Nialli Apuilana nodded and smiled faintly, and took her tray, and retreated into her room. Afterward she made a point of looking out before going into the hall to make certain that no one was here.
Sometimes, after that, she went to the window and watched the rain. Most often she sat crosslegged in the center of the room, absentmindedly grooming herself hour after hour while letting her thoughts drift without direction.
Now and again she would take the hjjk star down from the wall, the amulet of plaited grass that she had carried back with her from the Nest years ago. Would hold it, would stare into the open place at its center, would let her mind drift. Sometimes she could see the pink glow or Nest-light coming from it, and dim figures moving about: Militaries, Egg-makers, Kindlers, Nest-thinkers. Once she thought she even had a glimpse of the Queen-chamber itself, of the great unmoving mysterious bulk within it.
But the visions were vague ones. Most of the time the star showed her nothing at all.
She had no clear idea of where to go next, or what to do, or even who she was. She felt lost between worlds, mysteriously suspended, helpless.
Kundalimon’s death had been the death of love for her, the death of the world. No one had understood her as he had; and she had never felt such an understanding of anyone else. It hadn’t been just the twining, and certainly not the coupling, that had bound them together. It was the sense of shared experience, of knowledge held in common. It was Nest-bond. They had touched the Queen; the Queen had touched them; the Queen then had stood as a bridge between their souls, making it possible for them to open themselves to one another.
It had only been a beginning, though. And then Kundalimon had been taken away. And everything had seemed to end.
What didn’t end was the rain. It fell on the city and on the bay, on the hills and on the lakes. In the farming district of Tangok Seip, on the eastern side of the Emakkis Valley where the inner range of coastal mountains began to rise, it fell with such force that it peeled the soil from the slopes in torrential mud-slides such as had never been seen since the founding of the city. Whole hillsides sheared away and flowed down into the bottomlands.
A Stadrain farmer named Quisinimoir Flendra, taking advantage of a lull in the latest storm to chase after a prize vimbor bull that had broken free from its compound, was crossing the rain-soaked breast of a hill when the earth gave way practically at his feet. He dropped down and dug his fingers into the sodden earth, sure that he’d be swept over the edge into this newly formed abyss and buried alive. There was a terrible sickening sound, a kind of sucking roar, a liquid thunder.
Quisinimoir Flendra held tight and prayed to every god whose name he could remember: his own first, the All-Merciful, and then Nakhaba the Interceder, and then Yissou, Dawinno, Emakkis. He was struggling to remember the names of the other two Koshmar gods when he realized that the hill had stopped collapsing.
He looked down. The earth had broken away in a crescent just in front of him, revealing a sheer face of brown earth laced with exposed roots.
Other things were showing too. A great tiled arch, for one; a row of thick columns, their bases hidden somewhere deep in the earth; a scattering of shards and fragments of ruined structures strewn over the newly exposed face of the shattered hillside like so much trash. And also there was the mouth of the stone-vaulted tunnel, leading into the hill. Quisinimoir Flendra, hanging head-down, was able to make out the beginnings of a cave. He peered in astonishment and awe into its mysterious depths.
Then the rain started up again. The hill might collapse a little further, and take him down with it. Hastily he scrambled down the back face of the hill and headed for his house.
He said nothing about what he had seen to anyone.
But it remained with him, even entering his dreams. He imagined that the Great World people still lived inside that hill: that slow solemn massive sapphire-eyes folk were moving about in there with reptilian grace, speaking to one another in mystic poetry, and with them were pale fragile long-limbed humans, and the little flowery vegetals, and the dome-headed mechanicals, and all the other amazing beings of that splendid era, living on and on in a kind of cocoon much like the cocoon that Quisinimoir Flendra’s own tribe had inhabited all during the Long Winter.
Why not? We had a cocoon. Why not them?
He wondered if he dared to investigate the place again, and decided that he didn’t. But then it struck him that there might be treasure in that cave, and that if he didn’t go in there to look for it someone else sooner or later would.
