The mountains of Majipoor.
Robert Silverberg.
For Lou Aronica Editors and publishers may come and go, but a friend is a friend forever.
"I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done. . . . Thick fogs, Snow storms, Intense Cold and every other thing that can render Navigation dangerous one has to encounter and these difficulties are greatly heightned by the enexpressable horrid aspect of the Country, a Country doomed by Nature never once to feel the warmth of the Suns rays, but to lie for ever buried under everlasting snow and ice. . . ."
- Captain James Cook,.
Journals.
The sky, which had been a frosty blue all these weeks of Harpirias"s northward journey into this bleak and turbulent land, was the color of lead today. The air had grown so cold that it seemed to burn the skin. And a fierce cutting wind had suddenly begun rushing down through the narrow pa.s.s in the great mountain wall just ahead, carrying with it clouds of tiny hard particles, myriad sharp-edged things that struck Harpirias"s unprotected cheeks like little stinging insects.
"Prince, you asked me yesterday what a snowstorm was like," said Korinaam the Shapeshifter, who was the expedition"s guide. "Today you"ll find out."
"I thought it was supposed to be summer here just now," Harpirias said. "Does it snow in the Khyntor Marches even in summer?"
"Even in summer, oh, yes, it does that very often," Korinaam replied serenely. "Sometimes for many days on end. Wolf-summer, we call that. When the snowdrifts pile higher than a Skandar"s head, and famished steetmoys come out of the far north by the dozens to prey on the herds of the farmers in the foothills."
"By the Lady, if that"s summer, what can the winters in this place be like, then?"
"If you are a believing man, you would do well to pray that the Divine never gives you the opportunity to find out," said Korinaam. "Come, prince. The pa.s.s awaits us."
Harpirias squinted uneasily toward the fanged heights before them. The heavy sky looked bruised and swollen. With mounting vigor the churning wind threw maddening handfuls of those sharp little particles in his face.
Surely it was suicidal to be going up into the teeth of that storm. Scowling, Harpirias glanced toward Korinaam. The Shapeshifter seemed untroubled by the gathering fury above. His frail, attenuated figure was clad only in a twist of yellow cloth around his waist; his rubbery-looking greenish torso showed no reaction to the sudden bitter cold; his face, virtually featureless-tiny nose, slit of a mouth, narrow eyes sharply slanting beneath heavy hoods-was almost impossible to read.
"Do you really think it"s wise to try to take the pa.s.s while it"s snowing?" Harpirias asked.
"Wiser than to wait down here for the avalanches and the floods that will follow them," the Shapeshifter said. His eye-hoods drew back for a moment. There was an uncompromising look in the dark implacable eyes beneath. "When traveling these roads in wolf-summer time, the higher the better is the rule, prince. Come. The real snowfall isn"t upon us yet. This is only harbinger-ice, the vanguard that rides on the first -wind. We ought to be moving onward before things get worse."
Korinaam jumped into the floater that he shared with Harpirias. Eight similar vehicles were lined up behind it along the narrow mountain road. Aboard them were the two dozen soldiers of this expedition to the inhospitable northlands which Harpirias so reluctantly found himself leading, and the equipment that was supposed to tide them through their difficult and dangerous venture into this desolate, forbidding country. But Harpirias hesitated a moment more, standing beside the open door of the floater, staring up in awe and wonder at the oncoming storm.
Snow! Actual snow!
He had heard of snow. He had read of it in storybooks when he was a child: frozen water, it was, water that had been turned by extreme cold to some kind of tangible substance. It sounded magical: lovely white dust, austere and pure, cold beyond all comprehension, that would melt at the touch of your finger.
Magical, yes. Unreal, the stuff of fable and witchcraft. Hardly anywhere on the whole vast world of Majipoor was it possible to encounter temperatures low enough actually to freeze water. Certainly one did not ever find snow on the airy slopes of Castle Mount, where Harpirias had spent his boyhood and young manhood among the knights and princes of the Coronal"s court, and where the great weather-machines built in ancient times kept the Fifty Cities wrapped in eternal gentle springtime.
