Queen of Springtime by Robert Silverberg

lay. She seemed tranquil, and very beautiful, strangely so, as though the long struggle had burned all fleshly impurities from her. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing very faintly, but she was still conscious. Old blind Fashinatanda sat beside her, chanting. As Thu-Kimnibol entered she broke off her chant and, without a word, rose and left the room.
    For a little while he talked quietly with Naarinta, though her words were cloudy and disconnected and he couldn’t be sure that she understood anything he said. Then they fell silent. She seemed to have traveled more than half the distance into the next world. After a time Thu-Kimnibol saw that the unearthly beauty was beginning to go from her as the final moments approached. Softly he spoke to her again, telling her what she had meant to him; and he took her hand, and held it until everything was over. He kissed her cheek. The fur of it already seemed strangely changed, less soft than it had been. One sob, only one, broke from him. He was surprised his reaction was no more vehement. But the pain was real and strong all the same.
    He left then and returned to the audience-chamber, where his friends stood in a little knotted group, no one speaking. He loomed over them like a wall, feeling suddenly cut off from them, set apart by the loss that he had suffered and the new solitude that was descending on him, falling so unexpectedly into a life that until this time had been marked only by happiness and accomplishment and the favor of the gods. He felt hollow, and knew that this strange calmness that possessed him now was that of exhaustion. A powerful sense came over him then that the life that had been his until today had ended with Naarinta, that he must now undergo transformation and rebirth. But into what? What?
    He put such thoughts aside for now. Time enough later to let the new life begin to enter the drained vessel that was his soul.
    “She’s gone,” he said simply. “Kartafirain, pour me more wine. And then let us sit for a while, and talk of politics, or hunting, or the benevolence of the hjjks. But first the wine, Kartafirain. If you please.”
    At the service Hresh spoke first, words he had spoken often enough before, the words of the Consolation of Dawinno: that death and life are two halves of one thing, for everything that lives arises out of all that once had lived but lives no longer, and in time must yield up its life so that new life may come forth. Boldirinthe then spoke the words of the service for the dead; Taniane spoke also, just a quiet sentence or two, and then Thu-Kimnibol, holding the body of Naarinta in his arms as though it were a doll, laid her cloth-wrapped form at the edge of the pyre. The flames engulfed her and in that fierce brightness she was lost to sight.
    Time now for the mourners to return to the city from the Place of the Dead. Taniane and Hresh rode together in the chieftain’s ornate wagon. “I’ve decreed seven days of public mourning,” she told him. “That gives us a little time to think about this scheme of the hjjks, before we have to take it to the Presidium.”
    “The hjjks, yes,” said Hresh softly. “The Presidium.”
    His spirit was still with Thu-Kimnibol and Naarinta. Taniane’s words seemed to him at first like mere empty sounds, tinny and meaningless.
    They seemed to be coming to him across a vast distance. Presidium?
    Hjjks? Yes. This scheme of the hjjks, she had said. What was that? The hjjks, the hjjks, the hjjks. He felt strangeness whispering at his mind, as it so often did when the thought of the hjjks came into it. The rustling of bristly claws. The clicking of great beaks.
    She said, breaking in on him sharply, “Where have you gone, Hresh?”
    “What?”
    “You seem to be on the far side of the moon, all of a sudden.”
    “Ah. You were saying—” He looked at her vaguely.
    “I was speaking of the hjjks. Of the offer of a treaty. I need to know what you make of it, Hresh. Can we possibly