At Winter's End

  Would he survive the voyage, he asked himself? Did it matter?

  He had no assurance that he would be able find Thalarne at all when he got there, or if he did, that she would welcome his having pursued her across all this great distance. It might well be that this whole enterprise would prove destructive to the very thing he hoped to accomplish. Maybe, he thought, she had gone off like this to sort out her feelings about him, and his going after her would serve only to convince her that he was still an adolescent in some ways, an interesting choice for a brief fling but too troublesome to remain involved with for very long.

  From beneath him rose a terrifying rumble. From each side of the airwagon came a low throbbing sound that rapidly expanded into a deafening roar.

  Without even pausing to consider the incongruity of what he was doing Nortekku, who had never had a moment of religious feeling in his life, murmured a quick spontaneous prayer to all the ancient tribal gods. He called upon Yissou the Protector to look after him, and then asked Mueri the Comforter to ease his journey, and then, for good measure, begged the surveillance of Friit the Healer and Emakkis the Provider as well, and even Dawinno himself, the deity of destruction and transformation.

  The airwagon began to move forward. And suddenly, astonishingly, unbelievably, it was aloft.

  Nortekku had no clear sense of the point at which the wagon made the transition from ground to sky. But there could be no doubt that it had made the transition, for he was looking down at treetops and the metal-roofed sheds of Yissou Sky Harbor, and then, as the wagon banked and wheeled eastward, he saw Yissou City far below, a clenched fist of a place, an ugly huddled maze of tangled streets held in a constricting grasp by the formidable medieval wall that encircled them, with a chaotic sprawl of latterday suburbs spreading outward from it. From this height it was possible clearly to make out the perfectly circular outline of the city: the first settlers had built the place inside the rim of one of the giant craters that had been formed when the death-stars struck the Earth.

  Yissou diminished quickly and was lost to sight somewhere behind them.

  In its jarring, lurching way the airwagon sped on through the sky. Red sparks streamed by the windows like frantic scarlet insects. The steady metallic screaming of the engines, disconcerting at first, came to seem familiar and almost welcome. Below, all was a green wilderness, with great blankets of snow on the highest elevations. From time to time Nortekku saw a great circular scar, a brown-walled cicatrice in the midst of the greenness: one of the innumerable pockmarks left on the face of the Earth by the falling death-stars.

  As he looked down he was struck by an inrushing awareness of the vastness of the world, and of its antiquity, and of the succession of races that had come and gone upon this planet. Down below there was nothing at all, now, but trees and stones. But once all that wilderness had been inhabited, he knew, by the myriad denizens of the long-lost Great World civilization, the unthinkably rich and glorious era of the Six Peoples whom he had studied in school long ago and then again lately in the first flush of his affair with Thalarne: the Hjjks, the Sea-Lords, the Vegetals, the reptilian race known as the Sapphire-Eyes people, the Mechanicals, and the most enigmatic ones of all, the Dream-Dreamers, who might perhaps have been the last vestiges of the humans who once had ruled this world in a previous epoch.

  For some unknowable length of time—half a million years, a million?—the huge cities of the Great World, full of quivering vitality, astounding in their opulence and size, their myriad windows sparkling in the sun, had covered the landscape below. They had come, they had flourished, they had disappeared, he thought. And it will be the same with us, as it was for others who had lived before them. More strongly than ever before he understood that we are all just visitors here. Though our time of stay may last for millions of years, we are merely temporary residents all the same.

  As Nortekku passed high above that landscape he sought with second sight to pry open the eons and thrust his mind into that ancient world, and the worlds that had lived before it, but without success. Nothing remained of it now except some vague traceries of foundation lines and a few ruined structures. Now and again he thought he could make out the spidery outlines of one of those lost ancient cities below, but perhaps that was only an illusion. Those cities were long gone, right down to their roots. The death-stars had come, dropping in swarms from the sky to stir up dark clouds of debris that blotted out the sun and brought on a winter seven hundred thousand years long, and all the Great World peoples had perished, all but the Hjjks, who manifestly could survive anything, even the end of the world.

