“Just now, you say?”
“Two days ago, or thereabouts. Two and a half, actually.”
“And he was riding a vermilion?”
“A vermilion the size of a house and a half,” Curabayn Bangkea said, stretching his arms wide. “But wait. It gets better. The vermilion’s got a hjjk banner around its neck and hjjk emblems stitched to its ears. And the boy sits up there and makes noises at you just like a hjjk.” Curabayn Bangkea put both his hands to his throat and uttered dry, throttled rattling sounds: “Khkhkh. Sjsjsjssss. Ggggggggjjjjjk. You know what kind of ghastly sounds they make. We’ve been interrogating him ever since the farmers brought him in, and that’s about all that comes out of him. Now and then he says a word we can more or less understand. Peace, he says. Love, he says. The Queen, he says.”
Husathirn Mueri frowned. “What about his sash? Any tribe we know?”
“He doesn’t wear a sash. Or a helmet. Or anything that might indicate he’s from the City of Yissou, either. Of course, he might have come from one of the eastern cities, but I doubt that very much. I think it’s pretty obvious what he is, sir.”
“And what is that?”
“A runaway from the hjjks.”
“A runaway,” Husathirn Mueri said, musing. “An escaped captive? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Why, it stands to reason, sir! There’s hjjk all over him! Not just the sounds he makes. He’s got a bracelet on that looks like it’s made of polished hjjk-shell—bright yellow, it is, one black stripe—and a breastplate of the same stuff. That’s all he’s wearing, just these pieces of hjjk-shell. What else can he be, your grace, if not a runaway?”
Husathirn Mueri narrowed his eyes, which were amber, a sign of his mixed ancestry, and very keen.
Now and then a wandering band of hjjks came upon some child who had strayed into a place where he should not have gone, and ran off with him, no one knew why. It was a parent’s greatest fear, to have a child taken by the hjjks. Most of these children were never seen again, but from time to time one did manage to escape and return, after an absence of days or weeks or even months. When they did come back they seemed profoundly shaken, and changed in some indescribable way, as though their time in captivity had been a horror beyond contemplation. None of them had ever been willing to speak so much as a word about their experiences among the insect-folk. It was considered an unkindness to ask.
To Husathirn Mueri the very thought of hjjks was distasteful. To be forced to live among them was the most miserable torture he could imagine.
He had seen them only once in his life, when he was a small boy growing up among the Bengs in Vengiboneeza, the ancient capital of the sapphire-eyes folk where some tribes of the People had taken up residence at the end of the Long Winter. But that one time had been enough. He would never forget them: gaunt towering insect-creatures larger than any man, strange, frightful, repulsive. Such great swarms of them had come to infest Vengiboneeza that the whole Beng tribe, which had settled there amid the ruined Great World buildings after years of wandering, finally had had to flee. Under great difficulties in a wet and stormy time they had crossed the endless coastal plains and valleys. Eventually they reached Dawinno, the great new city far to the south that the Koshmar tribe had built under Hresh’s leadership after making its own exodus from Vengiboneeza; and there they found refuge.
That hard journey still blazed in his memory. He had been five, then, and his sister Catiriil a year younger.
“Why do we have to leave Vengiboneeza?” he had asked, over and over. And from his patient gentle mother Torlyri had come the same answer each time:
“Because the hjjks have decided that they want it for themselves.”
He would turn then to his father in fury. “Why don’t you and your friends kill them, then?”
And Trei Husathirn would reply: “We would if we could, boy. But there are ten hjjks in Vengiboneeza for every hair on your head. And plenty more where those came from, in the north.”
During the interminable weeks of the journey south to Dawinno, Husathirn Mueri had awakened every night from terrible dreams of hjjk encroachment. He saw them standing over him in the dark as he slept, their bristly claws moving, their great beaks clacking, their huge gleaming eyes aglow with malevolence.
That had been twenty-five years ago. Sometimes he dreamed of them even now.
