The high priest—Mankhelm was his name—said a few brusque words to them. The sentinels saluted and made haste to roll back the uppermost level of the boulders so that they could enter.
All was dark within. There was a long business of lighting torches; and then Harpirias saw that they were in a low-roofed cavern, deep and narrow, that ran back far into the core of the rocky wall. Seepage from some mountain spring had coated its sides everywhere with an icy skin, which glinted with a beautiful bluish sheen by the torches’ smoky glow.
Shadowy figures came lurching out of the cavern’s depths, blinking and murmuring as they approached the light.
In a formal tone Harpirias said, “I am the ambassador of His Highness Lord Ambinole, come to win your freedom for you. Harpirias is my name. Prince Harpirias of Muldemar.”
“Divine be praised! What year is this?”
“What—year?” Harpirias was taken aback. “Why, the thirteenth of the Pontificate of Taghin Gawad. Does it seem that you’ve been here so long?”
“Forever. Forever.”
Harpirias stared. The man with whom he spoke was tall and terribly thin, pale as bleached parchment, with a crest of wiry graying hair fanning far out in every direction from his balding scalp and a thick, unkempt black beard covering nearly all of his face. Two burning half-crazed eyes peered from that thicket of hairy growth. He was dressed in loose fraying rags, pitifully inadequate to the cold.
“You’ve been here only a year,” Harpirias told him. “Or perhaps just a little more. It’s the middle of the summer in the Marches. The summer of the year Thirteen.”
“Only a year,” the man repeated in wonder. “It feels like a lifetime.—I am Salvinor Hesz,” he announced, after a moment. Harpirias knew the name. The leader of the ill-starred paleontological expedition, yes.
Others much like him in their raggedness and gauntness stood gathered behind. Harpirias counted quickly: six, seven, eight, nine. Nine. Was one missing?
“Is this the entire group of you?” he asked.
“All of us, yes.”
“There was some question about how many of you had made the journey. Eight, ten—the records were unclear.”
“Nine,” said Salvinor Hesz. “Changes of personnel were made at the last minute. Two dropped out—what luck for them!—and one replacement was found.”
“Myself,” a man of remarkable height and thinness said, in a black sepulchral voice that seemed to rise from the bottom of the Great Sea. “It was my good fortune to be allowed to join the expedition just as it was leaving Ni-moya. What an opportunity for furthering my career!” He put out a trembling hand. “My name is Vinin Salal. How much longer are we to be kept here?”
“I’ve only just arrived,” said Harpirias. “There’s a formal treaty to negotiate with the king before you can be freed. But I hope to have you out of here before the summer ends. I will have you out of here by then.” He looked from one to another of them, marveling at the fleshlessness of them all. Skin and bones was all they were. “By the Lady, they’ve been starving you, haven’t they? They’ll pay for this! Tell me: what kind of treatment have you had?”
“They feed us twice a day,” Salvinor Hesz said, without rancor. He gestured to the sacks of provisions which the Othinor had thrown down against the side of the cave, and which the men of the cavern appeared to be in no hurry to fall upon. “Dried meat, nuts, roots—pretty much the same things they eat themselves. It isn’t a diet one can love. But they do feed us.”
“Every morning, every afternoon, very punctually. A party of them always comes climbing up here with these sacks of food for us,” one of the others said. “Sometimes we can hear terrible storms raging outside, but they never miss a meal, they come up here all the same. You don’t get plump on Othinor fare, you know. Still, we can hardly say that we’re being starved.”
“No,” someone else agreed. “Not starved, no.”
“No.”
“Not at all.”
“Treated quite well, in fact.”
“Decent people. Very backward but not unkind, all things considered.”
Harpirias was puzzled by the mildness of their words, the almost benign tone in which they spoke of their savage captors. These men looked like walking skeletons. They had lived a year and something more in this dark glacial hole, far from their homes and loved ones and careers, slowly wasting away on the odds and ends of repellent food that was all the Othinor could provide. Where was their fury? Why were they not raining down curses on their jailers? Had this imprisonment so broken their souls that they were grateful even for the miserable bits and pieces that those who had condemned them to lie here were giving them to eat?
He had heard that prisoners, after many a month and year, sometimes came to love their keepers. But that was a hard thing for him to understand.
“You have no grievances against the Othinor at all?” Harpirias asked. “Other than having been forced to remain here against your will, I mean?”
They met his question with silence. It seemed to be difficult for these men to think clearly. Their minds as well as their bodies must have been weakened by their privations, Harpirias thought. The hunger, the cold, the separation from the world.
Then Salvinor Hesz said, “Well, they’ve taken our specimens away. The fossils. That was very distressing. You must try to get them back for us.”
“The fossils,” said Harpirias. “So you did actually find the bones of these land-dragons?”
“Oh, yes, yes. Quite a spectacular find. A clear link to the maritime species of dragons—an unquestionable evolutionary connection.”
“Is it, now?”
