The Queen of Springtime

2 Masks of Several Sorts

Afterward, when he is alone again, Hresh closes his eyes and lets his soul rove forth, imagining it soaring in a dream-vision beyond the bounds of the city, far across the windy northern plains, into that unknown distant realm where the hordes of insect-folk scurry about within their immense subterranean tunnels. They are a total enigma to him. They are the mystery of mysteries. He sees the Queen, or what he imagines to be the Queen, that immense remote inscrutable monarch, lying somnolent in Her heavily guarded chamber, stirring slowly while acolytes chant harsh clicking hjjk-songs of praise: the hjjk of hjjks, the great Queen. What hjjk-dreams of total world domination is She dreaming, even now? How will we ever learn, he wonders, what it is that those creatures want of us?

“Your abdication?” Minguil Komeilt cried, astonished. “Your abdication, lady? Who would dare? Let me take this paper to the captain of the guards! We’ll find the one who’s behind it and we’ll see to it that—”

“Peace, woman,” Taniane said. This fluttery outburst from her private secretary was more bothersome to her than the actual petition had been. “Do you think this is the first time I’ve had a note like this? Do you think it’ll be the last? It means nothing. Nothing. ”

“But to throw a stone at you in the streets, with a message like this attached to it—”

Taniane laughed. She glanced again at the scrap of paper in her hand. YOU STAY MUCH TOO LONG, it said, in huge crude lettering. IT’S TIME YOU STEPPED ASIDE AND LET RIGHTFUL FOLK RULE.

The words were Beng, the handwriting was Beng. The stone had come out of nowhere to land at her feet, as she was walking up Koshmar Way from the Chapel of the Interceder to her chambers in the House of Government, as she did almost every morning after she had prayed. It was the third such anonymous note she had received — no, the fourth, she thought — in the last six months. After nearly forty years of chieftainship.

“You want me to take no action at all?” Minguil Komeilt asked.

“I want you to file this wherever you file outbursts of this sort. And then forget about it. Do you understand me? Forget about it. It means nothing whatsoever.”

“But — lady—”

“Nothing whatsoever,” said Taniane again.

She entered her chambers. The masks of her predecessors stared down at her from its dark stippled walls.

They were fierce, vivid, strange, barbaric. They were emblems out of a former age. To Taniane they were reminders of how much had changed in the single life-span since the People had come forth from the cocoon.

“Time I stepped aside,” she said to them, under her breath. “So I’ve been told.” Rocks thrown at me in the street. Bengs who don’t care for the Act of Union. After all this time. Restless fools, that’s all they are. They still want one of their own to govern. As if they knew a better system. I should give them what they want, and see how they like it then.

There behind her desk was the Mask of Lirridon, which Koshmar had worn on that long-ago day when the tribe had made its Going Forth into the newly thawed world. It was a frightening thing, harsh and angular and repellent. Surely it was patterned after some old tribal memory of the hjjk-folk, some ancestral nightmare, for it was yellow and black in color, and outfitted with a terrible jutting sharp-edged beak.

Flanking it was Sismoil’s mask, bland, enigmatic, with a flat unreadable face and tiny eye-slits. Thekmur’s mask, very simple, hung beside it. Farther down the wall was the Mask of Nialli, a truly horrifying one, black and green with a dozen long spikes, red as blood, standing away from its sides at sharp angles. Koshmar had worn the Nialli mask on the day the invading force of Helmet People — Bengs — first had arrived and confronted the People in Vengiboneeza.

And there were Koshmar’s own masks: the shining gray one with red eye-slits that she had worn in her lifetime, and the finer one carved in her honor by the craftsman Striinin after her death, with powerful features marked in burnished black wood. Taniane had worn that mask herself, on the day of departure from Vengiboneeza, when the People were setting out on their second migration, the one that would bring them eventually to the place where they would build the City of Dawinno.

Glimmers of a vanished past, the masks were. Spark-trails, leading backward through the muffled swaddlings of time to forgotten days of what now seemed a claustrophobic enclosure.

“Should I go?” Taniane asked, looking at the Koshmar masks. “Are they right? Have I ruled long enough? Is it time to step aside?”

Koshmar had been the last of the old chieftains — the last to rule over a tribe so small that the chieftain knew everyone by name, and adjudicated disputes as though they were mere bickerings between friends.

How much simpler an age that had been! How guileless, how naive!

“Perhaps I should,” Taniane said. “Eh? Eh? What do you say? Do the gods require me to spend every remaining minute of my life doing this? Or is it out of pride that I hang on year after year? Or because I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself?”

From Koshmar’s masks no answers came.

The People had been just a little band, in Koshmar’s time, a mere tribe. But now the People were civilized; now they were city-dwellers; now they numbered in the thousands instead of in the handfuls, and they had been compelled to invent one new concept after another, a dizzying profusion of things, in order to be able to function at all in this new and expanded order. They had come to use the thing known as exchange-units instead of simply sharing alike, and they fretted over profits, possessions, the size of their living quarters, the number of workers they employed, tactics of competition in the marketplace, and other such strangenesses. They had begun to divide into classes: rulers, owners, workers, poor. Nor were the old tribal lines completely erased. They were fading, yes. But Koshmars and Bengs had not yet entirely forgotten that they had been Koshmars and Bengs; and then there were all the others, the Hombelions and Debethins and Stadrains and Mortirils and the rest, the proud little tribes gradually disappearing into the bigger ones but still struggling to retain some shred of their old identities.

Each of these things brought new problems, and all of them fell ultimately to the chieftain to solve. And everything had happened so rapidly. The city, powered by Hresh’s unceasing inventiveness and his researches into the archives of antiquity, had sprung up like a mushroom in a single generation, in unabashed and hopeful imitation of the Great World cities of the past.

Taniane looked at the masks.

“You never had to worry about census figures and tax rolls, did you? Or minutes of the Presidium, or statistics on the number of exchange-units in current circulation.” She riffled through the mound of papers on her desk: petitions of merchants seeking licenses to import goods from the City of Yissou, studies of sanitation problems in outlying neighborhoods, a report on the poor condition of the Thaggoran Bridge on the south side of town. On and on and on. And, right on top, Hresh’s little memorandum: A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks.

“If only you were down here,” Taniane said fervently to the masks, “and I were up there on the wall!”

She had never had a mask of her own. At first she was content to wear Koshmar’s, on those occasions when wearing a mask was appropriate. And then, after the Bengs had come to Dawinno to merge with the People under the Act of Union, the political compromise that provided for a chieftain of Koshmar blood but a Beng majority on the Presidium, and the city had entered the most spectacular phase of its growth, mask-wearing had begun to seem antiquated to her, a mere foolish custom of the earlier days. It was years now since she had worn one.

Even so, she kept them around her in her office. Partly as decorations, partly as reminders of that darker and more primitive time when ice had covered the land and the People were nothing more than a little band of naked furry creatures huddling in a sealed chamber cut into the side of a mountain. The harsh shapes and bright, slashing colors of those masks were her only link to that other era now.

Seating herself behind the curving block of black onyx, rising on a pedestal of polished pink granite that was her desk, Taniane scooped up a handful of the papers that Minguil Komeilt had left there for her and shuffled somberly through them again and again. Words swam before her eyes. Census … taxes … Thaggoran Bridge … hjjk treaty … hjjk treaty … hjjk treaty…

She glanced up at Lirridon’s mask, the hjjk-faced one with the great hideous beak.

“Would you sign a treaty with them?” she asked. “Would you deal with them at all?”

The hjjks! How she despised and dreaded them! From childhood on you were taught to loathe them. They were hideous; they were gigantic frightful nightmare bugs, cold and evil; they were capable of committing any sort of monstrous thing.

There were rumors of them all the time, roving bands of them said to lurk in the open country everywhere to the east and north. In truth there turned out to be no substance behind most of those tales. But all the same they had stolen her only child from her, just outside the city walls; and the fact that Nialli Apuilana had returned after a few months had done nothing to ease Taniane’s hatred for them, for the Nialli Apuilana who had returned was something mysteriously different from the girl they had taken. The hjjks were the menace. They were the enemy against whom the People would one day have to contend for supremacy in the world.

And this treaty — these purported messages of love from their ghastly Queen—

Taniane pushed Hresh’s report aside.

I’ve been chieftain so long, she thought. Ever since I was a girl. My whole life, so it seems — nearly forty years—

She had taken the chieftainship when the tribe was tiny, and she just a short time beyond her girlhood. Koshmar was dying, and Taniane the most vigorous and far-seeing of the younger women. They had all acclaimed her. She hadn’t hesitated. She knew she was made for the chieftainship, and the chieftainship for her. But she had had no way of seeing as far as this, these reports and studies and petitions for import licenses. And ambassadors from the hjjks. No one could have foreseen that. Perhaps not even Hresh.

She picked up another paper, the one on the cracks in the roadbed of the Thaggoran Bridge. That seemed more urgent just now. You are evading the real issue, she told herself. And other words floated before her eyes.

“Your abdication, lady? Your abdication ?”

“It’s nothing — nothing whatsoever—”

A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks

“Your abdication, lady?”

“Would you sign a treaty with them?”

“Mother? Mother, are you all right?”

“Your abdication ?”

“Can you hear me, mother?”

“Mother? Mother?”

Taniane looked up. There was a figure at the door of her chambers. That door was always open to any of the citizens of Dawinno, though few of them dared to come to it. Taniane struggled to focus her eyes. She had been in some sort of haze, she realized. Minguil Komeilt? No, no, Minguil Komeilt was a soft, round, timid little woman, and this one was tall and athletic, strong and restless.

“Nialli?” she said, after a moment.

“You sent for me.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course. Come in, girl!”

But she hovered in the doorway. She wore a green mantle casually over one shoulder and the orange sash of the highborn at her waist. “You look so strange,” she said, staring. “I’ve never seen you look this way. Mother, what’s the matter? You aren’t ill, are you?”

“No. And nothing is the matter.”

“They told me a rock was thrown at you in the street this morning.”

“You know about it?”

“Everyone knows. A hundred people saw it, and everyone’s talking about it. It makes me so furious, mother! That anyone should dare — should dare—”

“So big a city is bound to have a great many fools,” Taniane said.

“But to throw a rock, mother — to try to injure you—”

“You have it wrong,” Taniane said. “The rock fell well in front of me. It wasn’t meant to hit me at all. It was simply carrying a message. Some Beng agitator thinks I ought to abdicate. I’ve stayed much too long, is what he said. It’s time I stepped aside. In favor of a Beng chieftain, I suppose.”

“Would anyone really presume to suggest such a thing?”

“People presume to suggest anything and everything, Nialli. What happened this morning is meaningless. Some crank, nothing more. Some agitator. I can tell the difference between an isolated crank letter and the outbreak of a revolution.” She shook her head. “Enough of this. There are other things to discuss.”

“You dismiss it so lightly, mother.”

“Shall I let myself take it seriously? I’d be a fool if I did.”

“No,” Nialli Apuilana said, and there was heat in her tone. “I don’t agree at all. Who knows how far this will spread, if it’s not stopped right away? You should find the person who threw that rock and have him nailed to the city wall.”