They were an ancient race—the only one of the Six Peoples that had inhabited the world in the blissful days before the Long Winter which had managed to survive that harrowing eon of darkness and cold. Their seniority offended him, coming as he did from so young a stock, from a people whose ancestors had been mere simple animals in the time of the Great World. It reminded him how fragile was the claim to supremacy that the People had attempted to assert; it reminded him that the People held their present territories by mere default, simply because the hjjks appeared to have no use for those places and the other elder peoples of the Great World—the sapphire-eyes, the sea-lords, the vegetals, the mechanicals, the humans—were long gone from the scene.
The hjjks, who had not let the Long Winter of the death-stars displace them, still had possession of most of the world. The entire northland was theirs, and maybe much of the east as well, though tribes of the People had built at least five cities there, places known only by name and rumor to those who lived in Dawinno. Those cities—Gharb, Ghajnsielem, Cignoi, Bornigrayal, Thisthissima—were so far away that contact with them was all but impossible. The hjjks held everything else. They were the chief barrier to the People’s further expansion in these constantly warming days of the New Springtime. To Husathirn Mueri they were the enemy, and always would be. He would, if he could, wipe them all from the face of the Earth.
But he knew, as his father Trei Husathirn had known, that that was impossible. The best that the People could hope for against the hjjks was to hold their own with them: to maintain the security and integrity of the territories they already held, to keep the hjjks from encroaching in any way. Perhaps the People might even be able to push them back a little gradually and reach outward a short distance into some of the hjjk-controlled regions that were suitable for their own use. To think the hjjks could be altogether defeated, though—as certain other princes of the city were known to believe—was nothing but folly, Husathirn Mueri thought. They were an invincible enemy. They never would be anything else.
“There’s one other possibility,” Curabayn Bangkea said.
“And what would that be?”
“That this boy is no simple runaway, but in fact some kind of emissary from the hjjks.”
“A what?”
“Only a guess, throne-grace. There’s no evidence, you understand. But something about him—the way he holds himself, so polite and quiet and, well, solemn, and the way he tries to tell us things, the way he comes out once in a while with a word like ‘peace,’ or ‘love,’ or ‘queen’—well, sir, he doesn’t seem like your ordinary kind of runaway to me. It came to me all at once that this could be some sort of ambassador, like, sent to us by the wonderful queen of the bug-folk to bring us some kind of special message. Or so I think, throne-grace. If you pardon me for my presumption.”
“An ambassador?” Husathirn Mueri said, shaking his head. “Why in the name of all the gods would they be sending us an ambassador?”
Curabayn Bangkea gazed blandly at him, offering no answer.
Glowering, Husathirn Mueri rose from the justiciary throne and walked to and fro with a sliding gait before it, hands clasped behind his back.
Curabayn Bangkea was no fool; his judgment, however tentatively put forth, was something to respect. And if the hjjks had sent an emissary, someone of People birth, one who had dwelled among the bugs so long that he had forgotten his own speech and spoke only in harsh grinding hjjk-clatter—
As he paced, one of the merchants, coming up beside him, tugged at his sash of office and begged his attention. Husathirn Mueri, eyes flashing furiously, raised his arm as if to stri
ke the man. The merchant looked at him in astonishment.
At the last moment he checked himself. “Your suit is remanded for further study,” he told the merchant. “Return to this court when I am next sitting the throne.”
“And when will that be, lordship?”
“Do I know, fool? Watch the boards! Watch the boards!” Husathirn Mueri’s fingers trembled. He was losing his poise, and was troubled by that. “It’ll be next week, on Friit or Dawinno, I think,” he said, more temperately. “Go. Go!”
The merchants fled. Husathirn Mueri turned to the guard-captain. “Where is this hjjk ambassador now?”
“Throne-grace, it was only a guess, calling him an ambassador. I can’t say for sure that that’s what he really is.”
“Be that as it may, where is he?”
“Just outside, in the holding chamber.”
“Bring him in.”
He resumed his post on the throne. He felt irritated and perplexed and impatient. Some moments went by.
