Tales of Majipoor Read online

  “A love potion,” Ghambivole Zwoll said, setting about his task. “One that is suitable to win the heart of a highborn maiden, slender, delicate—”

  The job called for no little forethought. At Ghambivole Zwoll’s request, the Su-Suheris began taking books of reference down from the high shelves, the reliable old book of incantations that Ghambivole Zwoll had kept by his side since his student days in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, and the ever-useful Great Grimoire of Hadin Vakkimorin, and Thalimiod Gur’s Book of Specifics, and many another volume, more, in fact, than would possibly be needed. Ghambivole Zwoll suspected that he could compound the potion that the marquis had commissioned out of his own fund of accumulated skills, without recourse to any of these books. But he wanted to take no unnecessary risks; he had a whole week to complete what he could probably deal with in a morning; but any miscalculation due to overconfidence would surely have ugly consequences, and that stupefying fee of twenty royals more than amply compensated him for any unnecessary time that he expended on the task. It was not as though he had a great many other things to do this week, after all.

  Besides, he loved to burrow in the great array of wizardly materials with which his forefathers had crammed the small shop. These two centuries of professional magicking had made the place a virtual museum of the magus’s art. It was not an easy shop to find, tucked away as it was in a far back corner of the huge marketplace, but in happier days it had enjoyed great acclaim, and throngs of impatient clients had jostled elbow-to-elbow in the hall just outside, peering in at the racks of arcane powders and oils, bearing the awesome labels Scamion and Thekka Ammoniaca and Elecamp and Golden Rue, and the rows of leather-bound books of great antiquity, and the mysterious devices that sorcerers used, the ammatepilas and rohillas, the ambivials and verilistias, and much more apparatus of that sort, impressive to laymen and useful to practitioners. Even now, in this dreary materialistic era, the patrons of the Midnight Market who had come there to purchase such ordinary things as brooms and baskets, bangles and beads, spices, dried meats, cheese and wine and honey, often took the trouble to wend their way this deep into the building – for the Midnight Market was a huge subterranean vault, long and low, divided into a myriad narrow aisles, with the sorcerers’ booths tucked away in the hindmost quarter – to stare through the dusty window of Ghambivole Zwoll’s shop. That was all that most of them did, though: stare. The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had been the first patron to step through the doorway in many days.

  He drew the work out for nearly the full week, sequestered in the constricted little Vroon-sized laboratory behind the main showroom, jotting recipes, calculating quantities, measuring, weighing, mixing: the fine brandy of Gimkandale as a base, and then dried ghumba root, and a pinch of fermented hingamort, and some drops of tincture of vejloo, and just a bit of powdered sea-dragon hide, not strictly necessary, but always useful in speeding the effects of such potions. Allow it all to set a little while; then would come the heating, the cooling, the filtering, the titration, the spectral analysis. Meanwhile Shostik-Willeron remained out front, handling a surprising amount of walk-in trade, a Ghayrog who stopped by for a couple of amulets, two tourists from Ni-moya who came in out of nothing more than curiosity and stayed long enough to purchase a dozen of the black candles of divination, and a grain merchant from one of the downslope cities who sought a spell that would cast a blight on the fields of a supplier whom he had come to loathe. Three sales the same week, and also the potion for the marquis!

  Ghambivole Zwoll allowed himself to think that perhaps a return to the prosperity of old might be in its early stages.

  By the end of the week the job was done. There was one moment of near catastrophe on the evening when Ghambivole Zwoll arrived to begin his night’s work and found the massive Skandar charwoman Hendaya Zanzan bashing around with her mop in his rear workroom, where he had left the vials of ingredients that would go into the marquis’ potion sitting atop his desk in a carefully arranged row. In disbelief he watched the gigantic woman, who was far too large actually to enter the room, standing at the entrance to the room energetically swinging the mop from side to side and thereby placing everything within in great jeopardy.

  “No!” he cried. “What are you doing, idiot? How many times have I told you – Stop! Stop!”

