Harruel said, “They called us monkeys. I know what monkeys are. I killed the two that attacked you in the jungle. I killed more when we were entering the city. I wish I had killed them all, the filthy dung-throwing beasts. What are these things, these monkeys, that are supposed to be our kin?”
“Animals,” Hresh said. “Just animals.”
“And we are just animals too?”
“We are human beings,” said Hresh.
He said such things as though there could be no question of their truth. But in fact he felt no certainty, only a dark morass of confusion.
To be human, he thought, was a grand and glorious thing. It was to be a link in an infinite chain of achievement descending from the world’s most ancient times. To be a monkey, or even the cousin of a monkey, was to be scarcely better than one of those foul-smelling chattering stupid things that swung by their sensing-organs — no, Hresh corrected himself, by their tails — from the trees of the jungle beyond the city’s edge.
Are we humans, then, Hresh asked himself, or are we monkeys?
In the chronicles, in the Book of the Way, it was written that at winter’s end the humans would come forth from their hiding places and journey to ruined Vengiboneeza, and obtain there the things they needed to gain power over all the world. So Hresh understood the text to say; and he understood the chronicles to mean the People, where the Book of the Way spoke of “humans.”
But was that so? The chronicles were not written in the simple words of everyday speech; they were composed of encapsulated thought-packets to which a reader had access by the powers of mind. There was much scope for misinterpretation in that. What leaped from the vellum page to his fingers and from his fingers to his mind, when he studied the Book of the Way, was a concept that seemed to mean the People, that is, those-for-whom-this-book-has-been-written. But it could just as readily mean humans-who-are-distinct-from-the-People. When Hresh examined the text more closely, he saw that the only unarguable reading was one which said that those-who-deem-themselves-to-be-humans would come to Vengiboneeza at winter’s end to claim the treasures of the city.
One could deem oneself to be human, though, without truly being human.
The sapphire-eyes’ artificials, Hresh told himself, say that we are monkeys, or the descendants of monkeys. Koshmar angrily replies that we are human. Who is right? Does the Book of the Way mean that we will come to Vengiboneeza, or some mysterious they ?
Everything else in the Book of the Way appeared to be intended for the People. It was their book, written by them, for them. When the Book of the Way says “humans,” Hresh thought, it must surely be referring to us. But does the Book of the Way really say “humans” Hresh wondered? Or was that merely the reading that the People had given the word, because they had come over the centuries to regard themselves as human, when in fact they were not?
He was lost in confusion.
He asked himself: Does it matter, really, whether we are human or something else? We are what we are, and what we are is far from contemptible.
No. No.
Better than anyone else he knew what the monkey-beings of the jungle were like. He had looked them straight in the eyes, and had seen the beastliness there. He had been seized around the throat by a powerful furry tail and nearly done to death. He had heard their cackling gibberish. With all his soul he detested them; and with all his soul he prayed that the artificials had been lying, that there was not even the most distant of kinships between his people and the monkeys of the jungle.
He told himself fiercely that he and his people were human beings, just as Koshmar insisted. But he wished he could be as sure of that as she seemed to be. He wished he had some proof. Until then he must live in doubt and torment.
The People shared Vengiboneeza with other, smaller creatures, some of them very troublesome.
The monkeys of the jungle occasionally entered, dancing along the high ledges and cornices of the nearby buildings and tossing things at those below — pebbles, pellets of dung, little prickle-edged scarlet berries that burned like hot coals. Serpents with ruffled green mantles behind their heads were everywhere, coiling sleepily between rocks, but now and again uncoiling to hiss and strike. The girl Bonlai was bitten, and also the young warrior Bruikkos, and both were ill for many days, feverish and pain-racked, despite the medications and spells that Torlyri used on them.
Salaman, prowling between two slope-roofed three-sided alabaster buildings a hundred paces behind the main tower, came upon a slab in the ground with a metal ring set into it, and made the mistake of tugging on it. The slab lifted easily, and immediately a horde of gleaming iridescent blue-and-gold creatures no larger than a thumb came swarming up from the depths of the earth. Their eyes were huge and glittered like fiery red jewels, and their clacking little jaws were sharp as blades. Salaman endured a dozen bites, from each of which blood began to stream. He yelled in pain and Sachkor and Moarn came running, and the three of them were able to free him of his attackers, but by then the small beasts were everywhere. Their bodies were soft, though, and easily smashed by a blow from a broom of straw. An hour’s work by half a dozen of the tribe and all of them were dead. During the night unseen scavengers gathered the hundreds of pulpy little corpses from the plaza and by dawn none were to be seen.
Each day brought some new annoyance. There were stinging insects of many kinds, small and difficult and persistent. There were venomous little lizards that sang soft hissing sounds. There were birds with filmy tapering wings and pale, delicate blue bills that perched in high trees and bombarded anyone who passed beneath them with a shining sticky spittle that raised painful welts wherever it struck.
All in all, though, the city was not an unpleasant place to be. There were some who said that life here was almost as good as dwelling in the cocoon. And others declared that life in Vengiboneeza, for all its little annoyances and the strangeness of an existence beneath the terrifying open sky, was in truth to be preferred to the old days in the snug burrow in the heart of the mountain.
One day in the fifth week of their stay in Vengiboneeza, Koshmar called Hresh to her and said, “Tomorrow you and Konya will begin to explore the city.”
“Konya? Why Konya?”
“Did you expect to go out alone? We can’t risk losing you, Hresh.”
That was maddening. He had assumed that when Koshmar finally sent him out into Vengiboneeza he would be able to move at his own pace, thinking his own thoughts and poking his nose wherever he felt like poking it, without having to put up with some great hulking impatient warrior who had been given the job of protecting him. He argued, but it was useless. The sapphire-eyes folk, Koshmar said, might have filled the city full of deathtraps; or perhaps the outlying districts were occupied by the screeching monkeys, or some new kind of noxious insect or reptile with a poisonous bite. He was too valuable to the tribe. She would take no chances. One of the warriors would accompany him. Either that, she told him, or he could stay in the settlement and let the older and stronger men do the exploring without him.
Hresh was wise enough now to know when he could try to oppose Koshmar’s decisions and when it was best simply to abide by her wishes. He let the issue drop.
When morning came the day was warm and bright, with low-hanging mists quickly burning off. “Which way do you plan to go?” Konya asked, as they stood in the plaza before the great tower.
Hresh had no plan. But he peered in his most serious way to the right and to the left, as though deep in contemplation, and then pointed his forefinger straight ahead, toward a broad and awesome boulevard that seemed to lead to one of the grandest sectors of the city.