At Winter's End

“The sun is much larger than they are. And very much hotter.”

“Only because it’s closer. Believe me, boy: what you see are globes of fire hanging in the sky.”

“Ah. Globes of fire. Are they very far away, then?”

“So far that it would take the sturdiest warrior all his life to walk to the nearest of them.”

“Ah,” said Hresh. “Ah.” He stood staring at them a long while. Others had stopped too, and were studying the dazzling points of pulsating light that had begun to break out all over the sky. Thaggoran felt a chill, and not only from the evening air. He beheld a sky full of suns, and he knew there were worlds around all those suns, and he felt like dropping down to touch his head against the earth in recognition of his smallness and the greatness of the gods who had brought the People forth into this immense world, this world that was only a grain of sand in the immensity of the universe.

“Look,” someone said. “What’s that?”

“Gods!” cried Harruel. “A sword in the sky!”

Indeed something new was appearing now — a hook of dazzling white light, an icy crescent gliding into view above the distant mountains. All about him the tribe was kneeling, murmuring, offering up desperate prayers to that great silent floating thing that glowed with a frigid blue-white gleam above them.

“The moon,” Thaggoran called. “That is the moon!”

“The moon is round, like a ball, so you always told us,” Boldirinthe said.

“It changes,” said Thaggoran. “Sometimes it is like this, and sometimes its face is fuller.”

“Mueri! I feel the moonlight on my skin!” one of the men wailed. “Will it freeze me, Thaggoran? What will it do? Mueri! Friit! Yissou!”

“There’s nothing to fear,” Thaggoran said. But he was trembling now too. There is so much that is strange here, he thought. We are in another world. We are naked under these stars and this moon, and we know nothing, not even I, not even I, and everything is new, everything is frightening.

He found Koshmar. “We should make camp now,” he said. “It’s too dark to go on. And camping will give them something to do as the night comes over us.”

“What will happen in the night?” Koshmar asked.

Thaggoran shrugged. “Sleep will happen in the night. And then will come morning.”

“When?”

“When night is done,” he said.

They camped that first night in a depression beside a thinly flowing stream. As Thaggoran had thought, the work of halting and unpacking and building a campfire distracted the tribe from its fears. But they had hardly settled down when some sort of pale many-jointed insects as long as a man’s leg, with huge bulging yellow eyes and powerful-looking green legs tipped with nasty claws, came scuttering out of low mounds of earth nearby. The creatures were attracted by the light, it seemed, or perhaps the warmth of the fire. They looked fierce and ugly, and made a hideous clicking sound with their glossy red mandibles. The children and some of the women ran screaming away from them; but Koshmar came forward without fear and speared one with a quick contemptuous thrust. It pounded its two ends sadly against the ground a few moments before it became still. The others, seeing what had happened to their companion, crawled backward a dozen paces or so and stared sullenly. After a while longer they backed away into their holes again and were not seen again.

“These are greenclaws,” Thaggoran said, quickly inventing the name before Koshmar could question him. It embarrassed him not to know the names of the first two creatures they had encountered in the Time of Going Forth. There was nothing in the Book of the Beasts about these, either. He was sure of that.

Koshmar roasted the dead greenclaws in the fire that night, and she and Harruel and some of the other braver ones tasted its flesh. They reported that it had no particular taste at all; yet a few went back for second helpings. Thaggoran declined his share with tactful thanks.

In the night came another a

The pale light of morning brought Thaggoran out of uneasy sleep. It seemed to him almost that he had not slept at all, but he could remember dreams: visions of faces floating in midair, and a woman with seven dreadful red eyes, and a land where teeth grew from the ground. His body ached everywhere. The sun, looking small and hard and unfriendly, lay like an unripe fruit atop the jagged range of hills to the east. He saw Torlyri far away, making her morning offering.

Scarcely anyone spoke as they made ready to break camp. Wherever he looked, Thaggoran saw bleak faces. Everyone seemed to be struggling visibly against the cold, the fatigue of yesterday’s march, the nuisance of the sleep-destroying fireburs, the strangeness of the landscape. The oppressive ope

His own spirits were cast down by the barren terrain and the bitter stinging weather. Was this truly the New Springtime? Or had they given up their little nest in the mountain too soon, making a premature departure into inhospitable winter and certain death? Perhaps they were writing the Book of the Unhappy Dawn or the Book of the Cold Awakening all over again.

The shinestones had given him no clear answer. His attempt at divination had ended in ambiguities and uncertainties, as such attempts often did. “You must go forth,” the stones had told him, but Thaggoran already knew that: were the ice-eaters not practically upon them? Yet the stones had not said they would go forth happily, or that this was the proper time.

He moved apart from the others and wrote for a time in the chronicles. Hresh came to him as he squatted by the open casket with his hands on the book, but the boy stood silent, as if fearing to interrupt. When Thaggoran was done he glanced up and said, “Well? Would you like to write something now on these pages, boy?”

Hresh smiled. “If only I could.”

“I know that you can write.”

“But not in the chronicles, Thaggoran. I don’t dare touch the chronicles.”

Thaggoran said, laughing, “You sound so pious, boy.”

“Do I?”

“I’m not fooled, though.”

“No,” Hresh said. “I wouldn’t want to injure the chronicles by trying to write in them. I might put down nonsense, and then in all the years to come they would see what I had written, and they would say, ‘Hresh the fool wrote that nonsense there.’ What I want is to be able to read the chronicles, though.”

“I read them to the People every week.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. I want to read them for myself. Everything, even the oldest books. I want to know more about how the cocoon was built, and who built it.”

“Lord Fanigole built our cocoon,” said Thaggoran. “With Balilirion and Lady Theel. You know that already.”

“Yes, but who were they? Those are only names.”

“Ancient ones,” Thaggoran said. “Great, great beings.”

“Sapphire-eyes, were they?”

Thaggoran gave Hresh a strange look. “Why would you say a thing like that? You know that all the sapphire-eyes died when the Long Winter began. Lord Fanigole and Balilirion and Lady Theel were people of our own kind. That is, they were humans: all the texts agree on that. They were the greatest of heroes, those three: when the panic came, when the deathly cold began, they were the ones who remained calm and led us into shelter.” He tapped the casket of the chronicles. “It’s all written in here, in these books.”