They stared tensely at each other. A pounding began behind Taniane’s eyes, and she felt a tightness in her stomach. Congealing juices roiled there. With anyone else, she thought, this would merely be a discussion; with Nialli it was a battle. They were always at war. Why is that? she wondered. Hresh had said something about their being so similar, that like repels like. He had been doing something with little metal bars then, studying how one of them would attract the other at one end, but nothing would happen at the other. You and Nialli are too much like each other, Hresh had said. And that is why you will never be able to exert any real force over her. Your magnetism won’t work on her.

Perhaps so, although Taniane suspected that something else was at work too, some transformation which she had undergone while she was among the hjjks, that made her so difficult. But there was no denying her daughter’s likeness to her. The two of them were cast in the same image. It was an eerie and sometimes troubling thing. Looking at Nialli was like looking at a mirror that reflected through time. They could almost have been twins, mysteriously born some three and a half decades apart. Nialli was her one child, the child of her middle years, conceived almost miraculously after she and Hresh had long since given up hope of bringing any into the world; and there seemed to be no imprint of Hresh anywhere upon the girl, except, perhaps, her stubborn, independent mind. In all other ways she was Taniane reborn. Those elegant legs, those strong shoulders and high breasts, that splendid silken red-brown fur — yes, Taniane thought. She looked regal. She carried herself like a chieftain. There was a glory about her. Not always a comforting thing, that. Sometimes, when she saw Nialli, Taniane was all too painfully reminded of her own aging body. She felt herself already drifting downward into the earth, beckoned by the powers of decay, too soon dragged under by the mass of corroding flesh and softening bones. She heard the flutter of moth-wings, she saw trails of gray dust along stone floors. There were days when there was death in the air.

After a long silence Taniane said, “Must we quarrel, Nialli? If I thought there was something to worry about here, I’d take action. But if someone really wanted to overthrow me, it wouldn’t be done with rocks tossed in the street. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” said Nialli Apuilana. It was barely more than a whisper. “I understand.”

“Good.” Taniane closed her eyes a moment. She struggled to cast off fatigue and strain. “Now: if we can get down to the matter I called you here to discuss. Which is this supposed ambassador who has come to us from the hjjks, and the supposed treaty that he supposedly invites us to sign.”

“Why all these supposeds, mother?”

“Because everything that we really know about this comes by way of Hresh and the Barak Dayir. The boy himself hasn’t said anything coherent at all, has he?”

“Not yet, no.”

“You think he will?”

“As our language comes back to him, he may. He’s been in the Nest for thirteen years, mother.”

“What about your talking to him in his language?”

Nialli Apuilana seemed uneasy. “I’m not able to do that.”

“You can’t speak any hjjk?”

“Only a handful of words, mother. It was years ago — I was with them just a few months—”

“You’re the one who brings him his food, aren’t you?”

Nialli Apuilana nodded.

“What if you used those occasions to refresh your memories of the hjjk language? Or to teach him a little of ours.”

“I suppose I could,” Nialli Apuilana said grudgingly.

The obvious reluctance in her tone was maddening. Taniane felt her resistance. The girl is innately contrary, she thought. She said, perhaps a little too sharply, “You’re the only person in this city who can serve as an interpreter for us. Your help is essential, Nialli. The Presidium will meet soon to take up this entire treaty thing. I can’t rely on Wonderstone trances alone. The Wonderstone is all well and good; but we need to hear actual words from the boy. You’ll have to find some way of communicating verbally with him and learn from him what this is all about. And then give me a full report. I want to know everything that he says to you.”

Something was wrong. Nialli Apuilana’s jaw was set. There was a cold, hard look in the girl’s eyes. She stared without speaking, and the silence stretched across too many ticking moments.

“Is there some problem here?” Taniane asked.

Nialli Apuilana glared sullenly. “I don’t like acting as a spy, mother.”

A spy? Taniane thought. That was unexpected. It hadn’t occurred to her that serving as an interpreter on behalf of one’s own people could be construed as spying.

Is it because of the hjjks? she wondered.

Yes. Yes. It is because the hjjks are involved in this. And she sat stunned, appalled. For the first time she understood that her daughter might feel an actual conflict of loyalty.

Since Nialli Apuilana’s return from captivity she had never said a word to anyone about her experiences among the hjjks: nothing of what they had done to her, nothing of what they had said, not a scrap of information about what life in the Nest was like. She had steadfastly deflected all inquiries, meeting every query with an odd mix of distress and steely ferocity, until the inquiries had ceased altogether. Up till this moment Taniane had assumed that the girl had simply been shielding her privacy, protecting herself against the awakening of painful memories. But if she saw a request to report on her conversations with Kundalimon in terms of spying, then it might well be that it was the privacy of the hjjks, not her own, that she felt a powerful desire to protect. That was worth some further investigation.

Just now, though, such ambiguities of attitude were a luxury the city was unable to afford. An actual hjjk ambassador, tongue-tied and uncommunicative though he might be, was here. Guessing at his message, or relying on Hresh’s Wonderstone-assisted ability to read his mind, was insufficient. He had to be made to state his errand in words. Nialli would simply have to yield. Her assistance in this thing was too important.

Brusquely Taniane said, “What kind of foolishness is this? There’s no spying involved here. We’re talking about service to your city. A stranger comes, bearing news that the Queen wants to negotiate with us. But he can’t speak our language and nobody here can speak his, except for one young woman who happens to be the chieftain’s daughter, but who also seems to think that there’s something unethical about helping us to find out what an ambassador from another race is trying to say.”

“You’re turning everything your own way, mother. I simply don’t want to feel that if I do manage to open some sort of communication with Kundalimon, I’m obliged to report whatever he says to me to you.”

Taniane felt the beginnings of despair. Once she had thought Nialli Apuilana would succeed her one day as chieftain; but plainly that could never be. The girl was impossible. She was baffling: volatile, headstrong, unstable. It was clear now that the long line of the chieftainship, which could be traced back into the remote days of cocoon life, was destined to be broken. It was the hjjks that did this to her, Taniane thought. One more reason to despise them. But all the same Nialli Apuilana could not be allowed to win this battle.

Summoning all the force that was within her, she said, “You have to do it. It’s vital to our security that we understand what this is all about.”

“Have to?”

“I want you to. You have to, yes.”

There was silence. Inner rebellion knotted Nialli Apuilana’s forehead. Taniane stared at her coldly, pitilessly, matching the hardness of her daughter’s glare with an even fiercer look, one meant to overpower. To enhance it she allowed her second sight to arise, and Nialli Apuilana looked at her in amazement. Taniane maintained the pressure.

Nialli Apuilana, though, continued to resist.

Then at last she gave ground: or appeared to. Coolly, almost contemptuously, she said, “Well, then. As you wish. I’ll do what I can.”

Nialli Apuilana’s face, so wondrously a reflection of Taniane’s own refracted through decades of time, was expressionless, unreadable, a mask void of all feeling. Taniane felt the temptation to reach out at the most intimate level of second sight, to reach with forbidden force and penetrate that sullen mask for once. Was it anger that Nialli Apuilana was hiding, or mere resentment, or something else, some wild rebellious flare?

“Are we finished?” Nialli Apuilana asked. “Do I have permission to leave now?”

Taniane gave her a bleak look. This had all gone so very badly. She had won this little battle, perhaps. But she sensed that she had lost a war.

She had hoped to reach out to Nialli in love and friendship. Instead she had snapped and snarled, and had made use of the blunt strength of her position, and had coldly issued orders, as though Nialli were nothing more than some minor functionary of her staff. She wished she could rise, walk around the desk to her, take her in her arms. But that was beyond her, somehow. Often it seemed to her that a wall higher than King Salaman’s stood between her and her daughter.

“Yes,” she said. “You can go.”

Nialli Apuilana went briskly toward the door. When she reached the hallway, though, she turned and looked back.

“Don’t worry,” she said, and, to Taniane’s surprise, there seemed to be a conciliatory tone in her voice. It sounded almost gentle. “I’ll do things the right way. I’ll find out everything you need to know, and tell you. And I’ll tell it to the Presidium too.”

Then she was gone.

Taniane swung around and looked at the masks behind her on the wall. They seemed to be laughing at her. Their faces were implacable.

“What do you know?” she muttered. “None of you ever had mates, or children, did you? Did you?”

“Lady?” a voice called from outside. It was Minguil Komeilt. “Lady, may I come in?”

“What is it?”

“A delegation, lady. From the Guild of Tanners and Dyers of the Northern District, concerning repairs to their main water conduit, which they say has become blocked by sewage that is being illegally released by members of the Guild of Weavers and Wool-Carders, and is causing—”

Taniane groaned.

“Oh, send them to Boldirinthe,” she said, half to herself. “This is something the offering woman can handle as well as the chieftain can.”

“Lady?”

“Boldirinthe can pray for them. She can ask the gods to unplug the water line. Or bring down vengeance on the Guild of Weavers and—”

“Lady?” Minguil Komeilt said again, with alarm in her voice. “Do I understand you rightly, lady? This is a joke, is it not? This is only a joke?”

“Only a joke, yes,” said Taniane. “You mustn’t take me seriously.” She pressed her fingers against her eyes, and drew three quick deep breaths. “All right. Send in the delegation from the Guild of Tanners and Dyers—”

A veil of hazy heat shrouded the sky as Nialli Apuilana stepped into the street outside the House of Government. She hailed a passing xlendi-wagon.

“The House of Nakhaba,” she told the driver. “I’ll be there just five minutes or so. Then I’ll want you to take me somewhere else.”

That would be Mueri House, where the hjjk emissary had been lodged: a hostelry used mostly by strangers to the city, where he could be kept under close watch. Now it was time to bring him his midday meal. She went to Kundalimon twice a day, at noon and twilight. He had a small one-windowed room — it was more like a cell — on the third floor, facing backward into a blind plaza.

Her confrontation with her mother had left her drained and numb. Love warred with fear in her whenever she had to deal with Taniane. There was never any telling, with Taniane, when her powerful sense of the needs of the city was going to override all other considerations, all thought of the messy little private needs and problems of private individuals, whether they happened to be her daughter or some absolute stranger. For her the city always came first. No doubt you got that way, Nialli Apuilana supposed, when you held the chieftainship for forty years: time made you hard, narrow, singleminded. Maybe the Beng who had hurled the rock was right: maybe it was time for Taniane to step aside.

Nialli Apuilana wondered whether she really was going to spy for Taniane, as she had so abruptly found herself agreeing to do.

It had been a mistake, perhaps, to put the whole thing in terms of spying. She was, after all, a citizen of Dawinno and the daughter of the chieftain and the chronicler. And she did, after all, have at least a little knowledge of the hjjk language, which was more than anyone else here could claim. Why not serve as interpreter, and do it gladly, with pride in being of service? It didn’t mean that she’d have to repeat every single word of her conversations with Kundalimon to Taniane and the Presidium, or to open up her whole experience of the hjjks to their probing. She could pick and choose: she could easily enough limit what she reported to them to the basic matters of the negotiation. But it had been so frightening, the thought that they might grill her on everything she knew about the Nest and its ruler. That horrified her, that they would break through the shield of privacy which she had held in place around herself for nearly four years. She meant to cast off that shield herself, when and if she felt it was the proper time. The idea that they might in some way strip her of it before she was ready filled her with terror, though. An overreaction, perhaps. Perhaps.

