At Winter's End

  One other factor figured in Husathirn Mueri’s considerations, which was that he desired Nialli 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.

  “Nothing you do shocks us,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “Not since you came back from the hjjks. But why live with the Beng priests?”

  Her eyes flashed with amusement and annoyance. “Kinsman, I live alone!”

  “On the top floor of a huge building swarming with Beng acolytes who bow down to Nakhaba.”

  “I have to live somewhere. I’m a grown woman. There’s privacy in the House of Nakhaba. The acolytes pray and chant all day long and half the night, but they leave me to myself.”

  “It must disturb your sleep.”

  “I sleep very well,” she said. “The singing lulls me. As for their bowing down to Nakhaba, well, what affair is that of mine? Or that they’re Bengs. Aren’t we all Bengs these days? Look, kinsman, you wear a helmet yourself. And the language we speak—what is it, if it isn’t Beng?”

  “The language of the People is what it is.”

  “And is it the same language we spoke when we lived in the cocoon, during the Long Winter?”

  Thu-Kimnibol tugged uneasily at the thick red fur, almost like a beard, that grew along his heavy cheeks. “I never lived in the cocoon,” he said. “I was born after the Coming Forth.”

  “You know what I mean. What we speak is as much Beng as it is Koshmar, or more so. We pray to Yissou and we pray to Nakhaba, and there’s no difference to us any more, the Koshmar god or the Beng god. A god is a god. Only a handful of the older people still remember that we were two tribes, originally. Or care. Another thirty years and only the chronicler will know. I like where I live, kinsman. I’m not trying to shock anyone, and you know it. I simply want to be off by myself.”

  That had been more than a year ago, almost two. And after that no one in her family had bothered her about her choice of a place to live. She was of age, after all: past sixteen, old enough to twine and to mate, even if she didn’t choose to twine, and certainly not to mate. She could do as she pleased. Everyone accepted that.

  But in fact Thu-Kimnibol had been close to the truth. Her going to the House of Nakhaba had been a protest of some sort: against what, she wasn’t sure. Ever since her return from the hjjks there had been a great restlessness in her, an impatience with all the established ways of the city. It seemed to Nialli Apuilana that the People had wandered from the true path. Machines were what they loved now, and comfort, and this new idea called exchange-units, which allowed the rich to buy the poor. Things were wrong here, so she had begun to think; and, since she had no power to change the ways of the city, she often found herself making strange silent rebellions against them. Others thought she was willful and unruly. What they might think was unimportant to her. Her stay among the hjjks had transformed her soul in ways that no one else could comprehend, in ways that she herself was only now beginning to come to terms with.

  There was a knock at the door. Nialli Apuilana opened it to a plump, panting official of the Court of Justice, who had obviously found the climb to the top of the House of Nakhaba on this warm afternoon a profound challenge. He was running with sweat. His fur was sticking together in thick bunches, and his nostrils flickered as he struggled to catch his breath. His sashes and badges of rank were soggy and askew.

  “Nialli Apuilana?”

  “You know that’s who I am. What do you want with me?”

  A gasp. A wheeze. “Summons to the Basilica.” Another gasp. An attempt to smooth the sodden fur. A huff and a puff. “By request of Husathirn Mueri, court-captain of the day.”

  “To the Basilica? Why, have I done something wrong, then? Is that what his lordship Husathirn Mueri believes? Am I going to be put on trial?”

  The bailiff didn’t reply. He was peering open-mouthed past her shoulder into her room. Stark as a prisoner’s cell: scarcely any furniture at all, just a tiny cot, a little stack of books on the floor, and a single ornament, a star-shaped amulet of woven grass that Nialli Apuilana had brought back from the hjjks, hanging on the whitewashed wall directly opposite the door like a conquest-sign placed there by the insect-folk themselves.

  “I said, have I done something wrong?”

  “Nothing, lady. Nothing.”

  “Then why am I summoned?”

  “Because—because—”

  “What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a hjjk star before?”

  The bailiff looked guiltily away. He began to groom himself with quick uneasy strokes. “His lordship the court-captain wishes your help, that’s all,” he blurted. “As a translator. A stranger has been brought to the Basilica—a young man, who seems to speak only the language of the hjjks—”

  There was a sudden roaring in Nialli Apuilana’s soul. Her heart raced painfully, frighteningly.

  So stupid. Waiting this long to let her know.

  She seized the bailiff by a sash. “Why didn’t you say so right away?”

  “I had no chance, lady. You—”

  “He must be a returning captive. You should have told me.”

  Images rose from the depths of her mind. Powerful memories, visions of that shattering day that had changed her life.

