Majipoor Chronicles Read online

  Here Nismile felt himself beginning to heal. Everything in this place was unfamiliar and wonderful. On Castle Mount, where the climate was artificially controlled, an endless sweet springtime reigned, the unreal air was clear and pure, and rainfall came at predictable intervals. But now he was in a moist and humid rain-forest, where the soil was spongy and yielding, clouds and tongues of fog drifted by often, showers were frequent, and the vegetation was a chaotic, tangled anarchy, as far removed as he could imagine from the symmetries of Tolingar Barrier. He wore little clothing, learned by trial and error what roots and berries and shoots were safe to eat, and devised a wickerwork weir to help him catch the slender crimson fish that flashed like skyrockets through the stream. He walked for hours through the dense jungle, savoring not only its strange beauty but also the tense pleasure of wondering if he could find his way back to his cabin. Often he sang, in a loud erratic voice; he had never sung on Castle Mount. Occasionally he started to prepare a canvas, but always he put it away unused. He composed nonsensical poems, voluptuous strings of syllables, and chanted them to an audience of slender towering trees and incomprehensibly intertwined vines. Sometimes he wondered how it was going at the court of Lord Thraym, whether the Coronal had hired a new artist yet to paint the decorations for the pergola, and if the halatingas were blooming now along the road to High Morpin. But such thoughts came rarely to him.

  He lost track of time. Four or five or perhaps six weeks—how could he tell?—went by before he saw his first Metamorph.

  The encounter took place in a marshy meadow two miles upstream from his cabin. Nismile had gone there to gather the succulent scarlet bulbs of mud-lilies, which he had learned to mash and roast into a sort of bread. They grew deep, and he dug them by working his arm into the muck to the shoulder and groping about with his cheek pressed to the ground. He came up muddy-faced and slippery, clutching a dripping handful, and was startled to find a figure calmly watching him from a distance of a dozen yards.

  He had never seen a Metamorph. The native beings of Majipoor were perpetually exiled from the capital continent, Alhanroel, where Nismile had spent all his years. But he had an idea of how they looked, and he felt sure this must be one: an enormously tall, fragile, sallow-skinned being, sharp-faced, with inward-sloping eyes and barely perceptible nose and stringy, rubbery hair of a pale greenish hue. It wore only a leather loin-harness and a short sharp dirk of some polished black wood was strapped to its hip. In eerie dignity the Metamorph stood balanced with one frail long leg twisted around the shin of the other. It seemed both sinister and gentle, menacing and comic. Nismile chose not to be alarmed.

  “Hello,” he said. “Do you mind if I gather bulbs here?”

  The Metamorph was silent.

  “I have the cabin down the stream. I’m Therion Nismile. I used to be a soul-painter, when I lived on Castle Mount.”

  The Metamorph regarded him solemnly. A flicker of unreadable expression crossed its face. Then it turned and slipped gracefully into the jungle, vanishing almost at once.

  Nismile shrugged. He dug down for more mud-lily bulbs.

  A week or two later he met another Metamorph, or perhaps the same one, this time while he was stripping bark from a vine to make rope for a bilantoon-trap. Once more the aborigine was wordless, materializing quietly like an apparition in front of Nismile and contemplating him from the same unsettling one-legged stance. A second time Nismile tried to draw the creature into conversation, but at his first words it drifted off, ghostlike. “Wait!” Nismile called. “I’d like to talk with you. I—” But he was alone.

