At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  And he would have to prepare himself, Thalarne said, for a certain amount of discomfort. Did he know what seasickness was? The winter seas in these latitudes were not easy. Nortekku brushed that part of it aside also, making a fine show of not thoroughly heartfelt bravado. They would be together: what could a few bothersome storms matter? Their initial destination, she said, was Sempinore, a port city on the southern coast of the northern continent. There they would spend a week or so replenishing their supplies, and then they would set out southward across the Inland Sea, a journey of only a few days, to the secret location of the Sea-Lord colony on the northern shore of the other continent.

  It was all going to take much longer than he had expected, he saw. Nortekku fidgeted a bit, thinking about the expenses. After a time he said, “I hate to bring this up, but I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with the cost of this much traveling. You ought to know, Thalarne, that I’m not a rich man. My father is, yes, but he and I—”

  “There won’t be any expense,” she said crisply. “The entire expedition is being underwritten by a syndicate of wealthy and prominent Western Coast individuals, both from Dawinno and Yissou, which is how I happened to learn about the project at all. Our friend Prince Til-Menimat, for one.”

  “So he’s behind this one, too? How did he get to be part of it?”

  “He’s currently financing the excavations in Thisthissima, right down the coast from Bornigrayal. The Bornigrayan archaeologists who made the Sea-Lord discovery are connected with that work too. Thisthissima, you know, is built right on top of a major Great World city, and some very fruitful digging has been going on the past couple of years. So the Bornigrayal people came to Til-Menimat and said, ‘Listen, your grace, we’re on to something very big over across the Eastern Ocean, but we need serious funding in order to go ahead with it, and therefore—’”

  Nortekku began to feel just a little dazed. He understood the hunger to unearth the buried remnants of the world’s forgotten epochs, here in these constantly burgeoning years of the New Springtime. But only since becoming involved with Thalarne had he come to understand how fierce that hunger was. There was something ugly about it. Highborns from every city seemed to be competing frenziedly with one another in the race to uncover the secrets of all those lost yesterdays. Til-Menimat was a charming, cultured man, but in his lust to own pieces of the Great World he seemed to have greedy tentacles outstretched everywhere.

  He walked to the window. The morning sun was high, now, painting a fiery orange track across the snowy fields below.

  “So this is just an artifact-hunting operation, then?” he asked.

  “Not just an artifact-hunting operation. That part of it won’t be any concern of yours or mine. But we’ll be there to do scientific work. Studying the Sea-Lords.”

  “While these other archaeologists do the treasure hunting. These Bornigrayal people.”

  “Yes,” she said. “A man and a woman, Kanibond Graysz and his mate Siglondan. I’ve had a little correspondence with them, and I met them for the first time the other day, but I don’t really know much about them. It seems that they were in Sempinore consulting the archives there when some local Hjjks came to them and said that they had made a very interesting discovery over on the other side of the Inland Sea. So Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan went over with them to have a look, and there were the Sea-Lords. They hurried back to Bornigrayal, and then down to Thisthissima when they heard that Prince Til-Menimat happened to be back east touring the Thisthissima excavations just then. And that was when they told him about the discovery and got him to put up the money for this new expedition.”

  Nortekku nodded distantly. One aspect of the story had begun to bother him as this part of her story unfolded. “But you were right on the verge of setting out on our cocoon expedition, which Til-Menimat was also underwriting. Why would he have wanted to pull you off that and send you flying out to Bornigrayal?”

  “He didn’t,” Thalarne said. All resonance had suddenly fled from her tone, and her voice sounded hollow and dead. “It was Hamiruld who got me mixed up in this.”

  “Hamiruld?” he said, in a voice as suddenly leaden as hers.

  So he was in this too. The revelation came with the force of a blow. Every one of these highborns seemed linked to each of the rest in their worldwide dealings. They were all over the place. You came upon one where you didn’t expect him and then you saw that there was another of his kind standing right next to him. For all he knew, Prince Samnibolon was part of the group too. And had been quietly smiling within while Nortekku went on and on, the other day at the Embassy, about Thalarne’s having come to Bornigrayal on “family business.”