It was said that snow sometimes fell in the worst of winters along the highest ridges of certain other mountain peaks, though: atop Mount Zygnor in northern Alhanroel, and in the Gonghar range that ran across the midsection of the continent of Zimroel. But Harpirias had never been within a thousand miles of Zygnor, nor within five thousand of the Gonghars. He had never been anywhere at all where snow might be probable, until suddenly he was thrust into the command of this unlikely mission into Zimroel"s far northland-into the harsh and lofty mountain-girt plateau known as the Khyntor Marches. The veritable motherland of snow, that was, infamous for its howling icy gales and formidable glacier-locked peaks. Here alone in all of Majipoor did true winter reign: behind the awesome mountains known as the Nine Sisters that cut an entire peninsula off from the rest of the world and doomed it to a stern frigid climate of its own.
But Harpirias and his companions were making their Khyntor journey in summer. And so even here he was not expecting to experience a snowfall, but only perhaps to catch a glimpse of the leftover snow of the winter before, lying along the rims of the topmost peaks. As indeed he had. The travelers were no more than a few hundred miles north of the green round-bosomed hills that rise behind the city of Ni-moya when the landscape had begun to change, lush dense shrubbery giving way to spa.r.s.e stands of yellow-boled trees, and then they were in the foothills of the Marches, climbing steadily across a rising terrain of flat gray shields of granite cut by swift streams, and at last the first of the Nine Sisters of Khyntor came into sight: Threilikor, the Weeping Sister. But there was no snow on Threilikor in this season, only the mult.i.tude of streams and rivulets and cascades that gave her her name.
The next mountain they reached, though, was Javnikor, the Black Sister, and the road that took them past her flank showed Harpinas her north face, where near the summit the dark rock was brightly encrusted here and there with a scattering of white patches, like sinister encroaching blemishes. Still farther to the north, along the sides of the mountain known as Cuculimaive-the Lovely Sister, a symmetrical pile of pink stone festooned with uncountable rocky spires and parapets and outcroppings of all imaginable shapes - Harpirias beheld something even stranger, long grayish-white tongues of ice trailing down, which Korinaam said were glaciers. "Frozen rivers of ice is what they are, rivers of ice that flow down into the lowlands, slowly, very slowly, moving just a few feet every year."
Rivers of ice! How could there be such a thing?
And now before them lay the Twin Sisters, Shelvokor and Malvokor, which could not be gone around but must be ascended if the travelers were to attain their destination. Two great square-shouldered blocks of stone side by side, they were, immensely broad and so high that Harpirias could not begin to guess their height, and their upper reaches were mantled thickly in white, even on their south faces, so that when the sun struck their surfaces they were blinding to behold. A single narrow pa.s.s led up and between them, which Kormaam said must now be traversed. And down from that pa.s.s, scouring everything in its path, there blew a wind such as Harpirias had never felt before, a wind out of the Pit, a wolf-wind, a demon-wind, cold and biting and angry, carrying with it the sharp icy harbingers of a summer snowstorm.
"Well?" Korinaam said.
"You really think we should go up into that?"
"There is no other choice."
Harpirias shrugged and clambered into the floater next to the Shapeshifter. Korinaam touched the controls and the vehicle glided forward. The other floaters followed.
For a time the ascent merely seemed strange and beautiful. The snow came upon them in luminous wind-whipped ribbons that swirled and gusted in a wild frantic dance. The air before them took on a wondrous shimmer from the glittering flecks that were tossing about in it. A soft white cloak began to cover the black walls of the pa.s.s.
But after a time the storm intensified, the cloak wrapped itself closer and closer about them. Harpirias could see nothing but whiteness, before, behind, above, to the right and left. On every side there was snow, only snow, a dense swaddling of snow.
Where was the road? It was miraculous that Korinaam was able to see it at all, let alone to follow every twist and turn.
Though it was warm enough inside the floater, Harpirias found himself starting to shiver and could not stop. From such glimpses of the pa.s.s as he had had in the early stages of the climb, he knew that the road was a treacherous one, switching back from side to side above terrible abysses as it rose between the two stolid mountains. Even if Korinaam did not simply steer the floater over the edge on one of the sharper turns, the wind was only too likely to pick the vehicle up and send it crashing down the slope.
Harpirias sat still, saying nothing, fighting to keep his teeth from chattering. It was not proper for him to show fear. He was a knight of the Coronal"s court, a beneficiary of the severe and rigorous training that such a phrase implied. Nor was his ancestry that of a coward. A thousand years before, his celebrated ancestor Prestimion had ruled this world in glory, doing deeds of high renown, first as Coronal, then as Pontifex. Could a descendant of the resplendent Prestimion permit himself to display cowardice before a Shapeshifter?
