The Queen of Springtime

4 The Martyr

Kundalimon had the freedom of the city, now, by special order of Husathirn Mueri, who had been asked by Curabayn Bangkea to release him from house arrest. He could leave his little cell in Mueri House whenever he pleased, and roam into any quarter, even entering the holy buildings and the houses of government. Nialli Apuilana had made that clear to him. “No one will stop you,” she said. “No one will harm you.”

“Even if I go into the Queen-chamber?”

She laughed. “You know we have no queen.”

“Your — mother? The woman who rules?”

“My mother, yes.” Kundalimon still had trouble with such concepts as “mother” and “father.” These flesh-folk matters were only slowly becoming clear to him. The mother was the Egg-maker. The father was the Life-kindler. Coupling, the thing he did so pleasurably with Nialli Apuilana, was the means they used to kindle eggs into life among the flesh-folk. It was something similar to what was done in the Nest, and yet all so different, so deeply different. “What about her?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“Is she not queen of the city?”

“Taniane’s title is chieftain, not queen,” Nialli Apuilana said. “It’s an old title, from when we were just a little tribe living in a hole in the side of a mountain. She rules the city — with the advice of my father and the offering-woman and the whole council of princes — but she’s not our queen. Not as you and I understand Queen-nature. She’s my mother, that’s true. But not the mother of the entire city.”

“Then if I go into her chamber, no one will stop me?”

“It depends on what she’s doing. But ordinarily, yes, you can go in. You can go anywhere you like. They’ll be watching you, I suppose.”

“Who will?”

“The guards. They don’t trust you, Curabayn Bangkea’s whole crowd. They think you’re a spy.”

He didn’t quite comprehend. Much of what Nialli Apuilana said was a mystery to him. Even now, after weeks of daily lessons, when his mind was flooded with the language of the flesh-folk and he even found himself at times thinking in their words and not with Nest-words, he often was puzzled by the substance of what she told him. But he listened, and tried to remember, and hoped that in time he would understand.

In any case he was achieving his purpose, here, and that was the important thing. He had come to bring Queen-love, and he was doing it. First to Nialli Apuilana, in whom Queen-love was already awake, for she had spent time in the Nest; and now, now that he was finally free to go out into the city, he was bringing it to all the others, those who were entirely without Nest-awareness.

He had expected that he would be frightened, the first time he went outside alone. Nialli Apuilana had taken him out a few times to show him the main thoroughfares and explain the pattern of the streets to him; but then one morning he had risked going out without her. It was a test, to see whether he’d be able to take more than a few timid steps without wanting to rush back into the safety of the building.

So huge a city, so many streets, such hordes of flesh-folk everywhere about! The thick clinging humid southern warmth, so different from what he had been accustomed to in the dry cool north. The strange sweet alien aromas of the place. The utter absence of Nest-bond. The possibility that the people of this place might look on him with hatred or disdain.

But he felt no fear at all. He walked down past the jeering, sour-faced guards and down cobbled Minbain Way, and turned left into an open-air marketplace on a side street he hadn’t traveled with Nialli Apuilana, and moved from stall to stall, looking at the fruits and vegetables and the dangling slabs of meat. He was altogether calm. And when it seemed to him that the outing had lasted long enough, he found his way back to Mueri House without difficulty.

After that he went out almost every day. He had never known such excitement. Simply to stand at a streetcorner, listening to a ballad-singer or a preacher or a peddler of little toys — how different that was from the life of the Nest! To step into a restaurant and stare in wonder at the sizzling meat on the griddle, and then point and smile, and be smiled at in return, and be handed some strange tender bit of flesh-folk food to eat — how wonderful, how transfiguring that was! It was like moving through the most vivid of dreams.

A steady diet of the food of the flesh-folk was having a profound effect on him. His fur was much thicker, darker, now. His body was becoming almost plump: he could pinch his skin and there would be a thick strip of flesh between his fingers, as never before. And also this new rich nourishment was entering his soul. He felt a fresh access of vigor. He was restless, almost jumpy with unfamiliar energy. Sometimes, when Nialli Apuilana entered his room, he seized her almost before she had had a chance to say a word and drew her down with him to the floor or to his couch. In the streets, too, he moved in long forceful strides, enjoying the jolt of the pavement against his feet. That was new, too, to be walking on paved streets. Everything was new, everything was exciting.

They all seemed to know who he was. People pointed and whispered. A few spoke to him, courteously but with some uncertainty, as if they weren’t sure how safe it was to approach him. With the children it was different. Platoons of them followed him about. There were children everywhere here; sometimes it seemed to Kundalimon that scarcely anyone but boys and girls lived in this city. They capered after him, shouting and whooping, calling out to him.

“Hjjk! Hjjk! There goes the hjjk!”

“Say something to us in hjjk-speak, hjjk!”

“Hey, hey, hjjk! Where’s your beak?”

They meant no mockery. They were only children, after all. Their tone was light and playful.

He turned to them and beckoned. They were wary at first, the way the older ones tended to be, but then they came to him and stood close about him. Some of them shyly let him take their hands in his.

“Are you really a hjjk?”

“I am like you. I am flesh, like you.”

“Then why do they say you’re a hjjk?”

Kundalimon smiled. Gently he said, “The hjjks took me away when I was very young, and raised me in their Nest. But I was born here, you know. In this city.”

“You were? Who’s your mother? Who’s your father?”

“Marsalforn,” he said. “Ramla.” He struggled to remember which was which. The mother, the Egg-maker, that was Marsalforn, Nialli Apuilana had said, and the father, he who had kindled, was Ramla. Or was it the other way around? He could never keep it straight. In the Nest it made no difference who your Egg-maker was, and who the Life-kindler. Everyone was really the child of the Queen, after all. Without Her touch there could be no new life. Makers, kindlers, they all served the Will of the Queen.

“Where do they live?” a little girl asked. “Do you ever visit them, your mother and your father?”

“They live somewhere else now. Or maybe they don’t live anywhere any more. No one knows where they are.”

“Oh. That’s sad. Do you want to visit my mother and father, if you don’t have any of your own?”

“I’d like that,” said Kundalimon.

“How did you come here?” another girl said. “Did you fly like a bird?”

“I rode a vermilion.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arms, indicating a beast of mountainous size. “Down out of the north, from the place of the Nest of Nests, traveling day after day, week after week. Riding my vermilion, heading for this city, this city Dawinno. The Queen sent me here. Go to Dawinno, She said. She sent me so that I could talk to you. So that I could get to know you, and you to know me. So that I could bring you Her love, and Her peace.”

“Are you going to take us back with you to the Nest?” a boy in back called. “Did you come to steal us, like you were stolen?”

Kundalimon looked to him, amazed.

“Yes! Yes!” the children cried. “Are you here to take us to the hjjks?”

“Would you like that?”

“No!” they yelled, so loudly that his ears rang. “Don’t take us! Please don’t!”

“I was taken. You see that no harm came to me.”

“But the hjjks are monsters! They’re horrible and dangerous! Awful giant bug-creatures, is what they are!”

He shook his head. “It isn’t so. You don’t understand, because you don’t know them. No one here does. They’re kind. They’re loving. If you only knew. If you only could feel Nest-bond, if you only could experience Queen-love.”

“He sounds crazy,” a small boy said. “What’s he saying?”

“Shhh!”

“Come,” Kundalimon said. “Sit down with me, here in the park. There’s so much I want you to know. Let me tell you, first, what things are like, in the Nest—”

There was nothing left of the City of Yissou that Thu-Kimnibol remembered from his youth. Just as the first crude wooden shacks of Harruel’s original Yissou had been swept away to be replaced by the early stone buildings of Salaman’s city, so too by now had every vestige of that second city disappeared. A still newer and more powerful one had been superimposed on it, obliterating the other, which was gone without a trace, palaces and courts and houses and all.

Salaman said, “It looks good to you, does it? It looks like a real city, eh?”

“It doesn’t look at all the way I expected it would.”

“Speak up, speak up!” Salaman said sharply. “I have trouble understanding a lot of what you’re saying.”

“A thousand pardons,” said Thu-Kimnibol, in a voice twice as loud. “Is this better?”

“You don’t have to shout. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing. It’s all those damnable Beng words you use. You speak with helmets in your mouth. How am I supposed to make sense out of that? I suppose if I lived with Bengs in my lap the way you people do—”

“We are all one People now,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Ah. Ah. Is that what you are? Well, try not to speak so much Beng, if you want me to know what you’re saying. We’re conservatives here. We still speak the pure speech, the language of Koshmar and Torlyri and Thaggoran. You remember Torlyri? You remember Thaggoran, do you? No, no, how could you? He was the chronicler before Hresh. The rat-wolves killed him, right after the Coming Forth, that time when we were crossing the plain. But you weren’t even born then. You don’t remember any of that. I should have realized. I’m turning into a forgetful old man. And very cantankerous, Thu-Kimnibol. Very cantankerous indeed.”

Salaman grinned disarmingly, as though trying to deny his own words. But it was plain to see he was telling the truth. Cantankerous was what he had become, testy and sharp.

Time had brought changes to Salaman as well as to his city. Thu-Kimnibol remembered a Salaman from the early days who had been supple and resilient of mind, a clever and cunning planner, intelligent, far-seeing, a natural leader, an innately likable person. But then the changes had begun in him, that new Salaman emerging, darker, more crabbed of soul, a difficult and suspicious man. And now, twenty years later, the process was far along. The king seemed chilly and morose, gripped by some bitter malaise, or stained from within, perhaps, by the absolute power he had taken for himself here. You could see it in his face, drawn in upon itself, cheeks sunken, temples hollow, and in the taut, guarded way he carried himself. His fur had entirely whitened with age. There was a harsh wintry look about him.

The city he had created was like that too. Here were no broad sunny avenues, no brightly tiled towers against the blue of the sky, no green and leafy gardens, such as Thu-Kimnibol saw every day in airy Dawinno. The City of Yissou, penned within its crater-rim and its titanic rampart of heavy black stone, was a cramped, dismal place of narrow streets and low, thick-walled stone buildings with mere slits for windows. It looked more like a fortress than a city.

Was this what my father had in mind, Thu-Kimnibol wondered, when we left Vengiboneeza to found a city of our own? This dark, huddled, nasty town?

In the aftermath of the victory over the hjjks, on that sorry day when King Harruel had died fighting the insect hordes, Salaman had said, flushed with his new kingship, “We will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me.” But later — by demand of the people, said Salaman, claiming that they preferred to honor the god who protected them rather than the man who had brought them to this place — he had restored the original name. Just as well, Thu-Kimnibol thought now. He wouldn’t have wanted his father’s name forever attached to so grim and cheerless a city as Salaman’s City of Yissou.

Yet Salaman had managed to welcome him, at any rate, in an open-spirited and even cheerful way. He betrayed hardly a trace of recollection of the angry words that had passed between them long ago. Coming down from his walltop pavilion as Thu-Kimnibol’s wagons passed through the great gate of the city, he had waited calmly with folded arms for Thu-Kimnibol to step forth, and then, his stern and rigid face softening unexpectedly into a smile, he strode forward, arms extended, hands reaching for Thu-Kimnibol’s.

“Cousin! After so many years! What is this, do you return at last to take up your old life here, which was so suddenly interrupted?”

“No, king, I come only as an ambassador,” Thu-Kimnibol replied evenly. “I have messages for you from Taniane, and other things to discuss with you. My place is in Dawinno, now.” But he met Salaman’s embrace with an embrace of his own, reaching down to encircle the king in his arms. There was some difficulty in it for him, but only because Salaman was so much shorter a man.

