He looked at her imploringly. She smiled and raised her sensing-organ, and brought it into the most grazing of contacts with his.
“No,” he said at once, quickly whipping his sensing-organ beyond her reach. “Not—twine. No. Please—no.”
“No?”
“Frightens. Still. It is too much, the twining.” He shook his head. A deep quiver ran through him. He seemed to brood. But then his face grew sunny again. “You and I—you and I—oh, come close! Will you come close?”
“What do you want?” she asked, baffled.
He made an inarticulate sound, a hjjk-noise, not even a word: simply a noise, like that of a rusty gate resisting the pressure of a hand. A rush of emotions, nearly all of them unreadable, fluttered across his features in wild succession. Nialli Apuilana imagined that she saw sheer terror there, and embarrassment, and something that might have been Nest-love, and a kind of desperate yearning, and also something else, far more familiar, that she had seen only a little while before in the dull lust-ridden Beng-red eyes of Eluthayn Bangkea.
His hands went to her shoulders, her forearms, her breasts. He stroked her with frantic eagerness and pressed himself against her. His mating-rod was stiff.
Mueri and Dawinno and Yissou! she thought, in amazement and dismay. It’s coupling that he wants!
No question of it. His breath was hot against her cheek. He was muttering to her, still inarticulately, in a muzzy mixture of hjjk-clicks and People-grunts. He seemed dazed, lost in a swelter of desire.
It was almost funny. But it was alarming, too. Nialli Apuilana had never coupled with anyone. She was as frightened of coupling as Kundalimon seemed to be of twining. To her it had always meant the breaching of a mysterious barrier that she dared not surrender.
Others, she knew, did it at the snap of a finger, some of them beginning when they were no older than nine or ten. They casually flung their bodies together for a quick sweaty joining and thought nothing of it. But Nialli Apuilana had held herself fastidiously aloof from all that when she was younger, and now that she was well on her way into womanhood she had begun to think that she had held back too long, that she had by her very denial raised coupling to an act of such significance that she would need the most overwhelming imaginable reason ever to do it at all. That reason had never presented itself: certainly she hadn’t seen it in the sniggering eye-rollings of an Eluthayn Bangkea, nor the subtler hungry stares of a Husathirn Mueri.
But now—now—
Kundalimon was all over her, pawing, snorting, just the way she had always thought men did. He could barely control himself. And yet she felt no revulsion, only compassion. Penned up here alone day after day in this little single-windowed cell, he must have been overwhelmed by his solitude, his separation from the Nest, until the anguish had reached flood level in his spirit, and now it was flowing over. Nialli Apuilana saw no way of holding him back.
“Wait,” she said. “Please.”
“I—want—”
“But—please, Kundalimon, please—” He paused, just a moment, as if he really understood what she was trying to say. Or perhaps he simply felt the fearful agitation of her unwilling body. But he was still eager to proceed. How to stop him? In sudden wild inspiration she said, “I must not. Coupling is forbidden to me.” And in the hjjk language she told him, “I have yet to undergo Queen-touch.”
There was a chance, just a chance, he might yield to that argument. In the Nest, there was no mating until the Queen had brought you to maturity and fertility, in a rite the nature of which Nialli Apuilana didn’t know, but which marked the transition into adulthood for every hjjk.
Kundalimon, in the full grip of his own undeniable and no longer denied fleshhood, might not understand why a woman of the flesh-folk would not want to give herself up gladly to the powerful craving that now was sweeping through him. Shouldn’t she feel the same desires that he did, since she too was of the flesh? Well, yes: but he wasn’t able to comprehend her fears. Not even she could. But perhaps he might respond to that other argument for virginity that was unique to the Nest.
His fleshly aspect, though, was in the ascendant. No argument was going to sway him.
“I have not yet had Queen-touch either,” he said. “But we are—not in the Nest now—” He sucked his breath in deeply, and a look of mingled torment and passion blazed in his eyes. He was as virgin as she was. Of course. Who would he have coupled with, in the Nest? But now he was swept by need, flesh-need, the need inborn in everyone of his true race.
