Queen of Springtime (31 page)

Her body has long since slipped into that strange crystalline realm that lies beyond fatigue. She no longer feels the throbbings of her weary legs, no longer records the protests of her lungs or the pains that shoot upward through her back. She moves at a graceful lope, running swiftly in a kind of mindless serenity.

She must not allow her mind to regain awareness.

If it does, she will hear the lethal words again.
Found in an alleyway. Dead. Strangled.

The vision of Kundalimon’s slender body will come to her, twisted, rumpled, staring sightlessly toward the gray sky. His hands outstretched. His lips slightly apart.

Found in an alleyway.

Her lover. Kundalimon. Dead. Gone forever.

They would have gone north to the Queen together. Together they would have descended hand in hand into the Nest of Nests, down into that warm sweet-smelling mysterious realm beneath those distant plains. The song of Nest-bond would have engulfed their spirits. The pull of Queen-love would have dissolved all disharmonies in their souls. Dear ones would have come up to embrace them: Nest-thinkers, Egg-makers, Life-kindlers, Militaries, every caste gathering round to welcome the newcomers to their true home.

Dead. Strangled.
My only one.

Nialli Apuilana had never known that love such as theirs had been could exist. And she knows that such love can never exist for her again. She wants nothing now but to join him in whatever place it is where he has gone.

She runs, seeing nothing, thinking nothing.

It is twilight again. Shadows deepen, falling across her like cloaks. Gentle warm rain falls, on and off. Thick golden mists rise from the moist earth. Thick soft woolly clouds spiral up around her and take the forms of the gods, which have no forms, and in whose existence she does not believe. They surround her, looming higher than the towering smooth-trunked vine-tangled trees, and they speak to her in voices that tumble downward to her ears in shimmering harmonics richer than any music she has ever heard.

“I am Dawinno, child. I take all things, and transform them to make them new, and bring them forth into the world again. Without me, there would be only unchanging rock.”

“I am Friit. I bring healing and forgetfulness. Without me, there would be only pain.”

“I am Emakkis, girl. I provide nourishment. Without me, life could not sustain itself.”

“Me, child, I am Mueri. I am consolation. I am the love that abides and infuses. Without me, death would be the end of everything.”

“And I am Yissou. I am the protector who shields from harm. Without me, life would be a valley of thorns and fangs.”

Dead. Strangled. Found in an alleyway.

“There are no gods,” Nialli Apuilana murmurs. “There is only the Queen, holding us in Her love.
She
is our comfort, and our protection, and our nourishment, and our healing, and our transformation.”

In the deepening darkness, golden light encloses her. The jungle is ablaze with it. The lakes and pools and streams shimmer with it. Light pours from everything. The air, thick and torrid, swirls with the holy images of the Five Heavenly Ones. Nialli Apuilana holds her hand before her face to shield her eyes, so strong is that light. But then she lowers the hand, and lets the light come flooding upon her, and it is kind and loving. She draws new strength from it. She runs onward, deeper into that crystalline realm of tirelessness.

She hears the voices again. Dawinno. Friit. Emakkis. Mueri. Yissou.

Destroyer. Healer. Provider. Consoler. Protector.

“The Queen,” Nialli Apuilana murmurs. “Where is the Queen? Why does She not come to me now?”

“Ah, child, She is us, and we are She. Do you not see that?”

“You are the Queen?”

“The Queen is us.”

She considers that.

Yes, she thinks. Yes, that is so.

She is able to think again, now. Her eyes are open. She can see the stars, she can see the many worlds, she can see the shining web of Queen-love binding the worlds together. And she knows that all is one, that there are no differences, no gradations, no partitions dividing one form of reality from another. She had not realized that before. But now she sees, she hears, she accepts.

“Do you see us, child? Do you hear us? Do you feel our presence? Do you know us?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Shapes without form. Faces without features. Potent sonorities resonating through the descending shadows. Light, cascading from everything, coming from within. Density, strangeness, mystery. God-hood all about her. Beauty. Peace. Her mind is ablaze, but it is a cool white fire, burning away all dross. Out of the earth comes a roaring sound that fills all the sky, but it is a sweet roaring, enfolding her like a cloak. The Five Heavenly Ones are everywhere, and she is in their embrace.