To Thu-Kimnibol’s surprise, his heart did not resist the act of clasping Salaman to him, nor was there any insincerity in it. So it must be true, then: whatever grievance he had had against Salaman, or had thought he had, had burned away with time. The slights Salaman had visited upon him, or had seemed to visit upon him, when he was a young man, no longer mattered.

“We have our finest hostelry ready for you,” said Salaman. “And after you’re settled, a feast, eh? And then we’ll talk. Not the official business, not so soon. Just a talk, between two who once were good friends. Eh, Thu-Kimnibol?”

Fair enough, and friendly enough, thought Thu-Kimnibol. He let them take him to his rooms. Esperasagiot went off to find stables for the xlendis, and Dumanka to see about housing for the ambassadorial entourage, and Simthala Honginda to meet with officials of the city and discuss the local rules of diplomatic courtesy.

It was only much later, in the huge dark stone-walled ceremonial hall of the palace, after the feasting and after too much wine, and after Thu-Kimnibol had presented the gifts he had brought with him for Salaman from Taniane, the fine white cloths and green-tinged porcelains, and the expensively bound volume of chronicles that Hresh had assembled, and also personal gifts of his own to the king, casks of wine from his own vineyards, pelts of rare animals from the far southlands, preserved fruits, and more — it was only then that tensions finally began to surface between Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman.

Perhaps it was the language problem, which had bothered him from the first, that caused him finally to flare up. Salaman, who spoke the pure Koshmar speech, seemed genuinely annoyed by the Beng words and intonations Thu-Kimnibol habitually used. Thu-Kimnibol hadn’t realized how much the language of the People had changed in Dawinno since the union with the Bengs, how filled with Beng it had become. Salaman had never liked Bengs, ever since the golden-furred helmet-wearers had declined his invitation to settle in Yissou after being crowded out of Vengiboneeza by the hjjks, and had gone off to Hresh’s new Dawinno instead. And apparently the grudge had never left him, if the mere sound of Beng phrases in Thu-Kimnibol’s speech could so offend him.

Still, Thu-Kimnibol was taken by surprise, after an evening of drinking and entertainment, when Salaman suddenly said in a blunt way, as they lay comfortably sprawled side by side on ornate divans, “By the Five, I admire your gall! That you should come boldly dancing back to Yissou after the things you said to me the night you left.”

Thu-Kimnibol stiffened. “They still rankle in you, do they? After all these years?”

“You said you’d throw me from the top of the wall. Eh? Eh? Have you forgotten that, Thu-Kimnibol? By the Five, I haven’t! What do you think I made of your words, eh? Did I take them as pleasantries, do you think? Ah, no. No. The wall was much lower, then, but I took them to be a threat against my life. Which was correct, I think.”

“I would never have done it.”

“You could never have done it. Chham and Athimin were watching you the whole time. If you had laid a finger on me they’d have chopped you in pieces.”

Thu-Kimnibol took a long drink of his wine: the sweet strong wine of the district, which he hadn’t tasted in years. Over the top of the cup he glanced at the king. No one else was in the room but some of the evening’s dancers, exhausted, who sprawled like discarded pillows along the far wall. Were Salaman’s odious sons lurking behind the curtains, ready now to burst in and avenge the ancient slight he had given their father? Or would the dancers themselves suddenly come to life, with knives and strangling-cloths?

No. Salaman is simply playing games with him, he decided.

“You threatened me also,” he said. “You told me I’d be stripped of all rank and perquisites, and sent to scrub slops in the marketplace.”

“It was said in anger. If I’d had more of my brains about me, I’d have put a man of your size and strength to work on the wall, not in the market.”

The king’s eyes gleamed. He seemed immensely pleased by his own wit.

Best to ignore the insult. Thu-Kimnibol said only, “Why do you reawaken all this now, Salaman?”

Salaman smiled and stroked his chin. Long white tufts of hair sprouted from it now, giving him an oddly benign and almost comic appearance, probably not his intention. “We haven’t spoken in — what, twenty years? Twenty-five? Shouldn’t we at least try to clear the air between us?”

“Is that what you’re doing? Clearing the air?”

“Of course. Do you think we can simply ignore what happened? Pretend it never took place?” Salaman refilled his wine glass, and Thu-Kimnibol’s. He leaned across and stared at close range. In a low voice he asked, “Did you really want to be king in my place?”

“Never. I wanted only the honors due me as Harruel’s son.”

“They told me you meant to overthrow me.”

“Who did?”

“What does that matter? They’re all dead now. Ah, it was Bruikkos. Do you remember him? And Konya.”

“Yes,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “They came to resent me, when I was grown, because I had higher rank than they did. But what did they expect? They were only warriors. I was a king’s son.”

“And Minbain,” Salaman said.

Thu-Kimnibol blinked. “My mother ?”

“Ah, yes. She came to me, and said, ‘Thu-Kimnibol is restless, Thu-Kimnibol is hungry for power.’ She was afraid that you’d do something foolish and I would have to put you to death, which of course she would have regretted greatly. She said to me, ‘Speak with him, Salaman, ease him, give him at least the pretense of what he wants, so that he’ll do no harm to himself.’”

And the king smiled.

Thu-Kimnibol wondered how much of this was true, and how much simply some dark and devious amusement. Of course, Minbain might well have worried that her son would fatally overreach himself, and had taken steps to avert trouble. But that wouldn’t have been much like her. She’d have spoken to me first, Thu-Kimnibol thought. Well, no way to ask her about it now.

“I’d never have tried to displace you, Salaman. Believe me. I took an oath to you: why would I break it? And I knew that I was too young and hotheaded to be a king, and you were too powerfully entrenched.”

“I believe you.”

“If you had given me the titles and honors I wanted, there’d never have been trouble between us. I tell you that truly, Salaman.”

“Yes,” the king said, in a suddenly altered voice, all anger and harshness gone from it. “It was a mistake, my treating you the way I did.”

Instantly Thu-Kimnibol was on his guard.

“Are you serious?”

“I am always serious, Thu-Kimnibol.”

“So you are. But do kings ever admit their mistakes?”

“This one sometimes does. Not often, but sometimes, yes. This is one such time.” Salaman rose, stretched, laughed. “What I wanted was to goad you, to push you to your limit, to drive you out of Yissou. I thought you were too big for this city, too strong a rival, bound to grow even stronger as the years went on. That was my mistake. I should have cultivated you, honored you, disarmed you. And then put your strength to good use here. I saw that later, but it was too late. Well, you’re welcome here again, cousin.” Then an odd expression, half jovial, half suspicious, came into the king’s eyes. “You haven’t come here to seize my throne after all, have you?”

Thu-Kimnibol gave him a chilly look. But he managed a chuckle and a pale grin.

Salaman thrust out his hand. “Dear old friend. I should never have driven you off. I rejoice in your return, however brief it is.” He yawned. “Shall we get some rest, now?”

“A good idea.”

The king glanced at the sleeping dancers, who had not moved from their scattered places on the floor.

“Would you like one of these girls to warm your bed tonight?”

Again, a surprise. The thought of Naarinta, only a few weeks in the grave, came to him. But it was impolitic to refuse Salaman’s hospitality. And what did it matter, one coupling more or less, this far from home? He was weary. He was on edge, after this strange conversation. A warm young body in his arms in the night, a bit of comfort before the real work began — well, why not? Why not? He didn’t intend to remain chaste the rest of his life. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think I would.”

“What about this one?” Salaman prodded a girl with chestnut fur with his slippered toe. “Up, child. Up, up, wake up! You will be Prince Thu-Kimnibol’s tonight!”

The king sauntered away, moving slowly, lurching just a little.

Without a word the girl gestured and led Thu-Kimnibol off to his draped and cushioned bedchamber in the rear of the palace. By the dim amber bedlight he studied her with interest. She was short, and looked strong, and was wide through the shoulders for a girl. Her chin was strong, her gray eyes were set far apart. It was a familiar face. A sudden wild suspicion grew in him.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Weiawala.”

“Named for the king’s mate, were you?”

“The king is my father, sir. He named me after the first of his mates, but actually I’m the daughter of his third. The lady Sinithista is my mother.”

Yes. Yes. Salaman’s daughter. That was what he thought. It was astounding. Salaman, who had refused him a daughter once to be his mate, giving him one now as a plaything for the night. A strangely casual gift; or did Salaman have some deep purpose in mind? Very likely the last merchant caravan from Dawinno had brought him word that Naarinta was close to death. But if he hoped to cement relations between Yissou and Dawinno by some sort of dynastic marriage, this was an odd way indeed of going about it. Then again, Salaman was odd. He must have many daughters by now: too many, perhaps.

No matter. The hour was late. The girl was here.

“Come closer, Weiawala,” he said softly. “Beside me. Here. Yes. Here.”

“He’s preaching to the children,” Curabayn Bangkea said. “My men follow him wherever he goes. They see what he does. He gathers the young ones to him, he answers all their questions, he tells them about life in the Nest. He says it’s wrong to think of the hjjks as enemies. He spins fables for them about the Queen, and the great love She has for all creatures, not only creatures of Her own kind.”

“And they swallow what he tells them?” Husathirn Mueri asked. “They believe him?”

“He’s very persuasive.”

They were in the reception-room of Husathirn Mueri’s imposing house in the Koshmar district of the city, overlooking the bay. “Hard to imagine,” Husathirn Mueri said. “That he’s actually getting children to overcome their prejudice against hjjks. Children dread them. Always have. Great hideous hairy-legged bug-monsters, creeping stealthily around the countryside trying to grab little boys and girls — who wouldn’t despise them? I did. You must have. I had nightmares about hjjks, when I was young. Sweats and screaming. Sometimes I still do.”

“As do I,” said Curabayn Bangkea.

“What’s his secret, then?”

“He’s very gentle. Very tender. They feel his innocence, and children respond to innocence. They like to be with him. He leads them in meditation, and little by little they join with him in chanting. I think he snares their minds somehow with the chanting. He does it so subtly they don’t realize that what he’s selling them is a pack of ugly monsters. When he talks of hjjks, they don’t see real hjjks, I think. What they see is fairy-tale creatures, kindly and sweet. You can make any sort of monster seem sweet, your grace, if you tell the story the right way. And then the children are lost, once he’s made them stop fearing and hating the hjjks. He’s very clever, that boy. He reaches right into their minds and steals them from us.”

“But he can barely speak our language!”

Curabayn Bangkea shook his head. “Not true. He isn’t the uncouth wild man any more that he was when he first came here, not at all. Nialli Apuilana’s done a tremendous job of teaching him. It’s all come back to him. He must have known how to speak our language, you know, when he was young, before he was captured, and he’s found it again, the words, everything. It never really goes from you, when you’re born to it. He sits there — there’s a park he likes to go to, and children meet him there — and he talks of Queen-love, Nest-bond, Thinker-thoughts, Queen-peace, all that filthy hjjk craziness. And they eat it up, your grace. At first they were disgusted by the thought that real people could live in the Nest and like it, that you could touch hjjks and they could touch you and it would somehow seem a loving thing. But by now they believe it. You should see them sitting there with their eyes shining as he pours out his spew.”

“He’s got to be stopped.”

“I think so, yes.”