  Speaking a little too quickly, Thalarne said, “Prince Til-Menimat invited him into the syndicate, you see. They’ve gone into a lot of these things together. But Hamiruld pointed out that an out-and-out artifact-collecting expedition would raise some ethical problems, considering that what was involved was a bunch of actual living Sea-Lords. I mean, it’s one thing to dig up artifacts on an uninhabited site a million years old, and another thing entirely to take them from living people. Some archaeologist whose interests were purely scientific ought to go along also, Hamiruld said, for the sake of keeping an eye on the two Bornigrayans and make sure that everything was carried out in an appropriate way.”

  “Someone like you,” Nortekku said.

  “Someone like me, yes.”

  “Even though the artifacts are going to get taken anyway, whether you’re keeping an eye on things or not?”

  She gave him a pained look. “Don’t press me too hard on this, Nortekku. If I want to be part of the expedition at all, I can’t make myself too much of an obstacle. I know there are problems here. I’ll do whatever I can.”

  Everything was falling into place now for him. Hamiruld not only had known all along about her running off that way to Bornigrayal, he had engineered her leaving town himself. Unwilling, despite his pretense of indifference, to have Thalarne and Nortekku spend cozy weeks or even months digging things up together out by the Hallimalla, Hamiruld had maneuvered her into a place on this Sea-Lord expedition. Til-Menimat would surely have seen the importance of the discovery, and it might not have been hard to convince him that the cocoon venture could always wait for some other time, that the Sea-Lord journey must come first, and that Thalarne’s presence on it was necessary to provide scientific cover for the real purposes of the project. And then, after having shipped Thalarne safely off to the other side of the world, presumably far beyond Nortekku’s reach, Hamiruld would prevent Nortekku from finding out where she was by coolly pretending to him that he had no information whatever about where she had gone.

  Nortekku could understand all that easily enough. Hamiruld must have been more annoyed by Thalarne’s affair with him than he wanted to admit. Any man, even one who had countenanced the sort of things in his marriage that Hamiruld evidently had, might be expected to react in that way to an affair that gave the appearance of going well beyond the previously defined bounds of their arrangement.

  Well, he had thwarted Hamiruld’s scheme—but only because Hamiruld had been careless enough to tell Khardakhor that Thalarne had gone to Bornigrayal, never dreaming that Khardakhor would share the news with the son of his worst enemy. What still disturbed him, though, was the agitation Thalarne had displayed when she discovered that Hamiruld had blatantly altered the message she had given him about going to Bornigrayal, and the hesitation she had shown in revealing to him that Hamiruld was actually a key player in this Sea-Lord enterprise.

  In his quiet way Hamiruld held plenty of power over her, he saw. On some level she must still be uneasy about his presence as a third partner in her marriage—that the marriage itself still had more of a hold on her than she would like him to think, that she seemed eager to gloss swiftly over anything that might demonstrate to him that Hamiruld still played a significant role in her life. It was clear now that Hamiruld intended to fight to keep his marriage
intact; what was not so clear, Nortekku thought, was what Thalarne’s own position on the future of that marriage might be.

  “You’re very quiet,” Thalarne said, in something more like her normal tone of voice.

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  “The risks of the trip? The part about collecting artifacts? The fact that Hamiruld is involved?”

  “All of it.”

  “Oh, Nortekku—”

  They stood facing each other across the room for a moment. He had no idea what to say. Neither, it seemed, did she. But only for a moment. The same bright glow came into her eyes that he had seen at their first meeting, back in Yissou, what felt like eons ago. She stretched her arms toward him.

  “Come here,” she said.

