So what the hjjks called Queen-peace prevailed, year upon year. But Queen-peace might be no more than a trap, a lie, a hallucination, an accident of the moment. The hjjks could end it whenever they chose. War might come at any time. Sooner or later it certainly would.
How could he convince himself that a wall fifteen courses high was high enough? In his mind’s eye he saw invading hjjks building longer ladders, and longer ones yet, topping his wall no matter how high he built it, even if it reached through the roof of the sky.
“We will take it higher, I think,” Salaman often would say, with a sweeping gesture of both his hands. “Another three courses, or perhaps four.”
And the builders and masons would sigh; for as Salaman’s rampart continued to rise, all the battlements and parapets and guardhouses and watchtowers that existed presently along the highest level had to be ripped away to make room for the new rows of stone blocks, and rebuilt afterward, and then ripped away once more as Salaman’s insatiable hungers led him to demand yet another course or two, and so on and so on.
But they were used it. The wall was Salaman’s obsession, his cherished plaything, his monument. It would continue growing ever higher, everyone knew, so long as he was king. They wouldn’t have known what to do or say, if Salaman were to tell them some afternoon, “The wall is finished now. We are safe against any conceivable enemy. Go to your homes, all of you, and take up some new employment tomorrow.”
Small chance of that. The wall would never be finished.
The king stamped his feet again. He imagined the wall sending down deep massive roots and anchoring itself in the depths of the Earth. He laughed. To Biterulve he said, “Boy, do you know what I have done here? I’ve built a wall that will stand a million years. A million million, even. The world will grow old, and enter into a time of greatness someday beside which the Great World will seem like nothing at all, and people will say then, seeing the wall, ‘That wall is Salaman’s, who was king at Yissou when the world was young.’”
Biterulve said, with a sly look coming over his face, “And is the world young now, father? I thought it was very old, that we live in the latter days.”
“So we do. But to those who come after us, these will seem like early times.”
“Then how old is the world, do you think?”
The king smiled to himself. The boy reminded him of Hresh, sometimes, young Hresh, Hresh-full-of-questions. With a shrug he said, “The world is at least two million years old. Perhaps three.”
“Is it, do you think? But if seven hundred thousand years have gone by since the Great World lived, and there was a time before the Great World when the humans ruled everything, and there must have been a time before that, when even the humans were simple folk — can that all have happened in only three million years?”
“Perhaps four, then,” said Salaman. It amused him to be quibbled with in this way: but only by Biterulve. “Even five. The world is ever-renewing, boy. First it’s young, and then it grows old, and then it becomes young again. And when it’s old the next time, people look back and think of that early time barely remembered that came just before their time, and say that that was when it was young, not knowing that it had been old before that. Do you follow me, boy?”
“I think I do,” said Biterulve, but there seemed to be more slyness in his tone. Salaman gave him a rough caress.
They moved southward along the wall, toward the domed pavilion of shining smooth-hewn gray stone that rose atop the wall above the southernmost of the eighteen staircases. The sky continued to brighten.
The pavilion was for Salaman’s use only, his private place. He often lingered there, sometimes for hours, during his dawn meditations and at other times as well
The wall here — and only here — diverged from the route of the old crater rim. Here it extended some way out to the south, in order to climb a ridge so high that the distant western sea and the eastern forests could be seen from it, as well as the southern hills.
In the early days, when Harruel was king and even the wooden palisade was still incomplete and the city nothing more than seven lopsided wooden shacks held together by vines, Salaman had gone frequently to that high ridge, usually alone, sometimes with his mate Weiawala. There he would sit dreaming of glorious times to come. The same vision would come to him again and again: the City of Yissou grown to greatness and splendor, greater even than old Vengiboneeza of the sapphire-eyes folk: a mighty city, capital of a mighty empire spreading to the horizon and beyond, ruled not by the descendants of uncouth Harruel, but by the sons of the sons of Salaman.
Some of that had come to pass. Not all.
The city had expanded beyond its original bounds, though not exactly as far as the horizon. With the hjjks now in Vengiboneeza to cut off his dreams of empire to the north and east, and the sea forming an impassable barrier on the west, nothing but the south remained. New little farming villages had lately begun to spring up out there, but only those closest at hand acknowledged Salaman’s sovereignty. The others maintained a hazy independence, or, in the farthest south, regarded themselves as tributaries to Taniane’s Dawinno.
Salaman suspected and feared that his city was not as great by half as the City of Dawinno that Hresh and Taniane had built in the far south. But he had plenty of time left for empire-building. Still he would stand in the pavilion that he had caused to be constructed on the site of his dreaming-place of long ago, and he would look out over the land, imagining the grandeur of the realm that would someday be.
As they approached the pavilion now, Biterulve said abruptly, “I feel a strangeness, father.”
“A strangeness? What sort of strangeness do you mean?”
“Coming from the south. Approaching us now: a force, a power. I felt it all night, and all through the dawn. And now it’s stronger yet.”
Salaman laughed. “I felt a strangeness in this place myself once, do you know? An afternoon of bright sunlight: I was here with Weiawala. Long ago, when I was just a few years older than you are now. And I felt the drumming sound of an army on the march, heading toward us. An onrushing force of hjjks it was, a vast company of them, driving herds of their shaggy vermilions before them, sweeping down out of the north. Is that what you feel, boy? An army of hjjks?”
“No, nothing like that, father. Not hjjks.”
But Salaman was lost in reminiscence. “A great migration, it was, heading our way. A sound like thunder, the booming of a thousand thousand hooves. And then they came. But we beat them, we drove them away. You know that story, do you?”
“Who doesn’t? It was the day Harruel was killed, and you became the king.”
“Yes. Yes. That was the day.” Salaman thought for a moment of Harruel, brilliant in battle but too brutish and brooding and violent to be a successful king, and how he had perished valiantly that day of a hundred wounds, during the battle with the hjjks. So long ago! When the world was young! He slipped his arm around Biterulve again. “Come with me. Into the pavilion.”
“I thought you didn’t ever allow anyone to—”
“Come,” Salaman said again, a little roughly. “I ask you to stand by my side. Will you refuse me, when I invite you this way? Come, stand by my side, and we’ll see what this strangeness is that you say you feel.”
They moved quickly around the curve of the wall and entered the little pavilion. Side by side they stood by the long window, resting their hands on the beveled window-ledge. It was very odd, having someone in here with him. He couldn’t remember ever having done this before. But he’d make an exception in anything, for Biterulve, only for Biterulve.