At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  The stranger, motionless, stood with his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Hresh. They were unusual eyes, a clear pale green, like the water in the shallows of Dawinno Bay, but much colder. The stranger too seemed to be locked in deep concentration; and once again that odd almost-smile had appeared on his face.

  Hresh’s eyes were closed. He appeared not even to be breathing. He was lost in his own spell, his mind given up entirely into the power of the Barak Dayir. But after an eternity he could be seen to return. The room was very still.

  “His name is Kundalimon,” Hresh said.

  “Kundalimon,” Husathirn Mueri repeated gravely, as though the name had some deep significance.

  “At least, that’s what he thinks it is. He isn’t entirely sure. He isn’t entirely sure even of what a name is. He doesn’t have one among the hjjks. But the traces of the name Kundalimon are still in his mind, like the traces of ancient foundations in a ruined city. He knows that he was born here, seventeen years ago.”

  Husathirn Mueri said quietly to the bailiff, “Go to the House of Knowledge. See if there’s any record of a lost child named Kundalimon.”

  Hresh shook his head. “No. Let it be. I’ll take care of that myself, afterward.” He turned to the stranger. “We have to teach you your own name. Everyone in this city has a name, a name that belongs only to himself.” And in a clear high tone he said, pointing to the boy, “Kundalimon.”

  “Kundalimon,” the stranger repeated, nodding, tapping his chest, smiling something that was close to being an actual smile.

  Hresh touched his own breast. “Hresh.”

  “Hresh,” said the stranger. “Hresh.”

  Ho looked toward Nialli Apuilana.

  “He wants to know your name too,” Hresh said. “Go on. Tell him.”

  Nialli Apuilana nodded. But to her horror her voice wasn’t there when she called upon it. Nothing would come from her throat but a cough and a tight hoarse rasping that could almost have been a hjjk-sound. Dismayed, embarrassed, she clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Tell him your name,” said Hresh again.

  Silently Nialli Apuilana tapped her throat with her fingers and shook her head.

  Hresh seemed to understand. He nodded to Kundalimon and pointed to her. “Nialli Apuilana,” he said, in the same clear high tone as before.

  “Nialli—Apuilana,” Kundalimon repeated carefully, staring at her. The supple vowels and liquid consonants did not seem to rise easily to his lips. “Nialli—Apuilana—”

  She looked away, as if scalded by his gaze.

  Hresh took the Barak Dayir and closed his eyes again, and disappeared once more into his trance. Kundalimon stood statue-still before him. There was utter silence in the room.

  Shortly Hresh seemed to return, and after a time he said, “How strange his mind is! He’s been with the hjjks since he was four. Living in the great main Nest, the Nest of Nests, far in the north.”

  The Nest of Nests! In the presence of the Queen of Queens Herself! Nialli Apuilana felt a surge of envy.

  She found her voice and said softly, “And do you know why he’s come here, father?”

  In a curious muffled tone Hresh said, “The Queen wants to make a treaty with us.”

  “A treaty?” Husathirn Mueri said.

  “A treaty, yes. A treaty of perpetual peace.”

  Husathirn Mueri looked stunned. “What are the terms? Do you know?”

  “They want to draw a line across the continent, somewhere just north of the City of Yissou. Everything north of the line is to be considered hjjk, and everything south of it will remain the territory of the People. No one of either race will be allowed to enter territory belonging to the other.”

  “A treaty,” Husathirn Mueri said again in wonder. “The Queen wants a treaty with us! I can’t believe it.”

  “Nor can I,” said Hresh. “Almost too good to be true, isn’t it? Hard and fast boundaries. A no-trespass agreement. Everything clear, everything straightforward. In one stroke, an end to the fear of war with them that’s been dangling over us all our lives.”

  “If we can trust them.”

  “If we can trust them, yes.”

  “Have they sent an emissary to the City of Yissou also, do you know?” Husathirn Mueri said.

  “Yes. They’ve sent them to each of the Seven Cities, so it appears.”

