The Queen of Springtime

7 Rumblings of War

A week after Thu-Kimnibol’s departure, Salaman had the commander of the Acknowledgers brought to the palace. Zechtior Lukin, his name was. Athimin, newly released from prison and more than a little chastened, went with half a dozen guards into the run-down eastern quarter of the city to get him, anticipating a fight. But Athimin was surprised to find that Zechtior Lukin had no more qualms about going to speak with the king than he did about dancing naked in the streets when the black winds were blowing. He behaved as though he’d been expecting Salaman to summon him all along — as though he’d been wondering why the summons had taken so long to come.

There were some surprises for Salaman, too, in his meeting with the Acknowledger leader.

He had imagined that the head of the sect would be some wild-eyed fanatic, excitable and irascible, who would foam at the mouth, would shout and rant and babble incomprehensible slogans. He was right about one part of that, at least: Zechtior Lukin was a fanatic, beyond any doubt. Everything about him, the iron set of his jaw and the cold, bleak stony look of his eyes and his hard, thick-muscled frame, covered with gray, grizzled fur, spoke of extraordinary singlemindedness of purpose and dedication to his unlikely cause. And very likely he was irascible, too.

But a shouter? A ranter? A babbler of slogans? No. This man was cool and tough, with an air of icy reserve that Salaman immediately recognized as much like his own. He could surely have been a king, this one, if things gone a little differently in the early years of the city. Instead he had become a butcher, a meat-cutter, who spent his days not in a stone palace but in a slaughterhouse, chopping joints and loins and flanks while blood ran in rivers around him. And in the evenings he and his followers met in a drafty gymnasium in the eastern quarter, and drilled one another in the strange tenets of their creed.

He stood calmly before the king, square-shouldered, unintimidated.

“How long is it since you people first started this?” Salaman asked.

“Years.”

“Three years? Five?”

“Almost since the founding of the city.”

“No,” Salaman said. “That’s impossible, that you could have been in existence that long a time without my even hearing about you.”

Zechtior Lukin shrugged. “There were very few of us, and we kept to ourselves. We studied our texts and held our meetings and practiced our disciplines, and we didn’t go out looking for recruits. It was our private thing. My father Lakkamai was the first of us, and then—”

“Lakkamai?” Another surprise. In the cocoon and in Vengiboneeza Lakkamai had been a silent man, who kept to himself and seemed to have no depths to his soul. He had been the lover of the offering-woman Torlyri in Vengiboneeza, but when the Breaking Apart had happened Lakkamai had abandoned Torlyri without a qualm, to go off with Harruel as one of the founders of the tiny settlement that would become the City of Yissou. He had died long ago. Salaman couldn’t remember his ever having taken a mate, let alone siring a son.

“You knew him,” Zechtior Lukin said.

“Many years back, yes.”

“Lakkamai taught us that what happened to the Great World was by design of the gods. He said that everything that happens is part of their plan, whether it seems good or ill to us, and that when the Great World people chose to die, it was because they understood the will of the gods and knew that it was their time to go from the world. So they lifted no hand to avert the death-stars, and allowed them to strike the world, and the great cold descended on them. He learned these things, he said, while speaking with Hresh, the chronicler of the Koshmar people.”

“Yes,” said Salaman. “You talk with Hresh, your mind becomes filled with all sorts of fancies and strangenesses.”

“These are truths,” said Zechtior Lukin.

Salaman let the blunt contradiction pass. There was no point in arguing with the man. “So there were originally only a few of you. A couple of families only, is that it? But now my son says that there are a hundred ninety of you.”

“Three hundred seventy-six,” Zechtior Lukin said.

“I see.” One more black mark for Athimin. “So now you’ve decided to go out looking for new recruits after all, is that it? Why?”

“In dreams I saw the hjjk Queen hovering in the air over the city. I felt the tremendous presence of Her like a great weight above us. This was last year. And I saw that the day of reckoning is coming. The hjjks, as everyone knows, were exempted from the destruction of the Great World. The Five Heavenly Ones had some other purpose in mind for them, and brought them safely through the time of cold and snow so that they could perform that purpose in the New Springtime.”

“And you know what that purpose is, of course.”

“They are meant to destroy the People and their cities,” said Zechtior Lukin calmly. “They are the scourge of the gods.”

So he’s crazy after all, Salaman thought. What a pity that is.

But with calmness that matched the Acknowledger’s he said, “And how would that serve the purposes of the Five? They brought us safely through the Long Winter to be the inheritors of the world — so say all our chronicles. Why did the gods bother to preserve us, if all they had in mind was to let the hjjks destroy us now? It would have been simpler just to leave us out in the cold and let the Long Winter finish us off hundreds of thousands of years back.”

“You don’t understand. We were tested, and we have failed the test. As you say, we were spared from the cold so that we might inherit the world. But we have taken the wrong turn. We build cities; we live in ever more comfortable houses; we grow soft and lazy. It’s worse in Dawinno than it is here, but everywhere the People fall away from the intent of the Five. What was our aim, after all, in building these cities? Only to duplicate the ease and comfort of the Great World, so it would appear. But such a duplication is wrong. If the gods wanted the world to be as it was when the sapphire-eyes lived, they would merely have left the Great World as it was. Instead they destroyed it. As they will destroy us. I tell you, king, the hjjks will be the instruments of our correction. They will fall upon us; they will shatter our cities; they will force us out into the wild lands, where we will finally accept the disciplines that the gods intended for us to learn. Those few of us who survive the onslaught will make another attempt at building a world. This is Dawinno’s will: he who transforms.”

“And if you all die of freezing, dancing in the plazas at night, is that going to create this wonderful new world for you?”

“We do not freeze. We will not die.”

“I see. You’re invulnerable.”

“We are very strong. You saw us, that night, at our festivals. You haven’t seen us at our training. Our spiritual exercises, our physical drills. We are warriors. We have developed immense endurance. We can march for days without sleep or food. We are unafraid of cold or privation. We have given up our individual selves, to form a new unity.”

All this was astonishing to Salaman. The philosophies of Lakkamai’s son were gibberish and lunacy; but all the same the king felt a great kinship of temperament with this man, and much affection for him. His strength, his ferocity, were evident. Secretly he had built an entire little kingdom within the kingdom. He had the true force of royalty about him. They could almost have been brothers. And yet he was crazy. It seemed an immense pity.

He said, “You must let me see you at your training.”

“This very night, if you wish, King Salaman.”

“Done. Perform your most difficult exercises for me. And then, my friend, you and your friends will need to start packing. You’ll be leaving here.”

Zechtior Lukin seemed unsurprised by that, and even indifferent, as he appeared to be toward everything that came his way.

“Where would you have us go?” he asked calmly.

“Northward. Obviously you’re unhappy here in Yissou, living amidst our contemptible softness. And I tell you truly that I have no great eagerness to have you spread your creed of inevitable destruction in the city that I love. So it’s in your interest and mine also for you to leave, wouldn’t you say? You wouldn’t want to go south, of course. Life’s too easy there. Besides, as our city expands into the lands to the south and Dawinno grows northward, we’re bound to trespass on your privacy. So go north, Zechtior Lukin. Cold doesn’t bother you, you say. Hunger is unimportant to you. And there’s plenty of land to the north where you can found a settlement that lives according to your principles and precepts. It could well be the capital of the great and pure and proper world that we of the cities have failed to create.”

“You mean, we should go into the hjjk lands?”

“I mean that, yes. Beyond Vengiboneeza, even. Deep into the cold dry northlands. Choose the territory to please yourselves. It may be that the hjjks will leave you unmolested. From what you say, your ways are very much like theirs, anyway — warriors, unafraid of discomfort, free of individual ambition. They may welcome you because you’re so much like them. Or they’ll simply ignore you. Why should a few hundred settlers matter to them, when they have half a continent? Yes: go to the hjjks. What do you say, Zechtior Lukin?”

There was a silence. Zechtior Lukin’s face was expressionless: no look of anger, no defiance, not even dismay. Something was going on in his mind, but he looked as untroubled as if the king had asked him some question about the price of meat.

“How much time will you allow us to prepare ourselves for the journey?” he asked, after a little while.

Nialli Apuilana has had all the solitude she can bear. She has been in hibernation all the winter long, like some animal that goes through a metamorphosis every year, and lies hidden away, wrapped in its own web, until the time arrives to come forth. Now the time is here. On a day in late winter when the rain is falling on Dawinno in torrents that are stupendous even for that season of merciless downpours, Nialli Apuilana leaves her room in the House of Nakhaba early in the afternoon. Now and then she has gone out late at night, but this is the first time since her recovery that she’s been out in daytime. There’s no one around to see her. The storm is so furious that the streets are deserted. Not even the guards are out. A light gleams behind every window: everyone’s indoors. But she laughs at the fury of the storm. “It’s really much too much,” she says out loud, looking upward, addressing herself to Dawinno. It is Dawinno who moves the great wheel of the seasons, now sending sun and now storms. “You’re overdoing it a little, don’t you think?” All she’s wearing is a sash. Her fur is drenched before she has taken five steps. It clings to her like a tight cloak, and water streams down her thighs.

