At Winter's End

5 Vengiboneeza

On the afternoon of the day of the water-strider Threyne came to Torlyri, holding her hands to her sides, and announced that her time was upon her. Indeed Torlyri could see that it was true: the unborn was moving eagerly against the girl’s distended belly, and there were other signs of imminent birth.

“We can’t go onward so soon,” Torlyri told Koshmar. “Threyne has come to her time.”

For an instant unconcealed disappointment flickered in Koshmar’s eyes. Koshmar was in a fever to race onward to Vengiboneeza, Torlyri knew, now that she had learned the great city was so close. But she would have to wait. The birth of a child took precedence over everything. Threyne must be made comfortable; the child must be brought safely into the world.

In the cocoon days the birth of each new child had carried with it not only joy but also a hidden darker aspect, for the only time someone new was allowed into the world was when someone else was nearing the time when it was necessary to leave it: there was no room for expansion within the cocoon, and birth was inextricably mixed with death. Thus the limit-age, so that the People would not be faced with a choice between an intolerable smothered existence and a virtual prohibition against new births. Out here, where so much was altogether different for the tribe, there was no need to fear overcrowding. Quite the opposite: they needed all the new life they could produce, and more beyond that. No one would have to die to make room for children any longer. Whoever had the childbearing power, Torlyri thought, owed it to the tribe to be hatching an unborn of her own. She was beginning to toy with the idea even for herself.

They went as far as they could get from the bog and its black lake. No one wanted the water-strider bursting forth again to fill the air with its horrifying laughter while Threyne was having her baby.

Some of the men cut down saplings to make a leafy bower for her. Minbain and Galihine and a couple of the other older women washed her and held her hands as the pains grew strong. Preyne, who was the child’s father, crouched beside her for a while, touching his sensing-organ to hers and taking some of the discomfort from her, as was his obligation and privilege. Torlyri prepared birth-offerings to Mueri in her role as Comforter and to Yissou the Protector and also to Friit the Healer, for afterward. The labor was a long one, and Threyne groaned more than most women did. It was the hardship of the trek, Torlyri thought, that had put this pain in her.

Koshmar, who had been pacing tensely all afternoon, came to the bower toward sunset and stared down at Threyne’s swollen middle. To Torlyri she said, “Well? Is everything going as it should?”

Torlyri beckoned Koshmar aside, out of Threyne’s hearing, and said, “It’s taking too long. And she’s in great pain.”

“Let Preyne take the pain from her.”

“He’s doing his best.”

“Is she going to die?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Torlyri said. “But she’s suffering. She’ll be very weak for days afterward, if she lives.”

“What are you saying, Torlyri?”

“We won’t be able to break camp for a while.”

“But Vengiboneeza—”

“—has waited seven hundred thousand years for us,” Torlyri said. “It can wait another few weeks. We can’t risk Threyne’s life with your impatience. And Nettin’s baby is almost due also: two days, three. We might as well stay here until they’re strong enough to go onward. Or else divide the tribe, send Harruel and some of the other men ahead to look for the city, and we stay here to care for the mothers.”

Koshmar looked bothered. “If anything happens to Threyne I’d never forgive myself. But can you see how I feel, with the city so close?”

Tenderly Torlyri put her hands to Koshmar’s shoulders a moment, and held her. “I know,” she said softly. “You’ve fought so hard to bring us here.”

From Threyne just then came a new sound, higher, sharper.

“Her time has arrived,” Torlyri said. “I’ll have to go to her. We’ll be on the march again soon, I promise you that.”

Koshmar nodded and walked off. Torlyri, watching her go, shook her head. It amazed her that Koshmar, ordinarily so level-headed and clear-minded, had needed to be told that they would have to halt here for a while, and probably even now was having trouble accepting the idea. But Koshmar lacked all aptitude for these matters of women. She had never let a man put his hand to her thighs; she had never thought for a moment of bearing a child; she had aimed herself from childhood on for the chieftainship and nothing but the chieftainship, and to Koshmar that had excluded the idea of motherhood. Chieftains did not bear children: it was the tradition. But only because it had been necessary to regulate population within the cocoon so strictly, Torlyri thought. All sorts of traditions about who could bear children and who could not had sprung up over the centuries, but the underlying reason was always the fear that unlimited breeding would choke the cocoon and drive the tribe out into the harshness of winter before the true time.

