At Winter's End

  After that he went out almost every day. He had never known such excitement. Simply to stand at a streetcorner, listening to a ballad-singer or a preacher or a peddler of little toys—how different that was from the life of the Nest! To step into a restaurant and stare in wonder at the sizzling meat on the griddle, and then point and smile, and be smiled at in return, and be handed some strange tender bit of flesh-folk food to eat—how wonderful, how transfiguring that was! It was like moving through the most vivid of dreams.

  A steady diet of the food of the flesh-folk was having a profound effect on him. His fur was much thicker, darker, now. His body was becoming almost plump: he could pinch his skin and there would be a thick strip of flesh between his fingers, as never before. And also this new rich nourishment was entering his soul. He felt a fresh access of vigor. He was restless, almost jumpy with unfamiliar energy. Sometimes, when Nialli Apuilana entered his room, he seized her almost before she had had a chance to say a word and drew her down with him to the floor or to his couch. In the streets, too, he moved in long forceful strides, enjoying the jolt of the pavement against his feet. That was new, too, to be walking on paved streets. Everything was new, everything was exciting.

  They all seemed to know who he was. People pointed and whispered. A few spoke to him, courteously but with some uncertainty, as if they weren’t sure how safe it was to approach him. With the children it was different. Platoons of them followed him about. There were children everywhere here; sometimes it seemed to Kundalimon that scarcely anyone but boys and girls lived in this city. They capered after him, shouting and whooping, calling out to him.

  “Hjjk! Hjjk! There goes the hjjk!”

  “Say something to us in hjjk-speak, hjjk!”

  “Hey, hey, hjjk! Where’s your beak?”

  They meant no mockery. They were only children, after all. Their tone was light and playful.

  He turned to them and beckoned. They were wary at first, the way the older ones tended to be, but then they came to him and stood close about him. Some of them shyly let him take their hands in his.

  “Are you really a hjjk?”

  “I am like you. I am flesh, like you.”

  “Then why do they say you’re a hjjk?”

  Kundalimon smiled. Gently he said, “The hjjks took me away when I was very young, and raised me in their Nest. But I was born here, you know. In this city.”

  “You were? Who’s your mother? Who’s your father?”

  “Marsalforn,” he said. “Ramla.” He struggled to remember which was which. The mother, the Egg-maker, that was Marsalforn, Nialli Apuilana had said, and the father, he who had kindled, was Ramla. Or was it the other way around? He could never keep it straight. In the Nest it made no difference who your Egg-maker was, and who the Life-kindler. Everyone was really the child of the Queen, after all. Without Her touch there could be no new life. Makers, kindlers, they all served the Will of the Queen.

  “Where do they live?” a little girl asked. “Do you ever visit them, your mother and your father?”

  “They live somewhere else now. Or maybe they don’t live anywhere any more. No one knows where they are.”

  “Oh. That’s sad. Do you want to visit my mother and father, if you don’t have any of your own?”

  “I’d like that,” said Kundalimon.

  “How did you come here?” another girl said. “Did you fly like a bird?”

  “I rode a vermilion.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arms, indicating a beast of mountainous size. “Down out of the north, from the place of the Nest of Nests, traveling day after day, week after week. Riding my vermilion, heading for this city, this city Dawinno. The Queen sent me here. Go to Dawinno, She said. She sent me so that I could talk to you. So that I could get to know you, and you to know me. So that I could bring you Her love, and Her peace.”

  “Are you going to take us back with you to the Nest?” a boy in back called. “Did you come to steal us, like you were stolen?”

  Kundalimon looked to him, amazed.

  “Yes! Yes!” the children cried. “Are you here to take us to the hjjks?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “No!” they yelled, so loudly that his ears rang. “Don’t take us! Please don’t!”

  “I was taken. You see that no harm came to me.”

  “But the hjjks are monsters! They’re horrible and dangerous! Awful giant bug-creatures, is what they are!”

  He shook his head. “It isn’t so. You don’t understand, because you don’t know them. No one here does. They’re kind. They’re loving. If you only knew. If you only could feel Nest-bond, if you only could experience Queen-love.”

