“Nakhaba favor you,” Curabayn Bangkea declared grandly, dipping his head in respect as he approached the throne. For good measure he made the signs of Yissou the Protector and Dawinno the Destroyer. A couple of the Koshmar gods: always useful when dealing with crossbreeds.
Husathirn Mueri, who privately thought that too much of everyone’s time was taken up by these benedictions and gesticulations, replied with a perfunctory sign of Yissou and said, “What is it, Curabayn Bangkea? I’ve got these angry bean-peddlers to deal with, and I’m not looking for more nuisances this afternoon.”
“Your pardon, throne-grace. There’s a stranger been taken, just outside the city walls.”
“A stranger? What kind of stranger?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Curabayn Bangkea, shrugging so broadly he nearly sent his vast helmet clattering to the ground. “A very strange stranger, is what he is. A boy, sixteen, seventeen, skinny as a rail. Looks like he’s been starved all his life. Came riding down out of the north on top of the biggest vermilion you ever saw. Some farmers found him crashing around in their fields, out by Emakkis Valley.”
“Just now, you say?”
“Two days ago, or thereabouts. Two and a half, actually.”
“And he was riding a vermilion?”
“A vermilion the size of a house and a half,” Curabayn Bangkea said, stretching his arms wide. “But wait. It gets better. The vermilion’s got a hjjk banner around its neck and hjjk emblems stitched to its ears. And the boy sits upon them and makes noises at you just like a hjjk.” Curabayn Bangkea put both his hands to his throat and uttered dry, throttled rattling sounds: “ Khkhkh. Sjsjsjssss. Ggggggggjjjjjk.You know what kind of ghastly sounds they make. We’ve been interrogating him ever since the farmers brought him in, and that’s about all that comes out of him. Now and then he says a word we can more or less understand. ‘Peace,’ he says. ‘Love,’ he says. ‘The Queen,’ he says.”
Husathirn Mueri frowned. “What about his sash? Any tribe we know?”
“He doesn’t wear a sash. Or a helmet. Or anything that might indicate he’s from the City of Yissou, either. Of course, he might have come from one of the eastern cities, but I doubt that very much. I think it’s pretty obvious what he is, sir.”
“And what is that?”
“A runaway from the hjjks.”
“A runaway,” Husathirn Mueri said, musing. “An escaped captive? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Why, it stands to reason, sir! There’s hjjk all over him! Not just the sounds he makes. He’s got a bracelet on that looks like it’s made of polished hjjk-shell — bright yellow, it is, one black stripe — and a breastplate of the same stuff. That’s all he’s wearing, just these pieces of hjjk-shell. What else can he be, your grace, if not a runaway?”
Husathirn Mueri narrowed his eyes, which were amber, a sign of his mixed ancestry, and very keen.
Now and then a wandering band of hjjks came upon some child who had strayed into a place where he should not have gone, and ran off with him, no one knew why. It was a parent’s greatest fear, to have a child taken by the hjjks. Most of these children were never seen again, but from time to time one did manage to escape and return, after an absence of days or weeks or even months. When they did come back they seemed profoundly shaken, and changed in some indescribable way, as though their time in captivity had been a horror beyond contemplation. None of them had ever been willing to speak so much as a word about their experiences among the insect-folk. It was considered an unkindness to ask.
To Husathirn Mueri the very thought of hjjks was distasteful. To be forced to live among them was the most miserable torture he could imagine.
He had seen them only once in his life, when he was a small boy growing up among the Bengs in Vengiboneeza, the ancient capital of the sapphire-eyes folk where some tribes of the People had taken up residence at the end of the Long Winter. But that one time had been enough. He would never forget them: gaunt towering insect-creatures larger than any man, strange, frightful, repulsive. Such great swarms of them had come to infest Vengiboneeza that the whole Beng tribe, which had settled there amid the ruined Great World buildings after years of wandering, finally had had to flee. Under great difficulties in a wet and stormy time they had crossed the endless coastal plains and valleys. Eventually they reached Dawinno, the great new city far to the south that the Koshmar tribe had built under Hresh’s leadership after making its own exodus from Vengiboneeza; and there they found refuge.
That hard journey still blazed in his memory. He had been five, then, and his sister Catiriil a year younger.
“Why do we have to leave Vengiboneeza?” he had asked, over and over. And from his patient gentle mother Torlyri had come the same answer each time:
“Because the hjjks have decided that they want it for themselves.”
He would turn then to his father in fury. “Why don’t you and your friends kill them, then?”
And Trei Husathirn would reply: “We would if we could, boy. But there are ten hjjks in Vengiboneeza for every hair on your head. And plenty more where those came from, in the north.”
During the interminable weeks of the journey south to Dawinno, Husathirn Mueri had awakened every night from terrible dreams of hjjk encroachment. He saw them standing over him in the dark as he slept, their bristly claws moving, their great beaks clacking, their huge gleaming eyes aglow with malevolence.
That had been twenty-five years ago. Sometimes he dreamed of them even now.
They were an ancient race — the only one of the Six Peoples that had inhabited the world in the blissful days before the Long Winter which had managed to survive that harrowing eon of darkness and cold. Their seniority offended him, coming as he did from so young a stock, from a people whose ancestors had been mere simple animals in the time of the Great World. It reminded him how fragile was the claim to supremacy that the People had attempted to assert; it reminded him that the People held their present territories by mere default, simply because the hjjks appeared to have no use for those places and the other elder peoples of the Great World — the sapphire-eyes, the sea-lords, the vegetals, the mechanicals, the humans — were long gone from the scene.
The hjjks, who had not let the Long Winter of the death-stars displace them, still had possession of most of the world. The entire northland was theirs, and maybe much of the east as well, though tribes of the People had built at least five cities there, places known only by name and rumor to those who lived in Dawinno. Those cities — Gharb, Ghajnsielem, Cignoi, Bornigrayal, Thisthissima — were so far away that contact with them was all but impossible. The hjjks held everything else. They were the chief barrier to the People’s further expansion in these constantly warming days of the New Springtime. To Husathirn Mueri they were the enemy, and always would be. He would, if he could, wipe them all from the face of the Earth.
But he knew, as his father Trei Husathirn had known, that that was impossible. The best that the People could hope for against the hjjks was to hold their own with them: to maintain the security and integrity of the territories they already held, to keep the hjjks from encroaching in any way. Perhaps the People might even be able to push them back a little gradually and reach outward a short distance into some of the hjjk-controlled regions that were suitable for their own use. To think the hjjks could be altogether defeated, though — as certain other princes of the city were known to believe — was nothing but folly, Husathirn Mueri realized. They were an invincible enemy. They never would be anything else.