Coolly she said, “What is it, Harruel?”
“How soon will we be breaking camp, Koshmar?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t decided. Why do you ask?”
“People are asking me. They dislike this place. It seems too dry to them, too dead. They want to pick up and move along.”
“If people have questions, they should bring them to me, Harruel.”
“You were nowhere to be found. You were off with Torlyri, we supposed. They asked me. And I had no answer for them.”
She regarded him steadily. There was a tone in his voice that she disliked and that she had never heard before. With the sound of his voice alone he seemed to be implying criticism of her: it was a sharp, fault-finding tone. There was almost a challenge in it.
“Do you have some problem, Harruel?”
“Problem? What kind of problem? I told you: they were asking me when we were going to leave here.”
“They should have asked me.”
“I said, you were nowhere to be found.”
“Better yet,” Koshmar said, going on as if Harruel had not spoken, “they should have asked no one, but simply waited to be told.”
“But they did ask me. And I had nothing to tell them.”
“Exactly,” said Koshmar. “There was nothing you could have told them. All you needed to say was ‘We will leave here when Koshmar says we are going to leave here.’ Such decisions are mine. Or would you prefer to make them for me, Harruel?”
He looked startled. “How could I do that? You’re the chieftain, Koshmar!”
“Yes. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to—”
“Let me be,” she said. “Will you? Go. Go, Harruel.”
For an instant there was something like fury in his eyes, mixed with confusion and, perhaps, fear. Koshmar was uncertain about the fear. She had always thought she could read Harruel with ease, but not now. He stood for a moment glowering at her, parting his lips and clamping them again several times as though considering and rejecting various angry speeches; and then, making a grudging gesture of respect, he turned ponderously about and stalked away. She stood watching him, shaking her head, until he had descended into the camp.
Strange, she thought. Very strange.
Everyone seemed to be changing out here under the pressures of life in this place without walls. She could see the changes in their eyes, their faces, the way they held their bodies. Some seemed to be thriving on the hardships. She had noticed Konya, who had always been a quiet and private man, suddenly laughing and singing in the midst of the group on the march. Or the boy Haniman, always so soft and lazy: yesterday he had gone running past her and she had barely recognized him, so vigorous had he become. And then there were some who were growing faded and weary on the march, like Minbain, or the young man Hignord, who went slouching along with their shoulders down and their sensing-organs trailing in the dust.
And now Harruel, swaggering around demanding to be told her schedule for the march, and behaving almost as though he felt he should take her place as chieftain. Big as he was, strong as he was, he had never before let Koshmar see any ambitions of that sort in him. He had always been courteous in his gruff way, obedient, dependable. Here in this land without walls something black and dour seemed to have entered his soul and of late he appeared barely able to disguise his wish to command the tribe in her stead.
Of course that could never be. The chieftain was always a woman: it had never been otherwise since the tribe had been founded, and that would never change. A man like Harruel was bigger and stronger than any woman could be, yes, but the tribe would scarcely trust a man as its leader no matter how strong he was. Men had no cunning; men had no sense of the long view of things; men, at least the strong ones, were too blunt, too hasty, too rash. There was too much anger in them, Yissou only knew why, and it kept them from thinking properly. Koshmar remembered Thekmur telling her that the anger flowed from the balls they carried between their legs, and went constantly to their brains, making them unfit to rule. That was in the last weeks of Thekmur’s life, not long after she had formally named Koshmar to be her successor. And Thekmur had probably learned her knowledge of men at close range, for she had often known men in the way of women, which Koshmar had never done herself.
Gods, she thought. Is that it? Does Harruel desire me?
It was a startling and horrifying idea. She would have to watch him closely. Something plainly was on Harruel’s mind that had never been there before. If he could not be chieftain himself, perhaps he meant to make himself the chieftain’s chieftain. Which she would never permit; but she needed Harruel, needed his great strength, needed his bravery, needed his anger, even. This would take some careful thinking.
4
The Chronicler
It required all the courage Hresh could summon to go to Koshmar and ask to be made chronicler in Thaggoran’s place. Not that he feared being refused so much, since, after all, he would be asking an extraordinary thing. It was being mocked that he dreaded. Koshmar could be cruel; Koshmar could be harsh. And Hresh knew that she already had cause to dislike him.
But to his surprise the chieftain appeared to receive his outrageous request amiably. “Chronicler, you say? That’s a task that customarily is given to the oldest man of the tribe, is it not? And you are—”
“I will be nine soon,” Hresh said staunchly.
“Nine. Something short of oldest.” Was Koshmar hiding a smile?
“The oldest man now is Anijang. He’s too stupid to be chronicler, isn’t he? Besides, what does my age matter, Koshmar? Everything is different for us out here. There are dangers on all sides. All the men must be on constant patrol. We have had the rat-wolves, the bloodbirds, the fireburs, the leather-wings, almost every day some new creature to fend off. And they will all be back again and again. I’m too small to fight well yet. But I can keep the chronicles.”
“Are you sure of that? Can you read?”
“Thaggoran taught me. I can write words and I can read them. And I can remember things, too. I have much of the chronicles by memory, already. Try me on anything. The coming of the death-stars, the building of the cocoons—”
“You’ve read the chronicles?” Koshmar asked, looking amazed.
Hresh felt his face grow hot. What a blunder! The chronicles were sealed; no one was permitted to open the chest that contained them except the chronicler himself. Indeed, even in the days of the cocoon Hresh had managed sometimes to study a few pages that Thaggoran had happened to leave open in his chamber, for the old man had been careless sometimes or indulgent, though Thaggoran had not seemed aware of what Hresh was doing. But Hresh had carried out most of his investigations of history since Thaggoran’s death, surreptitiously, while the older tribesfolk had been out foraging for food. The baggage was often left unguarded; there was no longer any chronicler to keep a special eye on his treasure; no one appeared to notice the boy slipping open the sacred casket, or to care.
Lamely Hresh said, hoping Koshmar would not see through the blatant lie, “Thaggoran let me see them. He made me promise never to say anything to anyone about that, but once in a while as a special favor he would—”
Koshmar laughed. “He did, did he? Does no one keep oaths in this tribe?”
Desperately improvising, Hresh said, “He loved to tell the old stories. And I was more interested than anyone else, so he — he and I—”
“Yes. Yes, I can see that. Well, it matters very little now what oaths were kept or broken in the time before we came forth.” Koshmar looked down at him from what seemed like an enormous height. She seemed lost in private musings for a long while. Then at last she said, “Chronicler, then? And not even nine? A strange idea!” And then, just as Hresh readied himself to slink away in shame, she said, “But go, get the books. Let me see how you write, and then we’ll decide. Go, now!”