Jaws snapping, they advanced like a horde of insects in tight formation until they were no more than thirty paces from him, and he began to look around for something to defend himself with. Backing away, he scooped up handfuls of pebbles and pelted them with those, without halting them. But when they reached a row of square-hewn blocks of green stone, set into the seawall just below where he was standing, that had tiny mysterious faces carved into them, they pulled up short as if they had hit an invisible barrier. Then they turned, baffled, glum, and headed back toward the water. Perhaps they had picked up the scent of a swarm of some even nastier beast on the far side of those shattered columns, he thought. Or maybe they just didn’t like my smell. Whichever it was, he knew he had been lucky to get off so easily.
Another time he saw clouds of flying creatures crossing overhead, so thick a flock that they darkened the sky at midday. It seemed to him that they were the fierce white-eyed things that were called bloodbirds, which had plagued the tribe far back when they had crossed the plains. He stood poised, ready to run to the settlement and give the alarm. But though they circled and circled far above the city, the birds never descended below the tops of the highest towers.
He was near the green stone pillars now where the three sapphire-eyes guardians sat. A short distance before him was the avenue that fronted the jungle.
Without any clear purpose in mind he began to walk toward the southern gate. But after a minute or two he halted abruptly. He heard a faint sound behind him: someone breathing, someone moving about. He grasped his spear. Had Minbain followed him? Or was this one of the ghosts that patrolled the city in the secrecy of the night? He whirled and peered into the shadows.
“Who’s there?”
Silence.
“I heard you. Come out where I can see you.”
“Harruel?” A man’s voice, low and steady, familiar.
“Who else do you think it would be? Is that you, Konya?”
Laughter came from the darkness. “You have a good ear, Harruel.”
Konya emerged and walked slowly forward. He was a tall man, though only shoulder-height to Harruel; but because he was so deep through his chest and back he did not seem as tall as he actually was. By the tribe he was regarded as the second-ranking warrior, generally deemed to be Harruel’s rival, a man smoldering with envy for Harruel’s preeminence. Only the two of them knew how untrue that was. Konya was strong enough to realize that it was all right not to be strongest. His nature was a calm, remote, quiet one. What he felt for Harruel was a respect growing out of the natural order of things, not envy; and what Harruel felt for him was an equal respect, though he knew Konya was not an equal.
“So you’re out wandering tonight too,” Harruel said.
“Sleep wouldn’t come. The moon was too bright in my eyes as I lay in bed.”
“In the cocoon that wasn’t a problem.”
“No,” Konya said, with a little laugh. “The moon’s brightness couldn’t trouble us, when we dwelled in the cocoon.”
They walked together in silence for a while. This was a street of shattered buildings whose golden-hued facades, perversely, were in perfect condition. Empty windowframes still bore their elegantly worked shutters of thin-cut white stone. Elaborate doors stood ajar, revealing rubble and emptiness behind them. Then they came to one building that was of the opposite condition: its facade was gone, so that each of its many floors was revealed along one side, but the interior was intact. Wordlessly Harruel entered it and began to ascend, not knowing what he was looking for. Konya went with him unquestioningly.
With difficulty they ascended a staircase that had been built for sapphire-eyes, with wide flat risers so low that it was more of a ramp than a stair. After a time Harruel developed the knack of taking the steps two and even three at a time in loping bounds, and the ascent became easier. Along the walls, all the way up, were carvings that troubled the eye. Seen from the side they seemed to show the figures of living creatures, sapphire-eyes and hjjks and other things that must have lived in the time of the Great World, but when you looked at them straight on they dissolved into jumbles of meaningless lines. The rooms of the building were empty. There was not even dust in them.
Eventually the staircase narrowed to a spiral passage that coiled upward for half a dozen bends and delivered them to the building’s flat roof of dark tile. Here they were high above the surrounding district. The city lay behind them, to the north. Looking southward over the edge of the roof they saw the closely arrayed trees of the jungle glowing eerily in the harsh bright moonlight.
There were stirrings in the treetops, little snicking sounds.
“Monkeys, there,” Konya said.
Harruel nodded. They were swinging through the treetops no more than a good stone’s throw away, those shrieking stinking chattering things of the jungle. How he loathed them! He felt a rushing in his ears. If he could, he would march through the jungle from tree to tree, spearing them all and piling their repellent little bodies in heaps for the snuffling scavenger-beasts to devour.
“Filthy creatures,” said Harruel. “I’d like to kill them all. A good thing that they keep out of the city, mostly.”
“I see them sometimes. Not many.”
“Just a few, yes, once in a while. It’s not hard for them to get in. They just have to swing right over that open space there and they’re inside. Good thing for us that it’s usually only one or two at a time. Yissou, I detest them! Foul filthy things!”
“They’re just wild animals, Harruel.”
“Animals? They’re vermin. You saw them yourself, right up close. They have no souls. They have no minds.”
“The sapphire-eyes who guard the gate said that they are our cousins.”
Harruel spat. “Dawinno! Do you believe that foolishness?”
“They look a little like us.”
“Anything with two arms and two legs and a tail would look a little like us, if it walked on its hind legs. We are humans, Konya, and they are beasts.”
Konya was silent a while. “You think that’s so, Harruel? What about the thing the sapphire-eyes said, that we aren’t human at all, that the humans were a different race altogether, that we’re nothing but monkeys with a high opinion of themselves?”
“We are human, Konya. What else could we be? Do you feel like a relative of those things swinging from their tails out there?”
“The sapphire-eyes said—”
“Dawinno take the sapphire-eyes! They’re dead lying things. They only want to make trouble for us!” Harruel turned toward Konya, glaring coldly. “Look: we think, we talk, we have books, we know the gods. Therefore we are human. I know it. I have no doubt of it. Regardless of what the sapphire-eyes may say. Besides, they let us enter the city, didn’t they? The city is reserved for the humans who will come here at winter’s end: that’s what the prophecy said. And the winter is over, and we are here, by permission of the three guardians. Therefore we are the ones who were supposed to come here. The humans, that is.”
“Koshmar made them let us in.”
“ Madethem? When they have magic in their hands? No, Konya, it wasn’t Koshmar’s doing. She could have talked at them all day, and if they truly felt we weren’t human beings they never would have accepted us. They let us in because it was our destiny to come in here, our right to come in here, and they knew it. They were only testing us with their idiotic lies, to see if we had the strength of spirit to claim our rights. If Koshmar hadn’t spoken out, I would have done so, and they would have yielded. And if they hadn’t yielded I would have slain the three sapphire-eyes to win admission here.”