At Winter's End

2 They Will Have Your Flesh

Thaggoran shuffled onward, keeping his place just behind Koshmar and Torlyri. There was a throbbing in his left knee and a stiffness in both his ankles, and the chill wind cut through his fur as though he had none at all. His eyes were swollen and pasty from the glaring sunlight. There was no hiding from that great angry blare of light. It filled the sky and reverberated from every rock, every patch of ground.

This was a hard business for a man of nearly fifty, to give up the comforts of the cocoon and march through so strange and bleak a countryside. But it was that very strangeness that would keep him going, hour after hour, day after day. For all his studies in the chronicles he had never imagined that such colors existed in the world, such smells, such shapes.

The land here was harsh and almost empty, a broad barren plain. Its deadness was a disheartening thing. He saw frightened faces all about him. Fear was general among the People. There was a terrible nakedness in having gone out from the cocoon, in being this far from that friendly sheltering place that had housed them all their lives. But Koshmar and Torlyri were working hard to keep panic from engulfing the marchers. Thaggoran saw them going again and again to the aid of those whose fears were overwhelming them. He felt little fear himself, only the threat of exhaustion; but he forced himself on, and smiled bravely whenever anyone looked his way.

The sky darkened steadily as the day went along: from a pale hard blue to a deeper, richer color, then to a dark gray, almost purple, as the shadows gathered. He had not expected that. He knew of such things as day and night from the chronicles, but he had imagined that night would fall like a curtain, cutting off the light at a single stroke. That it might come on gradually through the hours was not something he had considered, nor that the sun’s light would change also, growing ruddier through the afternoon, until when the sky was just beginning to turn gray the sun would become a fat red ball hanging low above the horizon.

Late on the afternoon of the first day, as the long purple shadows were beginning to fall across the land, the front line of marchers came upon three large four-legged beasts with great scarlet pronglike horns sprouting in triple pairs from their snouts. They were grazing elegantly on a hillside, moving with careful high-stepping gestures as if in some formal dance. But at the first scent of the humans they looked up in terror and fled wildly, taking off at astonishing speed across the plain.

“Did you see those?” Koshmar asked. “What were they, Thaggoran?”

“Grazing beasts,” he said.

“But their names, old man! What are such creatures called?”

He ransacked his memory. The Book of the Beasts said nothing about long-legged creatures with three pairs of red prongs on their noses.

“I think they must have been created during the Long Winter,” Thaggoran ventured. “They are not animals that were known in the Great World.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“They are unknown creatures,” Thaggoran insisted, growing irritated.

“Then we must name them,” Koshmar said resolutely. “We must name everything we see. Who knows, Thaggoran? We may be the only people there are. The naming of things will be one of our tasks.”

“That is a good task,” said Thaggoran, thinking about the fiery pain in his left knee.

“What shall we call them, then? Come, Thaggoran, give us a name for them!”

He looked up and saw the tall graceful things outlined sharply against the dark sky on the crest of a distant hill, peering cautiously down at the marchers.

“Dancerhorns,” he said unhesitatingly. “Those are called dancerhorns, Koshmar.”

“So be it! Dancerhorns they are!”

The darkness deepened. The sky was nearly black now. Thaggoran, looking up, saw some broad-winged birds flying east in the twilight, but they were too high overhead for him even to try to identify them. He stood staring, imagining himself soaring like that with nothing but air beneath him; for a moment it was an exhilarating idea, and then it became a terrifying one, and he felt a surge of nausea and vertigo that nearly knocked him to the ground. He waited for it to pass, breathing deeply. Then he crouched, digging his knuckles against the solidity of the dry sandy earth, leaning forward, putting his weight against the ground. It supported him as the floor of the cocoon once had done, and that was comforting. He rose after a time and went onward.

In the thickening blackness hard bright points of burning light began to emerge. Hresh, coming up beside him, asked him what they were.

“They are the stars,” Thaggoran said.

“What makes them so bright? Are they on fire? It must be a very cool fire, then.”

“No,” said Thaggoran, “a fiery fire, a blazing fire like the fire of the sun. What they are is suns, Hresh. Like the great sun that Yissou has placed in the day-sky to warm the world.”

“The sun is much larger than they are. And very much hotter.”

“Only because it’s closer. Believe me, boy: what you see are globes of fire hanging in the sky.”

“Ah. Globes of fire. Are they very far away, then?”

“So far that it would take the sturdiest warrior all his life to walk to the nearest of them.”

“Ah,” said Hresh. “Ah.” He stood staring at them a long while. Others had stopped too, and were studying the dazzling points of pulsating light that had begun to break out all over the sky. Thaggoran felt a chill, and not only from the evening air. He beheld a sky full of suns, and he knew there were worlds around all those suns, and he felt like dropping down to touch his head against the earth in recognition of his smallness and the greatness of the gods who had brought the People forth into this immense world, this world that was only a grain of sand in the immensity of the universe.