“I understand,” she whispers. “The Queen—the Creator—Nakhaba—the Five—all the same, all just different faces of the same thing—”

“Yes. Yes.”

Night is coming on swiftly now. The heavy sky behind her is streaked with blue, with scarlet, with purple, with green. Ahead lies darkness. Lantern-trees are awakening into light. Creatures of the jungle show themselves everywhere, wings and necks and claws and scales and jaws shining on all sides of her.

She drops to her knees. She can go no farther. With the return of thought has come the reality of exhaustion. She digs her hands into the warm moist ground and clings to it.

But it seems for a moment, as she crouches there gasping and shivering in her great weariness, that she is alone once again, except for the creatures that screech and cackle and hiss and bellow all about her in the deepening night. She feels a tremor of fear. Where have the gods gone? Has she run so fast that she has left them behind?

No. She can still feel them. She need only open herself to them, and they are there.

“Here, child. I am Mueri. I will comfort you.”

“I am Yissou. I will protect you.”

“I am Emakkis. I will provide for you.”

“I am Friit. I will heal you.”

“I am Dawinno. I will transform you. I will transform you. I will transform you, child.”

This was Thu-Kimnibol’s fifth week in the City of Yissou. Real negotiations in the matter of the military alliance between Salaman and the City of Dawinno hadn’t yet begun: only the preliminaries, and sketchy ones at that. Salaman seemed in no hurry. He side-stepped Thu-Kimnibol’s attempts to get down to the harder issues. Instead the king kept him diverted with a constant round of feasts and celebrations as though he regarded him as a member of his own family; and the girl Weiawala shared his bed each night as if they were already betrothed. Very quickly he had come to accept and enjoy her eagerness, her passion. It had renewed his taste for life. He was untroubled by the slow pace. It was giving the wound of Naarinta’s death a chance to heal, this far from old and familiar associations. And there were even older associations here. In an odd way Thu-Kimnibol was pleased to be back in what was, after all, the city where he had spent the formative years of his life, from his third year to his nineteenth. Vengiboneeza, his birth-place, seemed like a dream to him, nothing more, and Dawinno, great as it was, somehow insubstantial and remote. His whole life there, his princely house and his mate and his pleasures and his friends, had faded until they rarely entered his mind any longer. Here, in the dark shadow of Salaman’s bizarre titanic wall, in this dense dank claustrophobic warren of a city, he was beginning to feel somehow at home. That was surprising. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t even try. As for his mission, his embassy, the less hurry the better. An alliance of the sort he had in mind was best not forged in haste.

He went riding often in the hinterlands beyond the wall, usually with Esperasagiot and Dumanka and Simthala Honginda, sometimes with one or two of the king’s older sons. It was the king who had suggested these excursions. “Your xlendis will want exercise,” he said. “The streets of the city are too narrow and winding. The beasts won’t have room in them for stretching their legs properly.”

“What about the chance of running into hjjks out there?” Thu-Kimnibol asked. “I get the idea that they’re crawling all over the place.”

“If you stray very far to the northeast, yes. Otherwise you won’t be bothered.”

“Toward Vengiboneeza, you mean?”

“Right. That’s where the filthy bugs are. A million of them, maybe. Ten million, for all I know. Vengiboneeza boils with them,” Salaman said. “They infest it like fleas.” He gave Thu-Kimnibol a cunning look. “But even if you do meet up with a few hjjks while you’re out riding, what of it? You knew how to kill them once upon a time, so I recall.”

“Very likely I still do,” Thu-Kimnibol said quietly.

He was cautious outside the city, all the same. Usually he rode through the tame farming territories south of the city, and once or twice he and Esperasagiot went a short way into the unthreatening forests on the eastern side, but he never ventured toward the north. Not that the thought of running into hjjks troubled him much; and he cursed Salaman for that sly suggestion of cowardice. It would be good sport, slicing up a few hjjks. But he had a mission to carry out here, and getting himself killed in a brawl with the bugs would be worse than stupid: it would be irresponsible.

Then Salaman himself suggested that they go for a ride. And Thu-Kimnibol was surprised to see the king leading him toward the west, across a high plateau that gave way to a rough, ravine-crossed district where their xlendis were hard pressed to manage their footing. It was a troublesome broken region. Danger might be hiding anywhere. Salaman felt a need to test his guest’s courage, perhaps. Or to demonstrate his own. Thu-Kimnibol kept his irritation out of view. “It was here,” the king said, “that we destroyed the hjjks, the day of the great battle. Do you remember? You were so young.”

