If Hresh had been whispering suspicious thoughts in Koshmar’s ear about him, though, Harruel did not immediately see what he could do about it. It was reasonable now to think that Hresh was his enemy, and to conduct himself accordingly. But this was not the time to move against him. Things had to be thought through first. You had to be wary of little Hresh: he was too sharp, he perceived things too clearly, he had great power.
It also occurred to Harruel that the reason Koshmar was so pleased that he was going out on his reconnaissance patrols every day was that it kept him out of her way. So long as he was off in the hills half the day, he was no threat to her authority in the settlement. She might think that was very obliging of him.
Harruel continued to go out daily, usually with Nittin or Salaman, less often with Sachkor. He had lost patience with hearing how wonderful and beautiful Sachkor’s beloved Kreun was.
The Helmet People remained invisible. For the first time Harruel began to think, despite himself, that they might not be there at all. Perhaps that first scout had simply been on his own, a solitary wanderer far from the rest of his people. Or perhaps the helmet-wearers, passing through the vicinity of Vengiboneeza and discovering that it was occupied by Koshmar’s people, had sent him in here to see what sort of reception he would get; and when he failed to return, they had simply moved along.
It was a hard thing to face. Secretly Harruel hoped the Helmet People would turn up, and that they would be looking for trouble. Or if not the Helmet People, then some other enemy — any enemy, any enemy at all. This placid city life had made him restless to the core. His bones ached with it. He was eager for a good lively battle, for a fierce prolonged war.
During this tense period of unbroken peace, Harruel’s mate Minbain was brought to bed and delivered of a sturdy boy. That pleased him, to have fathered a son. Hresh was summoned, and did the naming-rite. Hresh gave his new half brother the birth-name of Samnibolon, which did not please Harruel at all, for Samnibolon had been the name of Minbain’s earlier mate, Hresh’s own father. Harruel felt in some way cuckolded to have the name return to the tribe in the person of his own son.
And it is Hresh who has done this to me, he thought angrily.
But the old man of the tribe had spoken the name, in the presence of the parents and the offering-woman, and the name was irrevocable. Samnibolon son of Harruel it would have to be. The gods be thanked, it was only the birth-name. When his naming-day arrived nine years from now the boy would be able to choose his permanent name, and Harruel would see to it that it was something else. Still, nine years was a long time to be calling your firstborn son by a name that was a bitter reproach in your mouth. Harruel vowed he would pay Hresh back for that, someday, somehow.
It was a difficult time for Harrueclass="underline" month after month of peace, and a son given a maddening name. Angers boiled and bubbled within him. It could not be long now before the cauldron boiled over.
There were few triumphs and many calamities as Hresh struggled to understand the things he had found in the ruins of Vengiboneeza.
The Great World folk — or the mechanicals who had been their artisans — had apparently intended to build their devices for all eternity. Most of them were simply constructed, strips of metal of different colors arranged in cunning patterns. They showed few signs of rust or other decay. Often they were inlaid with precious jewels that appeared to be part of the mechanism, rather than mere decorations.
In some cases operating them posed no difficulties. A few had intricate arrangements of pressure-points and levers, but most had the simplest of control panels, if they had any at all. Yet how could you tell what function a device was meant to have? Or what catastrophe you might cause by using it the wrong way?
Hresh’s early experiments led to catastrophe more often than not. There was one instrument, no longer than his arm, that began weaving a web the moment he touched a coppery node on its snout. With fantastic speed it hurled thin sticky strands of a nearly unbreakable cord from its muzzle, tossing them in wild loops for thirty paces all around. Hresh released the command node as soon as he saw what was happening, but by then he had snarled Sinistine, Praheurt, and Haniman in a tight net of the stuff. It took hours to cut them free of it and it was days before their fur was completely clean.
Another device, which fortunately he tried at some distance outside the temple courtyard, seemed to turn earth into air. With one quick blast Hresh dug a pit a hundred paces across and fifteen paces deep, leaving no trace behind of what had been there, only a faint burned smell. Perhaps it was meant for clearing away rubble, or perhaps it was a weapon. In horror Hresh hid it where no one was likely to find it again.
A long narrow box with angular projections running down its side turned out to be a bridge-building machine. In the five minutes before Hresh, with some desperation, managed to switch it off, it constructed a bizarre swaybacked bridge from nowhere to nowhere, ending in mid-air, that filled an entire avenue of the city. For a building material it employed a stonelike substance that it created out of — so it seemed — nothing at all. A similar-looking machine proved to be a wall-builder: with the same lunatic zeal as the bridge-building device, it began at the touch of a stud to throw up high walls at random all along the street. Hresh retrieved the pit-digging machine to clear away the bridge and the walls; but despite all caution he cleared away three buildings of the avenue with them. He hoped they had been unimportant ones.
Then there were the devices that could not be made to work at all — that was most of them — and the ones that somehow looked so treacherous and unpredictable that it seemed rash even to try them. Hresh put those away for such time as he might have a clearer notion of what he was doing.
Then, too, there were the ones that would function once, and almost immediately destroy themselves. Those were the most maddening of all.
One of those set up a star-map: a sphere of soft darkness that was three times as wide as a man’s body was long. On its surface all the stars of heaven were depicted in dazzling splendor. They moved as you looked at them; and if you pointed to one star with a shaft of light that came from the machine, a voice would utter a single solemn sound, which Hresh took to be the name of that star in the language of the Great World. He stared in awe and astonishment. But within five minutes curling wisps of pale smoke began coming from it and the brilliant panoply of the stars vanished in an instant, leaving Hresh gasping with the pain of irretrievable loss. He was never able to make that device work again.
Another played music: a tumultuous sky-filling music, full of heavy, clashing melodies, that brought everyone in the tribe running, as if the gods had come to Vengiboneeza and were playing in concert. It too died in smoke almost as soon as it had begun to function.
And there was one that wrote an incomprehensible message in the sky in letters of golden fire. Within moments the machine expired with a sad little sound and the wind blew the strangely fierce-looking sharp-angled characters away.
“We are ruining much and learning little,” Hresh said bleakly to Taniane, one day when there had been three such disasters. But Vengiboneeza was proving to be an incredibly rich storehouse of Great World artifacts. New treasures came back with the Seekers virtually every day. It was a pity to waste any of them, Hresh knew. But perhaps a certain amount of destruction was an inevitable part of the process of learning. He had to go on with the experiments, whatever the losses, whatever the risks. It was his task. The destiny of the tribe was at stake. And perhaps his own destiny as welclass="underline" for he was here not to find mere curious toys, but to discover the secrets by which the People would rule the world.