“You ought to talk to Dr. Mundiveen about all that,” said Kalban Vond.
Of course Stiamot’s interest in the Metamorphs was much more than a matter of mere personal curiosity, but there was no reason why he had to explain that to the District Resident. The Metamorph problem had been central to Council discussions for the past several years, and, though nothing whatever had been heard from the Coronal on the topic, it surely had to be on his mind as well.
By and large, the Metamorphs kept to their secluded forest homes and the people of the cities and farming districts of Majipoor to the territories they occupied, and each group did its best to pretend that the other was not there, or was, at least, invisible. But there had been a good many ugly incidents. Wherever Metamorph and human interests overlapped, difficulties arose. The Metamorphs held certain places sacred, but who knew which ones they were, until a trespass had occurred? The ever-expanding human population of Majipoor, and its constantly increasing non-human adjuncts, kept pushing outward into new lands where the Metamorphs would abide no intrusion. Reports trickled to the capital of occasional outbreaks of conflict, of kidnappings and killings, of skirmishes, of massacres, even. Information took so long to reach Stee from outlying regions, and arrived in such uncertain form, that no one at the capital could be completely certain of what was taking place; but plainly there was friction, there was violence, and neither side was wholly without blame. Now and again Metamorphs, erupting out of nowhere in the night, had slaughtered human settlers venturing into places that should not have been ventured into. Humans, coming upon some tempting locality that invited settlement, had driven its Metamorph population out by force, or simply destroyed them. There had, of course, been such incidents throughout all the thousands of years since the first emigrants from Old Earth had come to this world. But as the cities spread outward and the agricultural settlements that supported them multiplied, they appeared to be increasing in number, and there were those at court who felt that sooner or later some great precipitating event would touch off an all-out war between the Metamorphs and the humans of Majipoor, and that event could not be many years away.
The court was broken into various factions. Some members of the Coronal’s inner circle, a majority, perhaps, felt that a time was coming when complete separation of the races would have to be enforced, with the Metamorphs packed off into reservations of their own, possibly on the relatively lightly inhabited continent of Zimroel, and permitted there to live as they had always lived, but without access to the territories occupied by humans. An opposing group – not very numerous, but they were exceedingly vocal – regarded that as a futile notion, and were ready to launch an all-out war of extermination, arguing that the Metamorphs could never be confined in that way and such a plan was simply a prescription for an eternity of guerilla warfare.
Stiamot himself, who was by nature a mediator, a peacemaker, had emerged as the leader of a moderate central faction, one that saw great practical difficulties in the separationist scheme and looked upon the idea of a war of extermination as barbaric and repellent. It was Stiamot’s hope that through sympathetic meetings of the minds, a determined attempt by each species to understand the needs and goals of the other, a permanent detente could be established, with clear lines of territorial delineation for each race and complete freedom of travel across those boundaries. In Council he had argued as persuasively as he knew how for such a policy. But Stiamot had not been able to make much headway with that over the extremists to either side of him. So little was known of the real nature of the Metamorphs, and so little had been done to reach out to them, that most council-members looked upon his position as hopelessly idealistic. As for the Coronal, he had stayed aloof from the discussions thus far, lost as he was in what seemed to be some inner anguish that had no connection to any of the governmental issues of the day. But he could not remain aloof forever.
The Coronal’s arrival in Domgrave was still at least a week away when Stiamot saw his first Shapeshifter. It was the quiet time of the morning midway between breakfast and lunch, when the air was dry and still and the sun, climbing toward noon height, held everything in the grip of its insistent force. Stiamot was returning to his lodgings from a meeting with the head of the municipal police, going on foot down a sleepy street of small white-fronted houses flanked by rows of dusty-leaved matabango trees. A tall, very tall, figure wrapped in a flimsy, loosely fitting green robe emerged from an alley fifty feet in front of him, began to cross the street, saw him, halted, turned to face him, stared.