Minbain called to her. The child was coming.

Torlyri hurried to the bower, just barely soon enough. Already a tiny head was jutting from between Threyne’s thighs. Torlyri smiled. Koshmar could never bear to watch the moment of birth, but Torlyri thought it was beautiful. She knelt at the foot of the bower, holding Threyne lightly by her ankles as she uttered the prayers to Mueri the Mother.

“A boy,” Minbain announced.

He was very small, noisy, wrinkled, pink all over, with scattered patches of thin grayish fur that would eventually expand to cover his entire body. His little sensing-organ moved stiffly from side to side, beating the air: a good sign, a sign of vigor and passion. Torlyri remembered when she had helped at Minbain’s own childbed nine years before, when Minbain had been delivered of Hresh, how Hresh had whipped the air furiously with his sensing-organ. Certainly he had lived up to the omen, had Hresh.

“The old man,” one of the women said. “We need the old man here now, to give the birth-name.”

Minbain made a muffled sound, a smothered laugh. Some of the other women laughed also.

“The old man!” Galihine said. “Who ever heard of a child as old man!”

“Or a child presiding at a childbirth,” said Preyne.

“Nevertheless,” Torlyri said firmly. “We need him to do what must be done.”

She turned to a girl named Kailii, who was almost of the age of motherhood herself and watching the delivery with fascination, and sent her off to fetch Hresh.

He arrived in a moment. Torlyri saw his sharp little eyes take in the scene in a series of quick sweeps: the women clustering close about the bower, the exhausted Threyne with streaks of blood staining the fur of her thighs, the little wrinkled babe, more like a radish than a man. Hresh looked uneasy, perhaps because his mother was here, or perhaps because he knew these matters were not ordinarily things for boys to witness.

“A child has been born, as you can see,” Torlyri said. “A name must be provided, and it is your office to do so.”

At once Hresh seemed to put his uneasiness beside him. He stood tall — though how absurdly small he still was, Torlyri thought! — and appeared to cloak himself in the majesty of his position.

Solemnly he made the sign of Yissou, and then that of Emakkis the Provider, and then that of Mueri the Mother, and then that of Friit the Healer. And then, finally, the sign of Dawinno the Destroyer, subtlest of gods.

Torlyri felt a surge of pride and delight. Hresh was doing the proper things, and in the right order! Old Thaggoran would have done no better. And Hresh had never been present at the giving of a birth-name. He must have looked up the rite in his books. The shrewd boy: how remarkable he was!

“A male child has been given us,” said Hresh resonantly. “By Preyne, from Threyne, to us all. I name him for the great one who has been taken from us so cruelly. Thaggoran shall he be.”

“Thaggoran!” Preyne boomed. “Thaggoran son of Preyne, Thaggoran son of Threyne!”

“Thaggoran!” cried the women at the bower. “Thaggoran!” said Threyne faintly.

Hresh held out his hands to the mother, to the father, to Torlyri, as the rite required. Then he went around to each of the women in the group, one by one, even his mother Minbain, touching them on each cheek in a sort of blessing. Torlyri had never seen that done: it was something that Hresh must have invented, unless he had revived some ancient rite described in his books. He came last to Torlyri and touched her in the same way. His eyes were shining. What a splendid moment this must be for him, she thought: this boy-chronicler of ours, this strange little Hresh-full-of-questions, who seemed now both man and child, man in a child’s body. She thought of him that day at the cocoon’s hatch when she had seized him before he could flee, and remembered the terror in his eyes when she had told him that he must be taken before Koshmar for judgment. How utterly different everything had become for them all, since that day! And here was that same Hresh, in a land far from the cocoon, proclaiming a new Thaggoran to the world with all the seriousness of the old one.

