“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 passing 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 bloody 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 reassignment 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 documents, 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 damned 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 assured 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.
And wait
ed.
Several times he filed formal application for a transfer to duty at the Mount. He received no answers. He wrote to Tembidat, reminding him of the Coronal’s alleged promise to let him come home after a while. Tembidat replied that he was completely convinced that the Coronal intended to make good on his word.
The anniversary of Harpirias’s arrival came and went, and he began a second year of exile.
By now Harpirias was getting only the sketchiest of news from his friends and kinsmen at the Castle: an occasional brief letter, stray bits of gossip, greater and greater spaces between each communication. It was as if they were becoming embarrassed to write to him. So everything was happening just as he had feared. He was forgotten. His career was at an end; he would finish his days as a minor bureaucrat in this obscure administrative department in this prodigiously big but distinctly provincial city of Majipoor’s secondary continent, forever cut off from the sources of power and privilege to which he had had access all the years of his life.
His soul itself began to change. He who had been so rollicking and outgoing turned crabbed and harsh and inward, a sullen man, embittered perhaps beyond all soothing by the wrong that had been done to him.
Then one day when Harpirias was going through the newly arrived diplomatic pouch from Alhanroel, picking spiritlessly over the latest miscellany of empty documents with which he would be expected to deal, he was startled to come upon one that was addressed personally to him—an envelope that bore the insignia of Prince Salteir, High Counselor to the Coronal Lord Ambinole.
Harpirias had never expected to receive anything from so notable a figure as Salteir again. With trembling fingers he broke the seal. And began to read in wonder and delight.
A transfer! Lubovine had relented! They were lifting him out of Ni-moya at last!
But, as he continued to read, his brief flare of exultation turned swiftly to ashes. Instead of being called back to the center of government, he was being sent even farther away. Hadn’t burying him in Ni-moya been sufficient vengeance for Lubovine? Apparently not. For now, to his deep chagrin and utter dismay, Harpirias discovered that his newest assignment would send him beyond the boundaries of civilization itself: into the forlorn, ice-bound mountainous territories of Zimroel’s far northeastern region, the Khyntor Marches.
3
What had happened, Harpirias was to learn, was that a scientific expedition had ventured into the cheerless and virtually uninhabited realm that was the Marches in search of the supposed fossil remains of certain extinct land-dwelling dragons: gigantic reptilian creatures of an earlier era, related in some fashion to the immense and intelligent sea-dragons that to this day still wandered the immeasurable oceans of Majipoor in swarming herds.
Confused and contradictory tales of the one-time existence of such land-dragons on Majipoor were common to the mythology of many of the races that inhabited the giant planet. Among the Liimen, that unfortunate race of poor and itinerant sausage-sellers and fishermen, it was an article of faith that in a former epoch the dragons had lived upon the land, then had chosen to retreat to the sea, and would at some apocalyptic time take up residence on shore once again and bring about the salvation of the world. The Hjorts and the shaggy four-armed Skandars embraced similar beliefs; and the Shapeshifters or Metamorphs, the true aborigines of the planet, apparently had some such notions of their own, involving a long-vanished golden age when they and the dragons had been the only inhabitants of Majipoor, the two races living in telepathic harmony both on the land and in the sea. But it was difficult for anyone who was not himself a Metamorph to know what it was that the Metamorphs really believed.
The documents that Harpirias received told him that a party of steetmoy-hunters, roving unusually far to the north one mild summer, had penetrated deep into the normally snowy reaches of the Khyntor Marches and had spied outcroppings of fossilized bones of titanic size jutting from a barren rock formation high up near the rim of a remote canyon.
On the supposition that the bones were those of the legendary land-dragons, a party of some eight or ten paleontologists had received permission from the administrative authorities in Zimroel to go in search of the fossil outcropping. A Metamorph named Korinaam—a native of Ni-moya who, like a number of his people, had long earned his living by leading hunting parties into the more accessible regions of the Arctic zone—was hired to convey them into the Marches.
“They went up there early last summer,” said Heptil Magloir, the little Vroon from the Bureau of Antiquities who had signed the original exploration permit. “Nothing was heard from them for months. Then, in late fall, just before the full onset of the snowy season in the Marches, Korinaam returned to Ni-moya. Alone. The entire scientific party had been captured and was being held prisoner, he said, and he had been sent back to negotiate terms for their release.”
