Robert Silverberg: At Winter's End

Thaggoran laughed. “You’re insane, boy!”

“Am I, do you think?”

“Come here,” said the chronicler. He crooked his fingers beckoningly, and Hresh scampered into the holy chamber. Thaggoran slipped an arm around the boy’s waist. “When I was your age,” he said, “if you can imagine me as young once as you are now, Thrask was the chronicler. And if ever I had walked in here while Thrask was with the shinestones he would have had my hide pegged out on the wall an hour later. Lucky for you that I’m a softer man than Thrask.”

“Were you like me when you were my age?” Hresh asked.

“Nobody has ever been like you,” said Thaggoran.

“What do you mean?”

“We are quiet folk, boy. We live as we are told to live. We obey the laws of the People. You obey nothing, do you? You ask questions, and when you’re told to be quiet you ask why you should be. There was much that I too wanted to know when I was a boy, and in time I came to learn it: but no one ever caught me prying and peeping and poking where I didn’t belong. I waited until it was my proper time to be taught, which is not to say that I didn’t feel curiosity. But not the way you do. Curiosity’s a disease in you. You nearly died for that curiosity of yours the other day, do you realize that?”

“Would Koshmar have really made me go outside that time, Thaggoran?”

“I think she would.”

“And I would have died, then?”

“Most certainly you would.”

“But now we’re all going outside. Are we all going to die?”

“A boy like you, you’d never have lasted half a day by yourself. But the whole tribe — yes, yes, we’ll be all right. We have Koshmar to lead us, and Torlyri to comfort us, and Harruel to defend us.”

“And you to show us the will of the gods.”

“For a little while longer, yes,” Thaggoran said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you think I can live forever, boy?”

He heard Hresh gasp. “But you’re so old already!”

“Exactly. I’m near the end, don’t you see that?”

“No!” Hresh was trembling. “How can that be? We need you, Thaggoran. We need you. You have to live! If you die—”

“Everyone dies, Hresh.”

“Will Koshmar die? Will my mother? Will I?”

“Everyone dies.”

“I don’t want Koshmar to die, or you, or Minbain. Or anyone. Especially not me.”

“You know about the limit-age, don’t you?”

Hresh nodded solemnly. “When you come to be thirty-five, and you have to go outside. I saw the bones, when I was outside the hatch. There were bones scattered all over. They all died, everybody who had to go out there. But that was during the Long Winter. The Long Winter’s over now.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

“You aren’t sure, Thaggoran?”

“I was hoping the shinestones would tell me.”

“Then I interrupted you. I should go.”

Smiling, Thaggoran said, “Stay. A little while. There’s time yet for me to ask questions of the shinestones.”

“Will there still be a limit-age after we go from the cocoon?”

The shrewdness of the boy’s question startled the chronicler. After a moment he said, “I don’t know. Perhaps not. It’s a custom that won’t be needed, will it? It isn’t as if we’ll be crowded into this little place any longer.”

“Then we won’t have to die! Not ever!”

“Everyone dies, Hresh.”

“But why is that?”

“The body wears out. The strength goes. You see how white my fur has turned? When the color leaves, it means the life is leaving. Inside me, too, things are changing. It’s a natural thing, Hresh. All creatures experience it. Dawinno devised death for us so that we could find peace at the end of our toil. It’s nothing to fear.”

Hresh was silent, digesting that.

“I still don’t want to die,” he said, after a while.

“At your age it’s an unthinkable idea. Later you’ll understand. Don’t try to make sense of it now.”

There was another silence. Thaggoran saw the boy staring at the casket of the chronicles, which more than once he had allowed Hresh to peer into, even to touch, though it was against all propriety. The boy was eager; the boy was persuasive; there did not seem to be harm in letting him see the ancient books. Thaggoran more than once had found himself wishing that Hresh had been born earlier, or that he himself had come later to his post; for here was a natural-born chronicler, no question of it, the kind that came along once in a generation at best. And yet he was just a child, years away from any possibility of the succession. I will be long gone, Thaggoran thought, before this boy is a man. And yet — and yet—

“You should do what you have to do with the shinestones,” Hresh said finally.

“I should, yes.”

“May I stay and watch?”

“Another time, perhaps,” Thaggoran said, and smiled and touched the boy’s slender arm, and gave him the lightest of gentle pushes, and sent him from the room. Once more he turned his attention to his shinestones. Once more he touched Vingir, and then Dralmir. But something felt wrong. The tuning was discordant; the shimmer that precedes divination was absent. He looked around, and there was Hresh, peering around the edge of the chamber door. Thaggoran choked back a laugh, and said, as sternly as he could, “Out, Hresh! Out! ”

By the dim sputtering light of a sooty lamp fueled with animal fat Salaman saw the dark passageways twisting and forking in front of him. Awe rose in him like a rock-serpent slithering upward within his spine. He was ten years old, nearly eleven, just approaching the first threshold of manhood. He had never been down here before; he had never actually believed these caverns existed.

“Are you afraid?” Thhrouk asked, behind him.

“Me? No. Why should I be?”

“I am,” said Thhrouk.

Salaman turned. He had not been expecting such frankness. Warriors were not supposed to admit fear. Thhrouk, like Salaman, was of the warrior class, and he was older by at least a year, perhaps more, old enough almost to be of twining-age. But his face was tense and rigid with anxiety. By the murky light of the lamp Salaman saw Thhrouk’s eyes, glistening and smarting from the smoke. They were as bright as shinestones in his head, glassy, unblinking. Bunched muscles were working in his jaws, and those of his throat were clenched, protuberant, proclaiming his uneasiness.

“What’s to worry about?” Salaman said boldly. “Anijang will get us out of here!”

“Anijang!” Thhrouk said. “A mindless old worker!”

“He’s not so mindless,” Salaman said. “I’ve seen him keeping his calendar. He keeps good count of the time, the years and everything, let me tell you. He’s smarter than you think.”

“And he’s been down here before,” said Sachkor, farther back in the line. “He knows his way.”

“Let’s hope so,” Thhrouk said. “I’d hate to spend the rest of my life lost in these tunnels.”

From up ahead came the sharp clink of a falling rock, and then a louder and more muffled sound, as though the roof of the passage had begun to fall in. Thhrouk leaned forward and caught Salaman by the shoulder, his fingers digging in tightly in his alarm. But then Anijang’s voice could be heard in front of them, tunelessly bellowing the Hymn of Balilirion. So he was all right.

“You still there, boys?” the older man called. “Keep closer to me, will you?”

Salaman moved forward, crouching to avoid an overhanging boss of low rock. The other two kept pace. Small skittering creatures with beady red eyes ran past their legs. A trickle of cold water oozed across the path. They were down here on a mission of deconsecration; for in these musty old caverns were sacred objects that must not be left behind when the People left the cocoon. It was not a job that anyone could enjoy; but Sachkor and Salaman and Thhrouk were the three youngest warriors, and such tasks as this were part of their discipline. It was nasty work. Harruel himself would loathe doing it. But Harruel did not have to.