“He’s not so mindless,” Salaman said. “I’ve seen him keeping his calendar. He keeps good count of the time, the years and everything, let me tell you. He’s smarter than you think.”

“And he’s been down here before,” said Sachkor, farther back in the line. “He knows his way.”

“Let’s hope so,” Thhrouk said. “I’d hate to spend the rest of my life lost in these tunnels.”

From up ahead came the sharp clink of a falling rock, and then a louder and more muffled sound, as though the roof of the passage had begun to fall in. Thhrouk leaned forward and caught Salaman by the shoulder, his fingers digging in tightly in his alarm. But then Anijang’s voice could be heard in front of them, tunelessly bellowing the Hymn of Balilirion. So he was all right.

“You still there, boys?” the older man called. “Keep closer to me, will you?”

Salaman moved forward, crouching to avoid an overhanging boss of low rock. The other two kept pace. Small skittering creatures with beady red eyes ran past their legs. A trickle of cold water oozed across the path. They were down here on a mission of deconsecration; for in these musty old caverns were sacred objects that must not be left behind when the People left the cocoon. It was not a job that anyone could enjoy; but Sachkor and Salaman and Thhrouk were the three youngest warriors, and such tasks as this were part of their discipline. It was nasty work. Harruel himself would loathe doing it. But Harruel did not have to.

Anijang was waiting for them just around the bend. Some rocks had indeed fallen — they lay ankle-deep beside him — and Anijang was staring into the open place from which they had come. “New tunnel,” he said. “Old one, rather. Very old. Old and forgotten. Yissou only knows how many passages there are altogether.”

“Do we have to go into this one?” Thhrouk asked.

“Not on the list,” said Anijang. “We’ll keep going.”

There were alcoves dedicated to each of the Five Heavenly Ones in this labyrinth, each with holy artifacts that had been placed there in the early days of the cocoon. Already they had found the Mueri alcove and the one of Friit; but those were the easy gods, the Consoler, the Healer. The shrine of Emakkis the Provider should be next, and then, on deeper levels, that of Dawinno and, finally, of Yissou.

The intricacy of this gloomy subterranean world astonished Salaman. For the first time, now that the People were about to leave the cocoon, he comprehended something of what it meant to have occupied this one place for seven hundred thousand years. Only across vast spans of time could all of this have been constructed. Each of these tunnels had been scraped out by hand, by folk just like himself, patiently chipping and scrabbling at the dark cold rock and earth for day after day, carrying away the debris, smoothing the walls, building archways to support them — it must have taken forever and a half to cut each one. And look how many passageways there were! Dozens, hundreds — used for a time, then abandoned. Salaman wondered why they had not simply kept the same group of chambers and corridors all the time, since the tribe had grown no larger during all the centuries of its stay in the cocoon. The answer, he thought, must lie in the human need for having some continued occupation to pursue, other than the mere acts of eating and sleeping. For a span of time beyond understanding the People had been prisoners in this mountain beside the great river, dormant, hiding from the bitter winter outside in a long comfortable repose; they had their crops to grow and their animals to tend and their drills and rituals to perform, but even that was not enough. They had to have other ways of expending their energies as well. And so they had built this maze. Yissou! What labor it must have been!

As they proceeded, Salaman saw strange shadows everywhere. Mysterious sparks of light drifted in the depths. Occasionally he saw enigmatic features in the glimmering distance — squat pillars, heavy arches. The forgotten works of forgotten men. There was a whole universe of caverns down here. Ancient rooms, abandoned altars, rows of niches, stone benches. For what? How old? How long ago abandoned?

Now and then he heard the far-off sound of roaring, as if some monstrous beast lay chained in the far recesses of the mountain’s great heart. Salaman heard the sound of his own harsh breathing counter-pointed against that distant roar. The world hung suspended all about him. He was at its center, entombed in rock.

“We turn left here,” Anijang said.

They had arrived at a place where half a dozen irregular tunnels radiated out from a central gallery. The stone floor was rough and steep here, descending at a disturbing angle: it strained the knees to go downward so swiftly. And as they went down the passage narrowed. Salaman began to see why they had sent boys for this job, and a shriveled oldster like Anijang. Men like Harruel and Konya were too big for these corridors. Even he, wide-shouldered and husky for his age, was having trouble crawling through some of the tight places.

