Queen of Springtime (15 page)

“What about us?” someone called. “You say the hjjks are human. Do you think we are? Is everything that lives and thinks human?”

“We weren’t human in the time of the Great World, no. We were only animals then. But now we’re beginning finally to become human ourselves, now that we’ve left the cocoon. The hjjks, though—they crossed the threshold of humanity a million years ago. Or more. How can we think of making war on them? They aren’t our enemies! The only enemies we have are ourselves!”

“The girl’s insane,” she heard Thu-Kimnibol murmur, and saw him sadly shake his head.

“If you don’t like the treaty,” Nialli Apuilana cried, “then reject the treaty! Reject it! But reject war, too. The Queen is sincere. She offers us love and peace. Her embrace is our greatest hope. She will wait for us all to grow up—to attain full humanity, to become worthy of her people—and then we will be free to join with them in a new companionship, the way the Six Peoples of the Great World once were joined, before the death-stars fell! And then—and then—”

She was gasping and sobbing, suddenly. All strength left her in a moment. She had expended herself beyond her endurance. Her eyes were frantic, her body was racked by tremors.

“Get her down from there,” said someone—Staip? Boldirinthe?—sitting behind Husathirn Mueri.

Everyone was shouting and calling out. Nialli Apuilana clung to the podium, shivering, trembling violently. She thought she might be at the edge of some sort of convulsion. She knew she had gone too far, much too far. She had said the unsayable, the thing she had held back from them all these years. They all thought she was mad, now. Perhaps she was.

The room swayed about her. Below her, Thu-Kimnibol’s bright red mourning mantle seemed to be pulsing and throbbing like a sun gone berserk. At the high table Hresh appeared frozen, dazed. She looked toward Taniane, but the chieftain was unreadable behind her mask, standing motionless in the midst of the chaos that swept the room.

Nialli Apuilana felt herself beginning to topple.

A terrible scene, Husathirn Mueri thought. Shocking, frightening, pitiful.

He had listened to her with growing amazement and dismay. Her appearance here, young, mysterious, heartachingly beautiful, had had a tremendous impact on him. He had never imagined that Nialli Apuilana would address the Presidium. Certainly he hadn’t expected her to say any of the things she had, or to say them so boldly. To hear her speak in such a fierce and powerful way had made her all the more desirable to him: had made her irresistible, in fact.

But then what she was saying had degenerated into chaotic babble, and Nialli Apuilana herself had veered toward hysteria and collapse before them all.

Now she was plainly about to fall.

Without hesitating, almost without thinking, Husathirn Mueri rushed forward, vaulted to the platform, and caught her by both elbows, lifting her, steadying her.

The girl shook her head wildly. “Let—go—”

“Please. Come down from here.”

She glared at him—but was it in hatred, he wondered, or simple confusion? Gently he tugged, and she surrendered to him. Slowly he led her from the podium and with his arm around her protectively he drew her toward the side of the room. He eased her into a seat. She stared up at him out of eyes that seemed to be seeing nothing at all.

Taniane’s voice rang out like a trumpet behind him.

“Here is our decision. There’ll be no vote today. The treaty will be neither rejected nor accepted, and we will make no reply to the Queen. The entire matter of the treaty is tabled indefinitely. Meanwhile what we intend is to send an envoy to the City of Yissou, for the purpose of discussing with King Salaman the terms of an alliance of mutual defense.”

“Against the hjjk-folk, do you mean?” someone called.

“Against the hjjks, yes. Against our enemy.”

E
ARLY ON A CHILL
fog-bound midsummer morning King Salaman of Yissou, with Biterulve, his favorite of his many sons, came forth to make the circuit of the great and perpetually unfinished wall that enclosed the city.

The king went out each day without fail from his palace at the heart of the city to inspect the ongoing work of wall-building. Standing at the foot of the wall, he would stare toward the battlements and embrasures far overhead, measuring them against the burning need he felt within his soul. Then he would ascend the wall by one of the many staircases along its inner face, and prowl its upper course. The immense black rampart, lofty as it was, never quite seemed adequate to that great need of his. In feverish moments of fear he imagined hjjk scaling-ladders suddenly appearing at the top of the wall. He imagined furious hjjk legions swarming across the highest parapets and down into the city.

