At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  And Harruel swelled with wrath, and his powerful arm swung in sudden fury.

  “Miserable boy! Flea-ridden little cheat!”

  The blow was only a glancing one. But it was enough to knock Hresh off his feet and send him flying through the air. He landed in a heap, stunned and trembling. And stayed there until Torlyri went to him and lifted him and held him in her warm embrace.

  “Think about it,” said Torlyri’s son now. “Is it your brother Thu-Kimnibol who’s drilling that army on the stadium grounds now? Or is it King Harruel?” Husathirn Mueri gave him a close, searching look. Then he turned and was gone almost at once.

  As Hresh entered the vestibule of the House of Knowledge, haunted by all that Husathirn Mueri had told him and deep in thoughts of the anguished past and the foreboding future, Chupitain Stuld stepped out of one of the inner offices and said, “Shall I bring the artifacts from Tangok Seip up to your study now, sir?”

  “The artifacts from Tangok Seip?”

  “The ones the farmer found in the cave, after the mudslide. You said you’d look at them today.”

  “Ah. Yes. Yes. Those tools, you mean?”

  He tried to shake off the fog that had engulfed him. His mind was scattered from one end of the world to the other.

  That cache of Great World artifacts, yes. Chupitain Stuld had been after him persistently for the past few days to examine those things. She was probably right, he supposed. It was weeks since their discovery and he hadn’t even bothered to look at them. Other preoccupations had distracted him completely. But Plor Killivash had said the find was important. The least he could do, he told himself, was take a look.

  Chupitain Stuld was waiting for an answer.

  “Bring them upstairs, yes,” he said. “In half an hour, will you? I have a few things to do first.”

  He made his way up the spiral ramp and into his private chamber.

  Somehow he is outside the building, on the parapet. Then, without even troubling to take the Barak Dayir from its pouch, he feels himself rising, floating off into the upper air, soaring above the city, climbing effortlessly higher and higher, beyond the clustering clouds, into the sky above the sky. Everything up here is black, streaked with scarlet. Streams of cool air rush past him like rivers. Tiny pellets of ice strike his fur. There are crystals of ice on his fingertips. He dances on nothingness.

  Looking down, he can see everything, as if through a clear window in the darkness. The entire city lies open to his gaze.

  He sees the stadium grounds, and the troops of the Sword of Dawinno marching in formation, while at their head the impressive figure of Thu-Kimnibol struts and prances, gesturing emphatically and barking commands.

  He sees Nialli Apuilana walking in a park, moving like one lost in a dream. Mysteries shroud her soul. A bright crimson line of conflict runs through it as though it is splitting apart.

  Behind her, a considerable distance behind, lurks Husathirn Mueri. He is a mystery too: obvious enough on the surface, hungry for power and pathetically obsessed with Nialli Apuilana. But what lies beneath? Hresh senses only a void. Can it be, such emptiness in the son of Torlyri and Trei Husathirn? There must be more within him than that. What, though? Where?

  Hresh’s gaze moves on.

  Here is his garden of captive animals, now. The furry enigmatic blue stinchitoles, the gentle thekmurs, the stanimanders. The twittering sisichils frisk as though they know he’s watching them. The stumbains—the diswils—the catagraks—all the multitudinous horde of wondrous creatures that Dawinno the Transformer has tumbled forth upon the face of the thawing earth, and which Hresh’s hunters have brought together for him here.

  The caviandis. There they are beside their stream, the two slender gentle creatures. How lovely the sleekness of their purple fur, the brightness of their thick yellow manes. They look up and see him in the sky far above, and they smile.

  He feels the warmth of their spirits radiating toward him. She-Kanzi, He-Lokim: his friends, his friends. His caviandi friends.

  Their wordless greeting comes floating up to him, and his wordless reply descends. They speak again, and he replies; and then he asks, and they answer. Without words, without concepts, even. A simple, silent communion of being, an ongoing exchange of spirit that could not possibly be expressed other than as itself.