She stopped off at the House of Nakhaba only long enough to pick up the food for Kundalimon’s midday meal. Today she had a stewed loin of vimbor for him. Hjjk-food, mostly, was what she brought him: seeds and nuts and baked meats, nothing moist with sauces, nothing at all rich — but also she tempted him carefully now and then with the heartier fare of the People, a morsel or two at a time. Food could be a language too. The meals they took together were one means they had of learning to communicate with each other.

There was one time — it was the third or fourth time she had brought him his meal — when he spent a long time thoughtfully chewing a mouthful of nuts and fruits without swallowing, and finally spat out a quantity into his hand. This he held out to her. Nialli Apuilana’s first response was surprise and disgust. But he continued to press the handful of moist pulp upon her, pointing and nodding.

“What is it?” she asked, bewildered. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“No — food — you — Nialli Apuilana—”

She stared, still not comprehending.

“Take — take—”

Then it came back to her. In the Nest the hjjks shared partly digested food all the time. A mark of solidarity, of Nest-bond; and something more than that, perhaps, having to do with the way the hjjks’ bodies processed their food, that she could not understand. She remembered now the sight of her nestmates pressing chewed food on one another. It was a common thing among them, this sharing of food.

Hesitantly she had taken what Kundalimon offered. He smiled and nodded. She forced herself to nibble at it, though all her instincts recoiled. “Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes!”

She got it down somehow, straggling against nausea. He seemed pleased.

By pantomime he had indicated then that she should take some of the People-food she had brought and do the same with it for him. She picked up a haunch of roast gilandrin and bit into it, and when she had chewed it for a time she pulled the whole wad of it from her mouth, taking care to conceal her queasiness, and gave it to him.

He tasted it cautiously. He looked uncertain about the meat itself; but obviously he was gladdened by her having had it in her mouth first. She could feel a flood of warmth and gratitude coming from him. It was almost like feeling Nest-bond once again.

“More,” he said.

And so, gradually, because she was willing to adopt the hjjk custom with him, he was able to expand his range of foods. Once it became apparent to him that the things Nialli Apuilana brought him were doing him no harm, he ate them with gusto. There was new flesh on his bones, and his dark fur was thickening and had acquired a little sheen. Those strange green eyes of his no longer seemed so hard and icy.

Communication, of a sort.

He was shy and remote, but he seemed to welcome her visits. Had he figured out yet that she too had been in the Nest? Sometimes it seemed that way; but she wasn’t yet sure. Verbal contact between them was still very uncertain. He had picked up a dozen or so words of the language of the city, and she was starting to reconstruct her knowledge of hjjk. But vocabulary was one thing and comprehension was another.

Learn his language, or teach him to speak ours.Those were Taniane’s orders, and no maybes about them. Do it quickly, too. And tell us what you find out.

The first part, at least, was exactly what Nialli Apuilana intended to achieve. And when she and Kundalimon were able to communicate easily with each other, and had come to know each other better, and he had begun to trust her, perhaps he would talk with her of Nest-matters: of Queen-love, of Thinker-thoughts, of Egg-plan, and all the other things of that nature that lay at the heart of her soul. Taniane didn’t need to be told anything about that. The rest, this proposed treaty, the diplomatic negotiations: oh, yes, I’ll let her know whatever I might learn about all that, Nialli Apuilana thought. But nothing about the deeper things. Nothing about the things that really matter.

The xlendi-wagon was waiting. She got in.

“Mueri House, now,” she told the driver.

In Prince Thu-Kimnibol’s grand villa in the southwestern quadrant of the city the healers had gathered once again by the bedside of the lady Naarinta. This was the fifth night running that they had come. She had been ill for many months, slipping gradually downward from weakness to weakness. But now she was passing into the critical phase.

Tonight Thu-Kimnibol was keeping watch in the narrow antechamber just outside the sickroom. The healers had refused to let him get any closer. This night only women might enter Naarinta’s room. The smell of medicines and aromatic herbs was in the air. The smell of impending death was in it, too.

His sensing-organ trembled with the awareness of the great loss that was rushing toward him.

In the sickroom the offering-woman Boldirinthe sat beside Naarinta. Whenever spells and potions were needed and the aid of the Five Heavenly Ones had to be invoked, fat old Boldirinthe heaved her vast body into a wagon and obligingly came to be of service. Old Fashinatanda, godmother to the chieftain — there was another one, blind and feeble though she was, who rarely missed an opportunity to minister to the gravely ill. Some Beng herb-doctor was there, too, a little shriveled woman wearing a dark feather-trimmed helmet flecked with rust, and two or three others whom Thu-Kimnibol could not recognize. They were murmuring to one another, chanting in low lilting voices.

Thu-Kimnibol turned away. He couldn’t bear to listen. It sounded like a chant for the dead.

Outside, in the hallway, bundles of purple flowers with dark red stalks were stacked like temple offerings. The richness of their perfume made Thu-Kimnibol sputter and cough. He walked quickly past, into the huge high-vaulted room that was his audience-chamber. A little group of men waited there in the dimness: Maliton Diveri, Staip, Si-Belimnion, Kartafirain, Chomrik Hamadel. Gaming partners, hunting companions, friends of many years. They clustered round him, smiling, joking, passing a huge flagon of wine back and forth. This was no time for long faces.

“To happier times,” Si-Belimnion said, swirling the wine in his mug. “Happier times past, happier times to come.”

“Happier times,” Chomrik Hamadel echoed. He was of Beng royal blood, a short blunt-featured man with a piercing scarlet gaze. He drank deep, throwing back his head so vehemently that he came close to sending his helmet flying.

Maliton Diveri and Kartafirain joined the toast, grinning, noisily clinking mugs: two robustly built men, one short, the other tall. Only Staip was quiet. He was older than the others, which accounted in part for his restraint; but also he was Boldirinthe’s mate, and no doubt Boldirinthe had told him how little hope there was for Naarinta’s life. Staip had never been one for dissembling: a warrior’s simplicity, that was his style.

Thu-Kimnibol said, picking up a mug and offering it to Maliton Diveri to be filled, “Happier times, yes. Joy and prosperity to us all, and a swift recovery for my lady.”

“Joy and prosperity! A swift recovery!”

It was fifteen years since Thu-Kimnibol had begun to share his life with Naarinta. He had met her not long after he had come from the north to settle in the city that his half-brother Hresh had built; and they had been inseparable ever since. She was of the Debethin tribe, the chieftain’s daughter — not a great distinction, perhaps, there having been only fourteen Debethins still alive when the last survivors of that tribe’s unhappy wanderings had come marching out of the east to ask for citizenship in Dawinno, but a chieftain was a chieftain nonetheless. She was tall and graceful, with an air of quiet strength about her. They were splendid together: majestic, even, the towering Thu-Kimnibol and his stately lady. The gods had given them no children, which was his greatest regret; but he had been content with Naarinta alone, the partner of his labors, the companion of his days. And then this wasting disease had come upon her, this terrible incomprehensible decree of the Heavenly Ones, against which there seemed to be no appeal.

Chomrik Hamadel said, “Is there news, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“She’s very weak. What can I say?”

“News of the envoy from the hjjks, I mean,” said Chomrik Hamadel hastily. “They keep him locked up in Mueri House, I hear, and Taniane’s daughter runs to him every day. But what’s happening? What is this all about, this visitation from the bug-folk?”

“They want a peace treaty, so I understand it,” Kartafirain said, and laughed. He was a tall silver-furred man of Koshmar ancestry, nearly shoulder-high to Thu-Kimnibol himself, jovial and belligerent by nature. The warrior Thhrouk had been his father. “Peace! Who are they to talk of peace? They don’t know what the word means.”

“Perhaps Hresh misunderstood,” Si-Belimnion said, and rubbed the rolls of fat beneath his thick blue-gray fur. He was a wealthy man, and well fed. “Perhaps it’s a declaration of war that the boy carries, and not a message of peace. Hresh is getting old, I think.”

“So are we all,” said Chomrik Hamadel. “But do you think Hresh no longer knows the difference between peace and war? He used the Wonderstone to look into the boy’s mind, Curabayn Bangkea tells me. You have to trust what the Wonderstone says.”

“A treaty of peace,” Maliton Diveri said, and shook his head in wonderment. “With the hjjks! What will we do? Fall down on our faces and thank the gods for such mercies, I suppose!”

“Of course,” said Thu-Kimnibol gruffly. “And then scurry up and put our signatures on the treaty. I’ll be the first, if they’ll permit me. We have to show our deep gratitude. The kindness of the bug-folk! They’ll condescend to let us keep our city, I hear. And maybe even a little of the farmland outside it.”

“Are those the terms?” Si-Belimnion asked. “What I had heard was much more favorable to us: the hjjks will stay back of Vengiboneeza, is what I heard, provided we don’t attempt to expand beyond—”

“Whatever it is,” said Kartafirain flatly, “we’ll be the losers. You can bet your ears on that, and your sensing-organ too. When the Presidium meets, we’ve got to argue for rejection of this thing.”

“And when will that be?” asked Chomrik Hamadel.

“A week, ten days, maybe sooner. While Taniane’s daughter is tending this Kundalimon, she’s supposed to question him about the details of the treaty in his own language. She can speak it, you know. She picked it up while she was living with the bugs herself. She’ll tell Taniane what she finds out and then it all goes to the Presidium for general discussion, after which—”

Just then Staip, who had not said a word all the time, went suddenly from the room, holding his sensing-organ high. It was as though the old warrior had been called by some summons that no one else could hear. A strained silence fell.

Kartafirain ponderously got the conversation going again after a moment. “I don’t see the sense of involving Nialli Apuilana in this at all.” He looked toward Thu-Kimnibol. “What help can she possibly be?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she’s so strange. Friend, you know better than any of us what sort of creature she is. Do you think she’s likely to find out anything worthwhile? Or tell us if she does? Has that girl ever been willing to cooperate with anyone? Has she revealed so much as one syllable of whatever took place between her and the hjjks while she was their prisoner?”

Thu-Kimnibol said, “Be a little more charitable. She’s intelligent and serious. And she’s not a girl any more. She’s capable of changing. Perhaps the arrival of the envoy will help her start to develop a bit of a sense of responsibility to her city, or at least to her own family. If anyone can get any information out of this stranger from the north, she’s the one. And—”

He halted abruptly. Staip had come back into the room. He held himself stiffly and his expression was grim.

To Thu-Kimnibol he said quietly, “Boldirinthe wants a word with you.”

The offering-woman had left the sickroom and was sitting in the antechamber. Boldirinthe’s huge fleshy form overflowed a wickerwork chair that seemed hard pressed to sustain her. She gestured as if to rise, but it was only a gesture, and she subsided the instant Thu-Kimnibol signaled her to remain where she was. She seemed subdued of mood, uncharacteristically so, for she was one who bubbled with life and jollity at even the darkest of times.

“Is this the end, then?” Thu-Kimnibol asked bluntly.

“It will be very soon. The gods are calling her.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“Everything has been done. You know that. Against the will of the Five we are helpless.”

“Yes. So we are.” Thu-Kimnibol took the offering-woman’s hand in his. Now that the news had come he was calm. He felt an obscure desire to console Boldirinthe for having failed in her lifesaving task, even as she was seeking to give consolation to him. For a moment they both were silent. Then he asked, “How much longer?”

“You should make your farewells to her now,” said Boldirinthe. “There’ll be no chance later.”

