Queen of Springtime (55 page)

“You have the contact focus with you?”

He understood somehow that the Queen meant the Barak Dayir.

“Yes.”

“Use it.”

He drew the Wonderstone from its pouch. It felt fiery in his hand. A profound chill of fear coursed through him, but it was met at once by a neutralizing warmth that seemed to come from the Queen.

He took a deep breath and entered into union with the stone.

At once there is a sound like a crack of thunder, or perhaps the world splitting apart on its hinges. His mind goes soaring across a vast abyss. As if he has dissolved, as if he is traveling on the wind. Impossible for him to comprehend where he is or what is happening; he has a sense only of an immensity containing an immensity, and, somewhere deep within it, a heart of fire burning with the power of ten thousand suns.

He is no longer aware of Nest-thinker’s presence, of the Queen-attendants, even of his own body. There is only that immensity surrounding him.

“What are you?” he asks.

“You know Me as the Queen of Queens.”

He understands. He is within the Queen, and not the minor one of the Nest he knows. All Nests are linked; all Queens are aspects of the one Queen. And that greatest of hjjks who lies in the realm of mysteries in the north has a Wonderstone too: holds it embedded within her vast flesh, indeed, and it is that Wonderstone now that speaks to his. The union of the Wonderstones joins him to the Queen of Queens. He is engulfed in that gigantic mass of alien flesh.

Hresh remembers now his mentor Noum om Beng saying, so very long ago, “We had what you call a Barak Dayir also. But our Wonderstone was taken by the hjjks.” Yes, and swallowed by their Queen; and this was it, the other contact focus, the Wonderstone that the Bengs had had and lost, the twin to the ancient magical thing he holds clutched in his sensing-organ.

“Now you will see,” says the Queen.

The heavens split wide. The years roll away, back and back and back, and the Barak Dayir traces a narrow flaming line across the centuries into the distant past. The Queen wishes to show him the vastness of Her race’s heritage.

He sees the world buried in the ice of the Long Winter: he sees tongues of frost creeping down into lands that had never known cold, and green tenderness blackening under the onslaught. Creatures to which he could not give names searching desperately for refuge, and folk of his own kind fleeing pitifully hither and yon. The tall pale tailless creatures whom he knew as humans move among them, saying,
Come, come, here is the cocoon, you will be saved.

And also he sees legions of hjjks, leaning unperturbed on their spears as the black wind whipped swirling snowflakes past them.

Onward, then, back, back, into the time before the cold, into the glory of the Great World, even. Huge slow-bodied quick-witted crocodilian sapphire-eyes folk on the porticos of their marble villas; sea-lords in their carriages, vegetals, mechanicals, all the strange and wondrous beings of that glorious era. Humans, again. And hjjks, always hjjks, myriads of them, perfectly organized, clear-minded and cold-eyed, living ever in accordance with the vast millennia-spanning scheme that was Egg-plan, moving among the other races, often spending years at a time in the Great World cities before returning to the Nest from which they came.

Will She take him backward even to the time before the Great World?

No. No, the voyage has reached its end. Hresh feels himself drawn forward again with dizzying speed, the images leaping past, everything in rapid motion, comet-tails in the sky, death-stars crashing down, the air turning black, the first snowstorms, the withered leaves, the world entombed in ice, the stoic patience of the doomed sapphire-eyes, the panicky flight of the desperate beasts, and the hjjks again, always the hjjks moving calmly outward to take possession of the frozen world even as the other races abandoned it.

There was a great stillness in the royal chamber.

They were in the Nest again. A sense of the age-old grandeur and perfection of the hjjk world resonated like the swelling sounds of an immense symphony in Hresh’s soul.

The Queen said, “Now you see us as we are. Why, then, do you make yourselves our enemies?”

“I am not your enemy.”

“Your people refuse to live in peace with us. Your people even now prepare to attack us.”

“What they do is wrong,” Hresh said. “I ask your forgiveness for it. I ask you to tell me if there is any way for your people and mine to live peacefully together.”

There was silence again, a very long one.

“I offered a treaty,” the Queen said.

