But his own feelings were in turmoil again. Contemplating the antiquity of the world had stirred fresh yearnings for Thalarne in him. He wanted to sweep into his arms all those millions of lost years whose faint traces he imagined he could see down there, all that richness of a vanished world, as though to embrace the whole of Earth’s past, because by embracing that incomprehensible past he was embracing Thalarne, whose goal it was to comprehend it. And for him Thalarne was the future.
Bornigrayal would tell the tale.
He was surprised at how swiftly the day grew darker as they continued eastward. It was winter, of course, and days were short; but the airwagon had taken off in the morning, and already the sky had the dull cast of afternoon, though they had been aloft only a couple of hours. Such a foreshortening of the day perplexed him for a time. But then Nortekku realized that the sun, rising out of the east, was in motion just as they were, already past him and rushing off beyond the cities of the west into the Western Ocean even as they went roaring on in the opposite direction toward the gathering night. The hour must be later the farther east one went; in some places out there, night had already fallen. In Bornigrayal, Thalarne might even now be sitting down to her evening meal, while for him it was not much past midday. Strange, he thought, that it should be early afternoon here, and night already there. He had never considered such matters before.
A meal was served; and then the wagon began to descend. Landing at Bornigrayal so soon? Fine. He had already had more than enough of this trip. But no, no, not Bornigrayaclass="underline" it was a place called Kundalimon, they told him, a town he had never heard of, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Three passengers disembarked; seven new passengers came on board, five People and two Hjjks. The airwagon, he realized, must not have the capacity to fly all the way across the continent in a single burst, and, in any case, the inhabitants of places like Kundalimon must sometimes need to travel also. Within fifteen minutes the wagon was aloft again.
The hours went past. The sky became ashen with dusk and then grew entirely dark. Sometimes isolated villages came into view below, little sprinklings of lights, thin white rivulets of smoke curling upward. Otherwise he could no longer see anything down there. For all he knew they had already by this time passed above the Hallimalla, the great southward-flowing river that cut the continent in half. They might have gone right over the ancestral cocoon, even. But all was blackness below. Nortekku fell into a doze, and dreamed that he was wandering through a fabulous city, a place of gigantic shining towers and gleaming bridges that looped through the air without apparent means of support. In his dream he understood it to be Vengiboneeza, the one city of the Great World that had survived the Long Winter almost intact, and in which the Koshmar tribe of People, Thalarne’s ancestors, had dwelled for a few years after the Time of Going Forth. Dreaming about Vengiboneeza was nothing new for Nortekku; every architect speculated about Vengiboneeza, trying to reconstruct in his imagination how it must have looked. The descriptions left of it by those who had seen it while it still existed led one to think that its buildings were unparalleled for beauty and brilliance of design, crystalline cloud-piercing towers, arrayed on grand boulevards. But nothing remained of the place now. The Hjjks had occupied it after the People had moved on south to found Yissou and Dawinno, two centuries back, and in the war that soon followed between the Hjjks and the People the great Koshmar warrior Thu-Kimnibol had pounded those priceless ruins into oblivion, using potent Great World weapons that his brother, the famed wise man Hresh, had obtained for him by excavating ancient sites. Those two, Thu-Kimnibol and Hresh, were directly ancestral to Thalarne, Nortekku knew. He wondered whether her passion for archaeology was in some way a means of atoning for the destruction of great Vengiboneeza that her famous ancestors had brought about.
The airwagon made another stop, and another. Another meal was served. Nortekku slept again, and when he awakened the morning sunlight was in the sky and the wagon was landing once more.
Another brief stop, he thought. We will go on and on, for days, for weeks, for months, until this machine finally brings us to Bornigrayal. If ever it does.
But no: this place was Bornigrayal, even now, here, actually, truly, journey’s end. Rumpled and blinking, he joined the line of passengers leaving the wagon, descended the staircase that took him to the runway, shaded his eyes against the sudden flinty brightness of the day. This was the northernmost of the Five Cities of the Eastern Coast, and it was cold here, very cold, colder even than in Yissou. The Bornigrayal sky-harbor was situated practically at the shore of what must surely be the Eastern Ocean. A ferocious brutal wind, knife-sharp, came roaring in off the dull gray surface of that immeasurable body of water. The chill was like a bit of the Long Winter, long after its time, obstinately lingering here in these high latitudes. That wind cut right through Nortekku’s dense covering of fur and struck at the skin beneath, so that he began to shiver. None of the other debarking passengers seemed to be affected by the cold, not just the Hjjks, who were impervious to cold, but the various People too. Yissouans, naturally, were accustomed to hard winters, and so also must be the passengers who had boarded in mid-flight. But Nortekku had grown up in golden Dawinno of the balmy breezes, where true winter never came, where the only distinction between one season and another was that during the winter months the days were shorter and there was occasionally a little rain. For love of Thalarne he had subjected himself to a winter in Yissou, and now, it seemed, still for love of Thalarne, he was going to have to endure even worse weather than that.
Carriages were waiting to take the arriving passengers to the Bornigrayal proper, which could be seen against the western horizon as a distant row of white flat-topped towers glinting in the hard morning light. On the eve of his departure Nortekku had mentioned to Prince Vuldimin that the merchant Khardakhor had advised him to seek out the Dawinnan ambassador, Samnibolon, upon his arrival, and Vuldimin had at once given him a letter of introduction. The ambassador was, he said, an old friend of his. It was amazing how everybody of any importance in the two city-states of the Western Coast turned out to be an old friend of Vuldimin’s, if not an actual kinsman. But it should hardly be surprising that close ties of kinship would unite most of the highborn of both cities, since their ancestors had all come out of just two cocoons, the Koshmar one and the Beng, and Koshmars and Bengs had intermarried steadily since the union of the two tribes in the early days of the Going Forth.
“I should warn you,” Prince Vuldimin had said, “in case you’re not already aware of it, that Prince Samnibolon is connected by marriage to the family of the Princess Silina. Quite probably he doesn’t know a thing about your unfortunate little interaction with them. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to mention it, if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” said Nortekku. “Not to him, not to anyone, not ever.”
Prince Samnibolon was a small-framed man, gray-furred, whose office in the embassy quarter of the city was as elegantly appointed as any prince’s chamber should be, with painted scrolls on the wall and glass cases that contained the sort of small Great World artifacts that so many highborns were fond of collecting. The ambassador sat at a circular desk fashioned of strips of rare woods, raised on a gleaming bronze dais. Nortekku knew him to be a member of the House of Hresh, Dawinno’s dominant family, who held most of the highest posts in Dawinno’s government. He was reputed to be a suave and subtle man, a diplomat of diplomats. Through the Hresh connection he was related in some way to Thalarne.