At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  “Look! Look! Down there, Nortekku!”

  He glanced down, toward the quay, where the deckhands were tying up the ship.

  Hamiruld was standing there.

  Thalarne could barely speak. Only choked monosyllables came from her. “How—why—”

  “Easy, Thalarne. Easy.”

  Struggling to regain her self-control, she said, “But what’s he doing here? What does he want? He should be back in Yissou. He’s got no business being here!”

  Nortekku, feeling shaken also by the presence of Thalarne’s mate here, so far from their home, stared toward the slight, wiry figure of Hamiruld and was appalled to see him cheerily smiling and waving at them. The loving husband showing up at the pier to welcome his wife and a friend of hers as they returned from a little trip, yes. How sweet of him.

  This is very bad, Nortekku thought.

  As calmly as he could he said, “He’s come to claim you back, I suppose. Someone must have told him I flew out to Bornigrayal after you. Khardakhor, perhaps. Or even Prince Vuldimin.” Could that be, he wondered? Would he have cared that much? A more reasonable possibility presented itself. “Or perhaps he’s just here to represent the syndicate. I suspect they’d want to check up on our two Bornigrayan friends, and make sure that when the ship is unloaded they don’t go walking off with any Sea-Lord finds that don’t belong to them.”

  Either way, it was the worst finish to the voyage he could imagine, except, possibly, if the ship had gone down at sea with the loss of all aboard. First to discover the dolorous state of the little Sea-Lord colony, then to have to participate, however involuntarily, in the capture of the four who had come back with them, and now to be confronted in the moment of their arrival by Thalarne’s mean-souled, spiteful little husband—

  Hamiruld was courtesy itself, though, as they landed. He came sprinting up on deck as soon as the boarding ramp had been laid down, saluted the captain, warmly embraced Thalarne—she held herself stiffly away from him as he hugged her—and even clapped Nortekku exuberantly on the shoulder. He proffered no explanation for being here on this side of the continent. He let them know that had already heard reports of the great success of the expedition and that he wanted to hear all the details, that night, at the hotel in town where they would all be staying. He had rented the finest rooms; there would be a grand celebratory feast.

  “I will be spending the night aboard the ship, I think,” said Nortekku coolly. He assumed that Hamiruld would sweep Thalarne up into his own luxurious suite at the hotel, and the last thing he wanted was to be under the same roof. “There are a few details I have to finish up—I need to organize my notes, to do some final packing—”

  Hamiruld looked a little surprised at that, but not greatly troubled. All his attention was focused on Thalarne.

  She, though, said just as coolly, “I will be staying aboard the ship tonight also, Hamiruld.”

  At that a flash of quick fury came up into his eyes, like a goblin face appearing at a window. Then, just as quickly, he grew calm again. “You will? And why is that, Thalarne?”

  “I’d rather speak with you privately about that,” she said. “Nortekku? Would you excuse us for a moment?”

  She was in full command, now. Obediently Hamiruld allowed her to march him off toward the ship’s bow, and just as obediently Nortekku swung around and walked to the other side of the ship, where he could look outward into the harbor instead of having to observe their conversation from a distance.

  It went on a very long while. It was one of the longest moments of his life. Then she returned, grim-faced, her jaw tightly set. Glancing across, Nortekku saw that Hamiruld was gone from the deck that he had descended once again to the pier.

  “Well?” Nortekku asked.

  “I told him that we had brought four living Sea-Lords back with us, and that I wanted him to have them released. I told him that I would leave him if he didn’t.”

  The conditional nature of that threat left Nortekku feeling chilled. But all he said, when she did not continue, was: “And then?”

  “And then he shrugged. He said, ‘You’re going to leave me anyway, aren’t you? So why should I let them go?’ And that was all. He’s going back to the hotel now. I’ll stay with you aboard the ship.”

  In the night Thalarne awakened him and said, “Do you hear noises, Nortekku?”

  “Noises?” He had been in the deepest of sleeps.

  “Thumps. Shouts. A scream, maybe.”

  Nortekku pushed himself upward through the fog that shrouded his mind. Yes, there were noises. Muffled thumpings. A panicky outcry. Another. Then deep-voiced grunting sounds that could only be the bellowings of the Sea-Lords.

  “Someone’s in there with them in the tank,” she said. “Listen—that sound’s coming from a Sea-Lord. But that one isn’t.”

  “Hamiruld?” Nortekku suggested, pulling the idea out of the blue. “Could it be that he’s come on board, and—”

  But she was already up and on her way out of the cabin. Nortekku ran madly after her, down the corridor, up the little flight of well-worn stairs, and down the upper corridor that led toward the stern of the ship and the tank of the captive Sea-Lords. The door of their hold was open. The light was on inside.

  Hamiruld, yes.

  What was he doing on board? Who knew? Here to gloat over his invaluable prisoners, maybe? Or simply making sure that Thalarne and Nortekku weren’t going to release them in the night?

  But he seemed to be under attack. He was at the back of the hold, up on the narrow boardwalk that ran along three sides of the room around the edges of the tank, and the four Sea-Lords stood crowding around him, jostling him roughly. They were clustered close, pushing fiercely at him with their shoulders, buffeting him from one to another, and Hamiruld, crying out in terror and pain, was trying to get out from among them. The two big males seemed to be letting the females do most of the shoving, but even they were bigger than Hamiruld, and when they thrust themselves against him he went ricocheting back like a flimsy toy.

  “They’ll kill him!” Thalarne cried.

