“I couldn’t be more grateful, your grace,” said Nortekku, and thought for one wild moment that he was about to burst into tears.
That night he left for Yissou, not aboard the regular evening train but—at Vuldimin’s suggestion—as a passenger on a freight caravan, where no Dawinno bailiff would be likely to look for him. In Yissou he was given lavish quarters at Vuldimin’s sprawling dark-walled palace just off an enormous square known as the Plaza of the Sun, and during the succeeding weeks was treated by the prince’s huge staff of servants as though he were a visiting member of some royal house. Vuldimin himself returned from Dawinno shortly, assured Nortekko that his problems with Silina’s family would in one way or another be overcome, and made it clear that his breaking of the marriage contract would in no way affect the commission to build the new palace.
Nortekku had never cared much for Yissou, which was far to the north of Dawinno and had a much colder climate, especially now, in winter. One’s first view of the city was utterly off-putting. Its entire core was surrounded by a colossal, brooding wall of black stone, a wall of enormous height and breadth that had been constructed nearly two centuries before by one of the earliest kings of the city, who feared all manner of enemies both real and unreal and had devoted a reign of many decades to raising that wall ever higher and higher, until its implacable shadow came to dominate almost the whole of the city within.
Once you were inside the wall things were no prettier. Nortekku’s architect’s eye was offended by the cramped and twisting alleyways that passed for streets and the squat, ungraceful, ponderous stone buildings that filled them, each jammed up against the next, low thick-walled ground-hugging boxes with the narrowest of slits to serve as windows. Marketplaces had been situated with seeming randomness throughout the city, so you were assailed everywhere by the smell of produce that was no longer fresh and seafood that had spent too many days away from the sea. And one whole quarter of the city was populated by Hjjks, those giant yellow-and-black insect creatures that were the only one of the Six Peoples of the Great World that had survived the cataclysm of the death-stars. Nortekku had no great fondness for Hjjks, even though the ancient threat of warfare between the hive-dwellers and the People had subsided more than a century ago. He was displeased by the look of them, their dry, harsh, chittering voices, their icy alien reserve. But there were very few of them in Dawinno, far to the south, and he rarely encountered one there. Here in Yissou, much closer to the bleak Hjjk homeland that spanned the northern half of the continent, one saw them everywhere, tall menacing-looking six-legged creatures with formidable claws and beaks. He greatly disliked rubbing shoulders with them in the streets.
Still, life in Yissou had its compensations. Vuldimin’s palace was handsome and comfortable, and so long as Nortekku stayed indoors the ugliness and dank coldness of the city were no problem for him. Vuldimin himself was warm and friendly in a quasi-paternal way, and clearly had taken a liking to him. Nortekku, who had never known much in the way of affection from his own blustering, churlish father, found that very welcome. And it was the prince, rather than Yissou’s monarch, his gloomy cousin Falid, who was at the center of Yissou’s social and political life. Vuldimin was a man of great cultivation and progressive ideas, unarguably superior in intellect and vision and charisma to the cautious, reactionary king, and it was to him that Yissou’s brightest and most interesting people flocked. Thus it came to pass that Nortekku, at one of the regular assemblages of industrialists and scientists and artists one evening at Prince Vuldimin’s palace, found himself face to face with the brilliant young archaeologist Thalarne and had his life turned upside down between one moment and the next.
He had noticed her from the far side of the room, engaged in an animated conversation with six or seven persons who, Nortekku observed, all happened to be men. She was an instantaneously compelling sight: tall, nearly as tall as Nortekku himself, with a fine figure and a thick, gleaming pelt of dark fur spotted here and there by oval splotches of dazzling white.
Every aspect of her commanded attention. Her eyes were of a rich emerald color, glistening with an inner light; her features were delicately and beautifully formed, her expression a searching, mobile one; her stance was alert and dynamic. She wore the vivid yellow sash that Nortekku knew indicated membership in Yissou’s Institute of Scientific Study, the counterpart of his own city’s great research center, the House of Knowledge. Several of the men surrounding her wore the yellow sash also.
Nortekku drifted closer.
She was speaking of the tendency of sophisticated people in Yissou nowadays to regard the stories of the People’s past as just that stories, mere myth. Indeed Nortekku had encountered the same phenomenon among his friends in Dawinno, who brushed the popular historical tales aside as the stuff of legend. Had there ever really been a Long Winter? Did the People actually live once upon a time in underground cocoons? Had the Great World truly been as magnificent as the legends would have it?
“We have the evidence of the Chronicles, of course,” one of the men said.
“So we do,” said another, “but how do we know that they represent actual history? They may be no more reliable than the history plays we see in the theater.”
“Yes. Torlyri and Trei Husathirn,” said a third man. “The Boyhood of Hresh. Hresh at the Nest of Nests.”
“And there’s that play about Nialli Apuilana and her captivity among the Hjjks, and how she faced down the Hjjk Queen and defeated Her,” said another.
“You speak of them as though they’re just fiction,” the first man said. “These people actually existed. They really did the things that they’re credited with doing. Otherwise, how did we get here? Who led us from the cocoon, if not Koshmar and Torlyri? Who founded the cities, if not Hresh and Harruel and Salaman? Who drove back the Hjjks when they wanted to take over all our land? Why, Thalarne here is a direct descendant herself of Taniane, Hresh, Thu-Kimnibol—”
“They were real, yes,” said the second man. “But can we be sure that any of their great deeds actually took place? What if it’s all just a bunch of children’s fables?”
It was at that point, by which time Nortekku had brought himself to the very edge of the circle around Thalarne and was standing directly opposite her, that she said, in a deep, throaty voice that made him tingle with delight, “Which is exactly why all the evidence of the Chronicles needs to be challenged, reviewed, subjected to modern scientific examination. And the first step in that, I think, is to retrace the great trek, eastward all the way to the Hallimalla, and find the original Koshmar cocoon. Which is what I intend to do.”
“How soon will you be leaving?” one of the other sash-wearers asked.