When there had been three straight days without rain he went back to the broken hillside, carrying a rope, a pick, and some clusters of glowberries. He let himself down very carefully over the edge of the cave-in and wriggled into the tunnel. Paused, listened, heard nothing, warily went deeper.
He was in a stone-vaulted room. Another one lay beyond. A rockfall blocked access beyond that. There was no sign of any life. The silence had a weight of thousands of years. Quisinimoir Flendra, prowling cautiously, saw nothing useful at first, only the usual bits and fragments that these ancient sites contained. But toward the back of the inner room he found a box of green metal, half buried in the detritus on the floor of the cave, that came apart like wet paper when he poked it.
There were machines inside: of what kind, he had not the slightest idea. There were eleven of them, little metal globes, each one larger than his fist, with little studs and projections on their surfaces. He picked one up and touched one of the studs. A beam of green light burst from an opening in the thing and with a little whooshing sound it cut a round hole the size of his chest in the wall of the cave just opposite him, so deep that he couldn’t see how far it went. Hastily he let the globe drop.
He heard pebbles falling in the new opening. The hillside creaked and groaned. It was the sound of rock masses shifting about somewhere far within.
All-Merciful save me! It’s all going to fall in on me!
But then everything was still again, except for the faint dry trickle of falling sand in the hole he had so inadvertently carved. Quisinimoir Flendra, scarcely daring to breathe, tiptoed to the mouth of the tunnel, pulled himself up quickly and frantically to the safety of the hilltop, and ran all the way back to his house.
He had heard about such machines. They were things of the Great World. You were supposed to report such finds to the House of Knowledge in the city. Well, so be it. The scholars of the House of Knowledge were welcome to anything they could find in that cave. He didn’t even want a reward. Let them have it all, he thought. Just so long as I don’t have to go near any of those things again—so long as they don’t ask me to go back in there myself to show them where everything is—
Suddenly, with a shudder, Nialli Apuilana imagines that her room is full of hjjks. She isn’t even holding the plaited star when they come. They simply burst into being all around her, congealing out of the air itself.
These aren’t the gentle wise creatures of her feverish recollections. No, she sees them now as others of her kind have always seen them: huge frighteningly glossy-shelled bristle-limbed things with ferocious beaks and great glittering eyes, milling in hordes about her, clicking and clattering in a terrifying way. And behind them she glimpses the immense mass of the Queen in Her resting-place—motionless, gigantic, grotesque. Calling to her, offering her the joys of Nest-bond, offering her the comforts of Queen-love.
Queen-love?
Nest-bond?
What did those things mean? They were empty noises. They were food that carried no nourishment.
Nialli Apuilana trembles and draws back, pressing herself into the farthest corner of the room. She shuts her eyes, but even so she is unable to blot out the sight of the nightmare creatures that crowd up against her, clicking, clicking, clicking.
Get away from me!
Horrid hideous insects. How she loathes them! And yet she knows there was a time once when she had wanted to be one of them. For a time she had actually thought she was
. Or had all that been a dream, just a phantom of the night, just past—her sojourn in the Nest, her talks with Nest-thinker, her taste of Nest-truth? Had she really lived gladly among the hjjks, and come to love them and their Queen? Was such a thing possible, to love the hjjks?
Kundalimon. Had she dreamed him too?
Queen-love! Nest-bond! Come to us, Nialli! Come! Come! Come!
Strange. Alien. Horrible.
“Get away from me!” she cries. “All of you, get away!”
They stare reproachfully. Those immense eyes, glittering, cold. You are one of us. You belong to the Nest.
“No! I never was!”
You love the Queen. The Queen loves you.
Was it true? No. No. She couldn’t possibly have believed it, ever. They had put a spell on her while she was in the Nest, that was all. But now she’s free. They’ll never have her again.
She kneels and huddles into herself. Trembling, sobbing, she touches her arms, her breasts, her sensing-organ. Is this hjjk? she asks herself, feeling the thick lustrous fur, the warm flesh beneath.
No. No. No. No.
She presses her forehead to the floor.
