At Winter's End

  “You will follow.”

  “I’d like to go to my sleeping-place. I think it’s that way.”

  “You will follow,” said Nest-thinker again.

  In the Nest disobedience was simply not an option: if he persisted in going to his chamber, Hresh knew, Nest-thinker wouldn’t be angered so much as mystified, but in any case Hresh would end up going where Nest-thinker wanted him to go. He followed. The path ramped gently upward. After a time he saw what seemed surely to be the glow of daylight ahead. They were approaching one of the surface mouths of the Nest. Five or six Militaries were waiting there. Nest-thinker delivered Hresh to them and turned away without a word.

  To the Militaries Hresh said, “I’d be grateful if you’d take me to my sleeping-place, now. This isn’t where I wanted Nest-thinker to bring me.”

  The hjjks stared blandly at him as if he hadn’t said a thing.

  “Come,” one said, pointing toward the daylight.

  His wagon was waiting out there, and his xlendi, looking rested and well fed. The implication was clear enough. He had seen the Queen, and the Queen had seen him, and so the Queen’s needs had been served. Which was all that mattered here. His time in the Nest was over; now he was to be expelled.

  A quiver of shock and dismay ran through him. He didn’t want to leave. He had been living easily and happily here according to the rhythm of the Nest, strange as it was. It had become his home. He had supposed that he would end his days in the warmth and the silence and the sweetness of this place, dwelling here until at last the Destroyer came to take him to his final rest, which very likely would be soon. The outside world held nothing more for him. He wanted only to be allowed to penetrate ever more deeply into the way of the hjjks in whatever time might remain to him.

  “Please,” Hresh said. “I want to stay.”

  He could just as well have been speaking to creatures of stone. They leaned on their spears and stared at him, motionless, impassive. They hardly even seemed alive, but for the rippling of the orange breathing-tubes that dangled from the sides of their heads as air passed through the tubes’ segmented coils.

  The xlendi made a soft whickering sound. It had had its orders; it was impatient to set forth.

  “Don’t you understand?” Hresh told the hjjks. “I don’t want to leave.”

  Silence.

  “I ask for sanctuary among you.”

  Silence, icy, impenetrable.

  “In the name of the Queen, I beg you—”

  That, at least, brought a response. The two hjjks nearest him drew themselves up tall, and a brightness that might have been anger passed swiftly across the many facets of their huge eyes. They brought their spears up and held them out horizontally, as though they meant to push Hresh forward with them.

  A silent voice said, “It is the Queen’s wish that you continue your pilgrimage now. In the name of the Queen, then, go. Go.”

  He understood that there was no hope of further appeal. They stared at him inexorably. The horizontal spears formed an impenetrable gate, cutting him off from the Nest.

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “Very well.”

  He clambered into the wagon. Immediately the xlendi set out almost at a canter across the barren gray plain. He was startled by that. The beast had been so unhurried during the journey up here from Dawinno. But Hresh suspected that the xlendi was being guided, and even propelled, by some force within the Nest, and he thought that he knew what that force was. He sat passively, letting the wagon run; and when the xlendi halted for water and forage, he sipped a little water himself and ate a little of the dried meat that the hjjks had put into his wagon, and waited for the ride to resume. And so it went, day after day, a long quiet time, almost like a dreamless sleep, first through a zone of strange flat-topped sand-colored pyramidal hills, and then into a region of eerie erosion where the fiery crimson rocks had been cut into fantastic arches and colonnades, and after that through a landscape of rough sedge and occasional stubby trees and scattered herds of some dark-striped grazing animal Hresh had never seen before, which did not even look up as his wagon went by.

  Until at midday one day, while he was crossing what might not long ago have been a lake-bed, but was at this season a place of dry and cracked expanses of mud covered by a light scattering of sandy dust, he saw a figure on a vermilion just ahead, someone of the People, an unexpected sight indeed in this unknown place.

  The xlendi halted and waited as the huge red creature came shambling up. The man riding it gasped.

  “Gods! Can it really be you, sir? Or am I dreaming this? It must be a dream. It must.”

  Hresh smiled. Tried to speak. He hadn’t used his voice in so long that it was harsh and ragged, a mere rasping croak. But he managed to say, “I know you, I think.”

