At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  He studied the way of life of the cocoon era until he began to feel like a cocoon-dweller himself. Those snug cozy burrows, insulated chambers deep in the ground, self-sufficient, sealed away from the cold, carved out by the patient labor of generations—what marvels of architecture they must have been! A maze of passageways twisting and forking like serpents, a network of intricate ventilation shafts providing fresh air, clusters of luminescent glowberries for lighting, water pumped up from streams far underground, special chambers for raising crops and livestock—

  Soon he and Thalarne would be venturing into the holiest cocoon of all, the one from which Hresh and Koshmar and the rest of the great city-builders had come. When all of the planning was complete, a week or ten days from now, they would set out from Yissou in a cavalcade of motor vehicles on a journey that would take them halfway across the continent in search of the supposed site of the ancestral cocoon. Together they would uncover its buried secrets. Thalarne would be at his side, a woman like no woman he had ever known, beautiful slender Thalarne of the emerald eyes and the dark sleek fur, Thalarne of the quick, questing mind and the elegant vibrant body—Thalarne—oh, how he loved her!

  But then everything fell apart.

  First, practically on the eve of departure, they quarreled. It was over a trifle, an absurd trifle. And then, just as Nortekku was beginning to believe that everything had been patched up, Thalarne’s mate Hamiruld came to him unexpectedly with news that the expedition was cancelled.

  “Cancelled?” Nortekku said, amazed. “But I’m almost finished with all the arrangements! How—why—?”

  Hamiruld shrugged. He appeared scarcely to care. Hamiruld was marvelously indifferent to almost everything, up to and including Nortekku’s month’s-long romance with his mate. “She asked me to tell you that something else has come up, something more important. That’s all I know.”

  “All because of that stupid argument we had?”

  Another shrug. Hamiruld’s bland reddish-gray eyes seemed to be gazing into some other dimension. Idly he patted down a tangle in his fur. “I wouldn’t know about that. Something more important, she said.”

  Nortekku felt as though he had been punched. Cancelled? Cancelled? Just like that?

  “If that’s so,” he said to Hamiruld, “I’ve got to talk to her right now. Where is she? At home, or at the Institute?”

  “Neither one,” Hamiruld said.

  “Neither?”

  “I’m afraid she’s gone,” said Hamiruld mildly.

  “Gone? Where?” This was bewildering. Nortekku wanted to shake him.

  “I don’t actually know,” said Hamiruld, giving Nortekku a quick, pallid little smile. “She left very quickly, last night, without telling me where she was going. I didn’t see her. All there was was this message, asking me to let you know that the expedition was off.” There seemed to be a glint of malice behind the smile. Perhaps Hamiruld isn’t quite as indifferent to things as he leads one to believe, Nortekku thought.

  Cancelled. Something more important has come up.

  What do I do now, he wondered?

  It was his engagement to the Princess Silina of Dawinno—or, rather, an indirect consequence of his impulsive breaking off of that engagement—that had brought Nortekku into contact with Thalarne in the first place. Giving him not the slightest hint of his intentions, Nortekku’s father had arranged a marriage for his only child with the vapid but highborn Silina, whose ancestral line went back to some helmet-wearing chieftain of the Beng tribe that had played such a key part in the early days of the city-founding era.

  The elder Nortekku was one of the wealthiest and most successful members of the merchant class that was coming to wield the real economic and political power in Dawinno. For him the mating would provide his family with the touch of aristocracy that was the only asset it lacked. To his son, though, it felt like an intolerable intrusion on his freedom of choice. He had never been involved with any one woman for very long, had never even considered taking any of them as his mate, had not even been thinking about such things. And he had seen enough of silly Silina over the years, in the course of the regular social round of the Dawinnan upper classes, to know that she was close to the last woman he would want as his mate, assuming he wanted one at all.

  He tried to keep those feelings hidden. He did try. But then, with plans for the nuptials already far along, it all suddenly overflowed in him. Angrily Nortekku told his father that he rejected the entire arrangement and was indignant that it had been set up without consulting him. He would never marry, he said, never, never, never—not the Princess Silina, not anyone. All of which was met, just as heatedly, with a blazing glare, a snarl of fury, and a quick, explicit threat of disinheritance.