Afterward Hresh took her aside and said, “Did I do it well? Did I do it properly?”

“You were magnificent,” she told him; and, impulsively, she swept him up against her bosom, holding him dangling off the ground, and kissed him twice.

He seemed ruffled by that. He gave her an odd look when she set him down, and preened his fur with a distinct attitude of offended dignity. But when she smiled and put her hands to his shoulders in a more seemly caress he looked less irked. No one could stay irritated at Torlyri for long.

“There’s another ceremony we must do soon,” Hresh said.

“Nettin’s baby, you mean.”

“That too. But I meant one for me.”

“And what is that?” Torlyri asked.

“My naming-day,” he said. “I will be nine, you know.”

She struggled against laughter, could not suppress it, let it finally burst out.

Hresh stared at her, offended all over again.

“Did I make some joke?”

“No, there was no joke, Hresh, nothing funny at all — but — but—” She started to laugh again. “I’m sorry. It’s wrong of me.”

“I don’t understand,” Hresh said.

“Your naming-day. You are the old man of the tribe; you have just given a child a name yourself. Without even having had your own naming-day! Oh, Hresh, Hresh, these are truly strange times!”

“Nevertheless,” he said. “It is the proper time for me.”

She nodded. “Yes. You’re absolutely right, Hresh. I’ll speak to Koshmar about it this afternoon. Which day should it be, do you know?”

Sadly he said, “I’ve lost count, Torlyri. In these weeks and months of wandering. I think it may have gone past already. Some days back.”

“Well, no matter. I’ll speak to Koshmar,” she told him.

What might be the correct procedure for a naming-day in this new life was a puzzle to Torlyri and Koshmar both. There had been no occasion to perform such a rite since the Going Forth.

In the cocoon times the naming-day, which marked a child’s formal entry into adult life, had been one of the three sacramental days on which it was permissible for a member of the tribe to pass the threshold and briefly enter the outer world. Accompanied only by the offering-woman, the trembling nine-year-old would step through the hatch, proclaim the name that he or she had chosen to wear thenceforth, and — though dazed, astounded, by the view of the cliff and the river and the open vault of the sky, by the clutter of bleached old bones, and by the intoxicating impact of fresh cold air — perform the appropriate offering to the Five. A few years later would come a second rite, the twining-day, to mark the formal acknowledgment of maturity of soul; and the next time that most tribe members would go outside would be at the time of their death, when if they were strong enough to walk they would be escorted to the hatch by the offering-woman and the chieftain or sometimes the senior warrior, and otherwise would simply be carried out by the offering-woman and left to await the wind and the rain.

But how could Hresh go outside the cocoon for the rites of his naming-day, if he was outside it to begin with?

The old rite had become meaningless. But the naming-day was important. Once again, Torlyri realized, it had fallen to her to invent a rite. There was something strange and a little troublesome about that — simply making up a rite. Was that how all the old rites had come into being? she wondered. Invented by priestesses on the spot, or the old man, to meet some sudden need? Not decreed by a god at all?

The god, she told herself, speaks through the offering-woman.

So be it. She excused herself from Koshmar and went apart, back to the lake of the water-strider, and knelt there to Dawinno and asked for guidance. And Dawinno gave her a rite. It sprang clear and bright into her mind.

The water-strider appeared once again, while she still knelt there. She looked to it fearlessly, smiling as it unfolded its vast flimsy self. You could not harm me if you wished to, she thought. But even if you could, I would smile at you this day, and you would not do me injury. The strider, weaving slowly about at its great height, studied her somberly. And then it seemed to her that the strider smiled to her, and took pleasure in her presence there.

She nodded to it.

“The Five be with you, friend,” she said. And the strider laughed; but the laugh seemed more gentle than it had been that other time.