  The rider vaulted down from the vermilion and ran toward him. Peering over the wagon’s side, he stared at Hresh, shaking his head in wonder.

  “Plor Killivash, sir. From the House of Knowledge! You don’t recognize me? I was one of your assistants, don’t you remember? Plor Killivash!”

  “Is this Dawinno, then?”

  “Dawinno? Sir, no! We’re way up in hjjk territory. I’m with the army, your brother Thu-Kimnibol’s army! We’ve been fighting for weeks. We’ve fought at Vengiboneeza, we’ve fought at a couple of the small Nests—” Plor Killivash’s eyes grew wider and wider. “Sir, how did you get here? You couldn’t possibly have come all this way alone, could you? And why are you here? You shouldn’t be at the battlefront, you know. Sir, can you hear me? Are you all right, sir? Sir?”

  Thu-Kimnibol was in his tent. The army was camped on the edge of the prairie that they called the Plains of Minbain. He had given names to all the features of this unfamiliar land: the Mountains of Harruel, Lake Taniane, the Torlyri River, Boldirinthe Valley, Koshmar Pass. For all he knew, Salaman was bestowing names of his own on the same places as he advanced through them. Thu-Kimnibol didn’t care about that. To him the great jagged mountains they had gone past three weeks before were his father’s mountains, and this lovely serene tableland was his mother’s plain, and let Salaman call them what he would.

  To Nialli Apuilana he said, “There it is again. I can feel the king approaching. Marching at the head of his troops, coming this way.”

  “Yes. So do I. Or something dark and fierce, at any rate.”

  “Salaman. No question of it.”

  She put her hand to his thick forearm, where just a few days before he had taken a light wound from a hjjk spear. “You speak his name as though he’s the enemy, not the hjjks. Are you afraid of him, love?”

  Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “Afraid of Salaman? I don’t often think in terms of who it is that I fear. But only a fool wouldn’t fear Salaman, Nialli. He’s become some kind of monster. I told you once that I thought he was mad. But he’s gone beyond madness now. Or so I think.”

  “A monster,” Nialli Apuilana repeated. “But in war all warriors have to be monsters. Isn’t that so?”

  “Not like that. I watched him when our two armies were last together. He was fighting as if he wanted not just to kill every hjjk he saw, but to roast it and eat it also. There was fire in his eyes. Long ago I saw my father Harruel fight, and he was a troubled man, with great hot angry forces churning within him; but at his fiercest he seemed calm and gentle when I compare him with Salaman as he looked that day.” Thu-Kimnibol’s sensing-organ quivered. “I felt him again just now. Closer and closer. Well, perhaps it’s best that the armies join again. I never meant for us to advance separately into the country of the hjjks.”

  “Will you have some wine?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

  “Yes. Yes, that would be good.”

  Twilight was coming on. Most likely Salaman and his army would show up by midday tomorrow, if the emanations were this strong. The reunion of the two forces, after weeks of separation, was likely to be tense. And the gods only knew what a wild man the king had become by now. This entire campaign seemed to have been a voyage
into ever deeper madness for him.

  The trouble had started, Thu-Kimnibol thought, while they were planning the Vengiboneeza campaign: Salaman’s burst of anger after being told he wasn’t going to be given any of the Great World weapons had been the beginning. There had been a coldness between them ever since. They both obeyed the fiction that Salaman was commander-in-chief and Thu-Kimnibol the field general, but there hadn’t been much cordiality or real cooperation between them as the fighting itself got under way.

  Still, everything had gone well so far. Better even than they might have expected, in fact.

  The battle of Vengiboneeza had been an overwhelming triumph. The hjjks had constructed a Nest above ground there, a weird ramshackle array of flimsy gray tubes that ran in a hundred directions, spanning the old city from the waterfront to the eastern foothills. Salaman came upon the city from the western side, setting up a great uproar of flame and explosions along the seawall, while Thu-Kimnibol’s forces had descended carefully along the slopes of the great golden-brown mountain wall to the north and east. The hjjks were taken by surprise, rushing down to the water to see what the matter was while Thu-Kimnibol got ready to attack from above.