  The ship was much smaller than Nortekku had expected—a tubby, wide-bodied vessel, oddly square-looking, fashioned from thick planks of some kind of blackish wood, that sat low in the water along a weather-beaten pier at the harbor of Bornigrayal. It was hard to believe that a clumsy little craft like that, which seemed scarcely big enough to pass as a riverboat, would be able to carry them all the way across the immensities of the Eastern Ocean in anything less than a lifetime and a half.

  Once he was aboard, though, he saw that he had greatly underestimated the vessel’s size. There was much more of it below the water line than was visible from dockside. Two parallel corridors ran its length, with a host of small low-ceilinged cabins branching off from them, and a series of spacious cargo holds at front and back. Nortekku and Thalarne were going to share a cabin near the ship’s bow. “This will be a little complicated,” she told him. “Kanibond Graysz knows that I’m the wife of one of the backers of the expedition. I’ve booked only one cabin, and they’ve let me know that they can’t or won’t make another one available. But I don’t dare try to pass you off as Hamiruld.”

  “Shall we just say we’re very good friends?” Nortekku asked.

  “Don’t joke. I’ve let it be known that we’re brother and sister. When we’re in public, make sure you behave that way.”

  “I hate telling lies, Thalarne. You know that.”

  “Tell this one. For me.”

  “Can we at least be a particularly friendly brother and sister, then?”

  “Please, Nortekku.”

  “What if anyone passing our cabin at night happens to hear sounds coming out of it that might not be considered appropriate for a brother and sister to be making?”

  “Please,” Thalarne said, as irritated as he had ever heard her sound. “You know how badly I wanted you to accompany me on this expedition. But stirring up a scandal won’t achieve anything for anybody. I don’t think anybody’s going to care, but we need to observe the forms, anyway. Is that clear, brother?”

  He forced a grin. “Completely, sister.”

  Their cabin was ridiculously tiny. The two narrow bunks, one above the other, took up more than half of it. They had one small cabinet for their possessions, and a washbasin. There was scarcely room to turn around in the middle of the floor. The atmosphere in the room was pervaded by the thick, piercing odor of some caulking compound, close to nauseating at first, though Nortekku found himself rapidly getting used to it. A single slitlike opening, not even a hand’s-breadth wide, was their window to the outside world. When he pushed the shutter aside a harsh stream of cold air, salty and acrid and unpleasant, drifted in through it, filling the room with a rank, heavy smell that cut through the other one. The smell of the sea, he thought. Of multitudes of fishes, of seaweed, of scuttling sea-creatures moving about just beyond the hull. He had never smelled anything like it before, insistent, commanding, hostile.

  The Bornigrayans, Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan, had the cabin just across the corridor. They would have made a far more plausible brother-sister pair than Nortekku and Thalarne: indeed they might almost have been twins. They both were small and fine-boned, both were white-furred, though not from age, both had small alert close-set eyes, his a sharp yellow, hers blue-green. Their faces were cold and pinched, and when they looked at you out of those small bright eyes it was in what struck Nortekku as a shifty, calculating way, as though they were measuring you for some kind of swindle. He found himself taking an instant irrational dislike to them.

  But they were affable enough. They greeted Thalarne warmly and showed no sign of surprise that she had suddenly produced a brother as a traveling companion. Wisely, she introduced him as the architect that he was, rather than as any sort of archaeologist, but explained that he had a deep and abiding interest in Great World history—a hobby of his since childhood, she said and had begged her to be taken along. If they had any misgivings about that, they said nothing about them. They talked mostly about the excitement of what lay ahead, the great discoveries that were certain to be made. Not that Nortekku had an easy time understanding them: the language spoken in Bornigrayal was essentially no more than a dialect of that of the West Coast, but the pronunciation and placing of accents differed in a number of significant ways, words were often slurred, other words were entirely unfamiliar, and at all times the two Bornigrayans spoke so quickly that Nortekku found himself lagging a sentence or two behind. Still, they produced a flask of superb Bornigrayan brandy, of a truly extraordinary smoothness and tang, and the four of them solemnly raised a toast to each other and to the success of the expedition. No one who would share brandy of that quality with people they barely knew could be altogether bad, Nortekku decided.