“Tell me, Salaman — what do you think it’ll be like when we go outside?” Thhrouk asked suddenly, apropos of nothing at all.

Salaman, surprised by the question, glanced back over his shoulder.

“How would I know? Have I ever been out there?”

“Of course not. Except for your naming-day, and that wasn’t for very long. But what do you think it’ll be like?”

He hesitated. “Strange. Difficult. Painful.”

“Painful?” Sachkor said. “Why so?”

“There’s the sun out there. It burns you. And the wind. They say it cuts you like a knife.”

“Who says?” Thhrouk asked. “Thaggoran?”

“Don’t you remember how it was on your naming-day? Even if you were only outside for a moment or two then. And you’ve heard Thaggoran reading from the chronicles. How exposed everything is out there. Sand blowing in your eyes. Snow as cold as fire.”

“As cold as fire?” Sachkor said. “Fire is hot, Salaman.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. No, I don’t, not at all. That’s the sort of thing Hresh would say. Cold as fire: it makes no sense.”

“I mean that snow burns you. It’s a different kind of burning from the burning that fire does, or the sun,” Salaman said. He saw them staring at him as though he had lost his mind. It was a bad idea, he thought, to be telling them these things, though he had speculated a great deal about them privately. He was a warrior; it was not his task to think. They would see a side of him that he did not care to have them see. With a shrug he said, “I don’t really know anything about any of this. I’m just guessing.”

“Here,” Anijang called. “This is the way!”

He plunged into a black opening barely larger than he was.

Salaman looked back at Sachkor and Thhrouk, shook his head, and followed Anijang. There were marks on the walls here, blood-colored stripes and deeply engraved triangles, holy signs, intimations of the presence of Emakkis nearby. So Anijang still knew what he was doing: they were approaching the third of the five shrines.

Now that Thhrouk had awakened the thought in him, Salaman found himself once more pondering the changes that lay ahead. Part of him still could not believe that they truly were going to leave the cocoon. But all these weeks of preparation could not be argued away. They were going outside. To perish of the cold? No, not if Thaggoran and Koshmar were right: the New Springtime had come, they said, and who could say otherwise? Yet he found himself fearing the Going Forth. To leave the snug safe cocoon, to cast aside everything that was familiar and comforting in his life — Mueri! It was a frightening thing. And now he had frightened himself even more, with all his own talk of the burning sun, and the burning snow, and the sharp wind blowing sand in your eyes—

“What’s that sound?” Thhrouk said, digging his fingers into Salaman’s shoulders yet again. “You hear it? A rumbling in the walls? Ice-eaters!”

“Where?” Salaman asked.

“Here. Here.”

Salaman put his ear to the wall. Indeed he heard something in there, an odd rippling, sliding sound. He imagined an enormous snorting snuffling ice-eater just on the far side of the wall, chomping away as it rose mindlessly toward the top of the cliff. Then he laughed. He could make out a distant splashing, a quiet wet murmur. “It’s water,” he said. “There’s a stream running through the wall here.”

“A stream? Are you sure?”

“Just listen to it,” Salaman said.

“Salaman’s right,” said Sachkor, after a moment. “That’s no ice-eater. Look, you can see the water running out of the wall a little way up there.”

“Ah,” Thhrouk said. “Yes. You’re right. Yissou! I’d hate to meet an ice-eater while we’re wandering around down here!”

“Are you coming?” Anijang called. “Follow me or you’ll get lost, I promise you!”

Salaman laughed. “We wouldn’t want that.”

He hurried onward, so quickly that in his haste he nearly blew out his own lamp. Anijang was waiting by the entrance to a chamber that branched from the one they were in; he pointed inside, to the holy ikon of Emakkis on an altar within it. Of the four of them only Sachkor was slender enough to go in to get it.