And so, she understood suddenly, was she.
Almost without realizing what was happening, she was warming to his touch. As he stroked her, sensations were arising in her that she had never known before. She felt hot, she felt itchy, she felt eager. Muscles strained and throbbed along her thighs, her belly, her chest. Her breath came in gusts.
They were the sensations of pleasure. And somehow she knew that greater pleasure still was within her grasp. All she had to do was let it sweep over her.
It came upon her unanswerably that this was the moment, this the time, this the place, this the man. The barriers fell away. She smiled and nodded. He reached for her again, uttering hjjk-sounds, and she responded to them in hjjk and in inchoate wordless People-sounds, and together they slipped down to the floor, knocking over the flask of wine, scattering the tray of food she had brought. That didn’t matter. His hands were everywhere on her. He seemed to have no real idea of what to do, only vague guesses and approximations, and she knew barely more than that herself; but somehow they found an alignment that was right, and she drew him to her and parted her thighs, and he slipped inside.
So this is what it is like, she thought.
So this is what it is, the great thing over which so much is made. The bodies fit together and they move. That’s all there is to it. But how good it feels! How simple, how right!
And then she ceased thinking at all, except to wonder vaguely whether they had fastened the door securely. Even that thought went from her mind. They rolled about and about, laughing and crying out in both their languages, clutching at each other and nipping and clawing, and gasping in the strange excitement of it, until Nialli Apuilana heard him make a hoarse heavy sound that she had never heard from him before, and a kind of convulsion swept him. And, to her astonishment, she became aware of a warm welling-up feeling within her, almost as if she would burst, and she heard a sound not unlike the one he had made erupting suddenly from her own lips a moment later. It was, she realized, the sound of joy, the sound of ecstasy, the sound of release from a self-imposed penance.
They lay in silence, in wonder, now and again looking at each other. Then he reached for her once more.
Afterward, long afterward, when they were calm again, passion giving way to quiet tenderness, Kundalimon said, “Is one other thing I want.”
“Tell me. Tell me.”
“Is too sad here, always in one room for me,” he said, as he ran the tips of his fingers fondly across the fur of Nialli Apuilana’s back. “You get them let me go outside? You get them let me walk in city like free man? You do that for me, Nialli Apuilana? You do that?”
Thu-Kimnibol had five handsome well-made wagons, each drawn by a pair of xlendis that he had selected personally for its spirit and vigor, and a quartet of equally fine animals as spares, in case any of the others fell by the wayside. He had no intention of making this journey the way a merchant would, plodding placidly along northward for month after month. No, he meant to race northward in one single furious burst, like a shooting star streaking across the heavens, halting only when he must, driving the xlendis and his companions to the limits of their capacity. He longed to hurl himself quickly into this enterprise, to come before King Salaman swiftly and sit down with him to bring into being the alliance that was so long overdue.
But for all his high resolve the trip went slowly, and he saw very quickly that there was little he could do to hasten things. Esperasagiot was his wagonmaster, a bright golde
n Beng of the pure blood who knew xlendis the way he knew the name of his own father; and Esperasagiot drove the animals to their limits, but he knew where those limits were.
“We should stop now and rest,” he said on the first evening out from Dawinno, when the sun was still high in the west.
“So early? Half an hour more,” said Thu-Kimnibol.
“The xlendis will die of it.”
“Just half an hour.”
“Prince, do you want to kill the beasts on our very first day?”
Something about the man’s tone told Thu-Kimnibol to take him seriously. “Will they actually die, if we ask them to carry us just a little way farther?”
“If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the day after. This is where we must halt. I’ll stake my helmet on it, that if we go any farther tonight, and try to do as much tomorrow, we’ll have some dead xlendis within three days. There’s delicacy behind their strength. These aren’t lumber-wagon xlendis. You’ve chosen high-spirited beasts, that carry us swiftly enough when they’re fresh. But when they’ve begun to weary—” Esperasagiot pulled off his helmet, an artful one with five plumes of a silvery metal sweeping straight back, and put it in Thu-Kimnibol’s hands. “I stake my helmet on it, Prince Thu-Kimnibol. Against your sash. Two dead ones in three days, at this pace.”
