At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

Husathirn Mueri trembled. At the sound of that sweet innocent voice he felt a touch of terror. The light and the way? The essence and the substance? What madness was this? Was he dreaming it?

  He felt a choking, gagging sensation and covered his mouth with his hand. The basement room was windowless, and the air was close and hot. The musky salt tang of the barrels of dried fish, the gamy odor of sweaty fur, the rich pungent aroma of the sippariu and dilifar boughs on the altar—it was all starting to sicken him. He began to grow dizzy. He knotted his hands together and pressed his elbows hard into his ribs.

  They were all crying out in hjjk-sounds again, the boy and the girl and the congregation.

  At any moment, Husathirn Mueri imagined, the floor might open beneath him and he would find himself looking down into some vast pit where swarms of glittering hjjks moved in such multitudes that the earth seemed to be boiling with them.

  “Easy, sir, easy,” Chevkija Aim murmured beside him.

  He watched the boy and girl moving about now, taking fruits and boughs from the altar and showing them to the congregation, and replacing them again, while the worshippers stamped their feet and made the droning, clicking sounds. What did it all mean? Where had it come from so suddenly?

  The boy was wearing a shining yellow-and-black amulet on his chest, much like the one dead Kundalimon had worn. The same one, perhaps. The girl had a wrist-talisman that was also of hjjk-shell. Even in the dimness these objects gleamed with a preternatural brightness. Husathirn Mueri remembered how the shells of the hjjks had gleamed as they moved on their mysterious rounds through the streets of Vengiboneeza when he was a child.

  “Kundalimon guides us from on high. He tells us that the Queen is our comfort and our joy,” the boy called again.

  And again the congregation responded, “The Queen is our comfort and joy.”

  But this time a burly man three rows in front of Husathirn Mueri rose and shouted, “The Queen is the one true god!”

  The congregation began to repeat that too. “The Queen is the one true—”

  “No!” the boy cried. “The Queen is not a god!”

  “Then what is She? What is She?” For a moment the rhythm of the service was broken. People were rising everywhere, calling out, waving their arms. “Tell us what She is!”

  The boy-priest leaped atop the altar. Instantly he had their attention again.

  “The Queen,” he said, in that same eerie high singsong, “is of god-essence, by virtue of Her descent from the people of the Great World, who lived in the sight of the gods. But She is not a god Herself.” The boy seemed to be parroting some text he had learned by rote. “She is the architect of the gateway through which the true gods one day will return. Such is the word of Kundalimon.”

  “The humans, you mean?” the burly man asked. “Are the humans the true gods?”

  “The humans are—they are—” The boy on the altar faltered. His eyes seemed to turn glassy. He had no prepared text for this. He looked down toward the girl, and she reached out with her sensing-organ, coiling it about his ankle in an astonishingly intimate way. Husathirn Mueri caught his breath, amazed. The gesture seemed to steady the boy; he regained his poise and cried, “The revelation of the humans is yet to come! We must continue to await the revelation of the humans! Until then the Queen is our guide.” He made hjjk-clicks. “She is our comfort and our joy!”

  “She is our comfort and our joy!”

  They were all clicking in response, now. The sound of it was horrifying. The boy had them under control once more. That was horrifying too.

  “Kundalimon!” they cried. “Martyred Kundalimon, lead us to the truth!”

  The boy-priest held his arms high. Even at this distance Husathirn Mueri could see how his eyes blazed with conviction.

  “She is the light and the way.”

  “She is the light and the way.”

  “She is the essence and the substance.”

  “She is the essence and—”

  “Look,” Husathirn Mueri whispered. “The girl’s got her sensing-organ on his, now.”

  “They’re going to twine, sir. Everybody here is going to twine.”

  “Surely not. All in one place together?”

  “It is what they do,” said Chevkija Aim casually. “They all twine and let the Queen enter their souls, so I do hear. It is their custom.”

  Numb with disbelief, Husathirn Mueri said, “This is the greatest vileness that ever has been.”