While Sachkor carefully slipped into the shrine of the Provider, Salaman stood to one side, thinking still of the Going Forth and its perils and discomforts and strangenesses, thinking once more of the sun against his face, the snow, the sand. It was an awesome thing to undertake, yes. But somehow it began to seem less terrible, the longer he thought of it. Going outside had its risks, yes — it was all risk, it was nothing but risk — but what was the alternative? To live out your life in this tangled warren of dark, musty caverns? No! No! They were going to make the Going Forth, and it was glorious to contemplate. All the world stood before them. His heart began to race. His fears fell away from him.

Sachkor emerged from the tiny alcove, clutching the ikon of Emakkis. He was trembling and his face looked strange.

“What is it?” Salaman asked.

“Ice-eaters,” said Sachkor. “No, not another stream this time. The real thing. I heard them chewing on the rock just beyond the inner wall.”

“No,” Thhrouk said. “That can’t be.”

“Go in and listen for yourself, then,” Sachkor said.

“But I don’t fit.”

“Then don’t go in. Whatever pleases you. I heard ice-eaters.”

“Come along,” said Anijang.

“Wait,” said Salaman. “Let me go in. I want to hear what Sachkor heard.”

But he was too husky to enter; and after a moment of trying to slide his shoulders past the narrow opening he gave up, and they moved along, wondering what it was, in truth, that Sachkor had heard in there. Just around the bend Salaman had the answer. The cavern wall here was throbbing with a deep, heavy vibration. He put his hand to it and it seemed as though something were shaking the entire world. Cautiously he lifted his sensing-organ and extended his second sight. What he felt was bulk, mass, power, movement.

“Ice-eaters, yes,” Salaman said. “Just back of this wall. Eating the stone.”

“Yissou!” Thhrouk whispered, making a cluster of holy signs. “Dawinno! Friit! They’ll destroy us!”

“They won’t get the chance,” said Salaman. He smiled. “We’re leaving the cocoon, remember? We’ll be halfway across the world before they even get close to the dwelling-chamber level.”

Minbain woke quickly, as she always did. About her she heard the morning sounds of the cocoon, the familiar clatterings and clamorings, the laughter, the buzz of talk, the slap of running feet against the stone floor of the dwelling-chamber. Rising from her sleeping-furs, she made her morning prayer to Mueri and said the words that were due the soul of her departed mate Samnibolon.

Then she fell about her tasks. There were so many things to do, a million things to do, before the People could actually leave the cocoon.

Hresh was already awake. She saw him grinning at her from the sleeping-alcove down the way where the young ones stayed. He was always up before anyone else, even before Torlyri arose to make the sunrise offering. Minbain wondered sometimes if he ever slept at all.

He came scampering over, skinny arms and legs flailing, sensing-organ jutting out behind him in a strange awkward way. They embraced. He is all bones, she thought. He eats, but nothing sticks: he burns himself up by thinking too much.

“What do you say, Mother? Will today be the day?”

Minbain laughed gently. “Today? No, Hresh, no, not yet, Not today, Hresh.”

When he heard Koshmar declare, “This is the day we go outside,” Hresh had assumed that they really were going to set out that very day. But of course that could not be. The death-rites for the old Dream-Dreamer had had to be performed first, an event of great pomp and mystery. No one knew what the proper rite for the burial of a Dream-Dreamer should be — it seemed wrong simply to take him outside and dump him among the bones on the slope — but finally Thaggoran had found something in the chronicles, or had pretended to find something, that involved much singing and chanting and a torchlight procession through the lower caverns to the Chamber of Yissou, where his body was laid to rest beneath a cairn of blue rock. All that had taken several days to prepare and execute. Then the rituals of deconsecration of the cocoon had had to be carried out, so that they would not leave their souls behind on the long march to come. And then the packing of all the sacred objects; and then the slaughtering of most of the tribe’s meat-animals, and the curing of the meat; and after that would come the gathering-up of all useful possessions into bundles light enough to be carried, and then — and then — this rite and that, this task and that, everything according to instructions that were thousands of years old. Oh, it would be many days more, Minbain knew, before the Going Forth actually happened. And you could already hear the ice-eaters champing on the rock just below the dwelling-chamber, a dull ugly rasping sound that went on night and day, night and day. But the ice-eaters could have the place now, for whatever good it was to them. The tribe would never return to the cocoon. It was this time of waiting that was the difficult part, and for no one was it more difficult than Hresh. To Hresh a day was like a month, a month was like a year. Impatience chattered through him like a fire rushing through dry sticks.