As Torlyri returned to the camp she saw a flock overhead of the creatures that Thaggoran had named bloodbirds, which had swarmed upon them more than once far back in the plains, trying to pierce the marchers with their beaks. She remembered their frightful swoops, their screeching cries, the wounds they had inflicted. But this time she felt no cause for alarm. She looked upon them unafraid, as she had with the water-strider, and they stayed far above, circling without swooping.

This is the proper way to dwell in this place, she told herself. Meet these creatures without fear, meet them if you can with love, and they will do you no harm.

“Now, this is the rite,” she said to Koshmar. “I will go off with him into the forest, deep, far from the tribe, to a place where we are all by ourselves with only the creatures of the forest around us. That will be like leaving the safety of the cocoon in the old days. And he will make the offerings to the Five, and then he must go before some creature of the wilderness, it makes no difference which one, a snake, a bird, a water-strider, anything, so long as it is a creature not like us: and he will go to it in peace and tell that creature his new name.”

Koshmar looked troubled.

“What purpose does that have?”

“It says that we are people of the world and in the world, and that we live among its creatures again. That we come to them in love, without fear, to share their world with them now that the winter is over.”

“Ah,” said Koshmar. “I see.” But Torlyri could tell from the way she said it that she was not convinced.

Even so, it was the time of Hresh’s naming-day, and there was no cocoon for him to step out from, and this was the new rite that Torlyri had devised, and she was the only offering-woman the tribe had. So who was to say that the rite was incorrect? Torlyri gave Hresh instruction in what he was to do and they set forth together at dawn, just the two of them. He had an offering-bowl in his hand and as they walked he gathered blossoms and berries to give to the gods.

“Tell me when we are at the place,” he said.

“No, you must tell me,” said Torlyri.

His eyes were aglow with life and energy. It seemed to Torlyri that she had never known anyone so much alive as this boy, and her heart overflowed with love for him. Surely the force of the gods flowed in his veins!

“Here,” Hresh said.

It was dark in the place he had chosen, for the trees were stitched together high above by networks of vines thicker than a man’s arm. The ground was soft and damp. They could have been the only people in the world.

Hresh knelt and made his offerings.

“Now I will take my new name,” he said.

Then he searched about for a creature to be his name-creature; and after some time a beast of fair size came padding into the grove, an animal about the size of a rat-wolf, but far more appealing, with bright eyes and a long tapered head and two shovel-like golden tusks alongside its snout and a row of pale yellow stripes down its tawny back. Its legs were slender and ended in three sharp-tipped toes: a digging animal, perhaps, that fed on insects in the ground. It looked at Hresh as if it had never seen anyone of his sort before.

He went close to it.

“ Yourname is goldentusks,” Hresh said.

Torlyri smiled. How like him, to name the animal first, on his own naming-day!

The animal stared, unafraid, perhaps curious.

“And I,” Hresh went on, “I am Hresh-full-of-questions, and this is my naming-day, and I have chosen you as my naming-beast. And I tell you, goldentusks, that the name I take is — Hresh! Hresh-of-the-answers!”

Torlyri gasped. The audacity of him!

Once in a while it happened that someone chose his birth-name to be his grown-name as well, but it was rare, it was almost unheard-of, for to do such a thing spoke of an inner confidence, a security, that bordered almost on the foolhardy. Hresh who chooses to be named Hresh! Had there ever been anyone like this child?

And yet — and yet — was it the same name? Hresh-full-of-questions before, which was the name that others had come to call him; and Hresh-of-the-answers now, which was the name he had called himself.

He was talking to the goldentusks, standing close beside it, stroking it, patting it. Then he tapped its haunch and sent it padding off into the underbrush. He turned to Torlyri.

“Well?” he said. “Am I properly named?”

“You are properly named, yes.” She pulled him close to her and hugged him. “Hresh-of-the-answers, yes.” He accepted his nearness to her a little stiffly, a little reluctantly, as if uneasy with her affection. Releasing him, she said, “Come now: we must return to the camp, and tell the others what you have chosen for yourself. And then it will be time to go in search of great Vengiboneeza.”

