9
To the Nest of Nests
All week long the messages had been coming to Salaman with rising urgency and intensity from the relay stations to the north and to the south.
Thu-Kimnibol was advancing at the head of a vast army from Dawinno. He was close to Yissou now, no more than a few days’ march away, perhaps less. Every relay agent along the road had underscored the awe he felt at the size of that oncoming force. Had Thu-Kimnibol brought everyone of fighting age in Dawinno with him? It almost seemed that way.
On the northern front the army of the king, four hundred strong, had pressed deeper and deeper day by day into the hjjk lands, following the route the little colony of Acknowledgers had taken.
We have found them,came the report finally. All dead.
And then:
We’ve been attacked by hjjks ourselves.
And then:
There are too many of them for us.
And then silence.
“Twice now the insect-folk have attacked our people without provocation,” Salaman told the people of Yissou, speaking from his pavilion atop the wall to a great horde of citizens in the plaza below. “They have slaughtered the innocent settlers whom Zechtior Lukin led into unoccupied territory. And now they have massacred the army we sent forth to rescue Zechtior Lukin’s people. There can be only one policy now.”
“War! War!” came the cry from a thousand throats.
“War, yes,” Salaman replied. “All-out war, by all the People against this implacable enemy. The hjjks have threatened the existence of this city since its earliest days: but now, with the help of our allies from Dawinno, we will bring the fire to their own domain, we will cut them to mincemeat, we will drag forth their loathsome Queen into the light of day and put an end at last to Her unspeakable life!”
“War! War!” came the cry again.
And later that afternoon, when Salaman had returned to the palace and had taken his seat upon the Throne of Harruel, his son Biterulve came to him and said, “Father, I want to go with the army when it sets out into the hjjk country. I ask your permission for this, as I must. But I beg you not to withhold it.”
Salaman felt a hand tightening about his heart. He had never expected anything like this.
“You?” he said, staring amazed at the pale slender boy. “What do you know of warfare, Biterulve?”
“I feared you’d say that. But you know I’ve been riding with my brothers in the lands outside the wall for a long time now. I’ve learned some skills of fighting from them as well. You mustn’t keep me from this war, father.”
“But the danger—”
“Would you make a woman of me, father? Worse than a woman, for I know that there’ll be women in our fighting brigades. Am I to stay home, then, with the old ones and children?”
“You’re no warrior, Biterulve.”
“I am.”
The boy’s quiet insistence carried a force Salaman had never heard from him before. He saw the anger in Biterulve’s eyes, the injured pride. And the king realized that his gentle scholarly son had put him in an impossible situation. Refuse permission and he robbed Biterulve forever of his princeliness. He’d never forgive him for that. Let him go, and he might well fall victim to some thrusting hjjk spear, which Salaman himself could scarcely bear to contemplate.
Impossible. Impossible.
He felt his anger rising. How dare the boy ask him to make a decision like this? But he held himself in check.
Biterulve waited, expectant, unafraid.
He gives me no choice, Salaman thought bitterly.
At length he said, sighing, “I never thought you’d have any appetite for fighting, boy. But I see I’ve misjudged you.” He looked away, and made a brusque gesture of dismissal. “All right. Go. Go, boy. Get yourself ready to march, if that’s what you need to do.”
Biterulve grinned and clapped his hands, and ran from the room.
“Get me Athimin,” the king said to one of his stewards.
When the prince arrived, Salaman said to him dourly, “Biterulve has just told me he plans to go with us to the war.”
Athimin’s eyes brightened in surprise. “Surely you’ll forbid him, father!”
“No. No, I’ve given permission. He said I’d be making a woman of him, if I forced him to stay home. Well, so be it. But you’re going to be his protector and guardian, do you understand? If a finger of his is harmed, I’ll have three of yours. Do you understand me, Athimin? I love all my sons as I love my own self, but I love Biterulve in a way that goes beyond all else. Stay at his side on the battlefield. Constantly.”
“I will, father.”
“And see to it that he comes home from the war in one piece. If he doesn’t, you’d be wise to stay up there yourself in the hjjk wastelands rather than face me again.”
Athimin stared.
“Nothing will harm him, father,” the prince said hoarsely. “I promise you that.”
He went out without another word, nearly colliding as he did with a breathless messenger who had come scampering in.
“What is it?” Salaman barked.
“The army of Dawinno,” the runner said. “They’ve reached the lantern-tree groves. They’ll be in the city in a couple of hours.”
“Look yonder,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “The Great Wall of Yissou.”
Under a sky of purple and gold a massive band of the deepest black stretched along the horizon for an impossible distance, curving away finally at the sides to disappear in the obscurities beyond. It might have been a dark strip of low-lying cloud; but no, for its bulk and solidity were so oppressive that it was hard to understand how the ground could hold firm beneath its impossible weight.
“Can it be real?” Nialli Apuilana asked finally. “Or just some illusion, some trick that Salaman makes our minds play upon ourselves?”
Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “If it’s a trick, it’s one that Salaman has played on himself. The wall’s real enough, Nialli. For twice as many years as you’ve been alive, or something close to that, he’s poured all the resources of his city into constructing that thing. While we’ve built bridges and towers and roads and parks, Salaman’s built a wall. A wall of walls, one to stand throughout the ages. When this place is as old as Vengiboneeza, and twice as dead, that wall will still be there.”
“Is he crazy, do you think?”
“Very likely. But shrewd and strong, for all his craziness. It’s a mistake ever to underestimate him. There’s no one in this world as strong and determined as Salaman. Or as mad.”
“A crazy ally. That makes me uneasy.”
“Better a crazy ally than a crazy enemy,” Thu-Kimnibol said.
He turned and signaled to those in the wagons just behind him. They had halted when he had. Now they began to move forward again, up the sloping tableland toward the high ground where that incredible wall lay athwart the sky. Nialli Apuilana could see small figures atop the wall, warriors whose spears stood out like black bristles against the darkening air. For a moment she imagined that they were hjjks, somehow in possession of the city. The strangeness of this place inspired fantasy. She found herself thinking also that the wall, colossal as it was, was merely poised and lightly balanced on its great base, that it would take only a breeze to send it falling forward upon her, that already it had begun slowly to topple in her direction as the wagon rolled onward. Nialli Apuilana smiled. This is foolishness, she thought. But anything seemed possible in the City of Yissou. That black wall was like a thing of dreams, and not cheerful dreams.
Thu-Kimnibol said, “It was only a wooden palisade when I was a boy here. Not even a very sturdy one, at that. When the hjjks came, they’d have swarmed over it in a moment, if we hadn’t found a way of turning them back. Gods! How we fought, that day!”
He fell into silence. He seemed to lose himself in it.
Nialli Apuilana leaned against his comforting bulk and tried to imagine how it had been, that day when the hjjks came to Yissou. She saw the boy Samnibolon, who would call himself Thu-Kimnibol afterward, at the battle of Yissou: already tall and strong, never tiring, holding his weapons like a man, striking at the hordes of hjjks in the bloody dusk as the shadows lengthened. Yes, she could see him easily, a boy of heroic size, as now he was a man of heroic size. Fighting unrelentingly against the invaders who threatened his father’s young city. And something in her quivered with excitement at the thought of him hot with battle.