“Will they be killing more animals today?” he asked.

“That’s all done now,” Minbain told him.

“Good. Good. I hated it when they were doing that.”

“Yes, it was hard,” Minbain said. “But necessary.” Ordinarily one of the beasts was butchered every week or two for the use of the tribe, but this time Harruel and Konya had taken their blades and gone into the pen for hours, until blood ran down the sloping drainage channel and out into the dwelling-chamber itself. Only a few could be taken along as breeding stock; the rest must be slaughtered, and their meat cured and packed to sustain the tribe on the march. Hresh had gone to watch them at work at the butchering. Minbain had warned him not to go, but he had insisted, and he had stood there solemnly staring as Harruel seized the animals and lifted their heads to Konya’s knife. And afterward he had trembled in terror for hours; but the next day he was back, watching the killings. Nothing Minbain could say would keep him from it. Hresh baffled her, always had, always would.

“Will you be packing the meat again today?” he asked.

“Probably. Unless Koshmar’s got some other job for me today. What she tells me to do is what I do.”

“And if she told you to walk upside down on the ceiling?”

“Don’t be foolish, Hresh.”

“Koshmar tells everyone what to do.”

“She is the chieftain,” Minbain said. “Are we supposed to rule ourselves? Someone must give the commands.”

“Suppose you did instead. Or Torlyri, or Thaggoran.”

“The body has only one head. The People have one chieftain.”

Hresh pondered that a moment. “Harruel’s stronger than anybody else. Why isn’t he chieftain?”

“Hresh-full-of-questions!”

“Why isn’t he, though?”

With a patient smile Minbain said, “Because he’s a man, and the chieftain must be a woman. And because being big and strong isn’t the most important thing a chieftain needs. Harruel’s a fine warrior. He’ll drive off our enemies when we’re outside. But you know that his mind is slow. Koshmar thinks quickly.”

“Harruel thinks more quickly than you’d imagine,” said Hresh. “I’ve talked to him. He thinks like a warrior, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think. Anyway, I think more quickly than Koshmar. Maybe I ought to be chieftain.”

“Hresh!”

“Hold me, Mother,” he said suddenly.

The swift change in his mood startled her. He was shivering. One moment babbling in his Hreshlike way, the next huddling up against her, a small frightened bundle seeking comfort. She stroked his thin shoulders. “Minbain loves you,” she murmured. “Mueri watches over you. It’s all right, Hresh. Everything’s all right.”

A voice said over her shoulder, “Poor Hresh. He’s afraid of the Going Forth, isn’t he? I don’t blame him.”

Minbain looked around. Cheysz had come up beside her, small timid Cheysz. Yesterday Minbain and Cheysz and two of the other women had worked for hours, packing chunks of meat in bags made of skin.

Cheysz said, “I’ve been thinking, Minbain. As we do all this preparing for the Going Forth. What if they’re wrong?”

“What? Who?”

“Koshmar. Thaggoran. Wrong that this really is the New Springtime.”

Minbain pulled Hresh even closer against her breast, and clapped her hands over his ears. In fury she said to Cheysz, “Have you gone crazy? You’ve been thinking ? Don’t think, Cheysz. Koshmar thinks for us.”

“Please don’t look at me like that. I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Outside. It’s dangerous out there. What if I don’t want to go? We could die in the cold. There are wild animals. Yissou only knows what we’ll find out there. I like it in the cocoon. Why must we all leave, simply because Koshmar wants us to? Minbain, I want to stay here.”

Minbain was aghast. This was profoundly subversive talk. It horrified her that Hresh was taking it all in.

“We all want to stay here,” said a deep new voice behind her. It was Kalide, Bruikkos’ mother, another of the meat-packers of yesterday: like Minbain, a woman past middle years whose mate had died and who had shifted from breeding status to that of a worker. She was perhaps the oldest woman in the cocoon. “Of course we want to stay, Cheysz. It’s warm and safe in here. But it’s our destiny to go outside. We’re the chosen ones — the People of the New Springtime.”

