Queen of Springtime (32 page)

“Thrifty, you say!” Thu-Kimnibol spat. “Demons is what they are! We should exterminate them to the last one!”

“Ah, you think so, cousin?”

“I do.”

Salaman smiled broadly. “Well, then we think alike. I thought you’d find this ride instructive. Do you see what we face here, now? Why my wall, which I know you all find so amusing, is of the size that it is? We journey just a short way from the city, and there they are, committing their abominations right in front of our eyes, and not caring in the slightest that we’re watching.”

Thu-Kimnibol glared. Something throbbed in his forehead. “We should go down there and kill them as they eat. Two of us, four of them—those aren’t bad odds.”

“There may be a hundred more behind those trees. Do you want to be their next meal, cousin?” The king tugged at Thu-Kimnibol’s arm. “Come. The sun has gone down, and we’re far from the city. We should turn back, I think.”

Thu-Kimnibol was unable to take his eyes from the grim scene in the canyon below.

“A vision comes to me as I stand here,” he said softly. “I see an army, thousands of us, riding out across this land. From your city and ours, and all the small settlements between. Traveling swiftly, striking quickly, slaughtering every hjjk we find. Going right on without stopping, right into the heart of the great Nest, right into the Queen’s own hiding-place. A lightning strike that they won’t be able to withstand, no matter how may of them there are. The Queen is their strength. Kill her and they’re helpless, and we’ll be able to wipe the rest of them out at our ease. What do you say, Salaman? Isn’t that a wondrous vision?”

The king nodded. He looked pleased. “We think alike, cousin. We think alike! Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone from Dawinno to say such things to me? I had almost given up hope.”

“You never considered launching the war on your own?”

What might have been annoyance awoke in the king’s eyes for a moment. “There aren’t enough of us, cousin. It would be certain disaster. Your city, once it took in all those Bengs—that’s where the troops I need are. But what chance is there that I’d get them? Your city’s too comfortable, Thu-Kimnibol. Dawinno’s not a city of warriors. Yourself excepted, of course.”

“Perhaps you underestimate us, cousin.”

Salaman shrugged. “The Bengs were warriors once, when they were wanderers in the plains. But even they’ve grown fat and easy down there in the warm southlands. They don’t remember how much grief the hjjks gave them long ago. Dawinno’s too far from hjjk territory for anyone down there to care about them. How often do you see hjjks roaming as close to your city as these are to ours? Once every three years? We live with their presence every day. Among you there’s some little flurry of anger when a child is stolen, and then the child comes back, or is forgotten, and everything is as it was before.”

Tightly Thu-Kimnibol said, “You make me think my mission’s pointless, cousin. You tell me to my face that I speak for a nation of cowards.”

There has been a sudden shift in mood. The two men stare at each other in a way that is very much less friendly than it was only a little while before. The rebuke hangs in the air between them for a long silent moment. Down below, the feast is still going on: harsh sounds, sounds of rending and crunching, drift upward on the cool evening air.

Salaman says, “It was weeks ago that you said you’re here to propose an alliance, that Dawinno wants to join forces with us and make war against the hjjks. Exterminate them like vermin, that’s what you said you’d like to do. Fine. Excellent. And now you put forth this pretty vision of our two armies joining and marching north. Splendid, cousin. But forgive me if I’m skeptical. I know what people are like in Dawinno. Alliance or no alliance, how can I be sure that your people will actually come up here and fight? What I want is a guarantee that you can deliver the army of Dawinno to me. Can you give me that guarantee, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“I think I can.”

“Think-you-can isn’t good enough. Take another look down there, cousin. See them gnawing and grinding their comrade’s flesh. Can you make your people see what you see now? Those are hjjks, just a few hours’ ride from my city. Every year there are more of them. Every year they get a little closer.” Salaman laughs bitterly. “What does it matter to the people of Dawinno that the hjjks are camped on our doorstep, eh? It’s the flesh of
our
sons and daughters, not theirs, that they’ll be feeding on one of these days, eh, cousin? Do they realize, down south, that when the hjjks are through here, they’ll go on to pounce on Dawinno? Their appetites can’t be checked. They’ll go south, sure as anything. If not right away, then twenty, thirty, fifty years from now. Are your people capable of looking that far ahead?”

“Some of us are. Which is why I’m here.”

“Yes. This famous alliance. But when I ask you if Dawinno will really fight, you give me no answer.”

