“That was a long time ago, kinsman.”
“You said that making war on them was unthinkable, because they’re such great civilized beings.”
“Yes. I said that. And in some ways it’s true.”
“In some ways?”
“Some, yes. Not all. I put it all too simply that day at the Presidium. I was very young then.”
“Ah. Ah, yes, of course.”
“Don’t smile at me in that patronizing way, Thu-Kimnibol. You make me feel like a child.”
“I don’t mean to do that. You hardly seem like a child to me, believe me. But I don’t have to be as wise as Hresh to realize that you’ve come here today — at the urging, I suspect, of Puit Kjai and Simthala Honginda and other such peace-loving types — to denounce me and the war that I’m about to launch against your beloved hjjks. All right. Denounce me, then. And then let me get on with what I have to do.”
Her eyes sparkled defiantly. “You don’t understand me at all, do you, Thu-Kimnibol? I’ve come to you today to offer my support and help.”
“Your what?”
“I want to join you. I want to go north with you.”
“To spy on us for the Queen?”
She shot him a blazing look, and he could see her choking back some hot angry retort. Then she said, in a frosty tone, “You don’t know a thing about the beings you’re going out there to fight. I’ve experienced them at the closest possible range. I can guide you. I can explain things to you as you approach the Nest. I can help you ward off dangers you can’t even begin to imagine.”
“You give me very little credit if you think I’m such a fool, Nialli.”
“And you give me very little, if you think I’d act as traitor to my own blood.”
“Do I have any reason to think you’d be anything else?”
Her gaze was icy. Her nostrils flared and her fur rose, and he saw her biting down on her lower lip.
Then, to his complete amazement, she extended her sensing-organ toward him.
In a deadly calm voice she said, “If you doubt my loyalty, Thu-Kimnibol, I invite you to twine with me here and now. And then you can decide for yourself whether I’m a traitor or not.”
This was strange country out here, five days’ journey to the north of Dawinno and then some days more inland. Hresh had never seen it before, and he doubted that many others had, either. There were no farming settlements on this side of the interior hills, and the main road from Dawinno to Yissou passed well to the west.
It was broken land, cut by canyons and gullies. Dry cool winds blew from the center of the continent. Earthquakes had shattered this region many times, and the passage of ancient glaciers had ground it to ruin again and again, so that the bones of the world lay exposed here, great dark stripes cutting through the soft reddish rock of the hillsides.
A single xlendi drew his wagon. It might have been wiser to take two; but he knew so little about handling xlendis that he had decided not to risk the difficulties he’d encounter if the pair turned out to be ill-matched. He let the xlendi amble at its own pace, resting when it felt like it.
He had taken just a little with him in the way of provisions, enough to see him through the first few days. After that he would depend on the countryside for whatever he needed.
Nor had he brought anything from the House of Knowledge, any of his books or charts or ancient artifacts. Those things no longer mattered. He wanted to leave everything behind: everything. This was to be the final adventure of his life, this pilgrimage. Best not to be impeded by baggage out of the past.
With one exception: the Barak Dayir, in its little velvet pouch, tied about his waist beneath his sash. At the very last, he hadn’t been willing to abandon that.
Day after day he rode calmly onward, allowing his path to choose itself. Constantly he scanned the horizon, hoping to catch sight of roving parties of hjjks.
Where are you, children of the Queen? Here is Hresh-full-of-questions, come to talk with you!
But he saw no hjjks.
He was, he supposed, somewhere close by the lesser Nest where Nialli Apuilana had been taken by her captors years ago. But if there were hjjks hereabouts, they were keeping themselves out of sight; or else they were so sparse in these parts that he hadn’t passed near their encampment.
No matter. Eventually he’d find hjjks, or they would find him, in good and proper time. Meanwhile he was content to wander on, this way and that, across the broken land.
This cool windy region seemed fertile, in its way. There were great trees with thick black trunks and wide-spreading crowns of yellow leaves, each spaced far from the next as if it would tolerate no competition, choking off any of its own kind that tried to sprout within its zone of dominance. Sprawling shrubs with white woolly leaves clung to the ground like a dense coating of fur. Other plants, basket-shaped ones with tightly interwoven branches, rolled and tumbled freely as though they were beasts of the field.
But if there were plants that looked like animals here, so also did Hresh see animals that might well have been plants. A whole grove of snaky green creatures stood on their tails in holes in the ground. They might well have been rooted where they stood. He watched them rising up suddenly to snap some hapless bird or insect from the air and coiling back down again, and never once saw one come all the way out of its den. Then there were others that were no more than huge mouths with vestigial bodies, propped immobile against rocks and uttering booming seductive cries that brought their prey to them as if in trance. He remembered having encountered some such creatures when he was a boy, on the journey from the cocoon to Vengiboneeza. They had almost lured him then; but now he was invulnerable to their sinister music.
Hresh had told no one that he was leaving Dawinno. He had gone around to speak one last time with those he cared for most, Thu-Kimnibol, Boldirinthe, Staip, Chupitain Stuld, and, of course, Nialli Apuilana and Taniane. But he had told none of them, not even Taniane, that what he was actually doing was saying farewell.
That had been hard, hiding the truth that way. Especially from Taniane. He had suffered for it. But Hresh knew that they’d try to stop him from going, if they were aware of what he had in mind. So he had simply slipped out of the city in the mists of dawn. Now, with Dawinno far behind him, he felt no regrets at all. A long phase of his life had ended, a new phase was beginning.
If he regretted anything, it was that he had built the city so well. It seemed to him now that he had led the People down the wrong path, that it had been a mistake to build the City of Dawinno in the image of magnificent Vengiboneeza, to try to recreate the Great World here in the New Springtime. The gods had cleansed the Great World from the Earth because it had run its course. The Great World had developed as far as it could. It had reached a stand-still point. If the death-stars had not come to shatter it, its perfection would have given way imperceptibly to decay. For a civilization, unlike a machine, is a living thing, which must either grow or decay, and there is no third alternative.
He had wanted the People to attain the grandeur of the Great World, which had been hundreds of thousands of years in the making, in one sudden leap. But they hadn’t been ready for that. They were, after all, only a single generation away from the cocoon. Under the pressures of that leap they had passed from that primitive simplicity into their own corruption and decay, with scarcely a pause for ripening into real humanity.
This evil war, for example—
A crime against the gods, against the laws of the city, against the essence of civilization itself. But he knew that nothing he could do would stop it.
And so he understood that he had failed. In the time that remained to him he would do what he could to atone for that. But he refused to mourn the errors that he had made, or those that others were about to make; for he had done his best. That was the one great consolation. He had always done his best.