Tales of Majipoor Page 21
Thuwayne had been informed that her brother had begun dabbling in certain of those philosophies, and possibly had met his death as a result. I am a man of business, a practical man, concerned with shipping costs and bills of lading, not with the propitiation of demons, and I regard all these new philosophies essentially as lunacy. A few little protective amulets and talismans suffice for me, purely on the off chance that they might do some good; I go no farther into any of this occult stuff. Sippulgar was known to be a spawning-ground for the new cults, and that made me apprehensive. But, as I say, I will refuse Thuwayne nothing.
She asked me to go to Sippulgar to investigate her brother’s disappearance and probable death; and so to Sippulgar I went.
Cities are far apart on Majipoor and the road from anywhere to anywhere is usually a long one; but Sippulgar is a port city on the southern sea, and Sisivondal is a heartland city set in the midst of a bare featureless plain some thousands of miles across, far to the north, and so I found myself embarking on what I knew would be the great journey of my lifetime.
Plotting my route was easy. A dozen great highways meet in Sisivondal, intersecting like the spokes of a giant wheel: one coming in from the great port of Alaisor in the west, five going eastward toward Castle Mount, three descending from the north, and three connecting us with the south. Sisivondal’s boulevards and avenues are laid out in concentric circles that allow easy connection from one highway to another. All along the streets that run between the circular avenues are rows of warehouses where goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent are stored. The group of warehouses I control is close by the Great Southern Highway, the one which would carry me toward my goal, and so, after issuing a last set of instructions to my staff, I set out from there early one morning on my journey toward the sea.
Sisivondal has been called “a thousand miles of outskirts.” That is unkind, but I suppose it is true. The central sector is devoted entirely to commerce, many miles of warehouses and not much else; then one passes through the suburban residential district, and beyond that lies a zone of customs sheds and repair shops, gradually trickling off into the parched treeless plain beyond. Our climate is an extremely dry one and our only vegetation is of necessity sturdy: huge lumma-lummas that look like big gray rocks, and prickly garavedas that take a whole century to bring forth their black flower-spikes, and purple-leaved camaganda palms that can go years without a drop of water. Beyond town there is no vegetation at all, only a barren, dusty plain. Not a pretty place, I suppose, but essential to the economy of our continent; and in any case I am used to it.
Gradually, as I left central Alhanroel behind, the world grew more gracious. I spent a day or two in lovely Bailemoona, which I had visited years before, a city famous for its subtle cuisine and its swarms of shining bees, large as small birds and nearly as intelligent. There I hired a carriage to take me southward through the Sulfur Desert, that region of surpassing yellowness, where amidst fantastic eroded spires of soft cream-colored stone the bizarre city of Ketheron was set, a place of twisted yellow towers that could have been the pointed caps of witches. I had been there once before too. Beyond, though, everything was new to me. The air very shortly took on a tropic moistness, becoming soft as velvet, and rain-showers fell frequently. Our caravan rode past the Cliff of Eyes, a white mountain pockmarked with hundreds of dark shining boulders that stared down at us like disapproving orbs, and then we were at the Pillars of Dvorn, two sharp-tipped blue-gray rocks set athwart the highway to mark the boundary between central and southern Alhanroel. On the far side lay Arvyanda of the golden hills: here the slopes were covered by stubby trees whose stiff oval leaves had a metallic texture and yielded a brilliant glint in the strong tropical sunlight. Already I felt very far from Sisivondal, almost on another world entirely.
Gradually the sky grew dark with a thick cover of clouds. We were coming into the jungles of Kajith Kajulon, a green empire where rain falls constantly, more rain in a week than I had seen in the past ten years, and the trunks of the trees were bright with the red and yellow splashes of enormous fungi. There was no end to the rain, nor to the clouds of insects that swarmed around us, and we were besieged by armies of scarlet lizards and loud flat-headed toads. Long chains of blue spiders hung down from every branch, eyeing us in a sinister way. We rode through Kajith Kajulon for many days. I thought my bones would melt in the humid air.
