“If I can,” Nialli Apuilana said icily.
She went to the stranger, taking up a position facing him, so close that she too stood in the cone of light and the tips of her breasts came nearly within touching-distance of the Nest-guardian that dangled on his chest. He raised his eyes and looked into hers.
He was older than she had first thought. At a distance he seemed like no more than a boy, but that was because he was so flimsily built; in fact he must be at least her age, or even a year or two older. But there was no fat on him at all, and precious little muscle.
A diet of seeds and dried meat will do that to you, Nialli Apuilana knew. She had experienced it herself.
Very likely this stranger had lived among the hjjks for years. Long enough for his body to be shaped by the sparseness of their rations, at any rate. He even held himself in a hjjk’s stiff, brittle way, as if the fur and flesh that he wore were only a cloak concealing the gaunt insect beneath.
“Go on. Speak with him.”
“A moment. Give me a moment!”
She tried to collect herself. The sight of the hjjk talismans on his wrist and breast had stirred deep feelings in her. In her excitement she found herself unable to summon a single syllable of the hjjk language, what little of it she had learned years ago.
Hjjks communicated in many ways. They had a spoken language, the clicks and buzzes and hisses from which the People had coined a name for them. But also they were able to speak with each other — and with such of the People as they encountered — in a silent language of the mind, as if speaking by second sight. And then too they had an elaborate system of communicating by means of chemical secretions, a code of scented signals.
While in the Nest Nialli Apuilana had dealt with the hjjks mainly through the mental language. When they used that, they were able to make themselves perfectly understood to her, and also to understand what she said. She had managed to learn a few hundred words of their spoken language as well. But she had forgotten most of that by now. The language of the chemical secretions had always been altogether a closed book to her.
To break the interminable silence she raised her hand and lightly touched the stranger’s Nest-guardian, leaning forward and smiling warmly at him as she did.
He seemed almost to flinch. But he managed to hold his ground, and said something to her in harsh hjjk tones. His face was solemn. It didn’t seem capable of changing expression. It was like something carved of wood.
She touched his Nest-guardian again, and then her own breast.
Some words of hjjk sprang into her mind, then, and she spoke them, shaping them with some difficulty in her throat, as if she were gargling. They were the words for Nest, and Queen, and Nest-plenty.
He drew back his lips in a grimace that was almost a smile. Or perhaps it was a smile that could not help becoming a grimace.
“Love,” he said, in the language of the People. “Peace.”
A start, at least.
From somewhere more hjjk words came to her, the ones for Nest-strength, for Queen-touch, for Thinker-thoughts.
He brightened.
“Love,” he said again. “Queen — love.”
He lifted his clenched fists, as if straining to find other words of People-speech long lost in the deeper reaches of his mind. There was anguish on his narrow face.
At length he brought out another hjjk word, which Nialli Apuilana recognized as the one that could be translated as “flesh-folk.” It was the term the hjjks used for the People.
“What are you two saying?” Husathirn Mueri asked.
“Nothing very significant. Just making preliminary contact.”
“Has he told you his name yet?”
Nialli Apuilana gave Husathirn Mueri a scornful look. “The hjjk language doesn’t have a word for name. They don’t have names themselves.”
“Can you ask him why he’s here, then?”
“I’m trying,” she said. “Can’t you see that?”
But it was hopeless. For ten minutes she worked in a steady dogged way at breaking through, without getting anywhere.
She had expected so much of this meeting. She was desperately eager to relive with this stranger her time in the Nest. To speak with him of Queen-love and Egg-plan and Nest-strength and all those other things that she had barely had a chance to experience during her too-brief captivity: things which had shaped her soul as surely as the austere food of the hjjks had shaped this stranger’s lean body. But the barriers between them were a maddening obstacle.
There seemed no way to breach them. All they could do was stammer random words at each other, and fragments of ideas. Sometimes they seemed close to a meeting of minds, and the stranger’s eyes would grow bright and the ghost of a smile, even, appeared on his face; but then they reached the limits of their understanding, and the walls descended between them once again.
“Are you getting anywhere?” Husathirn Mueri asked, after a while.
“Nowhere. Nowhere at all.”
“You can’t even guess at what he’s saying? Or why he’s here?”
“He’s here as some sort of an ambassador. That much seems certain.”
“Do you have anything to go by, or are you just guessing?”
“You see those pieces of hjjk shell he’s wearing? They’re tokens of high authority,” she said. “The thing on his chest is called a Nest-guardian, and it’s made out of the shell of a dead hjjk warrior. They wouldn’t have let him take it out of the Nest except as a sign that he’s on a special mission. It’s something like a chieftain’s mask would be among us. The other one, the bracelet, was probably a gift from his Nest-thinker, to help him focus his thoughts. Poor lost soul, it hasn’t done him much good, has it?”
“Nest-thinker?”
“His mentor. His teacher. Don’t ask me to explain it all now. They’re only bug-folk to you, anyway.”
“I told you that I regretted—”
“Yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. “You told me that you regretted. Anyway, he’s surely here with some special message, not just the usual hazy stuff that returnees tell us, if they say anything at all. But he can’t speak. He must have lived in the Nest since he was three or four years old, and he can barely remember a word of our language.”
Husathirn Mueri moodily stroked his cheek-fur.
“Can you suggest anything?” he asked, after a time.
“Only the obvious. Send for my father.”
“Ah,” Husathirn Mueri said. “Of course!”
“Does the chronicler speak hjjk?” Curabayn Bangkea asked.
“The chronicler has the Wonderstone, idiot,” said Husathirn Mueri. “The Barak Dayir, the Barak Dayir! Of course! One touch of it and all mysteries are solved!”
He clapped his hands. The fat bailiff appeared.
“Find Hresh. Summon him here.” He looked around. “Adjourned until Hresh comes.”
The chronicler just then was in his garden of natural history, in the western quadrant of the city, supervising the arrival of his caviandis.
Many years earlier, Hresh in a vision of the Vengiboneeza of Great World times had entered a place called the Tree of Life. Here the sapphire-eyes folk had gathered all sorts of wild creatures and placed them in chambers that duplicated their natural surroundings. The dreaming Hresh, to his terrible shame and chagrin, had even found his own ancestors among the animals housed there; and so he had learned beyond question that day that his People, who once had thought of themselves as humans, were no such lofty thing, and in the days of the Great World had been regarded as nothing more than beasts fit for collecting and keeping in cages.
Most of the creatures Hresh had seen on that day of wandering in the remote past had perished in the Long Winter, and their kind was forever gone from the Earth. The Tree of Life itself had long ago crumbled to dust. But Hresh had built a Tree of Life of his own in the City of Dawinno, overlooking the tranquil bay: a maze-like garden where creatures from all parts of the continent had been assembled for him to study. He had water-striders there, and drum-bellies, and dancer-horns, and hosts of the other creatures whom the People had encountered in their migrations across the face of the land since leaving the ancestral cocoon. He had blue-furred long-legged stinchitoles, whose minds were linked in a way he had not begun to fathom. He had bevies of plump-legged red scantrins. He had the pink ropy long-fanged worms, longer than a man was tall, who lived in the steaming mud of the lakelands. He had the kmurs, and crispalls, and stanimanders. He had gabools. He had steptors. He had a band of the mocking green monkey-like tree-dwelling beasts who had pelted the People raucously with wads of dung when first they entered Vengiboneeza.