“Yissou!” she calls. “Yissou, protect me!” She prays to Mueri to give her ease. She prays to Friit to heal her, to rid her of this spell.
She tries to banish that terrible sound of clicking from her mind.
The gods are with her now, the Five Heavenly Ones. She feels their presence like a shield about her. Once she had told anyone who would listen that they were nothing but silly myths. But since her return from the lakelands they had been with her. They are with her now. They will prevail. The hjjks who have come crowding into her room grow misty and insubstantial. Tears flow down her cheeks as she gives thanks, gives praise, offers blessings.
Then after a time she begins to grow calm.
As mysteriously as it has come, the convulsion that has overtaken her spirit is gone from her, and she is herself once again. The loathing, the disgust, vanishes. I am free, she thinks. But not quite. She can’t see the hjjks any more, but she still feels their pull. She loves them as she did before. Into her mind once more comes an awareness of the sublime harmony of the Nest, of the industriousness of its inhabitants, of the great throbbing waves of Queen-love that sweep constantly through it. Queen-love throbs also in her heart. Nest-truth remains with her yet.
She doesn’t understand. How can she sway from one pole to the other like this? How can it be possible to have the Five within her, and the Queen also? Is she of the city or of the Nest, of the People or of the hjjks?
Both, perhaps. Or neither.
Who am I? she wonders. What am I?
Another time Kundalimon came to her.
He appeared toward evening. She hadn’t taken the trouble to light the lamps in her little room and the early darkness of the rain-swept city was beginning to settle upon everything. She saw him standing near the wall opposite the door, where the woven-grass star that the hjjks had given her long ago was hanging.
“You?” she whispered.
He made no reply. He merely stood before her, smiling.
There was something shimmering and golden about him. But within that luminous aura he looked just as he had in the final few weeks of his life, slender almost to the point of frailty, yet sturdy enough in his wiry way, with warm radiant eyes. At first Nialli Apuilana was afraid to look too closely at him, fearing that she would see the signs of violence on his body. But then she found the courage to do it, and saw that he was unharmed.
“You aren’t wearing your amulets,” she said.
He smiled and said nothing.
Perhaps he’s given them to someone, she thought. To one of the children with whom he used to speak in the streets. Or he has returned them to the Nest, now that his embassy is over.
“Come closer,” she said to him. “Let me touch you.”
He shook his head, smiling all the while. Waves of love continued to stream from him. All right. No need to touch him. She felt a great calmness; she felt total assurance. There was much in the world that she did not understand, and perhaps never would understand. But that didn’t matter. What mattered only was to be calm, and loving, and open, and accepting of whatever might befall.
“Are you with the Queen?” she asked.
He said nothing.
“Do you love me?”
A smile. Only a smile.
“You know that I love you.”
He smiled. He was like a great bower of light.
He stayed with her for hours. Finally she realized that he was beginning to fade and vanish, but it happened so slowly that it was impossible to tell, moment by moment, that he was leaving her. But at last he was altogether gone.
“Will you come back?” she asked, and heard no answer.
He came again, though, always at nightfall, sometimes standing beside her cot, sometimes by the star of grass. He never spoke. But always he smiled; always he filled the room with warmth, and that same profound sense of ease and calmness.
Thu-Kimnibol was almost ready to set out for home now. He looked down at Salaman’s daughter Weiawala and felt waves of fear and sadness and loss coming from her. Her chestnut-hued fur had lost all sheen. Her sensing-organ rose at a tense angle. She seemed forlorn and desperately frightened. And she looked terribly small, smaller than she had ever seemed to him before; but from his great height all women looked small, and most men.
“So you’re going now, are you?” she asked, her eyes not quite meeting his.
“Yes. Esperasagiot has the xlendis groomed, Dumanka’s got the wagons provisioned.”
“This is goodbye, then.”
“For now.”
“For now, yes.” She sounded bitter. “Your city is calling you. Your queen.”
“Our chieftain, you mean.”
“Whatever she’s called. She says come, and you hop to it. And you’re a prince, they say!”
