At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  Kaldo Tikret said, scowling, “And we’re risking our lives so the chronicler will have his caviandis to study. By the Five, it must be their coupling he wants to study, don’t you think?”

  “Not him,” said Vyrom, with a laugh. “I’ll bet he doesn’t care a hjjk’s turd for coupling, that one.”

  “He must have, at least once,” Kaldo Tikret said. “There’s Nialli Apuilana, after all.”

  “That wild daughter of his, yes.”

  “On the other hand, did he have anything to do with the making of her? If you ask me, Nialli Apuilana sprouted in Taniane’s womb without any help from Hresh. There’s nothing about her that’s his. They look like sisters, that pair, not mother and daughter.”

  “Be quiet,” Sipirod said, giving the two men a louring look. “All this chatter does us no good here.”

  Kaldo Tikret said, “But they say Hresh is too deep in his studies and his spells to spare any time for coupling. What a waste! I tell you, if I could have either one in my bed for an hour, the mother or the daughter—”

  “Enough,” said Sipirod more sharply. “If you don’t have any respect for the chieftain or her daughter, at least show some for your own neck. Those are treasonous words. And we have work to do. See, there?”

  “Is that a caviandi?” Vyrom murmured.

  She nodded. A hundred paces ahead, where a swift narrow stream flowed into the stagnant algae-fouled lake, a creature the size of a half-grown child crouched by the water’s edge, trolling for fish with quick sweeps of its large hands. Its purple body was slender, with a stiff mane of yellow hair standing up along its neck and spine. Sipirod beckoned to the men to be still and began to creep up silently behind it. At the last moment the caviandi, taken altogether by surprise, looked around. It made a soft sighing sound and huddled frozen where it was.

  Then, rising on its haunches, the creature held up its hands in what might have been a gesture of submission. The caviandi’s arms were short and plump, and its outstretched fingers seemed not very different from those of the hunters. Its eyes were violet-hued and had an unexpected gleam of intelligence in them.

  No one moved.

  After a long moment the caviandi bolted suddenly and attempted to run for it. But it made the mistake of trying to enter the forest behind it instead of going into the lake, and Sipirod was too quick. She rushed forward, diving and sliding along the muddy ground, leaving a track behind her. Catching the animal by the throat and midsection, she swung it upward, holding it aloft. It squealed and kicked in anguish until Vyrom came up behind her and popped it into a sack. Kaldo Tikret tied the sack shut.

  “That’s one,” said Sipirod with satisfaction. “Female.”

  “You stay here and guard it,” Vyrom said to Kaldo Tikret. “We’ll go find us another one. Then we can get out of this place.”

  Kaldo Tikret wiped a clot of yellow moss-pollen from his shaggy muzzle. “Be quick about it. I don’t like standing here by myself.”

  “No,” said Vyrom, jeering. “Some hjjks might sneak up on you and carry you away.”

  “Hjjks? You think I’m worried about hjjks?” Kaldo Tikret laughed. In quick bold hand-movements he drew the stark outline of one of the insect-men in the air, the towering elongated body, the sharp constrictions between head and thorax, thorax and abdomen, the long narrow head, the jutting beak, the jointed limbs. “I’d tear the legs right off any hjjk who tried to give me trouble,” he said, acting it out in fierce pantomime, “and stuff them into its bunghole. What would hjjks be doing in country this hot, though? But there are dangers enough. Make it quick, will you?”

  “Quick as we can,” said Sipirod.

  But their luck had changed. An hour and a half she and Vyrom trudged futilely through the swamps, until their fur was miserably soggy and stained a bright yellow everywhere. The moss-flowers, tirelessly pumping forth their pollen, turned the sky dark with it, and everything that was phosphorescent or luminescent in the jungle began to glow and pulsate. Some lantern-trees lit up like beacons and the moss itself gleamed brightly and somber bluish radiance came from the lakes. Of other caviandis they found none at all.

  After a time they turned back. As they neared the place where they had left Kaldo Tikret, they heard a sudden hoarse cry for help, strange and strangled-sounding.

  “Hurry!” Vyrom cried. “He’s in trouble.”