  She halted and swung about uncertainly, looming above him like a mountain as she shifted the handle of the mop from one to another of her four arms. “But it has been so many weeks, master, since I last cleaned that room—”

  “I’ve told you never to clean that room. Never! Never! And especially not now, when I have work in progress?”

  “Never, master?”

  “Oh, what a great stupid thing you are. Never: it means Not Ever. Not at any time. Keep your big idiotic mop out of there! Do you understand me, Hendaya Zanzan?”

  It seemed to take her quite a while to process the instruction. She stood with all four burly arms drooping, the slow workings of her mind manifesting themselves meanwhile by a series of odd twitchings and clampings of her lips. Ghambivole Zwoll waited, struggling with his temper. He knew it did very little good to get angry with Hendaya Zanzan. The woman was a moron, a great furry clod of a moron, a dull-witted shaggy mass of a creature eight feet high and nearly as wide, hardly more than an animal. Not only stupid but ugly besides, even as Skandars went, flat-faced, empty-eyed, slack-jawed, covered from head to toe with a bestial coarse gray pelt that had the stale stink of some dead creature’s hide left too long to fester in the sun. He had no idea why he had hired her – out of pity, probably – nor why he had kept her on so long. The shop did need to be cleaned once in a while, he supposed, but it had been madness to hire anyone as bulky as a Skandar to do the sweeping in such a small, cluttered space, and in any case Shostik-Willeron had little enough to occupy his time and could easily take care of the chore. But for the grace of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty-royal job Ghambivole Zwoll would have let her go in another week or two. Now it seemed that he could afford to keep her on a little longer, and he would, for discharging her would be an unpleasant task and he tended to postpone all such things; but if business were to slacken once again—

  “I am never to go into this little room,” she said finally. “Is that so, master?”

  “Very good, Hendaya Zanzan! Very good. Say it once again! Never. Never.”

  “Never to go into. The little room. Never.”

  “And never means – ?”

  “Not ever?”

  He didn’t care for the interrogative tone of her reply; but he saw that it was the best he was going to get out of the poor thing, and, sending her on her way, he went into his workshop and closed the door behind him. It took him no more than an hour to complete the final titration for the marquis’s potion. While he worked he heard the Su-Suheris moving about in the outer room, talking to someone, then pointlessly shifting furniture about, then whistling to himself in that maddening double-headed counterpoint his species so greatly cherished. What a useless fool the man was! Not a dolt like the Skandar woman, of course, but certainly he had little of the clear-eyed wisdom and cunning that the Su-Suheris, with the benefit of their double brain, were reputed to possess. Ghambivole Zwoll had badly needed an injection of fresh capital to meet the ongoing expenses of his shop or he would never have taken him on as a partner, an act that unquestionably would have brought fiery condemnation upon him from his forebears. If only business would pick up a little, he would surely buy Shostik-Willeron out and return to running the place as a sole proprietorship. But he knew what a futile fantasy that was.

  Scowling in annoyance, Ghambivole Zwoll poured his completed potion into an elegant flask worthy of the twenty-royal price, inscribed the accompanying spell on a sheet of vellum. On the appointed day the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran returned, clad even more grandly than before, high-waisted doublet of orange velvet, long-legged golden breeches bedecked with loops of braid and buttons, slender dress sword fastened to a wide silk s
ash tied in a huge bow. “Is this it?” he asked, holding the flask up to a glowglobe above his head and studying it intently.

  “Be certain that you are the object of her gaze when she drinks it,” said the Vroon. “And here,” he said, handing him the vellum scroll, “are the words you must speak as she consumes the potion.”

  The marquis’s brow furrowed. “Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour? What nonsense is this?”

  “Not nonsense at all. It is a powerful spell. The meaning is, ‘Let her be well disposed to me, let her fall in love with me, let her yield to me.’ And the third word is pronounced mouroph-, take care that you get it right, or the effect may be lost. Even worse: you may achieve the opposite of what you desire. Again: Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

  “Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

  “Excellent! But rehearse it many times before you approach her. She will fall helplessly into your arms. I guarantee it, your grace.”

