At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  PRAISE FOR

  THIS NEW SERIES

  FROM SF MASTER

  Robert Silverberg

  “Magnificently imaginative…SF on the grandest scale.”

  —Denver Post

  “Captivating science fiction.”

  —Cincinnati Post

  “Majestic…the lead characters…prove to be complex, vivid, and emotionally powerful, well suited to Silverberg’s biblical meditations on power, knowledge, anger, fear, love, and divinity. The persevering reader will find much to admire in this book, as in its predecessor.”

  —Locus

  “Science fiction with real scope and power…with real characters and zesty imagination, it never loses a close human focus.”

  —Gregory Benford

  author of Timescape and

  Great Sky River

  “A solid Silverberg effort with complex characters and a richly detailed, imaginative new setting.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “An endearing mix of adventure quest and allegory about the dawn of man…complex characters and interesting storytelling.”

  —Dow Jones

  “Outstanding in every respect.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  “An intriguing exercise in world-building…[on] a temporal scale to beggar most imaginations.”

  —Analog

  “A solid, dramatic novel…expands on the mixed terrors and pleasures of freedom.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Tingling, richly detailed and fascinating…a long, absorbing, far-future saga…Silverberg’s best full-length outing for many a long year.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Beautifully constructed with graphic descriptions of the lush new world…and in-depth characters…each a work of art…If you love fantasy, this one’s for you.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “Written in precise, yet effortless prose, Silverberg’s imagery is sharp and he evokes a sense of wonder.”

  —Rave Reviews

  “This is the welcome sequel to Silverberg’s brilliant At Winter’s End…Silverberg continues to be an excellent storyteller, never shying from complexities in his new societies.”

  —“Stargate,”

  Rockland Maine Courier-Gazette

  “A sprawling story…full of ingenious pieces of characterization and world building. Certain to appeal to Silverberg’s many faithful readers.”

  —Upfront

  Also by ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Nightwings

  Dying Inside

  Lord Valentine’s Castle

  Majipoor Chronicles

  Valentine Pontifex

  Tom O’Bedlam*

  Star of Gypsies*

  Gilgamesh the King

  Beyond the Safe Zone*

  Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder*

  At Winter’s End*

  *Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1990 by Agberg, Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Book design by H. Roberts

  Cover illustration by Michael Whelan

  Cover design by Don Puckey

  Warner Books, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10103

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book was originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.

  First Printed in Paperback: May, 1991

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Malcolm Edwards

  Time is not succession and transition, but the perpetual sound of the fixed present in which all times, past and future, are contained.

  —Octavio Paz

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 The Emissary

  2 Masks of Several Sorts

  3 Salaman Receives a Visitor

  4 The Martyr

  5 The Hand of the Transformer

  6 Difficult Weather

  7 Rumblings of War

  8 The Sword of Dawinno

  9 The Nest of Nests

  10 The Queen of Springtime

  BONUS

  Outline of “The Summer of Homecoming”:

  The New Springtime, Volume III

  A Piece of the Great World

  The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was a thing that happened every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside. But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

  Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land.

  But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now.

  1

  The Emissary

  As he came over the knife-edge summit of the bare rock-strewn hill and turned to descend into the warm green valley that was his destination, Kundalimon felt the wind change. For weeks it had been at his back, hard and dry and biting, as he journeyed from the interior of the continent toward its southwestern coast. But it was blowing from the south, now: a sweet soft wind, almost a caress, carrying a host of strange fragrances toward him out of the city of the flesh-folk down below.

  He could only guess at what those fragrances were.

  One was a smell that he supposed might be like that of the lust of serpents, and another something like the scent of burning feathers, and there was a third that he imagined was the smell of sea-things that have been brought in nets, angrily thrashing, to the land. And then one that might almost have been the smell of the Nest—the flavor of black root-earth from the deepest passageways below the ground.

  But he knew he was deceiving himself. Where he was now could not have been farther from the Nest, its familiar odors and textures.

  With a hiss and a jab of his heels Kundalimon signaled his vermilion to halt, and paused a moment, breathing deeply, sucking the city’s complex vapors deep down into his lungs in the hope that those strange fragrances would turn him to flesh again. He needed to be flesh, this day. He was hjjk now, in soul if not in body. But today he had to put aside all that was hjjk about himself, and meet these flesh-folk as if he truly were one of them. Which he had been once, long ago.

  He would need to speak their language, such few scraps of it as he remembered from his childhood. Eat their foods, however much they nauseated him. And find a way to touch their souls. On him, much depended.

  Kundalimon had come here to bring the flesh-folk the gift of Queen-love, the greatest gift he knew. To urge them to open their hearts to Her. Cry out to them to accept Her embrace. Beg them to let Her love flood their souls. Then, only then, could Queen-peace continue in the world. If his mission failed, the peace must end, and there would be warfare at last between flesh-folk and hjjk: strife, waste, needless death, interruption of Nest-plenty.

