Queen of Springtime (3 page)

They were University people too, of course; but there were good political reasons for keeping the chroniclership away from a Beng, and nobody imagined that it would ever go to anyone from so trifling a group as the Stadrains. But far as Plor Killivash cared these days, they could have it, either one of them. Let someone else be head chronicler after Hresh, that was how Plor Killivash felt nowadays. Let someone else supervise the task of hacking through these millennia-thick accumulations of rubble.

Once, like Hresh before him, he had felt himself possessed by an almost uncontrollable passion for penetrating and comprehending the mysteries of the vast pedestal of Earthly history atop which this newborn civilization that the People had created sat, like a pea atop a pyramid. Had longed to mine deep, digging beyond the icy barrenness of the Long Winter period into the luxurious wonder of the Great World. Or even—why set limits? why any limits at all?—even into the deepest layers of all, into those wholly unknown empires of the almost infinitely remote era of the humans, who had ruled the Earth before the Great World itself had arisen. Surely there must be human ruins left down there, somewhere far below the debris of the civilizations that had followed theirs.

It had seemed so wonderfully appealing. To live billions of lives extending across millions of years. To stand upon old Earth and feel that you had been present when it was the crossroads of the stars. Flood your mind with strange sights, strange languages, the thoughts of other minds of unspeakable brilliance. Absorb and comprehend everything that had ever been, on this great planet that had seen so very much in its long span, realm piled upon realm back to the dawn of history.

But he had been a boy then. Those were a boy’s thoughts, unfettered by practical considerations. Now Plor Killivash was twenty and he knew just how difficult it was to make the lost and buried past come alive. Under the harsh pressures of reality, that fiery passion to uncover ancient secrets was slipping from him, just as you could see it going even from Hresh himself, year by year. Hresh, though, had had the help of miraculous Great World devices, now no longer usable, to give him visions of the worlds that had existed before this world. For one who had never had the advantage of such wondrous things, the work of a chronicler was coming to seem nothing but doleful dreary slogging, carrying with it much frustration, precious little reward.

Somber thoughts on a somber day. And somberly Plor Killivash made ready to cut open the artifact from the sea.

The slim figure of Chupitain Stuld appeared in the doorway. She was smiling, and her dark violet eyes were merry.

“Still drilling? I was sure you’d be inside that thing by now.”

“Just another little bit to go. Stick around for the great revelation.”

He tried to sound light-hearted about it. It wouldn’t do to let his gloom show through.

She had her own frustrations, he knew. She too felt increasingly adrift amidst the mounded-up fragments of crumbled and eroded antiquity that the House of Knowledge contained.

Glancing at her, he said, “What’s happening with those artifacts you’ve been playing with? The ones the farmers found in Senufit Gorge.”

Chupitain Stuld laughed darkly. “That box of junk? It’s all so much sand and rust.”

“I thought you said it was from a pre-Great World level seven or eight million years old.”

“Then it’s sand and rust seven or eight million years old. I was hoping you were having better luck.”

“Some chance.”

“You can never tell,” Chupitain Stuld said. She came up beside the workbench. “Can I help?”

“Sure. Those tractor clamps over there: bring them into position. I’ve just about sawed through the last of it now, and then we can lift the top half.”

Chupitain Stuld swung the clamps downward and fastened them. Plor Killivash made the final intensity adjustment on his cutter. His fingers felt thick and coarse and clumsy. He found himself wishing Chupitain Stuld had stayed in her own work area. She was lovely to behold, small and delicate and extremely beautiful, with the soft lime-green fur that was common in her tribe. Today she wore a yellow sash and a mantle of royal blue, very elegant. They had been coupling-partners for some months now and even had twined once or twice. But all the same he didn’t want her here now. He was convinced that he was going to bungle things as he made the last incision and he hated the idea that she’d be watching as he did.

Well. No more stalling, he tells himself. Checks his calibrations one last time. Draws his breath in sharply. At last forces himself to press the trigger. The beam licks out, bites into the artifact’s shell-like wall. One quick nibble. He cuts the beam off. A dark line of severance has appeared. The upper half of the object moves minutely away from the lower half.

“You want me to pull up on the tractor harness?” Chupitain Stuld asked.

“Yes. Just a little.”