She crosses the city to the House of Knowledge and climbs the winding stairs to the uppermost floor. She hadn’t doubted for an instant that Hresh would be there; and indeed he is, writing away in one of his huge old books.

“Nialli!” he cries. “Have you lost your wits, going out in weather like this? Here — let me dry you off—”

He swaddles her in a cloth, as if she’s a child. Passively she lets him enfold her and rub her dry, though it leaves her fur ruffled and wild.

When he’s done she says, “We should start to tell each other things, father. The time for doing that is long overdue.”

“Things? What kind of things?”

“About — the Nest—” she says hesitantly. “About — the Queen—”

He looks incredulous. “You actually want to talk about the hjjks?”

“About the hjjks, yes. The things you’ve learned, and what I have. They may not be the same things. You’ve always said you need to understand the hjjks better. You aren’t the only one. I do too, father. I do too.”

Chevkija Aim indicated an arching doorway of weather-beaten smoke-gray wood at the end of a blind alleyway just off Fishmonger Street, flanked on either side by grubby-looking commercial buildings with facades of soiled red brick. Husathirn Mueri had never been in this part of the city before. It was some sort of industrial district, more than a little disreputable. “It’s all the way down there,” the guard-captain said. “A basement room. You go in and turn left, and down the stairs.”

“And is it safe for me just to walk right in?” Husathirn Mueri asked. “They won’t recognize me and panic?”

“You’ll be all right, sir. There’s not much light in there. You can just barely make out shapes, let alone faces. Nobody’ll know who you are.” The lithe young Beng grinned and nudged Husathirn Mueri’s arm with surprising familiarity. “Go on in, sir! Go on! I tell you, you’ll be all right.”

Indeed the room, long and narrow and rich with the salty reek of dried fish, was very dark. The only sources of light were two faint glowberry clusters mounted on the wall at the far end. A boy and a girl stood there, beside a table containing fruits and aromatic boughs that was probably the altar.

Husathirn Mueri, squinting, saw only darkness. Then his eyes adapted to it and saw a congregation of perhaps fifty people seated close together on rows of rough black barrels. They were muttering and chanting and occasionally stamping their feet in response to the words of the children at the altar. Here and there a towering Beng helmet rose above the crowd, but most of them were unhelmeted. The voices he heard were deep, thick, the voices of ordinary people, working-folk. Husathirn Mueri felt a new level of uneasiness. He had never gone among working-folk much. And to spy on them now, in their own sanctuary—

“Sit!” Chevkija Aim whispered, half shoving him down on one of the barrels in the last row. “Sit and listen! The boy is Tikharein Tourb. He’s the priest. The priestess is Chhia Kreun.”

“Priest? Priestess?”

“Listen to them, sir!”

He stared in disbelief. It seemed to Husathirn Mueri that he had arrived at the threshold of some other world.

The boy-priest made thick strange sounds, horrid chittering clicking noises that seemed much like hjjk-talk. The worshipers before him replied with the same bizarre noises. Husathirn Mueri shivered and put his hands over his face.

Then suddenly the boy called out, in a high clear voice, “The Queen is our comfort and our joy. Such is the teaching of the prophet Kundalimon, blessed be he.”

“The Queen is our comfort and our joy,” replied the congregation, sing-song.

“She is the light and the way.”

“She is the light and the way.”

“She is the essence and the substance.”

“She is the essence and the substance.”

“She is the beginning and the end.”

“She is the beginning and the end.”

Husathirn Mueri trembled. At the sound of that sweet innocent voice he felt a touch of terror. The light and the way? The essence and the substance? What madness was this? Was he dreaming it?

He felt a choking, gagging sensation and covered his mouth with his hand. The basement room was windowless, and the air was close and hot. The musky salt tang of the barrels of dried fish, the gamy odor of sweaty fur, the rich pungent aroma of the sippariu and dilifar boughs on the altar — it was all starting to sicken him. He began to grow dizzy. He knotted his hands together and pressed his elbows hard into his ribs.

They were all crying out in hjjk-sounds again, the boy and the girl and the congregation.

At any moment, Husathirn Mueri imagined, the floor might open beneath him and he would find himself looking down into some vast pit where swarms of glittering hjjks moved in such multitudes that the earth seemed to be boiling with them.

“Easy, sir, easy,” Chevkija Aim murmured beside him.

He watched the boy and the girl moving about now, taking fruits and boughs from the altar and showing them to the congregation, and replacing them again, while the worshipers stamped their feet and made the droning, clicking sounds. What did it all mean? Where had it come from, so suddenly?

The boy was wearing a shining yellow-and-black amulet on his chest, much like the one dead Kundalimon had worn. The same one, perhaps. The girl had a wrist-talisman that was also of hjjk-shell. Even in the dimness these objects gleamed with a preternatural brightness. Husathirn Mueri remembered how the shells of the hjjks had gleamed as they moved on their mysterious rounds through the streets of Vengiboneeza when he was a child.

“Kundalimon guides us from on high. He tells us that the Queen is our comfort and our joy,” the boy called again.

And again the congregation responded, “The Queen is our comfort and joy.”

But this time a burly man three rows in front of Husathirn Mueri rose and shouted, “The Queen is the one true god!”

The congregation began to repeat that too. “The Queen is the one true—”

“No!” the boy cried. “The Queen is not a god!”

“Then what is She? What is She?” For a moment the rhythm of the service was broken. People were rising everywhere, calling out, waving their arms. “Tell us what She is!”

The boy-priest leaped atop the altar. Instantly he had their attention again.

“The Queen,” he said, in that same eerie high sing-song, “is of god-essence, by virtue of Her descent from the people of the Great World, who lived in the sight of the gods. But She is not a god Herself.” The boy seemed to be parroting some text he had learned by rote. “She is the architect of the gateway through which the true gods one day will return. Such is the word of Kundalimon.”

“The humans, you mean?” the burly man asked. “Are the humans the true gods?”

“The humans are— they are—” The boy on the altar faltered. His eyes seemed to turn glassy. He had no prepared text for this. He looked down toward the girl, and she reached out with her sensing-organ, coiling it about his ankle in an astonishingly intimate way. Husathirn Mueri caught his breath, amazed. The gesture seemed to steady the boy; he regained his poise and cried, “The revelation of the humans is yet to come! We must continue to await the revelation of the humans! Until then the Queen is our guide.” He made hjjk-clicks. “She is our comfort and our joy!”

“She is our comfort and our joy!”

They were all clicking in response, now. The sound of it was horrifying. The boy had them under control once more. That was horrifying too.

“Kundalimon!” they cried. “Martyred Kundalimon, lead us to the truth!”

The boy-priest held his arms high. Even at this distance Husathirn Mueri could see how his eyes blazed with conviction.

“She is the light and the way.”

“She is the light and the way.”

“She is the essence and the substance.”

“She is the essence and—”

“Look,” Husathirn Mueri whispered. “The girl’s got her sensing-organ on his, now.”

“They’re going to twine, sir. Everybody here is going to twine.”

“Surely not. All in one place together?”

“It is what they do,” said Chevkija Aim casually. “They all twine and let the Queen enter their souls, so I do hear. It is their custom.”

Numb with disbelief, Husathirn Mueri said, “This is the greatest vileness that ever has been.”

“I have officers outside. We can clear all these hjjk-lovers out of here in five minutes, if you give the word, and smash the place up.”

“No.”

“But you’ve seen what they—”

“No, I said. The persecutions mustn’t be resumed. That’s the chieftain’s express order, and you know it.”

“I understand, sir, but—”

“Then no one is to be arrested. We’ll leave this chapel absolutely undisturbed, at least for now. And keep it under careful observation. How else will we understand what kind of threat we face, if we don’t look the enemy right in the face? Do you follow me?”

The guard-captain nodded. His lips were tightly clamped.

Husathirn Mueri looked up. In front of him the dark shapes of the congregation were rising, moving about, joining into groups. The hjjk-clicking sound could no longer be heard, and in its place came an intense deep humming. No one took any notice of the two men whispering in back. The air in the narrow long room seemed to grow superheated. It might burst into flames at any moment.

Quietly Chevkija Aim said, “We should leave, now.”

Husathirn Mueri made no response.

It seemed to him that he had become rooted in place. At the far end of the room the boy and the girl were unashamedly twining before the altar, and, two by two, the members of the congregation were beginning to enter into the communion. Husathirn Mueri had never heard of such a thing. He had never dreamed of it. He watched it now in terrible fascination.

