At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  There seemed no way to breach them. All they could do was stammer random words at each other, and fragments of ideas. Sometimes they seemed close to a meeting of minds, and the stranger’s eyes would grow bright and the ghost of a smile, even, appeared on his face; but then they reached the limits of their understanding, and the walls descended between them once again.

  “Are you getting anywhere?” Husathirn Mueri asked, after a while.

  “Nowhere. Nowhere at all.”

  “You can’t even guess at what he’s saying? Or why he’s here?”

  “He’s here as some sort of ambassador. That much seems certain.”

  “Do you have anything to go by, or are you just guessing?”

  “You see those pieces of hjjk shell he’s wearing? They’re tokens of high authority,” she said. “The thing on his chest is called a Nest-guardian, and it’s made out of the shell of a dead hjjk warrior. They wouldn’t have let him take it out of the Nest except as a sign that he’s on a special mission. It’s something like a chieftain’s mask would be among us. The other one, the bracelet, was probably a gift from his Nest-thinker, to help him focus his thoughts. Poor lost soul, it hasn’t done him much good, has it?”

  “Nest-thinker?”

  “His mentor. His teacher. Don’t ask me to explain it all now. They’re only bug-folk to you, anyway.”

  “I told you that I regretted—”

  “Yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. “You told me that you regretted. Anyway, he’s surely here with some special message, not just the usual hazy stuff that returnees tell us, if they say anything at all. But he can’t speak. He must have lived in the Nest since he was three or four years old, and he can barely remember a word of our language.”

  Husathirn Mueri moodily stroked his cheek-fur.

  “Can you suggest anything?” he asked, after a time.

  “Only the obvious. Send for my father.”

  “Ah,” Husathirn Mueri said. “Of course!”

  “Does the chronicler speak hjjk?” Curabayn Bangkea asked.

  “The chronicler has the Wonderstone, idiot,” said Husathirn Mueri. “The Barak Dayir, the Barak Dayir! Of course! One touch of it and all mysteries are solved!”

  He clapped his hands. The fat bailiff appeared.

  “Find Hresh. Summon him here.” He looked around. “Adjourned until Hresh comes.”

  The chronicler just then was in his garden of natural history, in the western quadrant of the city, supervising the arrival of his caviandis.

  Many years earlier, Hresh in a vision of the Vengiboneeza of Great World times had entered a place called the Tree of Life. Here the sapphire-eyes folk had gathered all sorts of wild creatures and placed them in chambers that duplicated their natural surroundings. The dreaming Hresh, to his terrible shame and chagrin, had even found his own ancestors among the animals housed there; and so he had learned beyond question that day that his People, who once had thought of themselves as humans, were no such lofty thing, and in the days of the Great World had been regarded as nothing more than beasts fit for collecting and keeping in cages.

  Most of the creatures Hresh had seen on that day of wandering in the remote past had perished in the Long Winter, and their kind was forever gone from the Earth. The Tree of Life itself had long ago crumbled to dust. But Hresh had built a Tree of Life of his own in the City of Dawinno, overlooking the tranquil bay: a maze-like garden where creatures from all parts of the continent had been assembled for him to study. He had water-striders there, and drum-bellies, and dancerhorns, and hosts of the other creatures which the People had encountered in their migrations across the face of the land since leaving the ancestral cocoon. He had blue-furred long-legged stinchitoles, whose minds were linked in a way he had not begun to fathom. He had bevies of plump-legged red scantrins. He had the pink ropy long-fanged worms, longer than a man was tall, that lived in the steaming mud of the lakelands. He had thekmurs, and crispalls, and stanimanders. He had gabools. He had steptors. He had a band of the mocking green monkey-like tree-dwelling beasts who had pelted the People raucously with wads of dung when first they entered Vengiboneeza.

  And now too he had a pair of caviandis, newly brought to him from the lakelands.

  He would make a comfortable habitat for them along the stream that ran through the garden, and the stream would be stocked with the fish they most preferred, and they would have room to dig the burrows in which they liked to live. And once they had grown accustomed to life in captivity he would try to reach their minds through second sight, through use of the Wonderstone if necessary. He would touch their souls, if souls they had, and see what depths were to be found in them.

