Free Queen of Springtime by Robert Silverberg

minute of my life doing this? Or is it out of pride that I hang on year after year? Or because I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself?”
    From Koshmar’s masks no answers came.
    The People had been just a little band, in Koshmar’s time, a mere tribe. But now the People were civilized; now they were city-dwellers; now they numbered in the thousands instead of in the handfuls, and they had been compelled to invent one new concept after another, a dizzying profusion of things, in order to be able to function at all in this new and expanded order. They had come to use the thing known as exchange-units instead of simply sharing alike, and they fretted over profits, possessions, the size of their living quarters, the number of workers they employed, tactics of competition in the marketplace, and other such strangenesses. They had begun to divide into classes: rulers, owners, workers, poor. Nor were the old tribal lines completely erased. They were fading, yes. But Koshmars and Bengs had not yet entirely forgotten that they had been Koshmars and Bengs; and then there were all the others, the Hombelions and Debethins and Stadrains and Mortirils and the rest, the proud little tribes gradually disappearing into the bigger ones but still struggling to retain some shred of their old identities.
    Each of these things brought new problems, and all of them fell ultimately to the chieftain to solve. And everything had happened so rapidly. The city, powered by Hresh’s unceasing inventiveness and his researches into the archives of antiquity, had sprung up like a mushroom in a single generation, in unabashed and hopeful imitation of the Great World cities of the past.
    Taniane looked at the masks.
    “You never had to worry about census figures and tax rolls, did you? Or minutes of the Presidium, or statistics on the number of exchange-units in current circulation.” She riffled through the mound of papers on her desk: petitions of merchants seeking licenses to import goods from the City of Yissou, studies of sanitation problems in outlying neighborhoods, a report on the poor condition of the Thaggoran Bridge on the south side of town. On and on and on. And, right on top, Hresh’s little memorandum: A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks.
    “If only you were down here,” Taniane said fervently to the masks, “and I were up there on the wall!”
    She had never had a mask of her own. At first she was content to wear Koshmar’s, on those occasions when wearing a mask was appropriate. And then, after the Bengs had come to Dawinno to merge with the People under the Act of Union, the political compromise that provided for a chieftain of Koshmar blood but a Beng majority on the Presidium, and the city had entered the most spectacular phase of its growth, mask-wearing had begun to seem antiquated to her, a mere foolish custom of the earlier days. It was years now since she had worn one.
    Even so, she kept them around her in her office. Partly as decorations, partly as reminders of that darker and more primitive time when ice had covered the land and the People were nothing more than a little band of naked furry creatures huddling in a sealed chamber cut into the side of a mountain. The harsh shapes and bright, slashing colors of those masks were her only link to that other era now.
    Seating herself behind the curving block of black onyx, rising on a pedestal of polished pink granite, that was her desk, Taniane scooped up a handful of the papers that Minguil Komeilt had left there for her and shuffled somberly through them again and again. Words swam before her eyes. Census…taxes… Thaggoran Bridge… hjjk treaty… hjjk treaty… hjjk treaty….
    She glanced up at Lirridon’s mask, the hjjk-faced one with the great hideous beak.
    “Would you sign a treaty with them?” she asked. “Would you deal with them at all?”
    The hjjks! How she despised and dreaded them! From childhood on you were taught to loathe them. They