Chevkija Aim whispered, “If we stay, they’ll want us to do it too, sir.”

“Yes. Yes. We have to go.”

“Are you all right, sir?”

“We — have to — go—”

“Give us your hand, sir. There. That’s it. Come on, now. Up. Up.”

“Yes,” Husathirn Mueri said. His feet felt dead beneath him. He leaned heavily on Chevkija Aim and tottered and stumbled toward the door.

She is the light and the way. She is the essence and the substance.

She is the beginning and the end.

The cool fresh air outside struck him like a fist.

Hresh said, “What I believed about them, once upon a time, is what everybody’s always believed. That they’re a malevolent alien folk. Our sworn enemies, strange and menacing. But lately I’ve been beginning to change my mind about that.”

“So have I,” said Nialli Apuilana.

“How so?”

She shrugged. “It’ll be easier for me if you speak first, father.”

“But you said you’d come here to tell me things.”

“And I will. But it has to be an exchange: what you know for what I know. And I want you to go first. Please. Please.”

Hresh stared at her. She was as baffling as ever.

After a moment he said, “All right. I suppose it began for me that time you addressed the Presidium: when you said the hjjks have to be regarded as something other than monsters, that in fact they’re intelligent creatures with a deep and rich civilization. You called them human, even. In the special sense of that word that I sometimes have used. It was the first hint you’d given of what you experienced while you were in the Nest. And I realized that what you said must certainly have been true at one time, for they were a part of the Great World, and in the visions of the Great World that I once was able to have I saw them, living among the sapphire-eyes and the humans and the others in peace and harmony. How could they have been demons and monsters, and still a part of the Great World?”

“Exactly so,” Nialli Apuilana said.

Hresh looked up at her. There was something even stranger than usual about her today. She was like a coiled whip.

He went on:

“Of course what they were in the Great World and what they may have become by now, hundreds of thousands of years after the Great World, aren’t necessarily the same. Maybe they have changed. But who can say? We have people like Thu-Kimnibol who’ve been convinced from the start that the hjjks are evil. Now, though, we have some among us who take the opposite position entirely. This new religion, I mean. I hear that in the chapels the hjjks are spoken of as the instruments of our salvation: benevolent holy creatures, no less. And Kundalimon is looked upon as some sort of prophet.” Hresh gave her a searching glance. “You know about the chapels? Do you go to them?”

“No,” Nialli Apuilana said. “Never. But if they’re teaching that the hjjks are benevolent, they’re wrong. The hjjks have no benevolence. Not as we know the meaning of the word. But neither are they evil. They’re simply — themselves.”

“Are they monsters, then, or holy creatures?”

“Both. And neither.”

Hresh considered that a moment.

“I thought you worshiped them,” he said. “That you wanted nothing more than to go to them, to live among them for the rest of your life. They live in an atmosphere of dreams and magic and wonder, you said. You breathe the air of the Nest, you told me, and it fills your soul.”

“That was before.”

“And now?”

Wanly she shook her head. “I don’t know what I want. Or what I believe, not any more. Oh, father, father, I can hardly tell you what confusion I feel! Go to the Nest, says a voice within me, and live in eternal Queen-love. Stay in Dawinno, says another voice. The hjjks aren’t what you’ve taken them to be, says that voice. One is the voice of the Queen, and the other — the other—” She looked at him with eyes bright with pain. “The other is the voice of the Five. And their voice is the one I want to obey.”

Hresh peered at her, not believing it. This was the last thing he would have expected to hear from her.

“The Five? You accept the authority of the Five? Since when? That’s something new, Nialli.”

“Not their authority, no, not really.”

“What then?”

“Their truth. Their wisdom. It came to me as I lay in the swamp. They entered me. I felt it, father. I thought I was dying, and they came to me. You know that I had no belief before that. But I do now.”

“I see,” Hresh said vaguely. But he didn’t see at all. The more she told him, the less he seemed to understand. Even as he had begun to feel the pull of the Nest — which was partly her doing — she appeared to be turning away from it. “So there’s no likelihood that you’ll try to return to the Nest, now that you have your strength back?”

“None, father. Not any more.”

“Speak only the truth to me, girl.”

“It is the truth. You know that I would have gone with Kundalimon. But now everything is changed. I’ve begun to doubt everything I once believed, and to believe everything I once doubted. The world’s become a mystery to me. I need to stay right here and sort things out before I do anything.”

“Can I believe you, I wonder?”

“I swear it! I swear by any god there is. I swear it by the Queen, father.”

She reached her hand toward his. He took it and held it as though it were a precious object.

Then he said, “What a puzzle you are, Nialli! Almost as great a puzzle as the hjjks themselves!” He smiled tenderly. “You’ll always be a puzzle to me, I suppose. But at least I think I’m beginning to understand the hjjks.”

“Are you, father?”

“Look at this,” he said. “A newly discovered text, very ancient.”

Carefully he drew a vellum scroll from the larger of his two caskets of chronicles, and undid its fastening. He laid it on the table before her.

Nialli Apuilana leaned forward to peer at it. “Where was it found?”

“In my collection of chronicles. It was there all along, actually. But it was in Beng, a very ancient form of Beng almost impossible to understand. So I didn’t pay much attention to it. Puit Kjai suggested finally that I ought to look at it, when I told him I was doing research in hjjk history. He was the keeper of the Beng chronicles, you know, before they were turned over to me. He helped me learn how to read it.”

She put her hands to the manuscript. “May I?”

“It won’t do you any good. But go ahead.”

He watched her as she bent over the text. The writing was unintelligible to her, of course. These ancient Beng hieroglyphics were nothing like the characters in use nowadays, and wouldn’t tune themselves easily to a modern mind. But Nialli Apuilana seemed determined to master them. How very much like me she is in some ways, Hresh thought. And how different in so many others.

She murmured under her breath, pressed her fingertips harder, struggled to bring sense out of the page. When it seemed to him that she had wrestled with it long enough he reached for the manuscript to decipher it for her, but she shook him away and continued to work at it.

He looked at her and his heart overflowed with warmth. He had so many times given her up for lost; and yet here she was, quietly sitting with him in his study, as she had so often done when she was a child.

Her strength and determination as she toiled over the ancient manuscript delighted him. Seeing her like this, he could see Taniane reborn in her, and it took him back to the days when he was young, when he and Taniane had roamed Vengiboneeza together in search of the secrets of the Great World.

But Nialli was something more than a mere duplicate of her mother. He could see the Hresh in her too. She was volatile and impulsive, a spooky willful child, as he had been. Before her capture by the hjjks she had been outgoing and exuberant, but also — as he had been — lonely, alienated, inquisitive, odd. How he loved her! How deeply he felt for her!

She looked up from the scroll. “It’s like the language they speak in dreams. Nothing will hold still long enough for me to find its meaning.”

“So I felt also. But not any longer.”

She gave him the manuscript. He put his fingers to it and the strange archaic phrases rose to his mind.

“It’s a document of the very early years of the Long Winter,” he said. “When all the tribes of the People were newly cocooned. There were some warriors of the Bengs who wouldn’t believe that they had to spend all their lives in hiding, and one of them made a Going Forth to see if the outer world could be reclaimed. You must realize that this was thousands of years before our own three premature departures from the cocoon, what we call the Cold Awakening, the Wrongful Glow, and the Unhappy Dawn. Most of the text is missing, but what we have is this—

“And then I stood in the land of ice and a terrible death of the heart came upon me, for I knew that I would not live.

“Then did I turn, and seek again the place of my people. But the mouth of the cave I could not find. And the hjjken-folk came upon me and seized me where I stood, laying their hands upon me and carrying me away, but I was free of fear, for I was a dead man already, and who can die the death more than once? There were twenty of them and very frightsome of aspect, and they did lay their hands on me and take me to the warm dark place where they lived, which was like unto the cocoon, but greatly larger, in the ground extending farther than I could see, with many avenues and side-passages going in every way.

“And there was in this place the Great Hjjken, a monster of huge and most formidable size, the sight of which made the blood run backward in my vessels. But she touched the soul of my soul with the second sight of her, and she said unto me, Behold, I give you peace and love, and I was not afraid. For the touch of her soul on my soul was like being taken into the arms of a great Mother, and I did marvel greatly that so huge and frightsome a beast could be so comforting. And also she said, You are come to me too soon, for my time is not yet. But when the world wakens into warmth will I embrace you all.