But at last we left that dense forest and emerged into the coastal province of Aruachosia, of which Sippulgar is the capital. Now we were just a few hundred miles from the sea, and the air, though warm and moist and heavy, was tempered by salty breezes out of the south. Just ahead lay the breathtaking wonder that is Sippulgar.
Everyone always calls it golden Sippulgar. Now I saw why. Its buildings, which are no more than two and three stories high, are made from a golden sandstone, flecked with bits of mica, that gleams with a dazzling brightness when the sun comes up out of the southern sea. I was amazed by the intensity of that brightness, and by the lushness of the decorative plantings that lined the streets: a hundred different kinds of tropical shrubs, all of them unknown to me, whose blossoms blazed forth in orange and green and scarlet and blue and gold, with darker ones in maroon and even jet-black interspersed among them for contrast. They exuded such a wealth of fragrance that the air itself seemed perfumed. Small wonder this district is known as the Incense Coast. I could not tell one plant from another, but I knew from a lifetime spent among bills of lading and customs forms that the region around Sippulgar was rich in cinnamon and khazil, the balsam called hinnam, thanibong trees and scarlet fhiiis, and many another scented plant, from which were produced a host of aromatic oils and gums.
I had booked a room in a hotel close to the city center, so that it would be easy for me to consult the official documents and records I needed in my quest. It was situated just a couple of blocks from the waterfront; and on my way there it was my bad luck to become entangled in a religious procession, of a sort that I soon learned was ubiquitous here. And so I stood for an hour and a half waiting amidst my baggage before I was able to cross the street and continue on to my lodgings.
Even in this era of multitudinous cults and sorceries, Sippulgar stands out for its abundance of strange creeds. Perhaps it is the heavy tropical air that spawns such credulity. At home in Sisivondal only one of these superstitions holds sway, the cult of the Beholders. All too frequently I have seen its worshippers dancing ecstatically down Grand Alaisor Avenue, strewing costly imported fiower-petals everywhere and blowing on pipes and flutes as the grotesque statuettes that are their seven sacred artifacts are carried on high, preceding the great box that they call the Ark of the Mysteries and the ebony cart that carries their high priest, who wears a mask with the visage of a terrifying yellow-eyed hound. What it is that the Beholders seek, and what they find, I will never know; but at least we have only that one cult to interrupt the smooth flow of commerce with its antics. In Sippulgar, I soon would learn, there were dozens.
From a distance I heard the shrill shriek of bellhorns, the crashing of cymbals, the tremendous uproar of a platoon of kettle-drums. When I drew nearer I saw my route blocked by a horde of marchers wearing nothing but loincloths and sandals, striding along with their heads upraised to the sky. There seemed to be millions of them. The people of Sippulgar are dark-skinned, mostly, no doubt some adaptation to the intense sunlight, but the sweat-shiny bodies of the marchers were streaked with bright splotches of red and green and purple that echoed the gaudiness of the shrubs in bloom all about them. There was no hope of crossing the street. I stood and waited. Eventually a group of weeping, chanting worshippers came down the boulevard pulling a massive platform on which stood the wooden image of a winged serpent that had the frightening toothy-snouted blazing-eyed face of a jakkabole, that ravenous, angry beast of the eastern highlands. I turned to the man who stood beside me. “I am a stranger here,” I said. “What god is that they worship?”
“It i
s Time,” he told me. “The devourer of all.”
Yes. The winged serpent that flies ever onward, jaws agape, engulfing everything in its path, as even the maddened jakka-boles do when they descend on the farms of the Vrambikat Valley in their ravening hunger. I watched the good folk of Sippulgar, lost in their madness, march on and on and on until at last the boulevard was clear, and I went across to my hotel and sank down gratefully on the softest of beds.