  There were half a dozen Hjjks aboard this very wagon. Nortekku saw their bristling antennae rising from seats not very far in front of his. He wondered what they were thinking and feeling as they looked down toward the uninhabited plains where their ancestors had dwelled in the Great World’s time of majesty. Nostalgia for that vanished epoch? Pride at its accomplishments? Grief over its destruction? Nothing at all, perhaps. Who could say what sort of emotions a Hjjk might have? They kept their feelings to themselves, if they had any.

  But his own feelings were in turmoil again. Contemplating the antiquity of the world had stirred fresh yearnings for Thalarne in him. He wanted to sweep into his arms all those millions of lost years whose faint traces he imagined he could see down there, all that richness of a vanished world, as though to embrace the whole of Earth’s past, because by embracing that incomprehensible past he was embracing Thalarne, whose goal it was to comprehend it. And for him Thalarne was the future.

  Bornigrayal would tell the tale.

  He was surprised at how swiftly the day grew darker as they continued eastward. It was winter, of course, and days were short; but the airwagon had taken off in the morning, and already the sky had the dull cast of afternoon, though they had been aloft only a couple of hours. Such a foreshortening of the day perplexed him for a time. But then Nortekku realized that the sun, rising out of the east, was in motion just as they were, already past him and rushing off beyond the cities of the west into the Western Ocean even as they went roaring on in the opposite direction toward the gathering night. The hour must be later the farther east one went; in some places out there, night had already fallen. In Bornigrayal, Thalarne might even now be sitting down to her evening meal, while for him it was not much past midday. Strange, he thought, that it should be early afternoon here, and night already there. He had never considered such matters before.

  A meal was served; and then the wagon began to descend. Landing at Bornigrayal so soon? Fine. He had already had more than enough of this trip. But no, no, not Bornigrayal: it was a place called Kundalimon, they told him, a town he had never heard of, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Three passengers disembarked; seven new passengers came on board, five People and two Hjjks. The airwagon, he realized, must not have the capacity to fly all the way across the continent in a single burst, and, in any case, the inhabitants of places like Kundalimon must sometimes need to travel also. Within fifteen minutes the wagon was aloft again.

  The hours went past. The sky became ashen with dusk and then grew entirely dark. Sometimes isolated villages came into view below, little sprinklings of lights, thin white rivulets of smoke curling upward. Otherwise he could no longer see anything down there. For all he knew they had already by this time passed above the Hallimalla, the great southward-flowing river that cut the continent in half. They might have gone right over the ancestral cocoon, even. But all was blackness below. Nortekku fell into a doze, and dreamed that he was wandering through a fabulous city, a place of gigantic shining towers and gleaming bridges that looped through the air without apparent means of support. In his dream he understood it to be Vengiboneeza, the one city of the Great World that had survived the Long Winter almost intact, and in which the Koshmar tribe of People, Thalarne’s ancestors, had dwelled for a few years after the Time of Going Forth. Dreaming about Vengiboneeza was nothing new for Nortekku; every architect speculated abo
ut Vengiboneeza, trying to reconstruct in his imagination how it must have looked. The descriptions left of it by those who had seen it while it still existed led one to think that its buildings were unparalleled for beauty and brilliance of design, crystalline cloud-piercing towers, arrayed on grand boulevards. But nothing remained of the place now. The Hjjks had occupied it after the People had moved on south to found Yissou and Dawinno, two centuries back, and in the war that soon followed between the Hjjks and the People the great Koshmar warrior Thu-Kimnibol had pounded those priceless ruins into oblivion, using potent Great World weapons that his brother, the famed wise man Hresh, had obtained for him by excavating ancient sites. Those two, Thu-Kimnibol and Hresh, were directly ancestral to Thalarne, Nortekku knew. He wondered whether her passion for archaeology was in some way a means of atoning for the destruction of great Vengiboneeza that her famous ancestors had brought about.