No. No.
Malvokor, which could not be gone around but must be ascended if the travelers were to attain their destination. Two great square-shouldered blocks of stone side by side, they were, immensely broad and so high that Harpirias could not begin to guess their height, and their upper reaches were mantled thickly in white, even on their south faces, so that when the sun struck their surfaces they were blinding to behold. A single narrow pa.s.s led up and between them, which Korinaam said must now be traversed. And down from that pa.s.s, scouring everything in its path, there blew a wind such as Harpirias had never felt before, a wind out of the Pit, a -wolf-wind, a demon-wind, cold and biting and angry, carrying with it the sharp icy harbingers of a summer snowstorm.
"Well?" Korinaam said.
"You really think we should go up into that?"
"There is no other choice."
Harpirias shrugged and clambered into the floater next to the Shapeshifter. Korinaam touched the controls and the vehicle glided forward. The other floaters followed.
For a time the ascent merely seemed strange and beautiful. The snow came upon them in luminous wind-whipped ribbons that swirled and gusted in a wild frantic dance. The air before them took on a wondrous shimmer from the glittering flecks that were tossing about in it. A soft white cloak began to cover the black walls of the pa.s.s.
But after a time the storm intensified, the cloak wrapped itself closer and closer about them. Harpirias could see nothing but whiteness, before, behind, above, to the right and left. On every side there was snow, only snow, a dense swaddling of snow.
Where was the road? It was miraculous that Korinaam was able to see it at all, let alone to follow every twist and turn.
Though it was warm enough inside the floater, Harpirias found himself starting to shiver and could not stop. From such glimpses of the pa.s.s as he had had in the early stages of the climb, he knew that the road was a treacherous one, switching back from side to side above terrible abysses as it rose between the two stolid mountains. Even if Korinaam did not simply steer the floater over the edge on one of the sharper turns, the wind was only too likely to pick the vehicle up and send it crashing down the slope.
Harpirias sat still, saying nothing, fighting to keep his teeth from chattering. It was not proper for him to show fear. He was a knight of the Coronal"s court, a beneficiary of the severe and rigorous training that such a phrase implied. Nor was his ancestry that of a coward. A thousand years before, his celebrated ancestor Prestimion had ruled this world in glory, doing deeds of high renown, first as Coronal, then as Pontifex. Could a descendant of the resplendent Prestimion permit himself to display cowardice before a Shapeshifter?
No. No.
And yet-that driving wind-these curves-those blinding surges of ever-thickening snow- Calmly Korinaam said, turning casually toward Harpirias as he spoke, "They tell the tale of the great beast Naamaaliilaa, who walked these mountains alone, in the days when she was the only being that lived on this world. And in a storm like this she breathed upon a cliff of ice, and licked with her tongue the place she had breathed on, and as her tongue moved, she carved a figure from it, and he was Saabaataan, the Blind Giant, the first man of our kind. And then she breathed again and licked again, and brought forth from the ice Siifiinaatuur, the Red Woman, the mother of us all. And Saabaataan and Siifiinaatuur went down out of this icy land into the forests of Zimroel, and were fruitful and multiplied and spread over all the world, and thus the race of Piurivars came into being. So this is a holy land to us, prince. In this place of frost and storm our first parents were conceived."
Harpirias responded only with a grunt. His interest in Shapeshifter creation myths was no more than moderate at the best of times, and this was something less than the best of times.
The wind struck the floater with the force of a giant fist. The vehicle lurched wildly, bobbing like a straw in the breeze and veering toward the brink of the abyss. Coolly Korinaam set it back on its course with the lightest touch of one long many-jointed finger.
Harpirias said through clenched teeth, "How much farther is it, would you say, to the valley of the Othinor?"
"Two pa.s.ses and three valleys beyond this one, that"s all." "Ah. And how long will that take us, do you think?" Korinaam smiled indifferently. "A week, maybe. Or two, or three. Or perhaps forever."
It had never been part of Harpirias"s plan to go venturing into the dismal snowy wastes of the Khyntor Marches. As a member of one of the great pontifical families, a Prestimion of Muldemar, he had quite reasonably expected that he would pa.s.s his days comfortably on Castle Mount in the service of the Coronal Lord Ambinole, perhaps rising in time to the rank of counselor to the Coronal, or possibly some high ministry, or even the dukedom of one of the Fifty Cities.