But they could not set out for Vengiboneeza just yet, for now Nettin had been brought to childbed: a girl this time, and Hresh, presiding again, named her Tramassilu, after the girl who had been speared by the red-beaked hopping thing. It was his plan to name all the new children for those who had died on the trek, to indicate that the losses had been made up. They needed a new Hignord and a new Valmud, therefore; and then other names could be used as other children were born. Already Jalmud, whose mate had been killed by the rat-wolves, had asked leave to take the girl Sinistine to couple with, and Hresh supposed that other pairs would be forming soon, now that everyone realized they need not fear engendering new life, but must come to see it as a sacred duty.

For a few days more the tribe remained camped near the water-strider pond, until Threyne and Nettin were strong enough to move onward. It was a hard time for Koshmar, who yearned to see Vengiboneeza. It was hard for Hresh, too. More than any of the others he had some idea of what to expect at Vengiboneeza, and he boiled with eagerness.

Indeed he was the first of all of them to glimpse its towers, four days after they resumed the march. Heading westward, they came to a lake of such a deep blue that it seemed black, and then another lake, just as the water-strider had said; and then they came to a stream, which plainly meant that Vengiboneeza must be near. It was only a small stream, but swift and cold with jutting fangs of rock everywhere. Crossing it with the baggage was an intricate task that took many hours, so that even Koshmar thought it was wisest to make camp and rest on the far side. But Hresh was unable to wait. Once they were across he slipped off by himself when no one was watching, and ran quickly through the trees until sudden amazement brought him to a halt.

The gleaming towers of a splendid city soared before him, rising like great slabs of shinestone above the jungle, and there were more of them than he could count, row upon row — this one an iridescent violet hue, this one a burning gold, this one scarlet rimmed with balconies of midnight blue, this one utter jet. Some were wrapped in strangling coils of vine, as the forest creature had said, but most stood clear.

Hresh resisted the urge to go plunging forward into the city itself. He stared at it a long while, drinking in its astonishing beauty.

Then, heart pounding, he hurried back toward the camp, crying out, “Vengiboneeza! I’ve found Vengiboneeza!”

He was less than halfway back to the camp when something thick and furry and incredibly strong snared him around the throat and hurled him to the ground.

Desperately Hresh struggled for air. He was choking. His eyes bulged in their sockets. Everything was a blur. He could barely make out his assailants. There were three of them, it appeared. Two were jumping up and down and the third held him prisoner with its long, ropy sensing-organ. If they were human, Hresh thought, they belonged to some very different tribe: their arms and legs were extraordinarily long, their bodies were thin and compact, their heads were small, their eyes were large and hard and gleaming, but without the light of intelligence in them. All three were covered from the crowns of their heads to their slender black toes by soft rank grayish-green fur of an unfamiliar texture.

“I — can’t breathe—” Hresh murmured. “Please—”

He heard coarse mocking laughter and a fierce babble of sounds in an unknown language, shrill and turbulent. Desperately he tugged at the whiplike sensing-organ that was choking him. He dug his fingertips in hard. Strangely, that produced no response, except perhaps a tightening of the grip. Hresh had never known of a sensing-organ so insensitive. The other seemed hardly to feel a thing.

“Please — please—” he said feebly, with what he knew to be his last breath. Everything was going black for him.

There was a sudden wild screeching sound. The pressure at his throat relented and he rolled free, doubling over, gasping and gagging. His head spun. The world reeled wildly beneath him. For a moment he was unable to see clearly: his eyes showed him nothing but spots and whirls. After a little while he felt himself recovering, and looked up.

Harruel and Konya stood above him. They had speared two of the three strangers and cast their bloody bodies aside like so much trash; the third had fled into the trees, and dangled there from its sensing-organ, screaming at them.

“Are you all right?” Harruel asked.

