“Your lover,” he supplied, as she faltered into silence.
“My lover, yes,” she said, and Nortekku could not mistake the frosty edge that she had put on the word.
He suspected that he was getting ever deeper into trouble, but he drove recklessly onward, unable to hold himself back. “The whole city knows about us already. Everybody is aware that you and I are about to set out on a trip lasting many months and that Hamiruld doesn’t care in the slightest. So what difference can it make if you happen to be sitting next to me in the opera house one night next week?”
“What I might be doing next month along the banks of the Hallimalla, far from this city and all its busybodies, is very different from what I choose to do next week in the opera house of Yissou.”
“Nevertheless—”
“No. Listen to me, Nortekku.”
“You listen to me.”
“Please, Nortekku—”
“You know he hates opera.” He waved the tickets about. “I insist—”
“You insist?”
It got worse from there. Very quickly they were shouting at each other; then they grew more calm, but it was the calmness of cold fury, and then she turned and walked out. Nortekku realized instantly how stupid he had been. Hamiruld and Thalarne were husband and wife; this was their native city, where they were people of some importance; he was an interloper in their marriage and so long as they were still living together he had no claim on her. And what did next week’s opera matter, anyway? She herself had reminded him that soon enough he and Thalarne would be far from Yissou and Hamiruld, with time aplenty for making love. To be raising such a fuss over a purely symbolic thing like a night at the opera together now was completely idiotic.
He sent her a letter of apology, and a gift. When no reply came, he sent a second letter, not quite so abject as the first but definitely conciliatory. She agreed to meet with him and gave convincing signs of having accepted his expressions of contrition. Even then there was still some distance between them, which at the moment he made no attempt to bridge, but it seemed to him that the damage was well on the way toward being repaired.
He had to spend the next two days doing the final surveying work out at the site of Vuldimin’s new palace in the country. When he came back, Hamiruld was waiting for him with the news that the expedition was off and Thalarne had left the city for points unknown, and the realization that he had no choice but to take himself back to Dawinno and face whatever it was that Silina’s people, or his father, or both, had in store for him.
He was still pondering his dilemma that evening when a burly, deep-chested man of middle years, with coarse thick fur and a fierce, glowering visage, hailed him by name in the street. Only after he had actually walked a few steps past him did the preoccupied Nortekku recognize him as Khardakhor, one of his father’s great commercial rivals, a dealer in metals and precious stones.
Once, many years back, Khardakhor and Nortekku’s father had been partners. Something had gone wrong between them, though. There had been a bitter and vindictive dispute and a court battle of some sort, and the name of Khardakhor was no longer mentioned in Nortekku’s house. But Nortekku had never known or cared very much about any of that and he saw no reason to snub Khardakhor now, this far from home. He halted and acknowledged the other man.
Khardakhor seemed amiable enough. He proved to be not nearly so fierce as he looked, greeting Nortekku like a long-lost nephew rather than as the son of an enemy. Evidently he had come north on business, and evidently, too, he had spent some time recently with Prince Vuldimin, because he knew about Nortekku’s having been hired to design a palace for the prince, and—wink, nudge, hearty grin—he knew about Nortekku’s affair with the beautiful Thalarne as well. “Quite a choice piece, that one is,” he said. “Saw her at Vuldimin’s a year or two ago, one of those dinner parties of his. If I were a little younger I’d have gone for her myself. I understand you and she have been cutting quite a swathe lately.—But why haven’t you gone off to Bornigrayal with her?”
“Bornigrayal?” Nortekku said blankly. What did Bornigrayal have to do with anything? He wondered whether he had heard correctly. Bornigrayal was a city on the other coast. He knew practically nothing about it, only its name and that it was one of the Five Cities back there. Everyone knew their names—Cignoi, Gharb, Gajnsiuelem, Thisthissima, Bornigrayal—but rarely did anyone from the two western city-states have any reason to visit one. Unknown tribes, emerging from unknown cocoons on the far side of the Hallimalla, had founded them after the Long Winter. For citizens of Dawinno or Yissou, they were all so distant that they might just as well have been on some other planet. “I don’t follow you. We didn’t have any plans for going to Bornigrayal. What we were about to do was to set out for the Hallimalla, to hunt for the old Koshmar-tribe cocoon.”