  The caviandis, trembling, sat side by side in their carrier, giving him a saucer-eyed look of misery and fear.

  Hresh returned that sorry stare with a deep look of curiosity and fascination. They were graceful, elegant beasts, unquestionably intelligent. Just how intelligent was what he meant to find out. The lesson of the ancient Tree of Life, of the Great World itself, was that intelligence was to be found in creatures of many sorts.

  There were those among the People, Hresh knew, who hunted caviandis for their flesh. They were said to be tasty things. But that would have to stop, if the brightness of the caviandis’ eyes turned out to be matched by a corresponding richness of intellect. Some sort of protective legislation, maybe—unpopular, but necessary—

  He was tempted to take a quick peek into their minds now. A bit of preliminary probing. Just to get some general idea.

  He smiled at the trembling animals, and lifted his sensing-organ, thinking to summon his second sight, only for a moment, only for a quick look.

  “Lordship? Lord chronicler?”

  The interruption was as jarring as a blow in the small of the back. Hresh whirled and saw one of his deputies behind him, and a coarse-looking man with him in the sash of a bailiff of the court of justice.

  “What is it?”

  The bailiff stumbled forward. “Your pardon, lord chronicler, but I bring a message from the court, from Husathirn Mueri, who sits in judgment today at the Basilica. A stranger has been found, a young man who appears to be returned from captivity among the hjjks, and who speaks no language except the noises of the bug-folk. And Prince Husathirn Mueri respectfully requests—if you could assist him—if you could come to the Basilica to aid in the interrogation—”

  They had sent her off to wait in a holding chamber during the adjournment, a sweaty little room, nothing very much different from the cells where criminals were kept while awaiting the attention of the justiciary prince; and they had put the hjjk emissary in a different room of the same sort on the far side of the cupola. Nialli Apuilana had thought it might have been useful for them both to wait for Hresh in the same room, so that they could try to make some further attempts at communication, but no, no, take her to this room, take him to that one. She realized with some surprise that Husathirn Mueri must not trust the two of them together in any unsupervised situation. It was one more illustration of the pettiness and fretful suspiciousness of his soul, the small mean ignobility of it.

  Can he possibly sense that there is Nest-bond between us? she wondered. Is he afraid that we’ll flange up some sort of treacherous conspiracy, if he gives us a chance to spend an hour or so in the same cell? Or is what he’s afraid of simply that we might pass the time with a little sweaty coupling? That was an odd idea. The stranger, all skin and bones, taking advantage of a bit of spare time to jump on her. She wasn’t attracted by him at all. But she didn’t put it past Husathirn Mueri to suspect such a thing. What does he think I am? she asked herself.

  Furiously she paced the little wedge-shaped room until she had counted its measurements out fifty times over. Then she took a seat on a bench of black stone beneath a niche containing an ikon of Dawinno the Transformer, and leaned back, folding her arms across her breasts. A bit more tranquil now. Summoning a little patience. They might have a long wait coming before the bailiff managed t
o track her father down.

  As she grew calmer she felt herself growing dreamy. Something strange arising within her, now. Visions come drifting into her mind. The Nest, is it? Yes. Yes. Increasing in clarity moment by moment, as if layers of filmy cloth are being stripped away. Old memories awaken now, after lying dormant so long. What has stirred them? The sight of those amulets on his wrist and chest, was it? The aura of the Nest that he carried about him, invisible only to her?

  She hears a rushing, a roaring, in her mind. And then she is there. That other world where she had passed the strangest three months of her life comes vividly to life for her.

  They are all around her in the narrow tunnel, welcoming her back after her long absence, rubbing their claws gently against her fur by way of greeting: half a dozen Queen-attendants, and a pair of Egg-makers, and a Nest-thinker, and a couple of Militaries. The dry crisp scent of them tingles in her nostrils. The air is warm and close; the light is a dim pink glow, the familiar lovely Nest-light, faint but sufficient. She embraces them one by one, savoring the feel of their smooth two-toned carapaces and their black-bristled forearms. It is good to be back, she tells them. I have longed for this moment ever since I left here.