“Is that the only way? To pen us up in the parts of the world that we already hold, and prevent us from going forth to explore the rest?”

“What value is it, this exploring? One piece of land is much like another. There are not so many of you that you need the entire world.”

“But to give up all hope of reaching outward into the unknown places—”

“Reaching outward! Reaching outward!” That huge pealing voice rang with royal contempt. “That is all you want, you little furry ones! Why not be content with what you have?”

“Is Egg-plan not a constant reaching-out?” Hresh asked boldly.

The Queen responded with a kind of enormous chuckle, as though answering a child so impudent that he was charming. “Egg-plan is the realization and fulfillment of that which has existed since before the beginning of time. It is not the creation of anything new, but only the final actualization of what has always been. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Hresh. “Yes, I think I do.”

“Your kind, boiling out of its hiding places when the time of cold ended, spreading like a disease over the land, multiplying your numbers unchecked, covering the Earth with cities of stone, fouling the land, darkening the air, staining the rivers as you turn them to your own use, pushing yourselves onward into places where you were never meant to be—you are the foe of Nest-truth. You are the enemy of Egg-plan. You are a wild force upon the orderly world. You are a plague, and must be contained. To eradicate you is impossible; but you must be contained. Do you understand Me, child of questions? Do you understand?”

“Yes. I understand, now.”

His sensing-organ tightened on the Barak Dayir. His entire body shivered with the force of the revelations sweeping through it.

He understood, beyond any doubt. And he knew that what he had come to see was more than the Queen had realized she was telling him.

The hjjks of the New Springtime were mere shadows of those who had lived during the time of the Great World. Those ancient hjjks had been venturers, voyagers, a race of bold merchants and explorers. They had journeyed the length and breadth of this and perhaps many other worlds as well in pursuit of their aims, lacing a bright red line of accomplishment through the rich fabric of the Great World.

But the Great World was long gone.

What were these hjjks who had survived? Still a great race, yes. But a fallen one, which had lost all of its technical skills and all of its outward thrust. They had become a profoundly conservative people, clinging to the fragments of their ancient glory and permitting nothing new to emerge.

What was it they most wanted, after all? Nothing more than to dig holes in the ground and live in the dark, performing eternal repetitive cycles of birth and reproduction and death, and once in a while sending their overflow population forth to dig a new hole somewhere else and start the cycle going there. They believed that the world could only be sustained by proper maintenance of the unvarying patterns of life. And they would do anything to assure the continued stability of those patterns.

This is great folly, Hresh thought.

The hjjks fear change because they’ve lived through so great a fall, and they dread some further descent. But change comes anyway. It was precisely because the Great World had done so well at insulating itself from change, Hresh told himself, that the gods had sent the death-stars upon them. The Great World had attained a kind of perfection, and perfection is something the gods cannot abide.

What the hjjks who had survived the catastrophe of the Long Winter still refused to comprehend was that Dawinno would inevitably have his way with them, whether they liked it or not. The Transformer always did. No living thing was exempt from change, no matter how deep in the earth it tried to hide, no matter how desperately it clung to its rituals of life. One had to respect the hjjks for what they had made out of the shards and splinters of their former existence. It was rigid, and therefore doomed, but in its own way it was awesomely perfect.

Building a different kind of static society wasn’t the answer. And for the first time in a long while Hresh saw hope for his own erratic, turbulent, unpredictable folk. Perhaps the world will be ours after all, he thought. Simply because we are so uncertain in our ways.

He had no idea how much time had passed. An hour, a day, perhaps a year. He knew that he had been lost in the strangest of dreams. There was absolute silence in the royal chamber. The Queen-attendants stood still as statues beside him.

Once more Hresh heard the tolling of the Queen’s great voice in his mind:

“Is there anything else you wish to know, child of questions?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I thank You for sharing Your wisdom with me, great Queen.”

With quick fierce strokes of his spearpoint Salaman sketched a map in the dark, moist earth.

“This is the City of Yissou”a tight circle, unbroken and unbreakable—“and this is where we are now, three days’ march to the northeast. Here is where the land begins to rise, the long wooded ridge that leads to Vengiboneeza. You remember, Thu-Kimnibol, we rode out that way together once.”

