She was silent a moment, frowning a little, as though debating how much she wanted to tell him. Then she said, “Hamiruld has no physical interest in women, Nortekku. He never has. I don’t know why: that’s just how he is. But he claims to love me, and I think he does. I’m a kind of trophy for him, perhaps: something to be proud of, a woman whom every man in Yissou seems to desire for one reason or another, most, I guess, for my looks, maybe some for my mind. Or both. And so he’s been willing to countenance my—affairs, provided I’ll go on living with him.”
My affairs. Well, he thought, of course he hadn’t been the first. Of course not.
“And you?” he said. “You’re perfectly willing to have that kind of marriage? Do you love him, Thalarne?”
Something close to evasiveness crossed her features. “Love? How can I say? It was never an issue, before you came along. We were, well, happy. We got on well together. We enjoyed each other’s company. We went to the year’s social events as a couple. To the parties at court. To the opera—you saw what a problem it created when you wanted to take me. He didn’t get in the way of my research. If I felt like amusing myself with another man, he didn’t interfere.”
“Up to a point, it would seem.”
“Up to a point, yes. But clearly he was unhappy about the proposed cocoon expedition, or at least with your being a part of it, and even unhappier when I announced I was going to come out here. And so he suppressed my message to you, which I find tremendously distressing. He’s never done anything like that before. It’s a complete violation of the rules of our marriage.”
Nortekku glanced away from her. All of this, this series of unwanted glimpses into the intimacies of their life together, was beginning to make him exceedingly uncomfortable.
The less he knew of the rules of their marriage, the less he knew about their marriage at all, the better, he thought. He had taken care never to question her about any aspect of it. It had seemed unlikely to him that they coupled—indeed Hamiruld didn’t appear to be the sort of man who cared much about bodily passion—but Nortekku had not presumed to pry. Did they twine? He certainly had not wanted to know that. And now—having heard everything that had just poured out of her—
We got on well together. We enjoyed each other’s company.
Hoarsely he said, “We’ve taken ourselves completely off the track with this discussion of how Hamiruld handled that message of yours. The important thing is that I still don’t know why it is that you went to Bornigrayal, or wanted me to come here. A new discovery, you said—a higher priority than excavating the cocoon site—”
“Yes.” She looked relieved to be changing the subject also. “Do you know where the Inland Sea is, Nortekku?”
“Approximately, yes.”
From the uncertainty of his tone she must have realized how approximate that knowledge was. Nortekku knew that there were other continents in the world, of course, somewhere on the far side of the Eastern Ocean, and that two of them were separated by a great land-rimmed sea that was almost a third ocean in itself. But that was all. One never thought much about the other side of the world. The Five Cities of this coast were remote enough; the continents of the other hemisphere were beyond consideration.
She sketched a quick map for him. “Our continent, here. Yissou, Dawinno.” A line down the middle for the Hallimalla River. Five dots along the eastern seaboard for the Five Cities. Then emptiness—the Eastern Ocean—and then, far off at the left end of the sheet, two amorphous land masses, one above the other, with another emptiness, this one long and oval, between them. “The Inland Sea,” Thalarne said, tapping the sheet. “And here, on its southern coast, where the weather is very warm, a little colony of Sea-Lords has been living ever since the Long Winter began.”
She said it quite calmly, as though telling him that she had learned of some interesting new inscription that had been discovered there, or some unusual Great World artifact. But for him it was like an earthquake. Sea-Lords? Still living somewhere, a little colony of them on the far side of the Eastern Ocean? There were no Sea-Lords anywhere, he thought. The Sea-Lords were gone, every last one of them, like all the rest of the Great World except the Hjjks.
Nortekku’s recent historical studies had told him very little about the Sea-Lords. One of the Six Peoples of the Great World, yes, a race of intelligent amphibious mammals, sea-going merchant princes who had held sway over the extensive maritime commerce that had flourished in Great World times. That was all he knew of them, other than that they were all supposed to have perished when the darkness and cold of the Long Winter fell upon the Earth. The books that Hresh and other historians had written about that era had dealt mainly with the reptilian Sapphire-Eyes, the dominant race of their time, and provided some knowledge of their servants the Mechanicals, and of the floral Vegetals, and, in abundance, of the Hjjks, whose subterranean hives had sheltered them without difficulty throughout the interminable icy years. But of the Sea-Lords virtually nothing was known. They were the most mysterious of the Great World races, other than the totally baffling Dream-Dreamers.
“You mean to say they’re still there? Living as they always did?”
“Still there, yes. Living as they always did, no. From what I’ve been told, I suspect that they’re pitiful impaired creatures, decadent, degenerate, whatever word you want to use—half-crazy, most of them. Bestial. Sad. They’ve retrogressed, gone some distance backward toward the animals they once were.”
That saddened him. Attuned to ancient history as he had lately become, he had often longed for some miracle that would restore at least a part of the Great World to life, in all its wonder, for him to see and experience. Still, the fact that they had survived at all—
“They’re definitely Sea-Lords, though? Not just some contemporary species of marine mammal?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely Sea-Lords. They speak what is thought to be a Great World language, or at least a debased version of it. The Hjjks who were in the discovery party claim to be able to communicate with them. Legends of the Great World have survived among them. They know what they once were, it seems.”
“This stands everything that we know about the end of the Great World on its head, doesn’t it?” Nortekku said.
“Much of it, anyway. We thought that the oceans everywhere had grown so cold that it became impossible for the Sea-Lords to survive. Apparently not so. And if there’s a band of them still alive on the coast of that southern continent, who can say what still survives farther south? A bunch of Sapphire-Eyes, maybe? Vegetals? It’s only two hundred years since we came out of the cocoons, Nortekku. We think we’ve achieved a lot, with our cities and our universities and our air-wagons and all of that. But the truth is we’ve only just begun, really, to explore the world around us. Off in Dawinno and Yissou, it seems to us that cities of the Eastern Coast like Bornigrayal and Thisthissima are worlds unto themselves, far off beyond our ken. Actually we should look upon them as being next door to us, though. There’s a whole huge continent south of us that we know just about nothing about—”
“South?”
“South, yes. Going on and on, right on down to the Pole, maybe. There have been some voyages to it from Cignoi, but the Cignese haven’t been saying anything about whatever they may have found there. And in the east, across this ocean here, there are two continents far larger than this one, with cities of the People on them—we know the names of two or three—with which Bornigrayal has regular commerce, though they haven’t been talking much about that either. Beyond those two—”