Tales of Majipoor Read online

  “No,” Stiamot said. “I think I’ve heard too much already.”

  These revelations had rocked him like an earthquake.

  He had known, of course, that Lord Thrykeld had given up his throne, pleading incapacity to serve, and that soon afterward he had been lost at sea. He had suspected, as many people did, that there probably had been more to the change of monarchs than that, that the forceful and charismatic Lord Strelkimar very likely had been instrumental in his cousin’s decision to abdicate, though he had taken the tale of Thrykeld’s deteriorating health at face value. But Mundiveen’s tale of strife at court, of ultimatum and counter-ultimatum between the cousins, of the forcible overthrow of a king – and of Mundiveen’s own near-fatal beating – gave the history of the years just before his own arrival at court a darker hue than he ever could have imagined. It all fit together now, Mundiveen’s sour cynicism, Strelkimar’s haunted, guiit-stricken eyes, the awkwardness and strangeness of the meeting of the two men this morning, so many years after all those terrible events. Lord Strelkimar lived daily with the knowledge that he had stolen the throne; Mundiveen lived daily with his fury and pain. And Stiamot had stupidly brought the two of them face to face.

  “Now,” Mundiveen said, “tell me what your Lord Strelkimar wants to know about the Piurivars.”

  “We want to find a solution to the problem of how we are going to live with them in the years to come, how we are going to share the planet. The Council is split in various ways, putting forth all sorts of ideas ranging from a geographical separation of the races to an all-out war of extermination. I myself hope to find some middle course. The Coronal hasn’t been taking part in our discussions up to now, but he seems to have come around to an awareness that we need to deal with the issue. And so, in my innocence, I told him that I had encountered someone who had intimate knowledge of the Piurivar way of life, and he asked me to bring you to speak with him. Not knowing, of course, that that man was you.”

  “The truth must have come as a great surprise to him.”

  “Something of a shock, I would say.”

  Mundiveen smiled balefully. “Well, so be it. If he had allowed me to tell him anything, I would have said that there’s no good solution to be found. Humans and Piurivars are never going to get along, my friend. Believe me. Never. Never”

  The formal state banquet was held as scheduled that evening, in the municipal festival hall, a lofty wooden structure with an arching roof far above. Planters had come in from all about, drawn by the novelty of a Coronal in their midst. A high table had been set up where the Coronal, in full royal regalia, sat flanked by members of his entourage, a duke or two, a couple of Council members, a sprinkling of Pontifical officials. District Resident Kalban Vond sat at the Coronal’s right hand – the greatest honor ever accorded him, Stiamot supposed.

  Just as the first course was being served Stiamot heard the sounds of a commotion outside, shouts, angry cries. Alarmed, he rushed to the window.

  A struggle of some kind was going on right outside the hall. Stiamot saw bursts of flame limned against the night, shadowy figures running about. Looking back at the high table, he saw the Coronal sitting altogether motionless, frowning, lost once again in the darkness of his own thoughts. He seemed entirely unaware that anything unusual might be taking place. But the District Resident beside him looked stricken and aghast. His mouth was agape; his soft, fleshy face seemed to be sagging.

  Then, unexpectedly, astonishingly, a side door that Stiamot had not noticed before opened and Mundiveen came limping in. After what had passed between the Coronal and him this morning, he was the last person, perhaps, whom Stiamot expected to see in the banqueting hall tonight. Flushed, panting, he made his way laboriously to Stiamot’s side at the window.

  “Metamorphs,” he said hoarsely. “Disguised as townsfolk. Knives under their cloaks. They’re throwing firebrands.” Stiamot looked out again. In the chaos beyond the window he was able to make out the guards attempting to form a phalanx. They were surrounded on three sides by a host of cloaked figures in rapid motion, flickering, changing dizzyingly from one shape to another as they moved.

  He seized Mundiveen by the shoulder. “What is this?”

  “The beginning of the insurrection, I think. They want to burn the building down.”

  “The Coronal—!”

  “Yes, the Coronal.”

  “I’m going out there,” said Stiamot. “I have to do something.”

  “No one can do anything. Especially not you.”

