Queen of Springtime (54 page)

“But the danger—”

“Would you make a woman of me, father? Worse than a woman, for I know that there’ll be women in our fighting brigades. Am I to stay at home, then, with the old ones and children?”

“You’re no warrior, Biterulve.”

“I am.”

The boy’s quiet insistence carried a force Salaman had never heard from him before. He saw the anger in Biterulve’s eyes, the injured pride. And the king realized that his gentle scholarly son had put him in an impossible situation. Refuse permission and he robbed Biterulve forever of his princeliness. He’d never forgive him for that. Let him go, and he might well fall victim to some thrusting hjjk spear, which Salaman himself could scarcely bear to contemplate.

Impossible. Impossible.

He felt his anger rising. How dare the boy ask him to make a decision like this? But he held himself in check.

Biterulve waited, expectant, unafraid.

He gives me no choice, Salaman thought bitterly.

At length he said, sighing, “I never thought you’d have any appetite for fighting, boy. But I see I’ve misjudged you.” He looked away, and made a brusque gesture of dismissal. “All right. Go. Go, boy. Get yourself ready to march, if that’s what you need to do.”

Biterulve grinned and clapped his hands, and ran from the room.

“Get me Athimin,” the king said to one of his stewards.

When the prince arrived, Salaman said to him dourly, “Biterulve has just told me he plans to go with us to the war.”

Athimin’s eyes brightened in surprise. “Surely you’ll forbid him, father!”

“No. No, I’ve given permission. He said I’d be making a woman of him, if I forced him to stay home. Well, so be it. But you’re going to be his protector and guardian, do you understand? If a finger of his is harmed, I’ll have three of yours. Do you understand me, Athimin? I love all my sons as I love my own self, but I love Biterulve in a way that goes beyond all else. Stay at his side on the battlefield. Constantly.”

“I will, father.”

“And see to it that he comes home from the war in one piece. If he doesn’t you’d be wise to stay up there yourself in the hjjk wastelands rather than face me again.”

Athimin stared.

“Nothing will harm him, father,” the prince said hoarsely. “I promise you that.”

He went out without another word, nearly colliding as he did with a breathless messenger who had come scampering in.

“What is it?” Salaman barked.

“The army of Dawinno,” the runner said. “They’ve reached the lantern-tree groves. They’ll be in the city in a couple of hours.”

“Look yonder,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “The Great Wall of Yissou.”

Under a sky of purple and gold a massive band of the deepest black stretched along the horizon for an impossible distance, curving away finally at the sides to disappear in the obscurities beyond. It might have been a dark strip of low-lying cloud; but no, for its bulk and solidity were so oppressive that it was hard to understand how the earth could hold firm beneath its impossible weight.

“Can it be real?” Nialli Apuilana asked finally. “Or just some illusion, some trick that Salaman makes our minds play upon ourselves?” Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “If it’s a trick, it’s one that Salaman has played on himself. The wall’s real enough, Nialli. For twice as many years as you’ve been alive, or something close to that, he’s poured all the resources of his city into constructing that thing. While we’ve built bridges and towers and roads and parks, Salaman’s built a wall. A wall of walls, one to stand throughout the ages. When this place is as old as Vengiboneeza, and twice as dead, that wall will still be there.”

“Is he crazy, do you think?”

“Very likely. But shrewd and strong, for all his craziness. It’s a mistake ever to underestimate him. There’s no one in this world as strong and determined as Salaman. Or as mad.”

“A crazy ally. That makes me uneasy.”

“Better a crazy ally than a crazy enemy,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

He turned and signaled to those in the wagons just behind him. They had halted when he had. Now they began to move forward again, up the sloping tableland toward the high ground where that incredible wall lay athwart the sky. Nialli Apuilana could see small figures atop the wall, warriors whose spears stood out like black bristles against the darkening air. For a moment she imagined that they were hjjks, somehow in possession of the city. The strangeness of this place inspired fantasy. She found herself thinking also that the wall, colossal as it was, was merely poised and lightly balanced on its great base, that it would take only a breeze to send it falling forward upon her, that already it had begun slowly to topple in her direction as the wagon rolled onward. Nialli Apuilana smiled. This is foolishness, she thought. But anything seemed possible in the City of Yissou. That black wall was like a thing of dreams, and not cheerful dreams.