  “He sounds crazy,” a small boy said. “What’s he saying?”

  “Shhh!”

  “Come,” Kundalimon said. “Sit down with me, here in the park. There’s so much I want you to know. Let me tell you, first, what things are like, in the Nest—”

  There was nothing left of the City of Yissou that Thu-Kimnibol remembered from his youth. Just as the first crude wooden shacks of Harruel’s original Yissou had been swept away to be replaced by the early stone buildings of Salaman’s city, so too by now had every vestige of that second city disappeared. A still newer and more powerful one had been superimposed on it, obliterating the other, which was gone without a trace, palaces and courts and houses and all.

  Salaman said, “It looks good to you, does it? It looks like a real city, eh?”

  “It doesn’t look at all the way I expected it would.”

  “Speak up, speak up!” Salaman said sharply. “I have trouble understanding a lot of what you’re saying.”

  “A thousand pardons,” said Thu-Kimnibol, in a voice twice as loud. “Is this better?”

  “You don’t have to shout. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing. It’s all those damnable Beng words you use. You speak with helmets in your mouth. How am I supposed to make sense out of that? I suppose if I lived with Bengs in my lap the way you people do—”

  “We are all one People now,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

  “Ah. Ah. Is that what you are? Well, try not to speak so much Beng, if you want me to know what you’re saying. We’re conservatives here. We still speak the pure speech, the language of Koshmar and Torlyri and Thaggoran. You remember Torlyri? You remember Thaggoran, do you? No, no, how could you? He was the chronicler before Hresh. The rat-wolves killed him, right after the Coming Forth, that time when we were crossing the plain. But you weren’t even born then. You don’t remember any of that. I should have realized. I’m turning into a forgetful old man. And very cantankerous, Thu-Kimnibol. Very cantankerous indeed.”

  Salaman grinned disarmingly, as though trying to deny his own words. But it was plain to see he was telling the truth. Cantankerous was what he had become, testy and sharp.

  Time had brought changes to Salaman as well as to his city. Thu-Kimnibol remembered a Salaman from the early days who had been supple and resilient of mind, a clever and cunning planner, intelligent, far-seeing, a natural leader, an innately likable person. But then the changes had begun in him, that new Salaman emerging, darker and crabbed of soul, a difficult and suspicious man. And now, twenty years later, the process was far along. The king seemed chilly and morose, gripped by some bitter malaise, or stained from within, perhaps, by the absolute power he had taken for himself here. You could see it in his face, drawn in upon itself, cheeks sunken, temples hollow, and in the taut, guarded way he carried himself. His fur had entirely whitened with age. There was a harsh wintry look about him.

  The city he had created was like that too. Here were no broad sunny avenues, no brightly tiled towers against the blue of the sky, no green and leafy gardens, such as Thu-Kimnibol saw every day in airy Dawinno. The City of Yissou, penned within its crater-rim and its titanic rampart of heavy black stone, was a cramped, dismal place of narrow streets and low, thick-walled stone buildings with mere slits for windows. It looked more like a fortress than a city.

&n
bsp; Was this what my father had in mind, Thu-Kimnibol wondered, when we left Vengiboneeza to found a city of our own? This dark, huddled, nasty town?

  In the aftermath of the victory over the hjjks, on that sorry day when King Harruel had died fighting the insect hordes, Salaman had said, flushed with his new kingship, “We will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me.” But later—by demand of the people, said Salaman, claiming that they preferred to honor the god who protected them rather than the man who had brought them to this place—he had restored the original name. Just as well, Thu-Kimnibol thought now. He wouldn’t have wanted his father’s name forever attached to so grim and cheerless a city as Salaman’s City of Yissou.

  Yet Salaman had managed to welcome him, at any rate, in an open-spirited and even cheerful way. He betrayed hardly a trace of recollection of the angry words that had passed between them long ago. Coming down from his wall-top pavilion as Thu-Kimnibol’s wagons passed through the great gate of the city, he had waited calmly with folded arms for Thu-Kimnibol to step forth, and then, his stern and rigid face softening unexpectedly into a smile, he strode forward, arms extended, hands reaching for Thu-Kimnibol’s.