Husathirn Mueri did what he could to regain control of himself, making a calmness at the core of his spirit as his mother Torlyri had taught him to do. Rashness led only to miscalculation and error. She herself—the gods rest her soul, that warm and tender woman!—had not been nearly this high-strung. But Husathirn Mueri was a crossbreed, with a crossbreed’s vigor and intensity and a crossbreed’s drawbacks of disposition. In his birth he had foreshadowed the eventual union of the two tribes. Torlyri had been the Koshmar tribe’s offering-woman and the indomitable Beng warrior Trei Husathirn had swept the Koshmar priestess up into unexpected love and an unlikely mating, long ago, when the Beng people and the Koshmars still dwelled uneasily side by side in Vengiboneeza.
He sat waiting, more calmly now. At length the shadow of Curabayn Bangkea’s immense helmet entered the cupola, and then Curabayn Bangkea himself, leading the stranger at the end of a leash of plaited larret-withes. At the sight of him Husathirn Mueri sat to attention, hands tightly grasping the claw-and-ball arm-rests of the throne.
This was a very strange stranger indeed.
He was young, in late boyhood or early manhood, and painfully slender, with thin hunched shoulders and arms so frail they looked like dried stems. The ornaments he wore, the bracelet and the shining breastplate, did indeed seem to be polished fragments of a hjjk’s hard carapace, a grisly touch. His fur was black, but not a deep, rich black, like that of Husathirn Mueri: there was a dull grayish tinge to it, and it was pitiful scruffy fur, thin in places, almost worn through. This young man has been poorly fed all his life, Husathirn Mueri realized. He has suffered.
And his eyes! Those pale, icy, unwavering eyes! They seemed to stare toward the judicial throne across a gulf many worlds wide. Frightful remorseless eyes, an enemy’s eyes; but then, as Husathirn Mueri continued to study them, he began to see them, more as sad compassionate eyes, the eyes of a prophet and healer.
How could that be? The contradiction bewildered him.
At any rate, whoever and whatever this boy might be, there seemed no reason to keep him tethered this way. “Unleash him,” Husathirn Mueri ordered.
“But if he flees, throne-grace—!”
“He came here with a purpose. Fleeing won’t serve it. Unleash him.”
Curabayn Bangkea undid the knot. The stranger seemed to stand taller, but otherwise did not move.
Husathirn Mueri said, “I am the holder of throne-duty in this court for today. Husathirn Mueri is my name. Who are you, and why have you come to the City of Dawinno?”
The boy gestured, quick tense flutterings of his fingers, and made hoarse chittering hjjk-noises deep down in his chest, as if he meant to spit at Husathirn Mueri’s feet.
Husathirn Mueri shivered and drew back. This was the nearest thing to having an actual hjjk here in the throne-room. He felt rising revulsion.
“I speak no hjjk,” he said icily.
“Shhhtkkkk,” the boy said, or something like it. “Gggk thhhhhsp shtgggk.” And then he said, wresting the word from his throat as though it were some spiny thing within him that he must expel, “Peace.”
“Peace.”
The boy nodded. “Peace. Love.”
“Love,” said Husathirn Mueri, and shook his head slowly.
“It was like this when I interrogated him, too” Curabayn Bangkea murmured.
“Be still.” To the boy Husathirn Mueri said, speaking very clearly and loudly, as though that would make any difference, “I ask you again: What is your name?”
“Peace. Love. Ddddkddftshhh.”
“Your name,” Husathirn Mueri repeated. He tapped his chest where the white swirling streaks that he had inherited from his mother cut diagonally across the deep black fur. “I am Husathirn Mueri. Husathirn Mueri is my name. My name. His name”—pointing—“is Curabayn Bangkea. Curabayn Bangkea. And your name—”
“Shthhhjjk. Vtstsssth. Njnnnk!” The boy seemed to be struggling in a terrible way to articulate something. Muscles writhed in his sunken cheeks; his eyes rolled; he clenched his fists and dug his elbows into his hollow sides. Suddenly a complete understandable sentence burst from him: “I come in peace and love, from the Queen.”
“An emissary, do you see?” cried Curabayn Bangkea, grinning triumphantly.
Husathirn Mueri nodded. Curabayn Bangkea began to say something else, but Husathirn Mueri waved him impatiently to silence.