“I’ll talk with Hresh. No, with Taniane. For all I know, Hresh’ll think it’s utterly fascinating that Kundalimon’s peddling stuff like Queen-love and Nest-bond to little boys and girls. He may applaud the idea. Probably he’s interested in learning more about such things himself. But Taniane will know what to do. She’ll want to find out what sort of creature it is that we’ve allowed into our midst, and what her daughter is spending so much time with, for that matter.”

“There’s another thing, your grace,” said Curabayn Bangkea. “Perhaps you ought to know it before you talk with Taniane.”

“And what is that?”

The guard-captain hesitated a moment. He looked unnerved. At length he said, quickly, with a flat intonation that twanged like an untuned lute, “Nialli Apuilana and the hjjk ambassador have become lovers.”

It struck Husathirn Mueri with the force of a thunderbolt. He sat back, staggered, feeling a sudden ache in the pit of his stomach, a dryness in his throat, a harsh stabbing pain between his eyes.

“ What?Coupling, are they?”

“Like monkeys in heat.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“My brother Eluthayn was on guard duty at Mueri House until recently, you know. One day he passed outside the room of Kundalimon while she was with him. The sounds that he heard from in there — the thumpings, the gaspings, the passionate outcries—”

“And if she was teaching him kick-wrestling?”

“I don’t think so, your grace.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because when Eluthayn reported this thing to me, your grace, I went to the door myself and listened. I tell you, I know the sounds of coupling from the sounds of kick-wrestling. I’ve done a little coupling myself, your grace. And some kick-wrestling too, for that matter.”

“But she won’t couple with anyone! That’s well known all around town!”

“She’s been in the Nest,” Curabayn Bangkea said. “Perhaps she was only waiting for someone else with the flavor of hjjks all over his fur to come along.”

Wild images leaped unbidden to Husathirn Mueri’s mind, Kundalimon’s hand between Nialli Apuilana’s smooth thighs, Kundalimon’s lips to her breasts, her eyes flickering with excitement and eagerness, their bodies coming together, their sensing-organs thrashing about, Nialli Apuilana turning to present her swollen sexual parts to him—

No. No. No. No.

“You’re mistaken,” he said, after a while. “They’re doing something else in there. Whatever sounds you heard—”

“It wasn’t the sounds, your grace.”

“I don’t understand.”

“As you say, the evidence of the ears alone isn’t enough. So I drilled a small observation hole in the wall of the room alongside his.”

“You spied on her?”

“On him, your grace. On him. He was in my custody then, may I remind you. It was correct for me to ascertain the nature of his activities. I observed him. She was there. It wasn’t kick-wrestling that they were doing, your grace. Not when he had his hands on her—”

“Enough.”

“I can assure you—”

Husathirn Mueri held up his hand. “By Nakhaba, enough, man! I don’t want to hear the sordid details.” He struggled to calm himself. “I’ll take it on faith,” he said coldly, “that your report is accurate. Close your spy-hole and don’t drill any new ones. Come to me daily with accounts of the ambassador’s preachings among the young.”

“And if I see him with Nialli Apuilana, your grace? In the street, I mean. Or in some public dining-hall. Or anywhere else, however innocent. Shall I tell you about that too?”

“Yes,” said Husathirn Mueri. “Tell me about that too.”

“I want to go into the Nest with you,” Nialli Apuilana said. “To feel Nest-bond again. To speak Nest-truths.”

“You will. When the time comes. When my work here is done.”

“No. I mean here, today, now.”

It was a quiet afternoon. The warm humid summer was over, and a strong autumn wind was blowing, hot but dry and crisp, out of the south. She and Kundalimon had coupled, and now they lay curled close together on his couch with limbs still entangled, grooming each other’s rumpled fur.

He said, “Now? How can that be?”

She gave him a wary look. Had she misjudged the moment? Was twining, was any sort of soul-intimacy, still as frightening to him as it had been at the beginning? He had changed so much since he had begun going out by himself into the city. He seemed different now in so many ways, stronger, less tense, more assured of himself in his flesh-folk identity. But still she was uneasy about risking his trust by crossing the unspoken boundaries that had been established between them.

He seemed calm, though. He watched her with easy, gentle eyes.

Cautiously she said, “You can guide me through your Nest-memories. By the touching of minds.”

“You mean the twining,” he said.

She hesitated. “That would be one way. Or through using our second sight.”

“You often speak of second sight. But I don’t know what that is.”

“A way of seeing — of perceiving the depths that lie beyond the surface of things—” Nialli Apuilana shook her head. “You’ve never felt yourself doing it? But everyone can do it. Young children, even. Although perhaps in the Nest, with no other flesh-folk minds around to show you what your own mind was capable of—”

“Show me now,” he said.

“You won’t be afraid when I touch you?”

“Show me.”

He really has changed, she thought.

Still she was fearful of provoking fear in him, of forcing him away from her. But he had asked. He had asked. Show me. She summoned her second sight and sent it outward, expanding its field around him. He felt it. No doubt of that. She perceived his mind’s instantaneous reaction, a startled drawing-back. And he was trembling. But he remained close beside her, open, accessible. There was no indication that he was putting up any of the usual defenses that one would put up against someone else’s use of second sight. Was it simply that he didn’t know how? No, no, he seemed to be accepting her probing willingly.

She took a deep breath and drove her expanded perceptions as deep into his mind as she dared.

And she saw the Nest.

Everything was blurred, indistinct, uncertain. Either his mental powers were still undeveloped, or he had learned some hjjk way of masking his mind. For what she saw in him she saw as though through many thicknesses of dark water.

It was the Nest, all right. She saw the dusky underground corridors, she saw the vaulted roofs. Dark figures moved about, hjjk-shaped, hjjk-rigid. But everything was vague. She couldn’t distinguish castes. She couldn’t even tell male from female, Military from Worker. And what was missing, above all else, was the spirit of the Nest, the dimension of soul-reality, the depth of Nest-bond that should envelop everything, the all-pervasive sweep of Queen-love flooding those dim subterranean aisles, the overriding imperative that was Egg-plan. There was no savor. There was no warmth. There was no nourishment. She was looking into the Nest and yet she remained cut off from it, an outsider, alone, lost in the cold realm of blackness that lies between the unfeeling stars.

In frustration, she probed a little deeper. No better. Then she felt a gentle push.

Kundalimon was trying to help her. Somehow he had discovered the font of his own second sight, which perhaps he had never used before, or had used without knowing what it was, and he was straining to amplify the vision for her. But even that couldn’t entirely lift the veil. She saw more clearly, yes, but the new brightness merely brought new distortions.

Maddening. To come this close, and not get there—

A sob burst from her. She pulled her mind free of his and rolled away, to lie facing the wall.

“Nialli?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll be all right in a moment.” She wept silently. She felt more alone than ever before.

His hands caressed her back, her shoulders. “Did I do anything to upset you?”

“No. Nothing, Kundalimon.”

“We went about it the wrong way, then?”

She shook her head. “I saw a little. Just a little. The edge of the outline of the Nest. It was all so shadowy. Unclear. Distant.”

“I did it wrong. You will teach me the right way.”

“It wasn’t your fault. It — just didn’t work.”

There was silence for a while. He moved closer to her, covering her body with his. Then, suddenly, startlingly, he ran his sensing-organ along hers, a quick whispering touch that sent a shiver of keen sensation through her soul.

“We try the twining, you think?” he asked.

“Do you want to, Kundalimon?” She held her breath, waiting.

“You want to see the Nest.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. So very much.”

“Then maybe the twining.”

“You were afraid, that other time.”

“That was the other time.” He laughed softly. “And there once was a time when you were afraid of coupling, I think.”

She smiled. “Things change.”

“Yes. Things change. Come. Show me the twining, and I’ll show you the Nest. But you must turn toward me, first.”

Nialli Apuilana nodded and swung around to face him. He was smiling, that wonderful open sunlit smile of his, a child’s innocent smile in a man’s face. His eyes gleamed into hers, bright, expectant, excited. He was beckoning to her in a way that he had never done before.

“I’ve twined only once,” she said. “With Boldirinthe, almost four years ago. I may not be much better at it than you are.”

“We will be fine,” he said. “Show me what it is, this twining.”

“First the sensing-organs, the contact. You focus everything, your entire being—” He began to look troubled. “No,” she said. “Don’t try to focus anything, don’t even try to think. Just do as I do, and let things happen to you.” She drew her sensing-organ close to his. He relaxed. He seemed completely trusting now.

They made contact. And held it.

Nialli Apuilana had never forgotten her hour of intimacy with Boldirinthe. The phases of it were clear in her mind, the way they had descended the ladder of perception that led to the deep realms of the soul where the communion took place. Kundalimon followed her readily. He seemed to know intuitively what to do, or else he discovered it as he went. In moments he was following her no longer, but was descending at her side, and even, at times, leading the way, down toward the dark mysterious depths where self was unknown and nothing existed but the unity of all souls.

They joined, then, in full twining.

His soul swept into hers, and hers into his, and at last she is back in the Nest.

The Nest of Nests, it is, the great one far in the north, not the subsidiary Nest where Nialli Apuilana had lived during her brief few months of captivity. In a sense all Nests were one, for Queen-presence infused them all; but she had known, even then, that her Nest was only a minor one in an outlying district of the hjjk domain, presided over by a subsidiary Queen. Where they are now is the heartspring of the nation, the core and hub of it, the great pivot, the axis of all. Here dwells the Queen of Queens.

Nothing about this place seems strange to Nialli Apuilana. It is where Kundalimon had spent most of the days of his life, flesh-folk boy among the hjjks, moving freely in their world, eating their food, breathing their air, thinking their thoughts, living as they lived. This was his home. And so it is her home also.

Hand in hand they float through it like wandering ghosts, unseen, undisturbed. She is Kundalimon, and he is Nialli Apuilana. He is she and she is he: not knowing where one leaves off and the other begins.

The great Nest is endless, a maze of warm dark galleries half hidden beneath the surface of the ground, stretching for leagues in all directions. The gentle glow of Nest-light comes from the walls, pink and soft, a dream-light. On the easy currents of the air drifts the tingling sweet fragrance of Nest-breath, soft as fur, rich with the complex chemical messages that pass between the Nest’s inhabitants. Here in these intricate labyrinths live millions of hjjks, and here too, in the deepest part, at the still point of this busy hive, at the center of everything, lies the quiescent immensity of the Queen of Queens, ancient, eternal, undying, vast, all-guiding, all-loving. Nialli Apuilana feels the presence of Her greatness now, rolling through every hall like the tolling of a giant gong. There is no escaping it. She encompasses all the Nest and all the subordinate Nests as well in Her overflowing outpouring of love. And then too over everything else there sweeps that even higher and more all-embracing force, which even the Queen Herself acknowledges as supreme, the great undeniable inescapable torrential energy that is Egg-plan, the fundamental power of life, the ineluctable universal femaleness that drives all existence endlessly forward.

Nialli Apuilana yields herself to that great song of perfection with utmost joy and ease. This is why she had yearned to come here: to feel once again the reassuring knowledge that the world has meaning and structure, to know once more that a shape, a design, an underlying purpose governs the bewildering workings of the cosmos.

“Here is Nest-truth,” Kundalimon says to her, and she to him. “Here is Queen-light.”

They drift onward, unhindered, here, there, everywhere.

Without a sound the myriad dwellers of the Nest go about their tasks. Each one knows its place, each its responsibility. That is Nest-bond: harmony, unity, pattern. Nothing like it exists in the chaotic random world outside; but nothing is chaotic or random here. A profound silence prevails in these corridors, and yet there is purposeful activity everywhere.

