Queen of Springtime (26 page)

“In Dawinno we still allow ourselves only one at a time, cousin,” Thu-Kimnibol replied evenly. “We are very conservative that way.” To Salaman it felt like a rebuke, and some of his good will toward Thu-Kimnibol evaporated as swiftly as it had come. Thu-Kimnibol shrugged and said, “For now the thought of choosing a new mate seems very strange to me. Time will take care of that, I suppose.”

“Time takes care of everything,” Salaman said elaborately, as though uttering oracular wisdom.

He could see that Thu-Kimnibol was growing impatient. Perhaps this talk of sons and mates was troubling to him. Or perhaps his impatience was yet another ploy. He had begun to pace about, stalking the vast room like some ponderous beast he stalked the vast room, striding past one row of princes, whirling, coming back past the other. Their eyes followed his every movement.

Abruptly Thu-Kimnibol settled on a divan close by the king and said, “Enough of this, cousin. Let me come to my business. Some months back a strange boy appeared in our city. A young man, rather. Riding out of the north, on a vermilion. Barely able to speak our language. Hjjk-noises was all he could manage, and maybe a People word or two. We couldn’t figure out where he had come from or what he wanted or who he was, until Hresh, using the sort of tricks that only Hresh knows, went into his mind with the Wonderstone. And discovered that he was from our city in the first place: stolen, about thirteen years back. When he was just a child.”

“Stolen by the hjjks, you mean?”

“Right. And raised by them in the Nest of Nests. And now they’d sent him back to us as an emissary, to offer us Queen-love and Queen-peace. So Hresh said.”

“Ah,” said Salaman. “We had one of those come to us a little time ago. A girl, she was. She’d spit and rant at us all day in hjjk. We couldn’t make any sense out of it at all.”

“She knew a few words of our language, father,” Chham said.

“Yes. Yes, she did. She’d babble to us about the grandeur of the hjjk Queen, the high godly truth of her ways. Or similar nonsense. We didn’t pay much attention. How long ago was this, Chham?”

“It was Firstmonth, I think.”

“Firstmonth, yes. And what finally happened? Ah: I remember. She tried to escape, wasn’t it, and make her way back to the hjjks?”

“Yes,” said Chham. “But Poukor caught up with her outside the wall and killed her.”

“
Killed
her?” Thu-Kimnibol said, eyes wide, astonishment in his voice.

Thu-Kimnibol’s show of seeming tenderness struck the king as amusing, even quaint in its sentimentality. Or did he mean it as another rebuke? Salaman wondered. He made a broad, imperiously sweeping gesture of his arms. “What else could we do? Obviously she was a spy. We couldn’t let her go back to the Nest with everything she’d learned here.”

“Why not simply bring her back into the city? Feed her, teach her how to speak the language. She’d have shed her hjjk ways sooner or later.”

“Would she?” the king asked. “I doubt that very much. To look at her she was a girl of the People, but her soul was the soul of a hjjk. That wouldn’t ever have changed. Once they get their poison into your head, you’re never the same again. Especially when it happens young. No, cousin, before long she’d have escaped again and gotten back to them. Better to kill her than to let that happen. It’s a terrible foulness, that a girl of the People should live in the Nest. Among those filthy creatures. The very thought of it sickens the gods themselves.”

“So I’d say also. All the same, to butcher her that way—a girl, a young girl—” Thu-Kimnibol shrugged. “Well, it’s no affair of mine. But I think she may not have been a spy. I think she was sent to you as an envoy, just as this Kundalimon—that’s his name—was to us. Hresh says they were sent to all the Seven Cities, these envoys.”

“Be that as it may. We’re not interested in getting messages from the hjjks,” said Salaman indifferently. “But of course Hresh would think otherwise. Does he happen to know why the Queen is sending these envoys around?”

“The Queen is offering us a treaty,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

Salaman sat bolt upright. “A treaty? What kind of treaty?”

“A peace treaty, cousin. An imaginary line is to be drawn clear across the continent from Vengiboneeza to the eastern coast. The hjjks will promise never to come across that line into our territory without an invitation, provided, of course, that we don’t go into any land of theirs. Our territory will be considered to be the region from the City of Yissou southward past Dawinno to the Southern Sea, or wherever it is that the land comes to its end. All the rest of the world is to be considered theirs, and is closed to us forever. Oh, yes, one other thing: we have to agree to let hjjk scholars live among us, so that they can teach us the truths of their religion and the wisdom of their way of life.”