This must indeed be some child the hjjks had stolen in infancy, he thought. Who has lived among them ever since, in their impenetrable northland empire. And has been sent back now to the city of his birth, bearing Yissou only knew what demand from the insect queen.
The purposes of the hjjks were beyond all fathoming. Everyone knew that. But the message that this boy was trying so agonizingly to communicate might portend the opening of some new phase in the uneasy relationship between the People and the insect-folk. Husathirn Mueri, who was only one of several princes of the city and had reached that point in manhood when it was essential to begin thinking of rising to higher things, took it as a lucky omen that the stranger had arrived on a day when he happened to be holding the magistracy. There must be some good use to which all this could be put. First, though, he needed to figure out what the envoy was trying to say.
An obvious interpreter came to his mind. The most celebrated of all the returned captives of the city, the only highborn girl ever to be taken: Nialli Apuilana, daughter of Taniane and Hresh. She’d know some hjjk, if anyone did. Three months in captivity among them, a few years back. Grabbed just outside the city, she was, setting off a vast uproar, and why not, the only child of the chieftain and the chronicler stolen by the bugs! Loud lamentations, much frenzy. Tremendous search of the outlying territory. All to no avail. Then, months later, the girl suddenly reappearing as if she had dropped down from the sky. Looking dazed, but no visible signs of harm. Like all who returned from the hjjks she refused to speak of her captivity; like the others also, she had undergone some alteration of personality, far more moody and remote than she had been before. And she’d been moody enough before.
Was it safe to draw Nialli Apuilana into this? She was self-willed, unpredictable, a dangerous ally. From her powerful mother and mysterious visionary father had come a heritage of many volatile traits. No one could control her. She was some months past the age of sixteen, now, and ran wild in the city, free as a river: so far as Husathirn Mueri knew she had never let anyone couple with her, nor had she ever been known to twine, either, except of course on her twining-day, with the offering-woman Boldirinthe, but that was just the ritual to mark her coming into womanhood, when she turned thirteen. Everyone had to do that. The hjjks had taken her the very next day. Some people said she hadn’t been taken at all, that she had simply run away, because she had found her first twining so upsetting. But Husathirn Mueri suspected not. She had come back too weird; she must really have been among the hjjks.
One other factor figured in Husathirn Mueri’s considerations, which was that he desired Nial
li Apuilana with a dark fervor that burned at his core like the fires at the heart of the world. He saw her as his key to power in the city, if only she would become his mate. He hadn’t yet dared to say anything about that to her, or anyone. But perhaps drawing her into this event today would help him forge the bond that was his keenest hope.
He looked toward Curabayn Bangkea and said, “Tell one of those useless bailiffs lounging in the hallway to go and bring Nialli Apuilana here.”
The House of Nakhaba was where Nialli Apuilana lived, in one of the small chambers on the uppermost floor of the north wing of that enormous, sprawling building of spires, towers and intricately connected hallways. That it was a dormitory for priests and priestesses meant nothing to her. That they were priests and priestesses dedicated to a Beng god, whereas she was of the Koshmar tribe’s blood, meant even less. Those old tribal distinctions were breaking down very fast.
When she first chose the House of Nakhaba as her lodging-place, Prince Thu-Kimnibol had wanted to know if she had done it simply as a way of shocking everyone. Smiling in his good-natured way to take the sting out of the question, yes. But it stung all the same.
“Why, are you shocked?” Nialli Apuilana had replied.
Thu-Kimnibol was her father’s half-brother, as different from her father as the sun is from the moon. Both the huge, hulking, warlike Thu-Kimnibol and the frail, scholarly, retiring Hresh were the sons of the same mother, Minbain by name. Hresh had been born to her in the cocoon days, when a certain Samnibolon, long dead and forgotten now, had been her mate. Thu-Kimnibol was her child by a different mate of later years, the grim, violent, and quarrelsome warrior Harruel. He had inherited his father’s size and strength and some of his intensity of ambition; but not, so Nialli Apuilana had been told, his brooding, troubled soul.