The summer was still high, and the air was thick and heavy. Rain fell often. This was fertile land, out here north of Dawinno, with many farms Sometimes Thu-Kimnibol saw little knots of farmers standing uneasily by the borders of their property, perhaps wondering whether he meant to raid them.
Soon the caravan was climbing into the hill country, though. Here it was much drier, and there were no more farms. The land was brown and rocky and bleak and the wind came from the north, with an edge on it. Some wild beasts, which had become scarce closer to the settled territories, roamed here. Flights of beaky wide-winged carrion-birds passed ominously overhead. At night the great scarred silver eye that was the Moon, dark with the wounds the death-stars had inflicted on it, lit the bare terrain with a cold gleaming glare.
The xlendis, under Esperasagiot’s expert handling, performed well. Each day they seemed to scamper with greater zeal. They were slender gray beasts, slender-flanked and proud-necked, with aristocratic round heads and flaring nostrils, and they snorted and pranced as they went.
Thu-Kimnibol understood now why Esperasagiot had been so sparing with the xlendis in the early days of the trip. These were city-trained animals, accustomed to pulling the chariots of princes, and they had no experience of long hauls in open country. If he wore them out at the beginning, when provender was easy to come by, what reserve of energy would they have in the harder days to come? Let them grow tough gradually, and be fully inured by the time the journey’s most difficult work was upon them, that was Esperasagiot’s theory.
“I owe you an apology,” Thu-Kimnibol told the wagon-master, when they had been on the road ten days. “Your way with the xlendis is the right one.”
Esperasagiot only grunted. He had no use for apologies, or praise, or anything else but xlendis.
They were in the great windswept coastal plateau now that lay between Dawinno and Yissou. Small twisted gray plants grew here in pale pebbly soil. There were ruined Great World cities along the route. But all that remained of them were faint white lines in the ground, the merest sketchy traces of foundations and pavements. Hresh had sent crews of University students here to dig for more, but there was nothing more to find.
Thu-Kimnibol ordered a halt at the first of these ancient sites that they came to, and looked around. He imagined a host of sapphire-eyes living in this place once, great meaty long-jawed reptilian things with big heads and heavy thighs, strolling slowly about like philosophers with their huge tails propped behind them as a sort of crutch, and the light of genius ablaze in their bulging blue eyes.
At another time he would have made a point of searching such a site as this for a trinket or two of the Great World to bring back for Naarinta. Things of that sort had always cheered her, a bit of fossil bone, some snippet of a mysterious instrument. She had decorated the halls of their villa with an odd and haunting collection of gnarled and twisted fragments of antiquity, and spent many an hour contemplating them.
He poked at this ruin now for sad memory’s sake, and, perhaps, to amuse himself. Thinking that he might stumble on some shining machine of the ancient days that could work miracles, something simply lying there for the taking in the ground that no one else had noticed. A weapon, perhaps, that might be used to obliterate the hjjks. Or even the bones of a sapphire-eyes. No one had ever found any of those. He scuffed at the chalky soil with his boot. But there was nothing.
On a whim he ordered a trench driven a short way into the ground. The diggers worked for an hour or more; but all they brought him was a clump of brown rust, which turned to loose powder in his hand. He shrugged and cast it aside.
A powerful sense of the ancientness of the world came over him, of former worlds that lay upon this one like a film, a crust.
There were echoing traces of history here, and of lost magics, and of magics that still lived, but were beyond his grasp. An abiding melancholy began to take hold of him. His mind dwelt on the Great World, on all that it had been. Why had it perished, for all its greatness? Why did great civilizations perish, even as living people did?
He was struck by the inadequacy of his knowledge: the inadequacy of his mind itself. Hresh knows these things, Thu-Kimnibol thought. We are of one flesh, or almost so, he and I, and yet he knows everything, and I — I know nothing at all. I am merely great strong Thu-Kimnibol, whom others wrongly think stupid, though I am not. Ignorant, yes. But not stupid.
I must speak with Hresh about these matters, when I return.
“I wonder why it is,” Thu-Kimnibol said to Simthala Honginda, who was his lieutenant-ambassador, “that Vengiboneeza survived over the years, or at any rate a good deal of it, enough so that we were able to walk in and take up lodgings there. But there’s nothing left of these cities except streaks of dust and rust.”
Simthala Honginda was of Koshmar blood, a wiry, quick-tempered man of high family connections, the eldest son of Boldirinthe and Staip, linked also to the line of Torlyri by way of his mating with Husathirn Mueri’s sister Catiriil. He kicked idly at the ground. “Vengiboneeza was a sapphire-eyes city. Those old crocodiles had clever machines to do all the work for them, my father tells me. And the machines stayed there, continuing to repair everything, thousands of years after the Long Winter killed off all the sapphire-eyes.”
“They must have been miraculous things, if they could last so long.”
“The sapphire-eyes had machines to repair the machines. And machines to repair the machines that repaired the machines. And so on and so on.”
“Ah. I see.” Thu-Kimnibol scratched a comic face in the dry soil with his heel. “And this place, it had no such machines, you think?”
“Maybe it was a city of the vegetals,” Simthala Honginda suggested. “They must have been very delicate, the plant-people, and froze to death and dried up and blew away like flowers. And so did their cities, I suppose, when the cold weather came. Or a human city, maybe. The humans are beyond our understanding. They mightn’t have cared to build cities as substantial as those of the sapphire-eyes. It could be that their cities were mere things of mist and film, and when the humans went away, nothing but the faint traces of their cities stayed behind. But how can I say? It was all so long ago, Thu-Kimnibol.”
“Yes. I suppose it was.” He knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt, and tossed it into the wind. “A miserable sad place. There’s nothing for us in it. We waste our time stopping here.”
He ordered the caravan onward. Staring morosely ahead across the dry tawny landscape, he felt himself sinking into an uncharacteristic mood of gloom and irritation.
Thu-Kimnibol had known since boyhood that there had been a world before the present one, when all the Earth had been a radiant paradise and six very different races lived together in splendor and magnificence. Great Vengiboneeza had been their capital then, the chronicles said. He had never seen it himself, but he had heard tales of it from his brother Hresh. The things that Hresh had told him of those sky-high towers of turquoise and pink and iridescent violet that had somehow survived out of distant antiquity, and all the wondrous machines that still could be found in them, had stayed vivid in Thu-Kimnibol’s mind ever since. What marvels! What astonishments! In those ancient times when the world had belonged to the slow heavy bright-eyed crocodilian sapphire-eyes folk, whose minds were ablaze with such powerful intelligence, the People, or the creatures who would one day become the People, had been no more than frisky jungle beasts. And Vengiboneeza had been the hub of the cosmos, visited by travelers from many lands and even, magically, other stars.
In those days also had lived the delicate vegetals, beings with petaled faces and hard knotty stems. And the brown-furred flipper-limbed sea-lords, who dwelled in the oceans but could come up on land and move about in clever chariots. And the dome-headed mechanicals, an artificial race, but something more than mere machines.