It sounded unreal. It was like something out of a dream.

Were they serious, the hjjks, proposing such an absurdity?

This was all so foolish that Salaman found himself suspecting some intricate trick on Taniane’s part, or Thu-Kimnibol’s. But no, no, that was just as foolish an idea.

“What a wonderful offer,” he said, with a little laugh. “I assume that what you did was to have the ambassador skinned and send his hide back to the Queen with your answer written on it. That’s what I would have done.”

Thu-Kimnibol’s eyes narrowed: that look of rebuke, again.

He thinks we’re barbarians, Salaman thought.

“The boy’s still in Dawinno. He’s under guard, but being treated well. The chieftain’s daughter herself brings him his food every day and is teaching him our language, which of course he’s forgotten, having been a captive so many years.”

“But this treaty? It’s been rejected, naturally.”

“Neither rejected nor accepted, cousin. Not yet. We’ve debated it in our high councils, but nothing’s decided. Some of us are eager to sign it, because it would assure peace. These people believe you’d ratify it too, what with the hjjks of Vengiboneeza being so close to your northern boundary and you being so uneasy of the possibility of an invasion.”

Amazed by that, Salaman said, with a snort of outrage, “They believe that? That I’d sign such a cowardly treaty?”

“Some do, cousin. I never imagined it myself.”

“You’re opposed to the treaty yourself.”

“Of course. So is Hresh: he can’t abide surrendering the unexplored parts of the world to the hjjks.”

“And Taniane?”

“She hasn’t said. But she despises the bugs. They grabbed her daughter a few years back, you know, and kept her for months. I thought Taniane would lose her mind. She’s not likely to want to do business with the Queen. Especially if Hresh’s already against the idea.”

Salaman was silent. This was astounding stuff. He coiled himself back into the polished curving recesses of his throne, and let his eyes rove down the rows of his sons. Solemnly they returned his gaze, mirroring him in gravity and austere concern. Probably they didn’t understand the half of what was at stake, he thought, but no matter. No matter. They’d grasp it soon enough.

It was hard for him to believe that Dawinno hadn’t instantly flung the Queen’s preposterous proposal back in her face, if a face is what it could be called, without further ado. This so-called treaty was nothing more than a deed of perpetual surrender. And yet there were some down there who actually argued for signing it! Probably the Beng faction, Salaman supposed: the fat merchants, the comfortable politicians. Yes, appease the hjjks, go on living your own easy life in your own pleasant city of the balmy breezes, which in any case lies comfortably distant from the heart of the hjjk territory. They’d want that, yes. Regardless of the long-term risk. Regardless of the ultimate cost.

He said, after a bit, “What chance is there that the cowards will have their way and you’ll sign the treaty?”

“That won’t happen.”

“No. I don’t expect that it would. But I’ll tell you what position I’ll take if it did. If Dawinno wants to sign away its birthright to the hjjks, say I, well, so be it, but nothing that Dawinno signs is going to be binding on us. The City of Yissou will never recognize the authority of the hjjks in anything, so long as I live. Which goes for my sons as well.”

“You needn’t worry,” said Thu-Kimnibol. “The hjjk treaty’s a dead thing. That isn’t what I came here to discuss with you.”

“What is, then?”

“I’m here to propose an alliance, cousin. Dawinno and Yissou, joined together for a single purpose.”

Salaman sat forward, grasping the sides of the throne. “And what would that purpose be, cousin?”

There was a strange new light in Thu-Kimnibol’s dark chilly eyes. “To make war on the hjjks,” he said, “and slaughter them like vermin.”

The zoological garden, near sundown. It is the eve of the Festival of Dawinno, and everyone is getting ready for the games. All but Hresh, ever contrary. Alone he wanders among his animals, thinking that it’s time to see what the minds of his caviandis are really like.