Ordinarily these prowling inspections of Salaman’s were carried out at dawn, always in solitude. If a citizen happened to be awake at that hour, he would avert his eyes, not wishing to intrude on the king upon the walls. No one, not even his sons, would approach him at such time. No one would dare.

But this morning Biterulve had asked to accompany him, and Salaman had acquiesced at once. There was nothing that Salaman would deny Biterulve. He was fourteen, the sixth of the eight princes Salaman had sired, Sinithista’s only boy—a frail and gentle child so little like the others that Salaman once had doubted that Biterulve could be of his own engendering, though he had kept those doubts to himself and was glad of it now. Biterulve’s frame was slender and long-boned, whereas Salaman and all his other sons were squat and stocky; and his fur was an eerie pale hue, the color of a snowy field by moonlight, where Salaman and the rest of his brood were dark. But Biterulve’s cool gray eyes were the unmistakable eyes of the king; and his supple spirit, though its nature was less fierce than that of Salaman or any of his other sons, was one that the king recognized as kin to his.

In the hour before sunrise they rode out together from the palace. Salaman, out of the corner of his eye, watched the boy closely. He handled his xlendi well, keeping the loose-limbed beast on a tight rein as they moved through the narrow curving streets, pulling back capably when an early-morning workman with a dray-wagon came unexpectedly around a sharp corner.

One of Salaman’s great fears was that this gentle son of his was too gentle: that there was nothing at all warlike about him, that Biterulve would be unable to play a proper role when the hjjks at last made the move he had so long expected, and the great cataclysmic time arrived. It was not so much the disgrace that Salaman feared, for he had a host of other sons who would be heroic enough. But he didn’t want the boy to suffer when that dread host of unholy insects began their onslaught.

It may be that I have misjudged him, thought Salaman, as Biterulve proudly urged the clattering xlendi forward through the quiet streets.

The king spurred his own mount and caught up with him just as he emerged from the warren of inner streets into the wider outer avenues that led to the wall.

“You ride very well,” Salaman called. “Better than I remember.”

Biterulve glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “I’ve been going out with Bruikkos and Ganthiav practically every day. They’ve showed me a few tricks.”

The king felt a stab of alarm.

“Outside the wall, you mean?”

The boy giggled. “Father, we can’t very well go riding inside the city, can we?”

“You have a point,” said Salaman grudgingly.

And what harm, he thought, could come to him out there, really? Surely Bruikkos and Ganthiav had more sense than to stray very far into places where hjjks might roam. If the boy wants to go riding with his older brothers, I’ll say nothing, Salaman told himself. I mustn’t overprotect him, if I want him to be a proper prince, if I want him to be a true warrior.

They had reached the wall now. They jumped down from their xlendis and tied them to posts. The first gray strands of morning were coming into the sky. The fog was scattering.

Salaman felt an uncharacteristic sense of ease. Ordinarily his spirit was dark and tense; but this morning his mind was loose and unfocused, his body poised and calm. He had spent the night just past with Vladirilka, the fourth and newest of his mates. The aroma of her was still on his fur, the warmth of her still soothed his flesh.

He was certain that he had sired a son on her in this night’s coupling. One is able to tell, Salaman believed, when a son is being made: and surely this had been a coupling for sons.

He had so many daughters that he had difficulty remembering all their names, and he needed no more of those. Women had ruled in the cocoon, and a woman still ruled, he knew, in Dawinno. But Yissou from the first had been a city for men. Salaman had respected old Koshmar and thought well of Taniane; but there would be no female kings here.

It was sons he wanted, and many of them, sons aplenty, so that the succession would be assured. A king, he thought, could never have too many sons. Building dynasties is like building walls; one must look beyond the immediate, and prepare for the worst of eventualities. Therefore Salaman had sired eight boys so far, and he hoped he had added a ninth tonight. If it wasn’t Chham who followed him to the throne, then it would be Athimin; and if not Athimin, then Poukor, or Ganthiav, or Bruikkos, or one of the even younger princes. Perhaps even the one he had engendered on Vladirilka this very night would be the next king. Or some boy yet to be conceived, by some mate not yet chosen. Only one thing was certain, that he would not give Biterulve the kingship. The boy was too sensitive, too complex. Let him be a royal counselor, Salaman felt. Let someone like Chham or Athimin handle the hard choices a king must face.