“Look,” someone said. “What’s that?”

“Gods!” cried Harruel. “A sword in the sky!”

Indeed something new was appearing now — a hook of dazzling white light, an icy crescent gliding into view above the distant mountains. All about him the tribe was kneeling, murmuring, offering up desperate prayers to that great silent floating thing that glowed with a frigid blue-white gleam above them.

“The moon,” Thaggoran called. “That is the moon!”

“The moon is round, like a ball, so you always told us,” Boldirinthe said.

“It changes,” said Thaggoran. “Sometimes it is like this, and sometimes its face is fuller.”

“Mueri! I feel the moonlight on my skin!” one of the men wailed. “Will it freeze me, Thaggoran? What will it do? Mueri! Friit! Yissou!”

“There’s nothing to fear,” Thaggoran said. But he was trembling now too. There is so much that is strange here, he thought. We are in another world. We are naked under these stars and this moon, and we know nothing, not even I, not even I, and everything is new, everything is frightening.

He found Koshmar. “We should make camp now,” he said. “It’s too dark to go on. And camping will give them something to do as the night comes over us.”

“What will happen in the night?” Koshmar asked.

Thaggoran shrugged. “Sleep will happen in the night. And then will come morning.”

“When?”

“When night is done,” he said.

They camped that first night in a depression beside a thinly flowing stream. As Thaggoran had thought, the work of halting and unpacking and building a campfire distracted the tribe from its fears. But they had hardly settled down when some sort of pale many-jointed insects as long as a man’s leg, with huge bulging yellow eyes and powerful-looking green legs tipped with nasty claws, came scuttering out of low mounds of earth nearby. The creatures were attracted by the light, it seemed, or perhaps the warmth of the fire. They looked fierce and ugly, and made a hideous clicking sound with their glossy red mandibles. The children and some of the women ran screaming away from them; but Koshmar came forward without fear and speared one with a quick contemptuous thrust. It pounded its two ends sadly against the ground a few moments before it became still. The others, seeing what had happened to their companion, crawled backward a dozen paces or so and stared sullenly. After a while longer they backed away into their holes again and were not seen again.

“These are greenclaws,” Thaggoran said, quickly inventing the name before Koshmar could question him. It embarrassed him not to know the names of the first two creatures they had encountered in the Time of Going Forth. There was nothing in the Book of the Beasts about these, either. He was sure of that.

Koshmar roasted the dead greenclaws in the fire that night, and she and Harruel and some of the other braver ones tasted its flesh. They reported that it had no particular taste at all; yet a few went back for second helpings. Thaggoran declined his share with tactful thanks.

In the night came another annoyance, small round creatures no larger than the ball of a man’s thumb, which moved in great lunatic leaps although they had no legs that could be seen. When they landed on someone they dug immediately in, deep down into the fur, and sank their little teeth into the flesh with a sensation that burned like a hot coal. From here and there about the camp outcries of annoyance and pain were heard, until everyone was awake, and the People gathered in a circle to groom one another, snapping the things between forefinger and thumb and pulling them free of the fur with no little difficulty. Thaggoran gave them the name of fireburs. They vanished with the dawn.

The pale light of morning brought Thaggoran out of uneasy sleep. It seemed to him almost that he had not slept at all, but he could remember dreams: visions of faces floating in midair, and a woman with seven dreadful red eyes, and a land where teeth grew from the ground. His body ached everywhere. The sun, looking small and hard and unfriendly, lay like an unripe fruit atop the jagged range of hills to the east. He saw Torlyri far away, making her morning offering.

Scarcely anyone spoke as they made ready to break camp. Wherever he looked, Thaggoran saw bleak faces. Everyone seemed to be struggling visibly against the cold, the fatigue of yesterday’s march, the nuisance of the sleep-destroying fireburs, the strangeness of the landscape. The oppressive openness of the view was troublesome to many; Thaggoran saw them with their hands held before their faces, as if they were striving to create a private cocoon for themselves.

His own spirits were cast down by the barren terrain and the bitter stinging weather. Was this truly the New Springtime? Or had they given up their little nest in the mountain too soon, making a premature departure into inhospitable winter and certain death? Perhaps they were writing the Book of the Unhappy Dawn or the Book of the Cold Awakening all over again.

The shinestones had given him no clear answer. His attempt at divination had ended in ambiguities and uncertainties, as such attempts often did. “You must go forth,” the stones had told him, but Thaggoran already knew that: were the ice-eaters not practically upon them? Yet the stones had not said they would go forth happily, or that this was the proper time.

He moved apart from the others and wrote for a time in the chronicles. Hresh came to him as he squatted by the open casket with his hands on the book, but the boy stood silent, as if fearing to interrupt. When Thaggoran was done he glanced up and said, “Well? Would you like to write something now on these pages, boy?”