  Then it was the moment to bring the Great World weapons into play. Thu-Kimnibol had used the one he called the Loop to set up an impenetrable barrier along the foothills to keep the hjjks from assailing his position. Then with the Line of Fire he raked the city with flames until the red tongues rose above the highest rooftop and the pulpy walls of the Vengiboneeza Nest blackened and shriveled. With the Bubble Tube he had caused such turbulence in the air that the city’s age-old towers, those marvelous spires of scarlet and blue, of glittering purple, of brilliant gold, of midnight black, crumbled like brittle sticks. Now he called into service the most potent of his weapons, the Earth-Eater, to gobble huge craters in the fabric of the dying metropolis below him. The boulevards and avenues themselves slipped downward into chaos, whole districts collapsing and sinking from sight, and a great pall of dust and smoke rose to choke the sky as if the death-stars had come gain.

  The Long Winter itself hadn’t been able to destroy Vengiboneeza. But Thu-Kimnibol had done it in a single afternoon, with four small devices that an ignorant farmer had found in a muddy hillside.

  They had stayed all night to watch the city burn. All its immense population must have burned with it, for Thu-Kimnibol’s troops saw not a single hjjk try to escape on the foothills side, and Salaman’s warriors along the seawall cut down every one of those that attempted to get away by water. The armies rejoined on the far side of Vengiboneeza and set out side by side into the true hjjk heartland. Which was where Salaman’s army had split off after the destruction of one of the smaller Nests behind Vengiboneeza. The king, made wild by the love of slaughter, had insisted on pursuing and killing a few hundred hjjks that had managed to get away. Thu-Kimnibol found little joy in the thought of seeing him again. Too bad Salaman hadn’t decided to take separate route all the rest of the way.

  Pulling Nialli Apuilana close against him, he drew his breath deep, filling his lungs with the fragrance of her. At least tonight they’d be at their ease together. If Salaman turned up tomorrow, as seemed more and more likely, he’d deal with that problem when it presented itself.

  “It still surprises me,” he said softly, “when I awaken and see that it’s you beside me. Even after all this time, I look at you, and I tell myself in wonder, That’s Nialli there! How strange!”

  “You still expect to find Naarinta, do you?” she said playfully.

  “Gods! How merciless you can be! You know what I mean, Nialli. I’ll always cherish Naarinta’s memory, yes. But she’s long gone. What I’m trying to tell you is that it continues to amaze me that I should have found such love with you, you, my half-brother’s own child, that strange wild girl whom no one in Dawinno was able to tame—”

  “And have you tamed me now, Thu-Kimnibol?”

  “Hardly. But I no longer see you as anyone’s child. Or strange. Or wild.”

  “Ah, and how do you see me, then?” she asked, smiling.

  “Why, as the most—”

  “Sir? Lord prince?” came a deep familiar voice from outside the tent.

  Thu-Kimnibol muttered a curse. “Is that you, Dumanka? By all the gods, this had better be important, that you come interrupting me in my tent when—”

  “Sir, it is! It is!”

  “I’ll have him flayed if it isn’t,” he said to Nialli Apuilana under his breath. “I promise you that.”

  “Go to him. Dumanka’s not one to bother you over nothing.”

  “Yes. I suppose.” Thu-Kimnibol put down his wine and made his way to the tent entrance, a little creakily, for his muscles were still sore from the last battle. He peered out.

  Dumanka looked as astonished as if he’d just seen the sun moving backwards through the sky. Thu-Kimnibol had never seen him in such a state.

  “Lord prince—”

  “Gods, man! What is it?”

  “Hresh, sir. Hresh the chronicler?”

  “Yes, I know who Hresh is. What of him? Is there a message from him?”

  Dumanka shook his head. Hoarsely he blurted, “Sir, he’s here.”

  “Here?”

  “Plor Killivash just brought him in. Found him, sir, wandering around in a xlendi-wagon out in the patrol area. We’ve got him in the medic tent. He seems to be all right, just a little woolly in the head. He’s been asking for you, and I thought—”

  Thu-Kimnibol, stunned, waved him into silence. He turned to Nialli Apuilana. “Did you hear that?”

  “No. Trouble?”

