At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

Finally Taniane began to speak, her voice faltering a little: “The gods have brought you safely home. We rejoice, Thu-Kimnibol, in your victorious—”

  An eruption of frantic action then, sudden, bewildering. The figure of Husathirn Mueri burst into view, emerging from behind Taniane and rushing toward Thu-Kimnibol. A knife gleamed in his upraised left hand.

  In that same moment Chevkija Aim, sprinting up the three steps that separated the lower platform from the one where the notables stood, came running toward Husathirn Mueri from the side. He too carried a drawn blade.

  “Lady, watch out!” the guard-captain shouted. “He’s a traitor!”

  And an instant later Husathirn Mueri and Chevkija Aim were tangled up together in a desperate struggle at the center of the platform. Thu-Kimnibol, too astonished to move, saw weapons flashing in the sun. There was a grunting sound of pain. A startling gout of blood spurted from Chevkija Aim’s chest and ran down over his thick golden Beng fur. The guard-captain lurched forward, his arms jerking convulsively, his knife skittering across the platform and landing practically at Taniane’s feet as he fell. Husathirn Mueri, his face contorted and wild, swung around a second time toward Thu-Kimnibol. But Nialli Apuilana stepped swiftly between them just as Husathirn Mueri raised his blade.

  He gaped at her, aghast, and checked his blow before it could strike her. His eyes glazed as though he had been smitten by the gods. Recoiling from her with a moaning outcry of despair, he lowered his arm and let his weapon drop from suddenly nerveless fingers. By now Thu-Kimnibol had managed to make his way around Nialli Apuilana in the confusion and started toward him. But Husathirn Mueri had already turned and was staggering crazily toward the rear of the platform, heading for Taniane, who had picked up Chevkija Aim’s knife and was studying it in wonder.

  “Lady—” he muttered thickly. “Lady—lady—forgive me, lady—”

  Thu-Kimnibol reached for him. Taniane waved him back. She stared at Husathirn Mueri as though he were an apparition.

  In a dark anguished voice he said, “Kundalimon’s death was my doing. And Curabayn Bangkea’s as well, and all the grief that followed.”

  With a desperate sob he threw himself upon her as if to embrace her. Unhesitatingly Taniane’s arm came forward, rising swiftly toward Husathirn Mueri’s rib cage in a single sharp jab. He stiffened and gasped. Clutching his middle, he took a couple of reeling steps back from her. For a moment he stood utterly motionless, rearing up on the tips of his toes. Blood trickled out over his lips. He took one tottering step toward Nialli Apuilana. Then he fell sprawling, landing beside the body of Chevkija Aim. He quivered once and was still.

  “Guards! Guards!” Thu-Kimnibol roared.

  Seizing Nialli Apuilana with one hand and Taniane with the other, he pulled them behind him and swung about to see what was happening below the platform. Some kind of disturbance was going on down there. The guardsmen were moving in to quell it. Further in the distance the warriors of Thu-Kimnibol’s own army, aware now of the strange struggle on the platform, had left their wagons and were rushing forward. At the center of everything Thu-Kimnibol saw the figure of a bright-robed boy of ten or twelve years, holding his hands high in the midst of the crowd and screaming curses of some sort in a terrifying furious voice sharp as a dagger.

  “Look,” Nialli Apuilana said. “He has Kundalimon’s Nest-guardian! His Nest-bracelet, too!” Her eyes were gleaming as fiercely as the boy’s. “By the gods, I’ll deal with him! Leave him to me!”

  The Barak Dayir was suddenly in her hand. Deftly she seized it with her sensing-organ. Thu-Kimnibol stared at her in bewilderment as the Wonderstone instantly worked some bizarre transformation on her: she seemed to grow in size, to turn into something huge and strange.

  “I see the Queen within you,” cried Nialli Apuilana in a dark frightful tone, looking down with blazing eyes at the boy in bright robes. “But I call Her out! I cast Her forth! Now! Now! Now! Out!”

  For a moment all was silent. Time itself hung, frozen, still, suspended by a heartbeat.

  Then the boy staggered as if he had been struck. He twisted about and made a dry chittering sound, a sound almost like one a hjjk would make, and his face turned gray and then black; and he fell forward and was lost to sight in the surging crowd.

