“Two months, maybe three,” she said. “However long it takes to get the funding together and acquire the equipment.”
“Excuse me,” Nortekku said then. “I couldn’t help overhearing your discussion. I’m Nortekku of Dawinno, an architect, here to design a palace outside the wall for Prince Vuldimin.” He was addressing himself directly to her, as though the others weren’t there at all.
“Thalarne Koshmar,” she said.
His name, his link to his father’s vast wealth, didn’t seem to mean anything to her. But she was looking straight back at him, very intently indeed. He knew what an intense stare like that usually meant. He knew, also, that he was probably staring at her the same way.
“And did I hear correctly that you’re planning an expedition to the original cocoon?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I most certainly am.”
“Well, then,” said Nortekku at once. “I wonder if there might be room in your group for someone who isn’t himself an archaeologist, but who—”
The words were out of his mouth before he had given the thing half a thought. He had no idea what use an architect would be to a bunch of archaeologists, but that hardly mattered. Four or five weeks, even a couple of months, perhaps, out there in the back woods with this wondrous Thalarne—why would he hesitate for so much as a moment?
“Are you serious?” she asked, with a little flurrying show of surprise.
“Positively! To be part of a project like that—why, it’s the most fascinating idea I’ve heard in years, Thalarne!” Shamelessly he said, almost believing it for the moment, “History has always been one of my great interests, as a matter of fact.”
“Ah, has it? Why, that’s wonderful!” she said, as though she might not be entirely sure of his sincerity, but wanted to be.
“And to be on hand when scientists enter the original Koshmar cocoon—to help recover whatever artifacts our forefathers might have left behind at the Time of Going Forth—to gain new knowledge of the early days of the People—!”
His mind went racing ahead, looking for reasons that might make his presence on the expedition plausible. As an architect, he would be well equipped to map and sketch the intricate layout of the underground chambers that had been inhabited so long. They surely went great distances into the earth. He might even be able to provide technical aid with the excavations. And he could offer financial support too, if that was needed—by way of his father’s many business enterprises he was well connected among the princes and great merchants of Dawinno, many of whom claimed to have a profound interest in matters of antiquity.
But it was unnecessary to muster any of those arguments. He could see right away, from the sudden brightness in Thalarne’s eyes and the sudden quivering of her sensing-organ and the unmistakable rising of her lustrous black fur, that Thalarne wanted him on the expedition as much as he wanted to be on it, and for the same reasons, which had very little, actually, to do with archaeology.
Over the weeks that followed his mind dwelled on the adventure to come to the exclusion of almost everything else. Enamored of her and newly enraptured by the science to which she had devoted her life, he flung himself into his belated study of antiquity, the better to understand her.
She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end—the world of the humans, of which not the slightest speck remained, and the Great World, whose merest outlines alone survived, and the hidden world of the now abandoned cocoons in which the People, created out of simple apelike animals by the humans to be the successors to the Great World, had waited out the Long Winter. And now, rising atop those strata of antiquity, the brave new world that the People had created for themselves since the Time of Going Forth. Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least in some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future. And in the months ahead, he told himself, that comprehension would only grow and deepen as Thalame and he made their way, side by side, into the ancestral cocoon.
These months in Yissou were the happiest of his life. He and Thalame had become lovers almost immediately, and soon after that became twining-partners also, even before he discovered that she already had a mate, a certain Hamiruld, who was yet another kinsman of the king of Yissou and of Prince Vuldimin. The fact that Thalame was married did not appear to be a serious obstacle. Nortekku quickly came to see Hamiruld as a sly and effete man, who appeared to have no particular interest in Thalame and displayed no overt signs of love for her. Why he had married her, the gods alone knew, but he seemed not to be in any way possessive. Indeed, he seemed to go beyond complaisance into indifference. Quite likely he would step aside if asked; for Nortekku, for the first time ever, had mating on his mind. Thalarne’s stunning beauty, her soaring spirit, her keen intelligence—
But that was for later. Finishing the plans for the expedition was the central thing now. Nortekku busied himself putting together the financial backing and purchasing the necessary equipment—Prince Til-Menimat, the famous collector of antiquities, provided most of the money—while Thalame assembled her team of fellow archaeologists and worked out the details of the route to the ancestral cocoon.
Her ancestral cocoon, anyway, for Thalame was highborn, not just a member of the aristocratic Koshmar line but of the House of Hresh that was the leading family of that line. Therefore she could trace a direct line of descent from several of the leaders of the little band of People that had come forth at the end of the Long Winter to found both Yissou and Dawinno. Nortekku himself had no clear idea of his own ancestry. All that his father had ever been able to discover was that they had sprung from one of the minor People groups—he wasn’t sure which one, maybe the Stadrains, maybe the Mortirils—that had been eking out a scruffy existence in the hinterlands at the time when Hresh and Koshmar and Harruel and the rest of those heroes of long ago, semi-mythical by now, had made their epic trek westward to found the two great city-states of the coastal strip.
They were ten days or so away from the departure date. And then came the quarrel.
It was a preposterous thing: a new opera was having its premiere, Salaman, about the tempestuous life of the second king of Yissou, he who had built the great wall. Tickets were scarce—it would be the social event of the winter season—but Prince Vuldimin was able to obtain a dozen of them and gave a pair to Nortekku, who offered one to Thalarne. He thought she would be pleased. She had already spoken of the new opera in some excitement, and Hamiruld, who notoriously had branded opera as a decadent amusement on several recent occasions, was unlikely to want to attend. Nortekku was excited too: it would be their first public outing as a couple.
“But surely you realize that I’ll be going to the opera with Hamiruld!” Thalarne said.
Nortekku was taken aback by that, and let it show.
She gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you seem so surprised, Nortekku?”
“That you should be going with Hamiruld? He doesn’t have any more interest in opera than that chair over there!”
“But we have tickets. He feels that he ought to go. It’s an important evening. He’s a direct descendant of King Salaman, you know.”