  Sipirod caught her mate by the wrist. “Wait.”

  “Wait?”

  “If something’s wrong, no sense both of us plunging into it together. Let me go up ahead and see what’s happening.”

  She slipped through the underbrush and stepped out into the clearing. Out of the lake rose a gorynth’s black shining neck, perhaps that of the same monster they had heard hooting earlier. The huge creature’s body lay submerged. Only its curving upper surface was visible, like a row of sunken barrels; but its neck, five times the length of a man and ornamented by triple rows of blunt black spines, arched up and outward and down again, and at the end of it was Kaldo Tikret, caught in its powerful jaws. He was still calling for help, but more feebly, now. In another moment he would be under the water.

  “Vyrom!” she shouted.

  He came running, brandishing his spear. But where to hurl it? What little of the gorynth’s body could be seen was heavily armored with thick overlapping scales that would send his spear bouncing aside. The long neck was more vulnerable, but a difficult target. Then even that disappeared, and Kaldo Tikret with it, down into the dark turbid water. Black bubbles came upward.

  The water churned for a time. They watched in silence, uneasily grooming their fur.

  Abruptly Sipirod said, “Look. Another caviandi, over there by the sack. Probably trying to free its mate.”

  “Aren’t we going to try to do anything for Kaldo Tikret?”

  She made a chopping gesture. “What? Jump in after him? He’s done for. Don’t you understand that? Forget him. We have caviandis to catch. That’s what we’re paid for. Faster we find the second one, faster we can start getting ourselves out of this wretched place and back to Dawinno.” The black surface of the lake began just then to grow still. “Done for, yes. Just as you said before: smart and lucky, that’s what you have to be.”

  Vyrom shivered. “Kaldo Tikret wasn’t lucky.”

  “Not very smart, either. Now, if I slip around to the side, while you come up behind me with the other sack—”

  In central Dawinno, the official sector, a workroom on the second sublevel of the House of Knowledge: bright lights, cluttered laboratory benches, fragments of ancient civilizations scattered around everywhere. Plor Killivash delicately presses the firing-stud on the small cutting tool in his hand. A beam of pale light descends and bathes the foul-smelling, misshapen lump of he-knew-not-what, big as a bushel and tapered like an egg, that he has been brooding over all week. He focuses it and makes a quick shallow cut, and another, and another, slicing a fine line in its outer surface.

  A fisherman had brought the thing in the week before, insisting that it was a Great World relic, a treasure-chest of the ancient sea-lord folk. Anything that might be sea-lord material was Plor Killivash’s responsibility. Its surface was slimy with a thick accretion of sponges and coral and soft pink algae, and sour dirty sea-water dripped constantly from its interior. When he rapped it with a wrench it gave off a hollow thudding sound. He had no hope for it at all.

  Perhaps if Hresh had been around he might have felt less disheartened. But the chronicler was away from the House of Knowledge this day, calling at the villa of his half-brother Thu-Kimnibol. Thu-Kimnibol’s mate, the lady Naarinta, was seriously ill; and Plor Killivash, who was one of three assistant chroniclers, was as usual finding it hard to take his work seriously in Hresh’s absence. Somehow when he was on the premises Hresh managed to infuse everyone’s labors with a sense of important purpose. But the moment he left the building, all this pushing about of the sad shards and scraps of history became a mere absurdity, an empty pointless grubbing in th
e rubble of a deservedly forgotten antiquity. The study of the ancient days began to seem a meaningless pastime, a miserable airless quest into sealed vaults containing nothing but the stink of death.

  Plor Killivash was a sturdy burly man of Koshmar descent. He had been to the University, and was very proud of that. Once he had had some hope of becoming head chronicler himself some day. He was sure he had the inside track, because he was the only Koshmar among the assistants. Io Sangrais was Beng, and Chupitain Stuld belonged to the little Stadrain tribe.

  They were University people too, of course; but there were good political reasons for keeping the chroniclership away from a Beng, and nobody imagined that it would ever go to anyone from so trifling a group as the Stadrains. But far as Plor Killivash cared these days, they could have it, either one of them. Let someone else be head chronicler after Hresh, that was how Plor Killivash felt nowadays. Let someone else supervise the task of hacking through these millennia-thick accumulations of rubble.

