Sorcerers of Majipoor Read online

Like the spokes of a giant wheel were the wide roads that crossed those dreary plains to intersect here, one coming in from the major port of Alaisor to the west, three running down from the north, three from the south, and no less than five connecting Sisivondal with mighty Castle Mount off in the distant east. The boulevards and avenues of Sisivondal were laid out as concentric circles that allowed easy connection from any of the incoming highways to any other. All along the streets that ran between the circular avenues were rows of flat-roofed nine-storied warehouses, each very much like its neighbor, in which goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent could temporarily be stored.

  It was an uninteresting but necessary place, and its appearance was in keeping with its function. Located as it was in a district of Alhanroel where little rain fell except for a couple of months in the winter, Sisivondal did without the grand and lavish ornamental gardens that were a distinctive mark of nearly all the cities of Majipoor. The monotony of its broad bare streets, dry and dusty under the constant golden-green eye of the sun, was relieved here and there only by plantings of rugged undemanding shrubs and trees, usually arrayed in long regular rows along the curbsides: squat thick-trunked camaganda palms with drooping grayish-purple fronds, somber lumma-lumma bushes that looked like boulders with leaves and grew so slowly they might just as well have been carved from stone, and spiky garavedas that flowered only once every hundred years, each one sending up a single ominous black spike three times the height of a man.

  No, not a pretty city. But here the cult of the Beholders had taken root, and the Beholders, when they held the Procession of their Mysteries, did indeed bring for a brief time an unfamiliar beauty to the drab streets of Sisivondal.

  They came forth now, dancing and singing and chanting as they marched past the long stolid rows of identical warehouses that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue. At the head of the procession ran scores of young women in immaculate white garments who strewed the ground with the bright crimson-and-gold petals of halatinga blossoms that had been brought in at monumental expense from Castle Mount. Young men with sparkling mirrors sewn to their jerkins danced after them, sprinkling the streets with balsams and unguents. Next came the massed ranks of sturdy chanters, accompanied by the shrill cries of pipes and flutes as they bellowed over and over, “Make way for the holy things! Make way! Make way!”

  Now, marching by herself, there advanced the terrifying figure of a giantess in red boots with soles a foot thick, carrying an enormous two-headed wooden staff that she gripped with both her hands and raised again and again above her head. To her huge shoulders a pair of powerful dark wings was strapped, which fluttered slowly in time to the pounding rhythms of two masked drummers who followed her at a respectful distance. Behind this group came initiates of the cult, walking six abreast, their faces hidden by loose black veils. Their heads had been shaven closely and waxed, those of men and women both, so that the tops of their skulls rose above the swirling veils like domes of polished marble.

  Those in the forefront of this group bore the seven artifacts that the Beholders held to be among their most sacred possessions, things which they displayed only at occasions of the highest gravity. One held aloft an elaborately carved stone lamp of curious design, from which a fearsome, roaring yellow-tipped flame spurted far into the sky; the next, a palm branch interwoven with strands of gold in the form of a coiling serpent with gaping jaws; the one beyond that, the giant image of a disembodied human hand with the middle finger bent backward in an impossible and menacing way; then a fourth with a silver urn in the shape of a woman’s breast, from which he poured an inexhaustible stream of steaming, fragrant golden milk into the streets; and a fifth with a huge fan made of wood, which he swept from side to side in a manner that caused onlookers at the edge of the throng to leap back in fright. A sixth bore the effigy of a plump little pink-fleshed deity whose face had no features, and a seventh came staggering along under the weight of a monstrous male genital organ carved from a long curving slab of purple wood.

  “Behold and worship!” the marchers cried.

  And from the onlookers came an answering cry: “We behold! We behold!”

  More dancers followed—frenzied ones now, in a delirious, ecstatic furor, leaping crazily from one side of the street to another as though tongues of flame were bursting from the pavement all about them, and uttering brief wordless cries like the yippings of demented beasts. They moved on, giving way to a pair of grim towering Skandars who carried slung between them on a stout wooden pole the Ark of the Mysteries, said to contain the most potent and holy objects of the cult, though these would not be revealed to anyone until the final hours of the world.

