He said nothing about what he had seen to anyone.
But it remained with him, even entering his dreams. He imagined that the Great World people still lived inside that hilclass="underline" that slow solemn massive sapphire-eyes folk were moving about in there with reptilian grace, speaking to one another in mystic poetry, and with them were pale fragile long-limbed humans, and the little flowery vegetals, and the dome-headed mechanicals, and all the other amazing beings of that splendid era, living on and on in a kind of cocoon much like the cocoon that Quisinimoir Flendra’s own tribe had inhabited all during the Long Winter.
Why not? We had a cocoon. Why not them?
He wondered if he dared to investigate the place again, and decided that he didn’t. But then it struck him that there might be treasure in that cave, and that if he didn’t go in there to look for it someone else sooner or later would.
When there had been three straight days without rain he went back to the broken hillside, carrying a rope, a pick, and some clusters of glowberries. He let himself down very carefully over the edge of the cave-in and wriggled into the tunnel. Paused, listened, heard nothing, warily went deeper.
He was in a stone-vaulted room. Another one lay beyond. A rockfall blocked access beyond that. There was no sign of any life. The silence had a weight of thousands of years. Quisinimoir Flendra, prowling cautiously, saw nothing useful at first, only the usual bits and fragments that these ancient sites contained. But toward the back of the inner room he found a box of green metal, half buried in the detritus on the floor of the cave, that came apart like wet paper when he poked it.
There were machines inside: of what kind, he had not the slightest idea. There were eleven of them, little metal globes, each one larger than his fist, with little studs and projections on their surfaces. He picked one up and touched one of the studs. A beam of green light burst from an opening in the thing and with a little whooshing sound it cut a round hole the size of his chest in the wall of the cave just opposite him, so deep that he couldn’t see how far it went. Hastily he let the globe drop.
He heard pebbles falling in the new opening. The hillside creaked and groaned. It was the sound of rock masses shifting about somewhere far within.
All-Merciful save me! It’s all going to fall in on me!
But then everything was still again, except for the faint dry trickle of falling sand in the hole he had so inadvertently carved. Quisinimoir Flendra, scarcely daring to breathe, tiptoed to the mouth of the tunnel, pulled himself up quickly and frantically to the safety of the hilltop, and ran all the way back to his house.
He had heard about such machines. They were things of the Great World. You were supposed to report such finds to the House of Knowledge in the city. Well, so be it. The scholars of the House of Knowledge were welcome to anything they could find in that cave. He didn’t even want a reward. Let them have it all, he thought. Just so long as I don’t have to go near any of those things again — so long as they don’t ask me to go back in there myself to show them where everything is—
Suddenly, with a shudder, Nialli Apuilana imagines that her room is full of hjjks. She isn’t even holding the plaited star when they come. They simply burst into being all around her, congealing out of the air itself.
These aren’t the gentle wise creatures of her feverish recollections. No, she sees them now as others of her kind have always seen them: huge frightening glossy-shelled bristle-limbed things with ferocious beaks and great glittering eyes, milling in hordes about her, clicking and clattering in a terrifying way. And behind them she glimpses the immense mass of the Queen in Her resting-place — motionless, gigantic, grotesque. Calling to her, offering her the joys of Nest-bond, offering her the comforts of Queen-love.
Queen-love?
Nest-bond?
What did those things mean? They were empty noises. They were food that carried no nourishment.
Nialli Apuilana trembles and draws back, pressing herself into the farthest corner of the room. She shuts her eyes, but even so she is unable to blot out the sight of the nightmare creatures that crowd up against her, clicking, clicking, clicking.
Get away from me!
Horrid hideous insects. How she loathes them! And yet she knows there was a time once when she had wanted to be one of them. For a time she had actually thought she was.
Or had all that been a dream, just a phantom of the night just past — her sojourn in the Nest, her talks with Nest-thinker, her taste of Nest-truth? Had she really lived gladly among the hjjks, and come to love them and their Queen? Was such a thing possible, to love the hjjks?
Kundalimon. Had she dreamed him too?
Queen-love! Nest-bond! Come to us, Nialli! Come! Come! Come!
Strange. Alien. Horrible.
“Get away from me!” she cries. “All of you, get away!”
They stare reproachfully. Those immense eyes, glittering, cold. You are one of us. You belong to the Nest.
“No! I never was!”
You love the Queen. The Queen loves you.
Was it true? No. No. She couldn’t possibly have believed it, ever. They had put a spell on her while she was in the Nest, that was all. But now she’s free. They’ll never have her again.
She kneels and huddles into herself. Trembling, sobbing, she touches her arms, her breasts, her sensing-organ. Is this hjjk? she asks herself, feeling the thick lustrous fur, the warm flesh beneath.
No. No. No. No.
She presses her forehead to the floor.
“Yissou!” she calls. “Yissou, protect me!” She prays to Mueri to give her ease. She prays to Friit to heal her, to rid her of this spell.
She tries to banish that terrible sound of clicking from her mind.
The gods are with her now, the Five Heavenly Ones. She feels their presence like a shield about her. Once she had told anyone who would listen that they were nothing but silly myths. But since her return from the lakelands they have been with her. They are with her now. They will prevail. The hjjks who have come crowding into her room grow misty and insubstantial. Tears flow down her cheeks as she gives thanks, gives praise, offers blessings.
Then after a time she begins to grow calm.
As mysteriously as it has come, the convulsion that has overtaken her spirit is gone from her, and she is herself once again. The loathing, the disgust, vanishes. I am free, she thinks. But not quite. She can’t see the hjjks any more, but she still feels their pull. She loves them as she did before. Into her mind once more comes an awareness of the sublime harmony of the Nest, of the industriousness, of its inhabitants, of the great throbbing waves of Queen-love that sweep constantly through it. Queen-love throbs also in her heart. Nest-truth remains with her yet.
She doesn’t understand. How can she sway from one pole to the other like this? How can it be possible to have the Five within her, and the Queen also? Is she of the city or of the Nest, of the People or of the hjjks?
Both, perhaps. Or neither.
Who am I? she wonders. What am I?
Another time Kundalimon came to her.
He appeared toward evening. She hadn’t taken the trouble to light the lamps in her little room and the early darkness of the rain-swept city was beginning to settle upon everything. She saw him standing near the wall opposite the door, where the woven-grass star that the hjjks had given her long ago was hanging.
“You?” she whispered.
He made no reply. He merely stood before her, smiling.
There was something shimmering and golden about him. But within that luminous aura he looked just as he had in the final few weeks of his life, slender almost to the point of frailty, yet sturdy enough in his wiry way, with warm radiant eyes. At first Nialli Apuilana was afraid to look too closely at him, fearing that she would see the signs of violence on his body. But then she found the courage to do it, and saw that he was unharmed.