Hresh smiled. “If only I could.”

“I know that you can write.”

“But not in the chronicles, Thaggoran. I don’t dare touch the chronicles.”

Thaggoran said, laughing, “You sound so pious, boy.”

“Do I?”

“I’m not fooled, though.”

“No,” Hresh said. “I wouldn’t want to injure the chronicles by trying to write in them. I might put down nonsense, and then in all the years to come they would see what I had written, and they would say, ‘Hresh the fool wrote that nonsense there.’ What I want is to be able to read the chronicles, though.”

“I read them to the People every week.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. I want to read them for myself. Everything, even the oldest books. I want to know more about how the cocoon was built, and who built it.”

“Lord Fanigole built our cocoon,” said Thaggoran. “With Balilirion and Lady Theel. You know that already.”

“Yes, but who were they? Those are only names.”

“Ancient ones,” Thaggoran said. “Great, great beings.”

“Sapphire-eyes, were they?”

Thaggoran gave Hresh a strange look. “Why would you say a thing like that? You know that all the sapphire-eyes died when the Long Winter began. Lord Fanigole and Balilirion and Lady Theel were people of our own kind. That is, they were humans: all the texts agree on that. They were the greatest of heroes, those three: when the panic came, when the deathly cold began, they were the ones who remained calm and led us into shelter.” He tapped the casket of the chronicles. “It’s all written in here, in these books.”

“I would like to read those books someday,” Hresh said again.

“I think you will have that opportunity,” said Thaggoran.

Gray wisps of fog drifted toward them. Thaggoran began to pack away his holy things. His fingers were numb with cold, and his hands moved clumsily over the locks and seals of the casket. After a moment he beckoned impatiently to Hresh, asking him to help, showing the boy what to do. Together they closed the casket, and then Thaggoran put his raw hands to its lid as though he might be warmed by what it contained.

Hresh said, “Will we ever go back to the cocoon, Thaggoran?”

Again Thaggoran looked at him in a puzzled way. “We have left the cocoon forever, boy. We must go forward until we have found what we are instructed to find.”

“And what is that?”

“The things we must have in order to rule the world,” said Thaggoran. “As it has been written in the Book of the Way. Those things wait for us out there in the ruins of the Great World.”

“But what if this isn’t the true New Springtime? Look how cold it is! Don’t you ever wonder if we’ve made some kind of mistake and come out too soon?”

“Never,” Thaggoran said. “There can be no doubt. All the omens are favorable.”

“It is very cold, though,” said Hresh.

“Indeed. Very cold. But do you see how night gradually overtakes the day, and day is gradually born out of night? So too with the New Springtime, boy. A springtime does not arrive in a single great burst of warmth, but it happens moment by moment, bit by bit.” Thaggoran shivered and wrapped his arms about himself as the fog touched his bones. “Come, Hresh. Help me with this casket, and let’s rejoin the others.”

It troubled him that Hresh seemed to have doubts about the wisdom of the trek, for there often was a seer’s keenness in the things this strange little boy said, and Hresh’s misgivings echoed Thaggoran’s own. Koshmar, he thought, might well have been too quick to designate this as the Time of Going Forth. The Dream-Dreamer had not actually said that this was the moment, had he? He had only blurted a few words. Koshmar had finished the sentence for him, and she had put words in the Dream-Dreamer’s mouth. Even Torlyri had accused her of that. But no one dared to cross Koshmar. Thaggoran was aware that she had been determined for a long time to be the chieftain who accomplished the Going Forth.

Besides, there were the ice-eaters: not only an omen of springtime, but an immediate threat to the cocoon. Still, might it not have been better to seek shelter somewhere else and wait for warmer weather, rather than to set out across this trackless wasteland?

Too late. Too late. The march had begun, and Thaggoran knew it would not end until Koshmar attained the glory that she had always sought, whatever it might be. Or else it would end with the deaths of them all. So be it, Thaggoran told himself. Whatever would come would come, as was usually the case.

The second day was harsh and difficult. In midday angry swarms of winged creatures with eerie white eyes and furious blood-seeking beaks swooped down. Delim suffered a slashed arm, and the young warrior Praheurt was cut in two places on his back. The People drove them off with shouts and rocks and firebrands, but it was an ugly task, for they kept coming back again and again, so there was no peace for hours. Thaggoran gave them the name of bloodbirds. Later there were others even more vile, with leathery black wings tipped with savage horny claws, and fat little bodies covered with stinking green fur. At night there were fireburs again, a maddening multitude of them. To keep spirits high Koshmar ordered everyone to sing, and sing they did, but it was a joyless singing that they did. There was sleet in the depths of the night, cold hard stuff that raked one’s skin like a spray of fiery embers. Torlyri, when she had finished with her offering in the morning, made the rounds of the People, offering the comfort of her warmth and tenderness. “This is the worst of it,” she said. “It will be better, soon.”

