Vengiboneeza! He felt his heartbeat quicken.
They were soon to set out in search of the most splendid city of the Great World!
I should have guessed it, Hresh thought, chagrined; for Thaggoran had spoken of such matters, how in the Book of the Way it was written that at winter’s end the People would go forth from their cocoons and find amidst the ruins of the Great World the things they would need to make themselves masters of the planet. What better place to search for such things than at the ancient capital of the sapphire-eyes folk? Perhaps Koshmar had realized that too; or, rather, Thaggoran very likely had suggested it to her. Vengiboneeza! Truly life has become a dream, Hresh thought.
He looked up at her. “Am I the new chronicler, then?” he asked.
She was studying him quizzically. “How old did you say you were? Nine?”
“Not quite.”
“Not quite nine.”
“But I read. I write. I have learned many things already, and for me it is only the beginning, Koshmar.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps this is the only way I can keep you under control, eh, Hresh? Hresh-full-of-questions? You will read these books, and they will answer some of your questions and fill you full of new ones, and you will be so busy with your books that you will no longer go stealing off, seeking new ways of making trouble.”
“I was the one who found the rat-wolves, that time I went off by myself,” he reminded her.
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
“I can be useful as well as troublesome.”
“Perhaps you can,” said Koshmar.
“This isn’t some game you’re playing with me? I really am the new chronicler, Koshmar?”
Koshmar laughed. “You are, boy, yes. You are the new chronicler. We will proclaim you today. Even if you’re not yet old enough to have had your naming-day. These are new times, and everything is different now, eh? Or almost everything. Eh, boy? Eh?”
So it was done. Hresh took up his new tasks with great zeal. As best he could, he brought Thaggoran’s unfinished account of the Going Forth up to date, telling of the tribe’s adventures at this point and that. He attempted to reconstruct the calendar of days, so that the rituals could properly be observed; but in the confusions following Thaggoran’s death no one had bothered with that duty and Hresh suspected that he had not properly made up the tally, so that henceforth perhaps naming-days and twining-days and other ritual events would not be celebrated on precisely the correct date. He did his best to remedy that, though without much confidence that his work was accurate.
Each day now Hresh would come to the chieftain and she would speak with him, and those things that seemed to be of high importance he would set down in the vast book. And whenever he had the opportunity he burrowed with the burning eagerness of a cave-mole to the deeper levels of the casket, hungry to discover all that was. He reveled in the overflowing treasure of history. It might take him half his life to read through all those books, but he meant to try. In a kind of fever of knowledge-hunger Hresh turned the pages, stroking them, absorbing them, barely allowing himself time to scan more than a few lines on this page before he went on to that, and to the one beyond it. The truths that the books held became blurred and tangled as he wandered among them, turning into mysteries even deeper than they had been for him before he knew anything of them at all; but that was not important, for he would have plenty of time to master this knowledge later. Now he wanted only to gobble it.
He slipped the amulet of Thaggoran around his neck now, and wore it day and night. It was a strange presence at first, thumping against his breastbone, but soon he grew accustomed to it and then it came to seem virtually a part of him. Wearing it, he felt the nearness of Thaggoran. Touching it, he imagined that he could feel the wisdom of Thaggoran entering into him.
He went back to the oldest books, which he could barely understand, since they were written in a strange kind of writing that would not tune itself easily to his mind. But he ran his trembling fingertips over the stiff pages and a sort of sense came up out of them after a while, though always ambiguous, elliptical, elusive. Fragmentary accounts of the Great World is what they were: what seemed to be tales of how the Six Peoples had lived in harmony on the earth, humans and hjjk-folk and vegetals and mechanicals and sea-lords and sapphire-eyes. It was dim and faint, an echo of an echo, but even that echo resounded in his soul like a clarion fanfare out of the dark well of time. Surely it had been the most astounding of epochs, the peak of Earth’s lost splendor, when all the world was a festival. He trembled just to think of it: the multitudes of people, the many races, the glittering cities, the ships sailing between the stars. He could scarcely begin to comprehend it. He felt the knowledge of it, partial though it was, swelling within him so that he feared he would choke on it. And then he skipped forward to the Great World’s tragic end, when the death-stars began to fall, as had been foretold so long before. Why did they allow it to happen, they who had achieved such grandeur? Had they been unable to turn the plummeting stars aside? Surely that would have been within their power, since all other things were. Yet nothing was done. No mention was made of any of that, only of the coming of the doom itself. That was when the sapphire-eyes perished, for their blood was cold and they could not abide freezing weather, and the vegetals died also, having been fashioned out of plant cells and being unable to bear the frost. Hresh read the noble account of the voluntary death of the mechanicals, who had not wanted to survive into the new era, though that would have been possible for them. He read it all, swallowing it down in great intoxicating gulps.
He took out the shinestones, too, and arranged them in patterns, and stroked them and squeezed them and murmured to them, hoping to be able to draw some wisdom from them. But they remained silent. They seemed to him to be no more than dark gleaming stones. Try as he would, they told him nothing. Sadly he realized that the People no longer would have their guidance. That was lost forever to the tribe. Whatever secret governed the shinestones’ use had died with Thaggoran.
The Barak Dayir, the Wonderstone, was the one thing in the casket that Hresh did not dare to examine at all. He left it undisturbed within its pouch of green velvet, not even daring to touch it. It would, he knew, open doors to realms of knowledge beyond even those that reading could make available to him; but he feared to do too much too soon. The Wonderstone was star-stuff, so Thaggoran had said. He had said that it had its dangers, too. Hresh chose to let it be until he had found some clue to the safe means of using it. In the privacy of his spirit he praised himself warmly for this one act of prudent renunciation, so alien to his character, and then laughed at his own absurd pride.
To the others of the tribe Hresh’s ascent to the rank of chronicler was more a matter for amusement than anything else. They had heard Koshmar’s proclamation, and they could see him every day puttering around in the baggage-train where the chronicles were kept; but they had trouble comprehending the fact that a small boy now was the chronicler. Minbain laughed and asked him, “Am I supposed to call you old man?”
“It’s only a title, Mother. It makes no difference to me whether it’s used or not.”
“But you are chronicler? You are truly chronicler?”
“You know that I am,” Hresh said.
Minbain put her hands over her breasts. Through gusts of laughter she said, in a way that seemed loving without being kind, “How could such a strange thing as you have come out of me? How? How?”
Torlyri was kinder to him, telling him that he was the proper choice and that to be chronicler was clearly what he had been born to be; but then Torlyri was kind to everyone. Orbin, who had been his playmate and friend, looked at him now as though he had grown an extra head. The others of his own age, or near to it, had never felt comfortable with Hresh to begin with. Now they kept their distance entirely, all except Taniane, who seemed utterly unimpressed with his new glory. She still would talk with him and march beside him on the trek as if nothing had changed, although lately she had begun spending a great deal of time with Haniman, of all people. What she found interesting in that oaf was hard for Hresh to see, although Haniman was at least growing less flabby as he marched, and showing signs of developing some coordination and grace, though not very much.