  And then, at last, borne on a resplendent gleaming cart of ebony inlaid with silver, came the terrifying figure of the high priest, the masked Messenger of the Mysteries. He was a slim naked man of phenomenal height whose rippling body was painted black down one side and gold down the other; he wore over his head the carved visage of a furious-looking yellow-eyed hound with fierce elongated muzzle and long narrow ears standing stiffly erect; and he held in one hand a narrow staff around which golden serpents with swollen necks and red staring eyes were entwined, and in the other a leather whip.

  Screams of joy went up from those who lined the path of the procession as he went by, nodding his blessings to the multitudes at every step and occasionally flicking his whip at them. And they fell in behind him, hundreds of them, thousands, the ordinary citizens of Sisivondal, sober, hardworking citizens, now ecstatic, sobbing, laughing eerily, prancing wildly, flinging high their arms, throwing back their heads as they begged the empty vault of the sky for some sign that mercy would be forthcoming. Spittle flicked their faces. Their eyes rolled in their heads, and on some only the whites could be seen. “Spare us!” they cried. “Spare us!” But what it was from which they wanted to be spared, or from whom they expected their salvation to come, very few in that jostling throng that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue would have been able to say, or perhaps none at all.

  On that same day, in the windswept hilltop city of Sefarad on the western coast of Alhanroel, a little group of mages clad in saffron-colored chasubles, surplices of bright purple silk, and yellow shoes led the way to the sharp ridge known as Lord Zalimox’s Chair, overlooking the roughly tossing waters of the Inner Sea. They were five men and three women of the human kind, stately and tall, with a look of nobility and grandeur about them. Their faces were dabbed with spots of blue powder and their eye-sockets were painted a brilliant scarlet, and they carried long white staffs fashioned from sea-dragon ribs carved along every inch of their length with mysterious runic figures in what was said to be the script of the Elder Gods.

  A long, winding procession of the citizens of Sefarad followed after them, murmuring prayers to those unknown ancient deities. As they moved steadily forward to the sea, they made the sign of the sea-dragon over and over again with their hands, fingers simulating the beating of the voluminous leathery wings, wrists curving to imitate the swooping of the mighty necks.

  Many of those who followed the mages to Lord Zalimox’s Chair were Liimen, the humblest folk of the town, slender rough-skinned people with dark flat faces much wider than they were high, out of which three circular eyes stared like glowing coals. These simple fishermen and farmers and street-sweepers and sausage-vendors had for many centuries looked toward the huge winged dragons of Majipoor’s seas as semidivine beings. For them the dragons occupied a station midway between the mortal people of Majipoor and the gods who once had ruled this giant planet and had unaccountably departed long ago; and they felt that those gods would one day return to take possession of what was rightfully theirs. Now, in clustering groups of fifty or a hundred, the Liimen of Sefarad hastened to the edge of the sea to beg their vanished gods to hasten their return.

  But they were far from alone today. Word had gone about that a herd of sea-dragons would be coming close to shore here this day. That was startling in itself, for the drag
ons in their long maritime migrations were never a common sight along this coast of Alhanroel; and the notion that this visitation might be a miraculous one, that the immense beasts might somehow have the ability to establish contact with those mysterious ancient gods of which the Liiumen had long babbled, had spread like fire in dry brush through every race of the city. Humans, Hjorts, Ghayrogs, and even a handful of Vroons and Su-Suheris, were also to be found in the band of pilgrims that came scrambling up the rocky road to the beach.

  And shapes were visible today, far out to sea, that might have been the shapes of dragons, unless they were something else. “I see them!” one pilgrim cried to the next in surprise and delight. “A miracle! The dragons are here!” And perhaps they were. Humped gray forms like bulky barrels floating in the sea? Dark wide-spreading wings? Yes, dragons. Maybe so. Or maybe just illusions, born of the glinting and flashing of sunlight against the churning tops of the waves.

  “I see them, I see them!” the pilgrims continued to cry, shouting it until their voices grew hoarse and ragged, each one spurring his neighbor on toward desperate certainty.

