“But — lady—”
“Nothing whatsoever,” said Taniane again.
She entered her chambers. The masks of her predecessors stared down at her from its dark stippled walls.
They were fierce, vivid, strange, barbaric. They were emblems out of a former age. To Taniane they were reminders of how much had changed in the single life-span since the People had come forth from the cocoon.
“Time I stepped aside,” she said to them, under her breath. “So I’ve been told.” Rocks thrown at me in the street. Bengs who don’t care for the Act of Union. After all this time. Restless fools, that’s all they are. They still want one of their own to govern. As if they knew a better system. I should give them what they want, and see how they like it then.
There behind her desk was the Mask of Lirridon, which Koshmar had worn on that long-ago day when the tribe had made its Going Forth into the newly thawed world. It was a frightening thing, harsh and angular and repellent. Surely it was patterned after some old tribal memory of the hjjk-folk, some ancestral nightmare, for it was yellow and black in color, and outfitted with a terrible jutting sharp-edged beak.
Flanking it was Sismoil’s mask, bland, enigmatic, with a flat unreadable face and tiny eye-slits. Thekmur’s mask, very simple, hung beside it. Farther down the wall was the Mask of Nialli, a truly horrifying one, black and green with a dozen long spikes, red as blood, standing away from its sides at sharp angles. Koshmar had worn the Nialli mask on the day the invading force of Helmet People — Bengs — first had arrived and confronted the People in Vengiboneeza.
And there were Koshmar’s own masks: the shining gray one with red eye-slits that she had worn in her lifetime, and the finer one carved in her honor by the craftsman Striinin after her death, with powerful features marked in burnished black wood. Taniane had worn that mask herself, on the day of departure from Vengiboneeza, when the People were setting out on their second migration, the one that would bring them eventually to the place where they would build the City of Dawinno.
Glimmers of a vanished past, the masks were. Spark-trails, leading backward through the muffled swaddlings of time to forgotten days of what now seemed a claustrophobic enclosure.
“Should I go?” Taniane asked, looking at the Koshmar masks. “Are they right? Have I ruled long enough? Is it time to step aside?”
Koshmar had been the last of the old chieftains — the last to rule over a tribe so small that the chieftain knew everyone by name, and adjudicated disputes as though they were mere bickerings between friends.
How much simpler an age that had been! How guileless, how naive!
“Perhaps I should,” Taniane said. “Eh? Eh? What do you say? Do the gods require me to spend every remaining minute of my life doing this? Or is it out of pride that I hang on year after year? Or because I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself?”
From Koshmar’s masks no answers came.
The People had been just a little band, in Koshmar’s time, a mere tribe. But now the People were civilized; now they were city-dwellers; now they numbered in the thousands instead of in the handfuls, and they had been compelled to invent one new concept after another, a dizzying profusion of things, in order to be able to function at all in this new and expanded order. They had come to use the thing known as exchange-units instead of simply sharing alike, and they fretted over profits, possessions, the size of their living quarters, the number of workers they employed, tactics of competition in the marketplace, and other such strangenesses. They had begun to divide into classes: rulers, owners, workers, poor. Nor were the old tribal lines completely erased. They were fading, yes. But Koshmars and Bengs had not yet entirely forgotten that they had been Koshmars and Bengs; and then there were all the others, the Hombelions and Debethins and Stadrains and Mortirils and the rest, the proud little tribes gradually disappearing into the bigger ones but still struggling to retain some shred of their old identities.
Each of these things brought new problems, and all of them fell ultimately to the chieftain to solve. And everything had happened so rapidly. The city, powered by Hresh’s unceasing inventiveness and his researches into the archives of antiquity, had sprung up like a mushroom in a single generation, in unabashed and hopeful imitation of the Great World cities of the past.
Taniane looked at the masks.
“You never had to worry about census figures and tax rolls, did you? Or minutes of the Presidium, or statistics on the number of exchange-units in current circulation.” She riffled through the mound of papers on her desk: petitions of merchants seeking licenses to import goods from the City of Yissou, studies of sanitation problems in outlying neighborhoods, a report on the poor condition of the Thaggoran Bridge on the south side of town. On and on and on. And, right on top, Hresh’s little memorandum: A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks.
“If only you were down here,” Taniane said fervently to the masks, “and I were up there on the wall!”
She had never had a mask of her own. At first she was content to wear Koshmar’s, on those occasions when wearing a mask was appropriate. And then, after the Bengs had come to Dawinno to merge with the People under the Act of Union, the political compromise that provided for a chieftain of Koshmar blood but a Beng majority on the Presidium, and the city had entered the most spectacular phase of its growth, mask-wearing had begun to seem antiquated to her, a mere foolish custom of the earlier days. It was years now since she had worn one.
Even so, she kept them around her in her office. Partly as decorations, partly as reminders of that darker and more primitive time when ice had covered the land and the People were nothing more than a little band of naked furry creatures huddling in a sealed chamber cut into the side of a mountain. The harsh shapes and bright, slashing colors of those masks were her only link to that other era now.
Seating herself behind the curving block of black onyx, rising on a pedestal of polished pink granite that was her desk, Taniane scooped up a handful of the papers that Minguil Komeilt had left there for her and shuffled somberly through them again and again. Words swam before her eyes. Census … taxes … Thaggoran Bridge … hjjk treaty … hjjk treaty … hjjk treaty…
She glanced up at Lirridon’s mask, the hjjk-faced one with the great hideous beak.
“Would you sign a treaty with them?” she asked. “Would you deal with them at all?”
The hjjks! How she despised and dreaded them! From childhood on you were taught to loathe them. They were hideous; they were gigantic frightful nightmare bugs, cold and evil; they were capable of committing any sort of monstrous thing.
There were rumors of them all the time, roving bands of them said to lurk in the open country everywhere to the east and north. In truth there turned out to be no substance behind most of those tales. But all the same they had stolen her only child from her, just outside the city walls; and the fact that Nialli Apuilana had returned after a few months had done nothing to ease Taniane’s hatred for them, for the Nialli Apuilana who had returned was something mysteriously different from the girl they had taken. The hjjks were the menace. They were the enemy against whom the People would one day have to contend for supremacy in the world.
And this treaty — these purported messages of love from their ghastly Queen—
Taniane pushed Hresh’s report aside.
I’ve been chieftain so long, she thought. Ever since I was a girl. My whole life, so it seems — nearly forty years—
She had taken the chieftainship when the tribe was tiny, and she just a short time beyond her girlhood. Koshmar was dying, and Taniane the most vigorous and far-seeing of the younger women. They had all acclaimed her. She hadn’t hesitated. She knew she was made for the chieftainship, and the chieftainship for her. But she had had no way of seeing as far as this, these reports and studies and petitions for import licenses. And ambassadors from the hjjks. No one could have foreseen that. Perhaps not even Hresh.