  “You might call it that. Your father’s here, Nialli. My lunatic brother. Dumanka says he just came wandering in out of the open country. Mueri and Yissou and Dawinno, what’s he doing here? On the front line of the war, no less. Just what we need. Gods! Gods!”

  Quietly Hresh said, “Come with me to the Queen, brother. Let me show you what She is like.”

  It was an hour after his arrival. He had been bombarded with surprises: Thu-Kimnibol and Nialli Apuilana sharing a tent like mates, Vengiboneeza destroyed, the hjjks being pushed back on every front. But, spent and drained as he was by his journey, startled and dismayed as he was by these developments, he kept his mind and strength focused on his purpose.

  “To the Queen?” Thu-Kimnibol said. He seemed bewildered. Then he flashed a brief flickering smile, a look of patronizing indulgence. “You and I. The Queen of Queens, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “To speak with Her. Not to kill Her, only to have a chat with Her.”

  “Yes,” said Hresh.

  “And how will we get there? In your little wagon?”

  “I have this,” Hresh said, and brought forth in his hand the little pouch that contained the Barak Dayir.

  A grunt of amazement. “You’ve taken the Wonderstone with you?”

  “The Barak Dayir is mine, brother. As were the weapons with which you destroyed Vengiboneeza.”

  Thu-Kimnibol made no attempt to parry that. “Let me understand you. You’re proposing that we visit the Nest, but not in our actual bodies, just by using the Wonderstone to send our souls there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And why, brother, do you want me to put myself in my enemy’s power?”

  “So you can begin to understand your enemy’s nature: not just Her greatness, which I think you underestimate, but also Her vulnerability, which I don’t think you see at all.”

  “Her greatness. Her vulnerability.” Thu-Kimnibol frowned. “Of Her greatness I’ve heard far too much. But Her vulnerability? What are you talking about?”

  “Come with me, if you want to know.”

  Hresh’s serenity was an unassailable armor. Thu-Kimnibol shot a glance at Nialli Apuilana as though begging for help.

  Hresh saw now the healing wounds here and there beneath his brother’s thick brick-hued fur, at least half a dozen of them. He wondered what prodigies of her
oism Thu-Kimnibol had managed in battle, how many scores of hjjks he had already sent to their deaths.

  Nialli Apuilana said, “What risk is there in this, father?”

  “Only the risk that we’ll fall under Her spell, which as you know is potent. But I think we can defeat it. I know we can. I’ve been able to escape from her grasp once already.”

  “Are you saying that you’ve already made the voyage to the Nest yourself?” Thu-Kimnibol asked.

  “To a minor Nest, yes. I was there for weeks. And went from there to the great one with the help of the Barak Dayir. The Queen of Queens has a Wonderstone also, one that once belonged to the Bengs. It’s inside her body. I spoke with her, Wonderstone to Wonderstone. After which, the hjjks of the Nest where I was living sent me on my way. And guided my xlendi, I think, until I could be found by one of your men.”

  “Then all this is a trap,” said Thu-Kimnibol.

  “All of it is part of Dawinno’s plan,” Hresh replied.

  Thu-Kimnibol fell silent. Hresh watched him patiently. He felt that he had infinite patience, now. He had never known such tranquility of spirit before. Nothing could shift him from his path.

  He had noticed immediately the signs all over the tent that his brother and Nialli Apuilana were living together in intimacy. That had jolted him, but only for a fraction of an instant. Thu-Kimnibol and Nialli Apuilana each had greatness in them. That they should finally have come together in this troubled time seemed appropriate. Yes, even inevitable. Let them be.

  Learning of Vengiboneeza’s destruction had been a shock too, of a different sort. Vengiboneeza had been a place of wonder and majesty since time’s early days. For it to be gone, that treasury of ancient miracles where he had spent his youth, ruined more completely now by this war than it had ever been by the Long Winter, was painful news.

  But then he had put his regret aside. Nothing was eternal except Eternity itself. To mourn the loss of Vengiboneeza was to deny Dawinno. The gods provide, the gods take away. The flux of change is the only constant. The Transformer sweeps everything away in its time, and replaces it with something else. There had been cities greater than Vengiboneeza upon this Earth, Hresh knew, of which not a scrap remained, not even their names.