Here, bands of Militaries come trooping in from their latest forays, and Workers go to them to collect and clean their weapons, and to carry off for cleaning and storage the food-stuffs they have brought back. Here, in this place where the light is a dark purple, a smoldering smoky color, troops of Egg-layers rest in their stalls. Long lines of Life-kindlers move steadily past them, each pausing by this one or by that to perform the act of fertilization. Here, Nourishment-givers hover over eggs as they hatch, and bend to offer food to the newborn.

And here the Nest-thinkers hold forth, enclosed in gloomy narrow stalls, instructing the young who stand motionless before them in taut concentration. Here too are the Queen-attendants in their warm catacomb, preparing Her morning meal. Here are the Queen-guardians in close formation, arms linked tightly together, barring the way to the lower galleries where the royal chamber is. Here are processions of the young, males here, females there, awaiting their summons to the chamber, there to receive the gift of Queen-touch and be awakened to adulthood and fertility — or else to be set apart by a different designation, marked as a Warrior or a Worker or, perhaps, to become one of the chosen few, a Nest-thinker.

The royal chamber itself is the only area of the Nest that she and Kundalimon do not enter in this vision. They may not, not yet, for she was never granted First Audience in her earlier stay in the Nest, and Kundalimon cannot bring her before the Queen now, not even this way, in a vision, in a dream. That would have to wait until its proper time. When at last she would behold the Queen, vast and inscrutable, at rest in Her secret place at the heart of the Nest.

But everything else lies before them. Nialli Apuilana moves through it in wonder, in a rapture of Nest-love.

Nest-thinker says, “Here they are. The flesh-child, and the flesh-child’s bride. Come, sit here with us, enter into Nest-truth with us.”

So they aren’t invisible to the Nest-dwellers after all. Of course not. How could they be?

She puts forth her hand, and a hard bristly claw takes it and holds it. Shining many-faceted blue-black eyes glow close by hers. Sweeping waves of force throb through her soul, the Nest-thinker’s potent emanation.

Nest-thinker enters her spirit now and shows her the high Nest-truth, the one supreme unifying concept of the universe, the power that binds all things, which is Queen-peace. He shows her the great Pattern: the grandeur of Queen-love which embodies Egg-plan in order to bring Nest-plenty to all things. He fills her mind with it, as another Nest-thinker in another Nest had done once before, years ago.

And, as had happened before, the simplicity and force of what he tells her enters Nialli Apuilana’s soul and takes possession of it, and she bows down to the unanswerable reality of it. She kneels then, sobbing in ecstasy, as the grand music of it roars through the channels and byways of her spirit. And gives herself up to it, in the fullest of surrenders.

She is in her true home again.

She will never leave it, now.

“Nialli?”

The sound of a voice, unexpected, numbingly intrusive. It fell upon her like a cascade of boulders roaring down an immeasurable slope.

“Nialli, are you all right?”

“No — yes — yes—”

“It’s me, Kundalimon. Open your eyes. Open your eyes, Nialli!”

“They — are — open—”

“Please. Come back from the Nest. It’s over, Nialli. Look: look, there’s my window, there’s the door, there’s the courtyard down there.”

She struggled. Why should she want to leave the place that was her home?

“Nest-thinker — Queen-presence—”

“Yes. I know.”

He held her, stroked her, pulled her close against him. The warmth of him steadied her. She blinked a few times and her sight began to clear. She could make out the walls of his room, the little slit of a window, the clear, dazzling autumn light. She heard the sound of the dry rushing wind. Reluctantly she yielded to unanswerable reality. The Nest was gone. No Nest-light here, no Nest-scent. She could no longer feel the presence of the Queen. And yet, yet, the words of Nest-thinker still resonated through her spirit, and the powerful comfort she had taken from them still calmed and eased her soul.

She looked at him in sudden astonishment.

Kundalimon, she thought. I’ve twined with Kundalimon!

“Were you there with me?” Nialli Apuilana asked. “Did you feel it too?”

“All of it, yes.”

“And we’ll see it again, won’t we? As often as we like.”

“In visions, yes. And one day we’ll see it as it really is. We will go to the Nest together, when the time comes. But for now, we have the visions.”

“Yes,” she said. She was trembling a little. “I knew we’d have to twine, if we wanted to see it together. And so we did. We did it very well.”

“We are twining-partners now,” he said.

“How do you know that term?”

“I learned it from you. Just now, while we lay twined together. I was in your soul while you were in mine.” He smiled. “Twining-partners. Twining-partners. You and I.”

“Yes.” She looked at him tenderly. “Yes, we are.”

“It is like coupling, but much deeper. Much closer.”

Nialli Apuilana nodded. “Anyone can couple. But it’s possible to achieve real twining only with a few. We’re very lucky people.”

“When we are in the Nest together, there will be much twining for us?”

“Yes. Oh, yes!”

“I will be ready to return to the Nest very soon now,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you’ll go with me when I leave here? We’ll go together, you and I?”

She nodded eagerly. “Yes. I promise you that.”

She looked toward the window. Out there all the city went about its varied occupations, her mother, her father, fat Boldirinthe, sly slippery Husathirn Mueri, filthy Curabayn Bangkea and his filthy brother, thousands of citizens moving along the hectic circles of their individual paths. And they were all blind to the truth. If they only knew, she thought. All of them, out there! But they had no idea what had happened in here. What sort of partnership had been forged in here, this day. What promises we have made. And will keep.

The first days of Thu-Kimnibol’s visit had been the time for the entertainments, the dancers and the feastings and the lovemaking and the displays of kick-wrestling and fire-catching, and then the final exchange of gifts. Now it was time for business. Whatever thing it was that had brought him back to Yissou.

Salaman took his place on his great throne in the Hall of State. It was carved from a single immense teardrop-shaped block of glossy black obsidian streaked with flame-colored swirls, which he had unearthed long ago while digging in the heart of the original city. The Throne of Harruel, everyone called it: one of the few tributes the city paid to its first king. Salaman didn’t mind that. A sop to the beloved founder’s memory: why not? But Harruel had never so much as seen his supposed throne, let alone sat upon it.

People nowadays thought of Harruel, when they thought of him at all, as a great warrior, a wise far-seeing leader. A great warrior, certainly. But a leader? Wise? Salaman had his doubts about that. By now, though, scarcely anyone was still alive who remembered the true Harruel, that brooding drunkard, that beater and forcer of women, forever consumed by his own racking anguish of the spirit.

And here now was Harruel’s son, come to Harruel’s city to stand before the Throne of Harruel as Dawinno’s ambassador to Harruel’s successor. The great wheel turned, and in its turnings brought everything to everything. Why was he here? So far he had given no inkling. It had all gone smoothly up till now, at least. In the beginning Salaman had found Thu-Kimnibol’s unexpected arrival ominous and oppressive: a mystery, a threat. But also it was an interesting challenge: can you still handle him, Salaman? Can you hold him in check?

The king said, gesturing amiably, “Will you be seated, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“If it pleases your majesty, I’m comfortable as I am.”

“Whatever you prefer. Will you have wine?”

“After we speak, maybe. It’s early in the day for me to be drinking.”

Salaman wondered, not for the first time, whether Thu-Kimnibol was being shrewd or merely simple. The man was impossible to read. By choosing to remain standing, Thu-Kimnibol had, so it seemed, opted to dominate the room by sheer size and force; but had that been a deliberate choice, or, as he claimed, a matter of preference in comfort? And by refusing wine he had imposed a tension and a stiffness on the meeting that might work to his favor in any hard bargaining. Or was it just that drinking wasn’t to his taste? The sons of drunkards often want to follow a different path.

The king felt the need of regaining the advantage that Thu-Kimnibol, by inadvertence or design, had taken from him so swiftly and easily. It was bad enough that he was so big. Salaman always felt uneasy in the presence of big men, not because he had any great regret at being short-legged himself, but because great slow lumbering fellows like Thu-Kimnibol made him feel overhasty and fevered in his motions, like some small scurrying animal. But aside from all that he could not allow Thu-Kimnibol the additional superiority of controlling the field of discussion.

“You know my sons?” Salaman asked, as the princes began to enter the hall and take their seats.

“I know Chham and Athimin, certainly. And Ganthiav I met when I arrived.”

“This is Poukor. This is Biterulve. And these are Bruikkos and Char Mateh. My son Praheurt is too young to attend this meeting.” The king spread his arms in a great curve, embracing them all. Let them surround Thu-Kimnibol. Let them engulf him. He may be big, but together we can outnumber him.

They lined the room, the seven princes, each of them a close copy of his father down to the cold gray eyes, the stockiness of frame — all but the one called Biterulve, rather less sturdy than the others, and pale of aspect, though he at least had the royal eyes. Salaman was pleased to see some shadow of dismay cross Thu-Kimnibol’s face as these replicas of him assembled. An impressive phalanx, they were. They testified to the force of his spirit: when he coupled with a woman it was his seed that made the mark, his features and form that were born again. Anyone could see that in these sons of his. He was fiercely proud of it.

“A commendable legion you have here,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Indeed. They are my great pride. Do you have sons, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“I was never blessed that way by Mueri. And am not likely to be, now. The lady Naarinta—” His voice trailed off. His face turned bleak.

Salaman felt a stab of shock. “Dead? No, cousin! Tell me it’s not so!”

“You knew she was ill?”

“I heard something about it when the merchant caravan was last here. But they said there was some hope of her recovery.”

Thu-Kimnibol shook his head. “She lingered all winter, and weakened in the spring. Not long before I set out for Yissou she died.”

The somber words fell like stones into the room. Salaman was caught unprepared by them. They had managed so far this evening to be purely formal with each other, rigidly playing their official roles, king and ambassador, ambassador and king, like figures on a frieze, for the sake of keeping the troublesome past that lay between them from breaking through and disturbing the niceties of their diplomatic calculations. But now an unexpected moment of mortal reality had interposed itself. “A pity. A very great pity,” Salaman said, after a moment, and sighed. “I prayed for her recovery, you know, when the merchants told me. And I grieve for you, cousin.” He offered Thu-Kimnibol a look of genuine regret. Suddenly the tone of the meeting was altered. This man here, this looming giant, this ancient rival of his, this dangerous son of the dangerous Harruel: he was vulnerable, he had suffered. It became possible to see him as something other than a puzzling and annoying intruder, suddenly. He imagined Thu-Kimnibol at his lady’s deathbed, imagined him clenching his fists and weeping, imagined him howling in rage as he himself had howled when his own first mate Weiawala had died. It made Thu-Kimnibol more real for him. And he remembered, then, how they had stood together, he and Thu-Kimnibol, at the battle against the hjjks, how Thu-Kimnibol, just a child then, still carrying his child-name, even, had fought like a hero that day. A great surge of liking and even love for this man, this man whom he had hated and had driven from his kingdom, flooded his soul. He leaned forward and said in a low hoarse tone, “No prince of your bearing should be without sons. You ought to choose another mate as soon as your mourning’s over, cousin.” Then, with a wink: “Or take two or three. That’s how I’ve done it here.”

“In Dawinno we still allow ourselves only one at a time, cousin,” Thu-Kimnibol replied evenly. “We are very conservative that way.” To Salaman it felt like a rebuke, and some of his good will toward Thu-Kimnibol evaporated as swiftly as it had come. Thu-Kimnibol shrugged and said, “For now the thought of choosing a new mate seems very strange to me. Time will take care of that, I suppose.”

“Time takes care of everything,” Salaman said elaborately, as though uttering oracular wisdom.