But his upward path had been abruptly interrupted, and for the most cruel and trivial of reasons.
With a band of six companions he had ridden out from the Castle, on his twenty-fifth birthday, a fateful day for him, and down into the forested estate country close by the city of Halanx. His friend Tembidat"s family long had maintained a hunting preserve there. The outing was Tembidat"s idea, Tembidat"s gift to him.
Hunting was one of Harpirias"s greatest pleasures. He was a man of short stature, like most of the men of the Prestimion line, but agile and broad-shouldered and strong, a genial, outgoing, athletic young man. He loved the chase in its every part: the stalking, the sighting of the prey, the sweet air whistling past his cheeks as he gave pursuit, the moment of pausing to take aim. And then, of course, the kill. What finer way to celebrate one"s birthday than by slaughtering a few bilantoons or fierce-tusked tuamiroks in an elegant and skillful manner, and bringing the meat back for a joyous feast, and taking a trophy or two to hang on the wall?
All that day had Harpirias and his friends hunted, and with the greatest of success, bagging not only a score of bilantoons and a brace of tuamiroks but a fat succulent vandar as well, and a dainty high-prancing onathil, and, as the afternoon was waning, the most wondrous catch of all, a majestic sinileese that had a splendid glistening white hide and glorious many-branched scarlet antlers. Harpirias himself was the one to bring it down, with a single well-placed shot at an astonishing range, a clean shot that filled him with pride at his own marksmanship.
"I had no idea your family kept such rare creatures as this in its park," Harpirias said to Tembidat, when they had recovered the body of the sinileese and he was preparing it for transport back to the Castle.
"In fact I had no idea of it myself," said Tembidat in an oddly somber and uneasy tone, which might have served Harpirias as a hint of what was to come. But Harpirias was too swollen with delight at his achievement to notice. "I confess I felt just a bit of surprise when I saw it standing there," Tembidat continued. "Rare indeed, a white sinileese - I"ve never seen a white sinileese before, have you? - "
"Perhaps I should have let it be," Harpirias said. "It may be some special prize of your father"s - some particular favorite of his - "
"Of which he"s never spoken? No, Harpirias!" Tembidat shook his head, a little too vigorously, perhaps, as though trying to convince himself of something. "He must not have known of it, or cared, or it wouldn"t have been roaming loose. This is our family estate, and all animals here are fair game. And so the sinileese is my birthday present to you. My father would feel only joy, knowing that you were the one who had slain it, and that this is your birthday hunt."
"Who are those men, Tembidat?" asked one of the others in the hunting party suddenly. "Your father"s gamekeepers, are they?"
Harpirias looked up. Three burly grim-faced strangers in crimson-and-purple livery had stepped from the forest into the clearing where the hunters were at work.
"No," said Tembidat, and that curious tautness had returned to his voice, "not my father"s keepers, but those of our neighbor Prince Lubovine."
"Your -neighbor-" said Harpirias, with apprehension growing in him as he considered the ample distance at which he had killed the sinileese.
He began to wonder, now, just whose beast the sinileese had been.
The biggest and most grim-looking of the crimson-and-purple strangers offered a careless salute and said, "Have any of you gentlemen happened to see - Ah, yes, apparently you have - "
His voice trailed off into a growl.
"A white sinileese with scarlet antlers," another of the newcomers finished tersely for him.
There was an ugly moment of hostile silence. The three were peering in a dark-visaged fashion at the animal over which Harpirias was crouching. Harpirias, putting down his skinning knife, stared at his bloodied hands. He felt a rushing roar in his ears, as of a seething torrent pa.s.sing through his skull.
Tembidat said finally, with an unsteady touch of defiance in his tone, "You surely must know that this is the hunting preserve of the family of Duke Kestir of Halanx, whose son I am. If your animal strayed across the boundary onto our land, we regret its death, but we were completely within our rights to regard it as legitimate prey. As you well know."
"If it had strayed across," said the first of Prince Lubovine"s gamekeepers. "If. But the sinileese, which we have been pursuing all afternoon since it broke from its cage, was on our prince"s domain when you shot it."
"Your-prince"s-domain - " Tembidat said, faltering.