  She saw her younger self, already long-legged and woman-sleek but with her breasts only barely sprouting yet, innocently gathering blue chilly-flowers in the hills beyond the city walls on the day after her first twining. Black-and-yellow six-limbed figures, weird and terrifying, taller than any man of the city, taller even than Thu-Kimnibol, emerging without warning from a deep cleft in the tawny rock. Terror. Disbelief. A sense of the world she had known for thirteen years crumbling to fragments about her. Monstrous sharp-beaked heads, huge many-faceted eyes, jointed arms tipped with horrid claws. The chittering noises of them, the clickings and buzzings. This is not happening to me, she tells herself. Not to me. Do you know whose daughter I am? The words won’t leave her lips. They probably do know, anyway. All the better, getting someone like her. The pack of them surrounding her, seizing her, touching her. Then the terror unexpectedly disappearing. An eerie dreamlike calmness somehow taking possession of her soul. The hjjks carrying her away, then. A long march, an endless march, through unknown country. And then—the moi
st hot darkness of the Nest—the strangeness of that other life, which was like some different world, though it was right here on Earth—the power of the Queen impinging, surrounding, engulfing, transforming—

  And ever since, the loneliness, the bitter sense that there was no one else at all like her anywhere in the world. But now, at last, another who had experienced what she had experienced. At last. Another who knew.

  “Where is he?” she demanded. “I have to see him! Quick! Quick!”

  “He is at the Basilica, lady. In the throne-chamber, with his lordship Husathirn Mueri.”

  “Quick, then! Let’s go!”

  She rushed from her room, not even bothering with her sash. Her nakedness mattered nothing to her. Let them stare, she thought. The bailiff came running along desperately behind her, huffing and wheezing, as she raced down the stairs of the House of Nakhaba. Astonished acolytes in priestly helmets, scattering before her onslaught, turned to glare and mutter, but she paid no attention to them.

  On this day in late spring the sun was still high in the western sky, though the afternoon was well consumed. Soft tropic warmth wrapped the city like a cloak. The bailiff had a wagon waiting outside, with two docile gray xlendis in the harness. Nialli Apuilana jumped in beside him, and the placid beasts started down the winding streets toward the Basilica at a steady, unhurried trot.

  “Can’t you make them go faster?” she asked.

  The bailiff shrugged and laid on the whip. It did no good: one of the xlendis twisted its long neck about and looked back over its shoulder with great solemn golden eyes, as if puzzled that anyone would expect more speed of it than it was providing. Nialli Apuilana forced herself to hold her impatience in check. The returnee, the escaper, whatever he was, the one who had come from the Nest, wasn’t going anywhere. He would wait for her.

  “Lady, we are here,” the bailiff announced.

  The wagon halted. The Basilica stood before them now, the high-vaulted five-domed court building on the east side of the city’s central plaza. The westering sun lit the green-and-gold mosaics of its facade and kindled them to brilliant flame.

  Within the building flickering glowglobes gleamed in dark metal sconces. Court functionaries stood stiffly in the hallway, performing no apparent function except to bow and nod as they went by.

  The stranger was the first person whom Nialli Apuilana saw, sharply outlined in a cone of light entering through a triangular window far up near the summit of the lofty central cupola. He stood in a downcast way, shoulders slumped and eyes averted.

  There was a Nest-bracelet on his wrist. There was a Nest-guardian hanging from a lanyard on his chest.

  Nialli Apuilana’s heart went out to him. If she had been alone, she would have run to him and embraced him, and tears of joy would have flowed from her eyes.

  But she held herself back. She looked toward the judge’s ornate throne under the network of interlaced bronze struts that formed the cupola, where Husathirn Mueri sat, and allowed herself to meet his keen, brooding stare.

  Husathirn Mueri seemed rigid and tense. A perceptible odor, something like that of burning wood, came from him. The language of his body was explicit and not at all difficult to decode.

  There was hunger for her in his gleaming amber eyes.

  That was the only word she could find for it. Not lust, though no doubt lust was there; not the desire for her friendship, though he might well feel that; not anything tender that could readily be called love, either. No, it was hunger. Simple but not at all pure, and not so simple, either. He seemed to want to fall upon her and devour her and make her flesh a part of his own. Every time he saw her, which was no more often than she could manage, it was the same thing. Now, as he gazed at her across the vast space of the courtroom, it was almost as though Husathirn Mueri had his face between her thighs, gnawing, consuming. What a strange man! And yet quite appealing physically: slim, elegant, graceful, even beautiful, if a man could be called beautiful. And intelligent, and gentle in his way. But strange. Nialli Apuilana had no liking for him at all.

  To the right of the throne stood the great brawny guard-captain, Curabayn Bangkea, half entombed within his gigantic helmet. He was looking at her in a pretty lascivious way also, but she knew it was something much less complex that was on his mind. Nialli Apuilana was accustomed to being stared at by men of all sorts. She realized that she was attractive: everyone said that she was the image of her mother Taniane when Taniane was young, with glossy, silken red-brown fur and long slender legs; and her mother had been the most beautiful woman of her day. Even now she still was splendid. So I am beautiful too, and so they stare at me. An automatic thing, for them. She had some notion also that the air of absolute unapproachability in which she usually wrapped herself might add to her appeal, for some.