They went on.

On the third day, as they were descending a series of bare gray rolling hills that opened into a shallow green meadow, keen-eyed Torlyri spied a strange solitary figure far in the distance. It seemed to be coming toward them. Turning to Thaggoran, she said, “Do you see that, old man? What do you think it is? No human, surely!”

Thaggoran narrowed his eyes and stared. His vision was not nearly so far-reaching as Torlyri’s, but his second sight was the sharpest in the tribe, and it showed him plainly the bands of yellow and black on the creature’s long shining body, the fierce beak, the great glittering blue-black eyes, the deep constrictions dividing head from thorax, thorax from abdomen. “No, not a human,” he muttered, shaken to the depths of his spirit. “Don’t you recognize a hjjk-man when you see one?”

“A hjjk-man!” said Torlyri in wonder.

Thaggoran turned away, trying to conceal the way he was trembling. He felt as though this were some phenomenally vivid dream. He could scarcely believe that a hjjk-man, an actual living hjjk-man, was even now crossing that meadow. It was like a book of the chronicles jumping up from the casket and coming to life, with figures out of the lost Great World pouring forth and dancing about before him. The hjjk-folk had been only a name to him, a concept, something dry and ancient and abstract, a mere remote aspect of a vanished past. Koshmar was real; Torlyri was real; Harruel was real; this barren chilly countryside was real. What was in the chronicles was only words. But that was no mere word out there that was approaching them now.

And yet it came as no great surprise to Thaggoran that the hjjks too had survived the winter. That was just as the chronicles had predicted. The hjjk-folk had been expected to see the hard times through. They were innate survivors. In the days of the Great World they had been one of the Six Peoples: insect-beings, they were, bloodless and austere. Thaggoran had heard nothing likable about them. Even at this distance he could feel the hjjk-man’s emanation, dry and cold like this land they were passing through — indifferent, remote.

Koshmar came over. She had seen the hjjk-man too.

“We’ll need to speak with him. He must know useful things about what lies ahead. Do you think you’ll be able to get him to talk?”

“Do you have any reason to think I won’t?” said Thaggoran gruffly.

Koshmar grinned. “Getting tired, old man?”

“I won’t be the first to drop,” he replied in a surly tone.

They were crossing now a parched terrain: the soil was sandy and its surface crunched underfoot, as though no one had walked here in thousands of years. Sparse tufts of stiff blue-green grass sprouted here and there, tough angular stuff that had a glassy sheen. Yesterday Konya had tried to pull up a clump and it had cut his fingers; he had come away bloody and cursing.

All afternoon long as they descended the last hill in the group they could discern the hjjk-man stolidly advancing in their direction. He reached them just before twilight, when they had arrived at the meadow’s eastern edge. Though they were sixty and he was only one, he halted and waited for them with his middle pair of arms crossed over his thorax, seemingly unafraid.

Thaggoran stared intently. His heart thundered, his throat was parched with excitement. Not even the Going Forth itself had had such an impact on him as the advent of this creature.

Long ago, in the glorious days of the Great World before the coming of the death-stars, these insect-beings had built vast hivelike cities in the lands that were too dry for humans and vegetals or too cold for sapphire-eyes or too moist for mechanicals. If no one else wanted a territory, the hjjk-folk would claim it, and once they did there was no relinquishing it. And yet the chroniclers of the Great World had not considered the hjjk-folk the masters of the earth, for all their sturdiness and adaptability: that was the place held by the sapphire-eyed ones, so it was written. The sapphire-eyes were the kings; after them came all the rest, including the humans, who had been the kings themselves in some even more ancient time. And would be again, now, with the Coming Forth. But the sapphire-eyes, Thaggoran knew, could not have survived the winter, and the humans had gone into hiding. Were the hjjk-folk the masters now by default?

In the failing light the hjjk-man’s body had a dull glimmering sheen, as though he were made of polished stone. He was banded in alternating strips of black and yellow from the top to the bottom of his long body — he was slender and tall, taller even than Harruel — and his hard, angular, sharp-beaked face looked much like the Mask of Lirridon that Koshmar had worn on the day of leaving the cocoon. His eyes, enormous and many-faceted, gleamed like dark shinestones. Just below them dangled the segmented coils of bright orange breathing-tubes at either side of his head.

The hjjk-man regarded them in silence until they drew near. Then he said in a curiously incurious way, “Where are you going? It is foolish of you to be here. You will meet your death out here.”

“No,” Koshmar said. “The winter is over.”