“Yes, of course. I heard about that project from Til-Menimat back in Dawinno. He expects you to find all sorts of marvels for his collection, I understand. But that’s been called off, hasn’t it? I ran into Thalarne’s husband Hamiruld yesterday”—wink, nudge, grin—“and he told me that he had put Thalarne aboard an airwagon bound for Bornigrayal, a few days back. There’s been some kind of discovery out that way that completely puts the cocoon thing in the shade.”
Nortekku shook his head. He felt as though a thick mist had wrapped itself about him. It seemed to him that he was moving from bafflement to bafflement these past few days, hardly having a chance to absorb one confusing thing before two or three more presented themselves.
“Well, maybe so. But Hamiruld didn’t say anything to me about her going to Bornigrayal,” Nortekku muttered, after a moment. He had difficulty articulating the words, like someone one who was just coming up from sleep. “He told me she was gone, but he didn’t know where she had gone. Didn’t have any idea, is what he said.”
“Which is what he told you, anyway,” said Khardakhor, grinning broadly. “To me, he said something different. I can’t see where he’d have had any reason to lie to me. Maybe he just didn’t want you going off to Bornigrayal after her.” The fierce eyes narrowed a bit. “Well, you didn’t hear it from me, did you? But the girl’s in Bornigrayal. I have it on the best authority.”
This was incomprehensible. Nortekku felt a heavy pounding in his chest. Carefully he said, “And what could be in Bornigrayal that might interest her, do you think?”
“How would I know? Never been there, never thought much about the place. I don’t do any business there.” Khardakhor was studying him very closely. In the narrow glinting eyes Nortekku saw amusement, pity, even, perhaps, just a little envy. “Odd that she didn’t say anything to you, if you and she were really as thick with each other as all the rumors around town had it. But if that was how you and she really were, shouldn’t you be heading off to Bornigrayal to look for her?”
“Bornigrayal,” Nortekku said, hopelessly befuddled. The other end of the continent. It was frightening to think that she was that far from him, and frightening also to contemplate the notion of going there after her. It was an unimaginable distance. He had never traveled anywhere except up and down the Western Coast between Dawinno and Yissou. The journey to the banks of the Hallimalla would have been the grandest peregrination of his life. Why Bornigrayal? What could have possibly taken her there, on the spur of the moment, giving him no warning? To get away from him and all the complexities he had introduced into her marriage? It would hardly have been necessary to go to the ends of the Earth for that. Simply telling him it was over would have sufficed.
Bornigrayal, he thought, in wonder. Why? Why?
“I should go, yes,” he said. “Find her. Talk to her. Get all of this straightened out.”
Khardakhor was beaming now. “Absolutely, boy. Absolutely! Go to Bornigrayal. Do you know our ambassador there, Samnibolon? He’ll help you. He’s a very good man, is Samnibolon. You tell him you’re a friend of mine, that you’re looking for your girlfriend, that I told you she’s in Bornigrayal. Go, boy.
Waste no time. Bornigrayal may be only the first stop for her. She may be planning to go even farther than that.”
It was all becoming something very dreamlike. He felt himself being drawn onward and onward, surrendering all volition. If this man Khardakhor thought he should go to Bornigrayal after Thalarne, who was he to say no? Go, boy. Waste no time.
Prince Vuldimin appeared to feel the same way. The prince knew nothing about Thalarne’s hasty departure and had no idea whatever of what could have drawn her to Bornigrayal, though he too seemed to know that that was where she had gone. Unhesitatingly he provided Nortekku with money for the trip. He provided a coachman, too, the following morning, who took Nortekku out to Yissou Sky Harbor, an enormous barren expanse of land far beyond the city walls, with two great concrete runways down its center and a huge gray airwagon sitting at the end of one of them. And within an hour Nortekku, who had never flown anywhere, who had never so much as thought of undertaking a journey by air, found himself aboard that great vessel as it made ready for takeoff.
The airwagon was a very large elongated metal box with wings, a thing of gigantic size. There must have been two or three dozen other passengers on board, perhaps even more. Nortekku was unable to understand how anything this massive could ever be capable of rising into the air. It was only about thirty years since the first experimental flying wagons had made the first tiny uncertain hops between one village and another, and already they were able to traverse the entire continent, which was impressive progress indeed; but for Nortekku transcontinental travel by air was simply something that one might read about, one more of the many technological miracles of modern times, not anything that had any real relevance to one’s own life.
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 latter-day 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 sittin
g 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 about 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 Millennium Express - 1995-2009 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Nine Page 38