“No,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “We’ll stop when you say.”
The summer was still high, and the air was thick and heavy. Rain fell often. This was fertile land, out here north of Dawinno, with many farms. Sometimes Thu-Kimnibol saw little knots of farmers standing uneasily by the borders of their property, perhaps wondering whether he meant to raid them.
Soon the caravan was climbing into the hill country, though. Here it was much drier, and there were no more farms. The land was brown and rocky and bleak and the wind came from the north, with an edge on it. Some wild beasts, which had become scarce closer to the settled territories, roamed here. Flights of beaky wide-winged carrion-birds passed ominously overhead. At night the great scarred silver eye that was the moon, dark with the wounds the death-stars had inflicted on it, lit the bare terrain with a cold gleaming glare.
The xlendis, under Esperasagiot’s expert handling, performed well. Each day they seemed to scamper with greater zeal. They were slender gray beasts, slender-flanked and proud-necked, with aristocratic round heads and flaring nostrils, and they snorted and pranced as they went.
Thu-Kimnibol understood now why Esperasagiot had been so sparing with the xlendis in the early days of the trip. These were city-trained animals, accustomed to pulling the chariots of princes, and they had no experience of long hauls in open country. If he wore them out at the beginning, when provender was easy to come by, what reserve of energy would they have in the harder days to come? Let them grow tough gradually, and be fully inured by the time the journey’s most difficult work was upon them, that was Esperasagiot’s theory.
“I owe you an apology,” Thu-Kimnibol told the wagonmaster, when they had been on the road ten days. “Your way with the xlendis is the right one.”
Esperasagiot only grunted. He had no use for apologies, or praise, or anything else but xlendis.
They were in the great windswept coastal plateau now that lay between Dawinno and Yissou. Small twisted gray plants grew here in pale pebbly soil. There were ruined Great World cities along the route. But all that remained of them were faint white lines in the ground, the merest sketchy traces of foundations and pavements. Hresh had sent crews of University students here to dig for more, but there was nothing more to find.
Thu-Kimnibol ordered a halt at the first of these ancient sites that they came to, and looked around. He imagined a host of sapphire-eyes living in this place once, great meaty long-jawed reptilian things with big heads and heavy thighs, strolling slowly about like philosophers with their huge tails propped behind them as a sort of crutch, and the light of genius ablaze in their bulging blue eyes.
At another time he would have made a point of searching such a site as this for a trinket or two of the Great World to bring back for Naarinta. Things of that sort had always cheered her, a bit of fossil bone, some snippet of a mysterious instrument. She had decorated the halls of their villa with an odd and haunting collection of gnarled and twisted fragments of antiquity, and spent many an hour contemplating them.
He poked at this ruin now for sad memory’s sake, and, perhaps, to amuse himself. Thinking that he might stumble on some shining machine of the ancient days that could work miracles, something simply lying there for the taking in the ground that no one else had noticed. A weapon, perhaps, that might be used to obliterate the hjjks. Or even the bones of a sapphire-eyes. No one had ever found any of those. He scuffed at the chalky soil with his boot. But there was nothing.
On a whim he ordered a trench driven a short way into the ground. The diggers worked for an hour or more; but all they brought him was a clump of brown rust, which turned to loose powder in his hand. He shrugged and cast it aside.
A powerful sense of the ancientness of the world came over him, of former worlds that lay upon this one like a film, a crust.
There were echoing traces of history here, and of lost magics, and of magics that still lived, but were beyond his grasp. An abiding melancholy began to take hold of him. His mind dwelt on the Great World, on all that it had been. Why had it perished, for all its greatness? Why did great civilizations perish, even as living people did?