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  He knows by now they have no use for words as he understands words, just as “He-Lokim” and “She-Kanzi” are not names as he understands names. They live outside the need of such things, just as they and all their kind live outside the need for the building of cities, or the fabrication of objects, or any other such “civilized” thing. The otherness of them is the central fact of their nature: their strangeness, their non-Peopleness.

  Their souls flood into his, and he into theirs, and suddenly there comes to him a vision within the vision he is having. He sees a second Great World upon the earth, different from the first but no less glorious, a world of not six races but of dozens, of hundreds, of People and caviandis and stinchitoles and thekmurs, of sisichils and stanimanders and catagraks, of all the creatures that lived—united, locked in perpetual understanding sharing in everything, a world deeper and richer in its fullness than even the old Great World had been, a world that embraced everything that lived upon the Earth—

  A sudden discordant voice within him asks:

  Even the hjjks?

  And he answers at once, without pausing to think:

  Yes. Even the hjjks. Of course, the hjjks.

  But then, considering it, he asks himself if the hjjks would in fact join in any such new confederation of races. They had, after all, been part of the earlier one. And the Transformer has had all the hundreds of centuries since the time of the Great World to alter and elevate them. It might be that they have moved so far beyond the other races of the Earth now that they are incapable of joining them as equals in anything.

  Was that so? Hresh wonders. Have they become gods? Is She a god, the great Queen of the hjjks?

  In that instant, but only for an instant, his dreaming mind flashes northward into the bleakness of the cold lands, where the horizon is lit by a brilliant incandescent glow. And he beholds there the vast secret Queen, lying motionless in her hidden chamber while She directs the destinies of all the millions of insect-folk, and, for all Hresh can tell, of the rest of the world as well. He feels the force and power of that immense mind, and of that great living machine, the Nest over which She rules. He observes the meshing of the parts, the weaving of gleaming pistons, the spinning of the web of life.

  Then it is gone and he hovers again in the indeterminate void; but the tolling echo of that immensity lingers in him.

  A god? Ruling over a race of gods?

  No, he thinks. Not gods.

  The Five Heavenly Ones, they are gods: Dawinno, Emakkis, Mueri, Friit, Yissou—the Transformer and Destroyer, the Provider, the Comforter, the Healer, the Protector.

  And Nakhaba of the Bengs: he is a god. The Interceder, he who stands between the People and the humans, and speaks with them on our behalf. So old Noum om Beng had taught him, when he was a boy in Vengiboneeza.

  And therefore it must be so, Hresh tells himself, that the humans also are gods, for we know that they are higher even than Nakhaba, and older than the Great World.

  Perhaps they are the ones who brought the other five races of the Great World into being, the hjjks and the sea-lords, the mechanicals and vegetals, the sapphire-eyes. Could it be? That they had grown weary of living alone on the Earth, the humans, and had created the others to join them in a new great civilization, which would flourish for many years, and then perish as all civilizations perished?

  Where are they, then, if they are gods?

  Dead, like the sapphire-eyes and the vegetals and the mechanicals and the sea-lords?

  No, Hresh thinks. For how can
gods die? They have simply withdrawn from the world. Perhaps their own Creator has summoned them elsewhere, and they are building a new Earth for Him far away.

  Or else they are still with us, nearby but invisible, biding their time, keeping themselves aloof while they await the working-out of their great plan, whatever that may be. And the hjjks, awesome though they are, are simply an aspect of that plan, not the designers and custodians of it.

  Perhaps. Perhaps.

  And if there is to be a new Great World, the hjjks must be part of it. We must turn to them as fellow humans, as Nialli Apuilana once had said. But now instead we are about to go to war with them. What sense does that make? What sense, what sense, what sense?

  He can’t say. Nor can he sustain himself aloft any longer. His soul comes spiraling downward through the darkness, crashing toward the ground. As he falls from the skies Hresh looks toward the city that rises to meet him, and catches one final glimpse of his brother Thu-Kimnibol, proudly parading before his troops on the stadium grounds. Then he passes through some zone of incomprehensible strangeness; and when he is conscious again, he finds himself at his own desk, dazed, stunned.

