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.
Koshmar came over. She had seen the hjjk-man too.
“We’ll need to speak with him. He must know useful things about what lies ahead. Do you think you’ll be able to get him to talk?”
“Do you have any reason to think I won’t?” said Thaggoran gruffly.
Koshmar grinned. “Getting tired, old man?”
“I won’t be the first to drop,” he replied in a surly tone.
They were crossing now a parched terrain: the soil was sandy and its surface crunched underfoot, as though no one had walked here in thousands of years. Sparse tufts of stiff blue-green grass sprouted here and there, tough angular stuff that had a glassy sheen. Yesterday Konya had tried to pull up a clump and it had cut his fingers; he had come away bloody and cursing.
All afternoon long as they descended the last hill in the group they could discern the hjjk-man stolidly advancing in their direction. He reached them just before twilight, when they had arrived at the meadow’s eastern edge. Though they were sixty and he was only one, he halted and waited for them with his middle pair of arms crossed over his thorax, seemingly unafraid.
Thaggoran stared intently. His heart thundered, his throat was parched with excitement. Not even the Going Forth itself had had such an impact on him as the advent of this creature.
Long ago, in the glorious days of the Great World before the coming of the death-stars, these insect-beings had built vast hivelike cities in the lands that were too dry for humans and vegetals or too cold for sapphire-eyes or too moist for mechanicals. If no one else wanted a territory, the hjjk-folk would claim it, and once they did there was no relinquishing it. And yet the chroniclers of the Great World had not considered the hjjk-folk the masters of the earth, for all their sturdiness and adaptability: that was the place held by the sapphire-eyed ones, so it was written. The sapphire-eyes were the kings; after them came all the rest, including the humans, who had been the kings themselves in some even more ancient time. And would be again, now, with the Coming Forth. But the sapphire-eyes, Thaggoran knew, could not have survived the winter, and the humans had gone into hiding. Were the hjjk-folk the masters now by default?
In the failing light the hjjk-man’s body had a dull glimmering sheen, as though he were made of polished stone. He was banded in alternating strips of black and yellow from the top to the bottom of his long body — he was slender and tall, taller even than Harruel — and his hard, angular, sharp-beaked face looked much like the Mask of Lirridon that Koshmar had worn on the day of leaving the cocoon. His eyes, enormous and many-faceted, gleamed like dark shinestones. Just below them dangled the segmented coils of bright orange breathing-tubes at either side of his head.
The hjjk-man regarded them in silence until they drew near. Then he said in a curiously incurious way, “Where are you going? It is foolish of you to be here. You will meet your death out here.”
“No,” Koshmar said. “The winter is over.”
“Be that as it may, you will die.” The hjjk-man’s voice was a dry rasping buzz; but it was not, Thaggoran realized after a moment, a spoken sound. He was speaking within their minds: speaking with second sight, one might say. “Just beyond me in the valley your death is waiting. Go forward and see whether I am lying.”
And without another word he began to move past them, as if he had given the tribe all the time he felt it deserved.
“Wait,” Koshmar said, blocking his way. “Tell us what perils lie ahead, hjjk-man.”
“You will see.”
“Tell us now, or you will travel no farther ill this life.”
Coolly the hjjk-man replied, “The rat-wolves are gathering in this valley. They will have your flesh, for you are flesh-folk, and they are very hungry. Let me pass.”
“Wait a little longer,” said Koshmar. “Tell me this: have you seen other humans in your crossing of the valley? Tribes like ours, emerging from their cocoons now that the springtime has come?”
The hjjk-man made a droning sound that might have been one of impatience. It was the first trace of emotion he had shown. “Why would I see humans?” the insect-creature asked. “This valley is not a place where one finds humans.”
“You saw none at all? Not even a few?”
“You speak words without sense or meaning,” said the hjjk-man. “I have no time to spare for such discourse. I ask you now again to allow me to pass.” Thaggoran picked up an odd scent, suddenly, sweet and sharp. He saw droplets of a brown secretion beginning to appear on the hjjk-man’s striped abdomen.
“We should let him go,” he said softly to Koshmar. “He’ll tell us nothing more. And he could be dangerous.”
Koshmar fingered her spear. Harruel, just to her side, took that as a cue and hefted his own, running his hands up and down its shaft. “I’ll kill him, eh?” Harruel murmured. “I’ll put my spear right through his middle. Shall I, Koshmar?”
“No,” she said. “That would be a mistake.” She walked slowly around the hjjk-man, who appeared unperturbed by this turn of the discussion. “One last time,” Koshmar said. “Tell me: are there no other tribes of humans in this region? It would give us great joy to find them. We have come forth to begin the world anew, and we seek our brothers and sisters.”
“You will begin nothing anew, for the rat-wolves will slay you within an hour,” replied the hjjk-man evenly. “And you are fools. There are no humans, flesh-woman.”
“What you say is absurd. You see humans before you at this very moment.”
“I see fools,” said the hjjk-man. “Now let me go on my way, or you will regret it.”
Harruel brandished his spear. Koshmar shook her head.