At Winter's End

  There was nothing unusual about that. The weather had mostly been stormy, eternally gray and windy, with much rain and sometimes sleet, and one or another of them had had a bout of seasickness practically every day. But Nortekku took exception to the phrasing.

  “My sister, you mean.”

  “Your sister, yes.” There was mockery in the man’s unfriendly blue eyes. “Up there, sick, your sister, on deck.” He winked suggestively. The other began to laugh.

  Well, let them laugh, Nortekku thought. Having to pass himself off as Thalarne’s brother hadn’t been his idea.

  He went up on deck. She was finished being sick, by then, but she looked dreadful. Nortekku laid his hand on her wrist and lightly rubbed the thick fur up and down by way of comfort, and she managed a faint, unconvincing smile.

  “Bad?” he asked.

  “Worse than seeing five sea-monsters crawling up on deck. But it’s over now.”

  Just then the sea bucked beneath them, though, and the ship seemed to skip and hop above it, and from Thalarne came a dry ratcheting sound, followed almost at once by a little moan. She turned away from him, huddling miserably into herself. He held her, gently stroking her shoulders, and the spasm passed without further incident. With a game little grin she said, “I wonder how much longer this voyage is supposed to last.”

  “Only another four years or so,” he told her. “Maybe three, if we remember to say our prayers every night.”

  Seasickness did not seem to afflict him. But as the days went by the restlessness that had plagued him since boyhood grew to a level that was barely tolerable. He prowled constantly from deck to deck, up, down, up, down, standing a long while in the sleety air abovedecks, and then, half-frozen, descending to their cabin, where Thalarne sat poring over some map of Great World sites and looked anything but pleased to see him, and then up again, down again to the tiny lounge in the stern, up, down.

  The time did pass, somehow. And it became evident, not many days later, that the worst of the voyage was behind them. Each day winter yielded a little more to spring, and the path of the ship had been trending all the while toward the southeast, so that now the skies were a clear blue the whole day long, no more rain fell, and the air was taking on some warmth. Birds were common sights overhead. Siglondan, who appeared to know something about natural history, said that they were shore-birds, coming out from the eastern continent just ahead of them.

  She and Kanibond Graysz, with whom Thalarne and Nortekku took their meals every day, were speaking more openly now about the approaching fulfillment of the goals of the expedition. They seemed more slippery than ever, still cagy about what was actually supposed to be achieved. But what was becoming clear was that they had been bought, that their chief interest lay not in what could be learned about this handful of Sea-Lords that had so surprisingly endured beyond their supposed time of extinction, but in how much profit they could turn by prying loose rare artifacts for which the sponsors of the venture would pay extremely well. From something careless that Kanibond Graysz had let slip, Nortekku concluded that whatever collectible objects they brought back with them would be distributed among Til-Menimat and Hamiruld and the other backers according to some prearranged system, and the two Bornigrayan archaeologists would be given bonuses according to the quantity and quality of what they brought back for them.

  A grimy business, Nortekku thought. And he knew what Thalarne thought of it as well. But she seemed able to balance her qualms against the advantage of being able to gain access to these improbable survivors from antiquity. He only hoped that she would emerge from the project with her own scientific reputation still untarnished.

  The ship moved on, into warmer and warmer weather. Then there was a darkness on the horizon, which rapidly resolved itself into the skyline of a city.

  “That’s Sempinore there,” Siglondan said. They had completed their crossing of the ocean; they were staring out at another continent, at a totally new world.

  The city of Sempinore occupied a long looping crescent around a curving bay of sparkling blue water under a warm, inviting sun. He was unable to see either its beginning or its end. Its population, he thought, must be enormous. He felt awed and overwhelmed.

  A grand boulevard ran along the shore parallel to the wharves, with swarms of wheeled vehicles moving swiftly up and down it, and porters guiding patient-looking red-furred beasts of burden that moved heedlessly among them. The air was sweet and fragrant, laden with the aroma of strange spices. There was noise everywhere, the shouts of the porters, the rhythmic chants of peddlers pushing heavily laden carts, the dissonant clash of unfamiliar music. Nortekku counted six wide, straight avenues radiating from the shoreline boulevard into different parts of the city: the main arteries, it would seem.