“Weiawala, I’ve been here for months. My city needs me. I’ve had a direct command from Taniane to return. Prince or not, how can I refuse to obey her?”
“I need you too.”
“I know,” Thu-Kimnibol said.
He studied her, feeling perplexed. It would be no great task to sweep her up in his arms and go to Salaman with her and say, “Cousin, I want your daughter as my mate. Let me take her to Dawinno with me, and in a few months we’ll return and hold the formal ceremony in your palace.” Certainly that was what Salaman had had in mind from the first moment, when he had offered this girl to him “to warm your bed tonight,” as the king in his cheerfully crude way had put it.
It was not as a concubine but as a potential mate that Salaman had given Weiawala to him. Thu-Kimnibol had no doubt of that. The king wanted nothing more than to atone for the old breach between them by linking his family in marriage to the most powerful man in Dawinno. And the prospect had obvious merit for Thu-Kimnibol, too. A king’s son himself, mated to the daughter of that king’s successor—he’d have a strong claim to the throne of Yissou, if that throne became vacant and for some reason no son of Salaman was in a position to take it.
But two obstacles lay in the way.
One was simply that it was too soon after Naarinta’s death for him to be taking a new mate. He was of the highborn class; there were proprieties to observe; there were the feelings of Naarinta’s family to consider. Of course he’d mate again, but not now, not so swiftly.
But beyond that was a deeper chasm. He felt no love for Weiawala, at least not the kind of love that led to mating. They had been inseparable, yes, since his arrival. They had coupled again and again, eagerly, passionately. But never once had they twined. Thu-Kimnibol hadn’t felt the desire for such intimacy, and she had shown no sign of interest in it either. That was significant, he thought. Without twining a marriage is hollow.
And, after all, she was hardly more than a child—no older, he suspected, than his niece Nialli Apuilana. How could he mate with a child? He was past forty. An
old man, some might say. No. Weiawala had been a fine companion for him these months in Yissou, but now it was over. He had to leave her behind, and put her from his mind, however she wept and begged.
None of this seemed remotely honorable to Thu-Kimnibol. But he wasn’t going to take Weiawala home with him to Dawinno, all the same.
As he stood there uncomfortably searching for the words that would pacify her, or at least to allow him to make a graceful escape, the king’s son Biterulve of the pale fur came up to them, that handsome, quick-witted boy. He put out his hand and took Thu-Kimnibol’s in a firm and confident way.
“A safe journey to you, cousin. May the gods watch over you.”
“My thanks to you, Biterulve. We’ll meet again before long, that I know.”
“I look forward to it, cousin.” Biterulve glanced quickly from Thu-Kimnibol to Weiawala, and back to Thu-Kimnibol again. For an instant the unasked question hung in the air between them; then it was gone. Biterulve appeared to be sizing things up: the distance between them, the look in her eyes.
It was another awkward moment. Biterulve was Weiawala’s full brother: their mother was Sinithista. He was the king’s favorite, that was very obvious. Of all the young princes he seemed the cleverest, and the gentlest by far, with little of the haughtiness that marked Chham and Athimin or the boisterousness of the other sons. Here was his sister being abandoned before his eyes, though. Gentle as he was, he might find that hard to swallow. Was he going to force the issue and create an embarrassment for everyone?
Apparently not. With sublime tact Biterulve turned to Weiawala and said, “Well, sister, if you and Thu-Kimnibol had made your farewells, come with me now to our mother. She’ll be glad to have us breakfast with her.”
Weiawala stared at him dully.
“And then afterward,” Biterulve said, “We’ll go to the top of the wall, and watch as our cousin from Dawinno sets out for his journey. So come. Come.” He slipped his arm around the girl’s shoulders. He was hardly any taller than she was, and scarcely more sturdy. But in a smooth and persuasive fashion he drew her away. Weiawala turned back once, giving Thu-Kimnibol a panicky look over her shoulder; and then she was gone from the room. Thu-Kimnibol felt a surge of gratitude. How wise the boy was!
At Winter's End Page 33