He could see that Thu-Kimnibol was growing impatient. Perhaps this talk of sons and mates was troubling to him. Or perhaps his impatience was yet another ploy. He had begun to pace about, stalking the vast room like some ponderous beast, striding past one row of princes, whirling, coming back past the other. Their eyes followed his every movement.

Abruptly Thu-Kimnibol settled on a divan close by the king and said, “Enough of this, cousin. Let me come to my business. Some months back a strange boy appeared in our city. A young man, rather. Riding out of the north, on a vermilion. Barely able to speak our language. Hjjk-noises were all he could manage, and maybe a People word or two. We couldn’t figure out where he had come from or what he wanted or who he was, until Hresh, using the sort of tricks that only Hresh knows, went into his mind with the Wonderstone. And discovered that he was from our city in the first place: stolen, about thirteen years back. When he was just a child.”

“Stolen by the hjjks, you mean?”

“Right. And raised by them in the Nest of Nests. And now they’d sent him back to us as an emissary, to offer us Queen-love and Queen-peace. So Hresh said.”

“Ah,” said Salaman. “We had one of those come to us a little time ago. A girl, she was. She’d spit and rant at us all day in hjjk. We couldn’t make any sense out of it at all.”

“She knew a few words of our language, father,” Chham said.

“Yes. Yes, she did. She’d babble to us about the grandeur of the hjjk Queen, the high godly truth of Her ways. Or similar nonsense. We didn’t pay much attention. How long ago was this, Chham?”

“It was Firstmonth, I think.”

“Firstmonth, yes. And what finally happened? Ah: I remember. She tried to escape, wasn’t it, and make her way back to the hjjks?”

“Yes,” said Chham. “But Poukor caught up with her outside the wall and killed her.”

“ Killedher?” Thu-Kimnibol said, eyes wide, astonishment in his voice.

Thu-Kimnibol’s show of seeming tenderness struck the king as amusing, even quaint in its sentimentality. Or did he mean it as another rebuke? Salaman wondered. He made a broad, imperiously sweeping gesture of his arms. “What else could we do? Obviously she was a spy. We couldn’t let her go back to the Nest with everything she’d learned here.”

“Why not simply bring her back into the city? Feed her, teach her how to speak the language. She’d have shed her hjjk ways sooner or later.”

“Would she?” the king asked. “I doubt that very much. To look at her she was a girl of the People, but her soul was the soul of a hjjk. That wouldn’t ever have changed. Once they get their poison into your head, you’re never the same again. Especially when it happens young. No, cousin, before long she’d have escaped again and gotten back to them. Better to kill her than to let that happen. It’s a terrible foulness, that a girl of the People should live in the Nest. Among those filthy creatures. The very thought of it sickens the gods themselves.”

“So I’d say also. All the same, to butcher her that way — a girl, a young girl—” Thu-Kimnibol shrugged. “Well, it’s no affair of mine. But I think she may not have been a spy. I think she was sent to you as an envoy, just as this Kundalimon — that’s his name — was to us. Hresh says they were sent to all the Seven Cities, these envoys.”

“Be that as it may. We’re not interested in getting messages from the hjjks,” said Salaman indifferently. “But of course Hresh would think otherwise. Does he happen to know why the Queen is sending these envoys around?”

“The Queen is offering us a treaty,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

Salaman sat bolt upright. “A treaty? What kind of treaty?”

“A peace treaty, cousin. An imaginary line is to be drawn clear across the continent from Vengiboneeza to the eastern coast. The hjjks will promise never to come across that line into our territory without an invitation, provided, of course, that we don’t go into any land of theirs. Our territory will be considered to be the region from the City of Yissou southward past Dawinno to the Southern Sea, or wherever it is that the land comes to its end. All the rest of the world is to be considered theirs, and is closed to us forever. Oh, yes, one other thing: we have to agree to let hjjk scholars live among us, so that they can teach us the truths of their religion and the wisdom of their way of life.”

It sounded unreal. It was like something out of a dream.

Were they serious, the hjjks, proposing such an absurdity?

This was all so foolish that Salaman found himself suspecting some intricate trick on Taniane’s part, or Thu-Kimnibol’s. But no, no, that was just as foolish an idea.

“What a wonderful offer,” he said, with a little laugh. “I assume that what you did was to have the ambassador skinned and sent his hide back to the Queen with your answer written on it. That’s what I would have done.”

Thu-Kimnibol’s eyes narrowed: that look of rebuke, again.

He thinks we’re barbarians, Salaman thought.

“The boy’s still in Dawinno. He’s under guard, but being treated well. The chieftain’s daughter herself brings him his food every day and is teaching him our language, which of course he’s forgotten, having been a captive so many years.”

“But this treaty? It’s been rejected, naturally.”

“Neither rejected nor accepted, cousin. Not yet. We’ve debated it in our high councils, but nothing’s decided. Some of us are eager to sign it, because it would assure peace. These people believe you’d ratify it too, what with the hjjks of Vengiboneeza being so close to your northern boundary and you being so uneasy of the possibility of an invasion.”

Amazed by that, Salaman said, with a snort of outrage, “They believe that? That I’d sign such a cowardly treaty?”

“Some do, cousin. I never imagined it myself.”

“You’re opposed to the treaty yourself.”

“Of course. So is Hresh: he can’t abide surrendering the unexplored parts of the world to the hjjks.”

“And Taniane?”

“She hasn’t said. But she despises the bugs. They grabbed her daughter a few years back, you know, and kept her for months. I thought Taniane would lose her mind. She’s not likely to want to do business with the Queen. Especially if Hresh’s already against the idea.”

Salaman was silent. This was astounding stuff. He coiled himself back into the polished curving recesses of his throne, and let his eyes rove down the rows of his sons. Solemnly they returned his gaze, minoring him in gravity and austere concern. Probably they didn’t understand the half of what was at stake, he thought, but no matter. No matter. They’d grasp it soon enough.

It was hard for him to believe that Dawinno hadn’t instantly flung the Queen’s preposterous proposal back in Her face, if a face is what it could be called, without further ado. This so-called treaty was nothing more than a deed of perpetual surrender. And yet there were some down there who actually argued for signing it! Probably the Beng faction, Salaman supposed: the fat merchants, the comfortable politicians. Yes, appease the hjjks, go on living your own easy life in your own pleasant city of the balmy breezes, which in any case lies comfortably distant from the heart of the hjjk territory. They’d want that, yes. Regardless of the long-term risk. Regardless of the ultimate cost.

He said, after a bit, “What chance is there that the cowards will have their way and you’ll sign the treaty?”

“That won’t happen.”

“No. I don’t expect that it would. But I’ll tell you what position I’ll take if it did. If Dawinno wants to sign away its birthright to the hjjks, say I, well, so be it, but nothing that Dawinno signs is going to be binding on us. The City of Yissou will never recognize the authority of the hjjks in anything, so long as I live. Which goes for my sons as well.”

“You needn’t worry,” said Thu-Kimnibol. “The hjjk treaty’s a dead thing. That isn’t what I came here to discuss with you.”

“What is, then?”

“I’m here to propose an alliance, cousin. Dawinno and Yissou, joined together for a single purpose.”

Salaman sat forward, grasping the sides of the throne. “And what would that purpose be, cousin?”

There was a strange new light in Thu-Kimnibol’s dark chilly eyes. “To make war on the hjjks,” he said, “and slaughter them like vermin.”

The zoological garden, near sundown. It is the eve of the Festival of Dawinno, and everyone is getting ready for the games. All but Hresh, ever contrary. Alone he wanders among his animals, thinking that it’s time to see what the minds of his caviandis are really like.

Sometimes, when he was younger, he would go about secretly trying to walk the way he imagined a sapphire-eyes would, slow and heavy, in an attempt to think like one. He remembers that now. Hold yourself like one, move like one, maybe you can make your mind work the way their minds worked. And also trying now and then to walk like a Dream-Dreamer, like a human, when no one was looking: pretending he was long and thin and skinny-shanked and had no sensing-organ. But the more he tried it, the more he felt like an ape. A monkey, even, just a jumped-up monkey. He would tell himself, then, that he was being too harsh on himself and on the People. We are much more than apes, very much more than monkeys. He still has to tell himself that once in a while. He’s been telling himself that nearly all his life. Even believing it, most of the time. Look at the city, for example. Is Dawinno so trivial? Everything we’ve accomplished here: he knows it’s a tremendous achievement. But sometimes when he sleeps Hresh dreams he’s back in the cocoon, a scrawny boy again, kick-wrestling and cavern-soaring and hoping without much luck to sneak a peek at old Thaggoran’s secret box of chronicles. That idle, empty, stagnant life. Living like animals, though we gave ourselves names, invented rites and ceremonies, even kept historical records. Why didn’t we die of boredom? he often wonders. Spending seven hundred thousand years penned up in those little caverns, doing nothing in particular. No wonder we came erupting out building enormous cities and filling them with our young. All that lost time to make up. All those dark stifled years. Build, grow, discover, fight. Yes. And here we are. What good has it all done? All our ambitions. All our schemes. Our grand projects.

What good, the water-strider asked us once, when we wanted to know the way to Vengiboneeza? What good? What good? What good? All we are is furry monkeys playing at being human.

No. No. No. No.

We are the ones to whom the gods gave the world.

Time to walk like a caviandi, now. Time to find out what they’re really like.

They’ve acclimated well to life in Hresh’s little park. His workmen have diverted the stream that flowed through the garden so that it forks, and the left-hand branch of it now runs down the patch of sloping, uneven terrain that has become the caviandis’ territory. Here, behind gossamer fences strong enough to hold back a vermilion, the two gentle beasts fish, sun themselves, patiently work at constructing a network of shallow subterranean tunnels flanking the stream on both sides. They seem to have recovered from the terror of their capture. Sometimes Hresh sees them sitting side by side on the great smooth pink rock above their nest, staring raptly at the rooftops and white walls of the residential district just beyond the park’s boundaries, as though looking toward the palaces of some unattainable paradise.

He no longer doubts they’re intelligent. It’s the quality of that intelligence that he wants to measure. But first he has had to give them some time to get used to their captivity. They have to be calm, trusting, accessible, before he attempts any sort of deep contact with them.

He approaches them now. Entering their enclosure, he takes a seat on a rock next to the stream and waits for them to come close. The two sleek, slender, big-eyed purple beasts are at the other side, near the fence, standing upright as they often do. They seem curious about his presence. But still they hold back.

Gradually he activates his second sight at low level, letting the field of perception that it creates spread out in a sphere around him.

He feels the tingling warmth of contact. He senses the auras of their souls and perhaps the workings of their minds. But what he picks up is nothing more than a dull undercurrent, a vague uncertain throbbing of distant sentience.

Cautiously Hresh sharpens the focus.

This is nothing new to him, this experiencing of alien minds. Many of the creatures of the New Springtime are capable of thought, perhaps all of them. And could communicate with him, he suspects, if only he learned how to detect their emanations.

Over the years he has on occasions spoken, after a fashion, with goldentusks and xlendis and taggaboggas and vermilions. He remembers the clangorous mental voice of the water-strider, rising to its great height to mock the wandering folk of Koshmar’s tribe as they searched for lost Vengiboneeza. And Young Hresh crouching behind a rock, listening by second sight to the bloodthirsty chanting of a pack of rat-wolves who spoke a dreadful howling language, the words of which were nevertheless unmistakably clear to him: “Kill — kill — flesh — flesh!”