“Which was all she said, and never did I speak with her again. But I did stay among the hjjken twenty days and twenty nights, the count of which I did keep most carefully, and lesser hjjken did ask of me with the voices of their inner minds a great many questions concerning my People and how we live and what we believe, and also they did tell me something of what it is that they believe, though that is all hazy in my mind, and was even as they told it me. And I did eat of their food, which is a dreadful mash that they do chew and spit forth for their companions to eat after them, and which gave me sore revulsion at first, though later hunger overcame me and I did eat of it and find it less hateful than might be thought. Then when they ceased to question me did they say to me, We will take you to your nation now, and let me forth into the bitter cold and deadly snows, and did conduct me thenceforward—”

Hresh laid the scroll down.

“That’s where it ends?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“It breaks off there. But what there is of it is clear enough.”

“And what does it tell you, father?”

“It explains, I think, the taking of captives by the hjjks. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Evidently it’s so they can study us. But they care for the captives and eventually they let them go, some of them, at least, as they did with that poor foolish Beng warrior who they found wandering around on the icefields.”

“So this is what has led you to cease thinking of them as monsters.”

“I never believed they were monsters,” said Hresh. “Enemies, yes, ruthless and dangerous enemies. Remember, I was there when they attacked Yissou. But perhaps they aren’t even that. After all this time we don’t really know what they are. We’ve never even begun to understand them. We hate them simply because they’re unknown.”

“And they probably always will be.”

“I thought you said you understood them.”

“I understand very little, father. I may have thought I did, but I was wrong. Who understands why the Five send us storms, or heat or cold, or famines? They must have their reasons, but how can we presume to say what they are? So it is with the Queen. She’s like a force of the universe. It’s impossible to understand Her. I know a little of what the Nest is like, its shape and smell and how life is lived there. But that’s mere knowledge. Knowledge isn’t understanding. I’ve started to see that no one who is of the People can even begin to understand the Queen. Except — just possibly — someone one who has been in the Nest.”

“But you have been in the Nest.”

“Just a minor one. The truths I learned there were minor truths. The Queen of Queens who dwells in the far north is the only source of the real revelations. I thought they were going to take me to Her when I was older; but instead they let me go and brought me back here to Dawinno.”

Hresh blinked in bewilderment. “They let you go? You told us that you escaped!”

“No, father. I didn’t escape.”

“Didn’t — escape—”

“Of course not. They released me, as they did that Beng in that chronicle of yours. Why would I have wanted to leave a place where I was completely happy for the first time in my life?”

The words struck him like blows. But Nialli Apuilana went serenely on.

“I had to leave. I never would have gone of my own will. Whether the Nest is a place of good or evil, one thing is true of it: while you’re in it you feel utterly secure. You know that you live in a place where uncertainty and pain are unknown. I surrendered myself completely to it, and gladly, as who wouldn’t? But they came for me one morning and said I had stayed with them as long as was necessary, and led me outside, and took me on vermilion-back to the edge of the city, and turned me loose.”

“You told us you had escaped from them,” Hresh said numbly.

“No. You and mother decided I had escaped from them, I suppose because you weren’t able to imagine that anyone could possibly prefer to remain in the Nest instead of coming home to Dawinno. And I didn’t contradict you. I didn’t say anything at all. You assumed I had escaped from the clutches of the evil bug-monsters, as any sensible person would have wanted to do, and I let you think so, because I knew you needed to believe that, and I was afraid you’d say I had lost my mind if I told you anything approaching the truth. How could I tell you the truth? If everyone in the city thinks the hjjks are dreadful marauding demons, and always has thought so, and I stand up and say that they aren’t, that I found love and truth among them, will I be believed? Or will I simply be met with pity and scorn?”

“Yes. Yes, I see that,” said Hresh. His shock and dismay were slowly beginning to lift. She waited in silence. At last he said, very softly, “I understand, Nialli. You had to lie to us. I see that now. I see a great many things now.” He put the ancient Beng scroll away, closed the casket of the chronicles, let his hands rest on the lid. “If I had known then what I know now, it might have been different.”

“What do you mean?”

“About the hjjks. About the Nest.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I have an idea of what the Nest is like, now. The great living machine that it is. The perfection of its pattern, the way it all rotates around the tremendous directing intelligence that is the Queen, who is Herself the embodiment of the guiding force of the universe—”

It was Nialli Apuilana’s turn to look amazed. “You sound almost like someone who’s been to the Nest!”

“I have,” Hresh said. “That’s the other thing I had to tell you.”

Her eyes went bright with shock and incredulity. “What? To the Nest? You?” She recoiled and stood up, bracing herself with both her hands against the edge of the table, staring at him open-mouthed. “Father, what are you telling me? Is this some kind of joke? These aren’t joking matters.”

Taking her hand in his again, he said, “I’ve seen the small Nests, like the one where you were taken. And then I approached the great one, and the great Queen within it. But I turned back before I reached it.”

“When? How?”

He smiled gently. “Not in the actual flesh, Nialli. I wasn’t really there. It was with the Barak Dayir, only.”

“Then you were there, you were!” she exclaimed, clutching his arm in her excitement. “The Barak Dayir shows you true visions, father. You told me so yourself. You’ve seen into the Nest! And so you must know Nest-truth. You understand!”

“Do I? I think I’m very far from understanding anything.”

“That isn’t so.”

He shook his head. “Perhaps I understand a little. But only a little, I think. Only the beginning of the beginning. What I had was simply a fleeting vision, Nialli. It lasted just a moment.”

“Even a moment would be enough. I tell you, father, there’s no way you can touch the Nest without experiencing Nest-truth. And therefore knowing Nest-bond, Egg-plan, all of it.”

He searched his mind. “I don’t know what those words mean. Not really.”

“They’re the things you spoke of a moment ago. When you talked of the Nest as a great living machine, and spoke of the perfection of its pattern.”

“Tell me. Tell me.”

Her expression changed. She seemed to disappear deep within herself. “Nest-bond,” she said, in an odd high-pitched way, as though reciting a lesson, “is the awareness of the relationship of each thing in the universe to everything else. We are all parts of the Nest, even those of us who have never experienced it, even those of us who look upon the hjjks as dread monsters. For everything is united in a single great pattern, which is the endless unstoppable force of life. The hjjks are the vehicle through which this force is manifested in our times; and the Queen is its guiding spirit on our world. That is Nest-truth. And Egg-plan is the energy that She expresses as She brings forth the unceasing torrent of renewal. Queen-light is the glow of Her warmth; Queen-love is the sign of Her great care for us all.”

Hresh stared, thunderstruck by the girl’s strange burst of eloquence. The words had come pouring out of her almost uncontrollably, almost as if someone or something else were speaking through her. Her face was aglow, her eyes were shining with absolute and unshakable conviction. She suddenly seemed swept up into some rapture of visionary zeal. She was aflame with it.

Then the flame flickered and went out, and she was only Nialli Apuilana again, the troubled, uneasy Nialli Apuilana of a moment before.

She sat stunned and depleted before him.

She is such a mystery, he thought.

And these other mysteries, those of the Nest — they were great and complex, and he knew that merely hearing of them like this could never give him a true grasp of them. He wished now that he had lingered longer when he had made his Barak Dayir voyage into the country of the hjjks. He began to see that he must before much longer make that voyage again, and experience the Nest far more deeply than he had allowed himself to do that other time. He must learn what Nialli Apuilana had learned, and he must learn it at first hand. Even if the learning of it cost him his life.

He felt very weary. And she looked exhausted. Hresh realized that they had carried this meeting as far as it could go this day.

But Nialli Apuilana apparently wasn’t quite ready to end it.

“Well?” she asked. “What do you say? Do you understand Nest-bond now? Egg-plan? Queen-love?”

“You look so tired, Nialli.” He touched her cheek. “You ought to get some rest.”

“I will. But first tell me that you understood what I was saying, father. And I didn’t really need to say it, isn’t that true? You already knew all that, didn’t you? You must have seen it when you looked into the Nest with your Wonderstone.”

“Some of it, yes. The sense of pattern, of universal order. I saw that. But I looked so quickly, and then I fled. Nest-bond — Queen-light — no, those terms are just words to me. They have no real substance in my mind.”

“I think you understand more than you suspect.”

“Only the beginning of the beginning of understanding.”

“That’s a beginning, at least.”

“Yes. Yes. At least I know what the hjjks are not.”

“Not demons, you mean? Not monsters?”

“Not enemies.”

“Not enemies, no,” Nialli Apuilana said. “Adversaries, maybe. But not enemies.”

“A very subtle shade of difference.”

“Yet a real one, father.”

Thu-Kimnibol was home at last. The journey south had been swift, though not nearly swift enough for him, and uneventful. Now he walked the grand, lonely halls of his great villa in Dawinno, rediscovering it, reacquainting himself with his own home, his own possessions, after his long absence. It seemed to him that he had been away ten thousand years. He was alone as he went from one echoing room to another, pausing here and there to examine the objects in the display cases.