“I think so. Just — out — of — breath.” He sat up, kneeling, and rubbed his aching throat and filled his lungs as deeply as he could. “Another moment and it all would have been over for me.” He looked at the two crumpled-up dead things, and shuddered. “But you saved me. And see, there? The city! The city!” Hresh pointed with a trembling hand. “Vengiboneeza !”

Vengiboneeza, yes. The two warriors glanced toward the towers. The tips of them were barely visible from here. Konya grunted in surprise and dropped down and made the sign of the Protector. Harruel leaned in silence on his spear, shaking his head slowly in wonder.

Then Koshmar came running, and Torlyri, and most of the others after them. Hresh, though still wobbly and uncertain of foot, led them all through the tangles of vines and saw-edged grasses to the place where he had seen the shining towers piercing the sky. But the chattering gray-green folk were everywhere, scrambling by dozens in the trees, dangling by their sensing-organs, leaping from bough to bough, cackling, laughing, calling out defiance. They must have been watching me all the while, Hresh realized.

“What tribe is this?” Torlyri asked.

“A very stupid one, I think,” said Hresh.

“They look something like us,” Torlyri said.

“Very little like us,” snapped Koshmar.

“But they move swiftly, this strange tribe,” Hresh said.

“Not so swiftly that we can’t slaughter them if they bother us,” Koshmar said. “Gods! This is no tribe! These are no humans! All they are is animals. Vermin. And look: the city! Vengiboneeza will be ours. Spears, everyone! Torches! On to Vengiboneeza!”

Vermin they might be, and stupid vermin also, yet the strange animals proved very troublesome. They would not descend from the trees, but pelted Koshmar’s people with fruit and branches and even their own green dung, crying out incomprehensible insults all the while. Galihine was knocked down by a heavy purple fruit that struck her between the shoulders, and Haniman was struck by a huge papery gray globe that turned out to be the nest of a swarm of angry stinging insects half a finger’s length long.

But Koshmar and her warriors advanced steadily, using spears, throwing-sticks, darts, and the rest of their weapons; and gradually the other tribe retreated. Hresh, watching the battle from a safe place, was dismayed and horrified by these forest-folk. How ugly they were, how debased, how — inhuman! They had the shape of people, or something almost like it, but they acted and carried themselves like mere beasts. The torches terrified them, as if they had never seen fire before. They used their sensing-organs simply as a tail, like any trivial wild creature, as though that organ had no powers at all except that of allowing them to swing through the treetops.

All the same, Hresh thought, they look not so very different from us. That was the worst part. We are human, they are beasts; and they are not so very different from us! There but for the grace of the gods go we!

In half an hour the battle was over. The forest-chatterers were gone; the way to Vengiboneeza lay open.

“Let me go in first,” Hresh begged. “I found it. I want to be first.”

Koshmar, chuckling, nodded amiably. “You are still Hresh-full-of-questions, aren’t you? Yes. Go.”

Suddenly taken aback at having been granted with such ease the thing he had requested, Hresh nevertheless turned without hesitation, and slipped through the massive gate of three heavy green pillars that stood open at the threshold of Vengiboneeza.

To his astonishment, three figures that he recognized at once as members of the sapphire-eyes race waited just within. He had seen their like many times, when running his hands over the pages of the books of the chronicles: massive beings, standing upright on great thick-thighed legs, supported by heavy sensing-organs — or were they simply tails? They held their small forearms outstretched in a gesture that seemed plainly to be one of invitation. Their huge heavy-lidded eyes, of a blue so deep they seemed to be not eyes but seas, were radiant with wisdom and power.

Hresh reared back, startled. Twice these beings had ruled the world: once in the ancientmost times, before any humans had even existed, in a long-ago civilization that an earlier onslaught of death-stars had destroyed; and then again late in the human era, when the few survivors of that first lost sapphire-eyes empire had brought themselves back to greatness a second time. Reptiles by ancestry, of crocodilian stock, descended from creatures that had long been content to lie torpid in the mud of tropical rivers, they had managed to rise far above that level; but the return of the death-stars had shattered the sapphire-eyes’ realm once again, and this time there had been no survivors in that new terrible cold. Or so the chronicles in their misty difficult way declared, and so Thaggoran had taught.

