“There’s one other possibility,” Curabayn Bangkea said.
“And what would that be?”
“That this boy is no simple runaway, but in fact some kind of emissary from the hjjks.”
“A what?”
“Only a guess, throne-grace. There’s no evidence, you understand. But something about him — the way he holds himself, so polite and quiet and, well, solemn, and the way he tries to tell us things, the way he comes out once in a while with a word like ‘peace,’ or ‘love,’ or ‘queen’ — well, sir, he doesn’t seem like your ordinary kind of runaway to me. It came to me all at once that this could be some sort of ambassador, like, sent to us by the wonderful Queen of the bug-folk to bring us some kind of special message. Or so I think, throne-grace. If you pardon me for my presumption.”
“An ambassador?” Husathirn Mueri said, shaking his head. “Why in the name of all the gods would they be sending us an ambassador?”
Curabayn Bangkea gazed blandly at him, offering no answer.
Glowering, Husathirn Mueri rose from the justiciary throne and walked to and fro with a sliding gait before it, hands clasped behind his back.
Curabayn Bangkea was no fool; his judgment, however tentatively put forth, was something to respect. And if the hjjks had sent an emissary, someone of People birth, one who had dwelled among the bugs so long that he had forgotten his own speech and spoke only in harsh grinding hjjk-clatter—
As he paced, one of the merchants, coming up beside him, tugged at his sash of office and begged his attention. Husathirn Mueri, eyes flashing furiously, raised his arm as if to strike the man. The merchant looked at him in astonishment.
At the last moment he checked himself. “Your suit is remanded for further study,” he told the merchant. “Return to this court when I am next sitting the throne.”
“And when will that be, lordship?”
“Do I know, fool? Watch the boards! Watch the boards!” Husathirn Mueri’s fingers trembled. He was losing his poise, and was troubled by that. “It’ll be next week, on Friit or Dawinno, I think,” he said, more temperately. “Go. Go!”
The merchants fled. Husathirn Mueri turned to the guard-captain. “Where is this hjjk ambassador now?”
“Throne-grace, it was only a guess, calling him an ambassador. I can’t say for sure that that’s what he really is.”
“Be that as it may, where is he?”
“Just outside, in the holding chamber.”
“Bring him in.”
He resumed his post on the throne. He felt irritated and perplexed and impatient. Some moments went by.
Husathirn Mueri did what he could to regain control of himself, making a calmness at the core of his spirit as his mother Torlyri had taught him to do. Rashness led only to miscalculation and error. She herself — the gods rest her soul, that warm and tender woman! — had not been nearly this high-strung. But Husathirn Mueri was a crossbreed, with a crossbreed’s vigor and intensity and a crossbreed’s drawbacks of disposition. In his birth he had foreshadowed the eventual union of the two tribes. Torlyri had been the Koshmar tribe’s offering-woman and the indomitable Beng warrior Trei Husathirn had swept the Koshmar priestess up into unexpected love and an unlikely mating, long ago, when the Beng people and the Koshmars still dwelled uneasily side by side in Vengiboneeza.
He sat waiting, more calmly now. At length the shadow of Curabayn Bangkea’s immense helmet entered the cupola, and then Curabayn Bangkea himself, leading the stranger at the end of a leash of plaited larret-withes. At the sight of him Husathirn Mueri sat to attention, hands tightly grasping the claw-and-ball armrests of the throne.
This was a very strange stranger indeed.
He was young, in late boyhood or early manhood, and painfully slender, with thin hunched shoulders and arms so frail they looked like dried stems. The ornaments he wore, the bracelet and the shining breastplate, did indeed seem to be polished fragments of a hjjk’s hard carapace, a grisly touch. His fur was black, but not a deep, rich black, like that of Husathirn Mueri: there was a dull grayish tinge to it, and it was pitiful scruffy fur, thin in places, almost worn through. This young man has been poorly fed all his life, Husathirn Mueri realized. He has suffered.
And his eyes! Those pale, icy, unwavering eyes! They seemed to stare toward the judicial throne across a gulf many worlds wide. Frightful remorseless eyes, an enemy’s eyes; but then, as Husathirn Mueri continued to study them, he began to see them more as sad compassionate eyes, the eyes of a prophet and healer.
How could that be? The contradiction bewildered him.
At any rate, whoever and whatever this boy might be, there seemed no reason to keep him tethered this way. “Unleash him,” Husathirn Mueri ordered.
“But if he flees, throne-grace — !”
“He came here with a purpose. Fleeing won’t serve it. Unleash him.”
Curabayn Bangkea undid the knot. The stranger seemed to stand taller, but otherwise did not move.
Husathirn Mueri said, “I am the holder of throne-duty in this court for today. Husathirn Mueri is my name. Who are you, and why have you come to the City of Dawinno?”
The boy gestured, quick tense flutterings of his fingers, and made hoarse chittering hjjk-noises deep down in his chest, as if he meant to spit at Husathirn Mueri’s feet.
Husathirn Mueri shivered and drew back. This was the nearest thing to having an actual hjjk here in the throne-room. He felt rising revulsion.
“I speak no hjjk,” he said icily.
“ Shhhtkkkk,” the boy said, or something like it. “Gggk thhhhhsp shtgggk.” And then he said, wresting the word from his throat as though it were some spiny thing within him that he must expel, “Peace.”
“Peace.”
The boy nodded. “Peace. Love.”
“Love,” said Husathirn Mueri, and shook his head slowly.
“It was like this when I interrogated him, too,” Curabayn Bangkea murmured.
“Be still.” To the boy Husathirn Mueri said, speaking very clearly and loudly, as though that would make any difference, “I ask you again: What is your name?”
“Peace. Love. Ddddkdd ftshhh. ”
“Your name, ” Husathirn Mueri repeated. He tapped his chest, where the white swirling streaks that he had inherited from his mother cut diagonally across the deep black fur. “I am Husathirn Mueri. Husathirn Mueri is my name. My name. His name” — pointing — “is Curabayn Bangkea. Curabayn Bangkea. And your name—”
“Shthhhjjk. Vtstsssth. Njnnnk!” The boy seemed to be struggling in a terrible way to articulate something. Muscles writhed in his sunken cheeks; his eyes rolled; he clenched his fists and dug his elbows into his hollow sides. Suddenly a complete understandable sentence burst from him: “I come in peace and love, from the Queen.”
“An emissary, do you see?” cried Curabayn Bangkea, grinning triumphantly.
Husathirn Mueri nodded. Curabayn Bangkea began to say something else, but Husathirn Mueri waved him impatiently to silence.
This must indeed be some child the hjjks had stolen in infancy, he thought. Who has lived among them ever since, in their impenetrable northland empire. And has been sent back now to the city of his birth, bearing Yissou only knew what demand from the insect queen.
The purposes of the hjjks were beyond all fathoming. Everyone knew that. But the message that this boy was trying so agonizingly to communicate might portend the opening of some new phase in the uneasy relationship between the People and the insect-folk. Husathirn Mueri, who was only one of several princes of the city and had reached that point in manhood when it was essential to begin thinking of rising to higher things, took it as a lucky omen that the stranger had arrived on a day when he happened to be holding the magistracy. There must be some good use to which all this could be put. First, though, he needed to figure out what the envoy was trying to say.