  His mind is in a whirl. Things are as they always have been for him. Too many questions, not enough answers.

  The voice of Chupitain Stuld cut through his confusion. “Sir? Sir, I’ve brought the Tangok Seip artifacts. Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

  “I—it—that is—”

  She came rushing into the room and hovered before him, eyes wide with anxiety. Hresh scrambled to pull himself together. Fragments of dream circled and spun in the bedlam of his soul.

  “Sir?”

  He summoned all the serenity he could muster.

  “A moment of reverie, is all—deep in thought—”

  “You looked so strange, sir!”

  “Nothing’s wrong. A moment of reverie, Chupitain Stuld. The wandering mind, very far away.”

  “I could come back another time, if you—”

  “No. No. Stay.” He pointed to the box she was holding. “You have them in there? Let me see. Inexcusable, that I’ve let them wait this long. Plor Killivash’s already studied them, you say?”

  For some reason that produced a flurry of turmoil in her. He wondered why.

  She began to lay the objects out on his desk.

  There were seven of them, more or less spherical, each one small enough to be held with one hand. By their elegance of design and richness of texture Hresh knew them at once to be Great World work, each of them fashioned of the imperishable colored metals characteristic of the extraordinary craftsmen of that vanished era. The vaults of Vengiboneeza had yielded hundreds of devices like these. Some of them no one had ever learned how to operate; a few had produced one single startling effect and then had never functioned again; still others he had managed to master and use effectively for years.

  Things like these were unearthed only rarely, now. This new cache was a remarkable find. It was a measure of the turmoil in his own soul that he’d left them to his assistants for so long, without bothering to examine them himself.

  He looked at the seven objects but didn’t touch any of them. He knew the dangers of picking such things up without knowing which of the various protrusions on them would activate them.

  “Does anybody have any idea what they do?”

  “This one—it dissolves matter. If I touched this knob on the side, a beam of light would come out and dissolve everything between here and the wall. This one casts a cloak of darkness over things, a kind of veil that’s impossible to see through, so you could walk through the city and no one would notice you. And this one, it cuts like a knife, and its beam is so powerful we couldn’t measure the depths of the hole it cut.” Chupitain Stuld gave him a wary look, as if unsure that he was paying attention. She picked up another of the things. “Now, this one, sir—”

  “Wait a moment,” said Hresh. “I see only seven instruments here.”

  She looked troubled again. “Seven. That’s right, sir.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “The—others?”

  “I seem to recall being told that there were eleven of these things, the day they were brought in. A couple of months ago, it was—during the rainy time, I remember—eleven Great World artifacts, that’s what you said, I’m sure of it, or perhaps it was Io Sangrais who told me—”

  “I was the one, sir,” said Chupitain Stuld in a very small voice.

  “Where are the other four?”

  Distress had turned to fright in her, now. She moved quickly back and forth in front of the desk, moistening her lips, frantically grooming herself.

  Hresh gave her just a minute jab of second sight. And felt the roiling fear within her, the shame, the contrition.

  “Where are they, girl?” he asked gently. “Tell me the truth.”

  “Out—on—loan—” she whispered.

  “On loan? To whom?”

  She stared at the floor.

  “To Prince Thu-Kimnibol, sir.”

  “My brother? Since when is he interested in ancient artifacts? What in the name of Nakhaba does he want with them, I wonder? How would he even have known they were here?” Hresh shook his head. “We don’t loan things, Chupitain Stuld. Especially new acquisitions that haven’t been properly studied. Even to someone like Prince Thu-Kimnibol. You know that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you authorize this loan?”

  “It was Plor Killivash, sir.” A pause. “But I knew about it.”

  “And didn’t tell me.”

  “I thought it was all right. Considering that Prince Thu-Kimnibol is your brother, and—”

  Hresh waved her into silence. “He has them now?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Why did he want them, do you know?”

  She was trembling. She tried to speak, but no words would come.