  Hesitating only a moment, Stiamot said, “Well, then, what about you? Even in the darkness, they’ll recognize you. And you could talk to them. They trust you if they trust anybody. You’ve done so many things for them. Explain to them now that this is insane, that they have to withdraw or they’ll all die, that the Coronal is too well guarded.”

  Mundiveen glared at him scornfully. “Why would they care about that? They’re beyond all caring about anything. Don’t you see, Stiamot, there’s no hope? This is a war to the death, beginning right now, right here, and it will never end, at least not until you people recognize that you have no choice but to eradicate them altogether.”

  His words hit Stiamot with the force of a punch. You people? Did Mundiveen, then, think that he stood outside the human race? You have to eradicate them altogether? This, from a man who had spent so many years living among them? Stiamot faltered, speechless.

  But then, abruptly, between one instant and the next, Mundiveen’s expression changed. A flash of something new came into his eyes, a wild, almost gleeful look, something Stiamot had never seen in them before. “All right,” he said, with a savage, twisted grin. “As you wish, my friend. I’ll go to them. I’ll talk to them.”

  “But – wait – wait a moment, Mundiveen—”

  Mundiveen broke free of Stiamot’s grasp and ran from the hall.

  By now the Coronal seemed to have realized that there was trouble of some sort; he had half-risen from his seat and was looking questioningly toward Stiamot. Stiamot beckoned urgently to him to sit down. His figure would be too conspicuous this way if the Metamorphs succeeded in breaking into the hall.

  Then he returned his attention to the window. Mundiveen had somehow succeeded in getting through the line of guards. Stiamot could see his small, angular form, moving clumsily and with great difficulty but even so at remarkable speed into the midst of the attackers. He was visible for a moment, his hands lifted high as though he were calling for their attention. Then the Shapeshifters swarmed in around him, surrounding him, yelling so loudly that their fierce incomprehensible cries penetrated the walls of the building. Stiamot had a fragmentary glimpse or two of Mundiveen tottering about at the center of their group, and then, as Stiamot watched in horror, they closed their circle tightly about him and Mundiveen seemed to melt, to vanish, to disappear entirely from view.

  In the morning, after order had been restored and the bodies cleared away, and while the preparations for the Coronal’s departure from Domgrave were being made, Lord Strelkimar called Stiamot to his side.

  The Coronal was so pale that the blackness of his beard seemed to have doubled and redoubled in the night. His hands were shaking. He had not dressed; he wore only a casual robe loosely girt, and a flask of wine stood before him on the table.

  Stiamot said at once, “My lord, the Shapeshifters—”

  Strelkimar waved him to silence with an impatient gesture. “Forget the Shapeshifters for a moment, Stiamot, and listen to me. There’s news from the Labyrinth.” Lord Strelkimar’s voice was a ragged thread, the merest fragment of sound. Stiamot had to strain to hear him. “A message came to me in the afternoon, just as I was getting dressed for the banquet. The Pontifex Gherivale has died. It was a peaceful end, I am told. This has been a day of great surprises, and they are not yet over, my lord.”

  My lord? My lord? Had he lost his mind?

  Blinking in confusion, Stiamot said, “What are you saying, my lord?”

&nbs
p; “Don’t call me ‘my lord.’ That’s you, Stiamot. I am Pontifex, now.”

  “And I am—?” The startling implications began to sink in, and his mind swirled in a jumble of wonder and disbelief. This was unthinkable. “Do I understand you correctly, my lord? How can this be? You are asking me – me—”

  “We are in need of a new Coronal. There’s a vacancy in the position. The succession must be maintained.”

  “Yes, of course. But – Coronal – me? Surely you aren’t serious. Consider how young I am!” He felt as though he were moving in a dream. “There are counsellors much senior to me. What about Faninal? What about Kreistand?”

  “They’ll be disappointed, I suppose. But we need a Coronal, right away, and we need a young one. You’ll be fighting the war against the Shapeshifters for the rest of your life.”

  “The war?” said Stiamot leadenly.

