“That way,” he said.
In the beginning Konya walked ahead of him, stamping his foot against the pavement to see if it would hold their weight, peering into doorways and down alleys in search of hidden enemies, prodding with the butt of his spear against the sides of buildings to make certain that they would not topple as he and Hresh went past. But after a while, when it was obvious that no lurking beasts were waiting to spring, that the streets would not give way beneath them or buildings come tumbling down, Hresh began to sprint ahead, going wherever his curiosity took him, and Konya made no objection.
To Hresh it was like entering an enchanted world. He was dizzy with excitement and his eyes flickered so wildly from one thing to another that his head began to throb. He wanted to take in everything at once, in a single greedy gulp.
He saw buildings everywhere whose grandeur and massive forms took his breath away. The Great World seemed almost still to be alive. Any moment, he imagined, sapphire-eyes or vegetals or sea-lords might come sauntering out of that building of swooping parapets over there, or this one that rose in delicate filigreed arches that looked like frozen music, or that one of the yellow towers and wide-jutting wings.
“In here,” he called to Konya. “No, this one! No, this looks better yet! What do you think, Konya?”
“Whichever you want,” the warrior said stolidly. “They all look good to me.”
Hresh grinned. “We’re going to find all sorts of marvelous things. The chronicles say so. Everything’s been preserved, the miraculous machines that the Great World used. We’re going to find it all sitting right where the sapphire-eyes left it when the death-stars came.”
But very quickly Hresh found out that it was not like that at all.
Many of the buildings that appeared so amazingly well preserved on the outside were mere ruins within. Some were empty shells, containing nothing more than a trickle of ancient dust. Others had collapsed inside so that one floor lay piled upon another in chaos, and it would have taken an army of strong diggers to penetrate the mounds of debris. In others, seemingly intact facades and cabinets came apart at the lightest touch, dissolving into clouds of dark vapor when Hresh approached them.
“We should be going back now,” said Konya finally, as the purple shadows of afternoon began to gather.
“But we haven’t found anything!”
“There’ll be other days,” Konya told him.
It was intensely embarrassing to return from the expedition empty-handed. Hresh could scarcely bear to look at Koshmar’s face as he made his report.
“Nothing?” Koshmar said.
“Nothing,” said Hresh, mumbling sheepishly. “Not yet.”
“Well, there’ll be other days,” said Koshmar.
He went out nearly every day, except when it rained. Usually it was Konya who went with him, sometimes Staip; never Harruel, for he was too huge, too overbearing, and Hresh told Koshmar bluntly that he would never be able to accomplish anything with Harruel breathing down his neck. Hresh would have preferred not to have Konya or Staip with him either, but Koshmar absolutely forbade that, and grudgingly he had to admit that she was right not to let him go off into the city alone. Hardly anyone else in the tribe knew how to read at all, let alone how to interpret the chronicles. If anything happened to him the People would be left helpless, cut adrift from all knowledge of the past and any hope of comprehending what the future might hold.
After a time, when some of Koshmar’s fears of the city’s dangers had subsided, he went out sometimes with Orbin as his companion. Orbin, though no older than Hresh, had always been bigger and sturdier, and now he was growing so fast that it looked as if he would be as big and strong as Harruel himself before many more years had gone by. Later still, Hresh took Haniman as his companion and bodyguard. To everyone’s surprise, Haniman too was growing tall and strong, and even in a way agile. He had become very unlike the Haniman Hresh had known in the cocoon, slow and pudgy and clumsy and, so it seemed, irritatingly stupid. The trek across the continent appeared to have transformed him, or, Hresh thought, perhaps there had been more to Haniman all along than he had been willing to see.
It made no difference who he went with, Konya or Staip, Orbin or Haniman, or where in the city he went, north or south, east or west. To his shame and consternation he could discover nothing of any imaginable value, only an occasional useless scrap of twisted metal or bit of dull glass.
“You look sad,” Taniane said. “It’s very disappointing, isn’t it?”
“There’s plenty out there. I’ll start finding things soon.”
“I know you will.” Taniane seemed very interested in his explorations. He wondered why. Perhaps he had underestimated her, too. She was taller than he was, now, growing up fast, and her mind seemed to be broadening, deepening, extending itself. There was an unusual expression about her eyes, a strange searching gleam that seemed to hint at hidden complexities. It was as if her coltish girlishness were only a mask for something more somber and strange. One day she asked him to teach her how to read, which surprised him greatly. He began to give her lessons. There was unexpected pleasure in going off with her to some quiet place and explaining the mysteries of the holy craft. But then a little while afterward Haniman expressed interest in learning how to read also, which spoiled everything. Hresh could hardly refuse him, but that was the end of his going off alone with Taniane, for there was no time to give each of them private instruction; and after a time he began to think that Haniman had asked Hresh to teach him to read for precisely that reason.
The great round of the seasons moved on. The mild rainy winter gave way to a drier, hotter time, and then a time of cooler east winds fore-tokening the return of winter. Resolutely Hresh went on searching the ruined city. Through one dark empty dusty shell of a building after another he prowled, finding nothing. He seethed with impatience. He wondered if he would ever find anything worthwhile at all.
It was beginning to seem as though Vengiboneeza was entirely useless.
What about the prophecy of the Book of the Way? Was it only a lie and a deception? Suppose he never discovered a thing in these ruins, as was beginning to seem likely? Did that mean, then, that the treasures of the city truly were reserved only for the real humans, whoever and wherever they might be? And that the People were in fact nothing more than glorified monkeys who had intruded where they did not belong?
Hresh fought bitterly against that dismal conclusion. But again and again it came swimming up from the depths of his mind to plague him.
He searched on and on, ranging farther and farther from the home settlement. Often now he went too far to return in a single day, and he begged and won permission to pitch camp overnight at some distant site of exploration. For those journeys he had to take two bodyguards, usually Orbin and Haniman, so that one might remain awake, sitting sentry through the dark hours. But they never encountered danger, though occasionally some wandering animal of the jungle browsed by, and once or twice a flock of monkeys went noisily through the upper stories of the buildings around them, swinging hand to hand in and out of empty windows and leaping wildly from one tower to another.
The size and complexity of the city still bewildered him, but after nearly a year Hresh knew it far better than any of the others. He was the only one for whom Vengiboneeza was something other than a wholly incomprehensible maze. He divided the city into zones, naming each sector for one of the Five Heavenly Ones, and subdividing each of the five into ten lesser zones that he named for members of the tribe. Then he drew a simple map which he carried with him at all times: a roughly sketched outline on an old strip of parchment.