Sometimes, when he was younger, he would go about secretly trying to walk the way he imagined a sapphire-eyes would, slow and heavy, in an attempt to think like one. He remembers that now. Hold yourself like one, move like one, maybe you can make your mind work the way their minds worked. And also trying now and then to walk like a Dream-Dreamer, like a human, when no one was looking: pretending he was long and thin and skinny-shanked and had no sensing-organ. But the more he tried it, the more he felt like an ape. A monkey, even, just a jumped-up monkey. He would tell himself, then, that he was being too harsh on himself and on the People. We are much more than apes, very much more than monkeys. He still has to tell himself that once in a while. He’s been telling himself that nearly all his life. Even believing it, most of the time. Look at the city, for example. Is Dawinno so trivial? Everything we’ve accomplished here: he knows it’s a tremendous achievement. But sometimes when he sleeps Hresh dreams he’s back in the cocoon, a scrawny boy again, kick-wrestling and cavern-soaring and hoping without much luck to sneak a peek at old Thaggoran’s secret box of chronicles. That idle, empty, stagnant life. Living like animals, though we gave ourselves names, invented rites and ceremonies, even kept historical records. Why didn’t we die of boredom? he often wonders. Spending 700,000 years penned up in those little caverns, doing nothing in particular. No wonder we came erupting out building enormous cities and filling them with our young. All that lost time to make up. All those dark stifled years. Build, grow, discover, fight. Yes. And here we are. What good has it all done? All our ambitions. All our schemes. Our grand projects.

What good, the water-strider asked us once, when we wanted to know the way to Vengiboneeza? What good? What good? What good? All we are is furry monkeys playing at being human.

No. No. No. No.

We are the ones to whom the gods gave the world.

Time to walk like a caviandi, now. Time to find out what they’re really like.

They’ve acclimated well to life in Hresh’s little park. His workmen have diverted the stream that flowed through the garden so that it forks, and the left-hand branch of it now runs down the patch of sloping, uneven terrain that has become the caviandis’ territory. Here, behind gossamer fences strong enough to hold back a vermilion, the two gentle beasts fish, sun themselves, patiently work at constructing a network of shallow subterranean tunnels flanking the stream on both sides. They seem to have recovered from the terror of their capture. Sometimes Hresh sees them sitting side by side on the great smooth pink rock above their nest, staring raptly at the rooftops and white walls of the residential district just beyond the park’s boundaries, as though looking toward the palaces of some unattainable paradise.

He no longer doubts they’re intelligent. It’s the quality of that intelligence that he wants to measure. But first he has had to give them some time to get used to their captivity. They have to be calm, trusting, accessible, before he attempts any sort of deep contact with them.

He approaches them now. Entering their enclosure, he takes a seat on a rock next to the stream and waits for them to come close. The two sleek, slender, big-eyed purple beasts are at the other side, near the fence, standing upright as they often do. They seem curious about his presence. But still they hold back.

Gradually he activates his second sight at low level, letting the field of perception that it creates spread out in a sphere around him.

He feels the tingling warmth of contact. He senses the auras of their souls and perhaps the workings of their minds. But what he picks up is nothing more than a dull undercurrent, a vague uncertain throbbing of distant sentience.

Cautiously Hresh sharpens the focus.

This is nothing new to him, this experiencing of alien minds. Many of the creatures of the New Springtime are capable of thought, perhaps all of them. And could communicate with him, he suspects, if only he learned how to detect their emanations.

Over the years he has on occasions spoken, after a fashion, with goldentusks and xlendis and taggaboggas and vermilions. He remembers the clangorous mental voice of the water-strider, rising to its great height to mock the wandering folk of Koshmar’s tribe as they searched for lost Vengiboneeza. And Young Hresh crouching behind a rock, listening by second sight to the bloodthirsty chanting of a pack of rat-wolves who spoke a dreadful howling language, the words of which were nevertheless unmistakably clear to him: “
Kill—kill—flesh
—
flesh
!”

He had even, once, when the tribe was only a few days out of the cocoon, heard with chilled fascination the dry buzzing silent mind-speech of a hjjk, greeting the tribe with cool scorn during a chance encounter in a bleak, chill meadow.

Everywhere in the world mind speaks to mind, creature hails creature in the voiceless speech of the spirit. It is not unusual. The world had long ago reached a time in the unfolding of its growth when such abilities were widespread. Virtually everything can speak, though some species have very little to say, and that little is often simple and dim.