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“I would like to read those books someday,” Hresh said again.
“I think you will have that opportunity,” said Thaggoran.
Gray wisps of fog drifted toward them. Thaggoran began to pack away his holy things. His fingers were numb with cold, and his hands moved clumsily over the locks and seals of the casket. After a moment he beckoned impatiently to Hresh, asking him to help, showing the boy what to do. Together they closed the casket, and then Thaggoran put his raw hands to its lid as though he might be warmed by what it contained.
Hresh said, “Will we ever go back to the cocoon, Thaggoran?”
Again Thaggoran looked at him in a puzzled way. “We have left the cocoon forever, boy. We must go forward until we have found what we are instructed to find.”
“And what is that?”
“The things we must have in order to rule the world,” said Thaggoran. “As it has been written in the Book of the Way. Those things wait for us out there in the ruins of the Great World.”
“But what if this isn’t the true New Springtime? Look how cold it is! Don’t you ever wonder if we’ve made some kind of mistake and come out too soon?”
“Never,” Thaggoran said. “There can be no doubt. All the omens are favorable.”
“It is very cold, though,” said Hresh.
“Indeed. Very cold. But do you see how night gradually overtakes the day, and day is gradually born out of night? So too with the New Springtime, boy. A springtime does not arrive in a single great burst of warmth, but it happens moment by moment, bit by bit.” Thaggoran shivered and wrapped his arms about himself as the fog touched his bones. “Come, Hresh. Help me with this casket, and let’s rejoin the others.”
It troubled him that Hresh seemed to have doubts about the wisdom of the trek, for there often was a seer’s kee
Besides, there were the ice-eaters: not only an omen of springtime, but an immediate threat to the cocoon. Still, might it not have been better to seek shelter somewhere else and wait for warmer weather, rather than to set out across this trackless wasteland?
Too late. Too late. The march had begun, and Thaggoran knew it would not end until Koshmar attained the glory that she had always sought, whatever it might be. Or else it would end with the deaths of them all. So be it, Thaggoran told himself. Whatever would come would come, as was usually the case.
The second day was harsh and difficult. In midday angry swarms of winged creatures with eerie white eyes and furious blood-seeking beaks swooped down. Delim suffered a slashed arm, and the young warrior Praheurt was cut in two places on his back. The People drove them off with shouts and rocks and firebrands, but it was an ugly task, for they kept coming back again and again, so there was no peace for hours. Thaggoran gave them the name of bloodbirds. Later there were others even more vile, with leathery black wings tipped with savage horny claws, and fat little bodies covered with stinking green fur. At night there were fireburs again, a maddening multitude of them. To keep spirits high Koshmar ordered everyone to sing, and sing they did, but it was a joyless singing that they did. There was sleet in the depths of the night, cold hard stuff that raked one’s skin like a spray of fiery embers. Torlyri, when she had finished with her offering in the morning, made the rounds of the People, offering the comfort of her warmth and tenderness. “This is the worst of it,” she said. “It will be better, soon.”
They went on.
On the third day, as they were descending a series of bare gray rolling hills that opened into a shallow green meadow, keen-eyed Torlyri spied a strange solitary figure far in the distance. It seemed to be coming toward them. Turning to Thaggoran, she said, “Do you see that, old man? What do you think it is? No human, surely!”
Thaggoran narrowed his eyes and stared. His vision was not nearly so far-reaching as Torlyri’s, but his second sight was the sharpest in the tribe, and it showed him plainly the bands of yellow and black on the creature’s long shining body, the fierce beak, the great glittering blue-black eyes, the deep constrictions dividing head from thorax, thorax from abdomen. “No, not a human,” he muttered, shaken to the depths of his spirit. “Don’t you recognize a hjjk-man when you see one?”
“A hjjk-man!” said Torlyri in wonder.
Thaggoran turned away, trying to conceal the way he was trembling. He felt as though this were some phenomenally vivid dream. He could scarcely believe that a hjjk-man, an actual living hjjk-man, was even now crossing that meadow. It was like a book of the chronicles jumping up from the casket and coming to life, with figures out of the lost Great World pouring forth and dancing about before him. The hjjk-folk had been only a name to him, a concept, something dry and ancient and abstract, a mere remote aspect of a vanished past. Koshmar was real; Torlyri was real; Harruel was real; this barren chilly countryside was real. What was in the chronicles was only words. But that was no mere word out there that was approaching them now.
And yet it came as no great surprise to Thaggoran that the hjjks too had survived the winter. That was just as the chronicles had predicted. The hjjk-folk had been expected to see the hard times through. They were i
Koshmar came over. She had seen the hjjk-man too.
“We’ll need to speak with him. He must know useful things about what lies ahead. Do you think you’ll be able to get him to talk?”
“Do you have any reason to think I won’t?” said Thaggoran gruffly.
Koshmar gri
“I won’t be the first to drop,” he replied in a surly tone.
They were crossing now a parched terrain: the soil was sandy and its surface crunched underfoot, as though no one had walked here in thousands of years. Sparse tufts of stiff blue-green grass sprouted here and there, tough angular stuff that had a glassy sheen. Yesterday Konya had tried to pull up a clump and it had cut his fingers; he had come away bloody and cursing.
All afternoon long as they descended the last hill in the group they could discern the hjjk-man stolidly advancing in their direction. He reached them just before twilight, when they had arrived at the meadow’s eastern edge. Though they were sixty and he was only one, he halted and waited for them with his middle pair of arms crossed over his thorax, seemingly unafraid.
Thaggoran stared intently. His heart thundered, his throat was parched with excitement. Not even the Going Forth itself had had such an impact on him as the advent of this creature.
Long ago, in the glorious days of the Great World before the coming of the death-stars, these insect-beings had built vast hivelike cities in the lands that were too dry for humans and vegetals or too cold for sapphire-eyes or too moist for mechanicals. If no one else wanted a territory, the hjjk-folk would claim it, and once they did there was no relinquishing it. And yet the chroniclers of the Great World had not considered the hjjk-folk the masters of the earth, for all their sturdiness and adaptability: that was the place held by the sapphire-eyed ones, so it was written. The sapphire-eyes were the kings; after them came all the rest, including the humans, who had been the kings themselves in some even more ancient time. And would be again, now, with the Coming Forth. But the sapphire-eyes, Thaggoran knew, could not have survived the winter, and the humans had gone into hiding. Were the hjjk-folk the masters now by default?