There were phantoms and spectres everywhere. These were Naarinta’s things, really: she was the one who had collected most of the ancient treasures that filled these rooms, the bits of Great World sculpture and architectural fragments and strange twisted metallic things whose purpose would probably never be known. As he looked at them his sensing-organ began to tingle and he felt the immense antiquity of these battered artifacts come crowding in about him, alive and vital, jigging and throbbing with strange energy, making the villa itself seem a dead place, though it had been built only a dozen years before.

It was still early in the day, just hours after his return from Yissou. But he had lost no time setting in motion his preparations for war. He was due to see Taniane in the afternoon; but first, messengers had gone out to Si-Belimnion, to Kartafirain, to Maliton Diveri, to Lespar Thone: men of power, men he could trust. He waited impatiently for their arrival. It was not good, being here by himself. He hadn’t expected that, how painful it would be to come back to an empty house.

“Your grace?” His majordomo, Gyv Hawoodin, an old Mortiril who had been with him for years. “Your grace, Kartafirain and Si-Belimnion are here.”

“Send them up. And then set out some wine for us.”

Solemnly Thu-Kimnibol embraced his friends. Solemnity seemed the appropriate mood of the day: Si-Belimnion wore a dark mantle that emanated a bleak funereal glow, and even the ebullient Kartafirain was somber and subdued. Thu-Kimnibol offered them wine and they drained their cups as though it were water.

“You won’t believe what has happened here while you were away,” Kartafirain began. “The common folk sing hymns to the Queen of the hjjks. They gather in cellars and children lead them in nonsensical catechisms.”

“This is the heritage of the envoy Kundalimon,” muttered Si-Belimnion, peering moodily into his cup. “Husathirn Mueri warned us that he was corrupting the young, and indeed he was. A pity he wasn’t killed even sooner.”

“It was Curabayn Bangkea that did it?” Thu-Kimnibol asked.

Kartafirain replied, with a shrug, “The guard-captain, yes. So everyone says, at any rate. Someone killed him too, the same day.”

“I heard about that up north. And who was it that killed him, do you suppose?”

“Very likely whoever it was that hired him to kill Kundalimon,” said Si-Belimnion. “To silence him, no doubt. No one knows who it might have been. I’ve heard twenty different guesses, all of them absurd. In any case the investigation’s just about forgotten, now. The new religion’s the only thing that anyone thinks about.”

Thu-Kimnibol stared. “But isn’t Taniane attempting to stamp it out? That’s what I heard.”

“Easier to stamp out wildfire in the dry season,” said Kartafirain. “It was spreading faster than the guards could close the chapels. Eventually Taniane decided that trying to eradicate it was too risky. There might have been an uprising. The common folk profess to see great blessings in the teachings of the Queen. She is their comfort and their joy, the prayer goes. She is the light and the way. They think everything will be love and peace here, once the kindly hjjks are among us.”

“Unbelievable,” Thu-Kimnibol murmured. “Utterly unbelievable.”

“There was love and peace aplenty in the days when our parents lived in the cocoon!” cried Maliton Diveri, who had just entered the room. “Perhaps that’s what they really want. To give up all this city life, and go back into the cocoon, and spend their days sleeping, or kick-wrestling, or munching on velvetberries. Pah! What this city has become disgusts me, Thu-Kimnibol. And it’ll disgust you too.”

“The war will put an end to all this foolishness,” Thu-Kimnibol said brusquely.

“The war?”

“I’ve spent these months speaking with Salaman. I sense that he believes the hjjks are restless and angry, that our failure to accept their treaty has offended them, that they’re going to launch war against us all. The first move will be to attack Yissou, within the year. If the Presidium ratifies, we’ll be pledged by treaty to go to his aid in that case.”

Maliton Diveri chuckled. “Salaman’s been having nightmares of a hjjk invasion for thirty years. Isn’t that why he’s hidden Yissou behind that preposterous wall? But the invasion never comes. What makes him think it’ll happen now? And why do you believe he’s right?”

“I have good reason to think he is,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“And then?” Si-Belimnion asked. “Is this city of sudden hjjk-lovers that we have here going to lift so much as a finger to save far-off Yissou?”

“We have to help them to see the importance of honoring our new alliance,” said Thu-Kimnibol quietly. “If there’s an attack and Salaman beats the hjjks without our help, he’ll lay claim to Vengiboneeza and everything north of it. Can we allow him to grab all that? On the other hand, if Yissou falls to the hjjks, it won’t be long before we see armies of the bug-folk marching through our own lands. Which is even less acceptable. We’ll make the citizens here understand that. They’ll have to realize that a hjjk invasion of Yissou is an act of war against all the People of every city. Surely not everybody in this city has become a worshiper of the Queen. We’ll find enough who are loyal. The rest, if they like, can stay behind and pray to their new goddess. While we’re marching north to destroy the Nest.”

“To destroy the Nest?” Lespar Thone asked. He was the most cautious of these princes, a man of great property and slow, wary ways. “Will that be so easy, do you think? The hjjks are ten to our one, or perhaps a hundred to one. They’ll fight like the demons they are to keep us from getting anywhere near the Nest. How are we going to overcome such numbers?”

“I remind you that I’ve faced those numbers before,” said Thu-Kimnibol. “We routed the hjjks long ago at the battle of Yissou, and we’ll rout them again now.”

“At the battle of Yissou the People had the aid of some Great World weapon, wasn’t that so?” Lespar Thone observed.

Thu-Kimnibol gave him a sour look. “You sound like Puit Kjai. Or Staip. We won that battle by our own valor.”

“Yet Hresh had some ancient thing that was of great help, so I understand,” Lespar Thone insisted. “Sometimes valor alone isn’t enough, Thu-Kimnibol. And against such an immense horde of hjjks, desperately determined to defend their Queen—”

“What are you trying to say?”

“The same thing Husathirn Mueri did, when we discussed all this at the Presidium. Before we can attack the hjjks with impunity we need to have some new weapons.”

“Perhaps the ones found a little while ago in the countryside will fill that need,” said Kartafirain.

Every head turned toward him.

“Tell me more,” said Thu-Kimnibol.

“The story’s been circulating by way of the House of Knowledge. I think there’s something to it. It seems that during the storms there was a great mudslide in the Emakkis Valley, and some farmer who was trying to catch some of his beasts that had escaped stumbled on the mouth of a tunnel leading into a hill. In which he found certain ancient artifacts that have since been brought to the House of Knowledge. A member of Hresh’s staff believes that they’re Great World devices of war, or, at any rate, of destruction. I have this from someone who works there, a Koshmar, Plor Killivash by name. His sister’s in my service.”

Thu-Kimnibol smiled triumphantly at Lespar Thone. “There you are! If there’s any substance to this, we have exactly what we need.”

Si-Belimnion said, “Hresh is known to be cool to the idea of a war with the hjjks. He may not cooperate.”

“Cool or not, the war will come. He’ll help us.”

“And if he chooses not to?”

“He’s my brother, Si-Belimnion. He won’t hold vital information back from me.”

“All the same,” Si-Belimnion said, “you might consider approaching one of Hresh’s subordinates instead of Hresh himself. This Plor Killivash, for example. I hardly need to tell you, of all people, how unpredictable Hresh can be.”

“A good point. We’ll work around him. Kartafirain? Will you have another talk with your friend at the House of Knowledge?”

“I’ll see what I can manage.”

“See that you do. These weapons are just what we need. If weapons is what they really are.” Thu-Kimnibol filled the wine-cups once again, and drank deep. “It troubles me,” he said after a while, “that Taniane hasn’t been willing to take action against this new cult of hjjk-worship. Don’t tell me that she’s come to love the Queen these days as much as her daughter does!”

Kartafirain laughed. “Hardly. She loathes them as much as you do.”

“Then why are these chapels allowed to flourish?”

“It’s as Kartafirain said,” Si-Belimnion replied. “She was afraid there’d be an uprising if she continued the suppression.”

“Taniane never lacked for courage in the old days.”

“You’ll find that she’s much changed,” said Si-Belimnion. “She looks old. She’s hardly ever seen at the Presidium, and doesn’t say much when she’s there.”

“Is she ill?” Thu-Kimnibol asked, thinking of Naarinta.

“Weary, only. Weary and sad. She’s been chieftain longer than most of us have been alive, my friend. It’s taken a terrible toll on her. And now she sees the city falling apart in her hands.”

“Things can’t be that bad!”

Si-Belimnion gave him a melancholy smile. “A bizarre new kind of belief sweeps through the populace. Her own daughter is lost in incomprehensible fantasies. Threats are made against her in the streets by people calling for her abdication — hotheaded members of my own tribe, mostly, I’m ashamed to say. The rain goes on and on as has never been seen here before. She thinks the gods have turned against us and that her own end can’t be far off.”

Thu-Kimnibol looked toward Kartafirain. “Is this true?”

“She’s greatly transformed, I think. And not for the better.”

