“One of these days your curiosity will kill you,” Harruel said annoyance.
“What? What?”
“The boy’s in a daze,” Staip said. “That sound — it was sucking him right in—”
“I feel it too, now,” said Salaman. “It’s like a drum summoning us. Boom — boom — boom—”
Harruel looked back and stared in fascination and horror. Salaman was right: the sound had a kind of magnetic force, pulling in creatures from all over the plain to be devoured. Bending suddenly, Harruel snatched up a rock the size of his hand and hurled it furiously toward the gaping mouth. But it fell short by five or ten paces.
“Come,” he said, his voice loud, rasping. “Let’s get away from these things before it’s too late.”
Back toward the marchers they ran, Harruel carrying Hresh lest he be hypnotized a second time and go dashing off again to his doom. Behind them the sound of the great heads grew louder and more insistent for a time, then faded with distance.
When the men reached the tribe they found everything in chaos and confusion. A new attack of bloodbirds had commenced. The fierce white-eyed creatures had come suddenly out of the darkness to the east in a dense swarm and were whirling and shrieking above the tribe, darting down to thrust with their razor-keen beaks. Delim was struggling with one that had engulfed her entire head in its beating wings, and Thhrouk was fighting with two at once. Lakkamai, hurrying forward, pulled the bloodbird away from Delim and tore it in half. The woman crouched down, holding both hands to an eye streaming with blood. Harruel chopped the air with his spear, skewering one and then another. Koshmar cried encouragement, fighting among the others. The dull booming of the far-off mouth-creatures still could be heard, and the wild piercing cries of the bloodbirds above it.
The battle lasted ten minutes. Then the birds disappeared as quickly as they had come. Six of the tribe had been wounded, Delim the most seriously. Torlyri bandaged her eye, but she would not have the sight of it again. Harruel had sustained two deep gouges on his spear-arm. Konya too had been injured. Everyone was weary and dispirited.
And now night was coming on. The last light of the dying sun drenched the flatland in a flood of crimson.
“All right,” Koshmar said. “It’s too late to continue. We’ll pitch our camp here.”
Harruel shook his head. “Not here, Koshmar. We need to get farther away from those mouth-things. Can you hear them? The sound they make is dangerous. We’ll have people going to them in the night, walking right into their jaws like sleepwalkers, if we stay here.”
“Do you mean that?”
“We nearly lost Hresh,” Harruel said. “He was heading straight for one.”
“Yissou!” Koshmar contemplated the great heads on the horizon for a moment, frowning. Then she spat and said, “Very well. Let’s move on.”
They marched until it was too dark to go any farther. The booming of the great heads was only faintly audible here. Aching, sore of foot, blistered of soul, the People dropped down in relief in a place where a feeble stream seeped from the sand.
“It was a mistake,” Staip said quietly.
“Leaving the cocoon, you mean?” Salaman asked. “You think we should have stayed? Taken our chances against the ice-eaters?”
Harruel glowered at them. “We were right to make the Coming Forth,” he said firmly. “There is no question but that it was the right thing to do.”
“I meant coming this way,” said Staip. “Koshmar was wrong to bring us out into these miserable plains. We should have turned south, toward the sunlight.”
“Who knows?” Harruel said. “One way is as good as another.”
In the darkness there were strange sounds all night: hissings, cacklings, far-off shrillings. And always the distant throb of the giant heads, booming their song of hunger as they waited by the base of the barren hills for their helpless prey to come to them.
It was the fifth week of the journey. Torlyri, rising at daybreak as always so that she could make the sunrise-offering, rolled and stretched and clambered to her feet. The sun bathed her in a cheerful glow. Quietly she went out of the camp where everyone still lay sleeping, and searched until she found a suitable site for performing her offering, a little way to the west. It seemed a holy place: a sheltered declivity where thousands of small red-backed insects were industriously building an intricate turreted structure out of the sandy earth. She knelt beside it, said the words, named the Names, prepared the offering.
The dawn sunlight felt strong and warm and good. She had begun to notice, in the past few days, that the weather seemed to be growing more agreeable. At first she had awakened stiff and shivering in a cold mist every day, but now the morning air seemed softer and milder, though not yet soft, not yet mild.
It was a sign that stirred hope in her. Perhaps this really was the New Springtime, after all.
Torlyri had never been certain of that. Like all the rest of the tribe she had allowed herself to be swept along out of the cocoon by Koshmar’s insistent optimism. Out of love for Koshmar she had not voiced any strong opposition, but Torlyri knew that there were some within the tribe who would have preferred to remain in the cocoon. Going forth was a tremendous step. It was such a change that Torlyri could scarcely believe they had done it. The tribe had lived in its cocoon forever; or almost forever, which was the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of years, so poor old Thaggoran had always said! It was impossible for Torlyri to imagine what sort of span of time hundreds of thousands of years might be, or even a thousand years. A thousand years was forever. A hundred thousand years was a hundred times forever.
But they had obediently come marching out, after living a hundred times forever in their cocoon. Like people walking in their dreams they had followed Koshmar outside, into a world of sudden dangers.
Those ferocious snarling chittering rat-wolves: a lucky thing the tribe had had some warning of them, or they would have taken more lives than just two, that was certain. Then the bloodbirds — what a ghastly task that had been, beating them off! And the leathery-winged ones who followed them. And then after them, there had been—
There was no end, Torlyri knew, to the perils that lurked in these plains. And it was cold out here, even now, and dry and dishearteningly bleak, and there were no walls. There were no walls. The cocoon offered total security: here there was none at all.
What if they had come out of the cocoon too early?
True, it had been centuries since the last great cataclysm, according to Thaggoran. But this might just be one of the quiet intervals between one death-star and the next.
Minbain had expressed the same anxiety a day or two before, when she had come to Torlyri to have the communion of Mueri. It was the third time in a week that Minbain had asked for that communion. The march seemed harder on her than on most of the other women, perhaps because she was older, though there were others even older than Minbain who were bearing up well. But she was haggard and dejected, and full of uncertainties.
“Thaggoran used to tell us,” Minbain said, “that as much as five thousand years would go by in peace, in the time when the death-stars were falling. But that didn’t mean that it was all over. Always, after a time of no death-stars, a new death-star would come. How can we be sure that the world has seen the last of them?”
“Yissou the Protector has brought us forth,” said Torlyri soothingly, hating herself for the smoothness with which she spoke the comforting lie.
“And if it wasn’t the Protector who brought us forth?” Minbain asked. “If it was the Destroyer?”