He nodded and went past her, into the room where Naarinta lay. She seemed tranquil, and very beautiful, strangely so, as though the long struggle had burned all fleshly impurities from her. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing very faintly, but she was still conscious. Old blind Fashinatanda sat beside her, chanting. As Thu-Kimnibol entered she broke off her chant and, without a word, rose and left the room.

For a little while he talked quietly with Naarinta, though her words were cloudy and disconnected and he couldn’t be sure that she understood anything he said. Then they fell silent. She seemed to have traveled more than half the distance into the next world. After a time Thu-Kimnibol saw that the unearthly beauty was beginning to go from her as the final moments approached. Softly he spoke to her again, telling her what she had meant to him; and he took her hand, and held it until everything was over. He kissed her cheek. The fur of it already seemed strangely changed, less soft than it had been. One sob, only one, broke from him. He was surprised his reaction was no more vehement. But the pain was real and strong all the same.

He left then and returned to the audience-chamber, where his friends stood in a little knotted group, no one speaking. He loomed over them like a wall, feeling suddenly cut off from them, set apart by the loss that he had suffered and the new solitude that was descending on him, falling so unexpectedly into a life that until this time had been marked only by happiness and accomplishment and the favor of the gods. He felt hollow, and knew that this strange calmness that possessed him now was that of exhaustion. A powerful sense came over him then that the life that had been his until today had ended with Naarinta, that he must now undergo transformation and rebirth. But into what? What?

He put such thoughts aside for now. Time enough later to let the new life begin to enter the drained vessel that was his soul.

“She’s gone,” he said simply. “Kartafirain, pour me more wine. And then let us sit for a while, and talk of politics, or hunting, or the benevolence of the hjjks. But first the wine, Kartafirain. If you please.”

At the service Hresh spoke first, words he had spoken often enough before, the words of the Consolation of Dawinno: that death and life are two halves of one thing, for everything that lives arises out of all that once had lived but lives no longer, and in time must yield up its life so that new life may come forth. Boldirinthe then spoke the words of the service for the dead; Taniane spoke also, just a quiet sentence or two, and then Thu-Kimnibol, holding the body of Naarinta in his arms as though it were a doll, laid her cloth-wrapped form at the edge of the pyre. The flames engulfed her and in that fierce brightness she was lost to sight.

Time now for the mourners to return to the city from the Place of the Dead. Taniane and Hresh rode together in the chieftain’s ornate wagon. “I’ve decreed seven days of public mourning,” she told him. “That gives us a little time to think about this scheme of the hjjks, before we have to take it to the Presidium.”

“The hjjks, yes,” said Hresh softly. “The Presidium.”

His spirit was still with Thu-Kimnibol and Naarinta. Taniane’s words seemed to him at first like mere empty sounds, tinny and meaningless. They seemed to be coming to him across a vast distance. Presidium? Hjjks? Yes. This scheme of the hjjks, she had said. What was that? The hjjks, the hjjks, the hjjks. He felt strangeness whispering at his mind, as it so often did when the thought of the hjjks came into it. The rustling of bristly claws. The clicking of great beaks.

She said, breaking in on him sharply, “Where have you gone, Hresh?”

“What?”

“You seem to be on the far side of the moon, all of a sudden.”

“Ah. You were saying—” He looked at her vaguely.

“I was speaking of the hjjks. Of the offer of a treaty. I need to know what you make of it, Hresh. Can we possibly abide by it? To let the hjjks isolate us in our own little province? To cut ourselves off from everything else in the world?”

“That is unthinkable, yes,” he said.

“So it is. But you seem to take it very calmly. It hardly seems to matter to you at all.”

“Must we talk about these things now? It’s a sad day, Taniane. I’ve just seen my brother’s beloved mate lowered into the fire.”

She seemed to stiffen. “By the Five, Hresh, we’ll see everyone we know lowered into that fire. And then someday our turns will come, and it won’t be as pretty as it is in that little sermon you always preach! But the dead are dead, and we’re still here, with plenty of trouble to cope with. This request for a peace treaty, Hresh: there’s nothing innocent or friendly about it. It has to be a maneuver in some larger game that we aren’t able at this time to comprehend. For us to sign it—”

“Please, Taniane.”

She ignored him. “ — would indeed be unthinkable, just as you say. Hresh, they want to take three-quarters of the world away from us under the guise of a treaty of friendship, and you won’t even raise your voice?”

He said, after a while, “You know I won’t ever give my support to a surrender to the hjjks. But before I take a public position there’s more I need to learn. The hjjks are complete mysteries to me. To everyone. Our ignorance affects our dealings with them. What are they, really? Nothing more than oversized ants? A vast swarm of soulless bugs? If that’s all that they are, how could they have been part of the Great World? There may be much more to them than we think. I want to know.”

“You always want to know! But how will you find out? You’ve spent your whole life studying everything that there ever was in this world and the worlds that went before it, and the best you can say after all that is that the hjjks are total mysteries to you!”

“Perhaps Nialli—”

“Nialli, yes. I’ve ordered her to speak with the envoy and bring me whatever she can discover. But will she? Will she, do you think? Who can say? She wears a mask, that girl. That girl is more mysterious than the hjjks themselves!”

“Nialli’s difficult, yes. But I think she’ll be of great help to us in this.”

“Perhaps so,” said Taniane. But there wasn’t much conviction in her voice.

The center of the city: the familiar confines of the House of Knowledge. A good place of refuge on a difficult day. Hresh found his assistants Chupitain Stuld and Plor Killivash there, huddling over some bits of rubble in one of the ground-floor offices. They seemed surprised to see him. “Will you be working today?” Plor Killivash asked. “We thought—”

“No, not working,” he said. “I simply want to be here. I’ll be upstairs. I won’t want to be disturbed.”

The House of Knowledge was a white slender spear of a tower, hardly a stone’s throw wide but many stories high — the tallest building in the city, in fact. Its narrow circular galleries, in which Hresh had stored the fruits of a lifetime of inquiry, coiled around and around, narrowing as they rose, like a great serpent coiled within the tower’s walls. At the summit of the whole structure was a parapet completely encircling the tip of the building to form a lofty balcony. From there Hresh could see virtually the whole of the great city that he had envisioned and laid out and brought into being.

A warm sultry wind was blowing. In his right hand he held a small silvery sphere that he had found long ago in the ruins of Vengiboneeza. With it, once, he had been able to conjure visions of the ancient magnificent epochs of the Great World. In his left lay a similar metal ball, golden bronze in color. It was the master control instrument that governed the Great World construction machines he had used to build Dawinno, in a place where nothing at all had existed but marshes and swamps and tropical forests.

Both these globes, the silver one and the golden bronze one, had long since burned out. They were of no value to him, or anyone, now. Within its translucent skin Hresh could see the master control’s core of shining quicksilver stained and blackened by corrosion.

As he hefted the two dead instruments thoughts of the Great World came into his mind. He was swept by powerful envy for the people of that vanished era. How stable their world had been, how tranquil, how serene! The various parts of that grand civilization had meshed like the gears of some instrument designed by the gods. Sapphire-eyes and humans, hjjks and sea-lords, vegetals and mechanicals, they all had lived together in harmony and unity, and discord was unknown. Surely it was the happiest time the world had ever known.

But there was something paradoxical about that; for the Great World had been doomed, and its people had lived under the knowledge of that impending doom for a million years. How then could they have been happy?

Still, he thought, a million years is a long time. For the people of the Great World there must have been much joy along the way to the inevitable end. Whereas our world has the precariousness of a newly born thing. Nothing is secure yet, nothing has real solidity, and we have no assurance that our fledgling civilization will last so much as a million hours, or even a million minutes.

Somber thoughts. He tries to brush them aside.

From the parapet’s edge he looked out over Dawinno. Night was beginning to descend. The last swirling purples and greens of sunset were fading in the west. The lights of the city were coming on. It was very grand, yes, as cities of the New Springtime went. But yet tonight everything about it seemed dreamlike and insubstantial. The buildings that he had long thought were so majestic appeared to him suddenly to be nothing more than hollow facades made of molded paper and held up by wooden struts. It was all only the mere pretense of a city, he thought dismally. They had improvised everything, making it look as they thought it should. But had they done it the right way? Had they done anything at all that was right?

Stop this, he tells himself.

He closed his eyes and almost at once he saw Vengiboneeza once again, Vengiboneeza as it had been when it was the living capital of the Great World. Those great shining towers of many colors, the swarming docks, the busy markets, the peoples of six vastly different races existing peacefully side by side, the shimmering vessels arriving from the far stars with their cargoes of strange beings and strange produce — the grandeur of it all, the richness, the complexity, the torrent of profound ideas, the poetry, the philosophy, the dreams and schemes, the immense vitality—

For a moment its beauty delighted him, as it always had. But only for a moment; and then he was lost in gloom again.

How small we are, Hresh thinks bitterly.

What a pathetic imitation of the lost greatness we’ve created here! And we’re so proud of what we have done. But in truth we’ve done so little — only to copy, like the monkeys that we are. What we have copied is the appearance, not the substance. And we could lose it all, such as it is, in the twinkling of an eye.

A dark night, this. The darkest of the dark. Moon and stars, yes, shining as they always had. But very dark within, eh, Hresh? You’ve thrown a cloak over your soul. Stumbling around in unyielding blackness, are you, Hresh?

For a moment he thought of tossing the useless globes over the side of the parapet. But no. No. Dead as they were, they were still able to summon lost worlds of life in his mind. Talismans, they were. They would lead him out of this bleakness. He caresses their silken-smooth surfaces and the endless past opens to him. And at last he begins to extract himself a little way from this smothering weight of clamoring misery that has engulfed him. Some perspective returns. Today, yesterday, the day before the day before yesterday: what do they matter, against the vast sweep of time? He has a sense of millions of years of history behind him: not only the Great World but a world even older than that, lost empires, lost kings, lost creatures, a world that had had no People in it, nor even the hjjks and sapphire-eyes, but only humans. And there might have been a world even before that, though his mind swims to think of it. World upon world, each arising and thriving and declining and vanishing: it is the way of the gods, that nothing can be perfect and nothing will last forever. What had all his studies of the past taught him, if not that? And there is powerful consolation in that.

He had been devouring the world all his life, hungrily gobbling its perplexing wonders. Hresh-full-of-questions: that was what they had called him when he was a boy. Cockily he had renamed himself Hresh-of-the-answers, once. He was that too. But the earlier name was truer. Every answer holds the next question, throbbing impatiently within it.

His thoughts wander back to the day when he was eight years old, in the time before the Time of Going Forth, when he had bolted through the hatch of the cocoon to see what lay outside.

Where was that boy now? Still here, a little worn and frayed. Hresh-full-of-questions. Dear Torlyri had grabbed him then, the gentle offering-woman, long since dead. It was almost fifty years ago, now. But for her, he too would have been long since dead, and long forgotten too, trapped outside when she closed the hatch after her morning prayers, and before nightfall eaten by rat-wolves, or carried off by hjjks, or simply perished of the chill of that forlorn era.

But Torlyri had caught him by the leg and yanked him back as he tried to scramble down the ledge into the open world. And when the chieftain Koshmar had sentenced him to death for his impiety, it was Torlyri who had successfully interceded on his behalf.

Long ago, long long ago. In what seems to him now like some other life. Or some other world.

But there was a continuity all the same. That unending desire to see, to do, to learn, had never left him. You always want to know, Taniane had said.