“Incredible. Incredible. There was never anyone with as much vitality as that woman. But I’ll speak with her. I’ll show her how the war will redeem us. She’ll feel young again once we go marching off to smash the hjjks!”

“She may oppose you on the war,” Maliton Diveri said.

“You think so?”

“Husathirn Mueri is very close with her now. And you know, Thu-Kimnibol, he’ll always take any position that stands against your own beliefs, If you’re for war, he’ll be against it. He’s still in favor of watching and waiting, taking no action, gathering our strength. And he’s certain to speak in the Presidium against your alliance with Salaman.”

Thu-Kimnibol spat. “Husathirn Mueri! That slippery ghost! How can Taniane possibly trust him?”

“Who said she trusts him? She’s smarter than that. But she listens to him. And I guarantee it, he’ll advise against any kind of military action that you support. May well be able to sway her, too.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Thu-Kimnibol.

Despite everything they had told him he was still unprepared for the transformation Taniane had undergone since summer. She seemed a hundred years old. It was hard to believe that this dull-eyed lusterless woman was the fiery chieftain who had ruled this city so vigorously for so many decades. The fierce masks of the former chieftains, hanging on the wall behind her, made a mockery of her fatigue. Thu-Kimnibol felt almost apologetic for his own vigor and strength.

“At last,” she said. “I thought you’d never return.”

“There was a great deal to discuss with Salaman. It had to be done carefully. And he went out of his way to make me feel welcome.”

“A strange man, Salaman. I’d have expected him still to hate you.”

“So would I. But all that’s ancient history now. He was very loving.”

“Salaman? Loving?” Taniane managed a faint smile. “Well, it may be. Even the hjjks are loving, so I’m told.” She leaned back in her chair. In a voice that seemed to come from some deep crypt she said, “There’s been madness here, Thu-Kimnibol. Things are almost beyond my control. I’m in need of all the help you can give.”

“I’ve never heard you so despondent, sister.”

“You know of the new religion? This Kundalimon-worship?”

“Hjjk-worship, you mean.”

“Yes. In truth, that’s what it is.”

“News of it came north with the autumn caravan.”

“Those who believe it — and there are hundreds of them, Thu-Kimnibol, perhaps thousands! — are pushing me to accept the treaty with the Queen. I get petitions every day. They march outside the Presidium. They cry out at me in the streets. I tell you, that boy spread some kind of poison in the minds of the children during just the few weeks he was among us. By the gods, Thu-Kimnibol, I tell you I wish he’d been killed sooner!”

Uneasily Thu-Kimnibol said, “Surely you didn’t have anything to do with his death, Taniane!”

For a moment there was a flash of the old fire in her eyes. “No. No, not at all. Am I a murderer? I had no idea the boy could do such harm. And he was Nialli’s lover. What do you think, that I’d have wanted him removed because of that? No, brother, I had nothing to do with it. I wish I knew who did.”

“Her lover?” Thu-Kimnibol said, shaken.

“You didn’t know? They were coupling-partners, and twining-partners also. I thought everyone knew that by now.”

“I’ve been away many months, sister.”

“You seem to know of everything else that’s gone on here.”

“Her lover,” Thu-Kimnibol said again, still struggling with the idea. “I never thought of that. But how obvious it seems now! Small wonder she went out of her mind when he was killed, then.” He shook his head. It was strange to think of his brother’s daughter having taken a lover of any sort, after the way she’d always kept herself aloof. But to have chosen that dreamy hjjk-reared lad — how much like her that was, he thought. And then for him to be killed. How sad. “The gods have been unkind to that girl,” he said. “One shouldn’t have to have so much turmoil so young. I suppose she’s involved with the new religion, now?”

“Not so far as I’ve heard. By all rights she should be, yes. But I’m told that she stays in her room at the House of Nakhaba and hardly ever goes out. I don’t see her very often, you understand.” Taniane laughed bitterly. “You see how it is? My one child is as foreign to me as a hjjk. My mate hides himself as usual in the House of Knowledge, and busies himself with important matters ten million years old. My people cry out to me to sign a treaty that means the end of us. There have been calls for my abdication, do you know that, Thu-Kimnibol? ‘ You stay much too long,’ they tell me, practically to my face. ‘ It’s time you stepped aside.’ By the gods, Thu-Kimnibol, I wish I could! I wish I could!”

“Taniane — my poor Taniane—” he began, in his gentlest tone.

Her eyes flared wildly. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that! I don’t want your pity! Or anyone’s! Pity isn’t what I need.” In a softer tone she said, “What I need is help. Do you see how isolated I am? How helpless? And do you see what troubles are upon us? What can you offer me beside pity, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“I can offer you a war,” he said.

“A war?”

“We’re in alliance now with the City of Yissou, if the Presidium will ratify it. It binds us to go to Salaman’s aid if his city is attacked by hjjks; and I tell you, no doubt of it, Yissou and the hjjks will be at war very soon. So, then, will we. And then it’ll be treason in this city to speak favorably of hjjks, for they’ll officially be our enemies. And so there’ll be an end to any talk of our accepting the Queen’s treaty, and an end also to this poisonous religion that has sprung up in our midst, and to all the rest of your troubles, sister. What do you say to that? Now, what do you say?”

“Tell me more,” said Taniane, and it seemed to Thu-Kimnibol that years had dropped from her in a single moment.

“All of us finally together again,” Boldirinthe cried. “You were gone so long, Simthala Honginda! How good it is to have you here with us at last!”

It was a joyous day for the old offering-woman; the day of her eldest son’s return from the north. Even the interminable rain had relented for once. For the first time in months her whole family was gathered about her in the warm pleasant hilltop lodgings she shared with Staip: her three sons and their mates, and her daughter and hers, and the whole horde of her grandchildren. Boldirinthe sat enfolded complacently in her own massiveness, contained by her vast body as though by a mound of blankets, and they came to her one by one to be embraced. Afterward they lifted her and led her to the dining-table, and brought the food and the wine. There were grilled scantrins, first, the fleshy-legged little creatures of the bay, not quite fish and not quite lizard but something midway between, and then heaping bowls of steamed kivvinfruit, and finally a roasted haunch of vimbor in shells of pastry, with plenty of good strong black Emakkis wine to wash it down. When they had eaten they sang and told old tales, and Staip, as he always did, reminisced about the People’s privations during the journeys from the cocoon to Vengiboneeza and from Vengiboneeza to the southland, and one of her grandsons recited a poem he had composed, and a granddaughter played a tinkling little tune on the serilingion, and the wine flowed freely and there was much laughter. But Boldirinthe noticed that in the midst of all this joy her son Simthala Honginda, in whose honor the gathering was being held, sat silently, smiling infrequently, seemingly forcing himself by supreme effort to pay even slight attention to what was taking place about him.

To her son’s mate Catiriil, sitting beside her, she said quietly, “He says so little. What troubles him, do you think?”

“Perhaps he’s finding it strange to be home again, after so long a journey.”

Boldirinthe frowned. “Strange? To be home? How can that be, girl? He’s with his kin again, his mate, his son, his daughter — he is here in his own splendid Dawinno, and not in Salaman’s miserable dank Yissou. But where is his spirit? Where is his spark? This isn’t the Simthala Honginda I remember.”

Nor I,” whispered Catiriil. “He seems still to be in some distant land.”

“Has he been like this all day?”

“From the first, when the caravan arrived at dawn. Oh, we embraced warmly enough, he told me how much he had missed me, he brought out gifts for me and for the children, he told us of the disagreeable place he had been and remarked on the beauty of Dawinno, even in the rain. It was all just words, though. There was no feeling in them.” Then, with a smile, Catiriil said, “It must be only that Thu-Kimnibol kept him up there in the north so long that the chill of Salaman’s city entered his soul. But give me a day or two to warm him up, Mother Boldirinthe. That’s all it’ll take!”

“Go to him now,” Boldirinthe said. “Sit with him. Serve him with wine, and see to it that his cup is never empty. Eh, girl? You know what I mean.”

Catiriil nodded and crossed the room to take the seat beside her mate. Boldirinthe watched approvingly. Catiriil was so gentle, so good, such a graceful person in every way, a splendid mate for her sharp-edged son. And beautiful, too, as her mother Torlyri had been, that same rich black fur startlingly banded with white spirals, the same dark warm eyes. Torlyri had been very tall, and Catiriil was small and delicate, but sometimes, seeing her son’s mate from the corner of her eye, Boldirinthe imagined she was seeing Torlyri returned from the dead, and it gave her a start. And also Catiriil had Torlyri’s mild and loving nature. How odd, Boldirinthe thought, that Catiriil was so pleasing in so many ways, and her brother Husathirn Mueri so difficult to like.

