How strange it was that Harruel was no longer there. He had occupied a huge place in the tribe — a somber, moody presence, and an increasingly frightening one — and now, suddenly, that place was empty. It was as if the great green mountain that rose above the city had abruptly disappeared. One might not like the mountain, one might think it overwhelming and ominous, but one grew used to seeing it there and if it vanished it would leave a disturbing sense of emptiness behind it.
If it was disturbing to have the tribe so dramatically reduced in size in a single hour, it was more unsettling still to have such a horde of strangers coming to live close at hand.
Within hours after Harruel’s secession the entire Beng tribe had entered the city, riding on the great red beasts that they called vermilions. There were more of the helmeted ones than the People had suspected: well over a hundred, including thirty or so who looked to be warriors. They had eighty or ninety vermilions, too, some to ride on and some that carried baggage. Other pack-animals, smaller blue-green ones with odd big-jointed legs, followed along in the train. It took all day for the whole Beng procession to pass through the gates.
Koshmar offered them the Dawinno Galihine district to settle in. It was an attractive part of the city, well preserved, with fountains and plazas and tile-roofed buildings, at a considerable distance from the settlement of the People. Hresh was unhappy about giving them that district, since there were things there that he had not properly explored. But Koshmar chose Dawinno Galihine for the Bengs because it was an isolated sector, connected to the main part of the city only by a narrow avenue bordered closely on both sides by fragile, tottering buildings. She believed that if hostilities were to spring up between the two tribes the People would be able to pin the Bengs down by toppling those flimsy buildings and blocking the road with rubble.
It was Haniman who brought news of that to Hresh, who shook his head. “She’s making a big mistake if she thinks that’s true,” he said. “The Bengs have three times as many warriors as we have. And those monstrous trained beasts. There’s no way we could ever blockade them inside Dawinno Galihine.”
“But if the old buildings fell, how would they get out?”
Hresh smiled. “They’d use the vermilions to push the debris aside. You think that would be hard for them? And then they’d come rumbling out right into our own settlement and trample everything that was in their way.”
Haniman made a string of holy signs in the air. “Yissou protect us, do you think it would come to that?”
With a shrug Hresh said, “They are many and we are few, and we’ve just lost most of our best warriors. If I were Koshmar, I’d be very amiable in my dealings with the Bengs, and hope for the best.”
In fact the Bengs did not seem interested in warfare. As they promised, they invited the People to a feast on the first night, and made generous offerings of meat and fruit and wine. Their meat came from animals Hresh had never seen before, short-legged plump ones that had flat black noses and thick woolly coats of gray striped with red, and the fruits the Bengs had brought with them were strange too, bright yellow, with three swollen nippled lobes that looked like breasts, and a sweet, musky flavor.
There were other feasts after that first one, and general efforts at what seemed like friendliness, though there was not much warmth about it. Often four or five helmeted Bengs came to the settlement of the People and stood about, staring, pointing, trying to make conversation. But what they said in that barking tongue of theirs made no sense to anyone, not even Hresh.
Sometimes Hresh would go with a few companions to return these visits. The Helmet People had settled down in Dawinno Galihine as though they found it perfect for their needs, and had set about clearing away rubble and restoring damaged structures with astonishing vigor and swiftness. They were always bustling around feverishly within their sector, digging, hammering, repairing. The newcomers seemed far more energetic and venturesome to Hresh than his own people did, though he was willing to allow that he had a certain prejudice in favor of the exotic and unfamiliar. One building in particular seemed to be the center of their toil, a narrow black stone spire, gleaming as though it were wet, that was ringed with rows of open galleries along its outer wall. Hresh felt a pang, seeing the Beng workers swarming over that intricate tapering tower, for it was one that he had never managed to explore. When he approached it now, the Bengs eyed him uneasily, and a sharp-faced captain in a ponderous bronze helmet spoke out with brusque jabbing gestures that did not seem like an invitation to enter.
As ever, Hresh was hungry for knowledge of these new people. He wanted to know their history and to learn of all the things they had seen in the course of their journey across the world to Vengiboneeza. He wondered if they had been able to find out more about the time of the Great World than he had managed to discover. He was eager to hear about their god, Nakhaba, and how he differed from the gods of his own tribe. Fifty other questions bubbled in his mind. He wanted to know everything. Everything, everything, everything!
But where to begin? How?
Since he was still unable to make much sense of the Beng language, Hresh tried pantomime. He drew aside a square-faced, chunkily built Helmet Man who seemed to have an easy, open look about him, and laboriously tried to ask him in gestures where they had lived in their previous days. The Beng responded with barking laughter and wild rollings of his scarlet eyes. But after a little while he appeared to get the drift of Hresh’s elaborate miming, and he began to make signs of his own. His arms waved impressively, his gleaming eyes rolled from side to side. Hresh had the impression that he was being told that the Bengs had come from the south and west, near the edge of a great ocean. But he was not entirely sure of that.
The language barrier was a serious problem. Through covert use of his second sight Hresh obtained a feel for the rhythm and weight of Beng speech, and it almost seemed to him that he was comprehending the meanings as well. But seeming to understand meanings was not the same thing as actually understanding them. Whenever he tried to translate a Beng phrase into his own language he faltered and failed.
Koshmar ordered Hresh to devote himself to learning the Beng tongue. “Penetrate the secret of their words,” she said, “and do it quickly. Otherwise we’re helpless before them.”
He went about the job zealously and with confidence. If someone like Sachkor could learn their language, he supposed, then he should have no difficulty with it.
But it proved to be more of a chore than he expected. Noum om Beng was the one to whom he turned, since the frail, dry-bodied old man held the same rank in the Beng tribe that Hresh did in his. He had taken up residence in a labyrinthine building that might have been a palace in the time of the Great World, just across the way from the spiral tower, and here, seated on a black stone bench covered with an ornate many-colored weaving, he held court all day long in the deepest and least accessible chamber of the building, a stark white-walled room without furniture, without ornament.
He seemed willing enough to give instruction, and they spent hours at a time together, Noum om Beng speaking and Hresh listening carefully, trying with more hope than success to seize meanings out of the air.