He moved apart from the others and wrote for a time in the chronicles. Hresh came to him as he squatted by the open casket with his hands on the book, but the boy stood silent, as if fearing to interrupt. When Thaggoran was done he glanced up and said, “Well? Would you like to write something now on these pages, boy?”
Hresh smiled. “If only I could.”
“I know that you can write.”
“But not in the chronicles, Thaggoran. I don’t dare touch the chronicles.”
Thaggoran said, laughing, “You sound so pious, boy.”
“Do I?”
“I’m not fooled, though.”
“No,” Hresh said. “I wouldn’t want to injure the chronicles by trying to write in them. I might put down nonsense, and then in all the years to come they would see what I had written, and they would say, ‘Hresh the fool wrote that nonsense there.’ What I want is to be able to read the chronicles, though.”
“I read them to the People every week.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. I want to read them for myself. Everything, even the oldest books. I want to know more about how the cocoon was built, and who built it.”
“Lord Fanigole built our cocoon,” said Thaggoran. “With Balilirion and Lady Theel. You know that already.”
“Yes, but who were they? Those are only names.”
“Ancient ones,” Thaggoran said. “Great, great beings.”
“Sapphire-eyes, were they?”
Thaggoran gave Hresh a strange look. “Why would you say a thing like that? You know that all the sapphire-eyes died when the Long Winter began. Lord Fanigole and Balilirion and Lady Theel were people of our own kind. That is, they were humans: all the texts agree on that. They were the greatest of heroes, those three: when the panic came, when the deathly cold began, they were the ones who remained calm and led us into shelter.” He tapped the casket of the chronicles. “It’s all written in here, in these books.”
“I would like to read those books someday,” Hresh said again.
“I think you will have that opportunity,” said Thaggoran.
Gray wisps of fog drifted toward them. Thaggoran began to pack away his holy things. His fingers were numb with cold, and his hands moved clumsily over the locks and seals of the casket. After a moment he beckoned impatiently to Hresh, asking him to help, showing the boy what to do. Together they closed the casket, and then Thaggoran put his raw hands to its lid as though he might be warmed by what it contained.
Hresh said, “Will we ever go back to the cocoon, Thaggoran?”
Again Thaggoran looked at him in a puzzled way. “We have left the cocoon forever, boy. We must go forward until we have found what we are instructed to find.”
“And what is that?”
“The things we must have in order to rule the world,” said Thaggoran. “As it has been written in the Book of the Way. Those things wait for us out there in the ruins of the Great World.”
“But what if this isn’t the true New Springtime? Look how cold it is! Don’t you ever wonder if we’ve made some kind of mistake and come out too soon?”
“Never,” Thaggoran said. “There can be no doubt. All the omens are favorable.”
“It is very cold, though,” said Hresh.
“Indeed. Very cold. But do you see how night gradually overtakes the day, and day is gradually born out of night? So too with the New Springtime, boy. A springtime does not arrive in a single great burst of warmth, but it happens moment by moment, bit by bit.” Thaggoran shivered and wrapped his arms about himself as the fog touched his bones. “Come, Hresh. Help me with this casket, and let’s rejoin the others.”
It troubled him that Hresh seemed to have doubts about the wisdom of the trek, for there often was a seer’s keenness in the things this strange little boy said, and Hresh’s misgivings echoed Thaggoran’s own. Koshmar, he thought, might well have been too quick to designate this as the Time of Going Forth. The Dream-Dreamer had not actually said that this was the moment, had he? He had only blurted a few words. Koshmar had finished the sentence for him, and she had put words in the Dream-Dreamer’s mouth. Even Torlyri had accused her of that. But no one dared to cross Koshmar. Thaggoran was aware that she had been determined for a long time to be the chieftain who accomplished the Going Forth.
Besides, there were the ice-eaters: not only an omen of springtime, but an immediate threat to the cocoon. Still, might it not have been better to seek shelter somewhere else and wait for warmer weather, rather than to set out across this trackless wasteland?
Too late. Too late. The march had begun, and Thaggoran knew it would not end until Koshmar attained the glory that she had always sought, whatever it might be. Or else it would end with the deaths of them all. So be it, Thaggoran told himself. Whatever would come would come, as was usually the case.
The second day was harsh and difficult. In midday angry swarms of winged creatures with eerie white eyes and furious blood-seeking beaks swooped down. Delim suffered a slashed arm, and the young warrior Praheurt was cut in two places on his back. The People drove them off with shouts and rocks and firebrands, but it was an ugly task, for they kept coming back again and again, so there was no peace for hours. Thaggoran gave them the name of bloodbirds. Later there were others even more vile, with leathery black wings tipped with savage horny claws, and fat little bodies covered with stinking green fur. At night there were fireburs again, a maddening multitude of them. To keep spirits high Koshmar ordered everyone to sing, and sing they did, but it was a joyless singing that they did. There was sleet in the depths of the night, cold hard stuff that raked one’s skin like a spray of fiery embers. Torlyri, when she had finished with her offering in the morning, made the rounds of the People, offering the comfort of her warmth and tenderness. “This is the worst of it,” she said. “It will be better, soon.”
They went on.
On the third day, as they were descending a series of bare gray rolling hills that opened into a shallow green meadow, keen-eyed Torlyri spied a strange solitary figure far in the distance. It seemed to be coming toward them. Turning to Thaggoran, she said, “Do you see that, old man? What do you think it is? No human, surely!”
Thaggoran narrowed his eyes and stared. His vision was not nearly so far-reaching as Torlyri’s, but his second sight was the sharpest in the tribe, and it showed him plainly the bands of yellow and black on the creature’s long shining body, the fierce beak, the great glittering blue-black eyes, the deep constrictions dividing head from thorax, thorax from abdomen. “No, not a human,” he muttered, shaken to the depths of his spirit. “Don’t you recognize a hjjk-man when you see one?”
“A hjjk-man!” said Torlyri in wonder.
Thaggoran turned away, trying to conceal the way he was trembling. He felt as though this were some phenomenally vivid dream. He could scarcely believe that a hjjk-man, an actual living hjjk-man, was even now crossing that meadow. It was like a book of the chronicles jumping up from the casket and coming to life, with figures out of the lost Great World pouring forth and dancing about before him. The hjjk-folk had been only a name to him, a concept, something dry and ancient and abstract, a mere remote aspect of a vanished past. Koshmar was real; Torlyri was real; Harruel was real; this barren chilly countryside was real. What was in the chronicles was only words. But that was no mere word out there that was approaching them now.
And yet it came as no great surprise to Thaggoran that the hjjks too had survived the winter. That was just as the chronicles had predicted. The hjjk-folk had been expected to see the hard times through. They were innate survivors. In the days of the Great World they had been one of the Six Peoples: insect-beings, they were, bloodless and austere. Thaggoran had heard nothing likable about them. Even at this distance he could feel the hjjk-man’s emanation, dry and cold like this land they were passing through — indifferent, remote.