At Winter's End

“He was the only one slain?” said Hresh.

“The only one. He went among the hjjks where they were thickest, and killed them as though he were swatting flies, until there were too many of them for him. There was no way we could get to him in time. But it was a brave death.”

“He wanted to die,” Minbain said.

Hresh turned to his mother. “You think so?”

“The gods gave him no peace. He was ever in torment.”

“He was radiant at the last moment,” said Salaman. “I saw his face. There was light coming from it. Whatever torment he was in, it had gone from him in his last moments.”

“Mueri ease his soul,” Hresh murmured.

Salaman gestured toward the city. “Will you stay with us awhile?”

“I think not,” Hresh said. “We will feast with you tonight, and then we’ll move on. This is your place. We should not occupy it long. Taniane leads us southward, and we will find a home for ourselves there, until we know where the gods mean to carry us next.”

“Taniane is chieftain, then,” said Salaman in wonder. “Well, it was what she dreamed. How did Koshmar die?”

“Of sadness, I think. And weariness. But also of knowing that she had completed her task. Koshmar lived nobly and died nobly too. She brought us out of the cocoon to Vengiboneeza, and she sent us onward from there to our next destination, as the gods meant her to do. She served them well, and us.”

“And Torlyri? Is she dead too?”

“The gods prevent it!” Hresh said. “She stayed behind of her own will, to live among the Bengs. She is a Beng now, she says. When last I saw her she wore a helmet, do you believe it? Love has transformed her.” He laughed. “Her eyes will turn red, I think, like theirs.”

Minbain came up to him. “And you, Hresh — what will you do? If you would do what will please me, you will stay behind also. Live here with us. Will you do that? This is a fine place.”

“And leave my tribe, Mother?”

“No. All of you, stay! The People reunited!”

Hresh shook his head. “No, Mother. The tribes must not be rejoined. You are all Harruel’s people now, with a destiny of your own. What it is, I ca

“Ah. Hresh-full-of-questions!”

“Always, Mother. Always.”

“Then I will never see you again?”

“We thought we had parted once forever, and look, here we are together. I think I’ll see you once more. And my brother Samnibolon, too. But who knows when that will be? Only the gods.”

Hresh walked away from them, to be by himself for a time before the feasting began.

This has been a strange day, he thought; but, then, every day has been strange, since that first day of strangeness long ago when I took it into my head to sneak outside the cocoon, and the ice-eaters began to rise under our cavern, and the Dream-Dreamer awoke and cried out. And now Harruel is dead and Koshmar is dead and Torlyri is a Beng and Taniane is a chieftain and Salaman is a king, and I am Hresh-full-of-questions who is also Hresh-of-the-answers, the old man of our tribe. And I will continue my Going Forth, until the ends of the earth, and Dawi

The cool wind of this high country blew refreshingly about him. His mind was clear and open and peaceful. A vision arose in it as he stood by himself, a vision of the Great World, achieved now without the aid of any of the machines he had brought with him out of Vengiboneeza. He simply saw it before him, as though he had been transported to it by magic. It was a vision once again of the Great World on its last day, with darkness in the air and black winds blowing and frost overtaking everything; and he was not an observer this time, but a citizen of that lost world, a sapphire-eyes, in fact. He felt the heaviness of his great jaw, and the ponderousness of his immense thighs and tail. And he knew that this was the last day of the Great World, did that sapphire-eyes who was Hresh-full-of-questions. No sapphire-eyes would survive the time that was drawing nigh. The gods had sent a death upon their world.

And Hresh as Hresh understood that it was Dawi

Yes. Yes, of course, Hresh thought. I should have realized that without needing so many slaps from Noum om Beng. I am very clever, he thought, but sometimes also I am very slow. Thaggoran might have explained all these matters to me, if he had lived. But Dawi

He smiled. Another vision was coming alive within his soul: a shining city on a distant hillside, glowing in all the colors of the universe, blazing in light so radiant that it stu

“See, there,” he said. “That great city.”

“A sapphire-eyes city, is it?”

“No, a human city. Which we will build, to show that we too are human.”

Taniane nodded. “Yes. We are the humans now.”

“We will be,” Hresh said.

He thought of the golden ball of quicksilver, and the machines it controlled. Miracles, yes. And not our miracles. But we will use them in forging a miracle of our own. For us, he thought, it will be an endless Going Forth. Now the task begins, the struggle to prevail, the mastery of ancient skills and new ones, the long upward climb. He would lead the way, and he would say to the others, “Follow me there,” and they would follow.

Hresh looked toward the south. In one of the nearest hills there he made out a disturbance on one slope. He saw something huge struggling there, emerging from the earth. It looked almost as though an ice-eater was breaking through from the depths. Could it be? An ice-eater? Yes. That was what it was. An ice-eater, perhaps one of the last to get the word that the New Springtime truly had come. The monstrous creature was breaching the surface now, tossing trees and earth and great slabs of rock to this side and that. Hresh saw its blind face, its black-bristled body. And now it had broken through; and now it lay gasping in the sunlight, dying. Hresh watched, and as he watched the vast bulk of the subterranean creature split apart, and tiny creatures — or at least they seemed tiny at this distance — came from it by the dozens, by the hundreds, little shimmering things, coiling and wriggling busily, an army of small serpents born out of the great dead thing of the former world. Its young, yes. Not hideous like their colossal progenitor, but delicate and strangely beautiful, bright gleaming creatures, blue and glossy green and velvet black, moving in tracks of shining light. Rushing off into the sunlit day to take up the life that was offered them here at winter’s end. Renewal and rebirth, yes. Renewal and rebirth everywhere.

So even the ice-eaters would survive, after a fashion, in the new world. The prophecy had said they would die when the long winter ended, but the prophecy had been wrong. They would not die. They would only be transformed. Out of winter’s bleak decay new life and beauty could come. Hresh offered them a blessing, the blessing of Dawi