Robert Silverberg: At Winter's End

One couple in particular were deeply enmeshed in the act, heart and soul, beaks and limbs and abdomens and thoraxes all convulsing as they embraced each other. Hresh shuddered. The female was larger than the male, and she held her mate in a fierce and strange grip, as though she meant not to couple with him but to devour him. From his body small swift organs had emerged and were moving over her lower part with a startling nervous quickness. It was a frightful, alien thing. And yet as he watched Hresh began to find it not so alien. Their forms and limbs and organs were very different from anything he knew, yes, but the impulse that drew them together was not too far from that which made Taniane attractive to him, or he to Taniane. The two of them emitted a potent emanation of desire for union, the hjjk equivalent of lust, Hresh thought. And a second emanation that denoted the fulfillment of desire: the hjjk equivalent of passion.

Good. Good. It was what he had hoped to find.

From those two coupling insect-beings Hresh had drawn the essence of their lust-emanation and their passion-emanation, and pulled it by way of the Barak Dayir deep into his own soul. Once he had incorporated it it no longer felt at all alien to him; he understood it, he respected it. He might just as well have been a hjjk-man himself, at that moment.

But he had not kept those essences within himself for long. He spun them forth, he wove them into a column of whirling force that rose to the heavens like a giant tower; and he set that tower in place around the metal tube that he had brought with him from Vengiboneeza.

Then he reached into the camp of the invaders a second time, and found a female vermilion who had come into heat that day. She stood with her back to a lofty tree, uttering horrifying roars and snorts of endearment and stamping her black-clawed feet and flapping her vast ears about like great sheets in the breeze. Three or four gigantic scarlet males jockeyed uneasily about her. Hresh slipped between them and took from her the essence of her heat, and drew that into himself also, and made it fifty times more intense. This he formed into a column too, and set it in place far to the west, where the plateau tumbled off into a broken area of streams and jumbled boulders.

“There,” Hresh said to Taniane. “Everything’s ready now. I’ve done all I can. The rest is in the hands of the warriors.”

That had been only a few hours ago, in the darkest of the night.

Dawn had come, and with it the battle. And now it was all over.

Hresh walked through the battlefield with Taniane at his side, and Salaman, and Minbain. No one spoke. A mist of death and confusion had settled over everything, and a great silence, and words seemed beside the point.

The hjjks were gone. Hresh could not say how many of them had vanished into the tube of strange light and even stranger darkness, but it must have been thousands of them, perhaps many thousands. In a terrible mad frenzy they had rushed toward the thing and leaped all over it, but it had engulfed them with an insatiable appetite as they came within its range of power, and they had disappeared. The rest of them, those who had not been attracted to the device or who had run from it in fear, were gone also, fled to all the corners of the earth. And those few who had tried to scale the sides of the crater had been killed by Taniane’s warriors as they came rushing past, or slain at the top by Harruel’s defenders waiting there.

The vermilions too had stampeded off elsewhere. Of all that astounding horde perhaps a dozen were still to be seen, shambling about in a lost purposeless way here and there on the plateau. Good: they could be rounded up, they could be domesticated for the tribe’s own uses. Of the others, it seemed that the males without exception had raced into the western hinterlands questing after the impassioned female that they thought to find there, and the females, puzzled or perhaps angered by that lunatic stampede, had gone off on journeys of their own, back to the wilderness from which the hjjks had taken them. In any case there were none hereabouts.

Hresh smiled. It had worked so well! It had worked perfectly!

And the little city — the City of Yissou, that was what they called it — the city was safe.

He looked around. Haniman sat quietly against a pink boulder, dabbing now and then at a cut on his forehead. He was glassy-eyed with fatigue. He had fought like a demon, had Haniman. Hresh had not known there was such strength in him. A little way from him lay Orbin, deep in sleep. He clutched the severed leg of a hjjk in one hand, a grisly trophy. Konya slept too. Staip. It had been a day of terrible conflict.

Hresh turned to Salaman. This quiet warrior whom he had scarcely known in the old days now seemed transformed, enlarged, a man of strength and wisdom and power, a giant.

“Will you be king now?” Hresh asked. “Or call yourself by some other title?”

“King, yes,” Salaman said quietly. “Over a tribe that can be numbered on the fingers of two hands. But I will be king, I think. It is a good name, king. We respect kings, in this city. And we will call the city Harruel, in honor of him who was king before me, though Yissou will still, I hope, be its protector.”

“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 cannot say. But I will follow Taniane, and we will go to the south. There is a great deal for us to do. All the world is there for us to discover and win. There is much I want to learn, still.”

“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.”