Robert Silverberg - The Queen of Springtime

Until at midday one day, while he was crossing what might not long ago have been a lake-bed, but was at this season a place of dry and cracked expanses of mud covered by a light scattering of sandy dust, he saw a figure on a vermilion just ahead, someone of the People, an unexpected sight indeed in this unknown place.

The xlendi halted and waited as the huge red creature came shambling up. The man riding it gasped.

“Gods! Can it really be you, sir? Or am I dreaming this? It must be a dream. It must.”

Hresh smiled. Tried to speak. He hadn’t used his voice in so long that it was harsh and ragged, a mere rasping croak. But he managed to say, “I know you, I think.”

The rider vaulted down from the vermilion and ran toward him. Peering over the wagon’s side, he stared at Hresh, shaking his head in wonder.

“Plor Killivash, sir. From the House of Knowledge! You don’t recognize me? I was one of your assistants, don’t you remember? Plor Killivash?”

“Is this Dawinno, then?”

“Dawinno? Sir, no! We’re way up in hjjk territory. I’m with the army, your brother Thu-Kimnibol’s army! We’ve been fighting for weeks. We’ve fought at Vengiboneeza, we’ve fought at a couple of the small Nests—” Plor Killivash’s eyes grew wider and wider. “Sir, how did you get here? You couldn’t possibly have come all this way alone, could you? And why are you here? You shouldn’t be at the battlefront, you know. Sir, can you hear me? Are you all right, sir? Sir?”

Thu-Kimnibol was in his tent. The army was camped on the edge of the prairie that they called the Plains of Minbain. He had given names to all the features of this unfamiliar land: the Mountains of Harruel, Lake Taniane, the Torlyri River, Boldirinthe Valley, Koshmar Pass. For all he knew, Salaman was bestowing names of his own on the same places as he advanced through them. Thu-Kimnibol didn’t care about that. To him the great jagged mountains they had gone past three weeks before were his father’s mountains, and this lovely serene tableland was his mother’s plain, and let Salaman call them what he would.

To Nialli Apuilana he said, “There it is again. I can feel the king approaching. Marching at the head of his troops, coming this way.”

“Yes. So do I. Or something dark and fierce, at any rate.”

“Salaman. No question of it.”

She put her hand to his thick forearm, where just a few days before he had taken a light wound from a hjjk spear. “You speak his name as though he’s the enemy, not the hjjks. Are you afraid of him, love?”

Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “Afraid of Salaman? I don’t often think in terms of who it is that I fear. But only a fool wouldn’t fear Salaman, Nialli. He’s become some kind of monster. I told you once that I thought he was mad. But he’s gone beyond madness now. Or so I think.”

“A monster,” Nialli Apuilana repeated. “But in war all warriors have to be monsters. Isn’t that so?”

“Not like that. I watched him when our two armies were last together. He was fighting as if he wanted not just to kill every hjjk he saw, but to roast it and eat it also. There was fire in his eyes. Long ago I saw my father Harruel fight, and he was a troubled man, with great hot angry forces churning within him; but at his fiercest he seemed calm and gentle when I compare him with Salaman as he looked that day.” Thu-Kimnibol’s sensing-organ quivered. “I felt him again just now. Closer and closer. Well, perhaps it’s best that the armies join again. I never meant for us to advance separately into the country of the hjjks.”

“Will you have some wine?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“Yes. Yes, that would be good.”

Twilight was coming on. Most likely Salaman and his army would show up by midday tomorrow, if the emanations were this strong. The reunion of the two forces, after weeks of separation, was likely to be tense. And the gods only knew what a wild man the king had become by now. This entire campaign seemed to have been a voyage into ever deeper madness for him.

The trouble had started, Thu-Kimnibol thought, while they were planning the Vengiboneeza campaign: Salaman’s burst of anger after being told he wasn’t going to be given any of the Great World weapons had been the beginning. There had been a coldness between them ever since. They both obeyed the fiction that Salaman was commander-in-chief and Thu-Kimnibol the field general, but there hadn’t been much cordiality or real cooperation between them as the fighting itself got under way.

Still, everything had gone well so far. Better even than they might have expected, in fact.

The battle of Vengiboneeza had been an overwhelming triumph. The hjjks had constructed a Nest above ground there, a weird ramshackle array of flimsy gray tubes that ran in a hundred directions, spanning the old city from the waterfront to the eastern foothills. Salaman came upon the city from the western side, setting up a great uproar of flame and explosions along the seawall, while Thu-Kimnibol’s forces had descended carefully along the slopes of the great golden-brown mountain wall to the north and east. The hjjks were taken by surprise, rushing down to the water to see what the matter was while Thu-Kimnibol got ready to attack from above.

Then it was the moment to bring the Great World weapons into play. Thu-Kimnibol had used the one he called the Loop to set up an impenetrable barrier along the foothills to keep the hjjks from assailing his position. Then with the Line of Fire he raked the city with flames until the red tongues rose above the highest rooftop and the pulpy walls of the Vengiboneeza Nest blackened and shriveled. With the Bubble Tube he had caused such turbulence in the air that the city’s age-old towers, those marvelous spires of scarlet and blue, of glittering purple, of brilliant gold, of midnight black, crumbled like brittle sticks. Now he called into service the most potent of his weapons, the Earth-Eater, to gobble huge craters in the fabric of the dying metropolis below him. The boulevards and avenues themselves slipped downward into chaos, whole districts collapsing and sinking from sight, and a great pall of dust and smoke rose to choke the sky as if the death-stars had come again.

The Long Winter itself hadn’t been able to destroy Vengiboneeza. But Thu-Kimnibol had done it in a single afternoon, with four small devices that an ignorant farmer had found in a muddy hillside.

They had stayed all night to watch the city burn. All its immense population must have burned with it, for Thu-Kimnibol’s troops saw not a single hjjk try to escape on the foothills side, and Salaman’s warriors along the seawall cut down every one of those that attempted to get away by water. The armies rejoined on the far side of Vengiboneeza and set out side by side into the true hjjk heartland. Which was where Salaman’s army had split off after the destruction of one of the smaller Nests behind Vengiboneeza. The king, made wild by the love of slaughter, had insisted on pursuing and killing a few hundred hjjks that had managed to get away. Thu-Kimnibol found little joy in the thought of seeing him again. Too bad Salaman hadn’t decided to take a separate route all the rest of the way.

Pulling Nialli Apuilana close against him, he drew his breath deep, filling his lungs with the fragrance of her. At least tonight they’d be at their ease together. If Salaman turned up tomorrow, as seemed more and more likely, he’d deal with that problem when it presented itself.

“It still surprises me,” he said softly, “when I awaken and see that it’s you beside me. Even after all this time, I look at you, and I tell myself in wonder, That’s Nialli there! How strange!”

“You still expect to find Naarinta, do you?” she said playfully.