Stiamot halted as well. He knew at once that the man – was it a man? – was a Metamorph, and he was astonished to encounter one right here in town. The few others that he had seen before had been like wraiths, flitting through the edge of some forest glade and vanishing into the underbrush as soon as they were aware that they were being perceived. But here was this one right in downtown Domgrave, unmistakably a Metamorph, tall, thin, sallow-skinned, sharp of cheekbone, with long narrow eyes that sloped inward toward the place where its nose would be if there were anything more than a minuscule bump where a nose ought to be. It seemed as curious about him as he was about it, pausing, standing in that odd stance of theirs, one long leg wrapped around the shin of the other so that it stood with utter and total dignity while balanced on its left foot alone. Its stare was calm and chilly. Stiamot wondered what, if anything, he could do to capitalize on the opportunity that had been so unexpectedly presented to him. “I greet you in the name of the Coronal Lord Strelkimar, whose counsellor I am?” No. Ridiculous. “I am Prince Stiamot of Stee, and I have come here to learn something about –” No. No. “I am a newcomer in Domgrave, and I wonder whether you and I—”
Impossible. There was nothing he could say that would be appropriate. The Shapeshifter clearly did not want anything to do with him. Those cold downsloping eyes left no doubt of that. The purpose of that icy glare was to establish a boundary, not to build a bridge. Stiamot and the Metamorph were separated not only by fifty feet of space but by an infinitely greater gulf of difference, and there was no way to breach that barrier. All Stiamot could do was stand, and stare, and curse himself for a blithering feckless fool, hopelessly unprepared for this meeting with one of the beings he had come here to make contact with.
Then for a single strange moment the outlines of the Shapeshifter’s body seemed to blur and flicker, and Stiamot realized he was watching some kind of brief, barely perceptible metamorphosis take place, a loosening and transmogrification of form that ended as quickly as it had begun, as though the Shapeshifter were saying, mockingly, I can do this and you cannot. And then the Metamorph swung around and continued on its way across the street, disappearing from view in a dozen longlegged strides, leaving Stiamot standing stunned and bewildered in the mid-morning stillness.
There was a second significant encounter much later that same day. Stiamot had fallen into the habit of going at the end of the day with some of the younger staff aides to an inn just off the main square that was frequented by the town’s wealthier planters and any visitor from the outlying plantations who happened to be in Domgrave on business. Since these people were going to bear most of the not inconsiderable expense of playing host to a Coronal making the grand processional, it seemed like a wise tactic for Stiamot to go among them, share a couple of flasks of wine with them in their cramped, dreary little tavern, reassure them that they would find the visit of the Coronal Lord very much to their benefit.
“He wouldn’t have bitten you, you know,” a dry, flat-toned voice said as Stiamot entered.
He turned. “Pardon me?”
“The Piurivar. They’re a damned shy bunch, most of them. If you actually want to get anywhere with them, you’ve got to open your mouth, not just stand there like a gaffed gromwark waiting for them to say something. I’m Mundiveen, by the way.” Stiamot had already figured that much out. Crazy old doctor with a limp, Kalban Vond had said. Eccentric, annoying. Stands right out. That much was easy. The man who st
ood before him, one elbow hooked lazily over the counter of the bar, was old, small, lean almost to the point of fleshlessness, a short, compact figure with piercingly intense gray eyes and a long, wild shock of coarse, unkempt white hair. Stiamot, who was only of medium height himself, towered over him. Mundiveen held his head at an odd angle to his neck and his body pivoted strangely at the middle, as though there might be some sort of a twist in his spine. It was not hard to imagine that he would walk with a limp.
“Stiamot,” he said uncomfortably. “Of Stee.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. The Coronal’s advance man. Everybody in town knows who you are.”
“And what I’ve been doing, also, I guess. You saw me talking to the – Piurivar, you called it?”
“That’s what they call themselves. I like to use the term too. Metamorph, Shapeshifter, Piurivar, whatever you like. No, I didn’t see you with him. What would I be doing awake at that hour? But he told me about it. He said you looked at him as though he were a creature from some other world. What do you like to drink, eh, Stiamot? First one’s on me.”
