“What is this?” Koshmar burst in, at last. “Who are these creatures? Sapphire-eyes, are they? And still alive?”
“No,” said Hresh, gathering himself. “Only artificials in the form of sapphire-eyes, guardians of the gate of Vengiboneeza. But did you hear what they said, Koshmar? Crazy stuff. That we aren’t human. That we’re only monkeys, or descended from monkeys, that our sensing-organs are nothing but monkey tails, that the real humans are gone from here—”
Koshmar looked startled. “What nonsense is this?”
“They say—”
“Yes, I heard what they say.” She turned to Torlyri. “What do you make of this?”
The offering-woman, plainly uncertain, blinked, smiled a nervous smile, frowned. “These are ancient creatures. Perhaps they have knowledge which—”
“It’s absurd,” Koshmar said bluntly. She gestured at Hresh. “You! Chronicler! You’ve studied the past. Are we humans or aren’t we?”
“I don’t know. The early chronicles are very difficult. The humans are gone, these artificials say,” Hresh murmured. He was shivering in the forest warmth. His eyes felt hot and swollen: the tears were a moment away.
Koshmar seemed to puff up with fury. “And what would humans be, then, if we are not humans?”
“The artificials say that they had no tails — no sensing-organs — they were without fur—”
“That is some other kind of human,” said Koshmar with a grand dismissing swoop of her arm. “A different tribe, long vanished, if they even existed at all. How do we know they ever lived? We have nothing but the word of these — these things here, these artificials. Let them say whatever they like. We know what we are.”
Hresh was silent. He tried to summon his knowledge of the chronicles, but all that would rise to his mind was cloudy ambiguities.
“We are the children of Lord Fanigole and Lady Theel, who led us to the cocoon,” said Koshmar vehemently. “They were humans and we are humans, and so be it.”
From the sapphire-eyes’ artificials, once again, came that hissing laughter.
Koshmar rounded on them fiercely. She made an angry sweeping gesture, as though brushing cobwebs out of the air before her face. “We are humans,” she repeated, and there was something terrible and awesome in the way she said it. “Let no creature, living or artificial, deny it!”
Hresh hovered between fierce agreement and numb disbelief. He felt as though his soul were fluttering in the balance. Not human? Not human ? What did that mean? How could it be? A monkey, nothing but a monkey, a superior kind of monkey? No. No. No. He looked toward Torlyri, and the offering-woman took his hand in hers. “Koshmar is right,” Torlyri whispered. “The sapphire-eyes wish to mislead us. Koshmar speaks the truth.”
“Yes,” cried Koshmar, overhearing. “It is the truth. If ever there were humans once without fur, without sensing-organs, well, they were some misbegotten mistake, and they are gone now. But we are here. And we are human, by right of blood, by right of succession. It is the truth. By Yissou, it is the truth!” She came forward and faced the three hulking reptiles just within the gate. “What do you say, sapphire-eyes? You tell us we are not humans. But are we not the humans now? Humans of a different kind from the sort you claim to have known, perhaps, but humans of a better kind: for they are gone, if ever they lived at all, and we are here. We have endured, where they have not. We have survived to winter’s end, and now we will take back the world from the hjjk-folk, or whoever else may have seized it in the time of coldness. What do you say, sapphire-eyes? Are we not humans? May we not enter great Vengiboneeza? What do you say?”
There was a long aching silence.
“I tell it to you again,” declared Koshmar unwaveringly. “If we are not the humans you knew, we are the humans now. Admit it! Admit it! Humans by right of succession. It is our destiny to have this city. Where are they, the ones you call the real humans? Where? Where? We are here! I tell you, we are the humans now.”
There was silence again, mighty and profound. Hresh thought that he had never seen Koshmar look more majestic.
The center sapphire-eyes, which had been staring toward the remote horizon, turned now to Koshmar. It regarded her with distant interest for a long while.
“So be it,” it said finally, just as it seemed the air itself would crack and split apart under the strain. “You are the humans now.” And the creature appeared to smile.
Then the three reptilian forms bowed and moved aside.
They have yielded, Hresh thought in joy and astonishment. They have yielded!
And Koshmar the chieftain, holding her sensing-organ aloft like a scepter, led her little band of humans through the gate and toward the shining towers of Vengiboneeza.
6
The Art of Waiting
In wonder and in jubilation Koshmar and her people took up lodgings in the great city of the lost sapphire-eyes folk.
Shattered and crumbling though it was, Vengiboneeza still was a place of splendor beyond anyone’s imagining. Its location was superb, in a sheltered bowl bordered on the north and partly on the east by a golden-brown mountain wall, on the south and east by the dense jungle that the tribe had just left, and on the west by a dark lake, or perhaps a sea, so broad that it was impossible to look across it to the far side. Warm winds blew steadily out of the west, carrying moisture from the sea. Rain was frequent and the land was green and lush. This was winter, the season of short days, which seemed to be the rainy season, and it was a very wet season indeed. But the air was mild by day and only a few of the nights saw frost, and then merely in the hour just before dawn. When the days began getting longer there was a distinct quickening of growth and the weather grew even warmer. It was all very different from those early bleak months in the first days after leaving the cocoon, when they were crossing the sad and barren plains at the heart of the continent. Plainly the time of the Long Winter was over. No one doubted that now.
Vengiboneeza itself was everywhere, sprawling, vast, incomprehensible, a world unto itself, lying under an awesome silence. From the edge of the sea to the rim of the jungle to the forested foothills of the mountains the dead city spread in all directions, without apparent plan, without discernible order. In some districts the streets ran in grand open boulevards that afforded magnificent views of the mountains beyond, or the sea; in others, there were networks of tiny alleys that coiled one upon another in a sort of desperate cringing secrecy, or high walls that were set at odd angles to block ready access to the plazas beyond. There were great towers in many places, rising generally in serried rows of ten or twenty, but sometimes — and these were the biggest — the towers stood in grand isolation above a neighborhood of low squat buildings with green tiled domes.
Much of the city, especially in the seafront districts, was in ruins. Much was not.
The Long Winter had left fewer scars here than in the unsheltered plains to the east, but there were scars aplenty. The sea had risen more than once during the winter years and had swept devastatingly through the low-lying neighborhoods. There were ancient gray waterstains on high walls and swirling carpets of sandy rubble on third-story balconies. The scattered and crumbled bones of sea-creatures lay in drifts on the flat rooftops. It was clear also that sluggish rivers of ice must have come flowing down the sides of the mountain wall at some time to fold and crush the buildings on the higher slopes. And it looked as if the earth itself had heaved upward from its depths in many parts of the city, where the pavements were vertically displaced and buildings stood at precarious angles or lay fallen in shattered segments and shards of iridescent metal.