  The airwagon made another stop, and another. Another meal was served. Nortekku slept again, and when he awakened the morning sunlight was in the sky and the wagon was landing once more.

  Another brief stop, he thought. We will go on and on, for days, for weeks, for months, until this machine finally brings us to Bornigrayal. If ever it does.

  But no: this place was Bornigrayal, even now, here, actually, truly, journey’s end. Rumpled and blinking, he joined the line of passengers leaving the wagon, descended the staircase that took him to the runway, shaded his eyes against the sudden flinty brightness of the day. This was the northernmost of the Five Cities of the Eastern Coast, and it was cold here, very cold, colder even than in Yissou. The Bornigrayal sky-harbor was situated practically at the shore of what must surely be the Eastern Ocean. A ferocious brutal wind, knife-sharp, came roaring in off the dull gray surface of that immeasurable body of water. The chill was like a bit of the Long Winter, long after its time, obstinately lingering here in these high latitudes. That wind cut right through Nortekku’s dense covering of fur and struck at the skin beneath, so that he began to shiver. None of the other debarking passengers seemed to be affected by the cold, not just the Hjjks, who were impervious to cold, but the various People too. Yissouans, naturally, were accustomed to hard winters, and so also must be the passengers who had boarded in mid-flight. But Nortekku had grown up in golden Dawinno of the balmy breezes, where true winter never came, where the only distinction between one season and another was that during the winter months the days were shorter and there was occasionally a little rain. For love of Thalarne he had subjected himself to a winter in Yissou, and now, it seemed, still for love of Thalarne, he was going to have to endure even worse weather than that.

  Carriages were waiting to take the arriving passengers to the Bornigrayal proper, which could be seen against the western horizon as a distant row of white flat-topped towers glinting in the hard morning light. On the eve of his departure Nortekku had mentioned to Prince Vuldimin that the merchant Khardakhor had advised him to seek out the Dawinnan ambassador, Samnibolon, upon his arrival, and Vuldimin had at once given him a letter of introduction. The ambassador was, he said, an old friend of his. It was amazing how everybody of any importance in the two city-states of the Western Coast turned out to be an old friend of Vuldimin’s, if not an actual kinsman. But it should hardly be surprising that close ties of kinship would unite most of the highborn of both cities, since their ancestors had all come out of just two cocoons, the Koshmar one and the Beng, and Koshmars and Bengs had intermarried steadily since the union of the two tribes in the early days of the Going Forth.

  “I should warn you,” Prince Vuldimin had said, “in case you’re not already aware of it, that Prince Samnibolon is connected by marriage to the family of the Princess Silina. Quite probably he doesn’t know a thing about your unfortunate little interaction with them. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to mention it, if I were you.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” said Nortekku. “Not to him, not to anyone, not ever.”

  Prince Samnibolon was a small-framed man, gray-furred, whose office in the embassy quarter of the city was as elegantly appointed as any prince’s chamber should be, with painted scrolls on the wall and glass cases that contained the sort of small Great World artifacts that so many highborns were fond of collecting. The ambassador sat at a circular desk fashioned of strips of rare woods, raised on a gleaming bronze dais. Nortekku knew him to be a member of the House of Hresh, Dawinno’s dominant family, who held most of the highest posts in Dawinno’s government. He was reputed to be a suave and subtle man, a diplomat of diplomats. Through the Hresh connection he was related in some way to Thalarne.

  The ambassador skimmed quickly through Nortekku’s letter of introduction and said, “Building a new palace for Vuldimin, are you? He does have a taste for comfort and luxury, that man!” Then, with a knowing smile: “But if I had to live in a ghastly place like Yissou, I suppose that I would too.—You’ve been up north for quite some time, then?”

  “Most of this past year. I bring you greetings from your friend the merchant Khardakhor, who is currently in Yissou. It was at his suggestion that I came to you.”

