Queen of Springtime

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Book: Read Queen of Springtime for Free Online
Authors: Robert Silverberg
her father as the sun is from the moon. Both the huge, hulking, warlike Thu-Kimnibol and the frail, scholarly, retiring Hresh were the sons of the same mother, Minbain by name. Hresh had been born to her in the cocoon days, when a certain Samnibolon, long dead and forgotten now, had been her mate. Thu-Kimnibol was her child by a different mate of later years, the grim, violent, and quarrelsome warrior Harruel. He had inherited his father’s size and strength and some of his intensity of ambition; but not, so Nialli Apuilana had been told, his brooding, troubled soul.
    “Nothing you do shocks us,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “Not since you came back from the hjjks. But why live with the Beng priests?”
    Her eyes flashed with amusement and annoyance. “Kinsman, I live alone!”
    “On the top floor of a huge building swarming with Beng acolytes who bow down to Nakhaba.”
    “I have to live somewhere. I’m a grown woman. There’s privacy in the House of Nakhaba. The acolytes pray and chant all day long and half the night, but they leave me to myself.”
    “It must disturb your sleep.”
    “I sleep very well,” she said. “The singing lulls me. As for their bowing down to Nakhaba, well, what affair is that of mine? Or that they’re Bengs. Aren’t we all Bengs these days? Look, kinsman, you wear a helmet yourself. And the language we speak—what is it, if it isn’t Beng?”
    “The language of the People is what it is.”
    “And is it the same language we spoke when we lived in the cocoon, during the Long Winter?”
    Thu-Kimnibol tugged uneasily at the thick red fur, almost like a beard, that grew along his heavy cheeks. “I never lived in the cocoon,” he said. “I was born after the Coming Forth.”
    “You know what I mean. What we speak is as much Beng as it is Koshmar, or more so. We pray to Yissou and we pray to Nakhaba, and there’s no difference to us any more, the Koshmar god or the Beng god. A god is a god. Only a handful of the older people still remember that we were two tribes, originally. Or care. Another thirty years and only the chronicler will know. I like where I live, kinsman. I’m not trying to shock anyone, and you know it. I simply want to be off by myself.”
    That had been more than a year ago, almost two. And after that no one in her family had bothered her about her choice of a place to live. She was of age, after all: past sixteen, old enough to twine and to mate, even if she didn’t choose to twine, and certainly not to mate. She could do as she pleased. Everyone accepted that.
    But in fact Thu-Kimnibol had been close to the truth. Her going to the House of Nakhaba had been a protest of some sort: against what, she wasn’t sure. Ever since her return from the hjjks there had been a great restlessness in her, an impatience with all the established ways of the city. It seemed to Nialli Apuilana that the People had wandered from the true path. Machines were what they loved now, and comfort, and this new idea called exchange-units, which allowed the rich to buy the poor. Things were wrong here, so she had begun to think; and, since she had no power to change the ways of the city, she often found herself making strange silent rebellions against them. Others thought she was willful and unruly. What they might think was unimportant to her. Her stay among the hjjks had transformed her soul in ways that no one else could comprehend, in ways that she herself was only now beginning to come to terms with.
    There was a knock at the door. Nialli Apuilana opened it to a plump, panting official of the Court of Justice, who had obviously found the climb to the top of the House of Nakhaba on this warm afternoon a profound challenge. He was running with sweat. His fur was sticking together in thick bunches, and his nostrils flickered as he struggled to catch his breath. His sashes and badges of rank were soggy and askew.
    “Nialli Apuilana?”
    “You know that’s who I am. What do you want with

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