  It was good to eat fresh tender meat that night, to drink sweet young wine again, and cool water from a nearby mountain spring, to fill one’s mouth with the flavors of fruits and vegetables that hadn’t spent weeks stored in casks. Good, also, to be at rest in a place solidly rooted in the ground, that didn’t sway or pitch or heave on the bosom of the sea. At the hotel Nortekku and Thalarne were given separate rooms, as befitted brother and sister; but he came to her after dinner and they slept that night side by side, in an actual bed, in one another’s arms. He left before dawn and returned to his own room, taking care not to be seen, though he doubted that any of their fellow travelers believed any longer that their relationship was what they had claimed it to be.

  During the idle week they spent in Sempinore Nortekku devoted much time to a study of the city’s architecture. The place had a profoundly alien look, and though he knew he should have expected that, it was a source of constant amazement for him.

  Its buildings—whitewashed clusters of high domes, spidery aerial bridges high above the ground linking spiky-tipped towers, massive dark octagonal stone structures surrounded by the delicate traceries of pink fretwork walls—had a kind of consistency of style from one block to the next, but it was an alien consistency, a style that reminded him curiously of the imaginary Vengiboneeza that he had seen once in his dreams. They had been designed and built by people whose experiences had been nothing like those of his own people, whose history was in every way different, other than that they too had waited out the Long Winter in cocoons.

  Those who dwelled here were folk who knew not Hresh, nor Koshmar nor Torlyri nor Thu-Kimnibol, nor any of the great Bengs, and they spoke a different language, a sibilant, whispering thing of which Nortekku couldn’t comprehend a single word, and when they had reached the city-building stage of civilization they had built a city that reflected all those differences. There are only certain ways one can handle the enclosing of space, Nortekku knew—that was what architecture was primarily about, he believed, the enclosing of space. And there are only certain things one can do with light, with form, with proportion. And yet, given all that, many sorts of variants were possible within those basics: variant materials, variant strategies of structural support, and variant kinds of ornament, of cornices, windows, facades, pediments, colonnades. Wherever he looked here, he saw variants from what he considered the norm. Everything, everything, was different here. Yissou was different from Dawinno, yes, and Bornigrayal different from both of those in other ways, but this place was—does the phrase make sense, he wondered?—more different still. He felt a kind of vertigo of the soul, walking among its infinity of strange buildings. This too was like a dream, the oddest kind of dream, in which one could not only see but also touch, and feel.

  Thalarne sometimes accompanied him on these walks, sometimes not. When she was with him he tried to make clear the impact that this place was having on him. Sempinore had produced an odd reversal in their relationship: when the center of their discourse had been the world’s ancient past, she was the teacher, he the novice, but now he was leading the way, endlessly analyzing and explaining the unfamiliar and sometimes almost unbelievable structural assumptions by which the buildings of Sempinore ha
d been put together, and she followed his discourses as well as she could.

  At last the reprovisioning job was complete and the time had come for the next stage of their journey.

  Two Hjjks had come on board now. Nortekku glumly watched them arrive: like all their kind they were towering figures, taller than any man, with long gleaming bodies marked horizontally with bands of yellow and black, fearsome-looking beaks, narrow tapering heads topped by great feathery antennae, glittering blue-black eyes, deep constrictions marking the boundaries between head and thorax, thorax and abdomen. They were, he supposed, their guides, the two who had discovered the Sea-Lord colony across the Inland Sea. Apparently they were going to sleep on the main deck. They laid out a little Hjjk domain for themselves there, nailing talismans of plaited grass to the planks, setting up small wooden shrines that contained some smooth egg-shaped white stones, installing a cupboard that held a stock of the dried fruit and sun-parched meat that was their food.

