“Hjjk! Hjjk! There goes the hjjk!”
“Say something to us in hjjk-speak, hjjk!”
“Hey, hey, hjjk! Where’s your beak?”
They meant no mockery. They were only children, after all. Their tone was light and playful.
He turned to them and beckoned. They were wary at first, the way the older ones tended to be, but then they came to him and stood close about him. Some of them shyly let him take their hands in his.
“Are you really a hjjk?”
“I am like you. I am flesh, like you.”
“Then why do they say you’re a hjjk?”
Kundalimon smiled. Gently he said, “The hjjks took me away when I was very young, and raised me in their Nest. But I was born here, you know. In this city.”
“You were? Who’s your mother? Who’s your father?”
“Marsalforn,” he said. “Ramla.” He struggled to remember which was which. The mother, the Egg-maker, that was Marsalforn, Nialli Apuilana had said, and the father, he who had kindled, was Ramla. Or was it the other way around? He could never keep it straight. In the Nest it made no difference who your Egg-maker was, and who the Life-kindler. Everyone was really the child of the Queen, after all. Without Her touch there could be no new life. Makers, kindlers, they all served the Will of the Queen.
“Where do they live?” a little girl asked. “Do you ever visit them, your mother and your father?”
“They live somewhere else now. Or maybe they don’t live anywhere any more. No one knows where they are.”
“Oh. That’s sad. Do you want to visit my mother and father, if you don’t have any of your own?”
“I’d like that,” said Kundalimon.
“How did you come here?” another girl said. “Did you fly like a bird?”
“I rode a vermilion.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arms, indicating a beast of mountainous size. “Down out of the north, from the place of the Nest of Nests, traveling day after day, week after week. Riding my vermilion, heading for this city, this city Dawinno. The Queen sent me here. Go to Dawinno, She said. She sent me so that I could talk to you. So that I could get to know you, and you to know me. So that I could bring you Her love, and Her peace.”
“Are you going to take us back with you to the Nest?” a boy in back called. “Did you come to steal us, like you were stolen?”
Kundalimon looked to him, amazed.
“Yes! Yes!” the children cried. “Are you here to take us to the hjjks?”
“Would you like that?”
“No!” they yelled, so loudly that his ears rang. “Don’t take us! Please don’t!”
“I was taken. You see that no harm came to me.”
“But the hjjks are monsters! They’re horrible and dangerous! Awful giant bug-creatures, is what they are!”
He shook his head. “It isn’t so. You don’t understand, because you don’t know them. No one here does. They’re kind. They’re loving. If you only knew. If you only could feel Nest-bond, if you only could experience Queen-love.”
“He sounds crazy,” a small boy said. “What’s he saying?”
“Shhh!”
“Come,” Kundalimon said. “Sit down with me, here in the park. There’s so much I want you to know. Let me tell you, first, what things are like, in the Nest—”
There was nothing left of the City of Yissou that Thu-Kimnibol remembered from his youth. Just as the first crude wooden shacks of Harruel’s original Yissou had been swept away to be replaced by the early stone buildings of Salaman’s city, so too by now had every vestige of that second city disappeared. A still newer and more powerful one had been superimposed on it, obliterating the other, which was gone without a trace, palaces and courts and houses and all.
Salaman said, “It looks good to you, does it? It looks like a real city, eh?”
“It doesn’t look at all the way I expected it would.”
“Speak up, speak up!” Salaman said sharply. “I have trouble understanding a lot of what you’re saying.”
“A thousand pardons,” said Thu-Kimnibol, in a voice twice as loud. “Is this better?”
“You don’t have to shout. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing. It’s all those damnable Beng words you use. You speak with helmets in your mouth. How am I supposed to make sense out of that? I suppose if I lived with Bengs in my lap the way you people do—”
“We are all one People now,” Thu-Kimnibol said.
“Ah. Ah. Is that what you are? Well, try not to speak so much Beng, if you want me to know what you’re saying. We’re conservatives here. We still speak the pure speech, the language of Koshmar and Torlyri and Thaggoran. You remember Torlyri? You remember Thaggoran, do you? No, no, how could you? He was the chronicler before Hresh. The rat-wolves killed him, right after the Coming Forth, that time when we were crossing the plain. But you weren’t even born then. You don’t remember any of that. I should have realized. I’m turning into a forgetful old man. And very cantankerous, Thu-Kimnibol. Very cantankerous indeed.”
Salaman grinned disarmingly, as though trying to deny his own words. But it was plain to see he was telling the truth. Cantankerous was what he had become, testy and sharp.
Time had brought changes to Salaman as well as to his city. Thu-Kimnibol remembered a Salaman from the early days who had been supple and resilient of mind, a clever and cunning planner, intelligent, far-seeing, a natural leader, an innately likable person. But then the changes had begun in him, that new Salaman emerging, darker, more crabbed of soul, a difficult and suspicious man. And now, twenty years later, the process was far along. The king seemed chilly and morose, gripped by some bitter malaise, or stained from within, perhaps, by the absolute power he had taken for himself here. You could see it in his face, drawn in upon itself, cheeks sunken, temples hollow, and in the taut, guarded way he carried himself. His fur had entirely whitened with age. There was a harsh wintry look about him.
The city he had created was like that too. Here were no broad sunny avenues, no brightly tiled towers against the blue of the sky, no green and leafy gardens, such as Thu-Kimnibol saw every day in airy Dawinno. The City of Yissou, penned within its crater-rim and its titanic rampart of heavy black stone, was a cramped, dismal place of narrow streets and low, thick-walled stone buildings with mere slits for windows. It looked more like a fortress than a city.
Was this what my father had in mind, Thu-Kimnibol wondered, when we left Vengiboneeza to found a city of our own? This dark, huddled, nasty town?
In the aftermath of the victory over the hjjks, on that sorry day when King Harruel had died fighting the insect hordes, Salaman had said, flushed with his new kingship, “We will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me.” But later — by demand of the people, said Salaman, claiming that they preferred to honor the god who protected them rather than the man who had brought them to this place — he had restored the original name. Just as well, Thu-Kimnibol thought now. He wouldn’t have wanted his father’s name forever attached to so grim and cheerless a city as Salaman’s City of Yissou.
Yet Salaman had managed to welcome him, at any rate, in an open-spirited and even cheerful way. He betrayed hardly a trace of recollection of the angry words that had passed between them long ago. Coming down from his walltop pavilion as Thu-Kimnibol’s wagons passed through the great gate of the city, he had waited calmly with folded arms for Thu-Kimnibol to step forth, and then, his stern and rigid face softening unexpectedly into a smile, he strode forward, arms extended, hands reaching for Thu-Kimnibol’s.
“Cousin! After so many years! What is this, do you return at last to take up your old life here, which was so suddenly interrupted?”
“No, king, I come only as an ambassador,” Thu-Kimnibol replied evenly. “I have messages for you from Taniane, and other things to discuss with you. My place is in Dawinno, now.” But he met Salaman’s embrace with an embrace of his own, reaching down to encircle the king in his arms. There was some difficulty in it for him, but only because Salaman was so much shorter a man.