  Samnibolon delicately raised one eyebrow in a brief show of surprise. He would know, certainly, about the bitter commercial rivalry between Khardakhor and the elder Nortekku. But he said nothing of that now, merely murmuring a word or two about hearty old rough-hewn Khardakhor and moving smoothly on to ask what it was that had brought Nortekku to Bornigrayal. To which Nortekku responded that he had come to have a small role in an archaeological project under the direction of Thalarne Koshmar of Yissou’s Institute of Scientific Study. She was currently here in Bornigrayal on a matter of family business, he said; and, since certain unexpected problems now had arisen regarding their project, he needed to locate her and apprise her of the new developments. It was a story that he had carefully rehearsed all morning and he delivered it unfalteringly.

  “Ah, Thalarne!” the ambassador said. “One of the great ornaments of the Yissouan branch of my family, so everyone says.”

  “You know her, do you?”

  “Alas, no. I haven’t had the pleasure. But I’ve heard many good things of her: said to be a most attractive woman—most! And brilliant and learned as well. As no doubt I hardly need to tell you.” Samnibolon pointed out that as a citizen of Yissou she was outside his official sphere of responsibility, and therefore she would not have had any reason to contact him since her arrival. So he could not confirm that she was actually in Bornigrayal at this very time, but if Nortekku wished him to make inquiries about her at the Yissouan Embassy, he definitely would. Nortekku did so wish. He gave the ambassador the address of the hostelry where he had found lodgings, and, after a few pleasant minutes of exchanging gossip about certain high figures of Dawinno who were known to them both—Nortekku noticed that throughout the interview Samnibolon had made no mention of Nortekku the elder; he must be aware of their estrangement—he took his leave.

  Late the next day a courier from the Embassy came to him bearing the address of the place where Thalarne was living.

  It was, Nortekku learned, halfway across the city from his own place. Which meant a considerable distance, for Bornigrayal had turned out to be a diffuse, far-flung city, endlessly proliferating itself over a succession of islands linked by bridges as it sloped down toward the ocean. Because of the cold, he had not cared to explore the city at all thus far—indeed he failed to understand why anyone had been mad enough to found a city in such a chilly site—but he saw now, as a hired carriage took him on what proved to be an hour-long journey to Thalarne’s lodgings, that considerable ingenuity and skill had been expended on the layout and construction of this place, and in fact it was a city of some grandeur, in every way the equal of grand Dawinno itself. One might regard all those tall flat-topped white buildings as stark and monotonous; but, just as readily, one might find great power in them, much rugged strength.

  According to the message from Samnibolon, Thalarne had found rooms for herself in the fa
culty lodge of Bornigrayal University. Nortekku, apprehensive over the meeting, had not sent word ahead to Thalarne that he was coming to see her. He realized that he half-hoped she would be somewhere else when he arrived.

  The University was dramatically situated on a high craggy outcropping rising above the city’s central island. His driver dropped him off in the wrong place, and Nortekku needed to do much dreary trudging about from building to building before he located the right one.

  That same apprehension, that same uneasiness about coming face to face with her, still gripped him as he knocked at her door. How would she react to his showing up like this on her doorstep? With amazement, no doubt, that he had followed her all the way across the continent. But then what? Displeasure, resentment, irritation, anger?

  He heard footsteps. The door opened. For a moment, standing there facing her, Nortekku had to fight back the temptation to turn and flee. But then he saw that she was smiling. Her eyes were warm and bright with surprise and pleasure.

  “So you got here at last!” she cried. “Oh, Nortekku, what could have taken you so long?”

  And drew him quickly across the threshold, and enfolded him in her arms, and touched her sensing-organ to his in a greeting of unqualified delight.

  He was too befuddled to be able to speak at all. Fearing the worst, he had never dared to expect anything like this. For a long while they embraced in silence; then, as she released him, he stepped back and looked at her in wonder, and said, finally, “What—took—me—so—long? Thalarne, what can you possibly mean? I had to find out where you had gone, first. And then make arrangements to get here. And then—you know how long the trip takes—then I had to track you down.—You aren’t upset that I came, then?”