Salaman’s eyes are bright with fierce energy, now. They drill remorselessly into Thu-Kimnibol’s. Thu-Kimnibol’s head is beginning to ache. Diplomatic lies are on the tip of his tongue, but he forces them back. This is the moment for utter honesty. That too can sometimes be a useful tool.

Bluntly he says, “You must have good spies in Dawinno, cousin.”

“They do a decent job. How strong is your peace faction, will you tell me?”

“Not strong enough to get anywhere.”

“So you actually think your people will go to war against the hjjks when the time comes?”

“I do.”

“What if you overestimate them?”

“What if you underestimate them?” Thu-Kimnibol asks. He stares down at the king from his great height atop his xlendi. “They’ll fight. I give you my own guarantee on that, cousin. One way or another, I’ll bring you an army.” He points with a jabbing finger into the canyon. “I’ll find a way of making them see what I see now. I’ll wake them up and turn them into fighters. You have my pledge on that.”

A disheartening look of continuing skepticism flickers across Salaman’s face. But almost immediately other things seem to be mixed into it: eagerness, hope, a willingness to believe. Then the whole mixture vanishes and the king’s expression once more becomes guarded, stony, gruff.

“This needs further discussion,” he says. “Not here. Not now. Come. Or we’ll be riding back in the dark.”

Darkness was indeed upon them by the time they reached the city. Torches blazed atop the wall, and when Salaman’s son Chham rode out from the eastern gate to greet them the look of anxiety on his face was unmistakable.

The king laughed it away. “I took our cousin out toward Vengiboneeza, so that he could smell the breeze that blows from that direction. But we were never in danger.”

“The Protector be thanked,” Chham exclaimed.

Then, turning to Thu-Kimnibol: “There’s a messenger here from your city, lord prince. He says he’s been riding day and night, and it must be true, for the xlendi he arrived on was so worn out it looked more dead than alive.”

Thu-Kimnibol frowned. “Where is he now?”

Chham nodded toward the gate. “Waiting in your chamber, lord prince.”

The messenger was a Beng, one of the guardsmen of the justiciary, a younger brother of the guard-captain Curabayn Bangkea. Thu-Kimnibol recalled having seen him on duty at the Basilica now and then. Eluthayn was his name, and he looked ragged and worn indeed, a thin shadow of himself, close to the point of breaking down from fatigue. It was all he could do to stammer out his message. Which was a startling one indeed.

Salaman came to him a little while afterward.

“You look troubled, cousin. The news must be bad.”

“Suddenly there seems to be an epidemic of murder in my city.”

“Murder?”

“During our holy festival, no less. Two killings. One was the captain of our city guard, the older brother of this messenger. The other was the boy the hjjks sent to us carrying the terms of the treaty they were offering.”

“The hjjk envoy? Who’d kill him? What for?”

“Who can say?” Thu-Kimnibol shook his head. “The boy was harmless, or so it seemed to me. The other one—well, he was a fool, but if simply being a fool is reason to be murdered, the streets would run red with blood. There’s no sense to any of this.” He frowned and went to the window, and stared off into the shadowy courtyard for a time. Then he turned toward Salaman. “We may have to break off our negotiations.”

“You’ve been recalled, have you?”

“The messenger said nothing about that. But with things like this going on there—”

“Things like what? A couple of murders?” Salaman chuckled. “An epidemic, you call that?”

“You may have five killings here every day, cousin. But we aren’t used to such things.”

“Nor are we. But two killings hardly seems—”

“The guard-captain. The envoy. A messenger racing all this way to tell me. Why is that? Does Taniane think the hjjks will retaliate? Maybe that’s it—maybe they think there might be trouble, maybe even a hjjk raid on Dawinno—”

“We killed the envoy that was sent to us, cousin, and we never heard a thing about it. You people are too excitable, that’s the problem.” Salaman stretched a hand toward Thu-Kimnibol. “If you haven’t been officially recalled, stay right where you are, that’s my advice. Taniane and her Presidium can take care of this murder business without you. We have work of our own to do here, and it’s barely only begun. Stay in Yissou, cousin. That’s what I think.”

Thu-Kimnibol nodded. “You’re right. What’s been happening in Dawinno is no affair of mine. And we have work to do.”