  “As you wish,” Nortekku replied, without a moment’s hesitation. He had never had any interest in his father’s wealth or in the dreary commercial pursuits that had created it. He had taken up architecture as his profession instead of going into the family firm because he wanted to accomplish something in his own right, not simply become the passive beneficiary of the older man’s boundless riches. Yearning to penetrate deep secrets, he had aspired originally to be an astronomer; but although there was poetry in him there was not quite enough mathematics, and so the choice had fallen upon architecture instead. “Keep your money, father. Give it to the poor. I’m not for sale.”

  “So you’ll go to her family, then, and tell them to their faces that you’re breaking off the betrothal? Just like that, sorry, it was all a mistake, goodbye, poof! What do you think Prince Vuldimin will say?”

  That was a difficult one. Prince Vuldimin, the shrewd and powerful cousin of King Falid of Yissou, was Nortekku’s most important client at the moment, and Nortekku’s whole professional relationship with him was an outgrowth of the marital negotiations. Vuldimin had come to Dawinno earlier in the year in search of an architect to design a new palace for him in the countryside outside Yissou, a palace that would favor the bright, airy, swooping look of modern Dawinnan architecture rather than the crabbed and somber style typical of Yissou.

  That project fell to Nortekku because Vuldimin was distantly related to Silina’s father, who was, for all his lofty ancestry, an impoverished aristocrat eager to see Silina married off to a man of wealth and importance. He saw the job of designing Vuldimin’s palace as a useful step in the building of his future son-in-law’s career, and arranged a meeting between Nortekku and the prince. It went very well: Vuldimin spelled out his ideas for the new palace, Nortekku dared to make some suggestions for bettering them, and Vuldimin showed what appeared to be unfeigned enthusiasm. And so two contracts were drawn up, one pledging the troth of Silina and Nortekku, the other engaging Nortekku as the architect of Vuldimin’s palace. The voiding of one contract now might well cause the other to be broken as well, with disastrous results for Nortekku’s career.

  Well, there was no helping any of it. If his father refused to name him as his heir, if Vuldimin withdrew the commission for designing the palace, so be it. Nortekku wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life listening to the Princess Silina’s whinnying laughter and mindless girlish chatter.

  The day he went to pay the ceremonial call on Silina’s family to explain his reluctance to undertake the mating, it happened, just to make everything worse, that Prince Vuldimin was there. But there was no turning back. Silina’s parents and brothers and cousins and uncles, perhaps anticipating what he was about to say, stood arrayed before him like a court of inquisition, every one of them glaring at him with those eerie crimson Beng eyes of theirs, while he lamely told them that he had looked into the depths of his soul in the past few weeks and seen how hastily, carried away by his infatuation with Silina’s great beauty and fascinating personality, he had allowed himself to plunge into the marriage contract.

  He understood now how rash that decision had been, he said.

  He did not see how the marriage could be a success.

  He told them that he felt unr
eady for mating, that he was too callow and flighty to be able to offer a splendid woman like Silina the sort of life she deserved, that he felt covered with shame and chagrin but saw no alternative but to withdraw from the contract. It was his hope, he said, that the Princess Silina would before long find a mate more worthy of her than he could possibly be.

  This produced an immediate uproar, loud and intense. Nortekku considered the possibility that there might even be violence. Silina, sobbing, rushed from the room. Her parents puffed up in rage like infuriated adders. The brothers and cousins and uncles shook fists and shouted. Threats of legal action were uttered.

  There was something almost comic about it, Nortekku thought, although he knew that the developments following upon his repudiation of Silina were not likely to be in any way amusing. He stood stock-still in the midst of the clamor, pondering how he was going to manage to make his escape.

  In the end it was Prince Vuldimin, who had witnessed the whole scene from the side, who rescued him. The prince, a short, stocky older man of almost regal presence and authority, cut through the hub-bub with a few quick pacifying words, delivered in a tone that could not fail to gain attention, and in the moment of shocked calm that ensued took Nortekku by the elbow and led him swiftly from the room.

