Read Online Queen of Springtime by Robert Silverberg - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Silverberg
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her private secretary was more bothersome to her than the actual petition had been. “Do you think this is the first time I’ve had a note like this? Do you think it’ll be the last? It means nothing. Nothing .”
“But to throw a stone at you in the streets, with a message like this attached to it—”
Taniane laughed. She glanced again at the scrap of paper in her hand. YOU STAY MUCH TOO LONG, it said, in huge crude lettering. IT’S TIME YOU STEPPED ASIDE AND LET RIGHTFUL FOLK RULE.
The words were Beng, the handwriting was Beng. The stone had come out of nowhere to land at her feet, as she was walking up Koshmar Way from the Chapel of the Interceder to her chambers in the House of Government, as she did almost every morning after she had prayed. It was the third such anonymous note she had received—no, the fourth, she thought—in the last six months. After nearly forty years of chieftainship.
“You want me to take no action at all?” Minguil Komeilt asked.
“I want you to file this wherever you file outbursts of this sort. And then forget about it. Do you understand me? Forget about it. It means nothing whatsoever.”
“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
“But to throw a stone at you in the streets, with a message like this attached to it—”
Taniane laughed. She glanced again at the scrap of paper in her hand. YOU STAY MUCH TOO LONG, it said, in huge crude lettering. IT’S TIME YOU STEPPED ASIDE AND LET RIGHTFUL FOLK RULE.
The words were Beng, the handwriting was Beng. The stone had come out of nowhere to land at her feet, as she was walking up Koshmar Way from the Chapel of the Interceder to her chambers in the House of Government, as she did almost every morning after she had prayed. It was the third such anonymous note she had received—no, the fourth, she thought—in the last six months. After nearly forty years of chieftainship.
“You want me to take no action at all?” Minguil Komeilt asked.
“I want you to file this wherever you file outbursts of this sort. And then forget about it. Do you understand me? Forget about it. It means nothing whatsoever.”
“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
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