Cheysz swung around, glaring, and laughed harshly. Minbain had never seen such fire in her. “Easy for you to say, Kalide! You’re practically at the limit-age anyway. One way or another, you’d be outside the cocoon before long. But I—”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” Kalide snapped. “You little coward, I ought to—”

“What’s going on?” said Delim, stepping forward suddenly. She was the fourth of the packers, a sturdy woman with deep orange fur and heavy, sloping shoulders. She put herself between Cheysz and Kalide, pushing them apart. “You think you’re warriors, now? Come on. Come on. Back off. We have work to do. What is this, Minbain? Are they going to have a fight?”

Softly Minbain said, “Cheysz is a little overwrought. She said an unkind thing to Kalide. It’ll pass.”

“We’re on packing detail again today,” Delim said. “We ought to go.”

“You go,” said Minbain. “I’ll be there in a little while.”

She glowered at Cheysz and made a quick brushing gesture with her hand, urging her away. After a moment Cheysz moved off toward the animal pen, Delim and Kalide close behind her. Minbain released Hresh from her grasp. He stepped back, looking up at her.

“I want you to forget everything you just heard,” she said.

“How can I do that? You know I can’t forget anything.”

“Don’t speak about it to anyone, is what I meant. The things Cheysz said.”

“About being afraid to leave the cocoon? About wondering whether Koshmar’s wrong about the New Springtime?”

“Don’t even repeat them to me. Cheysz could be punished very severely for saying such things. She could be cast out of the People. And I know she didn’t actually mean them. She’s a very kind woman, Cheysz — very gentle, very frightened—” Minbain paused. “Are you frightened about leaving the cocoon, Hresh?”

“Me?” he said, and his voice rang with disbelief. “Of course not!”

“I didn’t think so,” Minbain said.

“Form the line there!” Koshmar called. “Shape it up! You all know your places. Take them!” She held the Wand of Coming Forth in her left hand, and an obsidian-tipped spear in her right. A brilliant yellow sash was wrapped over her right shoulder and across her breast.

Hresh felt himself beginning to shiver. At last the moment had arrived! His dream, his wish, his joy. The whole tribe stood assembled in the Place of Going Out. Torlyri, the sweet-voiced offering-woman, was turning the wheel that moved the wall, and the wall was moving.

Cool air came rushing in. The hatch was open.

Hresh stared at Koshmar. She looked strange. Her fur was puffed up so that she seemed to be twice her normal size, and her eyes had turned to little slits. Her nostrils were flaring; her hands moved urgently across her breasts, which appeared bigger than usual. Even her sexual parts were swollen as if they were hot. Koshmar was not a breeder; it was odd to see her heated up like that. Some powerful emotion must be sweeping her, Hresh thought, some excitement brought on by the arrival of the Time of Going Forth. How proud she must be that she was the one to lead the tribe out of its cocoon! How excited!

And he realized that he felt some of the same excitement himself. He looked down. His own undeveloped mating-rod was stiff and jutting. The little balls beneath it felt heavy and hard. His sensing-organ tingled.

“All right, forward, now!” Koshmar boomed. “Move along and keep your places, and sing. Sing!”

Terror showed plainly in the eyes of many about him. Their faces were frozen with fear. Hresh looked at Cheysz and saw her trembling; but Delim had her by one arm and Kalide by the other, and they moved her along. A few of the other women looked just as frightened — Valmud, Weiawala, Sinistine — and even some of the men, even warriors like Thhrouk and Moarn, were definitely uneasy, Hresh was hard put to understand it, that dread they must be feeling as they stared into the unknown frosty wilderness that awaited them. For him the Going Forth had come none too soon. But for most of the others the departure seemed to be striking with the force of a hatchet. To step out into this vast mystery beyond the cocoon — to leave behind the only world that they and their forefathers had known throughout a span of time that seemed to take in all eternity — no, no, they were scared out of their skins, all but a handful. Hresh could see that easily. He felt contempt for their timidity and compassion for their fear, inextricably mixed in one muddled emotion.

“Sing!” Koshmar cried again.