“It’s giving, Plor Killivash! It’s going to lift!”

“Easy, now—easy—”

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this thing’s full of sea-lord amulets and jewels! And maybe a book of history of the Great World. Written on imperishable plates of golden metal.”

Plor Killivash chuckled. “Why not a sea-lord himself, fast asleep, waiting to be awakened so he can tell us all about himself? Eh?”

The halves were separating. The weighty upper one rose a finger-breadth’s distance, another, another. A burst of sea-water came cascading out as the last inner seal broke.

For an instant Plor Killivash felt a flicker of the excitement he had felt when he was new here, five or six years before, and it had seemed every day that they were making wondrous new inroads into the mysteries of the past. But the odds were that this thing was worthless. There was very little of the Great World left to find, seven thousand centuries after its downfall. The glaciers grinding back and forth across the face of the land had done their work all too well.

“Can you see?” Chupitain Stuld asked, trying to peer over the top of the opened container.

“It’s full of amulets and jewels, all right. And a whole bunch of fantastic machines in perfect preservation.”

“Oh, stop it!”

He sighed. “All right. Here—look.”

He scooped her up to perch on his arm, and they looked in together.

Inside were nine leathery-looking translucent purplish globes, each the size of a man’s head, glued to the wall of the container by taut bands of a rubbery integument. Dim shapes were visible within them. Organs of some kind, looking shrunken and decayed. A fierce stench of rot came forth. Otherwise nothing. Nothing but a coating of moist white sand along the sides of the container, and a shallow layer of opaque water at the bottom.

“Not sea-lord artifacts, I’m afraid,” Plor Killivash said.

“No.”

“The fisherman thought he saw the broken stone columns of a ruined city sticking out of the sand at the bottom of the bay in the place where he dredged this thing up. He must have had a little too much wine with his lunch that day.”

Chupitain Stuld stared into the opened container and shuddered. “What are they? Some kind of eggs?”

Plor Killivash shrugged.

“This whole thing was probably one gigantic egg, and I’d hate to meet the creature that laid it. Those things in there are little sea-monster embryos, I suppose. Dead ones. I’d better make a record of this and get them out of here. They’ll begin to reek pretty soon.”

There was a sound behind him. Io Sangrais peered in from the hallway. His brilliant red Beng eyes were glittering with amusement. Io Sangrais was sly and playful, a quick easy-spirited young man. Even the tribal helmet that he wore was playful, a close-fitting cap of dark blue metal with three absurd corkscrew spirals of lacquered red reed-stems rising wildly from it.

“Hola! Finally got it open, I see.”

“Yes, and it’s a wonderful treasure-house, just as I was expecting,” Plor Killivash said dourly. “A lot of rotten little unhatched sea-monsters. One more great triumph for the bold investigators of the past. You come to gloat?”

“Why would I want to do that?” Io Sangrais asked. His voice was ripe with mock innocence. “No, I came down here to tell you about the great triumph
I’ve
just pulled off.”

“Ah. Yes. You’ve finally finished translating that old Beng chronicle of yours, and it’s full of spells and enchantments that turn water into wine, or wine into water, whichever you happen to prefer at the moment. Right?”

“Save your sarcasm. It turns out not to be a Beng chronicle, just one from some ninth-rate little tribe that the Bengs swallowed long ago. And what it is is a full and thorough descriptive catalog of the tribe’s collection of sacred pebbles. The pebbles themselves vanished ten thousand years ago, you understand.”

Chupitain Stuld giggled. “Much rejoicing in the land. The unraveling of the mysteries of the past by the skilled operatives of the House of Knowledge goes on and on at the customary stupendous pace.”

In the Basilica that afternoon it was Husathirn Mueri’s turn to have throne-duty under the great central cupola, a task he shared in daily rotation with the princes Thu-Kimnibol and Puit Kjai. He was wearily hearing the petitions of two vociferous grain-merchants seeking redress from a third, who perhaps had cheated them and perhaps had not, when word came to him of the strange visitor who had arrived in the city.

No less a person than the captain of the city guard, Curabayn Bangkea, brought the news: a man of hearty stature and swaggering style, who generally affected a colossal gleaming golden helmet half again the size of his head, bristling with preposterous horns and blades. He was wearing it today. Husathirn Mueri found it both amusing and irritating.