What I knew about my brother-in-law Melifont’s life, and of his supposed fate, was this:
He was one of those unhappy men fated to fail at every enterprise he turned his hand to, despite the advantages of intelligence, zeal, and energy. At an early age he had left Sisivondal for the southlands to seek his fortune. He involved himself first in a mining project in the lava country back of the port of Glystrintal, where since time immemorial bold fools had sought for rumored mines of silver and gold. Melifont found neither silver nor gold, and when he moved on to search for the equally fabulous iron mines of Skakkenoir of the red soil, he returned so damaged from his adventures that his recovery took over a year. Hoping then for a quieter life, he settled next on the Stoienzar Peninsula, where he worked for a time as a tavernkeeper but appears also to have helped to found a bank that prospered greatly for a time, though ultimately it came to grief in a spectacular way. It was during his period of prosperity that I married his younger sister, and he returned to Sisivondal for the first time in many years to attend the ceremony. He was then about forty, a tall, handsome man with a florid face and sleek black hair, who limped a little, a souvenir of his mining project in Skakkenoir. I found him charming – magnetic, even – and Thuwayne, who had not seen her swaggering brother since she was a little girl, looked at him constantly in wonder and fascination. He presented us with a wedding gift of surprising generosity, which I put to good use in the expansion of my warehousing business.
Next we heard of him, his bank had failed – the malfeasance of a conniving partner, we were told – and he was off to Zimroel to sell rope to the Shapeshifters, or some such thing. Very little news travels from remotest Zimroel to our part of the world, and I have no idea how Melifont occupied himself for the decade that followed; but then he turned up in Sisivondal once again, looking very much older, his hair now gray and sparse, his limp more pronounced, but he was still charismatic, still full of ambition and optimism. His new endeavor was a shipping company that proposed to run a ferry service across the Inner Sea between Piliplok in Zimroel and the port of Tolaghai in our sun-blasted southern continent of Suvrael. I thought it was a crazy idea myself – Suvrael is a terrible place, and produces almost nothing useful – but in my relief at not being asked to finance his company out of my own pocket I gladly introduced him to several bankers of my acquaintance, whom he charmed into putting up a huge sum to underwrite his shipping operation. That was the last I saw of my brother-in-law Melifont. Now and again I asked my friends in shipping circles what they had heard of his ferry company, and in time I learned that it, too, had gone bankrupt. We heard from him only once more: a letter, three years back, that let us know that he had settled now in Sippulgar and had some interesting ideas for capitalizing on business conditions there. After that, only silence, until the puzzling next-of-kin letter from the Prefecture of Sippulgar inviting my sister to collect her brother’s effects.
The letter did not actually say he was dead. He was simply “no longer in Sippulgar,” she was told, and there was unclaimed property which would revert to the province if not collected by a member of his family. Certainly the implication of death was there, but not the certainty. I made inquiries in official circles and learned, after much patient probing, that Melifont Ambithorn had vanished under mysterious circumstances, was not expected to return, and his property in Sippulgar, such as it might be – undescribed – was formally considered to have been abandoned by him. Further inquiry yielded me nothing. “Mysterious circumstances,” was all anyone would say, and though I used my best political and commercial connections to get some more detailed explanation, the mystery remained a mystery. He had disappeared, and so far as the Prefecture of Sippulgar was concerned there was no likelihood of his turning up again, but no one would say explicitly that he was dead. Thuwayne could not accept such vagueness. Thus my journey to Sippulgar.
My first call was at the Prefecture. I bore documents establishing my family connection with Melithorn and informing me of the procedure I was supposed to follow when in Sippulgar, but even so it took me two hours to reach any official with authority to assist me in the case. He was, of course, a Hjort, puffy-faced and rough-skinned, with an enormous toadlike head. I do not like those officious creatures – who does? – but Hjorts populate our bureaucracy to such a degree that it is impossible for me to avoid frequent contact with them, and I have learned to be patient with their superciliousness and coarseness. The Hjort spent a long time pondering my papers, muttering to himself and jotting down copious notes, and said, finally, “Why are you here in place of his sister?”
I said with some restraint, “His sister – my wife – is not in a state of health that permits such a long journey. But I believe these documents make it clear that I am her officially designated representative.”
