The Queen of Springtime ns-2

by Robert Silverberg

  Ordinarily these prowling inspections of Salaman’s were carried out at dawn, always in solitude. If a citizen happened to be awake at that hour, he would avert his eyes, not wishing to intrude on the king upon the walls. No one, not even his sons, would approach him at such a time. No one would dare.

  But this morning Biterulve had asked to accompany him, and Salaman had acquiesced at once. There was nothing that Salaman would deny Biterulve. He was fourteen, the sixth of the eight princes Salaman had sired, Sinithista’s only boy — a frail and gentle child so little like the others that Salaman once had doubted that Biterulve could be of his own engendering, though he had kept those doubts to himself and was glad of it now. Biterulve’s frame was slender and long-boned, whereas Salaman and all his other sons were squat and stocky; and his fur was an eerie pale hue, the color of a snowy field by moonlight, where Salaman and the rest of his brood were dark. But Biterulve’s cool gray eyes were the unmistakable eyes of the king; and his supple spirit, though its nature was less fierce than that of Salaman or any of his other sons, was one that the king recognized as kin to his.

  In the hour before sunrise they rode out together from the palace. Salaman, out of the corner of his eye, watched the boy closely. He handled his xlendi well, keeping the loose-limbed beast on a tight rein as they moved through the narrow curving streets, pulling back capably when an early-morning workman with a dray-wagon came unexpectedly around a sharp corner.

  One of Salaman’s great fears was that this gentle son of his was too gentle: that there was nothing at all warlike about him, that Biterulve would be unable to play a proper role when the hjjks at last made the move he had so long expected, and the great cataclysmic time arrived. It was not so much the disgrace that Salaman feared, for he had a host of other sons who would be heroic enough. But he didn’t want the boy to suffer when that dread host of unholy insects began their onslaught.

  It may be that I have misjudged him, thought Salaman, as Biterulve proudly urged the clattering xlendi forward through the quiet streets.

  The king spurred his own mount and caught up with him just as he emerged from the warren of inner streets into the wider outer avenues that led to the wall.

  “You ride very well,” Salaman called. “Better than I remember.”

  Biterulve glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “I’ve been going out with Bruikkos and Ganthiav practically every day. They’ve showed me a few tricks.”

  The king felt a stab of alarm.

  “Outside the wall, you mean?

  The boy giggled. “Father, we can’t very well go riding inside the city, can we?”

  “You have a point,” said Salaman grudgingly.

  And what harm, he thought, could come to him out there, really? Surely Bruikkos and Ganthiav had more sense than to stray very far into places where hjjks might roam. If the boy wants to go riding with his older brothers, I’ll say nothing, Salaman told himself. I mustn’t overprotect him, if I want him to be a proper prince, if I want him to be a true warrior.

  They had reached the wall now. They jumped down from their xlendis and tied them to posts. The first gray strands of morning were coming into the sky. The fog was scattering.

  Salaman felt an uncharacteristic sense of ease. Ordinarily his spirit was dark and tense; but this morning his mind was loose and unfocused, his body poised and calm. He had spent the night just past with Vladirilka, the fourth and newest of his mates. The aroma of her was still on his fur, the warmth of her still soothed his flesh.

  He was certain that he had sired a son on her in this night’s coupling. One is able to tell, Salaman believed, when a son is being made: and surely this had been a coupling for sons.

  He had so many daughters that he had difficulty remembering all their names, and he needed no more of those. Women had ruled in the cocoon, and a woman still ruled, he knew, in Dawinno. But Yissou from the first had been a city for men. Salaman had respected old Koshmar and thought well of Taniane; but there would be no female kings here.