Harpirias raised his eyebrows. “Prisoners? Prisoners of whom? Surely not the March-men.” Tribes of rugged half-civilized nomads were known to roam the Marches, descending once in a while into the settled regions of Zimroel to offer furs and leather for sale, and the meat of the northland beasts they hunted. But these mountain folk, wild as they sometimes seemed, had never sought to raise any challenge against the vastly more numerous and powerful city-dwelling people of Majipoor.
“Not March-men, no,” said the Vroon, who was a many-tentacled creature barely higher than Harpirias’s knee. “At least, none that we have ever had dealings with before. It seems that the explorers were seized by a race of fierce barbarians—a people previously unknown to us, native to the northern Marches.”
“A lost race?” said Harpirias, suddenly fascinated. “Some isolated bunch of Shapeshifters, do you mean?”
“Humans. The backward descendants, so Korinaam says, of a small band of fur traders who went off into the upper Marches thousands of years ago and became trapped—or chose to trap themselves—in a little ice-bound valley, which until the recent spate of relatively warm years was completely cut off from the rest of Majipoor. They’ve devolved into the ugliest kind of savagery, and know nothing of the outside world. For example, they don’t have the slightest inkling that Majipoor is a planet of inconceivable size which contains billions of people. They believe that the whole world is pretty much like their own region, inhabited by a few scattered tribes of primitives who live by hunting and foraging. And when they were told about the Coronal and the Pontifex, they evidently understood them to be nothing more than petty tribal chieftains.”
“Why take the scientists prisoner, though?”
“The main concern of these people, if I can dignify them with that term,” answered the Vroon, “is simply to be left alone. They want to be allowed to go on living as they’ve always lived, safe from intrusion up there in the age-old isolation of their little valley, behind its wall of snow and ice. They’ve demanded a guarantee of that from the Coronal. And they intend to keep our paleontologists as hostages until we come across with a treaty to that effect.”
Harpirias nodded gloomily. “So I’ve been picked to serve as our ambassador to this bunch of mountain savages, is that it?”
“Exactly so.”
“Wonderful. And I suppose I’m to go to them and tell them sweetly and kindly—assuming that I can communicate with them at all—that the Coronal deplores this shameful violation of their privacy and respects their sacred territorial rights, and he pledges that no attempts will be made to send settlers into the unappealing icebox where they prefer to live. And I’m to let them know that as the authorized representative of His Majesty Lord Ambinole I am fully empowered to sign the treaty promising everything they are asking. In return for all this they are to release the hostages forthwith. Do I have it right?”
“There is one little complication,” said Heptil Magloir.
“Only one?”
“They aren’t expecting an ambassador. They expect the Coronal himself to come.”
Harpirias gasped. “But they can’t really think he will!”
>
“Unfortunately, they do. As I’ve already told you, they have no comprehension whatever of the size of Majipoor, or of the grandeur and majesty of the Coronal, or of the high responsibilities over which he presides. And these mountaineers are proud and touchy people. Their domain has been trespassed upon by strangers, which is apparently something they don’t permit; it strikes them as perfectly right and proper that those strangers’ chieftain now should show up in their village and humbly beg their pardon.”
“I see,” said Harpirias. “And therefore you want me to go to them and abjectly prostrate myself before them, all the while pretending that I’m Lord Ambinole. Is that it?”
The Vroon’s multitude of ropy tentacles moved in an agitated way. Softly he said, “No such statement was made by me.”
“Well, who am I supposed to be, then?”
“Be anybody that will make them happy. Tell them anything at all, so long as it gets those scientists free.”
“Anything. Up to and including masquerading as the Coronal?”
“The tactics you employ are for you to choose,” said Heptil Magloir primly. “These matters are entirely up to your discretion. You have a completely free hand. A man of your skill and tact will undoubtedly be equal to the task.”
“Yes. Undoubtedly.”
Harpirias took a few deep breaths. They wanted him to lie. They would not tell him to lie, but they had no objections to it, if lying to the savages was what it took to free the hostages. That saddened and angered him. Though Harpirias was far from straitlaced, the idea of posing as the Coronal among these barbarians seemed shockingly improper to him. It was offensive that they would even suggest it. What sort of man did they think he was?