A faint, straggling sound came up from a few voices, Koshmar’s, Torlyri’s, Hresh’s. The warrior Lakkamai, who was always so quiet, suddenly began to sing. Now came Harruel’s harsh heavy tuneless voice too, and Salaman’s; and then, surprisingly, that of mother Minbain, who hardly ever sang at all, and one by one the others picked it up too, uncertainly at first and then with more vigor, until at last from sixty throats at once came the Hymn of the New Springtime:

Now ends the darkness

Now shines the light.

Now comes the warm time.

Now is our hour.

Koshmar and Torlyri passed through the hatch side by side, with Thaggoran hobbling along right behind them, and then Konya, Harruel, Staip, Lakkamai, and the rest of the older males. Hresh, marching third from the end, threw his head back and bellowed the words louder than anyone:

Into the world now

Fearless and bold.

Now are we masters

Now shall we rule.

Taniane gave him a scornful look, as though his raucous singing offended her dainty ears. Haniman, that waddling plump boy, sticking close beside Taniane as he usually did, made a face at him also. Hresh stuck his tongue out at them. What did he care for Taniane’s opinion, or glassy-eyed Haniman’s? This was the great day at last. The exodus from the cocoon was finally under way; and nothing else mattered. Nothing.

The springtime is ours

The new time of light.

Yissou now gives us

Dominion and sway.

But then he passed through the hatch himself, and the outside world came rushing toward him and struck him like a great fist. He was overwhelmed despite himself, shaken, stunned.

That first time when he had crept outside it had all been too fast, too jumbled, a flash of images, a swirl of sensations, and then Torlyri had seized him and his little adventure was over, almost before it had begun. But this was the real Going Forth. He felt the cocoon and all that it represented dropping away behind him and plunging into an abyss; or else it was he that was falling into the abyss, drifting downward now into a vast well of mysteries.

He fought to regain his poise. He bit down hard on his lip, he clenched his fists, he drew slow, deep breaths. He looked around at the others.

The tribe was crowded together on the rocky ledge just outside the hatch. Some were crying softly, some were gaping in wonder, some were lost in deep silences. No one was unmoved. The morning air was cool and crisp and the sun was a great frightful eye high in the heavens on the far side of the river. The sky pressed down on them like a roof. It was a sharp hard color, with thick swirls of dust-haze making spiral patterns in it as the wind caught them.

The world stretched away before them, a vast empty desolation, open in all directions as far as Hresh could see: there were no walls, there was nothing at all to confine them. That was the most frightening thing, the openness of it. No walls, no walls at all! There had always been walls to press yourself against, and a roof over your head, and a floor beneath your feet. Hresh imagined that he could simply leap forward into the air beyond the ledge and go floating on and on forever, never striking anything. Even the roof that the sky made was so far above them that it scarcely provided any sense of boundary. It was truly terrifying to be staring into that immense open place.

But we will get used to it, Hresh thought. We will have to get used to it.

He knew how lucky he was. Lifetime after lifetime had gone by, thousands of generations of lifetimes, and all that while the People had huddled in their snug cocoon like mice in a hole, telling each other tales of the wondrous beautiful world from which the death-stars had driven their ancestors.

He turned to Orbin beside him. “I never thought I’d be seeing this, did you?”

Orbin shook his head — a tiny stiff movement, as though his neck had become a rigid stalk. “No. No, never.”

“I can’t believe we’re outside,” Taniane whispered. “Yissou, it’s cold! Are we going to freeze?”

“We’ll be all right,” Hresh said.

He stared into the gray distance. How he had yearned for even a single glimpse of the outside world! But he had resigned himself to his fate, knowing that he was surely destined to live and die in the cocoon, like everyone else who had existed since the beginning of the Long Winter, without ever having had that glimpse of the world of wonders that lay beyond the hatch, other than the fleeting ones they promised him for his naming-day and his twining-day later on. He was stifling in the cocoon. He hated the cocoon. But there had seemed to be no escaping the cocoon. Yet here they were beyond the hatch.

Haniman said, “I don’t like this. I wish we were still inside.”

“You would,” said Hresh scornfully.

“Only someone crazy like you would want to be out here.”

“Yes,” Hresh said. “That’s right. And now I’m getting my wish.”