He shrugged. And went inside, and set the two globes down on his desk. The darkness was threatening to invade him again.

This was his private chamber. No one else was permitted to enter it. Here Hresh kept the Barak Dayir and the other instruments of divination handed down to him by his predecessors. His manuscripts, too: his essays on the past, thoughts on the meaning of life and the destiny of the People. He had told the story of the greatness and the downfall of the sapphire-eyes folk, as well as he understood it. He had written of the humans, who were even greater mysteries to him. He had speculated on the nature of the gods.

He had never shown any of these writings to anyone. Sometimes he feared that they were nothing but a jumble of lofty-minded nonsense. Often he thought of burning them. Why not? Give these dead pages to the flames, as Thu-Kimnibol had given Naarinta to them a few hours before.

“You will burn nothing,” said a voice out of the shadows. “You have no right to destroy knowledge.”

In the darkest of the dark moments visions often came to him — Thaggoran, sometimes, long-dead old Thaggoran who had been chronicler before him, or sometimes the wise man Noum om Beng of the Helmet People, or even one of the gods. Hresh never doubted these visions. Figments they might be; but he knew they spoke only truth.

To Thaggoran now he says, “But is it knowledge? What if I’ve assembled nothing but a compilation of lies here?”

“You don’t know what it is to lie, boy. Errors, maybe: lies, never. Spare your books. Write other ones. Preserve the past for those who follow after.”

“The past! What good is preserving the past? The past is only a burden!”

“What are you saying, boy?”

“There’s no point in looking back. The past is lost. The past is beyond preserving. The past slips away from us every hour of our lives, and good riddance to it. The future is what we need to think about.”

“No,” Thaggoran says. “The past is the mirror in which we see that which is to come. You know that. You have always known that. What ails you today, boy?”

“I’ve been at the Place of the Dead today. I’ve seen my brother’s mate become ashes and dust.”

Thaggoran laughs. “Whole worlds have become ashes and dust. New worlds come forth from them. Why should I have to remind you of such things? You were telling the others that only this day, at the Place of the Dead.”

“Yes,” Hresh says, in sudden shame. “Yes, I was.”

“Is it not the will of the gods that death should come from life, and life from death?”

“Yes. But—”

“But nothing. The gods decree, and we obey.”

“The gods are mockers,” Hresh says.

“Are they, do you think?” says Thaggoran coolly.

“The gods gave the Great World happiness beyond all understanding, and then dropped the death-stars down on them. Wouldn’t you call that mockery? And then the gods brought us forth out of the Long Winter to inherit the world, though we are nothing at all. Isn’t that mockery also?”

“The gods never mock,” says Thaggoran. “The gods are beyond our understanding, but I tell you this: what they decree, they decree for reasons that are true and deep. They are mysterious in their ways, but they are never merely whimsical.”

“Ah, but can I believe that?”

“Ah,” says Thaggoran, “what else is there to believe?”

Faith, yes. The last refuge of the desperate. Hresh is willing to accept that. He is almost pacified now. But even in matters of faith he still clings to logic. Not yet fully comfortable with what the old man is trying to get him to see, he says:

“But tell me this, then — if we are to be the masters of the world, as our ancient books promise us, then why have the gods left the hjjks here to stand against us? Suppose the hjjks cut us off before we’ve barely begun to grow. What becomes of the plan of the gods then, Thaggoran? Tell me that!”

There was no answer. Thaggoran was gone, if indeed he had ever been there.

Hresh slipped into his worn familiar chair, and put his hands to the smooth wood of his desk. The vision had not carried him quite as far as he had needed to go, but it had done its work nevertheless. Somehow his mood had shifted. The past, the future: both of them darkness, all darkness, he thought. And under cover of darkness despair finds a good place to hide. But then he asked himself: Is it all truly so bad? What else can the future be, but unknowable, a darkness? And the past: we cast our little lights backward into it and illuminate it, after a fashion, and what we learn guides us onward into the other great unknown. Our knowledge is our comfort and our shield.

Yet I know so little, Hresh thought. I need to know so much more.

You always want to know,Taniane had said.

Yes. Yes. Yes, I do.

Even now. Although I am so tired. Even now.

“We’ve looked up your name in the records at the House of Knowledge,” Nialli Apuilana told Kundalimon. “You were born here, all right. In Year 30. That makes you seventeen, now. I was born in 31. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” he said, smiling. Perhaps he did, a little.

“Your mother was Marsalforn and your father was Ramla.”

“Marsalforn. Ramla.”

“You were taken by the hjjks in 35. It’s in the city records. Captured by a raiding party outside the walls, just like me. Marsalforn disappeared while searching for you in the hills. Her body was never found. Your father left the city soon afterward and no one knows where he is now.”

“Marsalforn,” he said again. “Ramla.” The rest of what she had said seemed lost on him.

“Do you follow what I’m telling you? Those are the names of your mother and father.”

“Mother. Father.” Blankly. Her words didn’t seem to hold meaning for him at all.

“Do you know what I want to do with you?” she said in a low, urgent voice, with her face close to his. “I want to talk about life in the Nest. I want you to make it come alive for me again. The smell of it, the colors, the sounds. The things that Nest-thinker says. Whether you ever went marching with the Militaries, or had to stay behind with the Egg-makers. Whether they let you go near the Queen. I want to hear all about it. Everything.”

“Marsalforn,” he said again. “Mother. Father. Ramla. Marsalforn is Ramla. Mother is Father.”

“You aren’t really getting much of what I’m saying, are you? Are you, Kundalimon?”

He smiled, the warmest smile she had seen from him yet. It was like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. But he shook his head.

She had to try something else. This was too slow.

Her heart began to pound.

“What we ought to do is twine,” Nialli Apuilana said, suddenly audacious.

Did he know what she meant? No. He made no response, simply maintained the same fixed smile.

“Twine. I want to twine with you, Kundalimon. You don’t know what that is, either, do you? Twine. It’s something that People do with their sensing-organs. Do you even know what a sensing-organ is? This thing here, hanging down behind you like a tail. It is a tail, I suppose. But much more than that. It’s full of perceptors that run up into your spine and connect right to your brain.”

He was still smiling, smiling, obviously comprehending nothing.

She persisted. “One of the things we use the sensing-organ for is to make contact with other people. Deep, intense, intimate contact, mind to mind. We aren’t even allowed to try it until we’re thirteen, and then the offering-woman shows us how, and after that we can go looking for twining-partners.”

He looked at her blankly. Shook his head.

She took his hand. “Any two people can be twining-partners — a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, anyone. It’s not like coupling or mating, you see. It’s a union of souls. You twine with anyone whose soul you want to share.”

“Twine,” he said, and smiled even harder.

“Twine, yes. I’ve done it only once. On my twining-day — when I was thirteen, you know — with Boldirinthe the offering-woman. Since then, never. Nobody here interests me that way. But if I could twine with you, Kundalimon—”

“Twine?”

“We’d make contact such as we’ve never known in our lives. We could share Nest-truths and we wouldn’t need even to try to speak each other’s languages, because there’s a language of twining that goes beyond any mere words.” She looked around to see if the door was latched. Yes. A kind of fever was on her now. Her fur was damp, her breasts were rising and falling swiftly. Her own scent was rank and musky in her nostrils, an animal reek.

He might be beginning to comprehend.

Gingerly she lifted her sensing-organ and brought it forward, and let it slide lightly across his.

For an instant there was contact. It was like a shock of lightning. She felt his soul with astonishing clarity: a smooth pale parchment, on which strange inscriptions had been written in a dark, bold, alien hand. There was great sweetness in it, and tenderness, and also strangeness. The dark cloistered mystery of the Nest was everywhere in it. He was open to her, entirely vulnerable, and there would be no difficulty about completing the twining and linking their spirits in the keenest of intimacies. Relief, joy, even something that might have been love, flooded her soul.

But then, after that first stunning moment, he whipped his sensing-organ back out of her reach, breaking the contact with jarring suddenness. Uttering a hoarse ragged sound, midway between a growl and a hjjk’s chittering insect-noise, he beat frantically at her for a moment using both his arms at once, the way a hjjk would. His eyes flared wildly with fright. Then he hopped backward and crouched in a defensive stance in the corner, pressed tight up against the walls of the room, panting in terror. His face was a frozen mask of fear and shock, nostrils wide, lips drawn back rigidly, both rows of teeth bared.

Nialli Apuilana looked at him wide-eyed, horror-stricken at what she had done.

“Kundalimon?”

“No! Away! No!”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you. I only—”

“No. No! ”

He began to tremble. He muttered incomprehensibly in hjjk. Nialli Apuilana held out her arms to him, but he turned away from her, huddling close to the wall. In shame and anguish she fled from him.

“Are you making any progress?” Taniane asked.

Nialli Apuilana gave her a quick uneasy look. “A little. Not as much as I’d like.”

“Can he speak our language yet?”

“He’s learning.”

“And the hjjk words? Are they coming back to you?”

“We don’t use the hjjk words,” Nialli Apuilana said in a low, husky tone. “He’s trying to put the Nest behind him. He wants to be flesh again.”

“Flesh,” Taniane said. Her daughter’s strange choice of words sent a chill through her. “You mean, to be part of the People?”

“That’s what I mean, yes.”

Taniane peered close. As always she wished she could see behind the mask that hid her daughter’s soul from her. For the millionth time she wondered what had happened to Nialli Apuilana during the months she had spent below the surface of the Earth in the dark mysterious labyrinth of the Nest.

She said, “What about the treaty?”

“Not a word. Not yet. We don’t understand each other well enough to talk about anything but the simplest things.”

“The Presidium will be meeting next week.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, mother. As fast as he’ll let me. I’ve tried to go more quickly, but there are — problems.

“What sort of problems?”

“Problems,” Nialli Apuilana repeated, looking away. “Oh, mother, let me be! Do you think this is easy?”

For three days she couldn’t bring herself to see him. A guardsman had been sent with his food in her place. Then she went, bringing a tray of edible seeds and the small reddish insects known as rubies, which she had gathered that morning in the torrid drylands on the northeastern slope of the hills. These she offered timidly, without a word. He took the tray from her just as wordlessly, and fell upon the rubies as if he had not eaten in weeks, sweeping the little ruddy carcasses into his mouth with broad avid motions of his hand.

He looked up afterward and smiled. But he kept a wary distance from her throughout that day’s visit.

So the damage wasn’t irreparable. Still, the breach would be some time in healing. She knew that her attempt at twining with him had been too hasty, too bold. Perhaps his sensing-organ itself was something he barely understood. Perhaps the fleeting touch of intimacy he had shared with her had been too powerful a sensation for him, raised as he had been among a species that had emotions of quite a different kind; perhaps it had begun to undermine his already uncertain sense of which race he belonged to.

He must regard himself as a hjjk in flesh-folk flesh, Nialli Apuilana thought. Such intimacy with a flesh-folk person would seem a disgusting obscenity to him, then. And yet some part of him had reached out eagerly and lovingly to her. Some part of him had yearned to let their souls rush together and become one. She was sure of that. But it had terrified him even while it tempted him; and he had pulled back in agonizing confusion.

That day she remained with him only a little while, and spent the time trying to break through the linguistic barrier. She ran through her short list of hjjk words, and told him the People equivalents, using pantomime and sketches to aid her. Kundalimon seemed to make progress. She sensed that he was deeply frustrated by his inability to make himself understood. There were things he wanted to say, amplifications of the message that Hresh had extracted from him by means of the Barak Dayir. But he had no way of expressing them.