  Husathirn Mueri laughed. “I’d like to see King Salaman’s face. Out of nowhere, peace breaks out! Perpetual peace with the great insect enemy! What then becomes of the holy war of extermination that he’s been aching to launch against them for the past ten or twenty years?”

  “Do you think Salaman was ever serious about a war with the hjjks?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

  Husathirn Mueri looked at her. “What?”

  “It’s all politics, isn’t it? So he can go on building his great wall higher and higher and higher. He keeps saying the hjjks are about to invade his city, but in fact the last time they did was before most of us were born. When Harruel was king up there, and Yissou had just been founded.”

  He turned to Hresh. “She has a point. Despite all of Salaman’s fretting, there haven’t been any real hostilities between the hjjks and the People in years. They have their lands, and we have ours, and nothing worse than a few border skirmishes ever takes place. If all the treaty does is ratify the status quo, what meaning does it have? Or is it some kind of trap?”

  “There are other conditions beside the one I spoke of,” Hresh said quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That had best be saved for discussion in the Presidium, I think,” said Hresh. “Meanwhile we have a weary stranger here. Give the boy a place to stay, Husathirn Mueri. See if you can find something for him that he’s willing to eat. And make sure that his vermilion is cared for, also. He’s very worried about his vermilion.”

  Husathirn Mueri signaled to one of the bailiffs, who came lumbering forward.

  “No,” Nialli Apuilana said. Her voice was a harsh croak again, but she managed to make herself heard. “Not you.” She held out her hand to the stranger. “I’ll take charge of getting him his food. I know what kinds of things he eats, better than anyone else here. Don’t forget I’ve been in the Nest myself.” She glanced defiantly around the room. “Well? Any objections?” But no one spoke.

  “Come,” she said to Kundalimon. “I’ll look after you.”

  As it should be, she thought.

  How could I let anyone else? What do they know, any of them? But we are both of the Nest, you and I. We are both of the Nest.

  2

  Masks of Several Sorts

  Afterward, when he is alone again, Hresh closes his eyes and lets his soul rove forth, imagining it soaring in a dream-vision beyond the bounds of the city, far across the windy northern plains, into that unknown distant realm where the hordes of insect-folk scurry about within their immense subterranean tunnels. They are a total enigma to him. They are the mystery of mysteries. He sees the Queen, or what he imagines to be the Queen, that immense remote inscrutable monarch, lying somnolent in her heavily guarded chamber, stirring slowly while acolytes chant harsh clicking hjjk-songs of praise: the hjjk of hjjks, the great Queen. What hjjk-dreams of total world domination is she dreaming, even now? How will we ever learn, he wonders, what it is that those creatures want of us?

  “Your abdication?” Minguil Komeilt cried, astonished. “Your abdication, lady? Who would dare? Let me take this paper to the captain of the guards! We’ll find the one who’s behind it and we’ll see to it that—”

  “Peace, woman,” Taniane said. This fluttery outburst from her private secretary was more bothersome to her than the actual petition had been. “Do you think this is the first time I’ve had a note like this? Do you think it’ll be the last? It means nothing. Nothing.”

  “But to throw a stone at you in the streets, with a message like this attached to it—”

  Taniane laughed. She glanced again at the scrap of paper in her hand
. YOU STAY MUCH TOO LONG, it said, in huge crude lettering. IT’S TIME YOU STEPPED ASIDE AND LET RIGHTFUL FOLK RULE.

  The words were Beng, the handwriting was Beng. The stone had come out of nowhere to land at her feet, as she was walking up Koshmar Way from the Chapel of the Interceder to her chambers in the House of Government, as she did almost every morning after she had prayed. It was the third such anonymous note she had received—no, the fourth, she thought—in the last six months. After nearly forty years of chieftainship.

  “You want me to take no action at all?” Minguil Komeilt asked.

  “I want you to file this wherever you file outbursts of this sort. And then forget about it. Do you understand me? Forget about it. It means nothing whatsoever.”

  “But—lady—”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” said Taniane again.

  She entered her chambers. The masks of her predecessors stared down at her from its dark stippled walls.