Catiriil was doing her best to cheer Simthala Honginda up. She had gathered a little group around him — his brother Nikilain, and Nikilain’s mate Pultha, who was an absolute well of laughter and high spirits, and Timofon, his close friend and hunting companion, the mate of Simthala Honginda’s sister Leesnai. They were joking with him, teasing him a little, centering all their attention and love on him. If a group like that couldn’t lift Simthala Honginda from his bleakness, Boldirinthe thought, then no one could. But it seemed to be working.

Abruptly Simthala Honginda’s voice rose clearly over the sounds of singing and merriment.

“Shall I tell you a story?” he said, in an oddly strained tone. “You have all told stories: now I’ll tell you one, or several.” He gulped the last of his wine and said without waiting for a response, “At one time in the hills east of Vengiboneeza there lived a bird with one body and two heads. You never saw it, did you, father? I didn’t think so. But this is a tale. It seems that one of the heads once noticed the other head eating some sweet fruit with great enjoyment, and became envious, and it said to itself, ‘I will eat poison fruit, then.’ And so it did; and the whole bird died.”

The room was completely quiet. There were some awkward attempts at laughter when Simthala Honginda was done speaking, but they died away as quickly as they were born.

“You liked that story, eh?” he cried. “Another one, then? Wait. Wait, let me have some wine.”

Catiriil said, “Perhaps you’re tired, love. We could—”

“No,” said Simthala Honginda, refilling and draining his cup almost at once. “Another story. The story of the serpent whose head and tail quarreled with each other as to which should be the front. The tail said, ‘You’re always in the lead. That isn’t fair. Let me lead once in a while.’ And the head replied, ‘How can I change places with you? The gods have decreed that I am the head.’ But the quarrel went on and on, until the tail, in anger, wrapped itself around a tree, and the serpent could not proceed. Finally the head relented, and allowed the tail to go first, whereupon the serpent fell into a pit of flame and perished. Which is to say that there is a natural order to things, and when that order is disturbed, everything will go to ruin.”

The silence this time was even more tense.

Staip, half rising from his seat, looked toward his son and said, “I think perhaps you should put your wine-cup away now, boy. What do you say?”

“I say that I haven’t had nearly enough, father! But you don’t like my stories, I take it. I thought you would, but it seems that I’m wrong. Well, then. No more stories. Only straightforward speech will it be, then. Direct and plain. Do you want to hear about my journey to the north? Do you want to know what our embassy achieved in Salaman’s kingdom?”

Softly Catiriil said, “You’re upsetting your mother, you know. You don’t want to do that, do you? Look how pale she’s become. Perhaps we should go out for a little fresh air, love. The rain has stopped, and—”

“No,” Simthala Honginda said fiercely. “No, she should hear this too. She’s still the offering-woman, isn’t she? She’s a high official of the tribe, is she not? Well, then. She must hear it.” His hand trembled as he reached for yet another cup of wine. “What I have to tell you is that there will be war soon,” he cried. “With the hjjks, it’ll be. Salaman and Thu-Kimnibol have arranged it between them, some provocation, some pretext that’ll touch it off, and we’ll be plunged into the full fury of it, like it or not. This I know from what I heard, and what I overheard, and what I found by prowling about. There will be war! Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman will have it no other way! And we’ll all blindly follow them over the edge of the cliff!” He took a deep draught of the wine. More moderately he said, “They’re mad, those two. And their madness will infect all the world. Or perhaps it’s the world’s madness that has infected them. Perhaps we’ve already gone so far down the wrong road that this is the inevitable outcome, that Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman are the appropriate leaders for our time.”

Boldirinthe stared, horror-stricken. She felt her heart beating furiously in the depths of her immense body.

Catiriil rose now and took the cup from Simthala Honginda, and whispered in his ear, trying desperately to calm him down. He responded angrily at first, but something she said appeared to reach him, and he nodded and shrugged, and spoke more gently to her, and after a moment she slipped her arm through his and led him quietly from the room.

Quietly Boldirinthe said to Staip, “Can what he said be true? Will there be war, do you think?”

“I’m no confidant of Thu-Kimnibol’s,” said Staip impassively. “I know no more than you do of any of this.”

“There must be no war,” she said. “Who will speak for peace in the Presidium? Husathirn Mueri will, I know. And Puit Kjai. And Hresh, perhaps. And certainly I will, if they give me a chance. And you? Will you speak?”

“If Thu-Kimnibol wants war, there will be war,” said Staip, sounding as though he spoke from the other side of the grave. “What of it? Will you have to go to battle? Will I? No, no, no, this is no affair of ours. The gods determine everything. This is no affair of ours, Boldirinthe. If there is to be war, I say, let it come.”

“War?” Husathirn Mueri said. He looked at his sister in astonishment. “A secret understanding with Salaman? A trumped-up provocation?”

“So Simthala Honginda insisted,” said Catiriil. “So he said, in front of Staip, in front of Boldirinthe, in front of the whole family. It was bubbling inside him all day, and finally it came out. He’d been drinking heavily, you understand.”

“Would he say the same things to me, if I went to see him?”

“He’s never been really close to you, you know.”

Husathirn Mueri laughed. “How kind you are! What you mean, but aren’t willing to say, is that he dislikes me intensely. Eh, Catiriil?”

She shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I’m aware that you and he have never been friendly. What he said at dinner is something he really had no right to reveal. It’s almost treasonous, isn’t it, blurting out state secrets like that? He may not want to take you into his confidence.”

“No right to reveal that we’re being tricked into fighting a war that’ll ruin us, simply to gratify Thu-Kimnibol’s lust for battle? You call that treasonous? It’s Thu-Kimnibol who’s committed the treason, Catiriil.”

“Yes. So I think also. That’s why I’ve brought this to you.”

“But you doubt that I can get Simthala Honginda to give me the details of it himself.”

“I doubt it very much, brother.”

“All right. All right. This is valuable enough for now, simply knowing what Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman have cooked up together. I’ll take it from there.”

“And may the gods be with us, whatever may come,” Catiriil said.

“The gods,” Husathirn Mueri said softly to himself, with a little chuckle, when his sister was gone. “Yes. May the gods be with us, indeed.”

To me they are nothing at all, they are only names.Those were Nialli Apuilana’s words, that astounding time when she had raved in such frenzy before the Presidium. Our own inventions, to comfort us in our difficult times. Husathirn Mueri had never forgotten that moment, nor those words.

Nothing but names. His own view exactly. In truth he knew himself to be a worse case even than Nialli Apuilana, for he had no beliefs at all, other than that life was nonsense, a cruel joke, a series of random events, that there was no reason for our being here other than that we are here. She at least had swallowed the hjjk myth that a cosmic plan governs the world and that everything is part of a preordained pattern. He had never seen evidence of that. And so he had no moral center, and knew it; he was capable of taking any position that seemed useful to the moment, favoring war one day and opposing it the next, as circumstances required. All that mattered was attaining power and comfort in his own lifetime, for that one lifetime was all there was, and everything was a joke in any case.

Husathirn Mueri had tried once to expound on these things to Nialli Apuilana, hoping to prove to her that they shared a set of common beliefs. But she had looked at him in shock and dismay, and had said to him in the coldest voice he had ever heard, “You don’t understand me at all, Husathirn Mueri. You don’t understand a thing about me at all.”

So be it. Perhaps he didn’t.

But he did understand the implications of the astonishing tale Catiriil had brought to him this day. He was surprised to see how little surprise he felt. Of course Thu-Kimnibol had gone north to stir up a war with the hjjks; of course the bellicose Salaman would gladly conspire with him to bring it about. And doubtless Taniane would lend what was left of her waning energies and all of her still considerable power to the task of mobilizing the Presidium’s approval.

But possibly there was still a way to head them off. Just possibly, he thought. Or, if a war couldn’t be avoided, at least to expose the perfidious role Thu-Kimnibol had played in bringing it about. The city could only suffer, if it went to war against the insect-folk. The losses would be terrible, the disruption of the fabric of life perhaps irreparable. And in the aftermath, those who had fomented the war would be brought down by it, and those who had tried in vain to prevent it would rise to greatness.

Husathirn Mueri smiled.

I’ll see what I can do, he thought.

And may the gods be with me indeed.

They had marched for weeks, going northward all the time. Behind them the world was gliding happily onward once again into spring, but in these forlorn lands on the far side of Vengiboneeza an iron winter still seemed to prevail. To Zechtior Lukin that made no difference. The chill of winter and the hot blasts of summer were all the same to him. He scarcely noticed the change of seasons, except that the hours of darkness lasted longer at one time of the year than at another.