  “Well, then. Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour.”

  “Mouroph, your grace.”

  “Mouroph. Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

  “She is yours, your grace.”

  “Let us hope so. And this is yours.” The marquis produced his bulging purse and casually tossed two coins, a fine fat ten-royal piece and a glossy fiver, onto Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk. “Good day to you. And may the Divine protect you if you have played me false! Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour. Mouroph. Mouroph.” He spun neatly on his heel and was gone.

  Three days passed quietly. Ghambivole Zwoll made two small sales, one for one crown fifty weights, one for slightly less. Otherwise the shop did no business. Creditors devoured most of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty royals almost at once. The Vroon returned to the state of gloom that had occupied him before the arrival of his aristocratic client.

  On the second of those three evenings Shostik-Willeron was late coming to the shop; and when he did both his long pallid faces were tightly drawn in the Su-Suheris expression of uneasiness verging on despair.

  “I warned you we were making a great mistake,” he said at once. “And now I’m sure of it!” It was the right-hand head that spoke: the cheerful, optimistic one, usually.

  Ghambivole Zwoll sighed. “What now, Shostik-Willeron?”

  “I have been speaking with my kinsman Sagamorn-Endik, who is in service at the Castle. Do you know that the Lady Alesarda of Muldemar, whom you have delivered so blithely into the clutches of that ridiculous dandy with your drug, is spoken of widely at court as the promised bride of the Coronal’s son? That by interfering in those nuptials, by despoiling this precious princess, your marquis runs perilously close to treason? And you and I, as abettors of his crime—”

  “It is no crime.”

  “To sleep with a simple scullery maid or some illiterate juggler girl, no. But for the fourth son of the third son of a provincial count to seduce a noblewoman destined for a royal marriage, to interpose his sweaty lusts in such high and delicate negotiations, or simply to be the ones who enable him to carry out such a thing, to be the agents who help him to have his way with her – oh, Ghambivole Zwoll, Ghambivole Zwoll, let us hope that that little potion of yours was a worthless draught! Otherwise your marquis is destroyed, and we are destroyed with him.”

  “If the potion worked,” said the Vroon in the calmest tone he was capable of mustering, “there is no certainty that what took place between the marquis and the princess will become known to anyone else. And if it does, the marquis will have to look to the consequences of his deed on his own. We are mere merchants, protected by law. But if the potion has failed – and how can it have failed, unless he blundered with the spell? – we owe him twenty royals, to fulfill my guarantee. Where will we get twenty royals, Shostik-Willeron? Conjure them out of the air? Look here.” He opened the cash drawer of his desk. “This is what’s left of it. Three royals, two crowns, and sixty – no, seventy weights. The rest is gone. Let us pray that the potion has done its work, for our own sakes, if nothing else.”

  “A princess of Muldemar – a descendant of the great Presti-mion – a beautiful lass, innocent, pure, betrothed to the son of the Coronal—”

  “Stop it, Shostik-Willeron. For all we know, she’s no more innocent and pure than that ox of a Skandar who works for us, and everybody at the Castle from the Coronal on down knows it and doesn’t care. And even if this tale of royal betrothals should be true – but do we know that it is? Only this kinsman of yours says so – we are in no danger ourselves. We are here to serve the public by making use of our skills, and so we have. We bear no responsibility for our client’s interference in other people’s arrangements. In any case, this blubbering of yours achieves nothing. What’s done is done.” Ghambivole Zwoll made shooing gestures with his outermost ring of tentacles. “Go. Go. If you keep this up you will jangle my nerves tonight to no useful purpose.”

