Robert Silverberg: At Winter's End

“Friit. Healer.

“Dawinno. Destroyer.

“Mueri. Consoler.”

Her voice chimed and echoed in the stillness. As she picked up yesterday’s bowl to empty it, she looked past the rim of the ledge and downward toward the river. Along that bare steep slope, where only gnarled and twisted little woody shrubs could grow, brittle whitened bones lay scattered and tumbled everywhere like twigs idly strewn. The bones of Gonnari were there, and of Thekmur, and of Thrask, who had been chronicler before Thaggoran. Torlyri’s mother’s bones lay in those scattered drifts, and her father’s, and those of their fathers and mothers. All those who had ever left the hatch had perished here, on this plunging hillside, struck down by the angry kiss of the winter air.

Torlyri wondered how long they lived, those who came forth from the cocoon when their appointed death-day at last arrived. An hour? A day? How far were they able to roam before they were felled? Most, Torlyri expected, simply sat and waited for the end to come to them. But had any of them, overtaken by desperate curiosity in the last hours of their lives, tried to strike out into the world beyond the ledge? To the river, say? Had anyone actually lasted long enough to make it down to the river’s edge?

She wondered what it might be like to clamber down the side of the cliff and touch the tips of her fingers to that mysterious potent current.

It would burn like fire, Torlyri thought. But it would be cool fire, a purifying fire. She imagined herself wading out into the dark river, knee-deep, thigh-deep, belly-deep, feeling the cold blaze of the water swirling up over her loins and her sensing-organ. She saw herself then setting out through the turbulent flow, toward the other bank that was so far away she could barely make it out — walking through the water, or perhaps atop it as legend said the water-strider folk did, walking on and on toward the sunrise land, never once to see the cocoon again—

Torlyri smiled. What foolishness it was to indulge in these fantasies!

And what treason to the tribe it would be, if the offering-woman herself were to take advantage of her hatch-freedom and desert the cocoon! But she felt a strange pleasure in pretending that she might someday do such a thing. One could at least dream of it. Almost everyone, Torlyri suspected, now and then looked with longing toward the outer world and had a moment’s dream of escaping into it, though surely few would admit to that. She had heard that there were those over the centuries who, growing weary of cocoon life, actually had slipped through the hatch and down to the river and into the wild lands beyond — not expelled from the cocoon as one was on one’s death-day, but voluntary sojourners, setting forth into that frigid unknowability of their own will simply to discover what it was like. Had anyone in truth ever chosen such a desperate course? So it was said; but if it had happened, it had not been in the lifetime of anyone now living. Of course those who might have gone forth in that way could never have returned to tell the tale; they would have died almost at once in that harsh world out there. To go outside was madness, she thought. But a tempting madness.

Torlyri knelt to collect what she needed for the inward offering.

Then out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of movement. She whirled, startled, turning back toward the hatch just in time to see the small slight figure of a boy dart through it and race across the ledge to the rim.

Torlyri reacted without thinking. The boy had already begun scrambling over the side of the ledge; but she pivoted, moved to her left, grabbed at him fiercely, managed to catch him by one heel before he disappeared. He yowled and kicked, but she held him fast, hauling him up, throwing him down onto the ledge beside her.

His eyes were wide with fright, but there was boldness and bright audacity in them too. He was looking past her, trying to get a glimpse of the hills and the river. Torlyri stood poised over him, half expecting him to make another desperate lunge around her.

“Hresh,” she said. “Of course. Hresh. Who else but you would try something like this?”

He was eight, Minbain’s boy, wild and headstrong all his life. Hresh-full-of-questions, they called him, bubbling as he was with unlawful curiosity. He was small, slender, almost frail, a wriggling little rope of a boy, with a ghostly face, triangular and sharply tapering from a wide brow, and huge dark eyes mysteriously flecked with scarlet specks. Everyone said of him that he had been born for trouble. But this was no trifling scrape he had gotten himself into now.

Torlyri shook her head sadly. “Have you gone crazy? What did you think you were doing?”

Softly he said, “I only wanted to see what’s out here, Torlyri! The sky. The river. Everything.”

“You would have seen all that on your naming-day.”

He shrugged. “But that’s a whole year away! I couldn’t wait that long.”

“The law is the law, Hresh. We all obey, for the good of all. Are you above the law?”

Sullenly he said, “I only wanted to see. Just for a single day, Torlyri!”

“Do you know what happens to those who break the law?”

Frowning, Hresh said, “Not really. But it’s something bad, isn’t it? What will you do to me?”

“Me? Nothing. It’s up to Koshmar.”

“Then what will she do to me?”

“Anything. I don’t know. People have been put to death for doing what you tried to do.”

“ Death? ”

“Expelled from the cocoon. That’s certain death. No human could last out there alone for very long. Look there, boy.”

She pointed down the slope, at the field of bleached bones.

“What are those?” Hresh asked at once.

Torlyri touched his thin arm, pressing against the bone within. “Skeletons. There’s one inside you. You’ll leave your bones on that hill if you go outside. Everyone does.”

“Everyone who’s ever gone outside?”

“They all lie right there, Hresh. Like pieces of old wood tossed about by the winter storms.”

He trembled. “There aren’t enough of them,” he said with sudden defiance. “All those years and years and years of death-days — the whole hill ought to be covered with bones, deeper than I am high.”

Despite herself Torlyri felt a grin coming on, and looked away a moment. There was no one else like this child, was there? “The bones don’t last, Hresh. Fifty, a hundred years, perhaps, and then they turn to dust. Those you see are just the ones who have been cast out most recently.”

Hresh considered that a moment.

In a hushed voice he said, “Would they do that to me ?”

“Everything is in Koshmar’s hands.”

There was a sudden flash of panic in the boy’s strange eyes. “But you won’t tell her, will you? Will you, Torlyri?” His expression grew guileful. “You don’t have to say anything, do you? You almost didn’t notice me, after all. Another moment and I’d have been past you and over the edge, and I would have just stayed out till tomorrow morning, and nobody would have been the wiser. I mean, it isn’t as though I hurt anybody. I only wanted to see the river.”

She sighed. His frightened, beseeching look was hard to resist. And, truly, what harm had he done? He hadn’t managed to get more than ten paces outside. She could understand his yearning to discover what lay beyond the walls of the cocoon: that boiling curiosity, that horde of unanswered questions that must rage in him all the time. She had felt something of that herself, though her spirit, she knew, had little of the fire that must possess this troubled boy. But the law was the law, and he had broken it. She could ignore that only at the peril of her own soul.