But there was plenty of time for fixing the succession. Salaman had just reached his sixtieth year. There were those who thought of him as old, he knew, but that was not an opinion he shared. He regarded himself as in the full vigor, still, of his manhood. And he suspected that soft young Vladirilka, lying now asleep with his warmth still between her thighs, would back him up on that score.

Biterulve pointed to the nearest of the staircases that led to the top of the wall.

“Shall we go up, father?”

“A moment. Stand here by me.” He liked to take it in from down here, first. To study it. To let its strength enter him and sustain his soul.

He looked up, and out, letting his gaze sweep along the wall as far as he could see. He had done this ten thousand times, and he never grew weary of it.

The immense wall that enclosed the City of Yissou was fashioned of cyclopean blocks of hard black stone, each one half the height of a man, and twice as wide as it was high, and deeper than a man’s arm is long. For decades now, a phalanx of master stonecutters had worked from dawn to twilight, every day of the year, slowly and patiently cutting those immense blocks in a mountain quarry in the steep ravine west of the city, trimming them, squaring them, dressing them smooth. Uncomplaining teams of vermilions hauled the massive blocks across the rough plateau to the edge of the wide, shallow crater in which the city lay sheltered. As each megalith reached its intended site along the constantly growing wall, Salaman’s skillful stonemasons lifted it and swung it boldly into its place, using elaborate wooden engines, and harnesses of tightly woven larret-withes.

The king nodded toward the wall. “This is the place where a block was dropped, five years back. That was the only time such a thing ever happened.”

Bitterness rose in his soul at the thought of it, as it always did when he was here. Three workmen had been crushed by the falling block, and two more were put to death for having dropped it, at Salaman’s order. His own sons Chham and Athimin had objected to the cruelty of that. But the king was inflexible. The men had been taken off and sacrificed that very day in the name of Dawinno the Destroyer.

“I remember it,” Biterulve said. “And that you had the men who dropped it killed. I often still think of those poor men, father.”

Salaman shot him a startled glance. “Ah, do you, boy?”

“That they should have died for an accident—was that really right, do you think?”

Keeping his anger carefully in check, the king said, “How could we tolerate such clumsiness? The wall is our great sacred endeavor. Carelessness in its construction is a blasphemy against all the gods.”

“Do you think so, father?” Biterulve said, and smiled. “If we were perfect in all things, we would be gods ourselves, so it seems to me.”

“Spare me your cleverness,” said Salaman, dealing him a light affectionate slap across the back of his head. Three good men died because those masons were stupid. The foreman Augenthrin was killed. This wall had been his life’s work. That hurt me, losing him. And who knows how many more might have died if I’d let such incompetents live? The next stone they dropped might have been on my own head. Or yours.”

In truth he had wondered about the wisdom of his own harsh decree right in the moment of uttering it. Biterulve didn’t need to know that. The words had simply escaped from his lips in his first red instant of fury when he saw that fallen block, so beautifully hewn and now cracked beyond repair, and those six bloody legs jutting out pathetically from beneath it.

But decrees once spoken may not be revoked. A king must be merciful and just, Salaman knew, but sometimes a king finds himself being unthinkingly cruel, for that is sometimes kingship’s nature. And when he is cruel he must take care not to let himself be seen second-guessing his own cruelty, or the people will think he is that worst of all tyrants, a capricious one. The very injustice of that hastily uttered sentence had made it impossible for him to call it back. Thus had blood atoned for blood in the building of Salaman’s black wall. If the people were troubled by it, they kept their discontent to themselves.

“Come,” Salaman said. “Let’s go up on top.”

At eighteen equidistant points around the perimeter, handsome stone staircases rising along the inner face gave access to the narrow brick footpath that ran along the wall’s summit. When he had first had had them built, some of Salaman’s sons and counselors had found those staircases paradoxical and even perverse. “Father, we should never have built them,” said Chham, with all the gravity that he affected as the eldest of the princes. “They’ll make it all the easier for the hjjks to descend into the city if they scale the wall.”