  “I have officers outside. We can clear all these hjjk-lovers out of here in five minutes, if you give the word, and smash the place up.”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve seen what they—”

  “No, I said. The persecutions mustn’t be resumed. That’s the chieftain’s express order, and you know it.”

  “I understand, sir, but—”

  “Then no one is to be arrested. We’ll leave this chapel absolutely undisturbed, at least for now. And keep it under careful observation. How else will we understand what kind of threat we face, if we don’t look the enemy right in the face? Do you follow me?”

  The guard-captain nodded. His lips were tightly clamped.

  Husathirn Mueri looked up. In front of him the dark shapes of the congregation were rising, moving about, joining into groups. The hjjk-clicking sound could no longer be heard, and in its place came an intense deep humming. No one took any notice of the two men whispering in back. The air in the narrow long room seemed to grow superheated. It might burst into flames at any moment.

  Quietly Chevkija Aim said, “We should leave now.”

  Husathirn Mueri made no response.

  It seemed to him that he had become rooted in place. At the far end of the room the boy and the girl were unashamedly twining before the altar, and, two by two, the members of the congregation were beginning to enter into the communion. Husathirn Mueri had never heard of such a thing. He had never dreamed of it. He watched it now in terrible fascination.

  Chevkija Aim whispered, “If we stay, they’ll want us to do it too, sir.”

  “Yes. Yes. We have to go.”

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “We—have to—go—”

  “Give us your hand, sir. There. That’s it. Come on, now. Up. Up.”

  “Yes,” Husathirn Mueri said. His feet felt dead beneath him. He leaned heavily on Chevkija Aim and tottered and stumbled toward the door.

  She is the light and the way. She is the essence and the substance.

  She is the beginning and the end.

  The cool fresh air outside struck him like a fist.

  Hresh said, “What I believed about them, once upon a time, is what everybody’s always believed. That they’re a malevolent alien folk. Our sworn enemies, strange and menacing. But lately I’ve been beginning to change my mind about that.”

  “So have I,” said Nialli Apuilana.

  “How so?”

  She shrugged. “It’ll be easier for me if you speak first, father.”

  “But you said you’d come here to tell me things.”

  “And I will. But it has to be an exchange: what you know for what I know. And I want you to go first. Please. Please.”

  Hresh stared at her. She was as baffling as ever.

  After a moment he said, “All right. I suppose it began for me that time you addressed the Presidium: when you said the hjjks have to be regarded as something other than monsters, that in fact they’re intelligent creatures with a deep and rich civilization. You called them human, even. In the special sense of that word that I sometimes have used. It was the first hint you’d given of what you experienced while you were in the Nest. And I realized that what you said must certainly have been true at one time, for they were a part of the Great World, and in the visions of the Great World that I once was able to have I saw them, living among the sapphire-eyes and the humans and the others in peace and harmony. How could they have been demons and monsters, and still a part of the Great World?”


  “Exactly so,” Nialli Apuilana said.

  Hresh looked up at her. There was something even stranger than usual about her today. She was like a coiled whip.

  He went on:

  “Of course what they were in the Great World and what they may have become by now, hundreds of thousands of years after the Great World, aren’t necessarily the same. Maybe they have changed. But who can say? We have people like Thu-Kimnibol who’ve been convinced from the start that the hjjks are evil. Now, though, we have some among us who take the opposite position entirely. This new religion, I mean. I hear that in the chapels the hjjks are spoken of as the instruments of our salvation: benevolent holy creatures, no less. And Kundalimon is looked upon as some sort of prophet.” Hresh gave her a searching glance. “You know about the chapels? Do you go to them?”

  “No,” Nialli Apuilana said. “Never. But if they’re teaching that the hjjks are benevolent, they’re wrong. The hjjks have no benevolence. Not as we know the meaning of the word. But neither are they evil. They’re simply—themselves.”

  “Are they monsters, then, or holy creatures?”

  “Both. And neither.”

  Hresh considered a moment.