Alone in his chambers atop the House of Knowledge in the early hours of the night, Hresh tries to come to terms with it all. Two days have gone by since Nialli Apuilana’s disappearance. Taniane is convinced that she is somewhere close at hand, that she’s gone into seclusion until her grief has burned itself out. Squadrons of guardsmen are at work combing the city for her, and the outlying districts.

But no one has seen her. And Hresh is convinced that no one will.

She has fled to the Queen: of that he’s sure. If she reaches them safely, he thought, she’ll spend the rest of her life among them. A citizen of the Nest of Nests, that’s what she’ll be. If she thinks of her native city at all, it’ll be only to curse it as the place where the man she loved was murdered. It’s the hjjks that she loves now. It’s the hjjks, Hresh tells himself, to whom she belongs. But why? Why?

What power do they have over her? What spell did they use to pull her toward them?

He feels baffled and impotent. These events have all but paralyzed him. Thought has become an immense effort. His soul seems to be encased in ice. The murders—when had there last been a violent death in Dawinno? And Nialli Apuilana’s disappearance—he must try to think—to think—

Someone had said yesterday that a girl riding a xlendi had been seen that rainy afternoon, out by the perimeter of the city. Seen only at a distance, just at a distance. There were plenty of girls in the city, plenty of xlendis. But suppose it had been Nialli. How far could she get, alone, unarmed, not knowing the route? Was she lost and close to death somewhere out there in the empty plains? Or had bands of hjjks been waiting to receive her and lead her onward to the Nest of Nests?

You can’t possibly know what it’s like, father. They live in an atmosphere of dreams, of magic, of wonder. You breathe the air of the Nest, and it fills your soul, and you can never be the same again, not after you’ve felt Nest-bond, not after you’ve understood Nest-love.

She had promised to explain all that to him before she left. But there hadn’t been time, and now she is gone. And he still understands nothing, nothing at all. Nest-bond? Nest-love? Dreams? Magic? Wonder?

He glances toward the huge heavy casket of the chronicles. He has spent his lifetime ransacking the hodgepodge of ancient half-cryptic documents in that casket. His predecessors had copied and recopied those tattered books, and copied them again, during the hundreds of thousands of years in the cocoon. Ever since he was a child staring over Thaggoran’s shoulder, he has looked to the chronicles as an inexhaustible well of knowledge.

He opens the seals and the locks and begins to draw the volumes forth and lay them out one by one on the work-tables of polished white stone that encircle the room.

Here is the Book of the Long Winter, with its tales of the coming of the death-stars. Here is the Book of the Cocoon, which tells how Lord Fanigole and Balilirion and Lady Theel led the People to safety in the time of cold and darkness. Here is the Book of the Way, containing prophecies of the New Springtime and the glorious role the People would play when they came forth again into the world. And this is the Book of the Coming Forth, which Hresh himself had written, except for the first few pages which Thaggoran who was chronicler before him had done: it tells of the winter’s end, and the return of the warmth, and the venturing of the tribe into the open plains at last.

This one is the Book of the Beasts, which describes all the animals that once had been. The Book of Hours and Days, telling of the workings of the world and the larger cosmos. This one here, with its binding hanging all in faded scraps, is the Book of the Cities, in which the names of all the capitals of the Great World are inscribed.

And these three: how sad they are! The Book of the Unhappy Dawn, the Book of the Wrongful Glow, the Book of the Cold Awakening, three pitiful tales of times when some chieftain, believing in error that the Long Winter was over, had led the People from the cocoon, only to be driven swiftly back by the icy blasts of unforgiving winds.

Concerning the hjjks, all he finds are old familiar phrases.
In the dry northlands, where the hjjks dwell in their great Nest,
or,
And in that year the hjjks did march across the land in very great number, devouring all that lay in their path,
or,
That was the season when the great Queen of the hjjk-folk dispatched a horde of her people to the city of Thisthissima, and another vast horde to Tham.
Mere chronicle-phrases, no real information in them.

He keeps rummaging. These books down here at the bottom have no names. They are the most ancient of all, mere elliptical fragments, written in a kind of writing so old that Hresh can perceive only the edge of its meanings. Great World texts is what they are, poems, perhaps, or dramatic works, or holy scriptures, or quite possibly all three things at once. When he touches the tips of his fingers to them, their frail vellum pages come alive with images of that glorious civilization that the death-stars had destroyed, of that splendid era when the Six Peoples had walked the glowing streets of the grand cities; but everything is murky, mysterious, deceptive, as though seen in a dream. He puts them back. He closes the casket.