“No,” Hresh whispered. “You can’t exist. You all died with the Great World!”

The sapphire-eyes on the left raised one of its little forearms inquiringly.

“How could we have died, little monkey, when we were never alive?” It spoke in a stiff, antiquated way, strange but understandable.

“Never alive?”

“Only machines,” said the one on the right.

“Placed here to welcome human beings at winter’s end into the city of our masters, in whose image we were made,” said the center sapphire-eyes.

“Machines,” said Hresh, absorbing it, digesting it. “Made in the image of your masters. Who died in the Long Winter. I see. I see.” He came up as close to them as he dared, craning his neck to peer into the deep mysteries of their gleaming eyes. “We can go into the city, then? You’ll show us all that it holds?”

He was trembling with awe. He had never seen anything so majestic as these three. And yet he felt an obscure sense of disappointment. All they were were clever artificials of some sort. Not really alive. He had wanted them to be true sapphire-eyes folk, miraculously sustained through the time of cold. But it was impossible. He put that hope aside.

Then he said, after a moment, “Why did you call me ‘little monkey’? Don’t you recognize a human being when you see one?”

The three sapphire-eyes made strange hissing sounds, which Hresh felt to be laughter. He heard another sound from behind him: little gasps and sighs of wonder. He glanced quickly back and saw Koshmar and Torlyri and the rest, standing with mouths agape.

“But you are a little monkey,” said the center sapphire-eyes. “And those are larger monkeys, standing behind you. And it was monkeys of a different and more foolish kind that attacked you in the forest.”

“ Theywere monkeys, perhaps. We are human beings,” said Hresh firmly.

“Ah, no,” said the left-hand sapphire-eyes, and made the little hissing sound again. “Not humans, no. The humans departed long ago, at the outset of the Long Winter.”

“Departed?”

“They are gone, yes. You are only their distant cousins, do you see? Both you and the forest-folk who chatter in the treetops.”

Hresh felt his face flaming with bewilderment and dismay.

“I believe none of this.”

“It is so. You and the forest folk—”

“I forbid you to speak of us and them in the same breath!”

“But they are your kin, little monkey.”

“No! No!”

“Oh, your kind is far superior in matters of the mind, that I will grant. But never confuse yourselves with humans, child. You are not made from human stock, but of something other, something similar, perhaps something of a different line of descent from the ancient ancestor of humans and monkeys both: a second attempt, perhaps, at achieving what the gods achieved with humans.”

Hresh stared. Confusion and wrath choked his throat. These are malicious lies, he thought. Intended to confound and discomfort him, because he had been so rash as to intrude on the age-old solitude of these three malevolent artificials.

“You are somewhat like the humans,” said the left-hand sapphire-eyes, “but not very much so. I assure you of that. They had no hair on their bodies, the humans, and they had no tails, and they—”

“This isn’t a tail!” cried Hresh, indignant. “It’s a sensing-organ!”

“A modified tail, yes,” the sapphire-eyes went on implacably. “It is quite good, it is truly remarkable, in fact. But you are not human. There no longer are humans here. What you are is monkeys, or the children of monkeys. The humans are gone from the earth.”

The incredible words were crushing. They had to be lying, they were toying with him, trying to torment and humiliate him with this hideous impossible slur. But he could not throw it off with the contempt it deserved. He felt his anger giving way to despair.

“Not — human?” Hresh said, close to tears, feeling very small and ugly. “Not — human? No. No. It isn’t possible.”

“What is this?” Koshmar burst in, at last. “Who are these creatures? Sapphire-eyes, are they? And still alive?”