  There is a commotion just then at the far end of the long passageway: a procession of young males, it is, jostling and crowding each other. They are on their way to the royal chamber to be aroused into fertility by Queen-touch. It is the last stage in their maturity. They will be allowed to mate, finally, once the Queen has done whatever it is that is done to bring the young to fertility. Nialli Apuilana envies them for that.

  But she is ripe herself. Ready for mating, ready for life to be kindled within her, ready to play her proper part in Egg-plan. The Queen must know that. The Queen knows everything. Soon, she thinks, one of these days quite soon, it will be my turn to come before the Queen, and Her love will descend upon me, and my loins will be quickened to life by Her touch, and at long last I too will be—

  I too will be—

  “Lady, the court is reassembling,” came a voice that cut through her like a dull rusty blade.

  She opened her eyes. A bailiff stood before her, a different one from before. She glared at him in such rage that it was a wonder it didn’t strip the fur from his skin. But he simply stood gaping like a clod. “Lady, they request that you return to—”

  “Yes. Yes! Don’t you think I heard you?”

  Hresh did not appear to have arrived yet. Everything was as it had been before, more or less. The stranger stood in the absolute center of the room, wholly motionless, like a statue of himself. He seemed scarcely even to breathe. A hjjk trick, that was. They weren’t ones for wasting energy. When they had no reason to be in motion, they didn’t move at all.

  Husathirn Mueri, though, was in constant motion. He crossed and uncrossed his legs; he shifted about uneasily as if the throne were growing icy cold beneath him, or fiery; he flicked his sensing-organ about, now curling it against his shins, now letting it arch upward behind him until the tip of it peered over his shoulder. His intense amber gaze flickered everywhere around the great room except in Nialli Apuilana’s direction; but then suddenly she caught him staring at her again in that hungry fashion of his. As soon as their eyes met, he looked away.

  She felt sorry for him, in an odd way. That he was so driven, so edgy. They said that his mother Torlyri had been a saintly loving person, and his father the most valiant of warriors. But Husathirn Mueri seemed not at all saintly, and Nialli Apuilana doubted that he would be of much use on a battlefield, either. Hardly a credit to his forebears. Perhaps it’s true, she thought, the thing that the older people like to say, that in this modern era of city life we’ve become a race of confused, troubled folk, no clear sense of direction in our lives at all. Weaklings, in fact. Decadents.

  But, she wondered, is it so? That we’ve gone from primitivism to decadence and weakness in a single generation? All that time pent up in the cocoon, scarcely changing in any way, and then we erupt and build ourselves a tremendous city, and practically overnight all the old virtues are lost, our godliness, our honor?

  Husathirn Mueri may be a decadent, she thought. And probably so am I. But is he really a weakling? Am I?

  “The chronicler! Hresh-of-the-answers! All rise for the chronicler Hresh!” came the braying voice of the bailiff who had gone to fetch him.

  She looked about and saw her father entering the throne-room.

  How long it had been since she had last seen him, she wasn’t sure: weeks, certainly, or possibly months. There had never been any formal estrangement between them; but her path and his simply tended rarely to cross, these days. He had his unending research into the world of the past to absorb him, while she, living her isolated and somehow suspended life in the upper reaches of the House of Nakhaba, felt little reason to come down into the central districts of the city.

  The moment he entered the room Hresh turned to her, holding out his arms, as if she were the only person there. And Nialli Apuilana went quickly, eagerly to him.

  “Father—”

  “Nialli—my little Nialli—”

  He had aged enormously in just these few months since they last had been together, as though each week had been a year for him. Of course he was at a point in his life when time galloped by. Some years past fifty now: old, as People life-spans went. His fur had long since grayed. Nialli Apuilana, his one child, born to him very late, could not remember a time when it had been any other color. His slender shoulders were bowed, his chest was hollow. Only his huge dark scarlet-flecked eyes, blazing like beacons beneath his wide forehead, still radiated the vitality that must have been his in those long-ago days when, still no more than a boy, he had led the People from the ancestral cocoon across the plains into Vengiboneeza.