  And at the very summit of the rock known as Lord Zalimox’s Chair the mages in their saffron chasubles and surplices of bright silk lifted their staffs of smooth white bone one by one and held them toward the sea and in tones of the greatest solemnity called out words in a language that no one understood:

  “Maazmoorn . . . Seizimoor . . . Sheitoon . . . Sepp!”

  From the congregation at the water’s edge resounded the answering cry:

  “Maazmoorn . . . Seizimoor . . . Sheitoon . . . Sepp!”

  And from the sea came, as ever, the rhythmic murmuring boom of the surf, saying things that the assembled worshipers were free to interpret in whatever way they wished.

  In wondrous Dulorn, the shining diamond-bright city of crystalline stone that the reptilian-looking Ghayrogs had built in western Zimroel, the amusements and entertainments of the Perpetual Circus had temporarily been put aside in this troubled hour, so that the huge circular building that housed the Circus could be employed for holier matters.

  All the buildings of Dulorn were airy sparkling things of fantasy, but for this one. The white mineral out of which the Ghayrogs had constructed Dulorn was a dazzling light calcite of high refractiveness. They had employed it with surpassing ingenuity in fashioning slender lofty towers of fanciful form, richly ornamented with faceted sides and flying buttresses, with leaping minarets and dizzying diagonal embrasures, everything bright as if lit by sheets of lightning in the midday sun.

  But the building of the Perpetual Circus, at the eastern edge of town, was a simple and unadorned circular drum, ninety feet high and in diameter of such an amplitude that it could easily contain an audience of hundreds of thousands. Here, because the snaky-haired forked-tongued Ghayrogs slept only a few months out of the year and were voraciously eager for diversion the rest of the time, theatrical performances of all sorts were held—jugglers, acrobats, teams of downs, trained-animal shows, prestidigitators, levitators, gobblers of live animals, anything at all that someone might deem amusing, a dozen or more acts at once on the huge stage—continuously, every hour of the day and every day of the year.

  Now all that had, however, been put aside in favor of a circus of a different sort. In this city of unique and striking loveliness, deformity had lately come to be looked upon as sacred, and monsters of all sorts were brought forth into the arena from every part of Majipoor so that they could be worshiped and implored to intercede with the dark powers that threatened the world.

  So here, strutting about like demigods, were pygmies and giants, pinheads and human skeletons, hunchbacks and gnomes, all manner of genetic detritus, the sad prodigies of a hundred kinds of miserable unfortunate births. Every nightmare distortion was on show here, monsters of unthinkable sorts, things so bizarre that no one would ever have dared to dream them: humans, Ghayrogs, Skandars, Hjorts, no species being spared, all packed one up against another. Here were two Ghayrogs whose bodies were joined at the back from shoulder to buttock, but one inverted in regard to the other, heads and feet in opposite ways; here was a woman whose boneless arms writhed like serpents, and a man whose fiery-hued head bore a ravenous orange bird bill that was curved like the beak of a milufta but even more savagely sharp. A man who was broader-bodied than he was tall, with arms like flimsy little flippers—a quartet of gaunt Liimen who were linked one to the next by a long ropy black umbilicus—a man with one giant eye in the center of his forehead; another with only a single leg, like a pedestal, proceeding from both his hips—another with feet at the ends of his arms, and hands sprouting from his ankles—

  All this was displayed in turn to every sector of the immense auditorium, for the entire stage floated in a pool of quicksilver and turned slowly on hidden bearings, making a complete revolution in not much more than an hour. During regular performances of the Circus, those sitting in the circular tiers that rose in sloping circles to the roof of the building had only to sit where they were and it all would come to them.

  But this was not a performance. It was a sacrament. Therefore the audience was allowed to come down out of the stands and mingle on the stage, as never was permitted ordinarily. A corps of Skandar wardens maintained order, keeping the swarming mass of worshipers filing from the seats in a single line with stinging blows of long batons, and prodding them swiftly onward from the stage once they had received the blessing for which they had come. Slowly, patiently, the members of the audience shuffled forward, knelt before this grotesque creature or that one, solemnly touched its knee or its toe or the hem of its robe, and then moved on.