Now they were in a gray land. The ground was gray, the sky was gray, the wind itself was gray with a burden of dark sand when it came roaring out of the east. The only color came from the vegetation, which seemed to be striking back against the grayness with sullen fury. The tough sparse sawedged grass was an angry carmine; the big rigid dome-shaped fungi were a deathly yellow and exploded into clouds of brilliant green spores when they were trampled; the trees, tall and narrow, had gleaming blue leaves shaped like spines, and constantly dropped a rain of viscous pink sap that burned like acid.

Low chalky hills like stubby teeth formed chains in the distance. The open country between them was flat and dry and unpromising, no lakes, no streams, only an occasional brackish spring oozing out of some salt-crusted crack in the ground.

“Which way now?” Lisspar Moen asked. She was the daily march-herald, who transmitted Zechtior Lukin’s orders to the others.

He nodded toward the hills and indicated a continued north-northeasterly route.

“Hjjk country?” she said.

“Our country,” Zechtior Lukin told her.

Striding along behind him in the gray plain were the Acknowledgers of Yissou, three hundred forty of them now.

Of his original three hundred seventy-six followers, a dozen or so had been too old and feeble to undertake the risks of beginning a new life in the wilderness, and another few had, when the moment of departure was at hand, simply recanted their faith and refused to go. Zechtior Lukin had anticipated something of that sort. He made no attempt to coerce them.

Coercion had no part in his philosophy. He acknowledged the supremacy of the gods in all things. If the gods decreed that some of his followers would choose not to follow him, he was prepared to accept that. Zechtior Lukin, expecting nothing of the world but what the world daily presented to him, had never known a moment’s disappointment.

There had been some losses on the march, too. He accepted those calmly too. The gods would always have their way.

A raiding party of hjjks had captured five of his people as the marchers were passing the vicinity of Vengiboneeza. Knowing that the ancient sapphire-eyes capital was held now by the insect-folk, Zechtior Lukin had chosen a route cutting well to the east of it. But not far enough, it seemed. At twilight, in a mountain pass shrouded in close-hanging mist, came a sudden attack, shrieks and scuffles, great confusion, and, after a moment, the realization that whatever had happened was over. A few abandoned knapsacks lay on the ground, and one hand-cart was overturned. There was no hope of giving chase: the high country surrounding them was dark and pathless. Zechtior Lukin was grateful that the hjjks had taken as few as they had.

Natural perils took others. This was an untamed land. A scattering of loose boughs turned out to conceal the mouth of a pit, and scarlet claws and yellow fangs were waiting at its bottom. A few days later a huge low-slung beast clad in thick brown scales hard as stone burst madly out of nowhere, swinging its small dull-eyed head from side to side like a club, killing those it struck. Then there was a comic hopping creature with merry golden eyes and absurd tiny forearms; but from its tail there sprang a spike that squirted poison. And at midday once came a swarm of winged insects, as dazzling as colored jewels, that filled the air with a milky spray. Those that breathed it fell ill, and some did not recover.

“These things are to be expected,” Zechtior Lukin said.

“We acknowledge the will of the gods,” his people replied.

The survivors went on undaunted. Zechtior Lukin waited for the Five Heavenly Ones to tell him that they had come to the place where they should build their city.

On the far side of the chalky hills the grayness lifted. The land here was pale brown streaked with red, a sign perhaps of fertility, and there was a river running from east to west that was split into three forks. Along the riverbanks the vegetation had shining green foliage and some of the shrubs bore fat purplish fruits with wrinkled skins. They proved to be edible.

“Here we will stay,” Zechtior Lukin said. “I feel the presence of the Five here.”

He chose a little ridge between the two southernmost forks that seemed likely to be above the river’s floodplain, and they set up the tents that they would live in until they had constructed the first buildings. Three women who were gifted with unusually powerful second sight went some distance apart to send word to Yissou of their location; for Zechtior Lukin had promised the king that he would do that. Salaman had shown him a method, combining twining and second sight, that would allow contact to be maintained over great distances. Zechtior Lukin was skeptical. But promises were to him like sacred oaths, and he sent the women off to transmit the message.

He said, “I call this place Salpa Kala,” which meant the Place of the Heavenly Ones.

On the morning of the fourth day after the Acknowledgers had settled at Salpa Kala three hjjks appeared without warning, as though they had risen from the earth, and went unhesitatingly to Zechtior Lukin as he was supervising the raising of a tent. He was aware that they were behind him even before he turned: he could feel a hard icy pressure against his consciousness that was the bleak, remote, arid coldness of their austere souls.

Calmly one of them — he could not tell which; it spoke in the silent buzzing droning voice of the mind — said, “This place is forbidden to you. You will leave here tonight and return to your own land.”

“This place is Salpa Kala, and the Five Heavenly Ones have given it to us to be our home,” Zechtior Lukin replied evenly.

By second sight he sent forth the vision he once had had, of the immensity of the Queen of the insect-folk hovering in the air above Yissou, as though to say that he knew of her greatness, and accepted it as he accepted all things; but what he attempted to transmit also was that he had been told by the gods, the same high gods who guide the destinies of the hjjks, that he must come to this place and establish a settlement here.

But if what he had sent forth had reached the hjjks, or had impressed them in any way, they gave no sign of it.

“You will leave here tonight,” said the rasping hjjk-voice again.

“We will not yield the gift of the gods,” said Zechtior Lukin.

The hjjks said nothing further. Zechtior Lukin studied them calmly, staring at their long shining bodies, their many-faceted eyes, their segmented orange breathing-tubes, their jutting beaks, their six slender bristly limbs. The shortest of the three was a head taller than he was, but he doubted that it weighed any more than a child, so parched and fleshless did its body seem. In the clear morning air their hard yellow-and-black carapaces reflected the sunlight with an unpleasant glare. He felt no fear of them.

After a time he shrugged and turned his back to them, and went back to the job of directing the raising of the tent.

“What will we do?” Gheppilin the harnessmaker asked, when the hjjks had gone stalking off.

“Why, we’ll hold our ground,” he said. “It’s ours by gift of the gods, is it not?”

He gave orders to his Acknowledgers to break out weapons: swords, spears, knives, clubs. At sundown they gathered in a tight circle beside their clustered baggage and waited for the hjjks to return.

The three who had come before — Zechtior Lukin assumed, at least, that they were the same ones — stepped out of the shadows.

“You are still here,” the droning hjjk-voice said.

“This place is ours.”

“It is no place for flesh-folk. Go back or die.”

“The gods have brought us here,” said Zechtior Lukin. “The gods’ will be done.”

There was a shrill cry from the far side of the encampment. Zechtior Lukin looked about quickly; but the one quick glance was enough. A horde of dark angular figures had emerged from the thickets by the river, hjjks by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands. It seemed as if every pebble along the bank had been transformed in that moment into a hjjk. Already his people were in chaos.

Zechtior Lukin lifted his spear. “Fight!” he bellowed. “Fight! Cowardice is ungodly!”

He thrust the weapon into the bright shining eye of the hjjk nearest him, pulled it free, used the edge of its blade to slash the breathing-tube of the second one.

“Fight!”

“We’ll all be killed!” Lisspar Moen called to him.

“We owe the gods a death, and tonight they’ll have it, yes,” Zechtior Lukin said, and struck down the third of the hjjks just as it raised its clacking beak above him. “But we’ll fight all the same. We’ll fight to the end.”

The insect-folk swarmed everywhere in the encampment. Their spears flashed. Their harsh screeching cries drowned out the voices of the Acknowledgers.

Lisspar Moen’s right, Zechtior Lukin told himself. We’re all going to die now.

So it seemed he had misunderstood the will of the gods. Evidently they hadn’t meant him to be the one who built the new world after all. That seemed clear. Very well: this too was the will of the gods, even as the descent of the death-stars upon the Great World had been their will, seven hundred thousand years before.

He wondered for a moment whether it was right even to attempt to resist. If the gods had ordained his death and the death of all his people this night, as surely they had, should he not put down his spear and wait peacefully for his end with folded arms, just as the sapphire-eyes had done when the Long Winter swept over them?

Maybe so. Looking quickly around, he saw some of his people trying to hide or flee, but others standing calmly, offering themselves with an Acknowledger’s true resignation to the spears of the hjjks.

Yes. Yes, he thought. That is the proper way.

But he realized that he himself couldn’t do it. Here at the last, with destruction at hand, he felt impelled to resist, futile though it was, and contrary to all that he had believed and taught. He didn’t have it in him, after all, to submit so obligingly to slaughter. In the final hour of his life Zechtior Lukin found himself staring at an aspect of his soul that he had not expected ever to find.

False Acknowledger! Hypocrite!

At least he was capable of acknowledging that much. He pondered the matter for an instant and thrust it from his mind. After all, he was what the gods had created, for good or ill.

A wide ring of hjjks surrounded him. Their shining eyes were like huge glittering dark moons. With a snarl, he set himself in a square battle-stance as they moved in on him.

He struck and struck and struck again, until he was able to strike no more.