“Be that as it may, you will die.” The hjjk-man’s voice was a dry rasping buzz; but it was not, Thaggoran realized after a moment, a spoken sound. He was speaking within their minds: speaking with second sight, one might say. “Just beyond me in the valley your death is waiting. Go forward and see whether I am lying.”

And without another word he began to move past them, as if he had given the tribe all the time he felt it deserved.

“Wait,” Koshmar said, blocking his way. “Tell us what perils lie ahead, hjjk-man.”

“You will see.”

“Tell us now, or you will travel no farther ill this life.”

Coolly the hjjk-man replied, “The rat-wolves are gathering in this valley. They will have your flesh, for you are flesh-folk, and they are very hungry. Let me pass.”

“Wait a little longer,” said Koshmar. “Tell me this: have you seen other humans in your crossing of the valley? Tribes like ours, emerging from their cocoons now that the springtime has come?”

The hjjk-man made a droning sound that might have been one of impatience. It was the first trace of emotion he had shown. “Why would I see humans?” the insect-creature asked. “This valley is not a place where one finds humans.”

“You saw none at all? Not even a few?”

“You speak words without sense or meaning,” said the hjjk-man. “I have no time to spare for such discourse. I ask you now again to allow me to pass.” Thaggoran picked up an odd scent, suddenly, sweet and sharp. He saw droplets of a brown secretion beginning to appear on the hjjk-man’s striped abdomen.

“We should let him go,” he said softly to Koshmar. “He’ll tell us nothing more. And he could be dangerous.”

Koshmar fingered her spear. Harruel, just to her side, took that as a cue and hefted his own, running his hands up and down its shaft. “I’ll kill him, eh?” Harruel murmured. “I’ll put my spear right through his middle. Shall I, Koshmar?”

“No,” she said. “That would be a mistake.” She walked slowly around the hjjk-man, who appeared unperturbed by this turn of the discussion. “One last time,” Koshmar said. “Tell me: are there no other tribes of humans in this region? It would give us great joy to find them. We have come forth to begin the world anew, and we seek our brothers and sisters.”

“You will begin nothing anew, for the rat-wolves will slay you within an hour,” replied the hjjk-man evenly. “And you are fools. There are no humans, flesh-woman.”

“What you say is absurd. You see humans before you at this very moment.”

“I see fools,” said the hjjk-man. “Now let me go on my way, or you will regret it.”

Harruel brandished his spear. Koshmar shook her head.

“Let him pass,” she said. “Save your energies for the rat-wolves.”

Thaggoran watched in keen sorrow as the hjjk-man stalked away toward the hills out of which they had just emerged. He longed to sit down with the strange creature and speak with him of ancient times. Tell me what you know of the Great World, Thaggoran would have said, and I will tell you all that is known to me! Let us talk of the cities of Thisthissima and Glorm, and of the Crystal Mountain and the Tower of Stars and the Tree of Life, and of all the glories past, of your race and mine and of the sleek sapphire-eyes folk who ruled the world, and of the other peoples also. And then let us speak of the swarms of falling stars whose great tails streamed in fire across the sky, and of the thunder of their impact as they struck the earth, and the clouds of flame and smoke that arose when they hit, and the winds and the black rain, and the chill that came over the land and the sea when the sun was blotted out by dust and soot. We can talk of the death of races, thought Thaggoran — of the death of the Great World itself, whose equal will never be seen again.

But the hjjk-man was nearly out of sight already, disappearing beyond the crest of the hills to the east.

Thaggoran shrugged. It was folly to think that the hjjk-man would have taken part in any such courteous exchange of knowledge. In the time of the Great World it was said of them, so Thaggoran understood, that they were beings who had not the slightest warmth, who knew nothing of friendship or kindness or love, who had, in fact, no souls. The Long Winter was not likely to have improved them in those regards.

A few days farther westward the tribe camped one afternoon in what appeared to be the bed of a dry lake, scooped low below the valley floor. For everyone, no matter how young, there were tasks to do. Some were sent off to gather twigs and scraps of dried grass for the main fire, some looked for greenery to build the second, smokier fire that they had learned kept the fireburs away, some set about herding the livestock into a close group, some joined Torlyri in chanting the guarding-rites to ward off the menaces of the night.

Hresh and Haniman were given tinder-gathering duties. That offended Hresh, that he should be assigned the same sort of job as fat, useless Haniman. He envied Orbin, who had gone off with the men to round up the livestock. Of course, Orbin was very strong for his age. Still, it was humiliating to be paired with Haniman this way. Hresh wondered if Koshmar really thought so little of him.

“Where shall we look?” Haniman asked.

“You go wherever you want to,” Hresh replied bluntly. “Just so long as it isn’t where I’m going.”

“Aren’t we going to work together?”

“You do your work and I’ll do mine. But you keep out of my way, understand?”

“Hresh—”

“Go on. Move. I don’t want to have to look at you.”