  Through Hresh’s mind ran Chupitain Stuld’s description of the artifacts that remained, the ones that Thu-Kimnibol hadn’t bothered to take. This one dissolves matter…This one casts a cloak of darkness…This one cuts like a knife, and its beam goes so deep we couldn’t measure it…

  Gods! These were the devices that Thu-Kimnibol had chosen to leave behind. What sort of destruction were the other ones capable of working?

  At this moment, he knew, Thu-Kimnibol was out drilling his army on the stadium grounds, getting ready for his war against the hjjks. It had taken him only a few days to assemble his troops.

  And now he had his weapons, too.

  Taniane said, “It’s not Thu-Kimnibol’s army, Hresh. It’s our army. The army of the City of Dawinno.”

  “But Husathirn Mueri—”

  “The gods confound Husathirn Mueri! He’s going to oppose us every step of the way, that’s obvious. But war is coming, beyond any question. And therefore I authorized Thu-Kimnibol to begin organizing an armed force.”

  “Wait a minute,” Hresh said. He looked at Taniane as though she were some stranger, and not his mate of forty years. “You authorized him? Not the Presidium?”

  “I’m the chieftain, Hresh. We’re facing a crisis. It’s no time for long-winded debate.”

  “I see.” He stared at her, scarcely believing what he heard. “And this war? Why are you so sure it’s on the way? You and Thu-Kimnibol and Husathirn Mueri too, for that matter. Is it all agreed? Has some kind of secret resolution to start a war been passed?”

  Taniane was slow to reply. Hresh, waiting, sensed the same evasiveness coming from her that had emanated earlier from Husathirn Mueri, and even from Chupitain Stuld. They were all trying to hide things from him. A web of deception had been woven here while he slept, and they were desperately eager to keep him from penetrating it now.

  She said finally, “Thu-Kimnibol obtained proof, while he was in Yissou, that the hjjks intend to launch an attack against King Salaman in the very near future.”

  “Proof? What sort of proof?”

  The eva
siveness deepened, “He said something about having gone riding out into hjjk territory with Salaman, and coming upon a party of hjjks, and forcing them to surrender secret military plans. Or something like that.”

  “Which they were conveniently carrying in little baskets around their necks. Personally signed by the Queen, with the royal hjjk seal stamped on them.”

  “Please, Hresh.”

  “You believe this? That the invasion of Yissou that Salaman’s been fretting about since the beginning of time is actually going to happen the day after tomorrow?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “What proof is there?”

  “Thu-Kimnibol knows what it is.”

  “Ah. I see. All right, let’s say the hjjks finally are going to invade. How timely for Salaman that this is going to happen right after he and my brother have concluded a treaty of mutual defense between Dawinno and Yissou, eh?”

  “You sound so angry, Hresh! I’ve never heard you this way.”

  “And I’ve never heard you this way, either. Dancing around my questions, talking about proof but not producing any, letting Thu-Kimnibol set up an army right here in the city without taking the trouble even to discuss it in the Presidium—”

  Now she was staring at him as if he were a stranger. Her eyes were hooded, her expression was cold.

  He couldn’t bear it, this wall of suspicion that had arisen between them suddenly, rearing as high as Salaman’s lunatic rampart. The urge came to him to ask her to twine with him, to join him in the communion that admits of no suspicion, of no mistrust. Then all would be made known between them; then once again they would be Hresh and Taniane, Taniane and Hresh, and not the strangers they had become to each other.

  But he knew that she’d refuse. She’d plead weariness, or an urgent meeting an hour from now, or some other such thing. For if she twined with him she would have no secrets from him; and Hresh saw that she was full of secrets that she was determined not to share with him. He felt a great sadness. He could always find out everything he wanted to know by taking recourse to the Barak Dayir, he knew. The powers of the Wonderstone would carry him anywhere, even into the guarded recesses of Taniane’s mind. But the idea was repugnant to him. Spy on my own mate? he thought. No. No, I’ll let the city be destroyed and everyone in it, before I do that.