This was Thu-Kimnibol’s fifth week in the City of Yissou. Real negotiations in the matter of the military alliance between Salaman and the City of Dawinno hadn’t yet begun: only the preliminaries, and sketchy ones at that. Salaman seemed in no hurry. He side-stepped Thu-Kimnibol’s attempts to get down to the harder issues. Instead the king kept him diverted with a constant round of feasts and celebrations as though he regarded him as a member of his own family; and the girl Weiawala shared his bed each night as if they were already betrothed. Very quickly he had come to accept and enjoy her eagerness, her passion. It had renewed his taste for life.
He was untroubled by the slow pace. It was giving the wound of Naarinta’s death a chance to heal, this far from old and familiar associations. And there were even older associations here. In an odd way Thu-Kimnibol was pleased to be back in what was, after all, the city where he had spent the formative years of his life, from his third year to his nineteenth. Vengiboneeza, his birthplace, seemed like a dream to him, nothing more, and Dawinno, great as it was, somehow insubstantial and remote. His whole life there, his princely house and his mate and his pleasures and his friends, had faded until they rarely entered his mind any longer. Here, in the dark shadow of Salaman’s bizarre titanic wall, in this dense dank claustrophobic warren of a city, he was beginning to feel somehow at home. That was surprising. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t even try. As for his mission, his embassy, the less hurry the better. An alliance of the sort he had in mind was best not forged in haste.
He went riding often in the hinterlands beyond the wall, usually with Esperasagiot and Dumanka and Simthala Honginda, sometimes with one or two of the king’s older sons. It was the king who had suggested these excursions. “Your xlendis will want exercise,” he said. “The streets of the city are too narrow and winding. The beasts won’t have room in them for stretching their legs properly.”
“What about the chance of running into hjjks out there?” Thu-Kimnibol asked. “I get the idea that they’re crawling all over the place.”
“If you stray very far to the northeast, yes. Otherwise you won’t be bothered.”
“Toward Vengiboneeza, you mean?”
“Right. That’s where the filthy bugs are. A million of them, maybe. Ten million, for all I know. Vengiboneeza boils with them,” Salaman said. “They infest it like fleas.” He gave Thu-Kimnibol a cunning look. “But even if you do meet up with a few hjjks while you’re out riding, what of it? You knew how to kill them once upon a time, so I recall.”
“Very likely I still do,” Thu-Kimnibol said quietly.
He was cautious outside the city, all the same. Usually he rode through the tame farming territories south of the city, and once or twice he and Esperasagiot went a short way into the unthreatening forests on the eastern side, but he never ventured toward the north. Not that the thought of running into hjjks troubled him much; and he cursed Salaman for that sly suggestion of cowardice. It would be good sport, slicing up a few hjjks. But he had a mission to carry out here, and getting himself killed in a brawl with the bugs would be worse than stupid: it would be irresponsible.
Then Salaman himself suggested that they go for a ride. And Thu-Kimnibol was surprised to see the king leading him toward the west, across a high plateau that gave way to a rough, ravine-crossed district where their xlendis were hard pressed to manage their footing. It was a troublesome broken region. Danger might be hiding anywhere. Salaman felt a need to test his guest’s courage, perhaps. Or to demonstrate his own. Thu-Kimnibol kept his irritation out of view. “It was here,” the king said, “that we destroyed the hjjks, the day of the great battle. Do you remember? You were so young.”
“Old enough, cousin.”
They stood a time, staring. Thu-Kimnibol was aware of the old memories, veiled as they were by time, stirring within him. First the hjjks thrown into confusion by that device of Hresh’s, which sent their vermilions stampeding into those boulder-strewn gullies. And then the battle. How he had fought that day! Cutting them to pieces as they milled around in bewilderment! Six years old, was he? Something like that. But already twice the size of any child his age. With his own sword, and not a toy sword, either. The finest hour of his life: the child-warrior, the boy-swordsman, hacking and slashing with fury and zeal. The one and only time in his life, it was, that he had tasted the true joy of warfare. He longed to feel the wine of it on his lips again.
On his second ride with Salaman the king was even bolder; for this time he headed into the high wooded lands east and north of the city, precisely the region he had warned Thu-Kimnibol against, and kept on going for hours without turning back. As they proceeded on and on during the day, it began to seem to Thu-Kimnibol that Salaman might have it in mind to ride all the way to Vengiboneeza, or some such insanity. Of course that was impossible, a journey that would take weeks, and certain death at the end of it. But the hjjks were supposed to be plentiful to the northeast even this close to the city. If it was so risky to take this route, why had the king chosen it now?
They rode in silence, deep into the afternoon, along a lofty ridge that stretched as far as the eye could see. The countryside grew increasingly wild. Once a passage of bloodbirds briefly darkened the sky just overhead. On a hot sunny knoll a sinister congregation of the large pale insects called green-claws, thick many-jointed things half the length of a man’s body, moved slowly about in the warmth. Later they rode past a place where the ground was in turmoil as though a giant auger were turning beneath it, and, looking down, Thu-Kimnibol saw scarlet eyes huge as saucers looking back at him out of the soft tumbled soil, and great yellow teeth clacking together.
At last they halted in a quiet grassy open place atop a high point along the ridge. The sky was deepening in color. It had the color of strong wine now. Thu-Kimnibol stared eastward, into the gathering shadows. Vengiboneeza was somewhere out there, far beyond the range of sight. He barely remembered it, only scattered scraps and bits, the image of a tower, the cobbled pavement of a great boulevard, the high sweep of a vast plaza. That gleaming ancient city, thick with ghosts. And its million hjjks, swarming furiously in their hive. How the place must reek of them!
After a time Thu-Kimnibol thought that he could see figures, angular and alien, moving about in the shallow canyon below the ridge, very far off.
“Hjjks,” he said. “Do you see them?”
They were very small at this distance, hardly more than specks, yellow banded with black.
Salaman narrowed his eyes, stared closely. “Yes, by Yissou! One, two, three, four—”
“And a fifth one, on the ground. With its belly in the air.”
“Your eyes are younger than mine. But yes, I can make them out now. You see how near to Yissou they venture? Forever prowling closer and closer.” He took a closer look. “The two large ones are females. Warriors, they are. Among hjjks it’s the females who are stronger. Escorting the other three somewhere, I suppose. A team of spies. The one on the ground’s badly hurt, by the looks of it. Or dead. Either way, they’ll be feasting in a little while.”
“Feasting?”
“On the dead one. They waste nothing, the hjjks. Didn’t you know that? Not even their own dead.”
Thu-Kimnibol laughed at the monstrous grisliness of the idea. But then, reconsidering, he felt himself shuddering. Could Salaman be serious? Yes, yes, apparently he was. Indeed, the quartet of distant hjjks seemed to be crouching over the body of the fallen one now, methodically pulling it apart, wresting its limbs from it and splitting them open to get at whatever meat they might contain. He watched in horror, unable to look away. Disgust made his skin crawl, his guts writhe. The busy claws, the avid beaks, the steady, diligent, efficient process of feeding — how loathsome, how hateful they were—