Queen of Springtime (59 page)

They are too rigid. They can be broken. If they won’t bend to the law of the gods, Thu-Kimnibol tells himself, then ultimately they’ll suffer the fate of all that can’t or won’t bend. In time they will be struck by a force too strong for them to withstand; and they will shatter in an instant. Yes.

“Come, brother,” he calls. “We’ve stayed here long enough. I’ve learned what you wanted me to learn.”

“Thu-Kimnibol?” Hresh says dimly. “Is that you? Where are you, brother?”

“Here. Here. Take my hand.”

“I am for the Queen, now, brother.”

“No. No, never. She can’t hold you. Come: here.”

Vast peals of laughter resound all about him. She thinks that She has them both. But Thu-Kimnibol is undismayed. His initial awe of the Queen had placed him at Her advantage; but that awe is gone now, overcome by anger and contempt, and there is no other way that She could hold him.

He understands that next to Her he is nothing more than a flea. But fleas can go about their business unseen by greater creatures. That’s the great advantage fleas have, Thu-Kimnibol thinks. The Queen can’t hold us if She can’t find us. And She’s so confident of her own omnipotence that She isn’t even trying very hard.

He begins to slip away from her, taking Hresh with him.

Ascending from Her lair is like climbing a mountain that reaches halfway to the roof of the sky. But any journey, no matter how great, is done a single step at a time. Thu-Kimnibol draws himself upward, and upward again, holding Hresh in his arms. The Queen does not appear to be restraining him. Perhaps She thinks he’ll fall back to Her of his own accord.

Upward, Upward. Streams of light come from behind him, but they grow indistinct as he continues. Now the blackness lies before him, deep and intense.

“Brother?” Thu-Kimnibol says. “Brother, we’re free. We’re safe now.”

He blinked and opened his eyes. Nialli Apuilana, standing above him, made a soft little cry of joy.

“At last you’re back!”

Thu-Kimnibol nodded. He looked over at Hresh. His eyes had opened slit-wide, but he seemed stunned and dazed. Reaching across, Thu-Kimnibol touched his brother’s arm. Hresh seemed very cool; his arm twitched faintly as Thu-Kimnibol’s fingers grazed it.

“Will he be all right?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“He’s very tired. So am I. How long were we gone, Nialli?”

“Just short of a day and a half.” She was staring at him as though he had undergone some great metamorphosis. “I was beginning to think that you—that—”

“A day and a half,” he said, in a musing tone. “It felt like years. What’s been happening here?”

“Nothing. Not even Salaman. He marched around our camp without even stopping, and is heading on north without us.”

“A madman, he is. Well, let him go.”

“And you?” Nialli Apuilana was still staring. “What was it like? Did you see the Nest? Did you make contact with the Queen?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “I never understood the half of it. How awesome She is—how mighty the Nest is—how intricate their life is—”

“I tried to tell you all, that day at the Presidium. But no one would listen, not even you.”

“Especially not me, Nialli.” he smiled. “They’re a frightening enemy. They seem so much wiser than we are. So much more powerful. Superior beings in every way. I get the feeling that I almost want to bow down before them.”

“Yes.”

“At least before their Queen,” he said. A note of discouragement came into his voice. The triumph of his escape seemed far behind him now. “She’s almost like some sort of god. That ancient immense creature, reaching out everywhere, running everything. To resist Her seems, well, blasphemous.”

“Yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. “I know what you mean.”

He shook his head wearily. “We
have
to resist, though. There’s no way we can arrive at any kind of accommodation with them. If we don’t keep on fighting them, they’ll crush us. They’ll swallow us up. But if we go on with the war, if we should win it, won’t we be going against the will of the gods? The gods brought them through the Long Winter, after all. The gods may have intended them to inherit the world.” He looked at her in perplexity. “I’m speaking in contradictions. Does any of this make sense?”

“The gods brought us through the Long Winter also, Thu-Kimnibol. Maybe they realize that the hjjks were a mistake, that they were an experiment that failed. And so we’ve been brought on to finish them off and take their place.”

He looked at her, startled. “Do you think so? Could it be possible?”

