Robert Silverberg: At Winter's End

Anijang was waiting for them just around the bend. Some rocks had indeed fallen — they lay ankle-deep beside him — and Anijang was staring into the open place from which they had come. “New tunnel,” he said. “Old one, rather. Very old. Old and forgotten. Yissou only knows how many passages there are altogether.”

“Do we have to go into this one?” Thhrouk asked.

“Not on the list,” said Anijang. “We’ll keep going.”

There were alcoves dedicated to each of the Five Heavenly Ones in this labyrinth, each with holy artifacts that had been placed there in the early days of the cocoon. Already they had found the Mueri alcove and the one of Friit; but those were the easy gods, the Consoler, the Healer. The shrine of Emakkis the Provider should be next, and then, on deeper levels, that of Dawinno and, finally, of Yissou.

The intricacy of this gloomy subterranean world astonished Salaman. For the first time, now that the People were about to leave the cocoon, he comprehended something of what it meant to have occupied this one place for seven hundred thousand years. Only across vast spans of time could all of this have been constructed. Each of these tunnels had been scraped out by hand, by folk just like himself, patiently chipping and scrabbling at the dark cold rock and earth for day after day, carrying away the debris, smoothing the walls, building archways to support them — it must have taken forever and a half to cut each one. And look how many passageways there were! Dozens, hundreds — used for a time, then abandoned. Salaman wondered why they had not simply kept the same group of chambers and corridors all the time, since the tribe had grown no larger during all the centuries of its stay in the cocoon. The answer, he thought, must lie in the human need for having some continued occupation to pursue, other than the mere acts of eating and sleeping. For a span of time beyond understanding the People had been prisoners in this mountain beside the great river, dormant, hiding from the bitter winter outside in a long comfortable repose; they had their crops to grow and their animals to tend and their drills and rituals to perform, but even that was not enough. They had to have other ways of expending their energies as well. And so they had built this maze. Yissou! What labor it must have been!

As they proceeded, Salaman saw strange shadows everywhere. Mysterious sparks of light drifted in the depths. Occasionally he saw enigmatic features in the glimmering distance — squat pillars, heavy arches. The forgotten works of forgotten men. There was a whole universe of caverns down here. Ancient rooms, abandoned altars, rows of niches, stone benches. For what? How old? How long ago abandoned?

Now and then he heard the far-off sound of roaring, as if some monstrous beast lay chained in the far recesses of the mountain’s great heart. Salaman heard the sound of his own harsh breathing counter-pointed against that distant roar. The world hung suspended all about him. He was at its center, entombed in rock.

“We turn left here,” Anijang said.

They had arrived at a place where half a dozen irregular tunnels radiated out from a central gallery. The stone floor was rough and steep here, descending at a disturbing angle: it strained the knees to go downward so swiftly. And as they went down the passage narrowed. Salaman began to see why they had sent boys for this job, and a shriveled oldster like Anijang. Men like Harruel and Konya were too big for these corridors. Even he, wide-shouldered and husky for his age, was having trouble crawling through some of the tight places.

“Tell me, Salaman — what do you think it’ll be like when we go outside?” Thhrouk asked suddenly, apropos of nothing at all.

Salaman, surprised by the question, glanced back over his shoulder.

“How would I know? Have I ever been out there?”

“Of course not. Except for your naming-day, and that wasn’t for very long. But what do you think it’ll be like?”

He hesitated. “Strange. Difficult. Painful.”

“Painful?” Sachkor said. “Why so?”

“There’s the sun out there. It burns you. And the wind. They say it cuts you like a knife.”

“Who says?” Thhrouk asked. “Thaggoran?”

“Don’t you remember how it was on your naming-day? Even if you were only outside for a moment or two then. And you’ve heard Thaggoran reading from the chronicles. How exposed everything is out there. Sand blowing in your eyes. Snow as cold as fire.”

“As cold as fire?” Sachkor said. “Fire is hot, Salaman.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. No, I don’t, not at all. That’s the sort of thing Hresh would say. Cold as fire: it makes no sense.”

“I mean that snow burns you. It’s a different kind of burning from the burning that fire does, or the sun,” Salaman said. He saw them staring at him as though he had lost his mind. It was a bad idea, he thought, to be telling them these things, though he had speculated a great deal about them privately. He was a warrior; it was not his task to think. They would see a side of him that he did not care to have them see. With a shrug he said, “I don’t really know anything about any of this. I’m just guessing.”

“Here,” Anijang called. “This is the way!”

He plunged into a black opening barely larger than he was.

Salaman looked back at Sachkor and Thhrouk, shook his head, and followed Anijang. There were marks on the walls here, blood-colored stripes and deeply engraved triangles, holy signs, intimations of the presence of Emakkis nearby. So Anijang still knew what he was doing: they were approaching the third of the five shrines.

Now that Thhrouk had awakened the thought in him, Salaman found himself once more pondering the changes that lay ahead. Part of him still could not believe that they truly were going to leave the cocoon. But all these weeks of preparation could not be argued away. They were going outside. To perish of the cold? No, not if Thaggoran and Koshmar were right: the New Springtime had come, they said, and who could say otherwise? Yet he found himself fearing the Going Forth. To leave the snug safe cocoon, to cast aside everything that was familiar and comforting in his life — Mueri! It was a frightening thing. And now he had frightened himself even more, with all his own talk of the burning sun, and the burning snow, and the sharp wind blowing sand in your eyes—

“What’s that sound?” Thhrouk said, digging his fingers into Salaman’s shoulders yet again. “You hear it? A rumbling in the walls? Ice-eaters!”

“Where?” Salaman asked.

“Here. Here.”

Salaman put his ear to the wall. Indeed he heard something in there, an odd rippling, sliding sound. He imagined an enormous snorting snuffling ice-eater just on the far side of the wall, chomping away as it rose mindlessly toward the top of the cliff. Then he laughed. He could make out a distant splashing, a quiet wet murmur. “It’s water,” he said. “There’s a stream running through the wall here.”

“A stream? Are you sure?”

“Just listen to it,” Salaman said.

“Salaman’s right,” said Sachkor, after a moment. “That’s no ice-eater. Look, you can see the water running out of the wall a little way up there.”

“Ah,” Thhrouk said. “Yes. You’re right. Yissou! I’d hate to meet an ice-eater while we’re wandering around down here!”

“Are you coming?” Anijang called. “Follow me or you’ll get lost, I promise you!”

Salaman laughed. “We wouldn’t want that.”

He hurried onward, so quickly that in his haste he nearly blew out his own lamp. Anijang was waiting by the entrance to a chamber that branched from the one they were in; he pointed inside, to the holy ikon of Emakkis on an altar within it. Of the four of them only Sachkor was slender enough to go in to get it.