  Unctuously Husathirn Mueri said, “Dawinno guide you, Nialli Apuilana. Nakhaba preserve and cherish you.”

  “Spare me these hypocrisies,” she said sharply. “You want my help as a translator, your bailiff says. Translating what?”

  He indicated the stranger. “The guards have just brought him in. All he speaks is hjjk, and a few stray words of ours. I thought you might remember enough of the language of the bug-folk to tell me what he’s trying to say.”

  She gave Husathirn Mueri a cool, hostile stare. “The language of the bug-folk?”

  “Ah. Sorry. The hjjks, I should have said.”

  “I find the other term offensive.”

  “Your pardon, lady. I mean that. I used the term too lightly. I won’t use it again.” Husathirn Mueri seemed to squirm. He looked genuinely dismayed. “Will you speak with him, now? And see if you can learn why he’s here.”

  “If I can,” Nialli Apuilana said icily.

  She went to the stranger, taking up a position facing him, so close that she too stood in the cone of light and the tips of her breasts came nearly within touching-distance of the Nest-guardian that dangled on his chest. He raised his eyes and looked into hers.

  He was older than she had first thought. At a distance he seemed like no more than a boy, but that was because he was so flimsily built; in fact he must be at least her age, or even a year or two older. But there was no fat on him at all, and precious little muscle.

  A diet of seeds and dried meat will do that to you, Nialli Apuilana knew. She had experienced it herself.

  Very likely this stranger had lived among the hjjks for years. Long enough for his body to be shaped by the sparseness of their rations, at any rate. He even held himself in a hjjk’s stiff brittle way, as if the fur and flesh that he wore were only a cloak concealing the gaunt insect beneath.

  “Go on. Speak with him.”

  “A moment. Give me a moment!”

  She tried to collect herself. The sight of the hjjk talismans on his wrist and breast had stirred deep feelings in her. In her excitement she found herself unable to summon a single syllable of the hjjk language, what little of it she had learned years ago.

  Hjjks communicated in many ways. They had a spoken language, the clicks and buzzes and hisses from which the People had coined a name for them. But also they were able to speak with each other—and with such of the People as they encountered—in a silent language of the mind, as if speaking by second sight. And then too they had an elaborate system of communicating by means of chemical secretions, a code of scented signals.

  While in the Nest Nialli Apuilana had dealt with the hjjks mainly through the mental language. When they used that, they were able to make themselves perfectly understood to her, and also to understand what she said. She had managed to learn a few hundred words of their spoken language as well. But she had forgotten most of that by now. The language of the chemical secretions had always been altogether a closed book to her.

  To break the interminable silence she raised her hand and lightly touched the stranger’s Nest-guardian, leaning forward and smiling warmly at him as she did.

  He seemed almost to flinch. But he managed to hold his gro
und, and said something to her in harsh hjjk tones. His face was solemn. It didn’t seem capable of changing expression. It was like something carved of wood.

  She touched his Nest-guardian again, and then her own breast.

  Some words of hjjk sprang into her mind, then, and she spoke them, shaping them with some difficulty in her throat, as if she were gargling. They were the words for Nest, and Queen, and Nest-plenty.

  He drew back his lips in a grimace that was almost a smile. Or perhaps it was a smile that could not help becoming a grimace.

  “Love,” he said, in the language of the People. “Peace.”

  A start, at least.

  From somewhere more hjjk words came to her, the ones for Nest-strength, for Queen-touch, for Thinker-thoughts.

  He brightened.

  “Love,” he said again. “Queen—love.”

  He lifted his clenched fists, as if straining to find other words of People-speech long lost in the deeper reaches of his mind. There was anguish on his narrow face.

  At length he brought out another hjjk word, which Nialli Apuilana recognized as the one that could be translated as “flesh-folk.” It was the term the hjjks used for the People.

  “What are you two saying?” Husathirn Mueri asked.

  “Nothing very significant. Just making preliminary contact.”

  “Has he told you his name yet?”

  Nialli Apuilana gave Husathirn Mueri a scornful look. “The hjjk language doesn’t have a word for name. They don’t have names themselves.”

  “Can you ask him why he’s here, then?”

  “I’m trying,” she said. “Can’t you see that?”

  But it was hopeless. For ten minutes she worked in a steady dogged way at breaking through, without getting anywhere.

  She had expected so much of this meeting. She was desperately eager to relive with this stranger her time in the Nest. To speak with him of Queen-love and Egg-plan and Nest-strength and all those other things that she had barely had a chance to experience during her too-brief captivity: things which had shaped her soul as surely as the austere food of the hjjks had shaped this stranger’s lean body. But the barriers between them were a maddening obstacle.