Stiamot shot a quick glance at the two aides with whom he had entered the inn, wordlessly telling them to fade away, and said to Mundiveen, “Let’s start with gray wine, shall we? And then, when I’m paying, we can go on to the blue.”
It was strange how quickly Stiamot began to feel at ease with this quirky little man. They would never be friends, Stiamot saw at once: the doctor was all sharp edges, prickly as a zelzifor, and Stiamot doubted that “friendship” was a word in his working vocabulary. The harsh, hopeless laugh with which he punctuated his sentences betrayed a profound mistrust of humanity. But Mundiveen seemed to be willing enough to accept a little companionship from Stiamot, at least. They crossed the room together – he did have a distinct limp, Stiamot saw – and settled at a corner table, and a zone of privacy appeared to take form around them, an invisible wall that set the two of them off from the crowd of noisy, boisterous planters who filled the room.
Mundiveen let him know right away that he was just about the only man in town who understood anything about the Shapeshifters. “Spent a lot of time with them, you know. Right there in their own forest. Helped one mend a badly broken arm – they do have bones, by the way, nothing like yours or mine but bones all the same, and they can break – and he took a kind of liking to me, and that was the beginning. One outcast to another, you might say.”
“That’s how you see yourself, an outcast?”
“That’s what I am,” said Mundiveen, laughing his hopeless little laugh, and bent low over his wine-bowl to forestall farther inquiry.
“The District Resident said you’d lived among them for a dozen years.”
“I still do live among them. If I can be said to live among anybody, that is.”
“You live in the forest?”
“I have a place in town, and one in the forest. I move from one to the other as the spirit takes me. We need another flask of wine. You pay, this time.”
“Of course.” Stiamot signalled to the barmaid. “Where were you from, originally?”
“Stee, same as you.”
“Stee? Really?”
“You seem surprised. No reason to be. Stee’s a big city; nobody can know everybody. It was a long time ago, anyway. You were probably just a boy when I left there. Your Coronal, Lord Strelkimar. How is he?”
That was an odd phrase, Stiamot thought: your Coronal. He was everybody’s Coronal. “His health, you mean?”
“His health, his state of well-being, his inner equilibrium, whatever you want to call it.”
Stiamot hesitated. His eyes met the little man’s – they were very pale eyes, not gray, as Stiamot had first thought, but a sort of washed-out yellowish-green, and one seemed imperfectly aligned with the other – and they revealed nothing, absolutely nothing. It would be improper, of course, for him to discuss the Coronal’s state of well-being, of inner equilibrium, with any stranger he happened to meet in a tavern, even if the Coronal were in a perfect state of well-being, but especially because he was not. He paused just long enough and said, “He’s fine, of course.”
“I knew him,” said Mundiveen. “In my days at court. Before he became Coronal. And for a short while after.”
“You were at court?”
“Of course,” Mundiveen said, and took refuge once more in his wine-bowl.
The conversation, when it resumed, centered on the Shapeshifters. Mundiveen seemed to know – how? From the Resident, no doubt – that Stiamot had some special interest in them, and asked him what that was about. Stiamot attempted to explain, as he had to Kalban Vond, that it was primarily a matter of intellectual curiosity, a private hobby: he was, he said, fascinated by their folkways, their religious beliefs, their art, their language. But the fact that he was a member of the Coronal’s staff, and not just that but an actual member of his Council, obviously made all that ring false to Mundiveen, who listened with as much patience as he seemed able to muster and finally said, “I’m sure you find them very interesting. So do I. Well, is some sort of policy shift in the making?”
“Policy of what sort?”
“You know what I’m saying. Policy toward the Piurivars.”
Stiamot smiled. “Even if there were, I’d hardly be likely to want to discuss it, would I?”
“Even if there were, I suppose you wouldn’t,” said Mundiveen.
Beyond any doubt Mundiveen was the man to cultivate here. He was unlikely to learn anything valuable about the Metamorphs from the planters, all of whom appeared to regard them with contempt or loathing, if not complete indifference, mere impediments to their intended expansion of their plantations. But Stiamot knew he had to go slowly with this sardonic, bitter little cripple. There was something dark and angry in Mundiveen that had to be approached with caution: one could not be too open with him until one had some idea of the forces that drove that anger and that bitterness, and it was too soon to start probing for that now.
