9
In the Cauldron
That was the beginning of Hresh’s true penetration into the mysteries of Vengiboneeza. The machine in the vault of the plaza of the thirty-six towers had opened the way; that and the Barak Dayir.
Everyone knew that he had made some great discovery. Haniman had spread the story far and wide. It stirred even the most sluggish imagination. Hresh was the center of all attention. People stared at him as if he were newly returned from a dinner at the table of the gods. “Did you really see the Great World?” he was asked, twenty times a day. “What was it like? Tell me! Tell me!”
But it was Taniane who saw the real truth. “You came upon something terrible when you were down in that hole. It upset you so much that you don’t want to say anything about it. But it’s changed you, hasn’t it, Hresh? Whatever it was. I can see it. There’s a darkness about your spirit now that wasn’t there before.”
He looked at her, amazed. “Nothing about me has changed,” he said tightly.
“It has. I can see it.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“You can tell me,” she said, cajoling. “We’ve always been friends, Hresh. It’ll soothe your soul to tell someone.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Nothing!”
And he turned quickly away from her, as he always did when he was fearful that someone would see the lie on his face.
Not only was he unable to bring himself to share with any of the others the agonizing truth he had discovered in the vault of the thirty-six towers, he could scarcely bear even to think about it. Now and again he felt it like a dull pain close to his heart; and now and again he heard a harsh mocking voice whispering, Little monkey, little monkey, little monkey. But the revelation of the vault was too painful for Hresh to face just yet. He put it aside; he thrust it down beyond the reach of his conscious mind.
He eased his spirit by plunging deep into the exploration of the ruins of Vengiboneeza. The pattern created in his mind by the machine and the Barak Dayir was his guide. When he wielded the Wonderstone, the points of red light that glowed on the interlocking circles that he saw gave him the clues he needed; and he began now systematically to uncover the city’s ancient caches of undamaged mechanisms, which he now knew lay all about at close hand, some in deeply hidden galleries, some virtually out in the open.
It amazed him that so many treasures of the Great World had survived the Long Winter. Even metal, he thought, should crumble to dust in so great a span of time. Yet wherever he looked — now that he knew the right places — he came up with wonders great and small. Most of the devices were far too big to remove; but many could be carried away and brought back to the settlement, where a special storeroom in the temple was set aside for them. Rapidly it filled with strange, glittering devices of mysterious function. Hresh examined them cautiously. Discovering these objects was one thing, determining how to make use of them was another. It was slow, difficult, frustrating work.
A group who became known among the People as the Seekers collected about Hresh to aid him in the task of exploration and discovery.
At first the Seekers were simply the handful of bodyguards — Konya, Haniman, Orbin — who usually went out to protect him as he roamed the city. Hresh had regarded them in the beginning as necessary nuisances and nothing more, mere spear-wielders. But before long they knew the city almost as well as he did. Though he tried to keep his map to himself, it was impossible to prevent others from learning their way around. Sometimes now they would go on expeditions of their own. It became a kind of competition for celebrity, now that they saw the fame that accrued to Hresh for having been out so often into the city. And occasionally they would actually return with some glittering little marvel out of antiquity, which they had pried out from under a fallen column, or excavated in some debris-choked undercellar.
Hresh protested to Koshmar about that. “They are ignorant,” he said. “They might damage the things they find, if I’m not there to oversee the work.”
“They’ll cease being ignorant,” Koshmar replied, “if they get into the habit of using their minds. And they can learn to be careful with what they find. This city is so big that we need all the searchers we can muster.” And after a moment she added, “They need to feel that they are doing important things, Hresh. Otherwise they’ll grow bored and restless, and that will endanger us all. I say let them wander where they want to.”
Hresh had to obey. He knew when to be wary of disputing the chieftain’s decisions.
The number of Seekers grew as time went along. There were many who were curious about the wonders of the city.
One day when he was searching with Orbin in the rich troves of the Yissou Tramassilu district, Hresh found a puzzling little container bound in intricately woven chains. He tried to open it, but the chains were too complex and delicate for his thick male fingers, or Orbin’s, to unravel. A woman’s hands, smaller and more adept at such work, were needed.
He brought the container back and let Taniane deal with it. Her fingers flew like whirling blades and within minutes she managed to get the container out of its wrappings. There was nothing inside but the dry bones of some small animal, hard as stone, and a bit of grayish powder, perhaps ash.
Taniane went to Koshmar and asked to be allowed to accompany the Seekers. “Probably they find many things like that little box,” she said. “And they break them, or they toss them aside. My eyes are sharper than theirs, my fingers are cleverer. They are only men, after all.”
“There is sense to what you say,” Koshmar replied.
She told Hresh to include Taniane in the search party the next time he went forth. He had mixed feelings about that. Taniane, who had grown tall and silken and keen-witted, had begun to fascinate him in a strange, disturbing way that he scarcely understood. It gave him a mysterious feeling of warmth and excitement when she was close to him, but at the same time she stirred powerful discomfort in him, and sometimes he felt so ill at ease that he would go out of his way to avoid her. He accepted her into the Seekers, for Koshmar had ordered him to, but he took care always to have Orbin or Haniman with him also whenever Taniane was part of the exploration group. They distracted her and kept her from asking him uncomfortable questions.
After Taniane, it was Bonlai who wanted to be a Seeker: if Taniane could go, other girls could, she insisted. And it would give her a chance to be with Orbin. Hresh saw no merit in that, and this time he prevailed with Koshmar. Bonlai, Koshmar agreed, was too young to go exploring. But Hresh could raise no such objection in the case of Sinistine, Jalmud’s mate, and she became the second woman of the tribe to join the group.
A little while later the shy and stolid young warrior Praheurt asked to be one of them, and then Shatalgit, a woman just entering childbearing age, who all too obviously was hoping to mate herself with Praheurt. So there were seven Seekers all told, almost a tenth of the entire tribe.
“Seven is certainly enough,” Hresh said to Koshmar. “Pretty soon there’ll be nobody left working in the vegetable fields or tending the meat-animals, and we’ll all be out prowling in the ruins.”
Koshmar frowned. “Are we here to raise crops or to find the secrets of the Great World that will show us how to conquer the world?”
“We’ve found any number of Great World secrets already.”
“And they remain secret,” said Koshmar sharply. “You don’t know how to use a single one of those machines.”
Hresh replied, trying to choke back his annoyance, “I’m working on that. But the secrets of the Great World will be of no value to us if we starve to death while trying to learn how to make use of them. I think seven Seekers is enough.”
“Very well,” said Koshmar.
Nothing more was heard from the Helmet People in all this time.