“You call them superior beings. But you saw for yourself how limited they really are, how inflexible, how narrow. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? That was what Hresh wanted you to see: that they don’t really want to create anything, that they aren’t even capable of it. All they want to do is keep on multiplying and building new Nests. But there’s no purpose to it beyond that. They aren’t trying to learn. They aren’t trying to grow.” She laughed. “Can you imagine? I stood up in the Presidium and said we ought to think of them as humans. But they aren’t. I was wrong and you were all right, even Husathirn Mueri.
Bugs
is what they are. Horrible oversized
bugs.
Everything I believed about them is something that they put into my head themselves.”

“Don’t underrate them, Nialli,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “You may be going too far in the other direction now.” Hresh made a soft sighing sound. He turned and looked at him. But Hresh seemed asleep, breathing gently and calmly. Thu-Kimnibol turned back to Nialli Apuilana. “There’s one more thing, something the Queen told me that seemed even stranger than all the rest. Were you ever taught, when you lived among them, that the hjjks believe they were created by the humans?”

Now it was her turn to look startled. “No. No, never!”

“Can it be true, do you think?”

“Why not. The humans were almost like gods. The humans may have
been
the gods.”

“Then if the hjjks are their chosen people—”

“No,” she said. “The hjjks were
a
chosen people. Chosen to survive, to endure the Long Winter, to take over the world afterward. But they didn’t work out, somehow. So the gods created us. Or the humans did, one or the other. As replacements for them.” Her eyes were bright with a fervor he had rarely seen in them before. “Some day the humans are going to come back to Earth,” she said. “I’m certain of it. They’ll want to see what’s been happening here since they left. And they won’t want to find the whole place one gigantic Nest, Thu-Kimnibol. They put us in those cocoons for a purpose, and they’ll want to know whether that purpose has been fulfilled. So we have to keep on fighting, don’t you see? We have to hold our own against the Queen. Call them gods, call them humans, whatever they are, they’re the ones who made us. And they expect that of us.”

“This is the kind of country the bug-folk love,” Salaman muttered. “Dead country, with all its bones showing.” The king brought his xlendi to a halt and looked around at his three sons. Athimin and Biterulve were riding alongside him, and Chham just a short way behind.

“You think there’s a Nest out there, father?” Chham asked.

“I’m sure of it. I feel its weight pressing on my soul. Here, I feel it. And here. And here.” He touched his breast, and his sensing-organ, and his loins.

The territory ahead had a bleached, arid look. The soil was pale and sandy and the fierce blue sky glared with whipcrack intensity. The only sign of life was a malign-looking woody low dome of a plant that looked almost like a weatherbeaten skull, from which two thick straplike gray leaves, tattered and shredded by the wind, extended across the desert floor to an enormous length.

These plants grew far apart, each presiding over its little domain like a sullen immobile emperor. Otherwise there was nothing.

Athimin said, “Shall I give the order to make camp, father?”

Salaman nodded. He stared into the distance. A sour chilly breeze struck his face, a wind of trouble. “And send scouts forward. Protected by patrols just behind them. There are hjjks out there, plenty of them. I can smell them.”

Strange uneasiness was growing in him. He had no idea why.

Until this moment Salaman had been confident that his army, and his army alone, would be able to march all the way to the great Nest and destroy it. Certainly they had met no real opposition thus far. The hjjks had numbers on their side, and they were strong and tireless warriors. But they didn’t seem to have any real idea of how to fight. It had been that way forty years ago too, Salaman remembered, when they had tried to lay siege to the newly founded City of Yissou.

What they did was come swooping down in great terrifying hordes, shrieking and waving their spears and swords. Most of them wielded two weapons at once, some of them even more than that. It was a sight that could make the blood run backward in your veins, if you let yourself be awed by their frenzy and by the frightful look of them.

But if you stood your ground, side by side in a sturdy wedge of warriors, and met them hack for hack, chop for chop, you could beat them down. The thing was not to carry the battle to them, but let them come to you. For all their wild dancing about, they were inefficient fighters, too many of them too close together. What you had to do was get your strongest and most fearless men into a phalanx up front, and slash away at any hjjk that came too near. Try to cut its breathing-tubes: that was where they were most vulnerable, the loose dangling orange breathing-tubes that hung from their heads to the sides of their chests. Snip one of those and within moments the hjjk was down, paralyzed by lack of air.

