Robert Silverberg - At Winter's End

“Why is it cold, if winter is over?” she asked.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Hresh said. But he found himself troubled about that too, all the same.

Up ahead, by the offering-stone, Torlyri was busy performing some sort of rite: the last one, Hresh hoped, before the march got really under way. It seemed to him that they had been doing almost nothing but rites and ceremonies these past weeks since that day when the Dream-Dreamer awakened and Koshmar announced that the tribe was going to leave the cocoon.

“Are we going to cross the river?” Taniane asked.

“I don’t think so,” Hresh said. “The sun’s in that direction, and if we go toward it we can get burned. I think we’re going to go the other way.”

He was simply guessing, but he turned out to be right, at least about the direction of the march. Koshmar — wearing now the Mask of Lirridon that had hung so long on the dwelling-chamber wall, yellow and black with a great beak that made her look like some sort of huge insect — raised her spear and called out the Five Names. Then she stepped forward on a narrow track that led up from the ledge to the top of the hill, and from there over the far side and down the western slope toward a broad bare valley beyond. One by one the others fell into line behind her, moving slowly under the burdens of their heavy packs.

They were outside. They were on their way.

They marched down the long slope and into the valley in steady formation, following the same sequence in which they had emerged from the cocoon: Koshmar and Torlyri up front, then Thaggoran, then the warriors, then the workers, then the breeders, and Hresh bringing up the rear with the other children. The valley was much farther away than it seemed, and sometimes appeared to be retreating before them as they marched. Koshmar set a cautious pace. Even the strongest of the marchers, the ones who were up front, seemed to grow weary quickly; and for some of the others, the breeding-women especially, and poor fat Haniman, and the smaller children, it was a struggle almost from the beginning of the trek. Now and again Hresh heard the sound of weeping ahead of him, though whether it was out of fear or from fatigue, he could not tell. None of them, after all, had ever done this much walking, except back and forth within the cocoon, which somehow was different. Here you had to put your feet down on a rough trackless surface that could sometimes shift and slide beneath you. Or go up rises and down slopes, or move around or over obstacles. It was much more difficult than Hresh had imagined. He had thought you simply put one foot forward and then the other, and then the first one again. Which was basically what you did do; but he hadn’t realized how tiring that could be.

The cold air was a hindrance, too. It was thin and it seemed to sting and burn with every breath. It went down your throat like a bundle of knives. It left you dry-mouthed and dizzy, and nipped your ears and nose. After a time, though, the cold seemed not to matter as much.

There was a great stillness, and that was more troublesome than Hresh could have expected. In the cocoon you heard the sounds of the tribe all around you all the time. There was a feeling of safety in that. Out here the tribesfolk were quieter, their voices stifled by awe, but even when they did speak the wind would blow their words away, or the vast dome of cold air overhead and the huge open spaces seemed to swallow them up. The silence had a hard, oppressive, metallic quality that no one liked.

From time to time someone halted as though unwilling to go on, and had to be comforted and consoled. Cheysz was the first, crumpling into a little sobbing heap; but Minbain knelt by her, stroking her until she rose. Then the young warrior Moarn dropped down and dug his fingers into the ground as though the world were spinning wildly about him; he clung desperately, cheek to the cold earth, and Harruel had to pry him loose with kicks and harsh words. A little later it was Barnak, one of the workers, a dull-witted man with huge hands and a thick neck: he turned and began to run back toward the cliff, but Staip went loping after him and caught him by one arm, and slapped him, and held him until he was calm. After that Barnak marched without looking up or speaking. But Orbin said, “It’s a good thing Staip caught him. If he had gotten away, a dozen more would have gone running back there too.”

Koshmar left her place at the head of the procession and came back, talking with everyone, offering encouragement, laughter, prayers. Torlyri moved through the line too to speak with those who were most frightened. She stopped by Hresh, to ask how he was doing, and he winked at her; and she laughed and winked also.

“This is where you always wanted to be, isn’t it?”

He nodded. She touched his cheek and went back up front.

The day moved along. Time seemed to hurry. The sun did a strange thing. It moved in the sky, instead of hanging there in the east where Hresh had first seen it. To his surprise the sun seemed to be pursuing them, and somewhere about midday it actually overtook them, so that in the afternoon it lay before them in the western sky.

Hresh was puzzled to find the sun traveling like that. He knew that it was a big ball of fire that hovered overhead all day and went out at night — “day” was when the sun was there, “night” was when it wasn’t — but it was hard for him to understand how it could move. Wasn’t it fastened in its place? He would have to ask Thaggoran about that a little later. For now, his discovery that the sun could move was simply an inexplicable surprise. But he suspected that there would be other and bigger surprises ahead.

Thaggoran shuffled onward, keeping his place just behind Koshmar and Torlyri. There was a throbbing in his left knee and a stiffness in both his ankles, and the chill wind cut through his fur as though he had none at all. His eyes were swollen and pasty from the glaring sunlight. There was no hiding from that great angry blare of light. It filled the sky and reverberated from every rock, every patch of ground.

This was a hard business for a man of nearly fifty, to give up the comforts of the cocoon and march through so strange and bleak a countryside. But it was that very strangeness that would keep him going, hour after hour, day after day. For all his studies in the chronicles he had never imagined that such colors existed in the world, such smells, such shapes.

The land here was harsh and almost empty, a broad barren plain. Its deadness was a disheartening thing. He saw frightened faces all about him. Fear was general among the People. There was a terrible nakedness in having gone out from the cocoon, in being this far from that friendly sheltering place that had housed them all their lives. But Koshmar and Torlyri were working hard to keep panic from engulfing the marchers. Thaggoran saw them going again and again to the aid of those whose fears were overwhelming them. He felt little fear himself, only the threat of exhaustion; but he forced himself on, and smiled bravely whenever anyone looked his way.

The sky darkened steadily as the day went along: from a pale hard blue to a deeper, richer color, then to a dark gray, almost purple, as the shadows gathered. He had not expected that. He knew of such things as day and night from the chronicles, but he had imagined that night would fall like a curtain, cutting off the light at a single stroke. That it might come on gradually through the hours was not something he had considered, nor that the sun’s light would change also, growing ruddier through the afternoon, until when the sky was just beginning to turn gray the sun would become a fat red ball hanging low above the horizon.