  He knew he would never understand Hjjks, nor come to have any liking for them. It was, he supposed, some kind of inherent racial animosity, something that had run through him from birth, inbred in blood and bone. To him they were unsightly, ominous things, dry and cold of soul, alien, remote, dangerous. Some of that feeling was a legacy of the things he had been taught in school about the early wars between People and Hjjks for territory in the first years of the New Springtime, but that was just history now. The Hjjks posed no sort of menace at all. The old system of dominance by a central Queen operating out of a central Nest had been shattered by a civil war; the Queen of Queens had been put to death by her own military caste, in a punitive action typical of the icy Hjjk mentality, after a rebellion by the lesser Queens.

  Now, Nortekku knew, each Nest was independent and the People’s old sense of the Hjjks as an implacable monolithic entity had been replaced by an awareness that, divided as they were, they could no longer be any sort of threat. The two species lived together, not exactly in friendship—never that—but with a sort of cool mutual toleration. There was commerce now, not warfare, between the two species. Hjjks moved freely through the cities of the People and had taken up residence in certain sectors of them. It was too warm and humid for them in Dawinno, but you saw them wherever you went in Yissou, and there had been many of them in Bornigrayal, too. Even so, Nortekku still felt a reflexive stiffening of his spine whenever he was near one; and now there would be two of them as his companions for the rest of the voyage.

  Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan could be seen up on deck with them most of the day, huddling in close conversations conducted in low, conspiratorial tones, the two Bornigrayans muttering in their rapid-fire Bornigrayan way and the Hjjks answering in their own harsh, chittering manner. Nortekku saw much sketching of diagrams, and handing of them back and forth, and a good deal of gesturing and pointing. There was something oddly secretive, almost unsavory, about these discussions that Nortekku found very puzzling. They made no attempt to draw their fellow archaeologist Thalarne into them, let alone Nortekku. He never even learned the names of the two Hjjks, if indeed—he had never been sure on that point—Hjjks had individual names. Well, he thought, whatever the Hjjks and the Bornigrayans had to say to each other was no concern of his. He was here to see the Sea-Lords; that, and to be with Thalarne.

  The second voyage was wholly different from the first one. The Inland Sea was the most placid body of water imaginable, waveless, tideless, a shimmering blue pathway offering no challenges of any sort. The whole day long the sun filled the sky like a beacon, bright, huge, astonishingly warm, drawing them on to the south.

  From the side of the deck Nortekku could see the creatures of the depths in all their abundance, great schools of silvery fish swarming almost at the surface, occasional solitary giants hanging motionless nearby like underwater balloons and feeding, it seemed, on the great wads of seaweed that lay in clumps all about, and swift predators with the fins along their backs raised up into view like swords cutting the air. Once a mountainous turtle paddled close beside the ship, extended its long neck to stare at him in a glassy, unintelligent way, and slowly closed one eye in a grotesque parody of a wink. Such a profusion of maritime life, Nortekku realized, could not have developed just in the relatively few years since the thawing of the world. Whatever havoc the Long Winter had worked among the citizens of the Great World, it must not have brought complete devastation to these denizens of this warm sea.

  In just a few days the shore came into view ahead of them, a long low line of sand and trees. The air was warm and soft. It was easy to believe that in this blessed place the Long Winter had never come, or, if it had, that it had brushed the land with only the gentlest of touches. They coasted westward past white beaches lined with trees of a kind Nortekku had never seen before, thick stubby brown trunks jutting upward from the sand to culminate in a single amazing explosion of long, jagged green leaves at the summit, like a crown of feathers. Farther back he saw wild tangles of vines all snarled together, blooming so profusely that they formed great blurts of color, a solid mass of magenta here, a burst of brilliant orange there, a huge spread of scarlet just beyond.

  Late that afternoon they pulled into a protected cove where steamy mist was hovering above the water. Bubbles were visible along the western curve of the little bay, suggesting that a stream of heated water must be rising here from some volcanic furnace below the sea.

