There was silence again, mighty and profound. Hresh thought that he had never seen Koshmar look more majestic.
The center sapphire-eyes, which had been staring toward the remote horizon, turned now to Koshmar. It regarded her with distant interest for a long while.
“So be it,” it said finally, just as it seemed the air itself would crack and split apart under the strain. “You are the humans now.” And the creature appeared to smile.
Then the three reptilian forms bowed and moved aside.
They have yielded, Hresh thought in joy and astonishment. They have yielded!
And Koshmar the chieftain, holding her sensing-organ aloft like a scepter, led her little band of humans through the gate and toward the shining towers of Vengiboneeza.
6
The Art of Waiting
In wonder and in jubilation Koshmar and her people took up lodgings in the great city of the lost sapphire-eyes folk.
Shattered and crumbling though it was, Vengiboneeza still was a place of splendor beyond anyone’s imagining. Its location was superb, in a sheltered bowl bordered on the north and partly on the east by a golden-brown mountain wall, on the south and east by the dense jungle that the tribe had just left, and on the west by a dark lake, or perhaps a sea, so broad that it was impossible to look across it to the far side. Warm winds blew steadily out of the west, carrying moisture from the sea. Rain was frequent and the land was green and lush. This was winter, the season of short days, which seemed to be the rainy season, and it was a very wet season indeed. But the air was mild by day and only a few of the nights saw frost, and then merely in the hour just before dawn. When the days began getting longer there was a distinct quickening of growth and the weather grew even warmer. It was all very different from those early bleak months in the first days after leaving the cocoon, when they were crossing the sad and barren plains at the heart of the continent. Plainly the time of the Long Winter was over. No one doubted that now.
Vengiboneeza itself was everywhere, sprawling, vast, incomprehensible, a world unto itself, lying under an awesome silence. From the edge of the sea to the rim of the jungle to the forested foothills of the mountains the dead city spread in all directions, without apparent plan, without discernible order. In some districts the streets ran in grand open boulevards that afforded magnificent views of the mountains beyond, or the sea; in others, there were networks of tiny alleys that coiled one upon another in a sort of desperate cringing secrecy, or high walls that were set at odd angles to block ready access to the plazas beyond. There were great towers in many places, rising generally in serried rows of ten or twenty, but sometimes — and these were the biggest — the towers stood in grand isolation above a neighborhood of low squat buildings with green tiled domes.
Much of the city, especially in the seafront districts, was in ruins. Much was not.
The Long Winter had left fewer scars here than in the unsheltered plains to the east, but there were scars aplenty. The sea had risen more than once during the winter years and had swept devastatingly through the low-lying neighborhoods. There were ancient gray waterstains on high walls and swirling carpets of sandy rubble on third-story balconies. The scattered and crumbled bones of sea-creatures lay in drifts on the flat rooftops. It was clear also that sluggish rivers of ice must have come flowing down the sides of the mountain wall at some time to fold and crush the buildings on the higher slopes. And it looked as if the earth itself had heaved upward from its depths in many parts of the city, where the pavements were vertically displaced and buildings stood at precarious angles or lay fallen in shattered segments and shards of iridescent metal.
“The wonder of it is,” Torlyri said, “that any of it survives at all, after seven hundred thousand years.”
“It has been cared for,” said Koshmar. “It must have been.”
Indeed that seemed to be true. In many places signs were visible of repair and even of reconstruction on a large scale, as though the keepers of the city were expecting the sapphire-eyes folk to return at any moment and were striving to maintain the place in fit condition for them. But who were the keepers? No mechanicals were in evidence, no artificials of any kind: the place seemed deserted except for the three gigantic guardians who sat before the gate, and they never left their posts.
“Search the chronicles,” Koshmar commanded Hresh. “Tell me how this city has been preserved.”
Most diligently did he search. But though he discovered a great deal about the founding and glory of Vengiboneeza, there was no clue to any understanding of its survival. For all he could find out, the ghosts of the sapphire-eyes themselves might well have flitted invisibly through the streets, doing what had to be done.
At first the tribe did not venture to the more remote parts of the city. Koshmar led them inside just far enough so that they would feel safe from the creatures of the jungle, but not so far that they would become confused in the labyrinth of ruined streets. There was time to risk such things later; patience was essential now, in these early mysterious days. They had had the patience to live seven hundred thousand years in a single cocoon in a mountainside. Koshmar herself was not an extraordinarily patient woman; but she strived constantly to master the art that any wise chieftain must learn, which is the art of waiting.
She chose a district close by the southern gate that was not very badly ruined. Here a stupendous six-sided many-windowed tower of smooth purple stone dominated a sprawling neighborhood of the little green-domed buildings. These she assigned to the tribe in what she thought was a clever way. Each of the breeding couples was given a house of its own. The warriors were sent to live in a group, so they would jostle against each other and consume some of the restless energies that might otherwise lead to trouble. The older people were allowed to dwell in units of three or four, to look after one another, and all the children were placed together in a house adjoining that of the unmated worker-women. Koshmar and Torlyri took the building closest to the great tower for themselves. The tower would become the tribe’s temple, and later it could serve as a beacon to lead them back to their home district when they traveled through the city, since there was no region of Vengiboneeza, apparently, from which it could not be seen.
This was the happiest time that Koshmar had ever known. There was some problem to solve every day, some decree to issue, some decision to make.
In the cocoon she had often felt uneasy and uncertain. Her powerful urge toward leadership had mainly gone unfulfilled. Since girlhood she had been shaped toward the chieftainship, and she exercised her powers with strength and incisiveness. But she had been a leader with no leading to do. Things were too easy in the cocoon. She played her proper role in all the rites, she passed judgment when disputes or quarrels broke out, she acted as counselor to the weak and pacifier to the strong and the headstrong. That was what the life of the cocoon was like, and that was what the role of the leader was.
But she had seen her days going by without real purpose, and the end of them had been coming into view with her restlessness still aching within her. Though at thirty she was still as vigorous as a girl, she knew she had no way of avoiding the onrushing limit-age. The law was absolute. Only the chronicler might live beyond the thirty-fifth year. There was no exemption for chieftains. Koshmar had often considered how it would be for her a few years hence, when she must be thrust through the exit hatch, vigorous or not, to meet her death in the world outside.
That was all changed now. Now it was essential for them all to live as long as they could, and for those who were capable of bearing young to bring them forth with zeal.