  They were fierce, vivid, strange, barbaric. They were emblems out of a former age. To Taniane they were reminders of how much had changed in the single life-span since the People had come forth from the cocoon.

  “Time I stepped aside,” she said to them, under her breath. “So I’ve been told.” Rocks thrown at me in the street. Bengs who don’t care for the Act of Union. After all this time. Restless fools, that’s all they are. They still want one of their own to govern. As if they knew a better system. I should give them what they want, and see how they like it then.

  There behind her desk was the Mask of Lirridon, which Koshmar had worn on that long-ago day when the tribe had made its Going Forth into the newly thawed world. It was a frightening thing, harsh and angular and repellent. Surely it was patterned after some old tribal memory of the hjjk-folk, some ancestral nightmare, for it was yellow and black in color, and outfitted with a terrible jutting sharp-edged beak.

  Flanking it was Sismoil’s mask, bland, enigmatic, with a flat unreadable face and tiny eye-slits. Thekmur’s mask, very simple, hung beside it. Farther down the wall was the Mask of Nialli, a truly horrifying one, black and green with a dozen long spikes, red as blood, standing away from its sides at sharp angles. Koshmar had worn the Nialli mask on the day the invading force of Helmet People—Bengs—first had arrived and confronted the People in Vengiboneeza.

  And there were Koshmar’s own masks: the shining gray one with red eye-slits that she had worn in her lifetime, and the finer one carved in her honor by the craftsman Striinin after her death, with powerful features marked in burnished black wood. Taniane had worn that mask herself, on the day of departure from Vengiboneeza, when the People were setting out on their second migration, the one that would bring them eventually to the place where they would build the City of Dawinno.

  Glimmers of a vanished past, the masks were. Spark-trails, leading backward through the muffled swaddlings of time to forgotten days of what now seemed a claustrophobic enclosure.

  “Should I go?” Taniane asked, looking at the Koshmar masks. “Are they right? Have I ruled long enough? Is it time to step aside?”

  Koshmar had been the last of the old chieftains—the last to rule over a tribe so small that the chieftain knew everyone by name, and adjudicated disputes as though they were mere bickerings between friends.

  How much simpler an age that had been! How guileless, how naive!

  “Perhaps I should,” Taniane said. “Eh? Eh? What do you say? Do the gods require me to spend every remaining minute of my life doing this? Or is it out of pride that I hang on year after year? Or because I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself?”

  From Koshmar’s masks no answers came.

  The People had been just a little band, in Koshmar’s time, a mere tribe. But now the People were civilized; now they were city-dwellers; now they numbered in the thousands instead of in the handfuls, and they had been compelled to invent one new concept after another, a dizzying profusion of things, in order to be able to function at all in this new and expanded order. They had come to use the thing known as exchange-units instead of simply sharing alike, and they fretted over profits, possessions, the size of their living quarters, the number of workers they employed, tactics of competition in the marketplace, and other such strangenesses. They had begun to divide into classes: rulers, owners, workers, poor. Nor were the old tribal lines completely erased. They were fading, yes. But Koshmars and Bengs had not yet entirely forgotten that they had been Koshmars and Bengs; and then there were all the others, the Hombelions and Debethins and Stadrains and Mortirils and the rest, the proud little tribes gradually disappearing into the bigger ones but still struggling to retain some shred of their old identities.

  Each of these things brought new problems, and all of them fell ultimately to the chieftain to solve. And everything had happened so rapidly. The city, powered by Hresh’s unceasing inventiveness and his researches into the archives of antiquity, had sprung up like a mushroom in a single generation, in unabashed and hopeful imitation of the Great World cities of the past.

  Taniane looked at the masks.

  “You never had to worry about census figures and tax rolls, did you? Or minutes of the Presidium, or statistics on the number of exchange-units in current circulation.” She riffled through the mound of papers on her desk: petitions of merchants seeking licenses to import goods from the City of Yissou, studies of sanitation problems in outlying neighborhoods, a report on the poor condition of the Thaggoran Bridge on the south side of town. On and on and on. And, right on top, Hresh’s little memorandum: A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks.