  When they were outside, Nortekku saw that the prince was smiling, even choking back a giggle. A great flood of relief washed over him.

  I have an ally here, he realized.

  The prince, who must understand his kinsmen here as well as anyone, had plainly sized up the situation in a moment and his sympathies were all with Nortekku. Thanks be to all the gods for that, Nortekku told himself.

  “What a pack of buffoons,” Vuldimin murmured. “How did you ever get entangled with them, anyway? Were you really so very infatuated with the princess?”

  “Not for a second,” Nortekku said. “It was all my father’s doing. He arranged it and told me about it afterward.—But I’m in trouble now, aren’t I? What do you think will happen next?”

  “Nothing that you’re going to like. If they’re wise, they’ll hush the whole thing up and try to find another husband for their girl before she gets branded as unmarriageable. But, as you see, they aren’t wise. So there’ll probably be a noisy lawsuit, breach of contract, defamation of character, the gods only know what else. They’ll want to portray you as a worthless adventurer, an evil seducer, a shameless social climber—”

  “I seduced no one here. And if I’m such a shameless social climber, why would I back out of a mating with a Beng princess, however much of a ninny she may be? There’s no sense to any of that.”

  “Maybe so. But there’d be plenty of sense to suing you if the real goal is to squeeze a couple of million units out of your father to settle the suit.”

  Nortekku gasped. “He’s already threatened to disinherit me if I don’t go through with the wedding. He’s certainly not going to pay my legal bills. And I don’t have a unit of my own to my name.”

  Vuldimin seemed to know that already. There was an almost fatherly warmth in his golden eyes as he looked up toward the much taller Nortekku and said, “Then the best thing for you is to get out of town for a while. Come up to Yissou; stay at my estate for a month or two. We’ll say that you need to begin surveying the site of the country palace. There’s truth in that, after all. And process servers from Dawinno have no jurisdiction up there, so the lawsuit will be stalled for however much time you’re out of town, and perhaps in your absence I can talk my kinsmen here into forgetting about the whole unfortunate event without making it even worse by suing. Once they realize that your father isn’t going to underwrite any settlement they may be willing to be rational about things. But in the meanwhile, get yourself to my place in Yissou and wait it out. What do you say?”

  “I couldn’t be more grateful, your grace,” said Nortekku, and thought for one wild moment that he was about to burst into tears.

  That night he left for Yissou, not aboard the regular evening train but—at Vuldimin’s suggestion—as a passenger on a freight caravan, where no Dawinno bailiff would be likely to look for him. In Yissou he was given lavish quarters at Vuldimin’s sprawling dark-walled palace just off an enormous square known as the Plaza of the Sun, and during the succeeding weeks was treated by the prince’s huge staff of servants as though he were a visiting member of some royal house. Vuldimin himself returned from Dawinno shortly, assured Nortekku that his problems with Silina’s family would in one way or another be overcome, and made it clear that his breaking of the marriage contract would in no way affect the commission to build the new palace.

  Nortekku had never cared much for Yissou, which was far to the north of Dawinno and had a much colder climate, especially now, in winter. One’s first view of the city was utterly off-putting. Its entire core was surrounded by a colossal, brooding wall of black stone, a wall of enormous height and breadth that had been constructed nearly two centuries before by one of the earliest kings of the city, who feared all manner of enemies both real and unreal and had devoted a reign of many decades to raising that wall ever higher and higher, until its implacable shadow came to dominate almost the whole of the city within.

  Once you were inside the wall things were no prettier. Nortekku’s architect’s eye was offended by the cramped and twisting alleyways that passed for streets and the squat, ungraceful, ponderous stone buildings that filled them, each jammed up against the next, low thick-walled ground-hugging boxes with the narrowest of slits to serve as windows. Marketplaces had been situated with seeming randomness throughout the city, so you were assailed everywhere by the smell of produce that was no longer fresh and seafood that had spent too many days away from the sea. And one whole quarter of the city was populated by Hjjks, those giant yellow-and-black insect creatures that were the only one of the Six Peoples of the Great World that had survived the cataclysm of the death-stars. Nortekku had no great fondness for Hjjks, even though the ancient threat of warfare between the hive-dwellers and the People had subsided more than a century ago. He was displeased by the look of them, their dry, harsh, chittering voices, their icy alien reserve. But there were very few of them in Dawinno, far to the south, and he rarely encountered one there. Here in Yissou, much closer to the bleak Hjjk homeland that spanned the northern half of the continent, one saw them everywhere, tall menacing-looking six-legged creatures with formidable claws and beaks. He greatly disliked rubbing shoulders with them in the streets.

