“Vengiboneeza!” finally, a high strong voice: Orbin, that good robust boy. And then, surprisingly, from Haniman too, and then a few of the older ones, Konya, Minbain, Striinin, and then all of them, even Harruel, even the reluctant Staip. They were a tribe once more, speaking with one voice: “Vengiboneeza! Vengiboneeza!”
They went onward. But how long, Koshmar wondered, before she would have to win them to her side all over again?
There were more losses as they marched. On a day of strange hot gusty winds the young man Hignord was carried off by something green and writhing and many-legged that came hurtling out of a concealed pit in the ground. A few days later the girl Tramassilu, who had gone off to snare little tree-dwelling yellow toads, was speared by a huge lunatic hopping thing with a long red beak that came bouncing down upon her like an avalanche and danced babbling over her body until Harruel smashed it with a club.
That made four deaths now, out of sixty that had begun the trek. The bellies of the breeding pairs were swelling with replacements for the lost ones, but a birth took a long time and death was quick out here. Koshmar fretted over the dwindling of the tribe, fearing that their numbers might become dangerously low if more women perished. Two of their dead so far had been fertile females. One male was all it took to impregnate an entire tribe, Koshmar knew; but it was the females who bore the children, and they were a long time in carrying them.
The heavy clouds opened and it rained for ten days and ten nights, until everyone was sodden and reeking from the wetness. There had been no rain before on the trek. But the sight of water falling from the sky quickly lost its fascination. Rain ceased to be a novelty and became a burden and a torment.
“Vengiboneeza,” they began to say. “How long until Vengiboneeza?”
There were those who insisted that a new death-star had struck the earth far away, too far away for the impact to have been heard here, and that the rain was the beginning of yet another time of darkness and cold. “No,” said Koshmar vehemently. “This is only something that happens in this particular place. It was dry where we were before, and here it is wet. Do you see how thick the grass is here, how heavy the foliage?” Indeed that was so. They went on, bowed and soggy, smelling of damp fur. And after a time the rain stopped.
Then the days began to grow shorter. Ever since they had left the cocoon, each day had been a little longer than the one before it; but now, beyond any dispute, the sun could be seen to drop below the western horizon earlier and earlier every afternoon.
“Vengiboneeza?” the tribesfolk began to mutter again.
Koshmar nodded, and pointed to the west.
“I think we are entering a land of eternal night,” said Staip. He had always been a jovial man, to whom doubt and pessimism were unknown. Not now. “A dark land will be a cold land,” he said.
“And a dead one,” said Konya, who no longer laughed and sang. His natural reserve of spirit had returned in recent weeks and had deepened greatly, so that he seemed now not merely aloof and private, but bleak and lost in some terrible realm of his soul. “Nothing can survive in such a place,” he said. “We should turn back.”
“We must go onward,” Koshmar insisted. “What is happening now is normal and natural. We have entered a place where the darkness is stronger than the light. Beyond it things will change for the better.”
“Will they?” Staip asked.
“Have faith,” said Koshmar. “Yissou will protect us. Emakkis will provide. Dawinno will guide us.”
And they went on.
But inwardly the chieftain was not so sure that her confidence was justified. In the cocoon the day and the night had been of identical lengths. Out here things were different, obviously. But what did it really mean, this dwindling of the hours of daylight? Perhaps Staip was right and they were marching into a realm where the sun never rose and they would meet their death of freezing.
She wished she could consult Thaggoran, who would have known the explanation or at least invented something reassuring. But she had no Thaggoran now, and her old man was a child. Koshmar sent for him anyway, and, taking care not to let him see how baffled she was, said to him, “I need to know an ancient name, chronicler.”
“And what name is that?”
“The name that the ancients gave to the changing of the times of light and dark. It must be in the chronicles somewhere. The name is the god: we must call the god by his rightful flame in our prayers, or the sunlight will never return.”
Hresh went off to examine the archives. He looked through the Book of the Way, the Book of Hours and Days, the Book of the Cold Awakening, the Book of the Wrongful Glow, and many another volume, including very old ones that were without names. He found a part of the answer in this book and another part in that one, and after three days he came to Koshmar and said, “It is called the seasons. There is the season of daylight and it is followed by the season of darkness and then the daylight season comes ‘round again.”
“Of course,” said Koshmar. “The seasons. How could I have forgotten the word?” And she summoned Torlyri and ordered her to pray to the god of seasons.
“Which god is that?” the gentle offering-woman asked.
“Why, the god who brings the time of light and the time of the dark,” said Koshmar.
Torlyri hesitated. “Friit, do you think? Friit is the Healer. He would bring light after darkness.”
“But Friit would not bring the darkness,” said Koshmar. “No, it is another god.”
“Tell me, then. For I have no idea which one to make my offerings to.”
Koshmar had hoped that Torlyri would know; but she saw now that Torlyri, rather, was looking to her. “It is Dawinno,” Koshmar said shortly.
“Yes, the Destroyer,” Torlyri replied, smiling. “The darkness and then the light: that would be Dawinno’s way. He holds everything in balance so that it will be right in the end.”
Each day at midday, then, when the sun stood straight overhead, Torlyri made an offering to Dawinno the Destroyer, god of seasons. She would burn some scraps of old fur and a bit of dried wood in a fine ancient bowl of polished green stone shot through with golden veins. The smoke rising toward the sun was her message of gratitude to the god whose subtlety was beyond human comprehension.
Though the days continued to grow shorter, Koshmar would hear no further discussion of the phenomenon. “It is the seasons,” she said, waving her hand imperiously. “Everyone knows that! What is there to fear? The seasons are natural. The seasons are normal. They are Dawinno’s gift to us.”
“Yes,” muttered Harruel, not so quietly that Koshmar could not hear him. “And so were the death-stars.”
The land was changing too. It was flat for a long while; then it became broken and wild, with ridges of blazing scarlet rock that were as sharp as knives along their summits. Just on the far side they found a strange sight: a dead thing of metal, twice as wide as a man but not half as tall, standing by itself on a bare stony slope. Its head was a broad one-eyed dome, its legs were elaborately jointed. Once it must have had a thick, gleaming metal skin, but now it was rusted and pitted by the rains of an uncountable number of years. “It is a mechanical,” Hresh announced, after studying his books. “This must be where they came to die.” And indeed in the lowlands a little way beyond that there were many more, hundreds, thousands, of the squat metal creatures, a forest of them, an ocean of them, covering the land in all directions, each standing upright in a little zone of solitude, a private empire. All were dead and rusting. They were so corroded that they dissolved at a touch, and toppled into a scattering of dust. “In the time of the Great World,” said Hresh solemnly, “these creatures lived in the mighty cities of great kingdoms where everyone was a machine. But they did not care to go on living once the death-stars began to fall.”