  They embraced quietly, almost solemnly. Then she stepped back from him and for a moment their eyes met.

  Hresh-of-the-answers, the bailiff had called him. Well, that was his full formal name, yes. He had once told her that he had chosen it himself upon reaching his naming-day. Before that, when he was a boy, he had been called Hresh-full-of-questions. They were both good names for him. There was no mind like his anywhere, always probing, always seeking. Truly he must be the wisest man in the world, Nialli Apuilana thought. Everyone said so.

  She felt herself drawn in, swallowed up, by those astonishing eyes of his, eyes that had looked upon such miracles and wonders as she could barely comprehend. Hresh had seen the Great World alive: he had held a device in his hand that brought it all back in visions, and showed him the mighty sapphire-eyes people and the sea-lords and the mechanicals and all the rest of those dead races—even the humans, whom the People had called by the name of Dream-Dreamers in the days when they lived in the cocoon—the baffling enigmatic humans, who had been masters of the Earth long before any of the others had come into being, so long ago that the mind was numbed merely to think of it.

  Hresh seemed so mild, so ordinary, until you looked into his eyes. And then he became frightening. He had seen so much. He had achieved so much. Everything that the People had become since the Long Winter’s end, they were because Hresh had shaped them that way.

  He smiled. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Nialli.”

  “Husathirn Mueri sent for me. He thought I still knew the language of the hjjks. But of course it’s all gone from me now, all but a few words.”

  Hresh nodded. “You shouldn’t be expected to remember. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”

  “Three, father. Almost four.”

  “Almost four. Of course.” He chuckled indulgently at his own absent-mindedness. “And who could blame you for blocking it from your mind? A nightmare like that.”

  She looked away from him. He had never understood the truth of her stay among the hjjks. No one had. Perhaps no one ever would. Except this silent stranger here, and she was unable to communicate in any useful way with him.

  Husathirn Mueri, descending from the throne, led t
he stranger to Hresh’s side. “He was found at midday, in Emakkis Valley, riding a vermilion. He makes hjjk-sounds, and speaks a few words of our language also. Nialli Apuilana says that these are hjjk-amulets on his wrist and breast.”

  “He looks half starved,” Hresh said. “More than half. He’s like a walking skeleton.”

  “Do you remember what I looked like, father, when I came back from the hjjks?” Nialli Apuilana asked. “They eat very little, the hjjks. Sparseness is what they prefer, in eating, in everything. That’s their way. I was hungry all the time, when I was with them.”

  “And looked it when you returned,” said Hresh. “I do remember. Well, perhaps we can find some way to talk with this boy. And then he ought to be given something to eat. Eh, Husathirn Mueri? Something to put a little meat on his bones. But let’s see what we can do, first.”

  “Will you use the Wonderstone?” Husathirn Mueri asked.

  “The Wonderstone, yes. The Barak Dayir.” Hresh drew a worn velvet pouch from a pocket of his sash and tugged at its drawstring. Into the palm of his hand tumbled a tapered bit of polished stone, like a finely made spearhead. It was a mottled purple and brown in color, with a pattern of intricate fine lines inscribed along its edges. “No one must come near me,” he said.

  Nialli Apuilana trembled. She had seen the Wonderstone no more than five or six times in her life, and not in many years. It was the People’s single most prized possession. No one, not even Hresh, knew what it was. They said it was made of star-stuff, whatever that meant. They said it was older even than the Great World, that it was a human-thing, an instrument out of that remote unknown world that had existed before the sapphire-eyes folk began to rule the Earth. Perhaps so. The only thing that was certain was that Hresh had learned how to work miracles with it.

  He took it now in the curve of his sensing-organ, grasping it firmly. His expression grew distant and strange. He was summoning his second sight, now, unleashing all the formidable powers of his mind and focusing them through the strange device that was called the Barak Dayir.