  Once, like Hresh before him, he had felt himself possessed by an almost uncontrollable passion for penetrating and comprehending the mysteries of the vast pedestal of Earthly history atop which this newborn civilization that the People had created sat, like a pea atop a pyramid. Had longed to mine deep, digging beyond the icy barrenness of the Long Winter period into the luxurious wonder of the Great World. Or even—why set limits? why any limits at all?—even into the deepest layers of all, into those wholly unknown empires of the almost infinitely remote era of the humans, who had ruled the Earth before the Great World itself had arisen. Surely there must be human ruins left down there, somewhere far below the debris of the civilizations that had followed theirs.

  It had seemed so wonderfully appealing. To live billions of lives extending across millions of years. To stand upon old Earth and feel that you had been present when it was the crossroads of the stars. Flood your mind with strange sights, strange languages, the thoughts of other minds of unspeakable brilliance. Absorb and comprehend everything that had ever been, on this great planet that had seen so very much in its long span, realm piled upon realm back to the dawn of history.

  But he had been a boy then. Those were a boy’s thoughts, unfettered by practical considerations. Now Plor Killivash was twenty and he knew just how difficult it was to make the lost and buried past come alive. Under the harsh pressures of reality, that fiery passion to uncover ancient secrets was slipping from him, just as you could see it going even from Hresh himself, year by year. Hresh, though, had had the help of miraculous Great World devices, now no longer usable, to give him visions of the worlds that had existed before this world. For one who had never had the advantage of such wondrous things, the work of a chronicler was coming to seem nothing but doleful dreary slogging, carrying with it much frustration, precious little reward.

  Somber thoughts on a somber day. And somberly Plor Killivash made ready to cut open the artifact from the sea.

  The slim figure of Chupitain Stuld appeared in the doorway. She was smiling, and her dark violet eyes were merry.

  “Still drilling? I was sure you’d be inside that thing by now.”

  “Just another little bit to go. Stick around for the great revelation.”

  He tried to sound lighthearted about it. It wouldn’t do to let his gloom show through.

  She had her own frustrations, he knew. She too felt increasingly adrift amidst the mounded-up fragments of crumbled and eroded antiquity that the House of Knowledge contained.

  Glancing at her, he said, “What’s happening with those artifacts you’ve been playing with? The ones the farmers found in Senufit Gorge.”

  Chupitain Stuld laughed darkly. “That box of junk? It’s all so much sand and rust.”

  “I thought you said it was from a pre-Great World level seven or eight million years old.”

  “Then it’s sand and rust seven or eight million years old. I was hoping you were having better luck.”

  “Some chance.”

  “You can never tell,” Chupitain Stuld said. She came up beside the workbench. “Can I help?”

  “Sure. Those tractor clamps over there: bring them into position. I’ve just about sawed through the last of it now, and then we can lift the top half.”

  Chupitain Stuld swung the clamps downward and fastened them. Plor Killivash made the final intensity adjustment on his cutter. His fingers felt thick and coarse and clumsy. He found himself wishing Chupitain Stuld had stayed in her own work area. She was lovely to behold, small and delicate and extremely beautiful, with the soft lime-green fur that was common in her tribe. Today she wore a yellow sash and a mantle of royal blue, very elegant. They had been coupling-partners for some months now and even had twined once or twice. But all the same he didn’t want her here now. He was convinced that he was going to bungle things as he made the last incision and he hated the idea that she’d be watching as he did.

  Well. No more stalling, he tells himself. Checks his calibrations one last time. Draws his breath in sharply. At last forces himself to press the trigger. The beam licks out, bites into the artifact’s shell-like wall. One quick nibble. He cuts the beam off. A dark line of severance has appeared. The upper half of the object moves minutely away from the lower half.

  “You want me to pull up on the tractor harness?” Chupitain Stuld asked.

  “Yes. Just a little.”

  “It’s giving, Plor Killivash! It’s going to lift!”

  “Easy, now—easy—”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this thing’s full of sea-lord amulets and jewels! And maybe a book of history of the Great World. Written on imperishable plates of golden metal.”