  It was a war that the Queen did not want. War was never an integral and necessary aspect of Nest-plan except as a last resort. But the imperatives of Nest-plan
were clear enough. If the flesh-folk refused to embrace the Queen in love, to allow Her joy to bring gladness to their souls, then war would be impossible to avert.

  “Onward,” he told the vermilion, and the ponderous scarlet beast went shambling forward, down the steep hillside, into the lushly vegetated valley.

  In just a few hours now he would reach the City of Dawinno, the great southern capital, the mother-nest of the flesh-folk. Where that race’s largest swarm—his race, once, but no more—had its home.

  Kundalimon stared in mingled wonder and disdain at the scene before him. The richness of it all was awesome; and yet something in him scorned this soft place, felt a dark and potent contempt for its superabundance. Wherever he glanced, there was such lavishness as made his head throb. All that foliage, dewy and shining in the morning light! Those golden-green vines, madly profligate, climbing tremendous trees with lunatic energy! From the boughs of squat long-armed shrubs there dangled heavy red fruits that looked as though they could quench your thirst for a month. Thick, sultry bushes with furry blue-tinged leaves sprouted absurdly huge clusters of shimmering lavender berries. The grass, close-packed and succulent with bright scarlet blades, seemed to be offering itself eagerly for the delight of hungry wanderers.

  And the gaudy flocks of plump noisy birds, pure white with startling bands of crimson on their huge beaks—the small clamorous big-eyed beasts scrambling in the underbrush—the little winged insects flashing wings of rainbow color—

  Too much, Kundalimon thought, too much, too much, much much too much. He missed the austerity of his northern homeland, the dry sparse plains where a patch of withered grass was cause for song, and one met one’s food with proper reverence, knowing how lucky one was to have this pouchful of hard gray seeds, this strip of dried brown meat.

  A land like this, where all manner of provender lay everywhere about for the mere taking, seemed undisciplined and overloving. A sloppy easy place that had the look of a paradise: but in the final truth it must surely do harm to its unsuspecting inhabitants in the guise of benefit. Where the nourishment is too easy, soul-injury is the inevitable result. In a place like this, one can starve faster with a full gut than an empty one.

  And yet this very valley was the place where he had been born. But it had had little time to place its imprint on him. He had been taken from it too young. This was Kundalimon’s seventeenth summer, and for thirteen of those years he had dwelled among the servants of the Queen in the far north. He was of the Nest now. Nothing that was flesh about him except his flesh itself. His thoughts were Nest-thoughts. His soul was a Nest-soul. When he spoke, the sounds that came most readily to his tongue were the harsh clicks and whispers of hjjk speech. Still, much as he would deny it, Kundalimon knew that beneath all that lay the inescapable truth of the flesh. His soul might be of the Nest but his arm was flesh; his heart was flesh; his loins were flesh. And now at last he was returning to this place of flesh where his life had begun.

  The flesh-folk city was a maze of white walls and towers, cradled in rounded hills beside an immense ocean, just as Nest-thinker had said. It soared and swooped like some bizarre giant sprawling organism over the high green ridges that flanked the great curving bay.

  How strange to live above the ground in that exposed way, in such a dizzying host of separate structures all tangled together. All of them so rigid and hard, so little like the supple corridors of the Nest. And those strange gaping areas of open space between them.

  What an alien and repellent place! And yet beautiful, in its fashion. How was that possible, repellent and beautiful both at once? For a moment his courage wavered. He knew himself to be neither flesh nor Nest and he felt suddenly lost, a creature of the indeterminate mid-haze, belonging to neither world.

  Only for a moment. His fears passed. Nest-strength reasserted itself in him. He was a true servant of the Queen; how then could he fail?

  He threw back his head and filled his lungs with the warm aromatic breeze from the south. Laden as it was with city-smells, with flesh-folk smells, it stirred his body to quick hot response: flesh calling to flesh. That was all right, Kundalimon thought. I am flesh; and yet I am of the Nest.

  I am the emissary of the Queen of Queens. I am the speaker of the Nest of Nests. I am the bridge between the worlds.

  He made a joyous clicking sound. Calmly he rode forward. After a time he saw tiny figures in the distance, flesh-folk, looking his way, pointing, shouting. Kundalimon nodded and waved to them, and spurred his vermilion onward toward the place called Dawinno.

  A day’s ride to the south and east, in the swampy lakelands on the far side of the coastal hills that lay inland of the City of Dawinno, the hunters Sipirod, Kaldo Tikret, and Vyrom moved warily through the fields of luminous yellow moss-flower. A heavy golden mist shimmered in the air. It was the pollen of the male moss-flower, rising in thick gusts to seek the female fields farther to the south. A string of long, narrow phosphorescent lakes, choked with stringy blue algae, stretched before them. The time was early morning. Already the day was stiflingly hot.