  Nortekku nodded. It was hard to believe, these gentle, passive creatures wanting to kill, but surely the rough sport they were having with Hamiruld was doing great injury. And very likely they would kill anyone who tried to intervene, too. He hesitated, uncertain of what to do, looking around for something he could use to push the Sea-Lords back from him.

  Then came footsteps in the corridor. Crewmen appearing, five or six of them, the night watch belatedly putting in its appearance.

  Nortekku pointed. “Don’t you see what’s happening?”

  They could see it, yes, and, seizing electric prods from a case mounted just inside the door, they ran into the room and headed down the boardwalk.

  At the sight of them, the Sea-Lords closed in even more tightly.

  Hamiruld was completely hidden by them now. Out of the center of the group came a single horrible shriek, high-pitched, cracking at the end. Then the crewmen were in the midst of the melee themselves, jabbing at the Sea-Lords with the prods, trying to push them back into the water of the tank. One of the males swung a broad flipper at the nearest crewman and knocked him on a high curving arc into the tank. The other men danced backward, then approached with their prods again. There came the hissing sound of electrical discharges—the bright flash of light at the tips of the prods—

  “No!” Thalarne called. “Not maximum! Don’t use maximum!”

  Everything dissolved into confusion, then—Sea-Lords and crewmen lurching back and forth on the narrow platform, prods hissing, lights flashing, Hamiruld nowhere to be seen—and then, abruptly, it was over.

  Two of the crewmen were in the tank. The rest stood gasping against the wall. All four of the Sea-Lords lay sprawling on the boardwalk, motionless. The crumpled figure of Hamiruld, broken and bent, was face-down at the edge of the tank, motionless also.

  Nortekku and Thalarne, who had remained in the doorway throughout the struggle
, moved out along the boardwalk now. Thalarne knelt beside Hamiruld. She touched his shoulder with the tip of a finger, very gently. Then she looked up.

  “Dead, I think.”

  “I imagine he is,” said Nortekku. He had reached one of the Sea-Lord females. “This one is, too. And this. They all are, all four. These idiots did have their prods turned to maximum!”

  “Dangerous animals,” one of the crewmen mumbled. “Gone berserk. Anything could have happened. Look, they killed that man who came from the city—”

  “Yes. So they did. And they’re dead too.”

  So four of them, at least, had had their wish. The Sea-Lords at rest were awesome, mysterious, calm. There was a rightness, he thought, about their death. They were creatures out of place in time, who should have died when the Great World ended. They had carried on their backs the whole burden of the world’s past ages, and now they had relinquished it at last.

  Nortekku looked toward Thalarne. “That was what they wanted most, wasn’t it? To die? It’s why they attacked him. They did it deliberately, to set things in motion. So that someone would come rushing in to defend him, someone who would kill them for the sake of protecting Hamiruld. Don’t you think so?”

  “I think you’re right,” Thalarne said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. She was still kneeling by Hamiruld, holding his limp arm at the wrist. Letting go of it, she rose and looked about, surveying the carnage. “What a ghastly scene, though. Dead, all of them. And Hamiruld too.”

  “He shouldn’t have been in here,” said Nortekku. “He had no right to be aboard.” But that only made it all the worse, blaming Hamiruld for his own death. Some ungovernable impulse made him ask her, as he had asked her once before, “Did you love him, Thalarne?”

  “I suppose I must have, once. In some way, yes, I did. After a fashion. But what difference does that make? I told him this afternoon I could never forgive him. For lying to you, for sponsoring this expedition, for agreeing to the capture of the Sea-Lords. I told him I wanted nothing more to do with him. Maybe that was why he came here tonight.”

  “We’ll never know what really went on in this room, will we?”

  “No,” she said. “We’ll never know.”

  “Come. Let’s get out of here.”

  He led her up on deck. The night air was warm, the moon was high and nearly full. The ship rocked gently against the pier. Out here it was as though none of the horror below had really happened.

  He felt very strange. He had never been in the presence of violent death before. And yet, shocked and dazed as he was, he felt that what had happened had not entirely been a thing of horror, that some necessary act of liberation had taken place this night. Those four Sea-Lords would not now go onward to a humiliating life as exhibits in a zoo; and whatever forces had driven the tormented Hamiruld were at rest now also. Perhaps all of them, Hamiruld and the Sea-Lords both, had found in that terrible melee in the tank room that which they had been seeking most.

  And for him everything that he thought he believed had been transformed in one moment of violence.

  What now? Now, Nortekku thought, it is up to us to finish the job.

  Thalarne moved close up beside him. He slipped one arm around her and they stood that way in silence.

  “You said you’d file a report with the governments of Yissou and Dawinno, and let them decide what to do with the Sea-Lords,” he said, after a long time had passed. “But you know who has the last word in what those governments decide: Prince Til-Menimat, and Prince Samnibolon, and maybe Prince Vuldimin, and Prince This-and-That, all the rest of them who paid for this expedition so they could add Sea-Lord artifacts to their collections. Do you know what they’ll do, when they find out that the first try at bringing some live Sea-Lords back has failed? They’ll organize another expedition right away.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what they’ll do.”

  “We have to get there first, don’t we?” He looked at her. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll speak to the captain, and ask him if his ship is available for making a voyage right back to where we just came from.”

  She nodded. She understood. “Yes. We should go back there.”

  “And we will,” he said. “We have to. Because now we have to show the rest of those Sea-Lords how to die.”