He had even, once, when the tribe was only a few days out of the cocoon, heard with chilled fascination the dry buzzing silent mind-speech of a hjjk, greeting the tribe with cool scorn during a chance encounter in a bleak, chill meadow.

Everywhere in the world mind speaks to mind, creature hails creature in the voiceless speech of the spirit. It is not unusual. The world had long ago reached a time in the unfolding of its growth when such abilities were widespread. Virtually everything can speak, though some species have very little to say, and that little is often simple and dim.

But these caviandis now — standing there on their hind legs, their delicate hands outstretched, their whiskered snouts twitching thoughtfully, their dark luminous eyes warm and gleaming — Hresh suspects that they are extraordinary, that they are something more than mere beasts of the field—

He raises his sensing-organ, which intensifies the emanation that is coming from him. They don’t draw back.

“I am Hresh,” he says. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

There is a stillness, an absence of contact. Then a whirling node of disturbance appears within the stillness, like a tiny red sun being born in the black shield of the heavens, and after a time the female caviandi says, in the silent voice of the mind, “I am She-Kanzi.”

“I am He-Lokim,” says the male.

Names! They have names! They have a sense of themselves as individual entities!

Hresh shivers with astonishment.

He has never found the concept of naming anywhere but among the People. The animals whose minds he has explored all seem to go nameless, as trees might, or rocks. Not even the hjjks use names, or so the story goes. They have no thought of themselves as individual beings separate from the mass of the Nest.

But here are She-Kanzi and He-Lokim proclaiming themselves to exist as their own selves. And the names, Hresh realizes almost at once, are more than mere labels. He comes to see that those two statements, “I am She-Kanzi,” “I am He-Lokim,” describe a whole cluster of complex things that he can barely comprehend, having to do with the two caviandis’ relationship to each other, to the other creatures of their kind, to the world in general, and even, possibly, to the caviandi gods, if he understands the emanation rightly. He doubts that he does. He suspects that what he has taken from it is no more than a rough first approximation. But even that much is amazing.

The caviandis stand all but motionless, watching him. They seem tense. The elegant little fingers of their finely formed hands contract nervously and open again, over and over. Their whiskered snouts twitch. But their huge shining unblinking eyes are like deep pools of dark liquid, still, serene, unfathomable.

Hresh surrounds them now with his second sight, and they show their innerness to him more fully. Much is unclear. But he draws a vision from them of a peaceful, undemanding life, lived close to the fabric of nature.

They are not human, as he understands that concept: they have no wish to grow or expand in any way, to yearn, to reach outward, to achieve mastery over anything except their own little stream. Yet in their own way their minds are strong. To be aware of their own existence: that in itself puts them far beyond most of the animals of the wilderness. They have a sense of past and future. They have traditions. They have history.

And the scope of that history is surprising. The caviandis are aware of the ancientness of the world, the great long curving arc of time that lies behind all the beings of the New Springtime. They feel the pressure of the vanished epochs, the succession of the lost eras. They know that kings and emperors have come and gone, that great races have arisen and flourished and fallen and have been forgotten beyond hope of recall. They understand that these are the latter days upon a world that has suffered and been transformed and grown old, and now is young again.

Most keenly do they know of the Long Winter. It lives vividly in their souls. From their minds come images of the sky turning dark as the plummeting death-stars raise clouds of dust and smoke. Of snow, of hail, of the burden of ice building up across the land. They show Hresh glimpses of ragged survivors of the early cataclysms trekking across the frozen landscape, seeking places where they would be safe: caviandis, hjjks, even the People themselves, fleeing toward the cocoons where they will wait out the interminable eons of cold.

Hresh has long wondered how many of the wild creatures that he has collected to live in his garden have come down through the ages of the Long Winter. How could they have survived it unprotected? Surely most of the former species had perished with the Great World. There must have been a new creation as the Earth slowly turned warm again. Perhaps, he has thought, the rays of the returning sun engendered new creatures from the thawing soil — or, more likely, the gods had transformed the older, cold-resistant creatures into the new beasts of the Springtime. It was Dawinno’s work.

But the caviandis are ancient, ancient as the People themselves.

The story is all there in the minds of these two, as though the memories are inborn, transmitted with the blood from mother to child. Cold winds sweeping across the Great World cities — the noble reptilian sapphire-eyes people waiting staunchly for their doom — the frail vegetal folk withering in the early blasts — the pale, hairless, mysterious humans now and again visible, moving calmly through the gathering chaos—

And the caviandis, adapting, burrowing into shallow tunnels, coming forth now and again to cut through the ice that covered their fishing-streams—

In wonder Hresh realizes that these creatures were able to survive the Long Winter outdoors, unprotected. While we hid ourselves away. While we cowered in holes in the rocks. And now, having lived on into the New Springtime, they find themselves hunted and slain and roasted for their meat by those who have come forth at long last from their hiding-places — or captured and put in pens, so that they could be studied—

Yet they hold no anger toward him, or toward his kind. That is, perhaps, the most amazing thing of all.

Hresh opens himself to them as fully as he can. He wants them to see his soul itself, and read it, and understand that there is no evil in it. He tries to make them realize that he has not brought them here to harm them, but only because he wishes to reach their spirits, which he could not have achieved in the wild lands where they lived. They can have their freedom whenever they want it, he tells them — this very day, even — now that he has learned what he had hoped to learn.

To this they are indifferent. They have their swift cool stream; they have their snug burrows; fish are plentiful here. They are content. How little they ask of life, really. And yet they have names. They know the history of the world. How strange they are, how simple, and yet so complex.

Now they seem to lose interest in him. Or else they are weary; for Hresh himself feels his energy running low, and knows he can’t sustain the contact much longer. A grayness is sweeping over his mind. Fog enfolds him.

There is more he wants to learn from them, much more. But that will have to wait. This has been a fruitful enough beginning. He lets the contact slip away.

Dawn, now. The day of the Games of Dawinno, the annual celebration commemorating the founding of the city and honoring its tutelary god.

For the chieftain a busy day lay ahead. So were they all, all busy days; but this one would be busier than most, for today she faced a conflict of rituals. By coincidence the opening of the Festival and the Rite of the Hour of Nakhaba were both due to be celebrated this day, and she was required to be present at both of them, more or less simultaneously.

At sunrise she’d have to be at the Beng temple to light the candle marking the Hour of Nakhaba. Then she would have to make her way — on foot, no less, no palanquins allowed, humility before the gods! — all the way out to Koshmar Park to declare the Festival officially open. And then back to the Bengs by midday to make sure that Nakhaba had properly achieved his re-entry into the world, after his journey on high to see the Creator and discuss the problems of the world with Him. Off to the Festival of Dawinno again, then, to preside over the afternoon’s round of athletic competitions.

All these gods! All these ceremonies!

In the simpler days long ago some of this would have fallen to Boldirinthe. But Boldirinthe was old and fat now, and turning a little silly, and in any event how could Boldirinthe preside over the Beng rite? To the Bengs she was nothing at all. Whatever authority the offering-woman had, it was confined entirely to those who still thought of themselves only as folk of the Koshmar tribe, and who clung to the old religion of the Five Heavenly Ones.

No, Taniane had to do the Hour of Nakhaba herself, not because she had a drop of Beng blood in her, or because she believed for a moment that Nakhaba existed or that he went on periodic trips to visit some still higher god far away, but because she was the head of the government here, who ruled over Koshmars and Bengs alike. Under the terms of the Act of Union she was in effect the successor to the whole long line of Beng chieftains. So Taniane would be there, at sunrise, to light the candle that sent the god of the Bengs on his way to the home of the Creator-god.

But first, there was this bothersome business with Husathirn Mueri—

He had sent a messenger to her late the night before, begging her for a private audience, telling her it couldn’t be delayed even a single day. “A matter of the highest seriousness,” he said. “Concerning the dangers to the city, and to herself, that certain activities of your daughter are creating. I can hardly underestimate the importance of these affairs.”

Undoubtedly he couldn’t. For Husathirn Mueri everything was a matter of the highest seriousness, especially if he saw something for himself in it. That was the way he was. All the same, Taniane didn’t care to spurn him. He was too useful a man; and he had powerful connections with the Beng community on his father’s side. If this concerned Nialli Apuilana — and if it really was serious, not just a ploy to enable him to get her attention—

She sent word that she would see him at her official residence, in the hour before dawn.

When she came downstairs in the morning Husathirn Mueri had already arrived and was pacing restlessly in the grand vestibule. The day was cool and overcast, with a light drizzle falling. He looked dapper and trim despite the rain. His thick black fur was impeccably groomed, and the white stripes that ran through it, so poignantly reminiscent of his mother Torlyri, stood out brilliantly.

He bowed elaborately as she entered, and made the sign of Dawinno at her, and for good measure wished her joy of Nakhaba’s favor. That was bothersome, all that piety coming from him. It was no secret to her how little faith he had in any of the gods, be they Beng or Koshmar.

Impatiently she said, not troubling to make holy signs at him in return, “Well, what is it, Husathirn Mueri?”

“Shall we talk here? In the vestibule?”

“It’s as good a place as any.”

“I had hoped — someplace a little more secluded—”

Taniane cursed silently. “Come with me, then. Hresh has a little study just off this hallway.”

A nervous look. “Will Hresh be there?”

“He gets up in the middle of the night and goes off to the House of Knowledge to play with his toys. Is this something Hresh isn’t supposed to know?”

“I’ll leave that to you to decide, lady,” Husathirn Mueri said. “My sole interest is in sharing it with you, but if you think the chronicler should be informed, well—”

“All right,” said Taniane. “Come.” She was growing more annoyed by the moment. All this bowing and shuffling, and this making of signs to honor gods he didn’t believe in, and these oily circumlocutions—

She led the way to the study and closed the door behind them. The place was a clutter of Hresh’s pamphlets and manuscripts. Through the narrow window she saw that the drizzle was turning now to heavy rain. The Festival would be ruined. She could see herself standing up there in the chieftain’s seat at the stadium, soaking wet, tossing down the smoldering sputtering torch that was supposed to inaugurate the races.

“So,” she said. “Here we are. A secluded place.”

“I have two things to report,” said Husathirn Mueri. “The first comes to me from the guards of the justiciary, who have been keeping watch on the hjjk ambassador at my orders.”

“You said this was about Nialli Apuilana.”

“So it is. But I also said it concerns a danger to the city also. I’d prefer to tell you that part of it first, if I may.”

“Well, go on, then.”

“The ambassador, you know, wanders freely around the city every day. We were keeping him under house arrest, but at Nialli Apuilana’s request it was lifted. And now he is corrupting the children, lady.”

She stared at him. “Corrupting?”

“Spreading hjjk beliefs among them. He teaches them such concepts as Nest-truth, Queen-love, Nest-bond, Egg-plan. You know those terms?”

“I’ve heard them, yes. Everyone has. I don’t really know what they mean.”

“If you’d like to know, you could ask any child in the city. Especially the very young ones. Kundalimon preaches to them daily. Daily he fills their heads with this evil nonsense.”

Taniane took a deep breath. “Are you sure of this?”

“He is very closely watched, lady.”

“And the children — do they listen to him?”

“Lady, they listen and believe! Their whole attitude toward the hjjks is changing. They don’t think of them the way the rest of us do, any longer. They don’t see them as repulsive. They don’t see them as evil. Talk to one of the children, lady, almost any child at all. You’ll find out. Kundalimon’s got them believing that the hjjks are deep and wise. Godlike, almost. Or at least creatures of some special high nature. He tells them how ancient the hjjks are, how important they were during the Great World days. You know how fascinated all children are by fables and tales of the Great World. And here he is, letting them know that people of one of the six Great World races still exist in our own time, and live in some fantastic underground castle far away, and want nothing more than to spread their loving wisdom among us—”

“Yes,” Taniane said crisply. “I see the danger. But what does he mean to do? Lead all of our little ones out of the city like a piper playing a merry tune, and dance them across the hills and valleys to the Nest?”