For a moment something almost like a spark of anger showed in Haniman’s little round eyes. Hresh wondered if he was actually going to have to fight him. Haniman was slow and awkward, but he was at least half again heavier than Hresh. All he needs to do is sit on me, Hresh thought. But let him try. Let him try.

Haniman’s moment of anger, if that was what it was, passed. Haniman was no fighter. He gave Hresh a reproachful look and went off by himself, kicking at the ground.

Carrying a little wicker basket, Hresh headed out into the territory just west and a little north of the campsite and began foraging about for anything that looked as though it could be burned. There seemed to be very little. He moved farther outward. It was still a barren zone. He went farther still.

Night was coming on swiftly now, and great jagged streaks of violent color, rich purple and angry throbbing scarlet and a somber heavy yellow, made the western sky beautiful and frightful. Behind him everything had turned black already, a stunning all-engulfing darkness broken only by the dim flickering smoky flare of the campfire.

Hresh went a little farther, creeping carefully around a wide shoulder of rock. He knew that what he was doing was rash. He was getting very far from camp now. Too far, perhaps. He could barely make out the sound of the chanting from here, and when he looked back over his shoulder none of the other tribesfolk were in sight.

But still he roamed on and on through this mysterious chilly domain without walls or corridors, where the dark sky was an astounding open dome that went up beyond all comprehension to the distant stars that hung from heaven’s roof.

He had to see everything. How else would he be able to understand what the world was like?

And seeing everything necessarily meant exposing himself to certain dangers. He was Hresh-full-of-questions, after all, and it was in the nature of Hresh-full-of-questions to seek answers, regardless of the risk. There is great merit, he thought, in having a soul as restless as mine. They didn’t understand that about him, yet, because he was only a boy. But one day they would, he vowed.

It seemed to him that he heard voices in the distance, borne toward him on the wind. Excitement surged in him. What if he were to find the campsite of another tribe just up ahead?

The thought made him giddy. Old Thaggoran claimed that other tribes existed, that there were cocoons just like theirs all over the world; and Thaggoran knew everything, or almost. But nobody, not even Thaggoran, had any real way of knowing whether that was true. Hresh wanted to believe that it was: dozens or even hundreds of little tribes, each in its own cocoon, waiting through generation after generation for the Time of Coming Forth. Yet no evidence for such a thing existed except in the chronicles. Certainly there had never been any contact with another tribe, at least not since the earliest days of the Long Winter. How could there be, when no one ever left his home cocoon?

But now Koshmar’s people were making their way in the open world. There might well be other tribes out here too. To Hresh that was a fantastic notion. He had known only the same band of sixty people all the eight years of his life. Now and then someone new was allowed to be born, at those times when someone old had reached the limit-age and was thrust outside the hatch to die — but otherwise it was just the same people all the time, Koshmar and Torlyri and Harruel and Taniane and Minbain and Orbin and the rest. The idea of stumbling upon a band of completely other people was wondrous.

Hresh tried to imagine what they would look like. Maybe some would have yellow eyes, or green fur. There might be men taller than Harruel. Their chieftain would not be a woman but a young boy. Why not? It was a different tribe, wasn’t it? They would do everything differently. Instead of an old man of the tribe they would have three old women, who kept the chronicles on bright sheets of grassglass and spoke in unison. Hresh laughed. They would have different names from ours, too. They will be called things like Migg-wungus and Kik-kik-kik and Pinnipoppim, he decided, names that no one in Koshmar’s tribe had ever heard. Another tribe! Incredible!

Hresh moved less cautiously now. In his eagerness to find the source of the voices ahead, he broke into a half-trot, jogging through the gathering darkness.

Another tribe, yes! The voices grew more distinct.

He pictured them sitting around a smoldering campfire just beyond the next clump of rocks. He saw himself stepping boldly into their midst. “I am Hresh of Koshmar’s cocoon,” he would say, “and my people are just over there. We mean to begin the world anew, for this is the great springtime!” And they would embrace him and give him velvetberry wine to drink, and they would say to him, “We too mean to begin the world anew. Take us to your chieftain!” And he would run back to camp, laughing and shouting, crying out that he had found other humans, a whole tribe of them, men and women and boys and girls, with names like Migg-wungus and Kik-kik-kik and—

Suddenly he halted, nostrils flaring, sensing-organ rigid and quivering. Something was wrong.

In the stillness of the night he heard the sounds of the other tribe very clearly, now. Very odd sounds they were, too, a high-pitched chittering sort of squeak mixed with a thick snuffling sort of noise — a peculiar sound, an ugly sound—

Not the sound of some other tribe, no.

Not human sounds at all.