Thu-Kimnibol said, “It was only a wooden palisade when I was a boy here. Not even a very sturdy one, at that. When the hjjks came, they’d have swarmed over it in a moment, if we hadn’t found a way of turning them back. Gods! How we fought, that day!”

He fell into silence. He seemed to lose himself in it.

Nialli Apuilana leaned against his comforting bulk and tried to imagine how it had been, that day when the hjjks came to Yissou. She saw the boy Samnibolon, who would call himself Thu-Kimnibol afterward, holding his weapons like a man, striking at the hordes of hjjks in the bloody dusk as the shadows lengthened. Yes, she could see him easily, a boy of heroic size, as now he was a man of heroic size. Fighting unrelentingly against the invaders who threatened his father’s young city. And something in her quivered with excitement at the thought of him hot with battle.

The warlike boy Samnibolon, who had become this warlike man Thu-Kimnibol: they were the utter opposite of the gentle Kundalimon, that shy and strange bearer of the Queen’s love and the Queen’s peace. Nialli Apuilana had loved Kundalimon beyond any doubt. In some way she still did. And yet—and yet—when she looked at this fierce Thu-Kimnibol she found herself swept by irresistible love and desire. It had come over her for the first time at the drill-field, to her astonishment and joy. It had come over her a hundred times since. Here beneath the terrible walls of Salaman’s city it seemed stronger than ever. She had known him since she was a child; and yet she realized now she had not actually known him at all, not until these past few weeks had brought them so strangely together.

All his life, she thought, he has waited for a chance to fight again; and now he will. And suddenly she realized that what she loved him for was that strength, that oneness of character, that had defined him since his earliest boyhood, when this city’s wall had been nothing more than a palisade of wood.

Her love for Kundalimon glowed imperishably within her: she was certain of that. And yet this other man, Kundalimon’s opposite in all things, now filled her soul so thoroughly that there seemed no room for anyone else.

Hresh had never touched such perfection before. He had not ever imagined it was possible. Truly the Nest functioned as smoothly as any machine.

He knew this was only a minor hjjk outpost, certainly not the great Nest of Nests; and yet it was so huge and complex that even after many days within it he had no clear idea of its plan. Its tunnels, warm and sweet-smelling and dimly lit by some pink glow that emanated from the walls, radiated in bewildering patterns, running this way and that, crossing and recrossing. Yet all those who traversed these corridors moved swiftly and unhesitatingly in obvious clear knowledge of the route.

The hjjks had fabricated their huge subterranean city in the simplest way, digging the tunnels with their bare claws—Hresh had watched them at work, for they never ceased expanding the Nest—and lining the walls with a pulp made of soft wood, which they chewed themselves and spat out into great soggy mounds that could be scooped up and pressed into place. Wooden beams served to prop the tunnel roof at regular intervals. He had expected something more complex from them. This was not very different except in size from the sort of nests the ants and termites of the forest built for themselves.

And, like those small insects of the forest floor, they had evolved an elaborate system of castes and professions. The biggest ones—females, they were, though apparently not fertile—were the Militaries. They were ordinarily the only ones who ventured into the world beyond the Nest. It was Militaries who had brought Hresh here.

A parallel caste of sterile males, the Workers, had charge of constructing and expanding the Nest, and of maintaining the intricate systems of ventilation and heating that kept it livable. They were thick-bodied and short, with little of the eerie grace that the slender Militaries displayed.

Then there were the reproductive cadres, the Egg-makers and Life-kindlers: smaller, stockier even than the Workers, with short limbs and blunt, rounded heads. When they were mature, they were taken before the Queen, who brought them to full fertility by penetrating them in some way and flooding them with a substance she herself secreted: this was known as Queen-touch. Life-kindlers and Egg-makers mated, then, and brought forth eggs that hatched into small pale larvae. A caste known as Nourishment-givers reared and nurtured these in outlying caverns. It was they who determined which caste the new hjjks would belong to, in accordance with the orders of the Queen, and shaped them for it by the manner of food they provided. The number of each caste’s members never changed: as the life of each hjjk Military or Worker or Egg-maker or Life-kindler neared its appointed end, its replacement was already being reared in the caverns of the Nourishment-givers.

