Robert Silverberg: At Winter's End

Now, though, Harruel grinned and waved almost jovially as he caught sight of Salaman. “D’ye smell that stink? By Yissou, we’ll clear the air of it by nightfall, Salaman!”

The prospect of war seemed to have brightened Harruel’s soul. Salaman nodded an acknowledgment to him and raised his spear in a halfhearted gesture of solidarity.

Harruel must have detected Salaman’s indifferent mood. The king clumped over to Salaman and clapped him lustily on the back, a blow of such bone-shivering violence that Salaman’s eyes flashed with wrath and he came close to returning it with all his force. But it was meant merely as encouragement. Harruel laughed. His face, looming high above Salaman’s own, was flushed with excitement.

“We’ll kill them all, lad! Eh? Eh! Dawinno take them, we’ll slaughter the bugs by the millions! What d’ye say, Salaman? You saw this coming long ago, eh? Your second sight is true magic! D’ye see victory just ahead for us?” Harruel reared about and signaled to Minbain, who lurked somewhere near the portico of their house. “Wine, woman! Bring me some wine, and make a hurry of it! We’ll drink to victory!”

Weiawala, under her breath, said to Salaman, “What does he need more wine for? He’s drunk already!”

“I’m not sure that he is. I think he’s just intoxicated with the thrill of making war.”

“The thrill of dying, you mean,” Weiawala said. “How can we survive this day, any of us?”

Salaman gestured wryly. “Then it’s dying that excites him, I suppose. But this is a Harruel reborn that we see here today.”

Indeed Salaman began then to realize that he too was at last awakening to the thing that was coming upon them this day. His apathy, his torpor, was falling away. He was ready to fight, and to fight well, and if necessary to die bravely. Feeling his soul surging suddenly within him, Salaman understood some of what must be taking place within Harruel.

The first intrusion of the hjjks must have been a hard and bitter disturbance for him. Harruel’s kingship, his manhood itself, had been jeopardized. The child Therista had been slain; the woman Galihine had been wounded so gravely that she would have been better dead; the palace had been set ablaze; most of the meat-animals had been set free and it had taken forever to round them up again. Even though the enemy had been turned back in total defeat, everyone knew that a far greater army was on the way and the city could not possibly withstand it. Harruel’s little world had been impinged upon from without and soon it would be destroyed.

In these weeks just past the king had been in a somber state indeed. Harruel had steeped himself so deep in drink that the city’s stores of wine had been all but depleted by his guzzling alone. Limping and solitary he had roamed the perimeter of the crater night after night, roaring in drunken rage. He had fought a bloody fistfight with Konya, who was his most loyal and dearest follower. He had summoned every woman of the tribe to his couch, sometimes three of them at once, and yet, so the report was, he had not been able to achieve a coupling with any of them. In his more sober moments he had spoken broodingly of the sins that he had committed and of the punishment that he merited, soon to be meted out by the hjjks. Which left Salaman wondering what sins he had committed, or Weiawala, or the infant Chham; for everyone would die together when the hjjks overran the City of Yissou, the wicked and the innocent alike.

Still, they had done all they could to prepare for the hopeless struggle that was coming. There had not been time enough to complete the palisade around the crater rim, but they had built a smaller one of sharpened stakes lashed with vines that completely enclosed the city’s inhabited zone. Just within it was a wide and deep trench, bridged by planks that could be removed if the invaders came close. A narrow new trail had been cut through the underbrush from the city’s southern side to the densest part of the forest that grew on the crater’s slope; if all else failed, they could slip away by ones and twos and try to lose themselves in the woods until the hjjk-folk grew bored with the search and moved along.

More than that the defenders could not do. There were only eleven of them, of which five were women and one of those wounded, and a few half-grown children. Salaman expected this to be the last day of his life and it seemed quite clear to him that Harruel’s vigor and animation this day stemmed from the same expectation. But though Harruel had plainly grown weary of life, Salaman had not. More than once in these recent days Salaman had thought of taking Weiawala and Chham and slipping away toward Vengiboneeza and safety before the hjjks arrived. But that would be cowardly; and that was probably foredoomed, too, for it was many weeks’ march to Vengiboneeza, assuming he could find it at all, and in that great wilderness what chance did a man and a woman and a child stand against the many creatures of the wilds?

Stand and fight; fight and die. It was the only way.

Salaman doubted that the hjjks intended them any particular harm. His one encounter with the insect-folk, that time long ago in the plains just after the tribe had gone forth from the cocoon, had left him with the belief that the hjjks were remote, passionless creatures incapable of such complex irrational feelings as hatred, covetousness, or vengefulness. The ones who had attacked the city had fought in a curiously impersonal, detached way, caring very little about their lives, which had reinforced Salaman’s view of them. The hjjks were interested only in maintaining their control. In this case they seemed to be merely on some great migration, and the City of Yissou happened to be in their way, posing unknown but definite danger to their supremacy; so they would eradicate it, as an inconvenience. That was all. The hjjks would probably suffer great losses today. But because there were so many of them, they would prevail.

Harruel’s plan was for everyone but the infants and the injured Galihine to wait for the enemy on the rim of the crater. When the invaders came close, the defenders would withdraw to the forested zone just below the rim, and attempt by main force to kill every hjjk that succeeded in clambering over the hastily improvised barricade of brush and thorny vines with which the tribe had surrounded the crater. If too many hjjks got through, they were to retreat closer to the city’s inner palisade; and as the situation grew even more perilous they would either hole themselves up within the city and try to withstand the hjjk siege, or else take the southern trail into the woods and hope to remain scattered and hidden until it was safe to emerge.

All of these stratagems seemed absurd to Salaman. But he could think of nothing better himself.

“Everyone to the rim!” cried Harruel in a mighty voice. “Yissou! Yissou! The gods protect us!”

“Come,” Salaman said quietly. “To our posts, love.”

He had asked for and received the sector of the rim closest to his special place, that high place from which he had first had the vision of the onrushing horde. He felt a deep affinity for that place, and since it seemed certain to him that he would die like all the others in the first hjjk charge, he had chosen that part of the rim to be the place where he would fall. In silence he and Weiawala clambered to it now.

When they reached the rim they halted, for just beyond it was the tangle of thorny stuff that they had so painfully woven there in the past few days to slow down the hjjks’ advance. But then a strange burst of curiosity, a sudden overmastering Hreshlike impulse toward the unexpected, came over him, and he vaulted the rim and began cleaving a path for himself through the thorns.