She felt sorry for him, in an odd way. That he was so driven, so edgy. They said that his mother Torlyri had been a saintly loving person, and his father the most valiant of warriors. But Husathirn Mueri seemed not at all saintly, and Nialli Apuilana doubted that he would be of much use on a battlefield, either. Hardly a credit to his forebears. Perhaps it’s true, she thought, the thing that the older people like to say, that in this modern era of city life we’ve become a race of confused, troubled folk, no clear sense of direction in our lives at all. Weaklings, in fact. Decadents.
But, she wondered, is it so? That we’ve gone from primitivism to decadence and weakness in a single generation? All that time pent up in the cocoon, scarcely changing in any way, and then we erupt and build ourselves a tremendous city, and practically overnight all the old virtues are lost, our godliness, our honor?
Husathirn Mueri may be a decadent, she thought. And probably so am I. But is he really a weakling? Am I?
“The chronicler! Hresh-of-the-answers! All rise for the chronicler Hresh!” came the braying voice of the bailiff who had gone to fetch him.
She looked about and saw her father entering the throne-room.
How long it had been since she had last seen him, she wasn’t sure: weeks, certainly, or possibly months. There had never been any formal estrangement between them; but her path and his simply tended rarely to cross, these days. He had his unending research into the world of the past to absorb him, while she, living her isolated and somehow suspended life in the upper reaches of the House of Nakhaba, felt little reason to come down into the central districts of the city.
The moment he entered the room Hresh turned to her, holding out his arms, as if she were the only person there. And Nialli Apuilana went quickly, eagerly to him.
“Father—”
“Nialli — my little Nialli—”
He had aged enormously in just these few months since they last had been together, as though each week had been a year for him. Of course he was at a point in his life when time galloped by. Some years past fifty now: old, as People life-spans went. His fur had long since grayed. Nialli Apuilana, his one child, born to him very late, could not remember a time when it had been any other color. His slender shoulders were bowed, his chest was hollow. Only his huge dark scarlet-flecked eyes, blazing like beacons beneath his wide forehead, still radiated the vitality that must have been his in those long-ago days when, still no more than a boy, he had led the People from the ancestral cocoon across the plains into Vengiboneeza.
They embraced quietly, almost solemnly. Then she stepped back from him and for a moment their eyes met.
Hresh-of-the-answers, the bailiff had called him. Well, that was his full formal name, yes. He had once told her that he had chosen it himself upon reaching his naming-day. Before that, when he was a boy, he had been called Hresh-full-of-questions. They were both good names for him. There was no mind like his anywhere, always probing, always seeking. Truly he must be the wisest man in the world, Nialli Apuilana thought. Everyone said so.
She felt herself drawn in, swallowed up, by those astonishing eyes of his, eyes that had looked upon such miracles and wonders as she could barely comprehend. Hresh had seen the Great World alive: he had held a device in his hand that brought it all back in visions, and showed him the mighty sapphire-eyes people and the sea-lords and the mechanicals and all the rest of those dead races — even the humans, whom the People had called by the name of Dream-Dreamers in the days when they lived in the cocoon — the baffling enigmatic humans, who had been masters of the Earth long before any of the others had come into being, so long ago that the mind was numbed merely to think of it.
Hresh seemed so mild, so ordinary, until you looked into his eyes. And then he became frightening. He had seen so much. He had achieved so much. Everything that the People had become since the Long Winter’s end, they were because Hresh had shaped them that way.
He smiled. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Nialli.”
“Husathirn Mueri sent for me. He thought I still knew the language of the hjjks. But of course it’s all gone from me now, all but a few words.”
Hresh nodded. “You shouldn’t be expected to remember. It’s been two years, hasn’t it?”
“Three, father. Almost four.”
“Almost four. Of course.” He chuckled indulgently at his own absentmindedness. “And who could blame you for blocking it from your mind? A nightmare like that.”
She looked away from him. He had never understood the truth of her stay among the hjjks. No one had. Perhaps no one ever would. Except this silent stranger here, and she was unable to communicate in any useful way with him.
Husathirn Mueri, descending from the throne, led the stranger to Hresh’s side. “He was found at midday, in Emakkis Valley, riding a vermilion. He makes hjjk-sounds, and speaks a few words of our language also. Nialli Apuilana says that these are hjjk-amulets on his wrist and breast.”
“He looks half starved,” Hresh said. “More than half. He’s like a walking skeleton.”
“Do you remember what I looked like, father, when I came back from the hjjks?” Nialli Apuilana asked. “They eat very little, the hjjks. Sparseness is what they prefer, in eating, in everything. That’s their way. I was hungry all the time, when I was with them.”
“And looked it when you returned,” said Hresh. “I do remember. Well, perhaps we can find some way to talk with this boy. And then he ought to be given something to eat. Eh, Husathirn Mueri? Something to put a little meat on his bones. But let’s see what we can do, first.”
“Will you use the Wonderstone?” Husathirn Mueri asked.
“The Wonderstone, yes. The Barak Dayir.” Hresh drew a worn velvet pouch from a pocket of his sash and tugged at its drawstring. Into the palm of his hand tumbled a tapered bit of polished stone, like a finely made spearhead. It was a mottled purple and brown in color, with a pattern of intricate fine lines inscribed along its edges. “No one must come near me,” he said.
Nialli Apuilana trembled. She had seen the Wonderstone no more than five or six times in her life, and not in many years. It was the People’s single most prized possession. No one, not even Hresh, knew what it was. They said it was made of star-stuff, whatever that meant. They said it was older even than the Great World, that it was a human-thing, an instrument out of that remote unknown world that had existed before the sapphire-eyes folk began to rule the Earth. Perhaps so. The only thing that was certain was that Hresh had learned how to work miracles with it.
He took it now in the curve of his sensing-organ, grasping it firmly. His expression grew distant and strange. He was summoning his second sight, now, unleashing all the formidable powers of his mind and focusing them through the strange device that was called the Barak Dayir.
The stranger, motionless, stood with his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Hresh. They were unusual eyes, a clear pale green, like the water in the shallows of Dawinno Bay, but much colder. The stranger too seemed to be locked in deep concentration; and once again that odd almost-smile had appeared on his face.
Hresh’s eyes were closed. He appeared not even to be breathing. He was lost in his own spell, his mind given up entirely into the power of the Barak Dayir. But after an eternity he could be seen to return. The room was very still.
“His name is Kundalimon,” Hresh said.
“Kundalimon,” Husathirn Mueri repeated gravely, as though the name had some deep significance.
“At least, that’s what he thinks it is. He isn’t entirely sure. He isn’t entirely sure even of what a name is. He doesn’t have one among the hjjks. But the traces of the name Kundalimon are still in his mind, like the traces of ancient foundations in a ruined city. He knows that he was born here, seventeen years ago.”