  Old Hresh the chronicler had sent them out here. He wanted them to bring him a pair of caviandis, the lithe quick fish-hunting creatures that lived in watery districts like this.

  Caviandis were harmless, inoffensive animals. But not much else in this region was harmless, and the three hunters moved with extreme caution. You could die quickly in these swamps. Hresh had had to promise a thick wad of exchange-units to get them to take on the task at all.

  “Does he want to eat them, do you think?” Kaldo Tikret asked. He was stubby and coarse, a crossbreed, with sparse chocolate fur tinged with the gold of the Beng tribe, and dull amber eyes. “I hear that caviandi is tasty stuff.”

  “Oh, he’ll eat them, all right,” said Vyrom. “I can see it from here, the whole picture. He and his lady the chieftain, and their crazy daughter, sitting down at table together in their finest robes, yes. Feasting on roast caviandi, cramming it in with both their hands, swilling down the good wine.” He laughed and made a broad, comfortably obscene gesture, switching his sensing-organ briskly from side to side. Vyrom was gap toothed and squint-eyed, but his body was long and powerful. He was the son of the sturdy warrior Orbin, who had died the year before. He still wore a red mourning band on his arm. “That’s how they live, those lucky rich ones. Eat and drink, eat and drink, and send poor fools like us out into the lakelands to snare their caviandis for them. We should catch an extra caviandi for ourselves, and roast it on our way back, as long as we’ve come all this way to get some for Hresh.”

  “Fools indeed is what you are,” Sipirod said, and spat. Sipirod was Vyrom’s mate, sinuous and quick-eyed, a better hunter than either of the others. She was of the Mortiril tribe, a small one long since swallowed up in the city. “The two of you. Didn’t you hear the chronicler say that he wanted the caviandis for his science? He wants to study them. He wants to talk to them. He wants them to tell him their history.”

  Vyrom guffawed. “What kind of history can caviandis have? Animals, that’s all they are.”

  “Hush,” said Sipirod harshly. “There are other animals here who’d gladly eat your flesh today. Keep your wits on your work, friend. If we’re smart, we’ll come out of this all right.”

  “Smart and lucky,” Vyrom said.

  “I suppose. But smart makes lucky happen. Let’s get moving.”

  She pointed ahead, into the steamy tropical wilderness. Diamond-eyed khut-flies half the size of a man’s head buzzed through the yellow air, trapping small birds with lightning swoops of their sticky tendrils and sucking the juices from them. Coiling steptors dangled by their tails from the branches of oily-barked trees, harrowing the black waters of the swampy lakes for fish. A long-beaked round creature with mud-colored fur and eyes like green saucers, standing high on naked stalk-like legs like stilts, waded through the shallows, scooping up struggling gray mud-crawlers with clumsy pouncing grabs of surprising efficiency. Far away, something that mus
t have been of terrible size bellowed again and again, an ominous low rumbling sound.

  “Where are all these caviandis?” Vyrom asked.

  “By fast-flowing streams,” said Sipirod. “Such as feed these filthy sluggish lakes here. We’ll see a few of them on the other side.”

  “I’d be glad to be done with this job in an hour,” Kaldo Tikret said, “and get myself back to the city in one piece. What idiocy, risking our lives for a few stinking exchange-units—”

  “Not so few,” Vyrom said.

  “Even so. It’s not worth it.” On the way out, they had talked of their chances of running into something ugly here. Did it make sense, dying for a few exchange-units? Of course not. But that was how it was: you liked to eat regularly, you went hunting where they told you to hunt, and you caught what they wanted you to catch. That was how it was. They tell us, we do. “Let’s get it over with,” Kaldo Tikret said.

  “Right,” said Sipirod. “But first we have to cross the swamp.”

  She led the way, tiptoeing as if she expected the spongy earth to swallow her if she gave it her full weight. The pollen became thicker as they moved southward toward the nearest of the lakes. It clung to their fur and blocked their nostrils. The air seemed tangible. The heat was oppressive. Even during the bleak days of the Long Winter this must have been a land of mild weather, and here, as the New Springtime surged yearly toward greater warmth, the lake country lay in the grip of an almost unbearable sultriness.

  “You see any caviandis yet?” Vyrom asked.

  Sipirod shook her head. “Not here. By the streams. The streams.”

  They went onward. The distant rumbling bellow grew louder.

  “A gorynth, sounds like,” Kaldo Tikret said moodily. “Maybe we ought to head in some other direction.”

  “There are caviandis here,” said Sipirod.