  Plor Killivash chuckled. “Why not a sea-lord himself, fast asleep, waiting to be awakened so he can tell us all about himself? Eh?”

  The halves were separating. The weighty upper one rose a finger-breadth’s distance, another, another. A burst of sea-water came cascading out as the last inner seal broke.

  For an instant Plor Killivash felt a flicker of the excitement he had felt when he was new here, five or six years before, and it had seemed every day that they were making wondrous new inroads into the mysteries of the past. But the odds were that this thing was worthless. There was very little of the Great World left to find, seven thousand centuries after its downfall. The glaciers grinding back and forth across the face of the land had done their work all too well.

  “Can you see?” Chupitain Stuld asked, trying to peer over the top of the opened container.

  “It’s full of amulets and jewels, all right. And a whole bunch of fantastic machines in perfect preservation.”

  “Oh, stop it!”

  He sighed. “All right. Here—look.”

  He scooped her up to perch on his arm, and they looked in together.

  Inside were nine leathery-looking translucent purplish globes, each the size of a man’s head, glued to the wall of the container by taut bands of a rubbery integument. Dim shapes were visible within them. Organs of some kind, looking shrunken and decayed. A fierce stench of rot came forth. Otherwise nothing. Nothing but a coating of moist white sand along the sides of the container, and a shallow layer of opaque water at the bottom.

  “Not sea-lord artifacts, I’m afraid,” Plor Killivash said.

  “No.”

  “The fisherman thought he saw the broken stone columns of a ruined city sticking out of the sand at the bottom of the bay in the place where he dredged this thing up. He must have had a little too much wine with his lunch that day.”

  Chupitain Stuld stared into the opened container and shuddered. “What are they? Some kind of eggs?”

  Plor Killivash shrugged.

  “This whole thing was probably one gigantic egg, and I’d hate to meet the creature that laid it. Those things in there are little sea-monster embryos, I suppose. Dead ones. I’d better make a record of this and get them out of here. They’ll begin to reek pretty soon.”

  There was a sound behind him. Io Sangrais peer
ed in from the hallway. His brilliant red Beng eyes were glittering with amusement. Io Sangrais was sly and playful, a quick easy-spirited young man. Even the tribal helmet that he wore was playful, a close-fitting cap of dark blue metal with three absurd corkscrew spirals of lacquered red reed-stems rising wildly from it.

  “Hola! Finally got it open, I see.”

  “Yes, and it’s a wonderful treasure-house, just as I was expecting,” Plor Killivash said dourly. “A lot of rotten little unhatched sea-monsters. One more great triumph for the bold investigators of the past. You come to gloat?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Io Sangrais asked. His voice was ripe with mock innocence. “No, I came down here to tell you about the great triumph I’ve just pulled off.”

  “Ah. Yes. You’ve finally finished translating that old Beng chronicle of yours, and it’s full of spells and enchantments that turn water into wine, or wine into water, whichever you happen to prefer at the moment. Right?”

  “Save your sarcasm. It turns out not to be a Beng chronicle, just one from some ninth-rate little tribe that the Bengs swallowed long ago. And what it is is a full and thorough descriptive catalog of the tribe’s collection of sacred pebbles. The pebbles themselves vanished ten thousand years ago, you understand.”

  Chupitain Stuld giggled. “Much rejoicing in the land. The unraveling of the mysteries of the past by the skilled operatives of the House of Knowledge goes on and on at the customary stupendous pace.”

  In the Basilica that afternoon it was Husathirn Mueri’s turn to have throne-duty under the great central cupola, a task he shared in daily rotation with the princes Thu-Kimnibol and Puit Kjai. He was wearily hearing the petitions of two vociferous grain-merchants seeking redress from a third, who perhaps had cheated them and perhaps had not, when word came to him of the strange visitor who had arrived in the city.

  No less a person than the captain of the city guard, Curabayn Bangkea, brought the news: a man of hearty stature and swaggering style, who generally affected a colossal gleaming golden helmet half again the size of his head, bristling with preposterous horns and blades. He was wearing it today. Husathirn Mueri found it both amusing and irritating.