  It was sons he wanted, and many of them, sons aplenty, so that the succession would be assured. A king, he thought, could never have too many sons. Building dynasties is like building walls: one must look beyond the immediate, and prepare for the worst of eventualities. Therefore Salaman had sired eight boys so far, and he hoped he had added a ninth tonight. If it wasn’t Chham who followed him to the throne, then it would be Athimin; and if not Athimin, then Poukor, or Ganthiav, or Bruikkos, or one of the even younger princes. Perhaps even the one he had engendered on Vladirilka this very night would be the next king. Or some boy yet to be conceived, by some mate not yet chosen. Only one thing was certain, that he would not give Biterulve the kingship. The boy was too sensitive, too complex. Let him be a royal counselor, Salaman felt. Let someone like Chham or Athimin handle the hard choices a king must face.

  But there was plenty of time for fixing the succession. Salaman had just reached his sixtieth year. There were those who thought of him as old, he knew, but that was not an opinion he shared. He regarded himself as in the full vigor, still, of his manhood. And he suspected that soft young Vladirilka, lying now asleep with his warmth still between her thighs, would back him up on that score.

  Biterulve pointed to the nearest of the staircases that led to the top of the wall.

  “Shall we go up, father?”

  “A moment. Stand here by me.” He liked to take it in from down here, first. To study it. To let its strength enter him and sustain his soul.

  He looked up, and out, letting his gaze sweep along the wall as far as he could see. He had done this ten thousand times, and he never grew weary of it.

  The immense wall that enclosed the City of Yissou was fashioned of cyclopean blocks of hard black stone, each one half the height of a man, and twice as wide as it was high, and deeper than man’s arm is long. For decades now, a phalanx of master stone-cutters had worked from dawn to twilight, every day of the year, slowly and patiently cutting those immense blocks in a mountain quarry in the steep ravine west of the city, trimming them, squaring them, dressing them smooth. Uncomplaining teams of vermilions hauled the massive blocks across the rough plateau to the edge of the wide, shallow crater in which the city lay sheltered. As each megalith reached its intended site along the constantly growing wall, Salaman’s skillful stonemasons lifted it and swung it boldly into its place, using elaborate wooden engines, and harnesses of tightly woven larret-withes.

  The king nodded toward the wall. “This is the place where a block was dropped, five years back. That was the only time such a thing ever happened.”

  Bitterness rose in his soul at the thought of it, as it always did when he was here. Three workmen had been crushed by the falling block, and two more were put to death for having dropped it, at Salaman’s order. His own sons Chham and Athimin had objected to the cruelty of that. But the king was inflexible. The men had been taken off and sacrificed that very day in the name of Dawinno the Destroyer.

  “I remember it,” Biterulve said. “And that you had the men who dropped it killed. I often still think of those poor men, father.”

  Salaman shot him a startled glance. “Ah, do you, boy?”

  “That they should have died for an accident — was that really right, do you think?”

  Keeping his anger carefully in check, the king said, “How could we tolerate such clumsiness? The wall is our great sacred endeavor. Carelessness in its construction is a blasphemy against all the gods.”

  “Do you think so, father?” Biterulve said, and smiled. “If we were perfect in all things, we would be gods ourselves, so it seems to me.”

  “Spare me your cleverness,” said Salaman, dealing him a light affectionate slap across the back of his head. “Three good men died because those masons were stupid. The foreman Augenthrin was killed. This wall had been his life’s work. That hurt me, losing him. And who knows how many more might have died if I’d let such incompetents live? The next stone they dropped might have been on my
own head. Or yours.”

  In truth he had wondered about the wisdom of his own harsh decree right in the moment of uttering it. Biterulve didn’t need to know that. The words had simply escaped from his lips in his first red instant of fury when he saw that fallen block, so beautifully hewn and now cracked beyond repair, and those six bloody legs jutting out pathetically from beneath it.

  But decrees once spoken may not be revoked. A king must be merciful and just, Salaman knew, but sometimes a king finds himself being unthinkingly cruel, for that is sometimes kingship’s nature. And when he is cruel he must take care not to let himself be seen second-guessing his own cruelty, or the people will think he is that worst of all tyrants, a capricious one. The very injustice of that hastily uttered sentence had made it impossible for him to call it back. Thus had blood atoned for blood in the building of Salaman’s great black wall. If the people were troubled by it, they kept their discontent to themselves.