  As the Bornigrayans poured a second round there came the shattering sound of the ship’s horn, three mighty blasts. Then the whole vessel began to quiver and from somewhere far below came the drumbeat pounding of the engines. The journey was beginning.

  Within moments Nortekku heard a frightful creaking sound that he realized must be the first movements of the ship’s two great paddlewheels. They went up on deck to watch as the ship pulled out. There was room for perhaps eight people up there, along with a couple of lifeboats, a sputtering oil lamp, a bell hanging in the bow. The planks were stained and unevenly laid. A flimsy-looking rail was all that guarded the deck’s margin.

  The day was cold, the sky bleak, a few wisps of snow swirling about. Ominous green lightning was crackling far out at sea. Quickly, but with a troublesome sidewise swaying motion, not quite sickening but distinctly unsettling, the ship moved away from Bornigrayal and on into the gray, unwelcoming ocean. This close to land the water was fairly calm, but dismaying-looking waves were curling along the surface out by the horizon. There would surely be worse to come. The sea is very wide, Nortekku thought, and our ship is so small.

  “You look unhappy,” Thalarne murmured at his side.

  “I think this is scarier than flying, and flying is scary enough. But if your airwagon falls out of the sky you die right away. I suspect that drowning is slow and hideous.”

  “No doubt it is. So let’s try not to drown, all right?”

  Gloomily he said, “Wouldn’t one good wave be sufficient to turn this ship upside down?”

  She looked entirely unperturbed about that: amused, even, by his fears. By way of dismissing them she invented even worse ones for him, slimy sea-monsters rising from the depths and swarming across the deck, or gigantic ocean-going birds swooping down from on high to carry off unsuspecting passengers, or a sudden whirlpool in the sea that would suck the ship down like a ravening monster. He admired her casual attitude—outwardly casual, at least—toward the perils of the sea, and felt abashed for his own faintheartedness. But he went on feeling miserable all the same, and before long returned to their cabin, pleading chill.

  At twilight the eastern sky dimmed swiftly, deep blue streaked with red, then a brooding grayish purple, then black. All sight of land had disappeared. They were alone in a seemingly endless expanse of water.

  But as one day slid into the next no sea-monsters turned up, nor whirlpools or other menaces, and though a storm swept over them on the fourth or fifth day out, lifting awesome waves that
went crashing across the ship’s bow, the crewmen behaved as though they were unconcerned and nothing untoward occurred. Nortekku felt himself sliding into the rhythm of the voyage. His fears subsided. Despite all the constraints that their brother-sister masquerade entailed, it was delightful to have Thalarne close beside him all the time, delightful to know that night after night he could climb down from his upper berth and find her welcoming arms outstretched to him.

  He was discovering, though, that that closeness was not without its drawbacks. In the cramped cabin they got on each other’s nerves all too easily. She had brought a little collection of books, as much as she could gather on short notice about the Great World and Sea-Lords in particular the day she had left for Bornigrayal. During the long hours of the day Nortekku studied them avidly, for what little good that did: they all had the same information, most of it sketchy and speculative. Often, though, Thalarne wanted to consult them too. Somehow whichever book he happened to be reading was the one she needed to look at, right now—or the other way around. Often that led to sharpness between them.

  They would heal these little conflicts, frequently, with bouts of coupling. But even that was hampered by the need not to be vocal in their taking of pleasure with each other lest they reveal to the Bornigrayans across the hall, or to some passing member of the crew, that their relationship was somewhat more intimate than that of brother and sister ordinarily should be.

  Not that it was at all certain that they had anyone fooled. On a morning when the sea was especially rough Nortekku was passing the time in the ship’s little lounge, and Thalarne had gone above—they tried now to give each other as much space as they could—when a couple of crewmen came down the stairs and one said to him, in that thick-tongued Bornigrayan dialect that Nortekku still had so much difficulty understanding, “You ought to go up. Your woman is sick on deck, pretty bad.”