“No, stay here, Harruel. I’m afraid to be alone now.”
“What harm can come to you? The only danger around here is me. And I will go out.”
“Stay.”
“I need to go off by myself for a time,” he said. He looked back at her. In the darkness, by cool shimmering moonlight and starlight, there appeared to be a beauty to Minbain that Harruel knew she did not in fact possess. Her face, rounded and delicate, seemed to have shed the years: she was new and tender, a girl again. His heart flooded with love for her. It was difficult for him to express that love in words; but he went to her and crouched down beside her, and let his hands rove tenderly over her throat where he had hurt her, and her breasts, and her soft warm belly. It seemed to him that he could feel new life starting inside her there. It was too early to tell, but he thought that his fingers detected a quickening, a gathering of life-force, which would become the son of Harruel. As softly as he could he said, “I did not mean to hurt you, Minbain. A demon was with me in my sleep. It was not me. I would never injure you.”
“I know that, Harruel. You are kind, behind your gruffness.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know it,” Minbain said.
He held his hand outspread across her belly for a time. He was calmer now, though his dark dream still oppressed him. Waves of deep love for her were coursing through his soul.
She was three years older than he was, and when he was growing up, not thinking at all about mates — for he was of the warrior class and in those days warriors had not mated — she had seemed to be more of his mother’s generation than his own; but when the new matings had been allowed, Minbain was the one he had chosen. A younger woman would have had more beauty, but beauty goes quickly, and Minbain had virtues that would remain all her life. She was warm and kind, somewhat like Torlyri in that regard. Torlyri was not a woman for men; but Minbain was, and Harruel had reached for her quickly. It made no difference to him that she was older, or that she had had a child. If anything it was a favorable thing that she had had a child, since that child was Hresh, who at so supernaturally early an age had come to have such power in the tribe. Harruel saw many uses for Hresh; and perhaps one way to reach Hresh was through his mother. Not that that was his main reason for having chosen Minbain. But it had been a factor. It had definitely been a factor.
“Let me go now,” Harruel said.
“Come back soon.”
“Soon,” he promised. “Yes.”
Minbain watched him go, a huge hulking shadow moving with exaggerated care across the room and out the door. She touched her throat. He had hurt her more than she had wanted him to know. In his madness he had struck her with a flailing elbow, he had seized her by both shoulders and slammed her against the wall, and when he had burrowed down against her throat like that he had nearly choked her with the pressure of his heavy head. But that had been the madness, the demon. It had not been Harruel. Minbain understood that in his rough way he cared for her.
She was carrying his child. That she knew for a certainty, and, from the way he had touched her body just now, he must know it too. They would have to go to Torlyri soon to have the first words said over her.
Hresh would have a brother. She would have a second son. She was sure of it, that it was a son; Harruel’s seed could bear nothing but sons, that much seemed obvious to her. She would be the first woman in thousands of years to bear two sons. Would the new one be anything like Hresh, she wondered?
No. There could never be anyone else like Hresh. Hresh was unique.
Nor had she ever known anyone rise like Harruel. She loved him and she feared him, and some days it was the love that was stronger, and some days the fear, and there were times like this when both were mixed in equal measure. He was so strange. The gods had given her a strange child for her son and now a strange man for her mate: why was that? Harruel was so huge, so powerful, so far beyond all the others in strength — he was unusual in his strength, yes. He had the force of a falling mountain. But there was something else. He had a darkness in his soul. He had an anger. Minbain had never really seen that when they all lived in the cocoon, but once they had begun the trek it had become obvious. Some turbulent force roiled his soul day and night. He yearned for something — but what? What?
Harruel walked down one street and up another, not knowing where he was going and scarcely caring. He felt the cold sharp moonlight upon him like a scourge, driving him onward. He had promised Minbain he would return, and so he would. But not before dawn. There was no sleep in him.
The city was a prison for him. He had borne cocoon life easily enough, never imagining there was an alternative to it. But now that they were free of the cocoon and he had come to know what it was like to walk boldly under the open sky, it galled him to live penned up in this sleek dead place, which in his mind reeked with the stench of the extinct sapphire-eyes folk. And it galled him also, it stung him like a firebur against his skin, that he would live under the commands of the woman Koshmar to the end of his days.
This was the time to end the rule of women. This was the time to restore the power of kings.
But it seemed to Harruel that Koshmar would be his chieftain until he was old and bent and white of fur. For there were no more death-days. Koshmar was older than he was, but she was healthy and strong. She would live a long time. Nothing would ever rid him of her, unless he did it himself; and there Harruel drew the line. To kill a chieftain was beyond him. It was almost beyond his comprehension. But he could not bear living under her rule much longer.
Of late he had taken to roaming the city frequently, going off alone on long wanderings, seeking to come to know it. The city was his enemy, and he believed that it is important to know your enemy. But this was the first time he had gone forth by night.
Everything looked altered. The towers seemed taller, the lesser buildings seemed more squat. Streets hooked away at strange angles. There was menace in every shadow. Harruel walked on and on. He had his spear. He was unafraid.
Some of the streets were paved with immaculate flagstones, as if the city had been abandoned by the sapphire-eyes only the day before yesterday. Others were cracked and rutted, with coarse grass rising through the paving-blocks, and still others had lost their pavements entirely and were mere muddy tracks bordered by crumbling buildings. This city made no sense to him. He detested it. It sickened him to think that his son would be born in it, in this hateful alien place, this place that had nothing human about it.
There were ghosts here. As he walked he kept watch for them.
Harruel was certain that ghosts hovered everywhere about. They were the ones who were making the repairs. It happened by night, though not when anyone could see it. Randomly, so it seemed, buildings that had fallen were shored up, given new facades, cleansed of debris. He saw the changes afterward. Some of the others had noticed it too — Konya, Staip, Hresh. Who was responsible?
He was wary, too, of creeping, crawling, stinging creatures of the night. Most of the pests that afflicted Vengiboneeza vanished with the coming of the darkness, except the ones that lived inside the buildings. But that did not mean that he could regard himself as altogether safe from them.
Early one evening not long before, wandering restlessly as he was tonight, Harruel had found himself at the edge of the warm sea that lapped the city on its western flank, and he had watched an invading army of ugly gray lizard-things come crawling up out of the water. They were evil little creatures with slim tubular bodies the length of his forearm and thick fleshy legs and wrinkled green wings folded back behind their necks, and they had a sinister glint in their bright yellow eyes. From them came a low growling hum of a sound, menacing and nasty, as if they were threatening him by name: “Harruel! Harruel! Harruel! We’ll make a meal of you tonight!”