  “I thought you worshipped them,” he said. “That you wanted nothing more than to go to them, to live among them for the rest of your life. They live in an atmosphere of dreams and magic and wonder, you said. You breathe the air of the Nest, you told me, and it fills your soul.”

  “That was before.”

  “And now?”

  Wanly she shook her head. “I don’t know what I want. Or what I believe, not any more. Oh, father, father, I can hardly tell you what confusion I feel! Go to the Nest, says a voice within me, and live in eternal Queen-love. Stay in Dawinno, says another voice. The hjjks aren’t what you’ve taken them to be, says that voice. One is the voice of the Queen, and the other—the other—” she looked at him with eyes bright with pain. “The other is the voice of the Five. And their voice is the one I want to obey.”

  Hresh peered at her, not believing it. This was the last thing he would have expected to hear from her.

  “The Five? You accepted the authority of the Five? Since when? That’s something new, Nialli.”

  “Not their authority, no, not really.”

  “What then?”

  “Their truth. Their wisdom. It came to me as I lay in the swamp. They entered me. I felt it, father. I thought I was dying, and they came to me. You know that I had no belief before that. But I do now.”

  “I see,” Hresh said vaguely. But he didn’t see at all. The more she told him, the less he seemed to understand. Even as he had begun to feel the pull of the Nest—which was partly her doing—she appeared to be turning away from it. “So there’s no likelihood that you’ll try to return to the Nest, now that you have your strength back?”

  “None, father. Not any more.”

  “Speak only the truth to me, girl.”

  “It is the truth. You know that I would have gone with Kundalimon. But now everything is changed. I’ve begun to doubt everything I once believed, and to believe everything I once doubted. The world’s become a mystery to me. I need to stay right here and sort things out before I do anything.”

  “Can I believe you, I wonder?”

  “I swear it! I swear by any god there is. I swear it by the Queen, father.”

  She reached her hand toward his. He took it and held it as though it were a precious object.

  Then he said, “What a puzzle you are, Nialli! Almost as great a puzzle as the hjjks themselves!” He smiled tenderly. “You’ll always be a puzzle to me, I suppose. But at least I think I’m beginning to understand the hjjks.”

  “Are you, father?”

  “Look at this,” he said. “A newly discovered text, very ancient.”

  Carefully he drew a vellum scroll from the larger of his two caskets of chronicles, and undid its fastening. He laid it on the table before her.

  Nialli Apuilana leaned forward to peer at it. “Where was it found?”

  “In my collection of chronicles. It was there all along, actually. But it was in Beng, a very ancient form of Beng almost impossible to understand. So I didn’t pay much attention to it. Puit Kjai suggested finally that I ought to look at it, when I told him I was doing research in hjjk history. He was the keeper of the Beng chronicles, you know, before they were turned over to me. He helped me learn how to read it.”

  She put her hands to the manuscript. “May I?”

  “It won’t do you any good. But go ahead.”

  He watched her as she bent over the text. The writing was unintelligible to her, of course. These ancient Beng hieroglyphics were nothing like the characters in use nowadays, and wouldn’t tune themselves easily to a modern mind. But Nialli Apuilana seemed determined to master them. How very much like me she is in some ways, Hresh thought. And how different in so many others.

  She murmured under her breath, pressed her fingertips harder, struggled to bring sense out of the page. When it seemed to him that she had wrestled with it long enough he reached for the manuscript to decipher it for her, but she shook him away and continued to work at it.

  He looked at her and his heart overflowed with warmth. He had so many times given her up for lost; and yet here she was, quietly sitting with him in his study, as she had so often done when she was a child.

  Her strength and determination as she toiled over the ancient manuscript delighted him. Seeing her like this, he could see Taniane reborn in her, and it took him back to the days when he was young, when he and Taniane had roamed Vengiboneeza together in search of the secrets of the Great World.