  “Yes, of course, the war. Your war. The war that we pretended for so long wasn’t coming, and which has now arrived. And happy I am to be able to hand it to you and hide myself away in the Labyrinth. I have enough sins on my soul for one lifetime.” Strelkimar rose. He loomed over Stiamot, a big man, heavy-muscled, deep-chested, still young himself. His face was bloodless with fatigue. Stiamot saw what might have been tears glistening at the corners of Strelkimar’s eyes. “Come, man. Let’s go out to the others and give them the news.”

  Stiamot nodded like one who moves in a trance. As it all sank in, the meaning of the bloody events of the night before, the change of government at the Labyrinth, his own precipitous rise to the Coronal’s throne, he knew that Strelkimar was right about the coming of the war. He had known that it was coming from the moment of Mundiveen’s death, or even a little earlier. There is no hope, the little man had said, before running from the banquet hall to yield himself up to his doom. This was something new, an attack on the Coronal himself, and it would not stop there. This is a war to the death. The uneasy peace that had obtained so long between human and Metamorph was at its end. And this was the end of the line, too, for Stiamot’s own dreams of a moderate middle course, of some peaceful resolution of the Metamorph problem. The races must be separated, he thought, or else one of them must be exterminated; and now that high power had been thrust upon him, he would choose the lesser of the two evils.

  “Come,” Strelkimar said again. “I have to introduce the new Coronal to them. Come with me, Lord Stiamot.”

  The war began in earnest in the spring. It ended in victory in the thirtieth year of Lord Stiamot’s reign.

  2

  The Book of Changes

  Standing at the narrow window of his bedchamber early on the morning of the second day of his new life as a captive, looking out at the blood-red waters of the Sea of Barbirike far below, Aithin Furvain heard the bolt that sealed his apartment from the outside being thrown back. He glanced quickly around and saw the lithe catlike form of his captor, the bandit chief Kasinibon, come sidling in. Furvain turned toward the window again.

  “As I was saying last night, it truly is a beautiful view, isn’t it?” Kasinibon said. “There’s nothing like that scarlet lake anywhere else in all Majipoor.”

  “Lovely, yes,” said Furvain, in a remote, affectless way.

  With the same relentless good cheer Kasinibon went on, addressing himself to Furvain’s back, “I do hope you slept well, and that in general you’re finding your lodgings here comfortable, Prince Aithin.”

  Out of some vestigial sense of courtesy – courtesy, even to a bandit! – Furvain turned to face the other man. “I don’t ordinarily use my title,” he said, stiffly, coolly.

  “Of course. Neither do I, as a matter of fact. I come from a long line of east-country nobility, you know. Minor nobility, perhaps, yet nobility never the less. But they are such archaic things, titles!” Kasinibon grinned. It was a sly grin, almost conspiratorial, a mingling of mockery and charm. Despite everything Furvain found it impossible to dislike the man. “You haven’t answered my question, though. Are you comfortable here, Furvain?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite. It’s absolutely the most elegant of prisons.”

  “I do wish to point out that this is not actually a prison but merely a private residence.”

  “I suppose. Even so, I’m a prisoner here, is that not true?”

  “I concede the point. You are indeed a prisoner, for the time being. My prisoner.”

  “Thank you,” said Furvain. “I appreciate your straightforwardness.” He returned his attention to Barbirike Sea, which stretched, long and slender as a spear, for fifty miles or so through the valley below the gray cliff on which Kasinibon’s fortress-like retreat was perched. Long rows of tall sharp-tipped crescent dunes, soft as clouds from this distance, bordered its shores. They too were red. Even the air here had a red reflected shimmer. The sun itself seemed to have taken on a tinge of it. Kasinibon had explained yesterday, though Furvain had not been particularly interested in hearing it at the time, that the Sea of Barbirike was home to untold billions of tiny crustaceans whose fragile bright-colored shells, decomposing over the millennia, had imparted that bloody hue to the sea’s waters and given rise also to the red sands of the adjacent dunes. Furvain wondered whether his royal father, who had such an obsessive interest in intense color effects, had ever made the journey out here to see this place. Surely he had. Surely.

  Kasinibon said, “I’ve brought you some pens and a supply of paper.” He laid them neatly out on the little table beside Furvain’s bed. “As I said earlier, this view is bound to inspire poetry in you, that I know.”