  Calmly Nialli Apuilana restored the Barak Dayir to its pouch.

  “All’s well now,” she said, taking Thu-Kimnibol once more by the hand.

  It was hours later, after general quiet had been restored. They were in the great chamber of the Presidium.

  Taniane said, “So there is to be peace, of a sort. Out of the madness of the war comes a kind of victory. Or at any rate a truce. But what have we accomplished? At any time, at the Queen’s mere whim, it could all begin again.”

  Thu-Kimnibol shook his head. “I think no, sister. The Queen knows better now what we’re like, and what we’re capable of doing. The world will be divided now. The hjjks will leave us alone, I promise you that. They’ll keep to their present territory, and we to ours, and there’ll be no more talk of Nest-thinkers setting up shop in our cities.”

  “And how will it be in territories that are neither theirs nor ours? That was what troubled Hresh so much, that the hjjks would keep us from the rest.”

  “The rest of the world will remain open, mother,” said Nialli Apuilana. “We can explore it as we choose, whenever we’re ready. And who knows what things we will find? There may be great cities of the People on the other continents. Or the humans themselves may have returned to the world from wherever it is they went when the Great World died, and are living there now, for all we know. Who can say? But we’ll find out. We’ll go wherever we want, and discover everything that is to be discovered, just as my father hoped we would. The Queen understands now that there’ll be no penning us up in our little strip of coastline. If anyone has been penned up, it’s the hjjks, in the godforsaken lands they’ve always inhabited.”

  “So it is a victory, then,” Taniane said. “Of a kind.” She did not sound jubilant.

  “A victory, sister,” said Thu-Kimnibol sternly. “Make no mistake about that. We’ll be at peace. What else is that but victory?”

  “Yes. Perhaps it is.” After a moment Taniane said, “And Hresh. You were with him when he died, Thu-Kimnibol has told me. What was it like for him, at the end?”

  “He was at peace,” said Nialli Apuilana simply.

  “I’ll want you to tell me more about that later. Now we have other matters to deal with.” Turning, she took the dark, gleaming mask of Koshmar from the high table of the Presidium, where she had placed it when they entered. She held it forth. It was boldly carved: a powerful, indomitable face with strong full lips, a jutting jaw, wide flaring cheekbones. To Nialli Apuilana she said, “This was Koshmar, the greatest woman of our tribe. Without her vision and strength none of us would be here today. Without her we would have been nothing. Take her mask, Nialli.”

  “What am I to do with it, mother?”

  “Put it on.”

  “Put it on?”

  “It’s the mask of chieftainship.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “This is the last day of my forty years of rule. They’ve been telling me for a long while now that it’s time I stepped aside, and they’re right. Today I resign my office. Take the mask, Nialli.”

  Amazement and uncertainty flared in Nialli Apuilana’s eyes.

  “Mother, this can’t be. My father has already named me chronicler. That’s what I’ll be. Not chieftain.”

  Now it was Taniane’s turn to look amazed.

  “Chronicler?”

  “So he told me, in his last moments. It was his special wish. I have the Wonderstone. I know how to use it.”

  Taniane was silent a long while, as if she had withdrawn into some distant world.

  Then in a quiet voice she said, “If you are to be chronicler and not chieftain, then the old way is at its end. I felt that you were ready, that at last it would be poss
ible for you to succeed me. But you will not have it; and there’s no one else to whom I would give this mask. Very well. There will be no more chieftains among the People.”

  She looked away.

  Thu-Kimnibol said, “Is there no way you could be chronicler and chieftain both, Nialli?”

  “Both?”

  “Why can’t the titles be joined? You’d have the mask and the Barak Dayir also. The mask makes you chieftain, the Wonderstone makes you chronicler. You’ll hold both and you’ll rule with both.”

  “But the chronicles—the work of the House of Knowledge—it’s too much, Thu-Kimnibol.”

  “Chupitain Stuld can have charge of the House of Knowledge. She’ll do the work, but she’ll report to you.”

  “No,” Nialli Apuilana said. “I see a different way. I’ll keep the Wonderstone, yes, because my father intended it that way. But I’m not the one who should sit at the head of the Presidium. Mother, give him the mask. He’s won the right to wear it.”

  Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “I, wear Koshmar’s mask? Go before the Presidium in it, and call myself chieftain? This is a fine strong face, Nialli, but it’s a woman’s face!”