There was nothing wrong with Curabayn Bangkea’s wearing a helmet, of course. Most citizens wore them nowadays, whether or not they traced their descent from the old helmet-wearing Beng tribe. And Curabayn Bangkea was pure Beng. But it seemed to Husathirn Mueri, who was Beng himself on his father’s side, though his mother had been of the Koshmars, that the captain of the guards carried the concept a little too far.

He wasn’t one to put much stock in high formality. It was a trait he owed, perhaps, to his mother, a gentle and easy-going woman. Nor was he greatly impressed by men like the guardsman, who strutted boisterously through life making a way for themselves by virtue of their size and bluster. He himself was lightly built, with a narrow waist and sloping shoulders. His fur was black and dense, striped a startling white in places and nearly as sleek as a woman’s. But his slightness was deceptive: he was quick and agile, with tricky whiplike strength in his body, and in his soul as well.

“Nakhaba favor you,” Curabayn Bangkea declared grandly, dipping his head in respect as he approached the throne. For good measure he made the signs of Yissou the Protector and Dawinno the Destroyer. A couple of the Koshmar gods: always useful when dealing with crossbreeds.

Husathirn Mueri, who privately thought that too much of everyone’s time was taken up by these benedictions and gesticulations, replied with a perfunctory sign of Yissou and said, “What is it, Curabayn Bangkea? I’ve got these angry bean-peddlers to deal with, and I’m not looking for more nuisances this afternoon.”

“Your pardon, throne-grace. There’s a stranger been taken, just outside the city walls.”

“A stranger? What kind of stranger?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Curabayn Bangkea, shrugging so broadly he nearly sent his vast helmet clattering to the ground. “A very strange stranger, is what he is. A boy, sixteen, seventeen, skinny as a rail. Looks like he’s been starved all his life. Came riding down out of the north on top of the biggest vermilion you ever saw. Some farmers found him crashing around in their fields, out by Emakkis Valley.”

“Just now, you say?”

“Two days ago, or thereabouts. Two and a half, actually.”

“And he was riding a
vermilion?
”

“A vermilion the size of a house and a half,” Curabayn Bangkea said, stretching his arms wide. “But wait. It gets better. The vermilion’s got a hjjk banner around its neck and hjjk emblems stitched to its ears. And the boy sits up there and makes noises at you just like a hjjk.” Curabayn Bangkea put both his hands to his throat and uttered dry, throttled rattling sounds: “
Khkhkh. Sjsjsjssss. Ggggggggjjjjjk.
You know what kind of ghastly sounds they make. We’ve been interrogating him ever since the farmers brought him in, and that’s about all that comes out of him. Now and then he says a word we can more or less understand. Peace, he says. Love, he says. The Queen, he says.”

Husathirn Mueri frowned. “What about his sash? Any tribe we know?”

“He doesn’t wear a sash. Or a helmet. Or anything that might indicate he’s from the City of Yissou, either. Of course, he might have come from one of the eastern cities, but I doubt that very much. I think it’s pretty obvious what he is, sir.”

“And what is that?”

“A runaway from the hjjks.”

“A runaway,” Husathirn Mueri said, musing. “An escaped captive? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Why, it stands to reason, sir! There’s hjjk all over him! Not just the sounds he makes. He’s got a bracelet on that looks like it’s made of polished hjjk-shell—bright yellow, it is, one black stripe—and a breastplate of the same stuff. That’s all he’s wearing, just these pieces of hjjk-shell. What else can he be, your grace, if not a runaway?”

Husathirn Mueri narrowed his eyes, which were amber, a sign of his mixed ancestry, and very keen.

Now and then a wandering band of hjjks came upon some child who had strayed into a place where he should not have gone, and ran off with him, no one knew why. It was a parent’s greatest fear, to have a child taken by the hjjks. Most of these children were never seen again, but from time to time one did manage to escape and return, after an absence of days or weeks or even months. When they did come back they seemed profoundly shaken, and changed in some indescribable way, as though their time in captivity had been a horror beyond contemplation. None of them had ever been willing to speak so much as a word about their experiences among the insect-folk. It was considered an unkindness to ask.