Besides, he had plenty of other things to do. Couriers brought him daily bulletins on the progress of the Coronal and his traveling companions: he was in Byelk, he was in Bizfern, he was in Milimorn, he was in Singaserin, he was moving steadily westward. He would stay the night in Kattikawn and in three days he would arrive in Domgrave. Stiamot spent the three days going over the final invitation list for the state banquet they would hold here, working out the formal program of speeches, conferring with the purveyors of meats and wines. And there were security issues to address. The Metamorphs came and went as they chose in the dark, sinister forests that surrounded these valley towns, and, as Stiamot could testify from personal experience, they seemed able to materialize and disappear like phantoms. If they had it in mind to assassinate a Coronal, madness though that would be, they would never have a better opportunity than this. Strelkimar was coming with his own guard, of course, but Stiamot thought it wise to enlist local peacekeepers in his service as well, and did.
On the second of those three busy days he went to the tavern again in the afternoon and found Mundiveen there once more, and had the same sort of uneasy arm’s-length conversation with him over a couple of expensive flasks of wine, centering mostly on Mundiveen’s years in the forest with the Shapeshifters. He wasn’t actually a doctor, Mundiveen admitted: in the days of the former Coronal Lord Thrykeld he had been a mining engineer, whose special responsibility in the government was supervision of the sparse mineral resources that the giant but metal-poor world of Majipoor had to offer. Once his days at court had ended – and he offered no information about that – he had lived in retirement in Deepenhow Vale, farther down the Mount from Stee, where somehow he had picked up a few medical skills, and then he had found it best to leave the Mount entirely and wander off toward the west, coming eventually to the forests of this northwestern region. There, as he put it, he “made himself useful as a physician to the Piurivars.”
Carefully, during the course of the evening, Stiamot nudged Mundiveen into tell
ing him some tales of life in the Shapeshifter encampments in the forests surrounding Domgrave. He learned something about their tribal arrangements – they had a single monarch, he said, the Danipiur, who in some fashion ruled over all the scattered bands of Piurivars everywhere in the world – and a little, though it was not very articulately expounded, about their religious beliefs. In a muddled, sketchy way Mundiveen related also a Piurivar myth, the legend of some dreadful ancient sin they had committed at the old Shapeshifter capital of Velalisier long before the first human settlers had arrived, a sin so grievous that it had brought a curse down on them and led directly to the downfall of the race.
Stiamot supposed that someone who had as little liking for mankind as Mundiveen apparently did would have made a compensating shift in the other direction, taking refuge among the Metamorphs as he had because he saw them as the only beings on the planet worth living among, pure and true and noble, altogether undeserving of having lost their planet to the human oppressors who had settled among them six thousand years before. But it was not like that at all. Mundiveen never spoke of the Metamorphs with the sort of scorn that the District Resident had expressed – “sneaky, nasty savages” – but he seemed to have no more fondness for then than he did for humanity, letting slip between the lines, as he told Stiamot one story and another that night, that he found them a difficult, quarrelsome, even treacherous race – “a slippery crew” was the phrase he used – and that much of his medical work consisted of repairing damage that one Metamorph had done to another.
The legend of that ancient sin and the curse evidently had something to do with his attitude toward the Piurivars – the unspeakably evil thing that they had done twenty thousand years ago that had crushed them under the vengeance of their own gods. Whatever that had been, and Mundiveen could not or would not say what it was, the tale seemed to have revealed something about their basic nature to him and mark them in Mundiveen’s eyes as a dark, troublesome lot. But perhaps, Stiamot thought, Mundiveen was inherently incapable of liking anyone at all, and chose to live among the Shapeshifters only because he preferred them, for all their faults, to his own species. Despite his manifold shortcomings, though, Mundiveen had had more first-hand experience of Shapeshifter life than anyone else Stiamot had ever encountered, and in the remainder of his time in Domgrave he intended to learn all that he could about them from the sharp-edged little man.