He slipped the amulet of Thaggoran around his neck now, and wore it day and night. It was a strange presence at first, thumping against his breastbone, but soon he grew accustomed to it and then it came to seem virtually a part of him. Wearing it, he felt the nearness of Thaggoran. Touching it, he imagined that he could feel the wisdom of Thaggoran entering into him.
He went back to the oldest books, which he could barely understand, since they were written in a strange kind of writing that would not tune itself easily to his mind. But he ran his trembling fingertips over the stiff pages and a sort of sense came up out of them after a while, though always ambiguous, elliptical, elusive. Fragmentary accounts of the Great World is what they were: what seemed to be tales of how the Six Peoples had lived in harmony on the earth, humans and hjjk-folk and vegetals and mechanicals and sea-lords and sapphire-eyes. It was dim and faint, an echo of an echo, but even that echo resounded in his soul like a clarion fanfare out of the dark well of time. Surely it had been the most astounding of epochs, the peak of Earth’s lost splendor, when all the world was a festival. He trembled just to think of it: the multitudes of people, the many races, the glittering cities, the ships sailing between the stars. He could scarcely begin to comprehend it. He felt the knowledge of it, partial though it was, swelling within him so that he feared he would choke on it. And then he skipped forward to the Great World’s tragic end, when the death-stars began to fall, as had been foretold so long before. Why did they allow it to happen, they who had achieved such grandeur? Had they been unable to turn the plummeting stars aside? Surely that would have been within their power, since all other things were. Yet nothing was done. No mention was made of any of that, only of the coming of the doom itself. That was when the sapphire-eyes perished, for their blood was cold and they could not abide freezing weather, and the vegetals died also, having been fashioned out of plant cells and being unable to bear the frost. Hresh read the noble account of the voluntary death of the mechanicals, who had not wanted to survive into the new era, though that would have been possible for them. He read it all, swallowing it down in great intoxicating gulps.
He took out the shinestones, too, and arranged them in patterns, and stroked them and squeezed them and murmured to them, hoping to be able to draw some wisdom from them. But they remained silent. They seemed to him to be no more than dark gleaming stones. Try as he would, they told him nothing. Sadly he realized that the People no longer would have their guidance. That was lost forever to the tribe. Whatever secret governed the shinestones’ use had died with Thaggoran.
The Barak Dayir, the Wonderstone, was the one thing in the casket that Hresh did not dare to examine at all. He left it undisturbed within its pouch of green velvet, not even daring to touch it. It would, he knew, open doors to realms of knowledge beyond even those that reading could make available to him; but he feared to do too much too soon. The Wonderstone was star-stuff, so Thaggoran had said. He had said that it had its dangers, too. Hresh chose to let it be until he had found some clue to the safe means of using it. In the privacy of his spirit he praised himself warmly for this one act of prudent renunciation, so alien to his character, and then laughed at his own absurd pride.
To the others of the tribe Hresh’s ascent to the rank of chronicler was more a matter for amusement than anything else. They had heard Koshmar’s proclamation, and they could see him every day puttering around in the baggage-train where the chronicles were kept; but they had trouble comprehending the fact that a small boy now was the chronicler. Minbain laughed and asked him, “Am I supposed to call you old man?”
“It’s only a title, Mother. It makes no difference to me whether it’s used or not.”
“But you are chronicler? You are truly chronicler?”
“You know that I am,” Hresh said.
Minbain put her hands over her breasts. Through gusts of laughter she said, in a way that seemed loving without being kind, “How could such a strange thing as you have come out of me? How? How?”
Torlyri was kinder to him, telling him that he was the proper choice and that to be chronicler was clearly what he had been born to be; but then Torlyri was kind to everyone. Orbin, who had been his playmate and friend, looked at him now as though he had grown an extra head. The others of his own age, or near to it, had never felt comfortable with Hresh to begin with. Now they kept their distance entirely, all except Taniane, who seemed utterly unimpressed with his new glory. She still would talk with him and march beside him on the trek as if nothing had changed, although lately she had begun spending a great deal of time with Haniman, of all people. What she found interesting in that oaf was hard for Hresh to see, although Haniman was at least growing less flabby as he marched, and showing signs of developing some coordination and grace, though not very much.
Anijang, who might have become chronicler in the old days simply because he was the senior tribesman now, only chuckled when Hresh went by. “What trouble you’ve saved me, lad! What a nuisance it would have been for me to have to learn to read!” He seemed honestly relieved. And the younger men, the warriors, generally ignored Hresh, all but Salaman, who sometimes paused and stared at him as though he could not bring himself to believe that a boy even younger than he was had become the chronicler and old man of the tribe. The other warriors paid no attention. For them the chronicler was a figure to revere, but they were not going to revere Hresh, and so he had no importance to them. Of them all only Harruel bothered to speak to Hresh at all, looking down from his vast height and gruffly wishing him success at his tasks. “You are very young,” said Harruel, “but customs change with changing times, and if you are to be our chronicler then I have no quarrel with that.” For which Hresh returned proper thanks, although Harruel was so huge and so strange these days — bitter over some sharp disappointment, it seemed, going about all the time with a black look in his eyes and a scowl on his lips — that Hresh preferred to stay away from him.
Naturally Hresh was supposed to keep everything that Koshmar dictated to him a secret until the chieftain was ready to divulge it to the entire tribe. But he was, after all, not quite nine years old. And so one day soon after he had become chronicler, when he was with Taniane, he said to her, “Do you know where we’re heading?”
“No one knows that but Koshmar.”
“I know it.”
“You do?”
“And I’ll tell you, if you keep it a secret.” He put his head close to hers. “We’re going to Vengiboneeza. Can you believe it? Vengiboneeza, Taniane!”
He thought the revelation would stun her. But it drew nothing from her but a blank look.
“Where?” she asked.
They marched west, on and on through a changing land, warmer every day though still far from hospitable.
Never once did they encounter other human beings, only the savage and strange beasts of the wilderness. Koshmar was of more than one mind about that. She would have liked to meet some other tribe in order to have confirmation that it had not been foolish for her to lead her people out of the cocoon before the true end of winter; and also she wished to be free of the uncomfortable possibility that her sixty souls were all that was left of the human race. And in truth she was eager to join with some other bands of wanderers with whom the People could share the risks and hardships of the journey.