Hresh learned all these things from the members of a different caste yet, one with which he felt a great personal kinship of spirit: the Nest-thinkers, the philosophers and teachers of the insect-folk.

Whether these were male or female, he couldn’t tell. They were as tall as Militaries, which argued that they were female, but they had the blocky frame of Workers, barely narrowing at all at the places where one segment of their bodies gave way to the next, as though they might be male. In any event they were unconcerned with sexual matters. They sat all day in dark sealed chambers, to which the young came for instruction. Hresh went to them too, and listened solemnly as they explained the workings of the Nest to him. He was never sure if he ever spoke twice with the same Nest-thinker. They seemed indistinguishable. After a while he fell into the habit of regarding them all as one, a single individual—Nest-thinker.

Nest-thinker it was who opened the mysteries of the Nest to him, Nest-thinker who showed him how every aspect of the life of the Nest was coordinated perfectly with every other aspect, Nest-thinker who instructed him in Nest-truth, who taught him the intricacies of Egg-plan and Queen-love, who offered him the comfort of Nest-bond.

It was Nest-thinker, ultimately, who brought him before the Queen.

That was the deepest mystery of all: the city’s giant immobile monarch, hidden in a chamber sunken far beneath the other levels, guarded by the elite caste of Queen-attendants—warriors of immense size and indomitable valor who encircled Her place of repose in an impenetrable legion.

“The Queen can never die,” Nest-thinker told Hresh. “She was born when the world was young and will live to its final age.” Was he supposed to take that literally? Surely the Queen’s life-span was great. Perhaps she lived so long that to the others she seemed immortal. But immortal?

Hresh had no idea how long he had been in the Nest before they took him to the Queen. Time had little meaning here: his days often passed in a dreamy haze of contemplation. He had slipped into a strange peaceful otherness. The storms of the outer world, the turmoil and bustle of the City of Dawinno, seemed to him now like phantasms out of some other life. But ultimately a day arrived when Nest-thinker said to him, “You are for the Queen today. Follow me.”

Together they descended a narrow, spiraling ramp, its earthen floor worn to a high polish by the passage of generations of feet. Hresh wondered if any of those feet had been feet like his. He doubted it. Very likely only the hard bristly claws of hjjks had traveled this way before today.

Down and down and downward still they went. The shaft was like an auger boring its way backward through the depths of time. Crisp unknown odors floated up toward him. A pulsing black glow was the only illumination.

The deeper they went, the faster they moved. The long-legged Nest-thinker set an unrelenting pace. Hresh came close to growing dizzy as the shaft wound on and on. But some unknown force steadied his soul: perhaps from Nest-thinker, perhaps from the Queen Herself.

Then at last they reached the holy of holies.

It was a long oval chamber with a high, rounded ceiling. Instead of roof-beams there was a vaulting of hexagonal plates overhead, fitted one against the other in a way that looked invulnerable even to the mightiest tremor of the earth. At one end of the chamber—the end where Nest-thinker and Hresh had entered—was a platform where the Queen-attendants stood packed close together, their weapons pointing outward. The Queen filled all the rest of the room, end to end, wall to wall.

She was a colossal tubular vessel of flesh, soft and pink, not remotely hjjk-like in any way, without eyes, without beak, without limbs, without features of any sort. But he felt himself to be in the presence of an extraordinary being, of such power and force that it was all he could do to keep himself from falling to his knees before her.

And yet this was only a minor Queen, Hresh knew. This was just a subordinate of the great Queen of Queens.

The only sound in the chamber was that of his own breathing. He pressed his hands to his sides, digging them deep into his fur to stop them from trembling. Queen-attendants came up close against him, surrounding him on all sides, their hard shells and bristly limbs pressing tight. Their blades lightly pricked his flesh. If he made so much as the slightest unexpected move those blades would plunge deep.

A voice that was like the tolling of an awesome bell spoke in his mind.