  The Vroon’s nerves were indeed already thoroughly jangled, however much he tried to put a good face on the matter. He wished most profoundly that Mirl Meldelleran had never shared with him the identity of his inamorata. It would have been sufficient to know her age, her approximate height and weight, and, perhaps, some inkling of her degree of experience in the wars of love. But no, no, the braggart Mirl Meldelleran had had to go and name her, besides; and if this rumor of a royal marriage truly had any substance to it, and the marquis’s seduction of the princess caused any disruption of that marriage, and the tale of how the marquis had managed to achieve his triumph came out, Shostik-Willeron quite possibly was correct: the magus who had compounded the dastardly potion might very well be made a scapegoat in the hubbub that ensued. Ghambivole Zwoll felt sure that the law would be on his side in any action against him, but a lawyer’s fee for defending him against an outraged Prince of Muldemar or, even worse, the Coronal’s son would be something more than trifling pocket-change, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy as it was.

  Still, there was nothing he could do about any of this now. The potion had been made and delivered and, in all likelihood, used, and, as he had said, whatever had happened after that had happened, and he could only wait and see what consequences befell. He mixed himself a mild calming elixir, and after a time it took effect, and he went about his business without giving the matter farther thought.

  The next evening, half an hour or so before the official opening time of the Midnight Market, Ghambivole Zwoll was moodily going over his accounts when he heard a disturbance in the hall outside, shouting and clatter, and then came the hammering of a fist on the door of his shop; and, looking up, he beheld the gaudy figure of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran gesturing at him through the time-dimmed glass.

  The marquis looked furious, and he was brandishing his bared sword in his right hand, swishing it angrily back and forth. Ghambivole Zwoll had never seen anyone brandishing a drawn sword before, let alone one that was being waved threateningly in front of his own beak. It was a dress sword, ornate and absurd, intended only an ornamental appurtenance – the fad for swordplay in daily life had long ago ended on Majipoor – but its edge looked quite keen, all the same, and Ghambivole Zwoll had no doubt of the damage it could work on the frail tissues of his small body.

  He was alone in the shop. The Skandar woman had already finished her nightly chores and gone, and Shostik-Willeron had not yet arrived. What to do? Darken the room, hide under the desk? No. The marquis had already seen him. He would only smash his way in. That would entail even more expense.

  “We are not yet open for business, your grace,” said the Vroon through the closed door.

  “I know that. I have no time to wait! Let me in.”

  Sadly Ghambivole Zwoll said, “As you wish, sir.”

  The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran strode into the shop and took up a stance just inside the door. Everything about him radiated anger, anger, anger. The Vroon looked upward at the figure that rose high above him and made a mild gesture to indicate that he found the bared sword disconcerting.

  “The
potion,” he said mildly. “It was satisfactory, I trust?”

  “Up to a point, yes. But only up to a point.”

  The tale came spilling out quickly enough. The lady had trustingly sipped the drink the marquis had put before her, and the marquis had managed even to recite the spell in proper fashion, and the potion had performed its function most admirably: the Lady Alesarda had instantly fallen into a heated passion, the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had swept her off to bed, and they had passed such a night together as the marquis had never imagined in his most torrid dreams.

  Ghambivole Zwoll sensed that there had to be more to the story than that, and indeed there was; for the next night the marquis had returned to Muldemar House, anticipating a renewal of the erotic joys so gloriously inaugurated the night before, only to find himself abruptly, coolly dismissed. The Lady Alesarda had no wish to see him again, not this evening, not the next evening, not any evening at all between now and the end of the universe. The Lady Alesarda requested, via an intermediary, that the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran never so much as look in her direction, should they find themselves ever again in the same social gathering, which was, unfortunately for her, all too likely, considering that they both moved in the same lofty circles among the younger nobility of Castle Mount.

  “It was,” said the marquis, smouldering with barely suppressed rage, “the most humiliating experience of my life!”

  Ghambivole Zwoll said mildly, “But you came to me seeking, so you said, a night of pleasure with the woman you most desired in all the world. By your own account, my skills have provided you with exactly that.”

  “I sought a continuing relationship. I certainly didn’t seek to be spurned after a single night. What am I to think: that when she looked back on our night together, she thought of my embrace as something vile, something loathsome, something that had left her with nothing but black memories that she longed to purge from her mind?”