“He might have that in mind, for all I know.”

“And you say that Nialli Apuilana’s involved in this? How?”

Husathirn Mueri leaned forward until his face was thrust practically into hers.

“Lady, she and the ambassador Kundalimon are lovers.”

“Lovers?”

“You know that she goes to his room every day, lady. To bring him his food, to teach him our language.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Lady, sometimes she spends the entire night with him. My guards have heard sounds coming from the room that — forgive me, lady, forgive me! — can only be the sounds of coupling.”

“Well, what of it?” Taniane flicked her hand through the air in an irritated gesture. “Coupling’s a healthy thing. She’s never been much interested in it. It’s high time she developed a liking for it, and then some.”

Husathirn Mueri’s expression turned stark, as though Taniane had begun lopping off his fingers one by one.

“Lady—” he began feebly.

“Nialli’s a grown woman. She can couple with anybody she pleases. Even the hjjk ambassador.”

“Lady, they are twining also.”

“What?” Taniane cried, caught by surprise. Twining was an altogether different matter. The thought of their souls fusing, of Kundalimon pouring feverish hjjk-fantasies into her daughter’s mind, unstable as it was already from her experiences in captivity, stunned her. For a moment she felt herself swaying, as though her legs would give out beneath her and send her toppling to the pink marble floor. She fought to regain control of herself. “How could you possibly know that?” she asked.

“I have no proof, lady,” said Husathirn Mueri huskily. “You understand that I have compunctions about spying on them. But the amount of time they spend together — the degree of intimacy — the fact that they have a common history of captivity among the hjjks — and also that they are unquestionably lovers already, and are of twining age—”

“You’re only guessing, then.”

“But guessing accurately, I think.”

“Yes. Yes, I see what you mean.”

Taniane glanced out the window. The rain was slackening again after the sudden severe downpour, and the sky was growing bright.

“Do you have instructions for me, lady?”

“Yes. Yes.” Her throat was dry, her head was throbbing. Time to be on her way, time to appear at the Beng temple and perform the rite that would send Nakhaba off to the Creator’s abode. The image of Nialli and Kundalimon twining blazed in her mind. She tried to push it away, and it would not go. Tautly she said, “Keep an eye on her, the way you’ve been doing. If you can find out what’s actually going on between her and Kundalimon, I want to know about it. But make sure she doesn’t suspect she’s being watched.”

“Of course. And how should we handle the other part, the teaching of hjjk doctrines to small children?”

The chieftain turned to face him. “That has to be brought to a stop right away. We can’t have him subverting the young. You understand what I’m saying? Brought to a stop.”

“Yes, lady. I understand. I understand completely.”

The drizzly dawn of the day of the Festival of Dawinno found Hresh at the House of Knowledge, making notes on his visit to the caviandis. Later in the day he would have to show himself at the Festival, take his seat beside Taniane in the place of honor, watch the city’s young athletes go through their paces. To skip the games would be scandalous, and impious besides. The Festival had been his own invention, after all, many years ago, in homage to the clever and unpredictable god who was his special patron, and the city’s. But he still had a few hours for getting some work done.

He heard sounds outside his half-open door. A light tapping, a gentle coughing.

“Father?”

“Nialli? Is it time to go to the games already?”

“It’s still early. I wanted to talk to you before everything gets started.” A pause. “I’m not alone.”

Hresh squinted into the darkness. “Who’s with you?”

“Kundalimon. We want to talk to you together.”

“Ah.” He pressed the palms of his hands against each other. “All right, come in, both of you.”

They were damp from the rain, but the moisture, instead of soaking into their fur, seemed to cling in shining globules to the tips of it. And they were shining too. There was a radiance about them, a glow of rare joy. They stood before him holding hands like innocent children, brimming with evident happiness, overflowing with it.

Hresh felt an uneasy mixture of pleasure and anxious anticipation at the sight of them. He understood only too well that glow of inner fire that emanated from them both.

They giggled and glanced at each other, but neither spoke.

“Well?” Hresh said. “What have you two been up to?”

Nialli Apuilana turned away, sputtering smothered laughter into her shoulder. But Kundalimon stared levelly at him, smiling in that strange off-center way of his.

The boy no longer seemed like a wild creature. He had gained weight, and he looked far less unworldly, far less the eerie visitor from some unknown planet, more like any other young man of the city. There was new strength and assurance in him.

After a moment Nialli Apuilana said, “This isn’t easy, father. I don’t know where to begin.”

“All right. Let me guess. I won’t need the Barak Dayir for this. You and Kundalimon are lovers, eh?”

“Yes.” Barely a whisper.

He felt no surprise at all. There had been something inevitable about it from the first, that these two should have come together.

She said, “And twining-partners too, father.”

That too? He hadn’t expected that, the deeper bond also. But he took it calmly enough. No wonder they were glowing!

“Twining-partners. Ah. Very good. Twining goes so far beyond coupling, you know. Surely you know that by now. Twining is the real communion.”

“So we’ve found out, yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. She moistened her lips. “Father—”

“Go on. Tell me the rest of it.”

“Don’t you know it already?”

“You want to become his mate?”

“More,” she said.

He frowned. “More? What more is there?”

She made no reply. Instead she turned to Kundalimon, who said, “I will return to the Nest very soon. The Queen calls me. My work is done here. I ask Nialli Apuilana to go with me, to the Nest, to the Queen.”

The quiet words went through Hresh like scythes.

“What?” he said. “The Nest?”

Earnestly Nialli Apuilana said, the words pouring out all in a rush, “You can’t possibly know what it’s like, father. No one does who hasn’t been there. What sort of place it is, what sort of people they are. How rich their lives are, how deep. They live in an atmosphere of dreams, of magic, of wonder. You breathe the air of the Nest, and it fills your soul, and you can never be the same again, not after you’ve felt Nest-bond, not after you’ve understood Queen-love. It’s so different from the way we live here. We lead such frightening solitary lives, father. Even with coupling. Even with twining, We’re all alone, each of us, locked into our own heads, going through the meaningless round of our existences. But they see a vision of the world as a whole, as a unity, with purpose, and pattern, everything and everyone connected to everything else. Oh, father, everyone thinks of them as sinister evil bugs, as scurrying buzzing hateful machine-like things, but it isn’t so, father, not at all, they aren’t anything like what we imagine them to be! I want to go to them. I have to go to them. With Kundalimon. He and I belong together, and we belong … there. ”

Hresh stared at her, numb, stunned.

This too had probably been inevitable ever since her return from the Nest. He should have anticipated it. But he hadn’t allowed himself to think about it. He hadn’t allowed himself to see it.

“When?” he said, finally. “How soon?”

“A few days, a week, something like that. Kundalimon isn’t quite finished here. He’s teaching the children Nest-truth. Teaching them Queen-love. So that they’ll understand, in a way that none of the older people possibly could. There’s still more that he wants to tell them and show them. And then we’ll go. But I didn’t want simply to slip away without telling you. I can’t tell Taniane — she’d never allow it, she’d clap me in prison to keep me from going — but you, well, you’re different, you see everything so deeply, so profoundly—”

Hresh managed a smile, though shock waves still were rippling through him.

“What I see is that you’ve made me a co-conspirator in this, Nialli. If I speak of it to your mother, you’ll never forgive me, is that correct?”

“But you won’t speak of it to her, or anyone. I know that.”

Hresh contemplated the pads of his fingers. Something cold and heavy was spreading within his chest. The full impact of Nialli’s words only now was beginning to reach him: his daughter, his only child, was lost to him forever from this moment on, and there was nothing he could do about it, nothing at all.

“All right,” he said, at length, hoping he could hide the sadness in his voice. “I’ll keep quiet.”

“I knew you would.”

“But one thing you have to do for me before you go. Or else no deal, and Taniane finds out within the hour exactly what you two are up to.”

Nialli was glowing again. “Anything you want, father. Just ask.”

“I want you to tell me about the Nest. Describe the Queen to me, and tell me what Nest-bond is, and Queen-love, and all those other things. You’ve been keeping everything to yourself since you came back to live in the city. Do you know how eager I’ve been to know about them, Nialli? I couldn’t force you, though. And you wouldn’t open up, not for a moment. Now’s the time. Tell me everything. I need to know. You’re the only one who can teach me. And you will, as soon as the games are over today. That’s the one thing I ask of you. Before you and Kundalimon go back to the Nest. Before you leave me forever.”

Curabayn Bangkea was busily polishing his helmet in the little cell beside the Basilica that was his office when Husathirn Mueri appeared. The guard-captain’s mood was somber, and had been for days. Nialli Apuilana haunted him, sleeping and waking. She danced for him in his dreams, naked, grinning, mocking him, hovering just out of reach. He longed for her in a way that he knew was an absurdity. She was beyond his reach in more ways than one, a woman of the city’s highest nobility, and he nothing but an officer of the justiciary guard. He stood no chance. It was ridiculous. All the same, it was eating at his soul. There was a constant metallic taste in his throat, a pounding ache behind his rib cage, all from thinking of her. These idiotic fantasies, this miserable self-torment! And hopeless, absolutely hopeless. From time to time he would see her in the streets of the city, always at a distance, and she would glare balefully at him the way she might at some creature that had come wriggling up out of a sewer.

“There you are,” Husathirn Mueri said, entering the room.

Curabayn Bangkea let his helmet fall clattering to the desktop. “Your grace?” he said, almost barking it, coughing and blinking in surprise.

“Why such an ill-tempered look this morning, Curabayn Bangkea? Does the rain jangle you? Did you sleep poorly?”

“Very poorly, your grace. My dreams prick me awake, and then I lie there wishing I could sleep again; and when I sleep, the dreams return, no more soothing than before.”

“You should go to a tavern,” Husathirn Mueri said, with an amiable grin, “and drink yourself a good draught, and have yourself a good coupling or two, or three, and then another round of wine. And riot the night away without trying to sleep at all. That gets rid of sour dreams, I find. When the dawn comes you’ll be a healthy man again. It’ll be a long time before your dreams give you the soul-ache again.”

“I thank your grace,” said Curabayn Bangkea without warmth. “I’ll put it under consideration.”

He picked up his helmet and resumed buffing and glossing it, wondering if Husathirn Mueri had any true idea of what was troubling him. Everyone knew how hot Husathirn Mueri himself was for Nialli Apuilana — you had only to look at him when she was around, and you could tell — but did he realize that practically every man of the city felt the same way? Would it make him angry, knowing that a mere captain of the guards was just as obsessed with her as he was? Probably so. I’d do well to hide this from him, Curabayn Bangkea told himself.

Husathirn Mueri said, “You weren’t at the temple for the Hour of Nakhaba this morning.”

“No, sir. I’m on duty.”

“Until when?”

“Midday, your grace.”

“And then?”

“To the Festival, I thought. To watch the games.”

Husathirn Mueri leaned close and smiled — an intimate, ingratiating sort of smile, a disturbing smile that signaled something unusual. In a soft voice he said, “I have a little work for you to do this afternoon.”

“But the games, sir!”

“Don’t worry. You’ll get to go to the games afterward. But I need you, first. To do a little job for me, all right? Something that’s vital to the security of the city. And you’re the only one I’d trust to do it.”