  “Cousin! After so many years! What is this, do you return at last to take up your old life here, which was so suddenly interrupted?”

  “No, king, I come only as an ambassador,” Thu-Kimnibol replied evenly. “I have messages for you from Taniane, and other things to discuss with you. My place is in Dawinno, now.” But he met Salaman’s embrace with an embrace of his own, reaching down to encircle the king in his arms. There was some difficulty in it for him, but only because Salaman was so much shorter a man.

  To Thu-Kimnibol’s surprise, his heart did not resist the act of clasping Salaman to him, nor was there any insincerity in it. So it must be true, then: whatever grievance he had had against Salaman, or had thought he had, had burned away with time. The slights Salaman had visited upon him, or had seemed to visit upon him, when he was a young man, no longer mattered.

  “We have our finest hostelry ready for you,” said Salaman. “And after you’re settled, a feast, eh? And then we’ll talk. Not the official business, not so soon. Just a talk, between two who once were good friends. Eh, Thu-Kimnibol?”

  Fair enough, and friendly enough, thought Thu-Kimnibol. He let them take him to his rooms. Esperasagiot went off to find stables for the xlendis, and Dumanka to see about housing for the ambassadorial entourage, and Simthala Honginda to meet with officials of the city and discuss the local rules of diplomatic courtesy.

  It was only much later, in the huge dark stone-walled ceremonial hall of the palace, after the feasting and after too much wine, and after Thu-Kimnibol had presented the gifts he had brought with him for Salaman from Taniane, the fine white cloths and green-tinged porcelains, and the expensively bound volume of chronicles that Hresh had assembled, and also personal gifts of his own to the king, casks of wine from his own vineyards, pelts of rare animals from the far southlands, preserved fruits, and more—it was only then that tensions finally began to surface between Thu-Kimnibol and Salaman.

  Perhaps it was the language problem, which had bothered him from the first, that caused him finally to flare up. Salaman, who spoke the pure Koshmar speech, seemed genuinely annoyed by the Beng words and intonations Thu-Kimnibol habitually used. Thu-Kimnibol hadn’t realized how much the language of the People had changed in Dawinno since the union with the Bengs, how filled with Beng it had become. Salaman had never liked Bengs, ever since the golden-furred helmet-wearers had declined his invitation to settle in Yissou after being crowded out of Vengiboneeza by the hjjks, and had gone off to Hresh’s new Dawinno instead. And apparently the grudge had never left him, if the mere sound of Beng phrases in Thu-Kimnibol’s speech could so offend him.

  Still, Thu-Kimnibol was taken by surprise, after an evening of drinking and entertainment, when Salaman suddenly said in a blunt way, as they lay comfortably sprawled side by side on ornate divans, “By the Five, I admire your gall! That you should come boldly dancing back to Yissou after the things you said to me the night you left.”

  Thu-Kimnibol stiffened. “They still rankle in you, do they? After all these years?”

  “You said you’d throw me from the top of the wall. Eh? Eh? Have you forgotten that, Thu-Kimnibol? But the Five, I haven’t! What do you think I made of your words, eh? Did I take them as pleasantries, do you think? Ah, no. No. The wall was much lower, then, but I took them to be a threat against my life. Which was correct, I think.”

  “I would never have done it.”

  “You could never have done it. Chham and Athimin were watching you the whole time. If you had laid a finger on me they’d have chopped you in pieces.”

  Thu-Kimnibol took a long drink of his wine: the sweet strong wine of the district, which he hadn’t tasted in years. Over the top of the cup he glanced at the king. No one else was in the room but some of the evening’s dancers, exhausted, who sprawled like discarded pillows, along the far wall. Were Salaman’s odious sons lurking behind the curtains, ready now to burst in and avenge the ancient slight he had given their father? Or would the dancers themselves suddenly come to life, with knives and strangling-cloths?

  No. Salaman is simply playing games with him, he decided.

  “You threatened me also,” he said. “You told me I’d be stripped of all rank and perquisites, and sent to scrub slops in the marketplace.”

  “It was said in anger. If I’d had more of my brains about me, I’d have put a man of your size and strength to work on the wall, not in the market.”

