Their bodies held each other and their souls held each other and together they floated down and down and down, through all the levels that led to their goal of warm dark union, drifting like feathers on warm gusts, weightless, effortlessly carried onward, passing without difficulty around the rocky scarps and jagged boulders of the soul, negotiating with pure simplicity the treacherous canyons and gullies of the mind. Until at last they were fully joined and they were at oneness within each other, each encompassing and enclosing the other, each fully open to the flow and rush of the other’s soul. Torlyri sought for the source of Koshmar’s anguish, but she could not find it; and then in the joyous union of twining she no longer could devote herself to anything but the twining itself.
Afterward they lay close together, warm, fulfilled.
“Is it gone from you now?” Torlyri asked. “The shadow, the cloud that was on you?”
“I think it is.”
“What was it? Will you tell me?”
Koshmar was silent for a while. She seemed to be struggling to articulate the anguish within her, which Torlyri had been able to perceive in their twining only as a dark, hard knot that could neither be penetrated nor understood nor made to uncoil.
After a time Koshmar dug her fingers lightly into Torlyri’s dense black fur and said, as if from a great distance, “Do you remember what the hjjk-man said, his last words to us? There are no humans, flesh-woman, is what he said.”
“I remember that, yes.”
“It remains in my mind, and it burns me, Torlyri. What could he have meant by that?”
Torlyri turned so that her eyes were close to Koshmar’s shining intense ones. “He was speaking mere idle mischief. He wished to trouble our souls, that’s all. He was impatient, he was bothered because we weren’t letting him pass. So he said something that he hoped would hurt us. It was only a lie.”
“He spoke the truth about the rat-wolves,” Koshmar pointed out.
“Even so. That doesn’t mean that anything else he said was true.”
“But what if it was? What if we’re the only ones, Torlyri?” Koshmar seemed to force the words from the pit of her chest.
The chilling thought echoed Torlyri’s own baleful speculations of a little while before. Somberly she declared, “The same thing has occurred to me, Koshmar. And also the thought of the responsibility that lies upon us to survive, if we sixty are the only humans left in the world. If all the others perished in the hardships of the Long Winter.”
“The responsibility, yes.”
“How heavily it must weigh on you, Koshmar!”
“But I am less troubled, now. I feel stronger, now that we have twined, Torlyri.”
“Are you?”
Koshmar laughed. “Perhaps all I needed was to twine with you, eh? I was so full of gloom, such foreboding, such a sense that I had committed some crazy folly and that the punishment for folly is always terrible — and I knew that I was the only one responsible, that I was the one who had decided that we had to leave the cocoon, that Thaggoran had had his doubts and so had you—” She shook her head. “As always you’ve cheered me, Torlyri. You’ve shared your strength with me and enabled me to go on. The hjjk-man was lying, eh? We’re not the only ones. And we’ll find the others and together we’ll rebuild the world. Isn’t that so? Of course. Of course. Who could doubt it! Ah, Torlyri, Torlyri, how much I love you!”
And she embraced Torlyri joyously. But Torlyri responded halfheartedly. In the last few moments she had felt some change come over her soul, darkening it with a grim heavy shadow, The uncertainties of the day before had returned. The fate of the People once again seemed to her to be precariously suspended above an infinite abyss. She was lost now in doubts and despairs, as if Koshmar’s anguish had passed from her to her twining-partner in their communion.
“Is your spirit troubled now?” Koshmar asked after a time, pulling back.
“Perhaps it is.”
“I won’t allow it. Have you raised up my soul at the expense of your own?”
“If I’ve taken your fears from you, it pleases me greatly,” said Torlyri. “But now, yes, I suppose that the fears that troubled you lie heavy on me.” She scooped handfuls of sandy soil and tossed them about irritably. At length she said, “What if we are the only humans, Koshmar?”
“What if we are?” said Koshmar grandly. “Then we will inherit the earth, we sixty! We will make it our kingdom. We will repeople it with our kind. We must be very wary, that is all, for we are a rare precious thing, if we are the only humans there are.”
Koshmar’s sudden buoyance was irresistible. Almost at once Torlyri felt the dark moment beginning to lift.
“Still,” Koshmar went on, “it’s the same either way, whether we are the only humans or just a few out of millions. We must always go warily, past all the perils this world holds for us. For above all else we have to guard and preserve one another, and—”
“Oh, look — look, Koshmar!” Torlyri cried suddenly.
She pointed to the insect-castle. The cable-creature had yanked itself completely free of the ground at one end. It was enormously long, three or four times the length of a man. Looping high and swooping down, it was striking again and again at the elaborate walls and turrets of the structure. Its featureless, eyeless face ended in a gaping maw, and once it broke the castle open it began to devour the small red insects and their shattered ramparts of earth as well in a series of voracious gulps that would soon leave no trace of the builders or their work.
Koshmar shivered. “Yes: perils on all sides. I told you I wanted to kill it.”
“But it hasn’t harmed you.”
“And the insects whose castle it has destroyed?”
Torlyri smiled. “You owe them no favors, Koshmar. Every creature must eat, even nasty cable-things. Come, let it finish its breakfast in peace.”
“There are times I think you are less gentle than you seem, Torlyri.”
“Every creature must eat,” said Torlyri.
Leaving Torlyri to complete the sunrise rite that she had interrupted, Koshmar returned to the place where the tribe lay encamped. It was well past the sunrise hour now, and all the tribesfolk were up and moving about.
She stood atop a low hillock and peered toward the west. It was good to feel the warmth of the morning sun on her back and shoulders.
The land that lay before them was flattening out into a broad shallow bowl without mountains, without trees, almost without features of any kind. It was very dry here, sandy soil, no lakes, no rivers, only the most trifling of streams. Here and there the rounded stumps of little hills could be seen. They looked as though they had been ground down, polished smooth, by some gigantic force, as indeed most likely they had. Koshmar tried to imagine how it had been, deep layers of ice lying everywhere on the land, ice so heavy that it flowed like a river. Ice cutting into mountains, turning them to rubble, sweeping them away during the hundreds of thousands of years of the Long Winter. That was what Thaggoran said had happened in the world while the tribe nestled in its cocoon.
Koshmar wished she had Thaggoran with her now. No loss could have been more painful. She had not realized how much she relied upon him until he was gone. He had been the mind of the tribe, and the soul of it, and its eyes also. Without him they were like blind folk, lurching this way and that, knowing nothing of the mysteries that surrounded them on every side.
She brushed the thought away. Thaggoran had been important but he was not indispensable. No one was. She had refused to let his death subdue her spirit. Thaggoran or no Thaggoran, they would go on, and on and on and on, until they had strung their path clear around the round belly of the world if necessary, for it was their destiny to move forward until they had achieved whatever it was that they had been called into the world to achieve. They were a special folk, this tribe. That she knew. And she was a special leader. Of that too Koshmar was certain. Nothing could dissuade her of that.