  But Nialli was something more than a mere duplicate of her mother. He could see the Hresh in her too. She was volatile and impulsive, a spooky willful child, as he had been. Before her capture by the hjjks she had been outgoing and exuberant, but also—as he had been—lonely, alienated, inquisitive, odd. How he loved her! How deeply he felt for her!

  She looked up from the scroll. “It’s like the language they speak in dreams. Nothing will hold still long enough for me to find its meaning.”

  “So I felt also. But not any longer.”

  She gave him the manuscript. He put his fingers to it and the strange archaic phrases rose to his mind.

  “It’s a document of the very early years of the Long Winter,” he said. “When all the tribes of the People were newly cocooned. There were some warriors of the Bengs who wouldn’t believe that they had to spend all their lives in hiding, and one of them made a Going Forth to see if the outer world could be reclaimed. You must realize that this was thousands of years before our own three premature departures from the cocoon, what we call the Cold Awakening, the Wrongful Glow, and the Unhappy Dawn. Most of the text is missing, but what we have is this—

  “And then I stood in the land of ice and a terrible death of the heart came upon me, for I knew that I would not live.

  “Then did I turn, and seek again the place of my people. But the mouth of the cave I could not find. And the hjjken-folk came upon me and seized me where I stood, laying their hands upon me and carrying me away, but I was free of fear, for I was a dead man already, and who can die the death more than once? There were twenty of them and very frightsome of aspect, and they did lay their hands on me and take me to the warm dark place where they lived, which was like unto the cocoon, but greatly larger, in the ground extending farther than I could see, with many avenues and side-passages going in every way.

  “And there was in this place the Great Hjjken, a monster of huge and most formidable size, the sight of which made the blood run backward in my vessels. But she touched the soul of my soul with the second sight of her, and she said unto me, ‘Behold, I give you peace and love’, and I was not afraid. For the touch of her soul on my soul was like being taken into the arms of a great Mother, and I did marvel greatly that so huge and frightsome a beast could be so comforting. And also she said, You are come to me too soon, for my time i
s not yet. But when the world wakens into warmth will I embrace you all.

  “Which was all she said, and never did I speak with her again. But I did stay among the hjjken twenty days and twenty nights, the count of which I did keep most carefully, and lesser hjjken did ask of me with the voices of their inner minds a great many questions concerning my People and how we live and what we believe, and also they did tell me something of what it is that they believe, though that is all hazy in my mind, and was even as they told it me. And I did eat of their food, which is a dreadful mash that they do chew and spit forth for their companions to eat after them, and which gave me sore revulsion at first, though later hunger overcame me and I did eat of it and find it less hateful than might be thought. Then when they ceased to question me did they say to me, We will take you to your nation now, and led me forth into the bitter cold and deadly snows, and did conduct me thenceforward—”

  Hresh laid the scroll down.

  “That’s where it ends?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

  “It breaks off there. But what there is of it is clear enough.”

  “And what does it tell you, father?”

  “It explains, I think, the taking of captives by the hjjks. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Evidently it’s so they can study us. But they care for the captives and eventually they let them go, some of them, at least, as they did with that poor foolish Beng warrior who they found wandering around on the icefields.”

  “So this is what has led you to cease thinking of them as monsters.”

  “I never believed they were monsters,” said Hresh. “Enemies, yes, ruthless and dangerous enemies. Remember, I was there when they attacked Yissou. But perhaps they aren’t even that. After all this time we don’t really know what they are. We’ve never even begun to understand them. We hate them simply because they’re unknown.”

  “And they probably always will be.”

  “I thought you said you understood them.”

  “I understand very little, father. I may have thought I did, but I was wrong. Who understands why the Five send us storms, or heat or cold, or famines? They must have their reasons, but how can we presume to say what they are? So it is with the Queen. She’s like a force of the universe. It’s impossible to understand Her. I know a little of what the Nest is like, its shape and smell and how life is lived there. But that’s mere knowledge. Knowledge isn’t understanding. I’ve started to see that no one who is of the People can even begin to understand the Queen. Except—just possibly—someone who has been in the Nest.”