“No,” said Hresh, gathering himself. “Only artificials in the form of sapphire-eyes, guardians of the gate of Vengiboneeza. But did you hear what they said, Koshmar? Crazy stuff. That we aren’t human. That we’re only monkeys, or descended from monkeys, that our sensing-organs are nothing but monkey tails, that the real humans are gone from here—”

Koshmar looked startled. “What nonsense is this?”

“They say—”

“Yes, I heard what they say.” She turned to Torlyri. “What do you make of this?”

The offering-woman, plainly uncertain, blinked, smiled a nervous smile, frowned. “These are ancient creatures. Perhaps they have knowledge which—”

“It’s absurd,” Koshmar said bluntly. She gestured at Hresh. “You! Chronicler! You’ve studied the past. Are we humans or aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. The early chronicles are very difficult. The humans are gone, these artificials say,” Hresh murmured. He was shivering in the forest warmth. His eyes felt hot and swollen: the tears were a moment away.

Koshmar seemed to puff up with fury. “And what would humans be, then, if we are not humans?”

“The artificials say that they had no tails — no sensing-organs — they were without fur—”

“That is some other kind of human,” said Koshmar with a grand dismissing swoop of her arm. “A different tribe, long vanished, if they even existed at all. How do we know they ever lived? We have nothing but the word of these — these things here, these artificials. Let them say whatever they like. We know what we are.”

Hresh was silent. He tried to summon his knowledge of the chronicles, but all that would rise to his mind was cloudy ambiguities.

“We are the children of Lord Fanigole and Lady Theel, who led us to the cocoon,” said Koshmar vehemently. “They were humans and we are humans, and so be it.”

From the sapphire-eyes’ artificials, once again, came that hissing laughter.

Koshmar rounded on them fiercely. She made an angry sweeping gesture, as though brushing cobwebs out of the air before her face. “We are humans,” she repeated, and there was something terrible and awesome in the way she said it. “Let no creature, living or artificial, deny it!”

Hresh hovered between fierce agreement and numb disbelief. He felt as though his soul were fluttering in the balance. Not human? Not human ? What did that mean? How could it be? A monkey, nothing but a monkey, a superior kind of monkey? No. No. No. He looked toward Torlyri, and the offering-woman took his hand in hers. “Koshmar is right,” Torlyri whispered. “The sapphire-eyes wish to mislead us. Koshmar speaks the truth.”

“Yes,” cried Koshmar, overhearing. “It is the truth. If ever there were humans once without fur, without sensing-organs, well, they were some misbegotten mistake, and they are gone now. But we are here. And we are human, by right of blood, by right of succession. It is the truth. By Yissou, it is the truth!” She came forward and faced the three hulking reptiles just within the gate. “What do you say, sapphire-eyes? You tell us we are not humans. But are we not the humans now? Humans of a different kind from the sort you claim to have known, perhaps, but humans of a better kind: for they are gone, if ever they lived at all, and we are here. We have endured, where they have not. We have survived to winter’s end, and now we will take back the world from the hjjk-folk, or whoever else may have seized it in the time of coldness. What do you say, sapphire-eyes? Are we not humans? May we not enter great Vengiboneeza? What do you say?”

There was a long aching silence.

“I tell it to you again,” declared Koshmar unwaveringly. “If we are not the humans you knew, we are the humans now. Admit it! Admit it! Humans by right of succession. It is our destiny to have this city. Where are they, the ones you call the real humans? Where? Where? We are here! I tell you, we are the humans now.”

There was silence again, mighty and profound. Hresh thought that he had never seen Koshmar look more majestic.

The center sapphire-eyes, which had been staring toward the remote horizon, turned now to Koshmar. It regarded her with distant interest for a long while.

“So be it,” it said finally, just as it seemed the air itself would crack and split apart under the strain. “You are the humans now.” And the creature appeared to smile.

Then the three reptilian forms bowed and moved aside.

They have yielded, Hresh thought in joy and astonishment. They have yielded!

And Koshmar the chieftain, holding her sensing-organ aloft like a scepter, led her little band of humans through the gate and toward the shining towers of Vengiboneeza.