  “Come,” Salaman said. “Let’s go up on top.”

  At eighteen equidistant points around the perimeter, handsome stone staircases rising along the inner face gave access to the narrow brick footpath that ran along the wall’s summit. When he had first had them built, some of Salaman’s sons and counselors had found those staircases paradoxical and even perverse. “Father, we should never have built them,” said Chham, with all the gravity that he affected as the eldest of the princes. “They’ll make it all the easier for the hjjks to descend into the city if they scale the wall.”

  And Athimin, Chham’s full brother, the king’s only other son by his earliest mate Weiawala, chimed in, “We ought to rip them out. They scare me, father. Chham’s right. They make us too vulnerable.”

  “The hjjks will never scale the wall,” Salaman had retorted. “But we need the stairs ourselves, so we can get troops up there in a hurry if anyone ever does try to come over.”

  The princes dropped the issue then. They knew better than to tangle with their father in any sort of dispute. He had ruled the city with a sure and capable hand throughout their entire lives, but in his later years he had grown increasingly irascible and stark of soul. Everyone, even Salaman himself, understood that the wall was not a topic suited for reasonable discussion. The king had no interest in being reasonable where the Great Wall was concerned. His concern was in making it so high that the question of its being scaled would be beyond all consideration.

  In his dawn perambulations he chose a different staircase every day, and invariably descended via the second staircase to the left of the one he had ascended, so that it took him six days to complete the full circuit of the rampart. It was a ritual from which he never deviated, winter or summer, rain or heat. It seemed to him that the safety of the city depended on it.

  Biterulve went skipping up to the summit. Salaman followed at a more stately pace. At the top he stamped his feet against the solid brick of the footpath, which lay above the huge black stones like a tough layer of skin above a mighty musculature.

  Salaman laughed. “Do you feel the strength of it, boy, beneath your legs? There’s a wall for you! There’s a wall to be proud of!”

  He slipped his arm over the boy’s shoulders and stared out into the misty lands beyond the city’s bounds.

  Yissou lay in a pleasant fertile vale. Dense forests and high ridges flanked it to the east and north, gentler hills rose to the south, and there was harsh broken country in the westlands leading off toward the distant sea.

  The huge crater which the city itself occupied lay at the center of a broad shadow thickly carpeted with grasses, both the green and the red. It was perfectly circular, and surrounded by a high, sharply delineated rim. Salaman believed, though he had never been able to prove it, that the crater had been created by the force of a death-star’s impact, plummeting into the breast of the Earth during the early dark days of the Long Winter.

  The crater’s rim, lofty as it was, offered little protection against invaders. And so the Great Wall of Yissou had been under continuous construction for the past thirty-five years.

  Salaman had begun it in the sixth year of the city, the third of his own reign after the death of the turbulent dark-souled Harruel, Yissou’s first king. During his long span of power he had seen the wall rise to a height of fifteen courses in most places, forming a gigantic fortification that completely encircled the city along the line of the crater’s rim.

  In Yissou’s earliest days a simple wooden palisade had guarded that perimeter, not very effectively. But Salaman, who had been only a young warrior then but already was dreaming of succeeding Harruel as king, had vowed to replace it one day by an unconquerable wall of stone. And so he had.

  If only it were high enough! But how high was high enough?

  There had been no hjjk attacks thus far during his reign, for all his fears. They wandered through the outlying countryside, yes. Now and then some small band of them, ten or twenty of them straying for some unfathomable hjjk reason out of their outpost at Vengiboneeza, might approach the city. But they came no closer than the edge of visibility — nothing more than black-and-yellow specks, seemingly no larger than the ants who were their distant kin. Then they would turn and swing back toward the north, having satisfied whatever urge it was that had brought them this way in the first place. There is never any understanding hjjks, Salaman thought.

