Robert Silverberg - At Winter's End

Alarm flickered in Torlyri’s dark eyes. Koshmar saw it and realized miserably that her ruse had succeeded, that she had drawn from Torlyri the truth, that which she had dreaded but which she had desperately needed to know.

“Are you serious?” Torlyri said.

“I’m having the order drawn up, and I’ll announce it very shortly. We’ll take everything with us that may be of value to us, all the strange devices that Hresh and his Seekers have collected, and off we’ll go, into the warm southland, as we should have done years ago. Harruel was right. There is poison in this city. He couldn’t get me to see that, and so he left. Well, Harruel is rash, and Harruel is a fool; but in this case he saw more clearly than I. Our time in Vengiboneeza is over, Torlyri.”

Torlyri looked stunned.

With rising energy now Koshmar reached for her. A passion that she had not felt for weeks, for months, had begun to burn in her. Hoarsely she said, “Come, now, beloved Torlyri, dear Torlyri! We are alone here. Let us twine — it’s been so long, hasn’t it, Torlyri? — and then we’ll go back to the settlement.”

“Koshmar—” Torlyri began, and faltered.

“Shall we twine?”

Torlyri’s lips and nostrils were quivering. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

In a low muffled voice Torlyri said, “I will twine with you, yes, if that is what you want.”

“Isn’t it what you want? You said you had gone looking for me so that you could enjoy the pleasure of being near me. Is there any better way of being near me than to twine?”

Torlyri looked toward the ground. “I’ve already twined once this day,” she said. “It was — my duty, you understand — someone came to me in need of the offering-woman’s consolation, and I must never refuse that, and — and—”

“And you’re too tired to do it again so soon.”

“Yes. Precisely.”

Koshmar looked at her squarely. Torlyri flinched away.

She will not twine with me, Koshmar thought, because then her soul will be open to me and I will see the depths of her love for the Helmet Man. Is that it?

No. No. For we twined not that long ago, and I have already seen what she feels for the Helmet Man, and she knows that I have seen it. It’s something else that she wishes to hide from me, then. Something new, something even more serious. And I think I can guess what it is.

“Very well,” Koshmar said. “I can live without a twining this afternoon, I suppose.”

She rose, and signaled to Torlyri that she should do the same.

“Koshmar, are we truly going to leave Vengiboneeza in a few weeks?” Torlyri asked.

“A month, perhaps. Six weeks, maybe.”

“A moment ago you said a month at most.”

“We’ll leave when we’re ready to leave. If it takes us a month, then we’ll leave in a month. If it takes two months, then two months.”

“But we will definitely leave?”

“Nothing could alter my resolve in that.”

“Ah,” Torlyri said, turning away as though Koshmar had struck her. “Then everything is ended.”

“What do you mean?”

“Please. Let me be, Koshmar.”

Koshmar nodded. She understood everything now. Torlyri would not twine with her because there was one thing Torlyri dared not tell her, which was that if the People were actually to leave Vengiboneeza she would not be leaving with them. She meant to stay behind with her Helmet Man; for she knew that Koshmar certainly would not permit the Helmet Man to come with the tribe, even if he might wish to do such a thing.

Torlyri is lost to me forever, then, Koshmar thought.

Together they walked back to the settlement in silence.

This was an ecstatic time for Hresh, bringing the fulfillment of many dreams, and of much that he had never expected to attain.

Taniane was his twining-partner and his coupling-partner both. Now that all barriers were down between them, he had come to realize that throughout all their childhood and young adulthood she had looked constantly to him in love and desire. While he, blind to that, lost in his studies of the chronicles and then of ruined Vengiboneeza, had completely failed to perceive the nature of her feelings for him, or even his own feelings for her.

Haniman had been only a diversion for her. He had been a standby lover, to fill her time and perhaps to awaken jealousy in Hresh. Hresh had badly misread the nature of that relationship, to everyone’s cost.

But all that was remedied now. All night long, night after night, Taniane and Hresh lay together, breast against breast, sensing-organ touching sensing-organ, in a union of body and mind so intense that he was dazed with wonder at it. As soon as he found the courage, he meant to ask Koshmar to let him take Taniane as his mate. He had not been able to find any precedent in the chronicles for that, the old man of the tribe taking a mate, but there was nothing prohibiting it, either. Torlyri had mated with Lakkamai; and if an offering-woman now could mate, why not a chronicler also?

Hresh knew also of the ambitions that blazed within Taniane: that she saw Koshmar as old, defeated, burned-out, that she yearned to be chieftain in Koshmar’s place.

Taniane made no attempt to hide her vision of the tribe’s future from him. “We’ll rule together, you and I! I’ll be the chieftain and you’ll be old man; and when our children are born, we’ll raise them to govern after us. How could anyone excel a child of ours? A child that would have your wisdom and stubbornness, and my strength and energy? Oh, Hresh, Hresh, how wonderfully everything has worked out for us!”

“Koshmar is still chieftain,” he reminded her soberly. “We’re not yet even mated. And there’s work for us to do in Vengiboneeza.”

Though Koshmar had angrily rejected his contention that the tribe must go forth from the city, and had not reopened the discussion, Hresh knew that their departure was inevitable. Sooner or later Koshmar would see that the People were stagnating in Vengiboneeza and that in any case the Bengs were making their position impossible here. And then, without warning — Hresh knew Koshmar well — she would give the order for packing up and clearing out. It was essential, then, for him to ransack the ruins of the city for anything else that might be of value, while he still had time.

For fear of encountering Beng patrols he went exploring now only by night. When the settlement grew dark and quiet, he and Taniane rose and went out into Vengiboneeza, hand in hand, running on tiptoes. They scarcely ever slept now and their eyes were bright with fatigue. The excitement of the task kept them going.

Three times he tried to reach the underground cache in the place where he had seen the repair-machines at work, but each time he spied Beng sentries nearby, and could not get close. Quietly he cursed his bad luck. He imagined the Bengs prowling around in there, plundering the relics themselves, seizing things of the highest importance, and felt a keen stab of pain that cut through his soul like a blade. But there was no end of other sites to explore. Using the treasure-map of the inter-locking circles and the points of red light as their guide, they rushed through corridors, vaults, galleries, buried chambers, and tunnels, moving at a breathless pace until dawn, then sometimes collapsing in each other’s arms for an hour or two of sleep before returning to the settlement.

They made many discoveries. But hardly anything seemed to be of immediate or even potential value.

In a great limestone-walled chamber in the part of the city known as Mueri Torlyri they came upon a solitary machine ten times their own height, perfectly preserved, a domed and gleaming thing of pearly-white metal with bands of colored stone set in it, and pulsating ovals of green and red light, and rounded arms that looked ready to move in many directions at the touch of a switch. It seemed almost like some kind of gigantic idol, that machine. But of what use was it?