Thu-Kimnibol, peering intently at the sketch, grunted his assent.

“This,” said Salaman, drawing a triangle to the right of what he had already inscribed in the ground, “Is Vengiboneeza, utterly infested with hjjks. Here”he poked the ground viciously, some distance beyond the triangle—“is a lesser Nest, where the hjjks dwell who slaughtered our Acknowledgers. Here, here, and here”three more angry jabs—“are other small Nests. Then there’s a great open nothingness, unless we’re greatly mistaken. And here”he strode five paces upward, and gouged a ragged crater there—“is the thing we seek, the Nest of Nests itself.”

He turned and looked up at Thu-Kimnibol, who seemed immense to him this morning, mountainous, twice his true size. And his true size had been more than big enough.

Last night Salaman’s spy Gardinak Cheysz had come to him to confirm what the king already suspected: that the friendship between Thu-Kimnibol and his kinswoman was more than a friendship, that in fact they were coupling-partners now. Perhaps twining-partners as well. Was that something recent? Apparently so, Gardinak Cheysz thought. At least the two of them had never been linked in gossip in the past.

An end to all hope of mating him with Weiawala, then. A pity, that. It would have been useful linking him to the royal house of Yissou. Now Thu-Kimnibol’s unexpected romance with the daughter of Taniane made it all the more likely that he’d emerge as the master of the City of Dawinno when Taniane was gone. A king there, instead of a chieftain? Salaman wondered what that would mean for himself and for his city. Perhaps it was for the best. But very possibly not.

Thu-Kimnibol said, “And what plan do you propose, now?”

Salaman tipped the ground with his spear. “Vengiboneeza is the immediate problem. Yissou only knows how many hjjks are swarming in there, but it has to be a million or more. We need to neutralize them all before we can proceed northward, or otherwise there’ll be a tremendous hjjk fortress at our backs, cutting us off, as we make our way toward the great Nest.”

“Agreed.”

“Do you know much about the layout of Vengiboneeza?”

“The place is unknown to me,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Mountains here, to the north and east. A bay here. The city between them, protected by walls. Thick jungle down here. We came through that jungle, on the migration from the cocoon, before you were born. It’s a hard city to attack, but it can be done. What I suggest is a two-pronged assault, using those Great World weapons of yours. You come in from the waterfront side, with the Loop and the Line of Fire, and create a distraction. Meanwhile I descend out of the hills with the Earth-Eater and the Bubble Tube and blow the city to bits. If we strike swiftly and well, they’ll never know what hit them. Eh?”

He sensed trouble even before Thu-Kimnibol spoke.

“A good plan,” said the bigger man slowly. “But the Great World weapons have to stay in my possession.”

“What?”

“I can’t share them with you. They’re mine only on loan, and I’m responsible for their safety. They can’t be offered to anyone else. Not even you, my friend.”

Salaman felt a burst of hot fury like molten rock flooding his veins. Bands of fire were tightening around his forehead. He wanted to bring his spear up in a single heedless gesture and bury it in Thu-Kimnibol’s gut: and it took all the strength within him to restrain himself.

Trembling with the effort to seem calm, he said, “This comes as a great surprise, cousin.”

“Does it? Why, then, I’m sorry, cousin.”

“We are allies. I thought there would be a sharing of the weapons.”

“I understand. But I’m obliged to protect them.”

“Surely you know I’d treat them with care.”

“Beyond any doubt you would,” said Thu-Kimnibol smoothly. “But if they were taken from you somehow—if the hjjks of Vengiboneeza managed to ambush you, let’s say, and the weapons were lost—the shame, the blame, all that would fall upon me for having let them out of my hands. No, cousin, it’s impossible. You create the seaside distraction, we’ll destroy Vengiboneeza from above. And then we will go on together, in all brotherhood, to the Nest.”

Salaman moistened his lips. He forced himself to stay calm.

“As you wish, cousin,” he said finally. “We approach the city by the water. You descend through the hills, with your weapons. Here: I give you my hand on it.”

Thu-Kimnibol grinned broadly. “So be it, then, cousin!”