  A few days afterward he was collecting firewood when he became aware yet again that he was being studied. At once he said to the Metamorph, “I’ve caught a bilantoon and I’m about to roast it. There’s more meat than I need. Will you share my dinner?” The Metamorph smiled—he took that enigmatic flicker for a smile, though it could have been anything—and as if by way of replying underwent a sudden astonishing shift, turning itself into a mirror image of Nismile, stocky and muscular, with dark penetrating eyes and shoulder-length black hair. Nismile blinked wildly and trembled; then, recovering, he smiled, deciding to take the mimicry as some form of communication, and said, “Marvelous! I can’t begin to see how you people do it!” He beckoned. “Come. It’ll take an hour and a half to cook the bilantoon, and we can talk until then. You understand our language, don’t you? Don’t you?” It was bizarre beyond measure, this speaking to a duplicate of himself. “Say something, eh? Tell me: is there a Metamorph village somewhere nearby? Piurivar,” he corrected, remembering the Metamorphs’ name for themselves. “Eh? A lot of Piurivars hereabouts, in the jungle?” Nismile gestured again. “Walk with me to my cabin and we’ll get the fire going. You don’t have any wine, do you? That’s the only thing I miss, I think, some good strong wine, the heavy stuff they make in Muldemar. Won’t taste that ever again, I guess, but there’s wine in Zimroel, isn’t there? Eh? Will you say something?” But the Metamorph responded only with a grimace, perhaps intended as a grin, that twisted the Nismile-face into something harsh and strange; then it resumed its own form between one instant and the next and with calm floating strides went walking away.

  Nismile hoped for a time that it would return with a flask of wine, but he did not see it again. Curious creatures, he thought. Were they angry that he was camped in their territory? Were they keeping him under surveillance out of fear that he was the vanguard of a wave of human settlers? Oddly, he felt himself in no danger. Metamorphs were generally considered to be malevolent; certainly they were disquieting beings, alien and unfathomable. Plenty of tales were told of Metamorph raids on outlying human settlements, and no doubt the Shapeshifter folk harbored bitter hatred for those who had come to their world and dispossessed them and driven them into these jungles; but yet Nismile knew himself to be a man of good will, who had never done harm to others and wanted only to be left to live his life, and he fancied that some subtle sense would lead the Metamorphs to realize that he was not their enemy. He wished he could become their friend. He was growing hungry for conversation after all this time of solitude, and it might be challenging and rewarding to exchange ideas with these strange folk; he might even paint one. He had been thinking again lately of returning to his art, of experiencing once more that moment of creative ecstasy as his soul leaped the gap to the psychosensitive canvas and inscribed on it those images that he alone could fashion. Surely he was different now from the increasingly unhappy man he had been on Castle Mount, and that difference must show itself in his work. During the next few days he rehearsed speeches designed to win the confidence of the Metamorphs, to overcome that strange shyness of theirs, that delicacy of bearing which blocked any sort of contact. In time, he thought, they would grow used to him, they would begin to speak, to accept his invitation to eat with him, and then perhaps they would pose—

  But in the days that followed he saw no more Metamorphs. He roamed the forest, peering hopefully into thickets and down mistswept lanes of trees, and found no one. He decided that he had been too forward with them and had frightened them away—so much for the malevolence of the monstrous Metamorphs!—and after a while he ceased to expect further contact with them. That was disturbing. He had not missed companionship when none seemed likely, but the knowledge that there were intelligent beings somewhere in the area kindled an awareness of loneliness in him that was not easy to bear.

  One damp and warm day several weeks after his last Metamorph encounter Nismile was swimming in the cool deep pond formed by a natural dam of boulders half a mile below his cabin when he saw a pale slim figure moving quickly through a dense bower of blue-leaved bushes by the shore. He scrambled out of the water, barking his knees on the rocks. “Wait!” he shouted. “Please—don’t be afraid—don’t go—” The figure disappeared, but Nismile, thrashing frantically through the underbrush, caught sight of it again in a few minutes, learning casually now against an enormous tree with vivid red bark.

  N
ismile stopped short, amazed, for the other was no Metamorph but a human woman.

  She was slender and young and naked, with thick auburn hair, narrow shoulders, small high breasts, bright playful eyes. She seemed altogether unafraid of him, a forest-sprite who had obviously enjoyed leading him on this little chase. As he stood gaping at her she looked him over unhurriedly, and with an outburst of clear tinkling laughter said, “You’re all scratched and torn! Can’t you run in the forest any better than that?”

  “I didn’t want you to get away.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t going to go far. You know, I was watching you for a long time before you noticed me. You’re the man from the cabin, right?”

  “Yes. And you—where do you live?”

  “Here and there,” she said airily.

  He stared at her in wonder. Her beauty delighted him, her shamelessness astounded him. She might almost be an hallucination, he thought. Where had she come from? What was a human being, naked and alone, doing in this primordial jungle?