  The king’s eyes gleamed. He seemed immensely pleased by his own wit.

  Best to ignore the insult. Thu-Kimnibol said only, “Why do you reawaken all this now, Salaman?”

  Salaman smiled and stroked his chin. Long white tufts of hair sprouted from it now, giving him an oddly benign and almost comic appearance, probably not his intention. “We haven’t spoken in—what, twenty years? Twenty-five? Shouldn’t we at least try to clear the air between us?”

  “Is that what you’re doing? Clearing the air?”

  “Of course. Do you think we can simply ignore what happened? Pretend it never took place?” Salaman refilled his wine glass, and Thu-Kimnibol’s. He leaned across and stared at close range. In a low voice he asked, “Did you really want to be king in my place?”

  “Never. I wanted only the honors due me as Harruel’s son.”

  “They told me you meant to overthrow me.”

  “Who did?”

  “What does that matter? They’re all dead now. Ah, it was Bruikkos. Do you remember him? And Konya.”

  “Yes,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “They came to resent me, when I was grown, because I had higher rank than they did. But what did they expect? They were only warriors. I was a king’s son.”

  “And Minbain,” Salaman said.

  Thu-Kimnibol blinked. “My mother?”

  “Ah, yes. She came to me, and said, ‘Thu-Kimnibol is restless, Thu-Kimnibol is hungry for power.’ She was afraid that you’d do something foolish and I would have to put you to death, which of course she would have regretted greatly. She said to me, ‘Speak with him, Salaman, ease him, give him at least the pretense of what he wants, so that he’ll do no harm to himself.’”

  And the king smiled.

  Thu-Kimnibol wondered how much of this was true, and how much simply some dark and devious amusement. Of course, Minbain might well have worried that her son would fatally overreach himself, and had taken steps to avert trouble. But that wouldn’t have been much like her. She’d have spoken to me first, Thu-Kimnibol thought. Well, no way to ask her about it now.

  “I’d never have tried to displace you, Salaman. Believe me. I took an oath to you: why would I break it? And I knew that I was too young and hotheaded to be a king, and you were too powerfully entrenched.”

  “I believe you.”

  “If you had given me the titles and honors I wanted, there’d nev
er have been trouble between us. I tell you that truly, Salaman.”

  “Yes,” the king said, in a suddenly altered voice, all anger and harshness gone from it. “It was a mistake, my treating you the way I did.”

  Instantly Thu-Kimnibol was on his guard.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I am always serious, Thu-Kimnibol.”

  “So you are. But do kings ever admit their mistakes?”

  “This one sometimes does. Not often, but sometimes, yes. This is one such time.” Salaman rose, stretched, laughed. “What I wanted was to goad you, to push you to your limit, to drive you out of Yissou. I thought you were too big for this city, too strong a rival, bound to grow even stronger as the years went on. That was my mistake. I should have cultivated you, honored you, disarmed you. And then put your strength to good use here. I saw that later, but it was too late. Well, you’re welcome here again, cousin.” Then an odd expression, half jovial, half suspicious, came into the king’s eyes. “You haven’t come here to seize my throne after all, have you?”

  Thu-Kimnibol gave him a chilly look. But he managed a chuckle and a pale grin.

  Salaman thrust out his hand. “Dear old friend. I should never have driven you off. I rejoice in your return, however brief it is.” He yawned. “Shall we get some rest, now?”

  “A good idea.”

  The king glanced at the sleeping dancers, who had not moved from their scattered places on the floor.

  “Would you like one of these girls to warm your bed tonight?”

  Again, a surprise. The thought of Naarinta, only a few weeks in the grave, came to him. But it was impolitic to refuse Salaman’s hospitality. And what did it matter, one coupling more or less, this far from home? He was weary. He was on edge, after this strange conversation. A warm young body in his arms in the night, a bit of comfort before the real work began—well, why not? Why not? He didn’t intend to remain chaste the rest of his life. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think I would.”

  “What about this one?” Salaman prodded a girl with chestnut fur with his slippered toe. “Up, child. Up, up, wake up! You will be Prince Thu-Kimnibol’s tonight!”