Briefly she considered attempting to reach him by second sight. That was the next best thing to twining. She could send her soul’s vision forth and try to touch his soul with it.

But most likely Kundalimon would become aware of what she was doing and see it as another intrusion, another violation of his soul’s inner space: as offensive, or as frightening, as her attempt to twine with him had been. She couldn’t risk it. The relationship would have to be rebuilt more slowly.

“What can you tell us?” Taniane asked her that evening. Brusquely getting right to it, all business as usual. Chieftain-mode, not mother-mode. Almost never mother-mode. “Have you started to talk about the treaty with him?”

“He still doesn’t have the vocabulary.” She saw the suspicion in Taniane’s eyes, and in distress she said, “Don’t you believe that I’ve been trying, mother?”

“Yes. I do believe it, Nialli.”

“But I can’t do miracles. I’m not like father.”

“No,” said Taniane. “Of course not.”

On the evening of the meeting of the Presidium, at the sixth hour after midday, the leaders of Dawinno began to assemble in their noble meeting-room of dark arching beams and rough granite walls.

Taniane took her place at the high table of mirror-bright red ksutwood, beneath the great spiral that represented Nakhaba of the Bengs and the five gods of the Koshmar tribe entwined in divine unity. Hresh sat at her left. The various princes of the city were arrayed along the curving rows of benches before them.

In the front row, the three princes of the justiciary: the dapper, elegant Husathirn Mueri, with the massive figure of Thu-Kimnibol looming beside him, still clad in his flame-red mantle and sash of mourning, and Puit Kjai, the Beng, sitting upright and rigid. Next to them Chomrik Hamadel, the son of the last independent Beng chieftain before the Union. In the row behind them the old warrior Staip, and his mate Boldirinthe the offering-woman, and Simthala Honginda, their eldest son, with his mate Catiriil, who was Husathirn Mueri’s sister. Around them, half a dozen of the wealthy merchants and manufacturers who held seats on the Presidium, and various members of the nobility, the heads of some of the founding families of the city: Si-Belimnion, Maliton Diveri, Kartafirain, Lespar Thone. Lesser figures — representatives of the smaller tribes, and of the craftsmen’s guilds — were in the row to the rear.

Everyone was mantled and robed in finest cloth. And all were grandly helmeted also, in accordance with the formal custom of the day, a congregation of intricate, lofty head-pieces everywhere in the great room. Chomrik Hamadel’s helmet was easily the most conspicuous, a towering agglomeration of metal and sparkling gems that rose above him to an improbable height; but Puit Kjai, wearing one of red bronze with huge silver projections flaring fore and aft, was scarcely to be outdone.

That these Beng princes would be so splendidly outfitted was no surprise. The Bengs were the original helmet-wearers. Nor was it startling that Husathirn Mueri, who was half Beng, should have donned a grand golden dome with crimson spikes.

But even those of pure Koshmar birth — Thu-Kimnibol, Kartafirain, Staip, Boldirinthe — were wearing their most magnificent headgear. More unusual still, Hresh, who wore a helmet perhaps once every five years, had one on now: a small one, some cleverly interwoven strips of dark bristly fiber bound by a single golden band, but a helmet nevertheless.

Only Taniane wore no helmet. But one of the bizarre old masks of the former chieftains that usually hung on her office wall was resting on the high table beside her.

Husathirn Mueri said, as the hour called for starting the meeting came and went, “What are we waiting for?”

Thu-Kimnibol seemed amused. “Are you in such a hurry, cousin?”

“We’ve been sitting here for hours.”

“It only seems that way,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “We waited much longer than this in the cocoon before we were allowed to make the Coming Forth. Seven hundred thousand years, wasn’t it? This is only the flicker of an eye.”

Husathirn Mueri grinned sourly and turned away.

Then, astonishingly, Nialli Apuilana came bursting into the chamber, breathless, her sash and mantle in disarray.

She seemed amazed to find herself here. Blinking, fighting to catch her breath, she stood for a moment staring at the assembled notables in unconcealed awe. Then she scurried into a vacant place in the front row, next to Puit Kjai.

“Her?” Husathirn Mueri said. “We’ve been waiting for her all this time? I don’t understand this.”

“Hush, cousin.”

“But—”

“Hush,” said Thu-Kimnibol more sharply.

Taniane, rising, brushed her hands lightly across the chieftain’s mask on the high table before her. “We are ready now to begin. This is the final session of deliberations on the proposal of a treaty of mutual territorial respect that the hjjks have made. I call upon Hresh the chronicler.”

The chronicler got slowly to his feet.

Hresh cleared his throat, looked around the room, let his keen, piercing gaze rest on this highborn one and that. And said, finally, “I’ll begin by recapitulating the terms of the hjjk offer, as I received it by way of the Barak Dayir from the mind of the hjjk emissary Kundalimon.” He held up a broad sheet of sleek yellow parchment on which a map had been sketched in bold brown lines. “This is the City of Dawinno down here, where the edge of the continent curves out to meet the sea. Here is the City of Yissou, to our north. Here, beyond Yissou, is Vengiboneeza. Everything from Vengiboneeza northward is undisputed hjjk territory.”

Hresh paused. Looked around again, as if taking the roll.

Then he continued. “The Queen proposes that we set a line passing between Vengiboneeza and the City of Yissou, extending from the seacoast across the northern half of the continent, past the great central river once known as the Hallimalla, and onward to the coast of the other sea that we believe touches the land at the eastern edge of the continent. Can you all see the line?”

“We know where the line goes, Hresh,” said Thu-Kimnibol.

The chronicler’s scarlet-flecked eyes brightened with annoyance. “Of course. Of course. Pardon me, brother.” A quick smile, pro forma. “To continue: the line is drawn in such a way as to confirm the present territorial division of the land. What the hjjks now hold is to be forever theirs, without dispute. What is ours will remain ours. The Queen promises to prohibit all hjjks under Her control — and as I understand it She controls all the hjjks in the world — from entering, the territory of the People except by our specific invitation and consent. And no member of the People is to go north of the City of Yissou into hjjk territory without permission of the Queen. That’s the first condition.

“There are others.

“First, the Queen offers us spiritual guidance, that is, instruction in the concepts loosely known as Nest-truth and Queen-love. These seem to be hjjk philosophical or religious ideas. Why the Queen thinks they’d be of interest to us, I can’t imagine. But it’s proposed that instructors in Nest-truth and Queen-love will take up residence in our city — in each of the Seven Cities — to teach us their meaning.”

“Some sort of joke?” Kartafirain boomed. “Hjjk missionaries living right here among us, spouting their lunatic mumbo-jumbo? Hjjk spies, I should say. Right in the middle of our city! Does the Queen think we’re that foolish?”

“There’s more,” Hresh said calmly, raising a hand to signal for silence. “A third proviso. The Queen further stipulates that we must also agree to confine ourselves to the territories we now hold. That is, permanently to relinquish our right to venture into any other continent, whether simply to explore or for actual settlement.”

“What?” This time it was Si-Belimnion who cried out in disbelief. “Absurd,” said Maliton Diveri, rising, shaking his arms in fury. Lespar Thone let forth peals of ringing laughter.

Hresh looked flustered. Taniane rapped for order. When the noise subsided she looked toward the chronicler and said, “Hresh, you still have the floor. Is that the complete report on the treaty terms?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you make of it all?”

“I’m of two minds,” he said. “On the one hand, we’ll be given undisputed possession of the warmest and most fertile half of the continent. And be freed forever from the danger and destructiveness of war.”

“Provided the hjjks honor their treaty!” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Provided they honor it, yes. But I think they will. They have much more to gain from it than we do,” said Hresh. “I mean by keeping us away from the other continents. Of course we don’t have any idea of what’s on those continents. Nor do we have any way at present of getting across the tremendous oceans that separate us from them. But I do know this: there could be ruined Great World cities out there, and some of them may be as full of treasure as Vengiboneeza was.” Again his eyes scanned the room. “Back when we were still living in Vengiboneeza,” he said, “I came upon an instrument that let me see a vision of all the four continents of the world, and all the cities that once existed on them: cities with names like Mikkimord, and Tham, and Steenizale. Very likely the ruins of those cities are waiting for us, even as Vengiboneeza was. Maybe they’re buried under hundreds of thousands of years of debris, or perhaps, as in Vengiboneeza, repair machines have kept them almost intact. You all know how useful the tools we found in Vengiboneeza were to us. These other ancient cities — and I don’t doubt that they’re there — might hold things that are even more valuable. If we sign this treaty, we sign away forever our right to go searching for them.”

“What if we stand no more chance of getting to these places than we do of swimming to the Moon?” Puit Kjai asked. “Or if we do reach them somehow, at the cost of the gods only know how many lives, and they turn out not to hold anything worthwhile? I say give them to the hjjks, wonders and all. This treaty lets us keep the lands that are already ours without risk of challenge. That seems more important.”

“You’re speaking out of turn,” said Taniane briskly. “The chronicler still has the floor.” Looking toward Hresh, she said, “Is it the chronicler’s opinion, then, that we should reject the hjjk treaty outright?”

Hresh stared at her as though answering so direct a question gave him keen pain.

At length he said, “The first clause of the treaty, the setting of boundaries, is acceptable to me. The second, the one sending us teachers of Nest-truth, I don’t understand at all. But the third—” He shook his head. “The thought of surrendering those treasure-troves to the hjjks forever isn’t to my liking at all.”

Taniane said, “Should we ratify the treaty or not, Hresh?”

He shrugged. “That’s for the Presidium to decide. I’ve stated my views.” And he sat down.

There was hubbub again. Everyone talking at once, helmets waggling, arms waving about.

“Let me speak!” Taniane cried, once more rapping the high table.

Over the diminishing voices of the unruly assembly she said, “If the chronicler won’t take a clear stand on this issue, the chieftain will!”

She leaned forward, staring fiercely down at the front rows. Casually, almost as though unaware of what she was doing, she scooped up the chieftain’s mask that lay beside her, and held it clasped against her breast, face outward. It was a monstrous glossy yellow mask tipped with black, with a great savage beak and jagged swooping projections along its periphery: almost a hjjk-face mask. The effect was much as if a hjjk were gnawing its way out of her from within and had burst forth suddenly, face foremost, upon her breast.

She stood in silence just a moment too long. There was more murmuring and then louder disputes began.

“Will you allow me to speak?” Taniane cried. And then, with anger in her voice: “Let me speak! Let me speak!”

“Gods! Will you let her speak?” Thu-Kimnibol roared ferociously, rising halfway to his full great height, and in moments the hall grew silent.

“Thank you,” said Taniane, looking furious. Her fingers ran busily over the rim of the mask that she held clutched to her bosom. “There is only one question that we need to address,” she said. “What do we actually gain from this treaty, at the price of handing away our claim to three-quarters of the world?”

“Peace,” said Puit Kjai.

“Peace? We have peace. The hjjks are no threat to us. The one time they made war on us, we slaughtered them. Have you forgotten? It was when they attacked the City of Yissou, which Harruel had only just founded then, and we all came to his aid. You were there, Staip, and you, Boldirinthe. And Thu-Kimnibol — you were just a boy, but I saw you killing hjjks by the dozen that day, fighting by the side of your father Harruel. At the end of the day the field was covered with the corpses of the hjjks, and the city was saved.”