From old Thaggoran he had learned the names of all the ancient lost cities: Valirian, Thisthissima, Vengiboneeza, Tham, Mikkimord, Bannigard, Steenizale, Glorm. Wonderful names! But what was a city, exactly? A great many cocoons side by side? And the things of nature out there: rivers, mountains, oceans, trees. He had heard the names, but what did they mean, really? To see the sky — just the sky — why, he had almost been ready to give his life for that, the day he had slipped past the sweet offering-woman and out the hatch. He nearly had given his life for that. Would Koshmar really have had him thrown out of the cocoon, if the Dream-Dreamer had not awakened just then? Probably she would. Koshmar was hard. Chieftains had to be. In another moment or two, but for the sudden outburst of the Dream-Dreamer, he would have been outside, yes, and the hatch forever shut behind him. That had been close, very close indeed. Only his luck had saved him.

Hresh had always thought of himself as gifted with unusual luck. He never spoke of it to anyone, but he believed he was under the special protection of the gods, all of them, not just Yissou, who protected everyone, or Mueri, who consoled the sorrowful, but also Emakkis, Friit, Dawinno, those more remote deities who governed the subtler aspects of the world. In particular Hresh thought Dawinno guided his days. It was Dawinno the Destroyer who had brought the death-stars upon the world, yes, but not in any malevolent way, he believed. He had brought them because they had needed to be brought. It was the time, and they had to come. Now the world would be resettled, and Hresh thought that he would have an important role in that; and so he would be doing the task that Dawinno had set aside for him. The Destroyer was the guardian of life, and not its enemy as simpler people believed. Thaggoran had taught Hresh these things. And Thaggoran was the wisest man who had ever lived.

Still, it surely had seemed to Hresh as if he had run out of luck that day of his attempt to go outside. If they had pushed him out the hatch into the world he so much yearned to see — and they would have, Torlyri or no, he was certain of that, the law was the law and Koshmar was a hard one — what would have become of him? Once outside, Hresh suspected, he wouldn’t have survived half a day on his own. Maybe three quarters of a day if his luck held out. But nobody’s luck was good enough to let him live long by himself in the outside world. Only Torlyri’s quickness had spared him — that and the mercy of Koshmar.

His playmates had mocked him when they learned of what he had done. Orbin, Taniane, Haniman — they couldn’t understand why he would have wanted to go outside, nor why Koshmar had not punished him for it. They had thought he was trying to kill himself. “Can’t you wait for your death-day?” Haniman asked. “It’s only another twenty-seven years.” And he laughed, and Taniane laughed with him, and even Orbin, who had always been such a good friend, made a jeering face and punched him in the arm. Hresh-full-of-questions, Hresh-who-wants-to-freeze, they called him.

No matter. They forgot about his little exploit in a few days. And everything was altered now. The tribe was truly going forth. For the second time in just a few weeks Hresh was seeing the sky, and not just a glimpse this time. He would see the mountains and the oceans. He would see Vengiboneeza and Mikkimord. All the world would be his.

Now comes the warm time.

Now is our hour.

“Is that the sky?” Orbin asked.

“That’s the sky, yes,” said Hresh, proud of having been out here before, if only for a few minutes. Orbin, stocky and very strong, with bright eyes and a quick, shining smile, was Hresh’s age exactly, and his closest friend in the cocoon. But Orbin would never have dared to try to slip outside with him. “And that’s the river down there. That green stuff is grass. The red stuff is grass of another kind.”

“The air tastes funny,” Taniane said, wrinkling her nose. “It burns my throat.”

“That’s because it’s cold,” Hresh told her. “You won’t mind it after a while.”

“Why is it cold, if winter is over?” she asked.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Hresh said. But he found himself troubled about that too, all the same.

Up ahead, by the offering-stone, Torlyri was busy performing some sort of rite: the last one, Hresh hoped, before the march got really under way. It seemed to him that they had been doing almost nothing but rites and ceremonies these past weeks since that day when the Dream-Dreamer awakened and Koshmar announced that the tribe was going to leave the cocoon.

“Are we going to cross the river?” Taniane asked.