The documents I had shown him said so in the very first sentence. I refrained from pointing that out. The Hjort muttered to himself some more and at length, scowling – and when a Hjort scowls, it is with a mouth that stretches from Alhanroel to Zimroel – he scribbled something and applied his stamp of office to it and shoved it across the desk to me. It was a permit to receive the personal effects of Melifont Ambithorn, citizen of Sippulgar, legally presumed to be deceased.
His effects weren’t to be had at the Prefecture, of course. I had to cross half the city, a journey that entangled me in two more religious processions, noisy and fervid, before I reached the government storehouse where Melifont’s things were being kept. After the predictable official delays I was given three goodsized boxes, which I took back to my hotel to inspect.
One of them contained some clothing, a little cheap jewelry, and a small collection of books. There was nothing useful there. The second box, I was displeased to see, was crammed with what even I could recognize as the apparatus used in the practice of sorcery: ambivials, crucibles, alembics, ammatepilas, an astrolabe, a pair of phalangaria, stoppered flasks containing oils and powders of many colors, and various other instruments whose names I did not know. I sorted through this stuff with mounting distaste. Why had my brother-in-law, that restless, energetic man whose ambitions had driven him into all those ill-fated ventures in mining, banking, and shipping, gathered about himself such a hodgepodge of useless claptrap, such a huge collection of instruments and materials suitable only for exploiting the delusions of a credulous populace?
The answer to my question was right there in the question itself. But – perhaps it was the fatigue of my long day’s quest, or some effect of the close, humid air – it was some long while before I saw what should have been instantly obvious.
I opened the third box. In it were papers, arranged in no perceptible order: documents relating to Melifont’s many defunct business enterprises of years gone by, travel brochures, extracts from technical books, and so on, everything jumbled hopelessly together. I picked through it and was rewarded, after a time, with a small handwritten journal, practically illegible, the first entry of which was dated just eighteen months before. I leafed through it, but found my brother-in-law’s scribbled writing difficult to make out and the entries themselves cryptic to the point of incoherence, and set it aside for further study. Then came another great wad of obsolete commercial records, and, below these, the one useful find in the whole messy mass: a leather binder in which were kept a group of contracts and municipal licenses and other material, all of it just a couple of years old, pertaining to the partnership between Melifont Ambithorn and a certain Nikkon Flurivole, citizen of Sippulgar, with whom Melifont proposed to organize a firm devoted t
o “the enhancement and farthering of the spiritual welfare of the people of Sippulgar and the entire Aruachosian coast.”
And instantly I saw it all. My brother-in-law, having spent thirty years of his life failing at this promising project and that one, had in a desperate moment begun to dabble in sorcery, and very likely had gone on from that to set himself up in the business of starting a new religion.
Locating his partner, this Nikkon Flurivole, was my obvious next step. But there were no Flurivoles listed in the municipal directory, and a visit to the Prefecture got me nowhere, since the civic government was plainly not going to provide information about its citizens merely to gratify the curiosity of strangers from Sisivondal. In vain did I display the writ that allowed me to investigate the fate of Melithon Ambithorn, and the legal papers that showed that this Flurivole had been his partner in the last known commercial undertaking of his life. My writ, I was told, extended to information about Melithon Ambithorn and no one else.
I know how to handle such bureaucratic obfuscation. Bribing Hjorts is a fool’s game – they will take your money and report you for attempted bribery – but the city administration was not made up entirely of Hjorts, and after a couple of attempts I found a chatty little undersecretary in the Registry of Names who, for the price of a couple of bowls of good Muldemar wine looked Flurivole up for me and reported that he was, like Melifont, “no longer in Sippulgar,” that he was carried in the registry as “disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” and that his personal effects were available for claiming by the next of kin, but to date no one had filed a request for them. My jolly new friend even supplied me with Flurivole’s last known address; but when I went there – it was a residential hotel in a not very golden corner of the city – I learned that his rooms had been rented to someone else quite some while back, that the rental agent could not or would not tell me anything about Flurivole at all, and that the new tenant knew nothing about his predecessor in the building. Nor did the name of Melifont Ambithorn mean anything to him.