“It was Hresh that killed them,” Staip said. “With that magic of his, that he found in the Great World city. It swallowed them up. I was there. I saw it.”

“That was part of it, yes,” said Taniane. “But only a part. They were unable to stand before our warriors. We had nothing to fear from them that day. We have nothing to fear from them now. They hover up north like angry buzzing bees, but we know that they have no real power over us. They are hateful, yes. They are foul and repellent creatures. But they no longer go raiding in any number. The occasional small scouting party does go forth, and these” — she glanced significantly at Nialli Apuilana — “do cause us some distress. But such occasions, Yissou be thanked, have become very rare. If we encounter three hjjks in our province in a single year, that’s unusual. So we mustn’t cringe in terror before them. They are our enemy, but we can withstand them if ever they dare to challenge us. If they descend upon us, we can and will drive them back. So why allow them to dictate to us? Now they grandly offer to let us keep our own lands, if we’ll simply turn the rest of the world over to them. What kind of offer is that? Which of you sees merit in it? Which of you sees advantage for us?”

“I do,” said Puit Kjai.

Taniane beckoned, and Puit Kjai arose and came to the speaker’s podium. He was a lean, angular man of more than middle years, with the lustrous golden fur and brilliant sunset-red eyes of a pure Beng. He had succeeded his father, wizened old Noum om Beng, as keeper of the Beng chronicles. But after the union of the tribes he had turned that responsibility over to Hresh, taking a post on the justiciary in return. He was a proud and stubborn man, with passionately held opinions.

“I am not one to advocate cowardly surrender or timid withdrawal,” he began, turning slightly so that his majestic bronze-and-silver helmet caught the light from above to best effect. “I believe, as most of you do, that it is our destiny someday to rule all the world. And, like Hresh, I would not casually sign away our right to explore the Great World cities of the other continents. But I believe in reason, too. I believe in prudence.” He glanced toward Taniane. “You say the hjjks are no danger to us. You say that the warriors of the Koshmar tribe slew them easily at the battle of the City of Yissou. Well, I was not at that battle. But I’ve studied it, and I know it well. I know that many hjjks died that day — but also that there were casualties among the People, too, that King Harruel of Yissou himself was one of those who fell. And I know that Staip tells the truth when he says that it was the magical Great World device that Hresh employed against the hjjks which carried the day for the People. But for that they would have destroyed you all. But for that there would be no City of Dawinno, today.”

“These are lies,” Thu-Kimnibol muttered hoarsely. “By the Five, I was there! There was no magic in our victory. We fought like heroes. I killed more hjjks that day than he’s ever seen, and I was only a child. Samnibolon was my name then, my child-name. Who will deny that Samnibolon son of Harruel was at that battle?”

Puit Kjai brushed the outburst aside with a grand sweep of his arm. “The hjjks number in the millions. We are only thousands, even now. And I have experienced more of hjjk aggression than most of you. I am Beng, you know. I was among those who lived in Vengiboneeza after the Koshmar folk left it. I ask you to recall that we had the city to ourselves ten years, and then the hjjks came in, first fifty, then a hundred and fifty, and then many hundreds. And then we couldn’t count them at all, there were so many. There were hjjks everywhere we turned. They never raised a hand against us, but they pushed us out all the same, by sheer force of numbers. So it is when the hjjks are peaceful. And when they aren’t … Well, you who fought at Yissou saw the hjjks in more warlike mode. You drove them off, yes. But the next time they choose to make war against us, we may not have Hresh’s Great World weapons to serve us.”

“What are you saying?” Taniane asked. “That we should beg them to let us keep our own lands?”

“I say that we should sign this treaty, and bide our time,” said Puit Kjai. “By signing it we win ourselves a guarantee against hjjk interference in the territories we presently have, until we are stronger, strong enough to defend ourselves against any hjjk army, no matter how large. We can always think about expanding our territory at that time. We can give some thought then to these other continents and the wonders they may hold, which at present we have no means of reaching in any case. Treaties can always be broken, you know. We aren’t signing anything away forever. This treaty buys time for us — it keeps the hjjks away from our frontier—”

“Pah!” Thu-Kimnibol bellowed. “Let me have the floor, will you? Let me say a thing or two!”

“Are you done, Puit Kjai?” Taniane asked. “Will you yield?”

Puit Kjai shrugged and gave Thu-Kimnibol a contemptuous look.

“I may as well. I relinquish my place to the God of War.”

“Let me get by,” said Thu-Kimnibol, pushing brusquely toward the aisle and nearly stumbling over Husathirn Mueri’s legs as he went past. He advanced in quick angry strides to the front of the room and stood hunched over the podium, grasping it with both his hands. So huge was he that he made it seem to be no more than a child’s toy table.

His mourning mantle encompassed his great shoulders like a corona of fire. This was his first appearance in public since Naarinta’s death. He seemed vastly changed, more aloof, more somber, much less the easy lighthearted warrior. Many that day had remarked on it. He visibly bore the weight of his position as one of the princes of the city. His eyes seemed darker and more deeply set now, and he studied the assembly with a slow, searching gaze.

When he began to speak it was in a ponderously sardonic manner.

“Puit Kjai says he is no coward. Puit Kjai says that what he advocates is mere prudence. But who can believe that? We all know what Puit Kjai is really saying: that he shivers with dread at the very thought of the hjjks. That he imagines them lurking outside our walls in enormous swarms, poised to burst into the city and tear him — him,the unique and irreplaceable Puit Kjai, never mind the rest of us — to tiny shreds. He awakens in cold sweats, seeing hjjk warriors hovering above his bed eager to rip chunks of his flesh loose from his body and devour them. That’s all that matters to Puit Kjai. To sign a paper, any paper, that will keep the terrible hjjks at a safe distance while he is still alive. Is that not so? I ask you? Is that not so?”

Thu-Kimnibol’s voice echoed resonantly through the hall. He leaned across the podium and looked around with a swaggering, defiant glare.

“This treaty,” he continued after a moment, “is nothing but a trap. This treaty is a measure of the contempt with which the hjjks regard us. And Puit Kjai urges us to sign it! Puit Kjai pines for peace! Break the treaty some other time when it is more convenient for us, the honorable Puit Kjai tells us! But for now, let us crawl on our bellies before the hjjks, because they are many and we are few, and peace is more important than anything else. Is this not so, Puit Kjai? Am I not stating your point of view fairly?”

Around the room there were murmurs again: of surprise, this time, for this was a new Thu-Kimnibol they were hearing. He had never spoken in the Presidium with such eloquence before, such flash and fury. Of course Thu-Kimnibol was a great warrior, almost godlike in his size and energy, a fiery giant, warlike, flamboyantly belligerent. His name itself proclaimed it: for although, as he had just said, he had been born Samnibolon, on his naming-day at the age of nine when the time came under Koshmar custom to choose his adult name, he had renamed himself Thu-Kimnibol, which meant “Sword of the Gods.” Other men flocked around him, eager for his advice and approval. But some — like Husathirn Mueri, who saw Thu-Kimnibol as his great rival for power in the city — tended to credit his powers of leadership to his immense physical strength alone, thinking there was no wit or subtlety to his soul. Now they found themselves unexpectedly forced to revise that appraisal.

“Let me tell you what I believe, now,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “I believe the world is rightfully ours — the entire world — by virtue of our descent from the humans who once ruled it. I believe it is our destiny to go forth, ever farther afield, until we have mastered every horizon. And I think that the hjjks, those ghastly and hideous survivors from a former world, must be eradicated like the vermin that they are.”

“Boldly spoken, Thu-Kimnibol,” said Puit Kjai with deep contempt. “We’ll make rafts of their dead bodies, and paddle ourselves across the sea to the other continents.”

Thu-Kimnibol shot him a murderous glance. “I hold the floor now, Puit Kjai.”

Puit Kjai threw up his hands in a comic gesture of surrender.

“I yield. I yield.”

“Here is what I say,” Thu-Kimnibol went on. “Send the hjjk messenger back with our rejection of the treaty stitched to his hide. At the same time, send word to our cousin Salaman of Yissou that we will do what he has long implored us to do, which is to join forces with him and launch a war of extermination against the roving bands of hjjks who threaten his borders. Then let us send our army north, every able-bodied man and woman we have — you needn’t trouble yourself to go, Puit Kjai — and together with King Salaman we’ll smash our way into the great Nest of Nests before the hjjks understand what is happening to them, and slay their Queen of Queens like the loathsome thing She is, and scatter their forces on the winds. That is how I say we should reply to this offer of love and peace from the hjjks.”

And with those words Thu-Kimnibol resumed his seat.

There was a stunned silence in the chamber.

Then, as though in a dream, Husathirn Mueri found himself rising and making his way toward the podium. He was not at all sure what he meant to say. He had not prepared a clear position. But he knew that if he failed to speak now, in the aftermath of Thu-Kimnibol’s astonishing outburst, he would spend all the rest of his days in the shadow of the other man, and it would be Thu-Kimnibol and not Husathirn Mueri who came to rule the city when Taniane’s time was done.

As he took his stance before the Presidium he asked the gods in whom he did not believe to give him words; and the gods were generous with him, and the words were there.

Quietly he said, looking out at the still astounded faces before him, “Prince Thu-Kimnibol has spoken just now with great force and vision. Permit me to say that I share his view of the ultimate destiny of our race. And I tell you also that I agree with Prince Thu-Kimnibol’s belief that we cannot avoid, sooner or later, an apocalyptic confrontation with the hjjks. It is the warrior within me who responds to Thu-Kimnibol’s stirring words, for I am Trei Husathirn’s son, whom some of you remember. But my mother Torlyri, whom you may also remember, and who was beloved by all, instilled in me a hatred of strife where strife was not needed. And in this instance I think strife is not only uncalled for, but profoundly dangerous to our purposes.”

Husathirn Mueri took a deep breath. His mind was suddenly awhirl with ideas.

“I offer you a position midway between those of Puit Kjai and Prince Thu-Kimnibol. Let us accept this treaty with the hjjks, as Puit Kjai suggests, in order to buy ourselves some time. But let us also send an envoy to King Salaman of Yissou, yes, and enter into an alliance with him, so that we will be all the stronger when the time to make war against the hjjks finally is at hand.”

“And when will that time be?” Thu-Kimnibol demanded.

Husathirn Mueri smiled. “The hjjks fight with swords and spears and beaks and claws,” he said. “Although they are an ancient race, actual survivors of the Great World, that is the best they can do. They have fallen away from whatever greatness must have been theirs in those ancient times, because the sapphire-eyes and the humans are no longer here to teach them what to do. Today they have no science. They have no machinery. They have only the most primitive of weapons. And why is that? Because they are nothing but insects! Because they are mere mindless soulless bugs!”

He heard an angry intake of breath from somewhere directly in front of him. Nialli Apuilana, of course.

“We are different,” he said. “We are discovering — or rediscovering,” he amended, with a diplomatic glance toward Hresh — “new things every day, new devices, new secrets of the ancient world. You have already seen, those of you who remember the battle of the City of Yissou, how vulnerable the hjjks are to such scientific weapons. There will be others. We will bide our time, yes; and in that time, we will devise some means of slaying a thousand hjjks at a single stroke — ten thousand, a hundred thousand! And then at last we will carry the war to them. When that day finally comes, we will hold the lightning in our hands. And how then can they stand against us, no matter how much greater than ours their numbers may be? Sign the treaty now, I say — and make war later!”