And so Salaman’s army had marched on and on and on, beyond the smouldering rubble-heap that was Vengiboneeza, into the ever more parched country to the north, eradicating the hjjks as they went. There had been four great battles so far, and each one had ended in a rout. His soul tingled with the memory of those victories—the hjjks hunted down to the last one, the severed claw-tipped limbs scattered about everywhere, the dry weightless bodies piled in stacks. Every army the Queen had sent against him had met the same fate.

Now, though, the invaders were approaching the first of the lesser Nests that rimmed the frontier of the true hjjk domain.

It was Salaman’s plan to wipe out those Nests and their Queens one by one as he passed northward, so that no enemies would remain behind him when he moved into the far side of the great emptiness to begin his assault on the central Nest. He had no clear notion yet how he was going to destroy them. Pour some sort of liquid fire into their openings, perhaps. It would all have been much easier if he’d had one or two of Thu-Kimnibol’s fancy weapons. But he was sure that he would find a way that would work, when the time came. He hadn’t had a moment’s worry on that score.

Now, though—this foul wind blowing, this sudden sense of distress, of impending disaster—

“Father!” Biterulve cried.

Out of nowhere a wall of water appeared before them, rising out of the desert like a gigantic ocean wave springing from the ground to blot out half the sky. The xlendis whinnied and reared wildly. Salaman swore and flung up his arm before his face in astonishment. Behind him he heard the panicky yelling of his men.

He needed only a moment to collect himself.

“A trick!” he bellowed. “An illusion! How can there be water in the desert?”

Indeed that titanic wave hung above them but did not descend. He saw the curling edge of white foam, the green impenetrable depths behind, the huge curve of inconceivable falling mass; but the mass did not fall.

“A trick!” Salaman roared. “The hjjks are attacking us! Form the wedge! Form the wedge!”

Chham, wild-eyed, rode up close behind him. Salaman shoved him fiercely back in the direction of the main body of the army. “Get them in formation!” he ordered. He saw Athimin already heading back, signaling, gesticulating, trying to keep the troops from scattering.

They seemed to realize that the sudden ocean wasn’t real. But now the ground itself was wavering like a blanket being shaken to free it from crumbs. Salaman, appalled, saw the earth rippling all about him. He grew dizzy and sprang down from his xlendi. An actual earthquake? Or another illusion? He couldn’t tell.

The wall of water had become a wall of fire, enclosing them on three sides. The air sizzled and crackled and blazed. He felt heat pressing inward on him. Blue-tipped flames streamed upward from the quivering earth.

And now bright bolts of shimmering light were dancing in the sky like spears running amok. Salaman, whirling to void their blinding light, saw dragons advancing from the north, breathing fire. Ravenous mouth-creatures. Birds with fangs like knives.

“Illusions!” he cried. “They’re sending Wonderstone dreams against us!”

Others saw that too. The army was rallying, trying desperately to get into fighting formation.

But then in the swirling madness he caught sight of an angular yellow-and-black figure just in front of him, clutching a short sword in one bristly claw and a spear in another. A force of hjjks had come upon them under cover of these hallucinations and was beginning an attack.

Lashing out with his blade, the king slashed a breathing-tube, and turned and saw second hjjk coming at him from the left. He caught it in its exposed knee-joint and sent it to the ground. On his other side Chham was thrusting away now at two other insect-warriors. One was down, the other staggering. Salaman grinned. Let them send dragons! Let them send earthquakes and oceans! When it came to hand-to-hand fighting, his troops would still slaughter them without mercy.

The illusions were continuing. Geysers of blood, fountains of coruscating light, whole mountains tumbling out of the air, sudden abysses opening a handsbreath away—there seemed no limit to their ingenuity. But so long as you ignore it all, Salaman thought, and simply keep your mind on the task of chopping down every hjjk that comes within reach of your weapon—

There! There! Strike, cut, kill!

The joy of battle was on him now as perhaps never before. He fought his way across the field, paying no heed to writhing serpents that floated before his face, to jeering luminous ghosts issuing from sulphurous crevices opening on every side, to disembodied eyes swirling about his head, to stampeding vermilions, to tumbling boulders. His warriors, rallied by Chham and Athimin, had formed themselves into three fighting wedges arranged in a circular pattern and were defending themselves well.