He was struck by the inadequacy of his knowledge: the inadequacy of his mind itself. Hresh knows these things, Thu-Kimnibol thought. We are of one flesh, or almost so, he and I, and yet he knows everything, and I—I know nothing at all. I am merely great strong Thu-Kimnibol, whom others wrongly think stupid, though I am not. Ignorant, yes. But not stupid.
I must speak with Hresh about these matters, when I return.
“I wonder why it is,” Thu-Kimnibol said to Simthala Honginda, who was his lieutenant-ambassador, “that Vengiboneeza survived over the years, or at any rate a good deal of it, enough so that we were able to walk in and take up lodgings there. But there’s nothing left of these cities except streaks of dust and rust.”
Simthala Honginda was of Koshmar blood, a wiry, quick-tempered man of high family connections, the eldest son of Boldirinthe and Staip, linked also to the line of Torlyri by way of his mating with Husathirn Mueri’s sister Catiriil. He kicked idly at the ground. “Vengiboneeza was a sapphire-eyes city. Those old crocodiles had clever machines to do all the work for them, my father tells me. And the machines stayed there, continuing to repair everything, thousands of years after the Long Winter killed off all the sapphire-eyes.”
“They must have been miraculous things, if they could last so long.”
“The sapphire-eyes had machines to repair the machines. And machines to repair the machines that repaired the machines. And so on and so on.”
“Ah. I see.” Thu-Kimnibol scratched a comic face in the dry soil with his heel. “And this place, it had no such machines, you think?”
“Maybe it was a city of the vegetals,” Simthala Honginda suggested. “They must have been very delicate, the plant-people, and froze to death and dried up and blew away like flowers. And so did their cities, I suppose, when the cold weather came. Or a human city, maybe. The humans are beyond our understanding. They mightn’t have cared to build cities as substantial as those of the sapphire-eyes. It could be that their cities were mere things of mist and film, and when the humans went away, nothing but the faint traces of their cities stayed behind. But how can I say? It was all so long ago, Thu-Kimnibol.”
“Yes. I suppose it was.” He knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt, and tossed it into the wind. “A miserable sad place. There’s nothing for us in it. We waste our time stopping here.”
He ordered the caravan onward. Staring morosely ahead across the dry tawny landscape, he felt himself sinking into an uncharacteristic mood of gloom and irritation.
Thu-Kimnibol had known since boyh
ood that there had been a world before the present one, when all the Earth had been a radiant paradise and six very different races lived together in splendor and magnificence. Great Vengiboneeza had been their capital then, the chronicles said. He had never seen it himself, but he had heard tales of it from his brother Hresh. The things that Hresh had told him of those sky-high towers of turquoise and pink and iridescent violet that had somehow survived out of distant antiquity, and all the wondrous machines that still could be found in them, had stayed vivid in Thu-Kimnibol’s mind ever since. What marvels! What astonishments! In those ancient times when the world had belonged to the slow heavy bright-eyed crocodilian sapphire-eyes folk, whose minds were ablaze with such powerful intelligence, the People, or the creatures who would one day become the People, had been no more than frisky jungle beasts. And Vengiboneeza had been the hub of the cosmos, visited by travelers from many lands and even, magically, other stars.
In those days also had lived the delicate vegetals, beings with petaled faces and hard knotty stems. And the brown-furred flipper-limbed sea-lords, who dwelled in the oceans but could come up on land and move about in clever chariots. And the dome-headed mechanicals, an artificial race, but something more than mere machines.
And hjjks, of course: they had been part of the Great World too, their lineage went back that far. And lastly the humans, the high mystery, that sparse race of arrogant regal creatures not unlike the People in form, but hairless and without sensing-organs. They had been the masters of the world before the coming of the sapphire-eyes to greatness, so it was said. And had chosen to resign all power to them.
Thu-Kimnibol found that a hard thing to understand, the resigning of power. But stranger yet than that to him was the passive way that the entire Great World had allowed itself to die when it became known that the terrible death-stars would crash down out of the sky, raising such clouds of dust and smoke that the sun’s light would be unable to reach the Earth, and all warmth would depart for a period of uncountable centuries.