  “No doubt it will,” said Furvain, still speaking in that same distant, uninflected tone.

  “Shall we take a closer look at the lake this afternoon, you and I?”

  “So you don’t intend to keep me penned up all the time in these three rooms?”

  “Of course I don’t. Why would I be so cruel?”

  “Well, then. I’ll be pleased to be taken on a tour of the lake,” Furvain said, as indifferently as before. “Its beauty may indeed stir a poem or two in me.”

  Kasinibon gave the stack of paper an amiable tap. “You also may wish to use these sheets to begin drafting your ransom request.”

  Furvain narrowed his eyes. “Tomorrow, perhaps, for that. Or the day after.”

  “As you wish. There’s no hurry, you know. You are my guest here for as long as you care to stay.”

  “Your prisoner, actually.”

  “That too,” Kasinibon said. “My guest, but also my prisoner, though I hope you will see yourself rather more as guest than prisoner. You will excuse me now. I have my dreary administrative duties to deal with. Until this afternoon, then.” And grinned once more, and bowed and took his leave.

  Furvain was the fifth son of the former Coronal Lord Sangamor, whose best-known achievement had been the construction of the remarkable tunnels on Castle Mount that bore his name. Lord Sangamor was a man of a strong artistic bent, and the tunnels, whose walls were fashioned from a kind of artificial stone that blazed with inherent radiant color, were considered by connoisseurs to be a supreme work of art. Furvain had inherited his father’s aestheticism but very little of his strength of character: in the eyes of many at the Mount he was nothing more than a wastrel, an idler, even a rogue. His own friends, and he had many of them, were hard pressed to find any great degree of significant merit in him. He was an unusually skillful writer of light verse, yes; and a genial companion on a journey or in a tavern, yes; and a clever hand with a quip or a riddle or a paradox, yes; and otherwise – otherwise—

  A Coronal’s son has no significant future in the administration of Majipoor, by ancient constitutional tradition. No function is set aside for him. He can never rise to the throne himself, for the crown is always adoptive, never hereditary. The Coronal’s eldest son would usually establish himself on a fine estate in one of the Fifty Cities of the Mount and live the good life of a provincial duke. A second son, or even a third, might remain at the Castle and become a counci
llor of the realm, if he showed any aptitude for the intricacies of government. But a fifth son, born late in his father’s reign and thereby shouldered out of the inner circle by all those who had arrived before him, would usually face no better destiny than a drifting existence of irresponsible pleasure and ease. There is no role in public life for him to play. He is his father’s son, but he is nothing at all in his own right. No one is likely to think of him as qualified for any kind of serious duties, nor even to have any interest in such things. Such princes are entitled by birth to a permanent suite of rooms at the Castle and a generous and irrevocable pension, and it is assumed of them that they will contentedly devote themselves to idle amusements until the end of their days.

  Furvain, unlike some princes of a more restless nature, had adapted very well to that prospect. Since no one expected very much of him, he demanded very little of himself. Nature had favored him with good looks: he was tall and slender, a graceful, elegant man with wavy golden hair and finely chiseled features. He was an admirable dancer, sang quite well in a clear, light tenor voice, excelled at most sports that did not require brute physical force, and was a capable hand at swordsmanship and chariot-racing. But above all else he excelled at the making of verse. Poetry flowed from him in torrents, as rain falls from the sky. At any moment of the day or night, whether he had just been awakened after a long evening of drunken carousing or was in the midst of that carousing itself, he could take pen in hand and compose, almost extemporaneously, a ballad or a sonnet or a villanelle or a jolly rhyming epigram, or quick thumping short-legged doggerel, or even a long skein of heroic couplets, on any sort of theme. There was no profundity to such hastily dashed-off stuff, of course. It was not in his nature to probe the depths of the human soul, let alone to want to set out his findings in the form of poetry. But everyone knew that Aithin Furvain had no master when it came to the making of easy, playful verse, minor verse that celebrated the joys of the moment, the pleasures of the bed or of the bottle, verse that poked fun without ever edging into sour malicious satire, or that demonstrated a quick verbal interplay of rhythm and sound without actually being about anything at all.