  Human?

  Of course not, Nismile realized, with the sudden sharp grief of a child who has been given some coveted treasure in a dream, only to awaken aglow and perceive the sad reality. Remembering how effortlessly the Metamorph had mimicked him, Nismile comprehended the dismal probability: this was some prank, some masquerade. He studied her intently, seeking a sign of Metamorph identity, a flickering of the projection, a trace of knife-sharp cheekbones and sloping eyes behind the cheerfully impudent face. She was convincingly human in every degree. But yet—how implausible to meet one of his own kind here, how much more likely that she was a Shapeshifter, a deceiver—

  He did not want to believe that. He resolved to meet the possibility of deception with a conscious act of faith, in the hope that that would make her be what she seemed to be.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Sarise. And yours?”

  “Nismile. Where do you live?”

  “In the forest.”

  “Then there’s a human settlement not far from here?”

  She shrugged. “I live by myself.” She came toward him—he felt his muscles growing taut as she moved closer, and something churning in his stomach, and his skin seemed to be blazing—and touched her fingers lightly to the cuts the vines had made on his arms and chest. “Don’t those scratches bother you?”

  “They’re beginning to. I should wash them.”

  “Yes. Let’s go back to the pool. I know a better way than the one you took. Follow me!”

  She parted the fronds of a thick clump of ferns and revealed a narrow, well-worn trail. Gracefully she sprinted off, and he ran behind her, delighted by the ease of her movements, the play of muscles in her back and buttocks. He plunged into the pool a moment after her and they splashed about. The chilly water soothed the stinging of the cuts. When they climbed out, he yearned to draw her to him and enclose her in his arms, but he did not dare. They sprawled on the mossy bank. There was mischief in her eyes.

  He said, “My cabin isn’t far.”

  “I know.”

  “Would you like to go there?”

  “Some other time, Nismile.”

  “All right. Some other time.”

  “Where do you come from?” she asked.

  “I was born on Castle Mount. Do you know where that is? I was a soul-painter at the Coronal’s court. Do you know what soul-painting is? It’s done with the mind and a sensitive canvas, and—I could show you. I could paint you, Sarise. I take a close look at something, I seize its essence with my deepest consciousness, and then I go into a kind of trance, almost a waking dream, and I transform what I’ve seen into something of my own and hurl it on the canvas, I capture the truth of it in one quick blaze of transference—” He paused. “I could show you best by making a painting of you.”

  She scarcely seemed to have heard him.

  “Would you like to touch me, Nismile?”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  The thick turquoise moss was like a carpet. She rolled toward him and his hand hovered above her body, and then he hesitated, for he was certain still that she was a Metamorph playing some perverse Shapeshifter game with him, and a heritage of thousands of years of dread and loathing surfaced in him, and he was terrified of touching her and discovering that her skin had the clammy repugnant texture that he imagined Metamorph skin to have, or that she would shift and turn into a creature of alien form the moment she was in his arms. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted, her tongue flickered between them like a serpent’s: she was waiting. In terror he forced his hand down to her breast. But her flesh was warm and yielding and it felt very much the way the flesh of a young human woman should feel, as well as he could recall after these years of solitude.

  With a soft little cry she pressed herself into his embrace. For a dismaying instant the grotesque image of a Metamorph rose in his mind, angular and long-limbed and noseless, but he shoved the thought away fiercely and gave himself up entirely to her lithe and vigorous body.

  For a long time afterward they lay still, side by side, hands clasped, saying nothing. Even when a light rain-shower came they did not move, but simply allowed the quick sharp sprinkle to wash the sweat from their skins. He opened his eyes eventually and found her watching him with keen curiosity.

  “I want to paint you,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Not now. Tomorrow. You’ll come to my cabin, and—”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t tried to paint in years. It’s important to me to begin again. And I want very much to paint you.”

  “I want very much not to be painted,” she said.

  “Please.”

  “No,” she said gently. She rolled away and stood up. “Paint the jungle. Paint the pool. Don’t paint me, all right, Nismile? All right?”

  He made an unhappy gesture of acceptance.