  So what the hjjks called Queen-peace prevailed, year upon year. But Queen-peace might be no more than a trap, a lie, a hallucination, an accident of the moment. The hjjks could end it whenever they chose. War might come at any time. Sooner or later it certainly would.

  How could he convince himself that a wall fifteen courses high was high enough? In his mind’s eye he saw invading hjjks building longer ladders, and longer ones yet, topping his wall no matter how high he built it, even if it reached through the roof of the sky.

  “We will take it higher, I think,” Salaman often would say, with a sweeping gesture of both his hands. “Another three courses, or perhaps four.”

  And the builders and masons would sigh; for as Salaman’s rampart continued to rise, all the battlements and parapets and guardhouses and watchtowers that existed presently along the highest level had to be ripped away to make room for the new rows of stone blocks, and rebuilt afterward, and then ripped away once more as Salaman’s insatiable hungers led him to demand yet another course or two, and so on and so on.

  But they were used it. The wall was Salaman’s obsession, his cherished plaything, his monument. It would continue growing ever higher, everyone knew, so long as he was king. They wouldn’t have known what to do or say, if Salaman were to tell them some afternoon, “The wall is finished now. We are safe against any conceivable enemy. Go to your homes, all of you, and take up some new employment tomorrow.”

  Small chance of that. The wall would never be finished.

  The king stamped his feet again. He imagined the wall sending down deep massive roots and anchoring itself in the depths of the Earth. He laughed. To Biterulve he said, “Boy, do you know what I have done here? I’ve built a wall that will stand a million years. A million million, even. The world will grow old, and enter into a time of greatness someday beside which the Great World will seem like nothing at all, and people will say then, seeing the wall, ‘That wall is Salaman’s, who was king at Yissou when the world was young.’”

  Biterulve said, with a sly look coming over his face, “And is the world young now, father? I thought it was very old, that we live in the latter days.”

  “So we do. But to those who come after us, these will seem like early times.”

  “Then how old is the world, do you think?”

  The king smiled to himself. The boy reminded him of Hresh, sometimes, young Hresh, Hresh-full-of-questions. With a shrug he said, “The world is at least two million years old. Perhaps three.”

  “Is it, do you think? But if seven hundred thousand years have gone by since the Great World lived, and there was a time before the Great World when the hum
ans ruled everything, and there must have been a time before that, when even the humans were simple folk — can that all have happened in only three million years?”

  “Perhaps four, then,” said Salaman. It amused him to be quibbled with in this way: but only by Biterulve. “Even five. The world is ever-renewing, boy. First it’s young, and then it grows old, and then it becomes young again. And when it’s old the next time, people look back and think of that early time barely remembered that came just before their time, and say that that was when it was young, not knowing that it had been old before that. Do you follow me, boy?”

  “I think I do,” said Biterulve, but there seemed to be more slyness in his tone. Salaman gave him a rough caress.

  They moved southward along the wall, toward the domed pavilion of shining smooth-hewn gray stone that rose atop the wall above the southernmost of the eighteen staircases. The sky continued to brighten.

  The pavilion was for Salaman’s use only, his private place. He often lingered there, sometimes for hours, during his dawn meditations and at other times as well

  The wall here — and only here — diverged from the route of the old crater rim. Here it extended some way out to the south, in order to climb a ridge so high that the distant western sea and the eastern forests could be seen from it, as well as the southern hills.

  In the early days, when Harruel was king and even the wooden palisade was still incomplete and the city nothing more than seven lopsided wooden shacks held together by vines, Salaman had gone frequently to that high ridge, usually alone, sometimes with his mate Weiawala. There he would sit dreaming of glorious times to come. The same vision would come to him again and again: the City of Yissou grown to greatness and splendor, greater even than old Vengiboneeza of the sapphire-eyes folk: a mighty city, capital of a mighty empire spreading to the horizon and beyond, ruled not by the descendants of uncouth Harruel, but by the sons of the sons of Salaman.