“Your grace?” Curabayn Bangkea said, mystified.

“The hjjk envoy,” Husathirn Mueri said, perching himself casually on a corner of the guard-captain’s desk. “Taniane knows now about his — activities. I mean his preaching, his corrupting of the children. She wants all that stopped as fast as possible.”

“Stopped how, sir? By putting him back under house arrest?”

“More effectively than that.”

“More effec—”

“You know what I’m saying.”

Curabayn Bangkea stared. “I’m not sure I do. Let’s be blunt, sir. Are you telling me to have him killed?”

Husathirn Mueri looked strangely serene. “The chieftain is deeply troubled by what’s going on. She’s ordered me to put an end to his subversion of the children. To stop it right away, and to stop it for good. That should be clear enough.”

“But to kill an ambassador—”

“There’s no real need to keep using that word, is there?”

“But that’s what you want. I’m right, aren’t I? Aren’t I?”

Husathirn Mueri said implacably, “The situation is critical. He’s creating an enormous disturbance in the city. This is our responsibility, Curabayn Bangkea, and by all the gods we’re going to deal with it responsibly.”

Curabayn Bangkea nodded. He was beginning to feel like a leaf being swept along on a swiftly flowing stream.

Husathirn Mueri said, “You’ll go to the games at the opening hour, and you’ll make sure you’re seen. Then you’ll leave, and you’ll make sure you aren’t seen. You’ll take care of the work that has to be done, and then you’ll go back to the games, where I’ll happen to run into you, and you’ll come sit in my box where everyone can see you and we’ll spend a little time together, just chatting, going over the highlights of the day’s contests. No one will suspect you were mixed up in anything unusual while the games were going on.”

He stared. “ I’lltake care of the work that has to be done, you say? You mean me, personally?”

“You and no one else. Taniane’s explicit order. What’s more, it’s essential that we mustn’t allow it to be traced back to her, or to me, for that matter. That would compromise the city leadership very seriously. Therefore you’ve got to do it, acting alone. Understand? And you have to forget it the moment it’s done.” Husathirn Mueri paused. “You’ll be suitably rewarded, of course.”

The only suitable reward, Curabayn Bangkea thought, would be the freedom to do as I please for a whole night with Nialli Apuilana. But they aren’t going to give me that.

He felt a burst of anger. What did they think he was, an animal, a barbarian? He was the captain of the guards, the upholder of the law. Why pick him for this filthy business? Couldn’t they have found some drifter in a tavern, who could be conveniently disposed of afterward?

I need you. You’re the only one I’d trust to do it.

Well, maybe so. That softened it, the fact of being needed, of being specially chosen. A secret mission at the chieftain’s specific request. Flattering, in a way. Unquestionably flattering. The only one I’d trust. A tavern drifter might bungle the job. Or might talk too much before getting it done. And this was official business, after all. Taniane’s order: put an end to the subversion of the children. A critical situation, yes. A threat to law and order, the spreading of all this hjjk-love.

His annoyance subsided a little.

In any case he saw that he had no choice but to go along with it, like it or not. He was in this too deep already. He knew too much. Now he had to play the game out. Serve your masters loyally, rise to the top. Turn your back on them when they need you, and it’ll be the finish for you.

“You aren’t going to let us down, are you?” Husathirn Mueri asked, as if he had been using second sight on him.

“Not at all, your grace.”

“What’s troubling you, then?”

“I’d like to know a little more about the payment that’s involved, if that’s all right.”

Smoothly Husathirn Mueri said, “This whole thing has come up so quickly that I haven’t had time to work out the details. I’ll be able to tell you that this afternoon, at the games. But one thing I promise you: it’ll be suitable. More than suitable.” The ingratiating smile again, soothing, conspiratorial: we’re all in this together, and one hand washes the other. “You’ll be well taken care of,” Husathirn Mueri said. “You know you can trust me on that score. Can I count on you?”

I’d sooner trust in a rat-wolf, Curabayn Bangkea thought. But there was no turning back.

“Of course you can,” he said.

Afterward, when Husathirn Mueri was gone, Curabayn Bangkea sat quietly for a time, letting the breath travel in and out of his body. He was past the first shock. His anger was gone, and he was beginning to see the benefits.

Not just the advantage that would accrue from carrying out a sensitive and secret mission for which he’d been specially selected, or the power that his part in the removal of Kundalimon would give him over Husathirn Mueri and even over Taniane. But also there was the killing itself, what it would accomplish. The clearing away of something infuriating, something unacceptable. If I can’t have her, he thought, at least he won’t either. It was pleasing to think about, the killing itself. To come up behind the man who had made himself Nialli Apuilana’s lover — to seize him, to pull him into a dark corridor, to snuff the life from him—

That might just be the purgation he needed, freeing him from this torrent of impossible thoughts that tormented him. The obsession that had possessed him for so long. For days, now, nothing but Nialli Apuilana on his mind. Hardly any sleep, no rest at all. Nialli Apuilana and Kundalimon, Kundalimon and Nialli Apuilana. Feverish fantasies. Imagining her in that little room with the hjjk emissary, picturing him enfolding her in some weird caress he’d learned in the Nest, some bizarre scrabbling hjjk-like maneuver, vile and revolting. Bringing ecstatic gasps from her as she lay in his arms.

Very likely the reason why Husathirn Mueri wanted it done was connected with Nialli Apuilana, too — not the subversion of the children, why would Husathirn Mueri care a hjjk’s turd about that, but the fact that the girl and Kundalimon were lovers. Doubtless Husathirn Mueri found that impossible to take. And had come to him, knowing that he’d be better able to manage the job than anyone else. Who’d suspect the guard-captain of such a crime? Who would even think of it?

He wondered what kind of payment he ought to ask for. He’d be in a strong negotiating position. One word from him and the city would explode with scandal: surely they realized that. He’d want exchange-units, certainly. A bushel of them. And a higher rank. And women — not Nialli Apuilana, of course, they could never deliver her to him, no one could, but there were other highborn women who were easier in their ways, and one of them — yes, they could let him have one of them, at least for a time.

Yes.

Everything took shape in Curabayn Bangkea’s mind in a moment.

He rose, donned his helmet, finished his morning’s chores. A wagon of the guard force took him to the stadium, then, and in a light downpour he watched the opening ceremonies and the first few competitions. Taniane presided, with Nialli Apuilana beside her. That made it much simpler for him, her being here instead of with Kundalimon. How beautiful she is, he thought. Her fur was soaked. Every curve of her body showed through. The chronicler Hresh was there with them in the chieftain’s box, slumped down boredly as though he had no wish even to try to hide how bored he was. But Nialli Apuilana sat upright, bright-eyed, alert, chattering.

He stared at her as long as he could, and then he turned away. He couldn’t stand to look at her for long. Too frustrating, too disturbing, all that unattainable beauty. The sight of her made his entrails churn.

After a time the rain let up once again. He left the stadium through one of the underground-level gates and went back into the center of the city. At this hour Kundalimon usually took his walk, down Mueri Way and into the park. Curabayn Bangkea was prepared. He waited at the mouth of a narrow alley in the shadows of the street just below Mueri House: ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour. The street was deserted. Almost everyone was at the games.

And there was the young man now, by himself.

“Kundalimon?” Curabayn Bangkea called softly.

“Who? What?”

“Over here. Nialli Apuilana sent me. With a token of love from her for you.”

“I know you. You are Cura—”

“Right. Here, let me give it to you.”

“She is at the games today. I thought I would go to her.”

“Go to your Queen instead,” Curabayn Bangkea said, and wrapped a silken strangling-cloth around Kundalimon’s neck. The emissary struggled, kicking and using his elbows, but struggle was useless against Curabayn Bangkea’s great strength. He drew the cloth tight. He imagined this man’s hands on Nialli Apuilana’s breasts, this man’s lips covering her mouth, and his grip tightened. For a moment Kundalimon made harsh rough hjjk-noises, or perhaps they were merely death-rattles. His eyes bulged. His lips turned black, and his legs gave way. Curabayn Bangkea eased him to the ground and dragged him deeper into the alleyway. There he left him lying, propped up against the wall like a drunk. He wasn’t breathing. Wrapping the strangling-cloth around his own wrist as though it were an ornament, Curabayn Bangkea returned to his wagon, which he had left three streets away. In half an hour more he was back at the stadium. He was surprised at how calm he felt. But it had all gone so smoothly: a very skillful job, no question of it, quick and clean. And good riddance. The city was cleaner now.

Husathirn Mueri was in one of the grand Presidium boxes near the center aisle. Curabayn Bangkea looked across to him, and nodded. It seemed to him that Husathirn Mueri smiled, but he wasn’t sure of that.

He took his seat in the commoners’ section, and waited to be invited to Husathirn Mueri’s box.

The summons was a long time in coming. They had run the long race, and done the vaulting one, and were getting ready for the relays. But eventually a man Curabayn Bangkea recognized as a servant of Husathirn Mueri appeared. “Guard-captain?” he said.

“What is it?”

“Prince Husathirn Mueri sends me to you with his good wishes. He hopes you’ve been enjoying the games.”

“Very much.”

“The prince invites you to share a bowl of wine with him.”

“It would he an honor,” Curabayn Bangkea said.

After a time he realized that the man didn’t seem to be leading him toward the central row of boxes where the aristos sat. Rather, he was taking him on some route around the far side, to the arched corridor that encircled the stadium.

Perhaps Husathirn Mueri had changed his mind, Curabayn Bangkea decided, about meeting with him in such a conspicuous place as his own box. Maybe he was afraid that the job had been botched, that there had been witnesses, that it wasn’t such a good idea to be seen in public with him until he knew what had actually happened. Curabayn Bangkea felt his anger returning. Did they think he was such a bungler?

There was Husathirn Mueri now, coming along the corridor toward him. Stranger and stranger. Where were they supposed to share that bowl of wine? In one of the public wine-halls downstairs?

He’s ashamed to be seen with me, Curabayn Bangkea thought, furious. That’s all it is. A highborn like him doesn’t ask a mere guardsman into his box. But then he shouldn’t have told me he was going to. He shouldn’t have told me.

Husathirn Mueri looked happy enough to see him, though. He was grinning broadly, as he might if he were going to a rendezvous with Nialli Apuilana.

“Curabayn Bangkea!” he called, from twenty paces away. “There you are! I’m so pleased we were able to find you in this madhouse!”

“Nakhaba favor you, your grace. Have you been enjoying the games?”

“The best ever, aren’t they?” Husathirn Mueri was alongside him now. The servant who had led Curabayn Bangkea to him vanished like a grain of sand in a windstorm. Husathirn Mueri caught him by the arm in that intensely confidential way of his and said, under his breath, “Well?”

“Done. No one saw.”

“Splendid. Splendid!”

“It couldn’t have gone off better,” said Curabayn Bangkea. “If you don’t mind, your grace, I’d like to talk about the reward now, if I could.”

“I have it here,” Husathirn Mueri said. Curabayn Bangkea felt a sudden warmth at his side, and looked down at the smaller man in astonishment. The blade had entered so swiftly that Curabayn Bangkea had had no chance even to apprehend what was happening. There was blood in his mouth. His guts were ablaze. Pain was starting to spread through his entire body now. Husathirn Mueri smiled and leaned close, and there came a second stunning burst of warmth, and more pain, far more intense than before; and then Curabayn Bangkea was alone, clinging to the railing, sagging slowly to the ground.