“Old enough, cousin.”

They stood a time, staring. Thu-Kimnibol was aware of the old memories, veiled as they were by time, stirring within him. First the hjjks thrown into confusion by that device of Hresh’s, which sent their vermilions stampeding into those boulder-strewn gullies. And then the battle. How he had fought that day! Cutting them to pieces as they milled around in bewilderment! Six years old, was he? Something like that. But already twice the size of any child his age. With his own sword, and not a toy sword, either. The finest hour of his life: the child-warrior, the boy-swordsman, hacking and slashing with fury and zeal. The one and only time in his life, it was, that he had tasted the true joy of warfare. He longed to feel the wine of it on his lips again.

On his second ride with Salaman the king was even bolder; for this time he headed into the high wooded lands east and north of the city, precisely the region he had warned Thu-Kimnibol against, and kept on going for hours without turning back. As they proceeded on and one during the day, it began to seem to Thu-Kimnibol that Salaman might have it in mind to ride all the way to Vengiboneeza, or some such insanity. Of course that was impossible, a journey that would take weeks, and certain death at the end of it. But the hjjks were supposed to be plentiful to the northeast even this close to the city. If it was so risky to take this route, why had the king chosen it now?

They rode in silence, deep into the afternoon, along a lofty ridge that stretched as far as the eye could see. The countryside grew increasingly wild. Once a passage of bloodbirds briefly darkened the sky just overhead. On a hot sunny knoll a sinister congregation of the large pale insects called greenclaws, thick many-jointed things half the length of a man’s body, moved slowly about in the warmth. Later they rode past a place where the ground was in turmoil as though a giant auger were turning beneath it, and, looking down, Thu-Kimnibol saw scarlet eyes huge as saucers looking back at him out of the soft tumbled soil, and great yellow teeth clacking together.

At last they halted in a quiet grassy open place atop a high point along the ridge. The sky was deepening in color. It had the color of strong wine now. Thu-Kimnibol stared eastward, into the gathering shadows. Vengiboneeza was somewhere out there, far beyond the range of sight. He barely remembered it, only scattered scraps and bits, the image of a tower, the cobbled pavement of a great boulevard, the high sweep of a vast plaza. That gleaming ancient city, thick with ghosts. And its million hjjks, swarming furiously in the hive. How the place must reek of them!

After a time Thu-Kimnibol thought that he could see figures, angular and alien, moving about in the shallow canyon below the ridge, very far off.

“Hjjks,” he said. “Do you see them?”

They were very small at this distance, hardly more than specks, yellow banded with black.

Salaman narrowed his eyes, stared closely. “Yes, by Yissou! One, two, three, four—”

“And a fifth one, on the ground. With its belly in the air.”

“Your eyes are younger than mine. But yes, I can make them out now. You see how near to Yissou they venture? Forever prowling closer and closer.” He took a closer look. “The two large ones are females. Warriors, they are. Among hjjks it’s the females who are stronger. Escorting the other three somewhere, I suppose. A team of spies. The one on the ground’s badly hurt, by the looks of it. Or dead. Either way, they’ll be feasting in a little while.”

“Feasting?”

“On the dead one. They waste nothing, the hjjks. Didn’t you know that? Not even their own dead.”

Thu-Kimnibol laughed at the monstrous grisliness of the idea. But then, reconsidering, he felt himself shuddering. Could Salaman be serious? Yes, yes. Apparently he was. Indeed, the quartet of distant hjjks seemed to be crouching over the body of the fallen one now, methodically pulling it apart, wresting its limbs from it and splitting them open to get at whatever meat they might contain. He watched in horror, unable to look away. Disgust made his skin crawl, his guts writhe. The busy claws, the avid beaks, the steady, diligent, efficient process of feeding—how loathsome, how hateful they were—

“Are they cannibals, then? Do they murder one another for their flesh?”

“Cannibals, yes. They see nothing wrong with eating their own dead. A thrifty folk, they are. But murderers, no. Killing their own kind is a sin they don’t seem to practice, cousin. My guess is that this one ran into something even nastier than itself. Yissou knows there’s danger all over the place in this open country, wild beasts of a hundred sorts.”