We got on well together. We enjoyed each other’s company.
Hoarsely he said, “We’ve taken ourselves completely off the track with this discussion of how Hamiruld handled that message of yours. The important thing is that I still don’t know why it is that you went to Bornigrayal, or wanted me to come here. A new discovery, you said—a higher priority than excavating the cocoon site—”
“Yes.” She looked relieved to be changing the subject also. “Do you know where the Inland Sea is, Nortekku?”
“Approximately, yes.”
From the uncertainty of his tone she must have realized how approximate that knowledge was. Nortekku knew that there were other continents in the world, of course, somewhere on the far side of the Eastern Ocean, and that two of them were separated by a great land-rimmed sea that was almost a third ocean in itself. But that was all. One never thought much about the other side of the world. The Five Cities of this coast were remote enough; the continents of the other hemisphere were beyond consideration.
She sketched a quick map for him. “Our continent, here. Yissou, Dawinno.” A line down the middle for the Hallimalla River. Five dots along the eastern seaboard for the Five Cities. Then emptiness—the Eastern Ocean—and then, far off at the left end of the sheet, two amorphous land masses, one above the other, with another emptiness, this one long and oval, between them. “The Inland Sea,” Thalarne said, tapping the sheet. “And here, on its southern coast, where the weather is very warm, a little colony of Sea-Lords has been living ever since the Long Winter began.”
She said it quite calmly, as though telling him that she had learned of some interesting new inscription that had been discovered there, or some unusual Great World artifact. But for him it was like an earthquake. Sea-Lords? Still living somewhere, a little colony of them on the far side of the Eastern Ocean? There were no Sea-Lords anywhere, he thought. The Sea-Lords were gone, every last one of them, like all the rest of the Great World except the Hjjks.
Nortekku’s recent historical studies had told him very little about the Sea-Lords. One of the Six Peoples of the Great World, yes, a race of intelligent amphibious mammals, sea-going merchant princes who had held sway over the extensive maritime commerce that had flourished in Great World times. That was all he knew of them, other than that they were all supposed to have perished when the darkness and cold of the Long Winter fell upon the Earth. The books that Hresh and other historians had written about that era had dealt mainly with the reptilian Sapphire-Eyes, the dominant race of their time, and provided some knowledge of their servants the Mechanicals, and of the floral Vegetals, and, in abundance, of the Hjjks, whose subterranean hives had sheltered them without difficulty throughout the interminable icy years. But of the Sea-Lords virtually nothing was known. They were the most mysterious of the Great World races, other than the totally baffling Dream-Dreamers.
“You mean to say they’re still there? Living as they always did?”
“Still there, yes. Living as they always did, no. From what I’ve been told, I suspect that they’re pitiful impaired creatures, decadent, degenerate, whatever word you want to use—half-crazy, most of them. Bestial. Sad. They’ve retrogressed, gone some distance backward toward the animals they once were.”
That saddened him. Attuned to ancient history as he had lately become, he had often longed for some miracle that would restore at least a part of the Great World to life, in all its wonder, for him to see and experience. Still, the fact that they had survived at all—
“They’re definitely Sea-Lords, though? Not just some contemporary species of marine mammal?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely Sea-Lords. They speak what is thought to be a Great World language, or at least a debased version of it. The Hjjks who were in the discovery party claim to be able to communicate with them. Legends of the Great World have survived among them. They know what they once were, it seems.”
“This stands everything that we know about the end of the Great World on its head, doesn’t it?” Nortekku said.
“Much of it, anyway. We thought that the oceans everywhere had grown so cold that it became impossible for the Sea-Lords to survive. Apparently not so. And if there’s a band of them still alive on the coast of that southern continent, who can say what still survives farther south? A bunch of Sapphire-Eyes, maybe? Vegetals? It’s only two hundred years since we came out of the cocoons, Nortekku. We think we’ve achieved a lot, with our cities and our universities and our air-wagons and all of that. But the truth is we’ve only just begun, really, to explore the world around us. Off in Dawinno and Yissou, it seems to us that cities of the Eastern Coast like Bornigrayal and Thisthissima are worlds unto themselves, far off beyond our ken. Actually we should look upon them as being next door to us, though. There’s a whole huge continent south of us that we know just about nothing about—”
“South?”
“South, yes. Going on and on, right on down to the Pole, maybe. There have been some voyages to it from Cignoi, but the Cignese haven’t been saying anything about whatever they may have found there. And in the east, across this ocean here, there are two continents far larger than this one, with cities of the People on them—we know the names of two or three—with which Bornigrayal has regular commerce, though they haven’t been talking much about that either. Beyond those two—”
“Even more continents?” Nortekku said. This was dizzying.
“Who knows? Nobody’s ever been there. But it’s a round planet, Nortekku. You keep going east, sooner or later you reach the Western Ocean’s far side, and if we could sail across it we’d be back at our own coast again. I find it hard to believe that there’s nothing but empty ocean west of us.”
“The Sea-Lords,” he said. “Come back to the Sea-Lords. You told me, when I first came in, that there’s a ship due to sail from here at the end of the week, and you’re planning to be on it. To go and look for that colony of Sea-Lords, is that it? And you want me to accompany you?”
“Of course,” Thalarne said.
It was too much, flooding in all in a single moment like this. His head was swimming. One day he had simply been trying to repair a spat with his lover, and the next, practically, he found himself aboard an airwagon heading for the other side of the continent, and then—new continents—living Sea-Lords—a voyage to the eastern hemisphere, to the shores of the Inland Sea—
She sat him down and poured wine for him, and she told him a little about the arrangements she had made for the new expedition and her hopes of what they would find out there across the ocean, and her fears, too, and of a good deal else, while he listened spellbound, though only partly convinced that any of this was really happening. Perhaps, Nortekku thought, he was still back in Yissou, lost in some fever-dream. Perhaps he had never even left Dawinno.
But the whiplash sound of an icy wind against the window reminded him that he really was in wintry Bornigrayal, and that the dark, emerald-eyed woman beside him actually was Thalarne, whom he had not lost after all, and that he and she were talking quite seriously about taking passage aboard some ocean-going vessel and crossing the sea in quest of survivors of a race that had thought to be extinct for seven hundred thousand years. He moved closer to her. By imperceptible stages they found themselves embracing, and then, after only a moment of shared uncertainty—shall we couple first? Or twine?—they made their choice and slid to the floor and were hard at it, coupling for the first time in—what, two weeks? Three? She arched her back against his chest, pressing herself close, and awaited him. How good it was to reunite with her now! First the coupling, the simpler communion, the basic one, the old primitive thing that all creatures enjoyed. And then later, he hoped, they would twine. But for now he lost himself in her rich scent, in the warmth of her. He clasped her tight, and cupped her breasts in his hands, and from her came a gasp of joy as he thrust himself into her.