There was another uproar. Everyone was standing, shouting, gesticulating.

“A vote!” Husathirn Mueri shouted. “I call for a vote!”

“A vote, yes!” This from Thu-Kimnibol. And Puit Kjai, too, was calling out for a decision.

“There will be one more speaker, first,” said Taniane, her voice cutting through the clamor like a blade.

Husathirn Mueri stared at her, amazed. Somewhere in the last few moments Taniane had actually placed the Mask of Lirridon over her head; and now the chieftain stood beside him at the high table like some figure out of nightmare, stiff and solemn and erect, with that appalling hjjk-face commanding the attention of everyone. She looked both foolish and frightening, all at once: but rather more frightening than foolish, a weary aging woman no longer but now some supernal being of tremendous imperious force.

For a moment, though he had no more to say, Husathirn Mueri held his place at the podium as though he were rooted to the floor. Then Taniane gestured commandingly, a gesture that could hardly be disobeyed. With that mask on, she was unanswerable, a fount of power. He went numbly from the speaker’s platform to resume his seat beside Thu-Kimnibol.

Nialli Apuilana came forward to take his place.

She stood stock-still, staring at the blur of faces before her. At first everyone was indistinct; but then a few individual figures stood out. She looked toward Taniane, hidden behind the startling mask. Toward Hresh. Toward the stolid massive figure of Thu-Kimnibol, sitting front and center, odious little Husathirn Mueri beside him. A swirl of conflicting thoughts ran through her head.

That morning she had gone to Taniane to confess failure: she hadn’t been able to find out any more about the hjjk treaty than Hresh had already learned with the Barak Dayir. Not that she was holding anything back: communicating with Kundalimon had proven more difficult than she — or Taniane — had expected. And so she had been a poor spy. On the subject of the treaty, she had nothing useful to report. It was the truth. And Taniane seemed to accept it as the truth.

That should have been the end of it, her vital mission fizzling away in anticlimax. But instead of dismissing her, Taniane had waited, as though expecting something more. And then there was something more. Nialli Apuilana listened, astonished, as words broke loose inside her and leaped unexpectedly to her own tongue.

Let me speak to the Presidium anyway, mother. Let me tell them about the hjjks. About the Queen, about the Nest. Things I’ve never been able to say. Things I can’t keep to myself any longer.

Bewilderment. You want to speak to the Presidium?

The Presidium, yes. During the debate over the treaty.

She could see the turmoil in Taniane. It was craziness, what she was proposing. Send a girl like her up to the podium? Allow her to contaminate the high legislative body of the city with her capricious, erratic, impulsive flights of fantasy? But it was tempting. The moody Nialli Apuilana finally breaks her silence. Speaks at last, reveals the mysteries of the Nest. Pours forth the awful details. In Taniane’s eyes temptation gleams. To know, at last, a little of what’s in her daughter’s mind. Even if it has to be spilled forth in the Presidium itself. Let me, mother. Let me, let me, please let me. And the chieftain nods.

And, unreal as it may seem, here she is. At the high table, all eyes upon her. The real story at last. The great revelation, after nearly four years. Did she dare? How would they respond? For a moment she was unable to find her voice. They were waiting. She felt their impatience, their hostility. To most of them she was nothing but a freak. Would they laugh? Would they jeer? She was the chieftain’s daughter. That would restrain them, she hoped. But it was so very hard to begin. Turn and run? No. No. Speak to them. Get the show started, Nialli.

And at last she did, speaking quietly, so quietly that she wondered if she could be heard even in the front row.

“I thank you all for this privilege. I stand before you now because there are things you must know, which I alone can tell you, before you decide how to respond to the message of the Queen.”

Her heart was racing. Her tongue was thick with fright. She forced herself to be calm.

“Unlike any of you,” she went on, “I have actually lived among the hjjks. As you are aware. You haven’t forgotten that I was a captive. Certainly I can never forget it. I know them at first hand — these vermin of which you speak, these hideous bugs, whom you think are fit only for extermination. And I tell you this: that they are nothing at all like the mindless hateful monsters you make them out to be.”

“They came to kill us when we founded Yissou,” Thu-Kimnibol burst in. “There were only eleven of us, and a few children. A scruffy little village, hundreds of leagues from their territory. Not exactly a serious threat. But they came by the thousands to destroy us. And would have wiped us out if we hadn’t—”

Calmly Nialli Apuilana overrode his full resonant voice. “No. They hadn’t come to kill you.”

“It certainly looked that way to us, an army like that, screeching, waving their spears around. Well, anyone can make a mistake, I suppose. It was just a little social visit.”

The great room echoed with laughter.

Nialli Apuilana gripped the edge of the podium. In a crackling voice she said, “Yes, kinsman, it was a mistake. But how could you have known what they were doing there? Do you have the slightest understanding of why they do the things they do? Do you have the least bit of insight into their minds?”

“Their minds?” said Puit Kjai, with heavy scorn.

“Their minds, yes. Their thoughts. Their wisdom. No, let me finish! Let me finish!” All fear was gone from her. Nialli Apuilana was defiant now. There was passion burning in her. “You know me, I think. You think of me as a rebel, a godless one, a wild child. Maybe you’re right. Certainly I’ve been unconventional. I won’t deny that I have no feeling for the Five Heavenly Ones, or for Nakhaba, or for the Five and the One, or any other combination of those gods you might want to name. To me they are nothing at all, they are only—”

“Blasphemy! Blasphemy!”

She scowled, smacked the podium, shot fierce glances here and there. This was her moment: she wouldn’t let them deprive her of it. This must be what Taniane feels like when she’s being grand and chieftainly, Nialli Apuilana thought.

Grandly and buoyantly she said, “Spare me these outcries, if you please. I am speaking now. The Five Names are just that to me: names. Our own inventions, to comfort us in our difficult times. Forgive me, father, mother, all of you. This is what I believe. Once I believed other things, the same as you. But when I went among the hjjks — when they took me — I shared their lives, I shared their thoughts. And I came to understand, as I could never have understood when I lived here, the true meaning of the Divine.”

“Do we need to listen to your daughter’s nonsense much longer, Taniane?” someone called from the rear. “Are you going let her mock the gods right to our faces?”

But the masked chieftain made no reply.

Inexorably Nialli Apuilana said, “This Queen, whom Thu-Kimnibol wants to chop in pieces — you know nothing of Her greatness and wisdom, none of you. You have no inkling of it. The Nest-thinkers — have you ever even heard the term?” She was hitting her stride, and loving it. “What can you tell me of the philosophies of the Nest? What can you say of Queen-love, of Nest-bond? You know nothing! Nothing! And I tell you that these vermin of yours, these bugs, are far from deserving of your contempt. They are not vermin at all, not monsters, not hateful, not repellent, none of those things. What they are, in fact, is a great civilization of human beings!”

“What? What? The hjjks human? She’s lost her mind!”

Into the incredulous outcry that came from all sides Nialli Apuilana retorted, shouting now, almost bellowing, “Yes, human! Human!”

“What is she saying?” old Staip asked muddledly. “The hjjks are insects, not humans! The Dream-Dreamers were the humans. The hairless pink ones, with no sensing-organs.”

“The Dream-Dreamers were one kind of human, yes! But not the only kind. Listen to me! Listen!” She gripped the podium and sent her words surging out to them with the force of second sight. The full spate now, the whole pent-up surge coming out all at once. “The truth is,” she declared in a high, ringing tone, “that all the Six Peoples of the Great World must be considered humans, whatever shape their bodies might have had. The Dream-Dreamers, and the sapphire-eyes, and the vegetals, and the mechanicals, and the sealords. And the hjjks! Yes, the hjjks! They were all human: six civilized peoples, able to live together in peace, and learn, and grow, and build. That is what it means to be human. My father taught me that when I was a child, and he should have taught you that too. And I learned it again in the Nest.”

“What about us?” someone called. “You say the hjjks are human. Do you think we are? Is everything that lives and thinks human?”

“We weren’t human in the time of the Great World, no. We were only animals then. But now we’re beginning finally to become human ourselves, now that we’ve left the cocoon. The hjjks, though — they crossed the threshold of humanity a million years ago. Or more. How can we think of making war on them? They aren’t our enemies! The only enemies we have are ourselves!”

“The girl’s insane,” she heard Thu-Kimnibol murmur, and saw him sadly shake his head.

“If you don’t like the treaty,” Nialli Apuilana cried, “then reject the treaty! Reject it! But reject war, too. The Queen is sincere. She offers us love and peace. Her embrace is our greatest hope. She will wait for us all to grow up — to attain full humanity, to become worthy of Her people — and then we will be free to join with them in a new companionship, the way the Six Peoples of the Great World once were joined, before the death-stars fell! And then — and then—”

She was gasping and sobbing, suddenly. All strength left her in a moment. She had expended herself beyond her endurance. Her eyes were frantic, her body was racked by tremors.

“Get her down from there,” said someone — Staip? Boldirinthe? — sitting behind Husathirn Mueri.

Everyone was shouting and calling out. Nialli Apuilana clung to the podium, shivering, trembling violently. She thought she might be at the edge of some sort of convulsion. She knew she had gone too far, much too far. She had said the unsayable, the thing she had held back from them all these years. They all thought she was mad, now. Perhaps she was.

The room swayed about her. Below her, Thu-Kimnibol’s bright red mourning mantle seemed to be pulsing and throbbing like a sun gone berserk. At the high table Hresh appeared frozen, dazed. She looked toward Taniane, but the chieftain was unreadable behind her mask, standing motionless in the midst of the chaos that swept the room.

Nialli Apuilana felt herself beginning to topple.

A terrible scene, Husathirn Mueri thought. Shocking, frightening, pitiful.

He had listened to her with growing amazement and dismay. Her appearance here, young, mysterious, heartachingly beautiful, had had a tremendous impact on him. He had never imagined that Nialli Apuilana would address the Presidium. Certainly he hadn’t expected her to say any of the things she had, or to say them so boldly. To hear her speak in such a fierce and powerful way had made her all the more desirable to him: had made her irresistible, in fact.

But then what she was saying had degenerated into chaotic babble, and Nialli Apuilana herself had veered toward hysteria and collapse before them all.

Now she was plainly about to fall.

Without hesitating, almost without thinking, Husathirn Mueri rushed forward, vaulted to the platform, and caught her by both elbows, lifting her, steadying her.

The girl shook her head wildly. “Let — go—”

“Please, Come down from here.”

She glared at him — but was it in hatred, he wondered, or simple confusion? Gently he tugged, and she surrendered to him. Slowly he led her from the podium and with his arm around her protectively he drew her toward the side of the room. He eased her into a seat. She stared up at him out of eyes that seemed to be seeing nothing at all.

Taniane’s voice rang out like a trumpet behind him.

“Here is our decision. There’ll be no vote today. The treaty will be neither rejected nor accepted, and we will make no reply to the Queen. The entire matter of the treaty is tabled indefinitely. Meanwhile what we intend is to send an envoy to the City of Yissou, for the purpose of discussing with King Salaman the terms of an alliance of mutual defense.”

“Against the hjjk-folk, do you mean?” someone called.

“Against the hjjks, yes. Against our enemy.”