  “Then make do without the mask,” said Taniane suddenly. “And without the title, also. All things are new now. If you won’t be chieftain, Thu-Kimnibol, call yourself king!”

  “King?”

  “Your father was a king in Yissou. You will be a king now too.”

  He stared at Taniane in wonder. “Do you mean this?”

  “Yours was the victory. Yours is the right. You are of the same blood as Hresh; and Nialli Apuilana has chosen you to rule. Can you refuse?”

  “There’s never been a king over the Koshmar tribe.”

  “This is not the Koshmar tribe,” said Taniane. “This is the City of Dawinno, and it’ll be without a ruler after today. Will you be king here, or do you mean to leave us leaderless, Thu-Kimnibol?”

  He paced back and forth before the high table. Then he halted and whirled and pointed at Nialli Apuilana.

  “If I’m to be king, then you’ll be queen!”

  She looked at him in alarm. “Queen? What are you saying? Do you think I’m a hjjk, Thu-Kimnibol? They’re the only ones who have queens.”

  Laughing, he said, “They have queens, yes, but why should that matter to us? In this city you are the king’s mate; and what’s the king’s mate, if not a queen? So the hjjks have their queen, and we’ll have one too. Queen of Dawinno, you’ll be. And when we go to the unknown lands, you’ll be queen of those also, eh? Queen of everything that grows and flourishes on the face of this reborn world. The Queen of the New Springtime.” He took her hand in his. “What do you say to that, Nialli? The Queen of Springtime!” His voice went booming through the great room with overwhelming exuberance. “And when that other and far less beautiful queen sends another ambassador to us, bringing some new and troublesome proposition, which she will surely do before we are old, why, you can reply to her as her equal, one queen to another! What do you say, Nialli? Queen Nialli, is it? And King Thu-Kimnibol?”

  Nialli Apuilana sits quietly, staring at the blank page in front of her. Her fingers hover above it. Chronicler? Her? And queen, too? How strange that seems! But for the moment, chronicler only. She is in Hresh’s study on the highest level of the House of Knowledge. All around her are Hresh’s things, the treasures he collected. The past is everywhere in this room.

  She must set it all down, these wondrous bewildering events. What shall she say? She can barely comprehend it. Is this where she has been heading all along, all through this difficult voyage of hers? What shall she say, what shall she say?

  Lightly she touches the amulet at her breast. A flicker of faint warmth goes through her hand. And it seems to her that a slight ghostly figure has passed swiftly through the room at that moment, one who is lithe and wiry, with great dark eyes in which luminous intelligence blazes forth, and that in the moment of his passage he turned to her, and smiled, and nodded, and shaped the word “queen” with his lips. The Queen of Springtime, yes. Yes. To whom will fall the task her father had begun, of attempting to discover who we really are, and what it is we must do to fulfill the intentions of the gods, how it is that we are meant to conduct ourselves in the world into which we came forth when the Long Winter ended. She smiles. She puts her fingers to the page at last, and the letters begin to form. She is entering it in the chronicles, finally, on the topmost blank page, that on the day such-and-such in the year such-and-such of the Coming Forth great changes came about, for on that day the revered Chieftain Taniane resigned her office and with her the chieftainship of ancient days at last was brought to an end for all time, and the first of the kings and queens of the city were chosen, who would preside over all that must be done in the aftermath of the great and terrible war with the hjjks. In which the People had acquitted themselves honorably and won a mighty victory.

  She pauses. Looks up. Searches through the room by the faint glow of lamplight, seeking Hresh. But now she is alone. She glances back at what she has written. The chieftain, the king, the queen, the victory. She must say something about the change of chroniclers now, too. Another great change.

  Many great changes, yes. With greater ones no doubt yet to come. For we are deep into the New Springtime now, and the springtime is the season of unfolding and growth. In springtime the world is born anew.