  In five locations only, equidistantly arranged around the great stage to form the points of a giant star, were there any open spaces in this multitude of monstrosities and their adorers. These five open places on the stage had been left clear for the holiest beings of all, the androgynes—those who combined in themselves the attributes both of male and female, and who thus represented the unity and harmony of the cosmos, which was the commodity that everyone on Majipoor most fervently wished to preserve.

  No one knew the origin of the androgynes. Some said that they were from Triggoin, that half-mythical city in the northern reaches of Alhanroel where only wizards lived. Some had heard that they came from Til-omon or Narabal or Ni-moya or some other city of Zimroel, and some that they were from Natu Gorvinu in remotest Suvrael, while others claimed they were native to one of the grand cities of Castle Mount itself; but though there was no agreement over where it was they had come into the world, it was universally believed that they had been born at a single birthing to a witch-woman who had engendered them herself, entirely unaided, simply through the casting of powerful spells.

  They were frail, pallid little creatures, these androgynes. But though they were no taller than children, their bodies were mature. Three had the gentle faces of women and distinct womanly bosoms, though small ones, but the well-developed genitalia of men below. The other two had the wiry, muscular upper bodies of men, with broad shoulders and flat, hard chests, but their hips were wide flaring female ones, their buttocks and thighs were full and plump, and at the joining of their legs they showed no trace of the male organs of generation.

  Naked, impassive, they displayed themselves all day long and all night too at the five points of the imaginary star that linked them on the stage, protected from the eagerly reaching arms of the gaping multitudes by circular boundary lines of cool red sorcery-flame that no one dared to cross, and by platoons of dour-faced baton-wielding Skandars as well, just in case.

  The androgynes stood staring at the crowds that passed before them in a distant, uncaring way, silent and aloof, like visitors from some other plane of existence. And throughout the long hours of the day and the night, the fearful people of Dulorn filed ceaselessly through the drum-shaped building of the Perpetual Circus, thousands and hundreds of thousands paying homage to the sacred monsters, reaching their hands out imploringly to
the uncaring androgynes and crying out their prayer in staccato shrieks sharp enough to pierce the sky, and the message that they repeated was the same one going up to the heavens from the marchers in the streets of Sisivondal: “Spare us . . . Spare us . . .”

  Far to the south, half a vast continent away in the humid city of Narabal on Zimroel, where winter was unknown and vegetation grew with violent abandon in the cloak of soft, dense, sultry air, the cult of flagellanti held sway. Men in white robes crisscrossed by broad yellow stripes ran through the streets in maniacal bounding leaps, brandishing swords and maces and knives. From time to time they would halt and throw their heads forward until their long hair covered their faces, and dance first on one foot and then the other while wildly rotating their necks, and bite themselves savagely on their forearms with no show of distress, as though they were unaware of pain. Then, eyes wild with glee, they slashed their own flesh with their knives, or presented their bared backs to women who rushed upon them bearing whips made of thokka vines strung with the knucklebones of blaves. Blood flowed freely in the streets, mixing with the rain of Narabal’s fine, steady downpours and carried away with it in the cobblestone gutters. “Yamaghai! Yamagha!” they shouted, over and over. Nobody knew what those words meant, but they were deemed to be words of notable power, for one was immune to the pain of the knives and the whips so long as one shouted them. “Yamaghai! Yamagha! Yamaghai! Yamagha!”

  It was the blood of bull-bidlaks with which they hoped to purify themselves in great glistening Ni-moya, grandest of the cities of the western continent, seven thousand miles to the east of the crystalline city of Dulorn. By hundreds they crowded into newly built underground sanctums, huddling shoulder to shoulder beneath the slitted gratings that covered these dank musty chambers and looking upward to the mages in ornate ritual vestments and golden helmets topped with quivering crests of red feathers who stood chanting in the street above them. And the slow heavy-thighed bidlaks were led forth over the grates; and the long knives flashed; and the blood came running down in bright rivulets upon the worshipers below, who crowded forward, shoving one another roughly aside as they strived to receive it on their upturned faces and tongues, to catch it in their hands and smear it over their eyes, to drench their clothing in it. With grunting cries of ferocious joy they received the bloody sacrament and were dizzied and inflamed by it; and then they moved along, some dancing, some merely lurching, and others taking their places as new bidlaks were led into position on the grates above.