"Indeed. Can you see the boundary marker over there, blazed on that pingla tree? The blood of the sinileese stains the ground well behind it. We have followed that b.l.o.o.d.y trail to here. You can carry the animal over the line to Duke Kestir"s land, if you wish, but that does not change the fact that it was standing in Prince Lubovine"s domain when you shot it."
"Is this true?" Harpirias said to Tembidat, with an edge of horror sharpening his words. "Is that the boundary of your father"s land?"
"Apparently so," Tembidat muttered hollowly.
"And the animal was the only one of its kind, the grandest treasure of Prince Lubovine"s collection," the gamekeeper said. "We claim its meat and its hide; but your foolish poaching will cost you much more than that, mark my words, my young princes."
The three wardens hoisted the sinileese to their shoulders, and stalked off into the forest with it.
Harpirias stood stunned. Prince Lubovine"s park of rare beasts was legendary for the marvels it contained. And Prince Lubovine was not only a man of great power and immeasurable wealth and high ancestry-he traced his lineage back to the Coronal Lord Voriax, elder brother of the famous Valentine, who had been Coronal and then Pontifex during the Time of Troubles five centuries before-but also he was known as a man of petty and vindictive nature, who brooked no affront lightly.
How could Tembidat have been so stupid as to let the hunting parry wander right up to the border of Lubovine"s estate? Why had Tembidat not said that the boundary was unfenced, why had he not warned him how risky it might be to aim at that far-off sinileese?
Tembidat, plainly aware of Harpirias"s dismay, said gently, "We will make full amends, my friend, have no doubt of that. My father will speak to Lubovine -we will make it clear that it was simply a mistake, that you had not the slightest intent of poaching-we will buy him three new sinileeses, five new sinileeses - "
But of course it wasn"t as simply dealt with as that.
There were profound apologies. There was the payment of an indemnity. There was an attempt-fruitless-to find another white sinileese for the outraged Prince Lubovine. Highly placed kinsmen of Harpirias"s, Prestimions and Dekkerets and Kinnikens, spoke on his behalf, urging leniency for what had been, after all, an innocent youthful error.
And then, just when he thought the whole affair had blown over, Harpirias found himself transferred to an obscure diplomatic post in the giant city of Ni-moya, on Majipoor"s subsidiary continent of Zimroel, far across the sea, thousands and thousands of miles from Castle Mount.
The decree crashed down upon him like the falling of an axe. In effect, his career was over. Once he had gone to Zimroel he would be forgotten at the Castle. He might be gone for years, even decades; he might never win rea.s.signment to the governmental center. And his duties in Ni-moya -would be meaningless; he would spend his days shuffling papers, filing trifling reports, and stamping his seal on pointless doc.u.ments, year after year; and meanwhile all the other young lordlings of his generation would vault past him to the high posts of the Coronal"s court that should have been his by right of birth and ability.
"This is Lubovine"s doing, isn"t it?" Harpirias asked Tembidat when it was clear that the transfer was irrevocable. "This is how he"s taking his revenge for that d.a.m.ned sinileese of his. But it isn"t fair-to ruin a man"s entire life simply because a stupid animal got killed by accident - "
"Your life -won"t be ruined, Harpirias."
"Won"t it?"
"You"ll spend six months in Ni-moya, a year at most. My father is certain of it. Lubovine is very powerful and he insists on extracting one final squeeze of retribution from you for what you did, so you"ll have to serve a kind of penitential exile out there for a little while, and then you"ll be back. The Coronal has a.s.sured him of that."
"And you believe it"ll really happen that way?"
"Absolutely," said Tembidat.
But that was, however, not the way things worked out.
Off went Harpirias to Ni-moya with the darkest forebodings. It was, at any rate, a grand and beautiful city, the greatest one in Zimroel, a place of more than thirty million inhabitants, hundreds of miles of wonderful white towers rising above the swift waters of the mighty River Zimr. But it was a city of Zimroel, all the same. No one who has been raised amid the splendors of Castle Mount can adapt lightly to the lesser glories of the other continent.
And there in Ni-moya Harpirias remained for one dreary month after another, performing negligible and insulting bureaucratic functions in something called the Office of Provincial Liaison, which seemed to fall neither into the sphere of the Coronal nor that of the Pontifex but into a kind of governmental limbo somewhere between.
He waited eagerly for the message summoning him back to Castle Mount. And waited.