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 chuttering 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.”
“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 possible 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, Th
u-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.
A Biography of Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) is an American author best known for his science fiction titles, including Nightwings (1969), Dying Inside (1972), and Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980). He has won five Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards. In 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America honored Silverberg with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 15, 1935, the only child of Michael and Helen Silverberg. An avid reader and writer from an early age, Silverberg began his own fanzine, Spaceship, in 1949. In 1953, at age eighteen, he sold his first nonfiction piece to Science Fiction Adventures magazine. His first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, was published shortly after, in 1955. That same year, while living in New York City and studying at Columbia University, Silverberg met his neighbors and fellow writers Randall Garrett and Harlan Ellison, both of whom went on to collaborate with him on numerous projects. Silverberg and Randall published pieces under the name Robert Randall. In 1956, Silverberg graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor of arts degree in comparative literature, married Barbara Brown, and won the Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author.
Following the whirlwind of his college years, Silverberg continued to write consistently for most of his life. Writing under various pseudonyms, including David Osborne and Calvin M. Knox, Silverberg managed to publish eleven novels and more than two hundred short pieces between 1957 and 1959. Having established himself as a science fiction writer by this time, Silverberg went on to show dexterity in other genres, from historical nonfiction with Treasures Beneath the Sea (1960) to softcore pornography under the pseudonym Don Elliot.
Silverberg continued to write outside science fiction until Frederik Pohl, the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, convinced him to rejoin the field. It was in this period, from the late 1960s to early 1970s, that Silverberg’s classics, including Tower of Glass (1970), The World Inside (1971), and The Book of Skulls (1972), came to life. After taking a break from writing, Silverberg returned with Lord Valentine’s Castle in 1980.
Though they had been separated for nearly a decade, Silverberg and Barbara officially ended their marriage in 1986. A year later, Silverberg married fellow writer Karen Haber. They went on to collaborate on writing The Mutant Season (1990) and editing several anthologies. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Silverberg published important titles including Star of Gypsies (1986), and continued his established Majipoor series with The Mountains of Majipoor (1995) and Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997). In 1999, Silverberg was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
With a career that spans half a century, multiple genres, and more than three hundred titles, Silverberg has made major contributions as a writer. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife.
Silverberg at six months old with his parents.
Silverberg at summer camp in August 1952, reading the September issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which featured a story by Theodore Sturgeon.
The first page of Silverberg’s manuscript for his first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, published in 1955.
An early rejection letter dated July 18, 1949.
Silverberg conversing with a nymph at author Brian Aldiss’s home in Oxford, England, after the 1987 Brighton Worldcon. (Courtesy of Andrew Porter.)
Silverberg with his wife, Karen, at the 2004 Nebula Awards in Seattle, where he received his Grand Master Award.
(Unless otherwise noted, all images taken from Other Spaces, Other Times by Robert Silverberg, courtesy of Nonstop Press.)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Agberg, Ltd.
First published in Great Britain 1989 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, 14 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8QJ.
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-1829-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Robert Silverberg, The Queen of Springtime
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