  Still, life in Yissou had its compensations. Vuldimin’s palace was handsome and comfortable, and so long as Nortekku stayed indoors the ugliness and dank coldness of the city were no problem for him. Vuldimin himself was warm and friendly in a quasi-paternal way, and clearly had taken a liking to him. Nortekku, who had never known much in the way of affection from his own blustering, churlish father, found that very welcome. And it was the prince, rather than Yissou’s monarch, his gloomy cousin Falid, who was at the center of Yissou’s social and political life. Vuldimin was a man of great cultivation and progressive ideas, unarguably superior in intellect and vision and charisma to the cautious, reactionary king, and it was to him that Yissou’s brightest and most interesting people flocked. Thus it came to pass that Nortekku, at one of the regular assemblages of industrialists and scientists and artists one evening at Prince Vuldimin’s palace, found himself face to face with the brilliant young archaeologist Thalarne and had his life turned upside down between one moment and the next.

  He had noticed her from the far side of the room, engaged in an animated conversation with six or seven persons who, Nortekku observed, all happened to be men. She was an instantaneously compelling sight: tall, nearly as tall as Nortekku himself, with a fine figure and a thick, gleaming pelt of dark fur spotted here and there by oval splotches of dazzling white.

  Every aspect of her commanded attention. Her eyes were of a rich emerald color, glistening with an inner light; her features were delicately and beautifully formed, her expression a searching, m
obile one; her stance was alert and dynamic. She wore the vivid yellow sash that Nortekku knew indicated membership in Yissou’s Institute of Scientific Study, the counterpart of his own city’s great research center, the House of Knowledge. Several of the men surrounding her wore the yellow sash also.

  Nortekku drifted closer.

  She was speaking of the tendency of sophisticated people in Yissou nowadays to regard the stories of the People’s past as just that stories, mere myth. Indeed Nortekku had encountered the same phenomenon among his friends in Dawinno, who brushed the popular historical tales aside as the stuff of legend. Had there ever really been a Long Winter? Did the People actually live once upon a time in underground cocoons? Had the Great World truly been as magnificent as the legends would have it?

  “We have the evidence of the Chronicles, of course,” one of the men said.

  “So we do,” said another, “but how do we know that they represent actual history? They may be no more reliable than the history plays we see in the theater.”

  “Yes. Torlyri and Trei Husathirn,” said a third man. “The Boyhood of Hresh. Hresh at the Nest of Nests.”

  “And there’s that play about Nialli Apuilana and her captivity among the Hjjks, and how she faced down the Hjjk Queen and defeated Her,” said another.

  “You speak of them as though they’re just fiction,” the first man said. “These people actually existed. They really did the things that they’re credited with doing. Otherwise, how did we get here? Who led us from the cocoon, if not Koshmar and Torlyri? Who founded the cities, if not Hresh and Harruel and Salaman? Who drove back the Hjjks when they wanted to take over all our land? Why, Thalarne here is a direct descendant herself of Taniane, Hresh, Thu-Kimnibol—”

  “They were real, yes,” said the second man. “But can we be sure that any of their great deeds actually took place? What if it’s all just a bunch of children’s fables?”

  It was at that point, by which time Nortekku had brought himself to the very edge of the circle around Thalarne and was standing directly opposite her, that she said, in a deep, throaty voice that made him tingle with delight, “Which is exactly why all the evidence of the Chronicles needs to be challenged, reviewed, subjected to modern scientific examination. And the first step in that, I think, is to retrace the great trek, eastward all the way to the Hallimalla, and find the original Koshmar cocoon. Which is what I intend to do.”