  Large brown animals, perhaps as many as ten of them, were splashing about in the surf, diving, surfacing, beating the water with their flipperlike limbs, uttering loud trumpeting snorts. Nortekku assumed at first, carelessly, unthinkingly, that they were nothing more than seagoing mammals—akin, perhaps, to the good-natured barking bewhiskered beasts that often could be seen frolicking off the coast near Dawinno. But then, as the ship’s dinghy carried him closer to the shore, he saw the luminous glow of what had to be intelligence in their sea-green eyes, and realized with a quick hard jolt of understanding and something not far from terror what these beings actually were.

  It was as if a doorway in time had rolled suddenly open and a segment of the ancient world had come jutting through.

  Of course the two Hjjks who stood distressingly close by him in the dinghy were survivors of the Great World themselves, but one took the survival of the Hjjks for granted: they had never gone away, they had been part of the landscape from the first moment when the People began coming forth from their cocoons. Sea-Lords, though, were a dead race, extinct, the next thing to legendary. Yet here they were, seven, eight, ten of them close at hand in the steamy pinkish water of this cove, and more appearing now on shore, emerging from the trees that lined the beach and clumsily moving down toward the edge of the water on their flipperlike hind legs.

  They displayed no sign of fear. The ones that had been in the water ceased to splash and snort, and now had gathered in a silent group to watch the dinghy’s approach, but they seemed quite calm. So too did the ones on shore, collecting now in five or six groups just at the fringe of the sea. They were handsome animals, Nortekku thought, telling himself instantly that he must not call them animals, must never think of them that way. Their kind had been among the rulers of the world when his own ancestors had been apes chattering in the trees.

  There might have been sixty of them all told, though others, possibly, might be lingering on the far side of the line of shallow dunes that rose just behind the trees, or out of sight at sea. They were gracefully tapering creatures, sturdily built, bigger and obviously stronger than men, with powerful, robust bodies that had a dense layer of sleek brown fur plastered close to their skin. Both their upper and lower sets of limbs were flipperlike, though Nortekku saw that their hands had capable-looking fingers with opposable thumbs. Their heads too were tapered, long and narrow, but with high-domed foreheads that indicated the force and capacity of the minds housed within.

  “Such sadness,” Thalarne said softly. “Do you see it, Nortekku? That look in their eyes—that misery, that pai
n—”

  Yes. It was impossible not to perceive it, even from a distance: a look of the deepest sorrow, almost of grief. Those big glossy eyes, so close in color to her own, seemed without exception disconsolate, desolate, shrouded in lamentation. There was a touch of anger in those eyes, too, he thought, a hot blast of fury plainly visible behind that sadness. He asked himself whether he had any right to project emotion of any sort on these beings of another species, whose true feelings probably could not be read with any accuracy. And then he looked again, and it was the same as before: sorrow, grief, heartbreak, rage. They were strong, agile, handsome, graceful beings: they should have been happy creatures on this happiest of coasts. But that did not appear to be the case.

  The dinghy came to rest in the shallows. “Is there a village here?” Thalarne asked Siglondan, as they scrambled ashore.

  “We didn’t find one last time, if by a village you mean permanent structures. They live mostly in the water, though they come up on shore for some part of every day and settle down for naps under the trees.”

  “Then they have no tools, either? Nothing that we’d call a culture?”

  “Not any more. But they have language. They have a knowledge of their own race’s history. We think that they may keep some shrines containing objects of Great World provenance somewhere not very far inland. They’ve pretty much reverted to a natural existence, but there’s no doubt that they’re genuine Sea-Lords.” Pretentiously Siglondan added, “It’s almost impossible for one to comprehend the full awesomeness of the discovery.”

  “Awesome, yes,” Thalarne said. “And sad. So very sad. These pitiful creatures.”

  The Bornigrayan woman gave her an odd look. “Pitiful, did you say?” But Thalarne had already begun to wander off. Nortekku moved along after her. He glanced down toward the group of Sea-Lords by the shore; then, hastily, he glanced away. The thought of transgressing on the privacy of these beings whom he had come such a great distance to behold made him ill at ease. That expression of deep-seated melancholy mingled with rage that he imagined he saw in those huge glossy green eyes, whether it was really there or not, was something that suddenly he could not bear to see.