  “If only you were down here,” Taniane said fervently to the masks, “and I were up there on the wall!”

  She had never had a mask of her own. At first she was content to wear Koshmar’s, on those occasions when wearing a mask was appropriate. And then, after the Bengs had come to Dawinno to merge with the People under the Act of Union, the political compromise that provided for a chieftain of Koshmar blood but a Beng majority on the Presidium, and the city had entered the most spectacular phase of its growth, mask-wearing had begun to seem antiquated to her, a mere foolish custom of the earlier days. It was years now since she had worn one.

  Even so, she kept them around her in her office. Partly as decorations, partly as reminders of that darker and more primitive time when ice had covered the land and the People were nothing more than a little band of naked furry creatures huddling in a sealed chamber cut into the side of a mountain. The harsh shapes and bright, slashing colors of those masks were her only link to that other era now.

  Seating herself behind the curving block of black onyx, rising on a pedestal of polished pink granite, that was her desk, Taniane scooped up a handful of the papers that Minguil Komeilt had left there for her and shuffled somberly through them again and again. Words swam before her eyes. Census…taxes…Thaggoran Bridge…hjjk treaty…hjjk treaty…hjjk treaty…

  She glanced up at Lirridon’s mask, the hjjk-faced one with the great hideous beak.

  “Would you sign a treaty with them?” she asked. “Would you deal with them at all?”

  The hjjks! How she despised and dreaded them! From childhood on you were taught to loathe them. They were hideous; they were gigantic frightful nightmare bugs, cold and evil; they were capable of committing any sort of monstrous thing.

  There were rumors of them all the time, roving bands of them said to lurk in the open country everywhere to the east and north. In truth there turned out to be no substance behind most of those tales. But all the same they had stolen her only child from her, just outside the city walls; and the fact that Nialli Apuilana had returned after a few months had done nothing to ease Taniane’s hatred for them, for the Nialli Apuilana who had returned was something mysteriously different from the girl they had taken. The hjjks were the menace. They were the enemy against whom the People would one day have to contend for supremacy in the world.

  And this treaty—these purported messages of love from their ghast
ly Queen—

  Taniane pushed Hresh’s report aside.

  I’ve been chieftain so long, she thought. Ever since I was a girl. My whole life, so it seems—nearly forty years—

  She had taken the chieftainship when the tribe was tiny, and she just a short time beyond her girlhood. Koshmar was dying, and Taniane the most vigorous and far-seeing of the younger women. They had all acclaimed her. She hadn’t hesitated. She knew she was made for the chieftainship, and the chieftainship for her. But she had had no way of seeing as far as this, these reports and studies and petitions for import licenses. And ambassadors from the hjjks. No one could have foreseen that. Perhaps not even Hresh.

  She picked up another paper, the one on the cracks in the roadbed of the Thaggoran Bridge. That seemed more urgent just now. You are evading the real issue, she told herself. And other words floated before her eyes.

  YOU STAY MUCH TOO LONG.

  IT’S TIME YOU STEPPED ASIDE.

  LET RIGHTFUL FOLK RULE

  “Your abdication, lady? Your abdication?”

  “It’s nothing—nothing whatsoever—”

  YOU STAY MUCH TOO LONG

  A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks

  “Your abdication, lady?”

  “Would you sign a treaty with them?”

  “Mother? Mother, are you all right?”

  “Your abdication?”

  “Can you hear me, mother?”

  IT’S TIME YOU STEPPED ASIDE

  “Mother? Mother?”

  Taniane looked up. There was a figure at the door of her chambers. That door was always open to any of the citizens of Dawinno, though few of them dared to come to it. Taniane struggled to focus her eyes. She had been in some sort of haze, she realized. Minguil Komeilt? No, no, Minguil Komeilt was a soft, round, timid little woman, and this one was tall and athletic, strong and restless.

  “Nialli?” she said, after a moment.

  “You sent for me.”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course. Come in, girl!”