“I don’t think so,” Hresh said. “The sun’s in that direction, and if we go toward it we can get burned. I think we’re going to go the other way.”

He was simply guessing, but he turned out to be right, at least about the direction of the march. Koshmar — wearing now the Mask of Lirridon that had hung so long on the dwelling-chamber wall, yellow and black with a great beak that made her look like some sort of huge insect — raised her spear and called out the Five Names. Then she stepped forward on a narrow track that led up from the ledge to the top of the hill, and from there over the far side and down the western slope toward a broad bare valley beyond. One by one the others fell into line behind her, moving slowly under the burdens of their heavy packs.

They were outside. They were on their way.

They marched down the long slope and into the valley in steady formation, following the same sequence in which they had emerged from the cocoon: Koshmar and Torlyri up front, then Thaggoran, then the warriors, then the workers, then the breeders, and Hresh bringing up the rear with the other children. The valley was much farther away than it seemed, and sometimes appeared to be retreating before them as they marched. Koshmar set a cautious pace. Even the strongest of the marchers, the ones who were up front, seemed to grow weary quickly; and for some of the others, the breeding-women especially, and poor fat Haniman, and the smaller children, it was a struggle almost from the beginning of the trek. Now and again Hresh heard the sound of weeping ahead of him, though whether it was out of fear or from fatigue, he could not tell. None of them, after all, had ever done this much walking, except back and forth within the cocoon, which somehow was different. Here you had to put your feet down on a rough trackless surface that could sometimes shift and slide beneath you. Or go up rises and down slopes, or move around or over obstacles. It was much more difficult than Hresh had imagined. He had thought you simply put one foot forward and then the other, and then the first one again. Which was basically what you did do; but he hadn’t realized how tiring that could be.

The cold air was a hindrance, too. It was thin and it seemed to sting and burn with every breath. It went down your throat like a bundle of knives. It left you dry-mouthed and dizzy, and nipped your ears and nose. After a time, though, the cold seemed not to matter as much.

There was a great stillness, and that was more troublesome than Hresh could have expected. In the cocoon you heard the sounds of the tribe all around you all the time. There was a feeling of safety in that. Out here the tribesfolk were quieter, their voices stifled by awe, but even when they did speak the wind would blow their words away, or the vast dome of cold air overhead and the huge open spaces seemed to swallow them up. The silence had a hard, oppressive, metallic quality that no one liked.

From time to time someone halted as though unwilling to go on, and had to be comforted and consoled. Cheysz was the first, crumpling into a little sobbing heap; but Minbain knelt by her, stroking her until she rose. Then the young warrior Moarn dropped down and dug his fingers into the ground as though the world were spinning wildly about him; he clung desperately, cheek to the cold earth, and Harruel had to pry him loose with kicks and harsh words. A little later it was Barnak, one of the workers, a dull-witted man with huge hands and a thick neck: he turned and began to run back toward the cliff, but Staip went loping after him and caught him by one arm, and slapped him, and held him until he was calm. After that Barnak marched without looking up or speaking. But Orbin said, “It’s a good thing Staip caught him. If he had gotten away, a dozen more would have gone running back there too.”

Koshmar left her place at the head of the procession and came back, talking with everyone, offering encouragement, laughter, prayers. Torlyri moved through the line too to speak with those who were most frightened. She stopped by Hresh, to ask how he was doing, and he winked at her; and she laughed and winked also.

“This is where you always wanted to be, isn’t it?”

He nodded. She touched his cheek and went back up front.

The day moved along. Time seemed to hurry. The sun did a strange thing. It moved in the sky, instead of hanging there in the east where Hresh had first seen it. To his surprise the sun seemed to be pursuing them, and somewhere about midday it actually overtook them, so that in the afternoon it lay before them in the western sky.

Hresh was puzzled to find the sun traveling like that. He knew that it was a big ball of fire that hovered overhead all day and went out at night — “day” was when the sun was there, “night” was when it wasn’t — but it was hard for him to understand how it could move. Wasn’t it fastened in its place? He would have to ask Thaggoran about that a little later. For now, his discovery that the sun could move was simply an inexplicable surprise. But he suspected that there would be other and bigger surprises ahead.