  She said, “I have to leave now.”

  “Will you tell me where you live?”

  “I already have. Here and there. In the forest. Why do you ask these questions?”

  “I want to be able to find you again. If you disappear, how will I know where to look?”

  “I know where to find you,” she said. “That’s enough.”

  “Will you come to me tomorrow? To my cabin?”

  “I think I will.”

  He took her hand and drew her toward him. But now she was hesitant, remote. The mysteries of her throbbed in his mind. She had told him nothing, really, but her name. He found it too difficult to believe that she, like he, was a solitary of the jungle, wandering as the whim came; but he doubted that he could have failed to detect, in all these weeks, the existence of a human village nearby. The most likely explanation still was that she was a Shapeshifter, embarked for who knew what reason on an adventure with a human. Much as he resisted that idea, he was too rational to reject it completely. But she looked human, she felt human, she acted human. How good were these Metamorphs at their transformations? He was tempted to ask her outright whether his suspicions were correct, but that was foolishness; she had answered nothing else, and surely she would not answer that. He kept his questions to himself. She pulled her hand gently free of his grasp and smiled and made the shape of a kiss with her lips, and stepped toward the fern-bordered trail and was gone.

  Nismile waited at his cabin all the next day. She did not come. It scarcely surprised him. Their meeting had been a dream, a fantasy, an interlude beyond time and space. He did not expect ever to see her again. Toward evening he drew a canvas from the pack he had brought with him and set it up, thinking he might paint the view from his cabin as twilight purpled the forest air; he studied the landscape a long while, testing the verticals of the slender trees against the heavy horizontal of a thick sprawling yellow-berried bush, and eventually shook his head and put his canvas away. Nothing about this landscape needed to be captured by art. In the morning, he thought, he would hike upstream past the meadow to a place where fleshy red succulen
ts sprouted like rubbery spikes from a deep cleft in a great rock: a more promising scene, perhaps.

  But in the morning he found excuses for delaying his departure, and by noon it seemed too late to go. He worked in his little garden plot instead—he had begun transplanting some of the shrubs whose fruits or greens he ate—and that occupied him for hours. In late afternoon a milky fog settled over the forest. He went in; and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door.

  “I had given up hope,” he told her.

  Sarise’s forehead and brows were beaded with moisture. The fog, he thought, or maybe she had been dancing along the path. “I promised I’d come,” she said softly.

  “Yesterday.”

  “This is yesterday,” she said, laughing, and drew a flask from her robe. “You like wine? I found some of this. I had to go a long distance to get it. Yesterday.”

  It was a young gray wine, the kind that tickles the tongue with its sparkle. The flask had no label, but he supposed it to be some Zimroel wine, unknown on Castle Mount. They drank it all, he more than she—she filled his cup again and again—and when it was gone they lurched outside to make love on the cool damp ground beside the stream, and fell into a doze afterward, she waking him in some small hour of the night and leading him to his bed. They spent the rest of the night pressed close to one another, and in the morning she showed no desire to leave. They went to the pool to begin the day with a swim; they embraced again on the turquoise moss; then she guided him to the gigantic red-barked tree where he had first seen her, and pointed out to him a colossal yellow fruit, three or four yards across, that had fallen from one of its enormous branches. Nismile looked at it doubtfully. It had split open, and its interior was a scarlet custardy stuff, studded with huge gleaming black seeds. “Dwikka,” she said. “It will make us drunk.” She stripped off her robe and used it to wrap great chunks of the dwikka-fruit, which they carried back to his cabin and spent all morning eating. They sang and laughed most of the afternoon. For dinner they grilled some fish from Nismile’s weir, and later, as they lay arm in arm watching the night descend, she asked him a thousand questions about his past life, his painting, his boyhood, his travels, about Castle Mount, the Fifty Cities, the Six Rivers, the royal court of Lord Thraym, the royal Castle of uncountable rooms. The questions came from her in a torrent, the newest one rushing forth almost before he had dealt with the last. Her curiosity was inexhaustible. It served, also, to stifle his; for although there was much he yearned to know about her—everything—he had no chance to ask it, and just as well, for he doubted she would give him answers.