Hresh sent forth his second sight in the way that Thaggoran had taught him to do. For a moment everything was muddled and indistinct, but then he tuned his perceptions more carefully and things came into focus for him. There were a dozen creatures just on the far side of those rocks. Their bodies were about as long as a man’s, but they moved on all fours, and their limbs looked quick and powerfully muscled. Their glaring red eyes were small and bright and fierce, their teeth were long and keen and protruded like daggers from their whiskery snouts, their hides were covered in dense gray fur, and their sensing-organs were held out straight and twitching behind them like long narrow whips, pink and almost hairless.

Not human. Not at all.

They were moving in a circle, around and around in a creepy shuffling way, pausing now and then to raise their snouts and sniff. Hresh could not understand the language they were speaking, but the meaning of their words rode clearly to him on his second sight:

“Flesh — flesh — flesh — eat — eat — eat — eat flesh—”

The rat-wolves are gathering in the valley, the hjjk-man had said. They will have your flesh, for you are flesh-folk, and they are very hungry. Koshmar had not seemed especially alarmed by that. Perhaps she had thought that the hjjk-man was lying; perhaps she thought there were no such creatures as rat-wolves at all. But what else could these snuffling shuffling bright-eyed long-toothed things be, if not the rat-wolves of whom the hjjk-man had tried to warn them?

Hresh turned and ran.

Around the jutting fangs of rock, past the low sandy hummocks, down into the dry lake bed — scrambling desperately in the dark, losing his basket of tinder in his haste, running as fast as he could back toward the campfire of the tribe. Strangenesses of the darkness assailed him. Something large with wings and bulbous greenish-gold eyes buzzed around his head. He slapped it away and kept running. A hundred paces farther on, another something that looked like three long black ropes side by side rose up before him, coiling and swaying in the cold faint starlight. Hresh darted to one side and did not look back.

Breathless, gasping, he rushed into the midst of camp.

“The rat-wolves!” he cried, pointing into the night. “The rat-wolves! I saw them!” And he went tumbling, exhausted, almost at the feet of Koshmar.

He feared that they would not believe him. He was only wild Hresh, troublesome Hresh, Hresh-full-of-questions, was he not? But for once they paid attention.

“Where were they?” Koshmar demanded. “How many? How big?”

Harruel began handing out spears to all but the smallest children. Thaggoran, squatting by the fire, aimed his sensing-organ out across the dry lake to read the rat-wolves’ emanations.

“They’re coming!” the old man called. “I feel them, heading this way!”

Koshmar, Torlyri, and Harruel, spears in hand, took up positions shoulder to shoulder at the western side of the camp. How magnificent they look, Hresh thought: the chieftain, the priestess, the great warrior. Nine more stood behind them, and then another row of nine, with the children and the childbearing women huddled in the middle.

He heard Koshmar invoking the Five Heavenly Ones, saw her making the Five Signs, and then the sign of Yissou the Protector over and over. He murmured a prayer to Yissou himself. Alone of his tribe he had seen the rat-wolves, their long snouts, their fiery little eyes, the sharp blades of their teeth.

There was a long timeless time when nothing happened. The warriors guarding the approach to the camp paced in tense circles. Hresh began to wonder if he had dreamed the rat-wolves out there in the dark. He wondered, too, how severely Koshmar would punish him if this proved to be a false alarm.

But then abruptly the enemy was upon them. Hresh heard terrible high-pitched chittering cries, and smelled a strange loathsome musky smell; and an instant later the camp was invaded.

“Yissou!” Koshmar bellowed. “Dawinno!”

The rat-wolves came bounding in from every side at once, screeching, leaping, snarling, flashing their teeth.

Women began to scream, and some of the men also. No one had ever seen animals like this, animals that lived on flesh and used their teeth as weapons. And no one had ever had to fight in this manner before, a true fight, not just a little social brawl among friends but a battle for life. It had been so easy in the cocoon, so sheltered. But they were not in the cocoon any longer.

The wolf-pack circled round and round as if seeking to find the weaker members of the tribe and cut them off. The sour smell of them was heavy on the air. By the flickering firelight Hresh saw their beady red eyes, their long naked sensing-organs, looking just as they had when he had seen them by second sight a little while before, but perhaps even more repellent. What ugly things, what monsters!

He shrank back toward the center of the group, holding the spear that Harruel had given him but not very sure what to do with it. Grasp it here, was that it? And thrust — upward? Let a rat-wolf come near him and he’d figure it out fast enough, he told himself.

The huge figure of Harruel was outlined against the darkness, thrusting, grunting, thrusting again. And there was Torlyri valiantly holding one rat-wolf at bay with robust kicks while skewering another on the tip of her spear. Lakkamai fought well, and Konya, and Staip. Salaman, who was not much older than Hresh himself, struck down two with two successive strokes of his weapon. Koshmar seemed to be everywhere at once, using not only the sharp end of her spear but its butt as well, ramming it with bloodthirsty joy into the toothy mouth of this wolf and that one. Hresh heard dreadful howling sounds. The rat-wolves were calling to one another in what could only be a sort of a language: “Kill — kill — kill — flesh — flesh — flesh —” And someone human was moaning in pain; and someone else was uttering a low whimpering sound of fear.

Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the battle seemed to be over.

Between one moment and the next all grew still. Harruel stood leaning on his spear, breathing hard, wiping at a runnel of blood that streamed from his thigh. Torlyri crouched on her knees, shivering in horror and saying the name of Mueri over and over. Koshmar, clutching her spear at the ready, was prowling about looking for more attackers, but there were none. Dead rat-wolves lay strewn all around, already stiffening, looking even more hideous in death than they had when living.

“Is anyone hurt?” Koshmar asked. “Answer when I call out your name. Thaggoran?”

There was silence.

“Thaggoran?” she repeated uneasily.

Still no answer came from Thaggoran. “Look for him,” Koshmar ordered Torlyri. “Harruel?”

“Yes.”

“Konya?”

“Konya here.”

“Staip?”

“Staip, yes.”

When it was Hresh’s turn, he could barely speak, so amazed was he by all that had occurred this evening. He managed to croak his name in a hoarse whisper.

Everyone was accounted for, in the end, except two — three, actually, for one of the dead was Valmud, a kindly if not overly intelligent young woman, one of the breeding couples; and she had been carrying an unborn. That was serious enough; but the other death was catastrophic.

It was Hresh who found him, lying sprawled in some straggly dead weeds just beyond the edge of the camp. Old Thaggoran had defended himself well. The wolf who had ripped out his throat lay beside him, eyes bulging, tongue black and swollen. The chronicler had strangled it even as he died.

Stunned and numbed, Hresh stared somberly at the dead man, unable even to cry. The loss was too great. He felt almost as if his own throat had been ripped out. After a time he managed a little dry choking sound, and then a sort of a sob. He could not move. He dared not even breathe. He wanted time to unhappen itself, this day to roll backward upon its foundations.

Finally he knelt and tremblingly touched the old man’s forehead, as if hoping that the knowledge that was packed so deeply behind it might leap from Thaggoran’s spirit to his at a touch, before Thaggoran had cooled. But Thaggoran’s spirit was gone.

It was beyond belief. Hresh had never known such a loss. His own father, Samnibolon, had been only a name to him, dead long ago. But this— this—

“Dawinno—” he began uncertainly.

Then the dammed flood of his feelings broke through. A terrible cry came welling up out of the depths of his body and he let it come forth, a great curdled furious wailing sound that almost tore him apart as it erupted from him. Tears poured down his cheeks, plastering his fur into damp spikes. He shook, he moaned, he stamped his feet.

For a long moment after the worst spasm had passed, he crouched, trembling and sweating, thinking of all that was lost to the People, all that had slipped through his own hands, by the death of this wise old man.

This was more than the death of one man: everyone had to die someday, after all, and Thaggoran had lived a long while already. But this was the death of knowledge. An immense vacant place in Hresh’s soul could never now be filled. There was so much he had hoped to learn from Thaggoran about this strange world into which the tribe had plunged, and he would never learn it now. Some things were in the chronicles, many things, yes, but some had been passed down only by spoken words, from one chronicler to the next across the hundreds of thousands of years, and now that line of transmission was broken, now those things were lost forever.

But I will learn all I can nevertheless, Hresh told himself.

I will make myself chronicler in Thaggoran’s place, he said boldly to himself, in that moment of grief and shock and intolerable loss.

He reached down and coolly probed the bloodied fur just below Thaggoran’s torn throat. There was an amulet that looked like a piece of green glass there, a small oval thing, very old, with tiny signs inscribed on it, something that Thaggoran once had told him was a piece of the Great World. Carefully Hresh slipped it free. It seemed to burn with a cold glow against his palm. He held it, heart pounding, tightly clenched in his hand for a time. Then he popped it into the little purse he carried on his hip.

He was not willing to put it around his own throat: not yet. But he would, someday soon.

And he resolved: I will go everywhere upon the face of this world and see everything that exists and learn everything that can be learned, for I am Hresh-full-of-questions! I will master all the secrets of the times gone by and the times to come, and I will fill my soul with wisdom until I nearly burst of it, and then I will set all my knowledge down in the chronicles, for those who are to follow after us in this the New Springtime.

And, thinking those things, Hresh felt the pain of Thaggoran’s death beginning to ebb.

All night long the whole tribe chanted the death-chants over their two fallen tribesfolk, and at dawn’s first light they carried the bodies eastward a little way into the hills and said the words of Dawinno for them and the words of Friit and Mueri for themselves. Then Koshmar gave the signal, and they broke camp and headed out into the broad plains to the west. She would not say where they were going: only that it was the place where they were destined to go. No one dared to ask more.