“We succeeded in excavating teeth of astonishing size, ribs, vertebrae, fragments of a huge spinal column—” Salvinor Hesz’s lean face became radiant with excitement. He glowed through the bushy shroud of his beard. “The largest land creatures that ever existed on this world, by far. And beyond any real doubt the ancestors of our sea-dragons—perhaps a transitional evolutionary form, one that will need a great deal of further study. The bones of their ears indicate clearly that they were designed to hear both on land and under water, for example. We’ve uncovered an entire new chapter in our knowledge of the development of life on Majipoor. And there’s more, much more, waiting to be discovered on that hillside. We had only just finished our scaffolding and begun to dig when the Othinor found us and took us prisoner.”
“And confiscated everything we had uncovered,” said another. “Reburied it, so we were given to understand.”
“That’s the most maddening part of all,” came a voice from farther back in the cavern. “Having made a major discovery like that, and not being able to bring our findings back to civilization. We can’t leave here without those things. You will insist on the return of the fossils, won’t you?”
“I’ll see what I can do, yes.”
“And also to get their permission to continue the work. You need to make them see that our excavating these fossils is mere scientific research, that the bones are of no value to them. And that the tribal gods, if they have any, won’t be displeased in any way by digging them up. Which I suppose is why they stopped us. Or don’t you agree?”
“Well—” Harpirias said.
“Surely the problem was some religious objection, wouldn’t you say? We were breaking some kind of taboo?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I remind you, I’ve only just arrived and real negotiations haven’t started. What they’ve asked for, though, is a treaty guaranteeing them that we will refrain forever from any sort of interference in their lives. There’s a chance I can at least get back the bones you’ve already dug up, but I’m not sure that they’re going to be willing to allow any additional excavations in the vicinity of their territory.”
There was a chorus of immediate objections to that.
“Hold on!” Harpirias said, raising his hands for silence. “Listen to me. I’ll do what I can for you. But my main purpose here is simpl
y to get you out of this place, and even that isn’t going to be easy. Anything else I happen to achieve in the way of safeguarding past or future scientific research will be strictly a bonus.” He glared at them. “Is that understood?”
No one answered.
He chose to take their silence for acquiescence. “Good. Good. Now: aside from the confiscation of the fossils, have you been mistreated in any way that I should be told about?”
“Well,” said one of the paleontologists hesitantly, “there’s the matter of the women.”
Harpirias heard some shushing noises. He saw them exchanging uncomfortable glances.
“The women?” he asked, looking around in bafflement. “What women?”
“This is very embarrassing,” Salvinor Hesz said.
“I need to know. What’s this about women?”
“They bring us their women,” one of the other paleontologists said in the faintest of voices, after a pause that threatened never to end.
“To be fertilized,” said another.
“It’s the worst part of the whole thing,” offered a third. “The absolute worst.”
“Shameful.”
“Disgraceful.”
“Revolting.”
Now that they had broken through their reserve, they all wanted to talk at once. Harpirias faced a confusing babbling clamor of statements, out of which, gradually, he pieced together the story.
Savages though the Othinor might be, apparently they did have some understanding of genetics. They were worried about the negative consequences of tribal inbreeding. As a small group of closely related individuals living as they did in the centuries-long seclusion of their all-but-inaccessible mountain home, they were probably already experiencing plenty of congenital defects. And so they had chosen to regard the arrival of the nine paleontologists as a happy gift of new genetic material. Over the months of the scientists’ captivity the Othinor had systematically been sending women into the cave for impregnation. Already, so the paleontologists believed, several halfbreed children had been born, and others were well along the way.
Harpirias’s mind swam with outrage and alarm. It began to be clear to him now why a daughter of King Toikella had been waiting for him in his room after the royal banquet.
“This has been going on since the beginning?”
“Since the beginning, yes,” Salvinor Hesz said. “Every few days a couple of women are brought here with the regular food delivery and are left here overnight. We’re very obviously expected to service them.”
“And have you seen their women?” demanded Vinin Salal. “Have you smelled them? This isn’t just moral and physical abuse. It’s an esthetic crime!” He trembled with barely contained anger.
Harpirias heard Korinaam snickering. He threw the Shapeshifter a wrathful glance.
Yet it was hard to keep from feeling a certain amusement. In the normal course of things, probably, very few of these dedicated, sober-sided, scholarly men had any more interest in matters of the flesh than he did in digging up fossil bones. For them to be forced to serve as stud males for Othinor women seemed vaguely comic. As for the esthetic issue, well, most of the scientists looked something short of beautiful themselves; nor was their odor, after all these months of captivity, anything of which to boast.
No matter, Harpirias thought. This was no way to treat prisoners. He understood their indignation. He looked at them with deepest sympathy.
“What they have made you do is disgusting,” he muttered. “Totally vile.”
Vinin Salal said, “The first night, of course, we stayed far away from them. It would never have occurred to us to lay a finger on them. But the next morning they reported what had happened—or rather, hadn’t happened—to the guards, and our food that day was withheld. The following morning they came with the food sacks as usual, and there were two new women also. There was a little pantomime. Food: women. Women: food. We figured out very quickly what we were supposed to do.”