  BONUS

  In the 2005 Bison Books edition of The Queen of Springtime Robert Silverberg discusses his plan for this “New Springtime” epic:

  At Winter’s End, the first of the books, followed the adventures of a small band of intelligent ape-like beings who had spent the seven hundred millennia of the Long Winter in cave-like “cocoons” underground, and who now, as the world began to thaw, had emerged into the unfamiliar landscape of Earth’s surface. There were no humans on this Earth of fourteen million years hence, though they had left legends of themselves behind, and the ape-folk had no idea where they had gone. The ruins of great lost civilizations were visible everywhere. And gradually the ape-folk learned of the existence of other post-human races—the insectoidal hjjks, the reptilian sapphire-eyes people, and others—of which some were extinct and some had managed to survive the rigors of the glacial period.

  I had been hesitant, at first, to admit even to myself that I was writing a trilogy. Even back then, more than twenty years ago, the triple-decker novel had become the default mode of science-fiction publishing, a device that seemed to me to owe more to marketing necessities than to the demands of art, and I felt a bit embarrassed at revealing that I was joining the trilogy bandwagon myself. But it was clear to me that I needed more than one volume to tell my story.

  At Winter’s End had described the events of the period when the Earth had warmed just barely enough to allow the People, as I called my intelligent apes, to come forth from their caves. That book was published in the spring of 1988, and a few months later I told my publisher, Warner Books, that I intended to write two more volumes.

  In The Queen of Springtime I would describe the creation by the People of a new urban society on the surface of the devastated, depopulated Earth. Then, in The Summer of Homecoming, I would have emissaries of the vanished human population of pre-Long Winter Earth return to confront the now complex civilization that their successors, the People, had built. To the series as a whole I gave the overriding name of The New Springtime.

  I began writing The Queen of Springtime in October 1988. The work proved unexpectedly taxing. For the first time ever, I was writing the middle volume of a trilogy, which meant that I needed to keep all the background material of the first volume fresh in my mind, to create for this volume equally vivid new material that would extend the story in new directions, and to foreshadow but to hold behind my back, so to speak, the plot developments that I had to reserve for the third volume. The struggle lasted all winter, and when I completed the first draft of the manuscript at the beginning of March 1988, I knew it was a long
way from being publishable. Usually my work requires very little revision once a complete first draft exists—just a bit of tightening here and there—but this time, I saw, I had written a loose, rambling monster of a book that was in need of major surgery. I launched at once into a full rewrite, moving sections around, adding scenes here, deleting them there, inserting new characters, even shifting certain passages from past tense to present in order to heighten their intensity. Rarely have I had to do so much restructuring as I did on this six-hundred-page manuscript.

  Even then the turmoil wasn’t over. I delivered the book to my publisher in mid-April of 1988, and six weeks later came a detailed letter from Brian Thomsen, my editor at Warner Books, calling for still another rewrite. (“P. 10-17: I really don’t see the necessity for this scene. It almost seems to be a false start. All of the background information about the People’s economic system, Hresh’s studies, and Nialli are [sic] covered elsewhere…”)

  In my reply of June 9, 1989, I expressed disagreement with that particular criticism, listing four reasons why I felt pages 10-17 should stand as written, and it did. But many of Brian’s other objections seemed cogent to me. Responding to his comments on pages 17-20, for example, I said, “Despite my defense of this scene in our phone conversation last week, I now feel that it can go. My only worry is that it contains background material needed later on. I’m much too close to the book at this stage to be able to keep straight in my head the details of how much of the Winter’s End material has been synopsized, and where. I’m willing to risk cutting the whole scene and letting the readers figure things out for themselves, but when you re-read the book try to keep in mind the possibility that this cut will make some reference later on too cryptic.”

  And so on for four single-spaced pages, as I noted the sections that I would rewrite, defended others against his criticisms, and asked for further explanation of certain comments. Then I settled in to do the rewrite, all through June and July, working Saturdays and even Sundays, something I had never done in the previous thirty-five years of my writing career. The rewrite was nearly as difficult as the first draft had been, as knotty structural problems kept cropping up, but at last I had all the scenes in the order they needed to be, and I re-read the revised manuscript with a sense of great relief. The second book, I thought, was even more inventive than the first, not simply an extension of the story but an amplification and deepening of the world that I had invented for it. The characters, alien though they were, seemed real and strongly defined to me. And when the time came to part with Hresh, perhaps my favorite among all my created characters, a person whom I had followed from his boyhood to his old age, I found myself deeply moved in a way that came as a major astonishment to a writer who, at that point, had been calmly killing off his characters whenever necessary for three and a half decades.