“We drew lots,” came a voice from the far corner. “The two who got the short straws were elected. And so it has gone ever since.”
“But why do you think this is a breeding program?” Harpirias asked. “Maybe the Othinor are just trying to make your imprisonment a little more comfortable for you.”
Salvinor Hesz smiled somberly. “Would that that were so. But we know otherwise now. We’ve learned a smattering of their language, you know, in all this time. The new women coming up tell us about the pregnancies. ‘Give me a baby too,’ they say. ‘Don’t send me away empty. The king will be angry with me if I don’t conceive.’ There’s no doubt about it. They sound almost desperate.”
“You’ll see soon enough,” said Vinin Salal. “He’ll want you to contribute to their gene pool too. You in particular, with your aristocratic blood. Mark my words, prince. The king will try to make your stay here more—ah—comfortable—just as he has done for us. And then what will you do?”
Harpirias smiled. “I’m not the king’s prisoner. And soon you won’t be either.”
9
That evening, not long after Harpirias had completed his descent from the canyon rim, a second mutilated hajbarak was dumped down into the Othinor village. The circumstances were much the same as before. At dusk a bonfire flared suddenly atop the mountain wall—a different sector of it this time—and diminutive figures could be seen outlined against the gathering darkness of the sky, dancing wildly about. Then another big half-butchered beast came tumbling down the mountainside, bouncing heavily and ricocheting from the rocks as it dropped. It landed near the place where the other one had fallen.
The disturbance outside brought Harpirias from his room. He saw the king in a state of high ire, shaking his fist at the mountaintop and roaring streams of angry commands at his warriors. Once again the great animal was dragged out of sight; once again, the plaza was ritually purged of bloodstains. Harpirias heard discordant chanting far into the night.
The negotiating session the next morning did not go well.
Korinaam was ill at ease even before it began. “Have a little forbearance today,” the Shapeshifter warned Harpirias as they entered the royal chamber. “He’ll be in a foul mood. Don’t provoke him in any way. I suggest that you simply express your regrets over this latest shocking death of a sacred hajbarak and request an immediate adjournment of the session.”
“Time’s wasting, Korinaam. I need to ask him about this monstrous business of forcing the prisoners to sleep with women of the tribe.”
“Ask him another day, prince. Please. Please.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Harpirias said.
But there was little opportunity for him to define the agenda of the day’s talks. The king seemed deeply shaken. Brooding, remote, edgy, he greeted them with little more than a surly growl and a perfunctory wave of his left hand.
Harpirias told the Shapeshifter to open by saying that the ambassador wished to take up certain matters concerning the welfare of the hostages. A calculated risk, Harpirias thought. Korinaam was plainly reluctant, but so far as Harpirias was able to judge, he did as he was told.
Toikella, slouching on his throne, said nothing, only grunted and shrugged.
“Tell him that it has to do with the women who are being sent to them,” Harpirias continued. “That I was extremely disturbed to find out that such things were going on. That I have the strongest objection to such things.”
“Prince, I implore you—”
“Tell him. Exactly as I instruct you.”
Korinaam gave Harpirias a weary nod. He turned toward the king once more and spoke briefly to him.
This time the response was immediate and violent. Toikella’s face turned flaming red. He pounded the sides of the throne and snarled almost incoherently. Then, recovering himself, he spoke more calmly with the Shapeshifter, but in a dark imperious way that left no doubt of his simmering anger. And as he continued to speak his tone gradually grew more heated again.
“You see, pr
ince?” asked Korinaam smugly.
“What’s he saying?”
“Essentially, that he isn’t interested in discussing this topic with you. That the subject isn’t negotiable and in any event he thinks you aren’t qualified to talk about it. He’s using the scornful form of the pronoun you, by the way.”
“The scornful form?”
“They employ it when they want to cast doubts on the virility of an enemy.”
Harpirias felt his own temper rising. “Still clinging to that notion, is he? Well, you can tell him for me—”
“Wait,” Korinaam broke in. The king was still speaking. “He says—we should take ourselves out of his presence at once, he says. No talks at all today. The session is canceled.”
“Because he’s so upset over the hajbaraks?”
“Not only that. It’s much more complicated. He was in a touchy mood to begin with, but you’ve made it a lot worse, I’m afraid. Just as I warned you. He’s worked himself up into a real fit of rage. We have to go, right now.”
“You can’t mean that. Waste yet another day? It’ll be winter here before we ever get down to—”
“We have no choice. If you could understand the things he’s saying, you’d know that. Come—come—he’ll be throwing pieces of the throne at us in another minute.” Korinaam plucked nervously at the sleeve of Harpirias’s jerkin. “Come, prince!”
When they were outside Harpirias said, “All right. What was it that sent him up the tree like that?”
“It’s the matter of your vow of chastity, prince. That’s what is really troubling him, not the hostages or anything else. When you began to talk about the women who are being sent to the hostages, you reminded him of the other thing—your refusing of his daughter.”