Into this sheltered place the sun would intrude, Harpirias calculated, only for a few hours at a time on just a few days of midsummer. The steep angle at which the canyon wall ascended probably kept the village of the Othinor in shadow all the rest of the year: a claustrophobic place of darkness and mystery, cold and grim. But just now it was radiantly lovely.
As he stood gazing wonderstruck at this eerie little frostbound empire of the high country, figures emerged from the city of ice and began to run across the open plaza toward them.
“The Othinor,” Korinaam said. “Remain calm, make no menacing gestures.”
They looked like demons. The name “Othinor,” Korinaam had explained, meant either “The Hidden Ones” or “The Holy Ones” in the native language: which one was the correct translation was still uncertain. But there was nothing very holy about those who came charging forward now. There were perhaps twenty of them, a band of snarling, hairy, uncouth-looking men, dressed in haphazardly sewn pelts of fur, with jagged stripes of clashing colors painted across their faces and arms. Though they appeared to be armed only with spears and crude swords, they looked ready and eager to go on the offensive against the newcomers.
Harpirias glanced back and saw that some of his Skandars were stirring uneasily. He heard the click of energy-throwers being put in readiness.
“No weapons,” he said sharply. “Just stand your ground, and take no action unless we’re actually attacked.”
It was difficult, even so, to look on nonchalantly as this motley horde of howling devils came rushing toward them. Harpirias threw an uncertain look at Korinaam, who only smiled and said, “They aren’t going to harm us. They know who I am and they understand that I’ve come back with good news for them.”
“I hope you’re right,” muttered Harpirias.
“Hold both your arms outstretched with the palms facing forward: it’s a sign of peaceful intentions. Look as dignified and regal as you can and don’t say a thing.”
Harpirias struck the pose, feeling more than a little foolish. In another moment the Othinor had reached them and surrounded them, capering and dancing in an almost comic show of barbaric force, shouting, sticking out their tongues, waving their swords and spears in their faces with theatrical ardor.
Perhaps that’s all it is, thought Harpirias: a show, a staged display of force. Their little way of signifying to strangers that they are not a people to be trifled with.
Korinaam was speaking now: loudly and slowly and clearly, uttering harsh thick-tongued words that had the sound of mere gibberish, though the odd word or two sounded almost familiar. One of the Othinor, a tall gaunt-faced man more elaborately robed and painted than the others, offered a reply, speaking with much greater rapidity; and after a pause Korinaam spoke again, apparently repeating his previous declaration. So it went, for some minutes, one long bewildering stream of palaver after another.
The language of these people, Harpirias began to see, was some distant relative to the language that was spoken everywhere on Majipoor. Like the tongue the March-men spoke, it was a transformed and distorted form of it, scarcely recognizable to a city-dweller. But the divergence had gone even further in this remote northern region. The March-men’s speech was actually just a rough-and-ready dialect of standard Majipoori; the strange lingo spoken here, developed during thousands of years of isolation, seemed to have become virtually a different language. How well, Harpirias wondered, did Korinaam understand it?
Well enough, apparently. The Othinor had halted their grotesque capering and were standing quietly in a circle around them. The one who had replied to Korinaam originally—was he the king? No, probably just a priest, Harpirias decided—still was speaking with him, but in a less formal, more conversational way; some of the others, after peering at Harpirias’s Skandars and Ghayrogs in unconcealed fascination at the sight of such alien beings, now came up to them to carry out an inspection at closer range.
An Othinor gingerly put his fingertips to the smooth, rigid scales of Mizguun Troyzt, the Ghayrog floater technician, and lightly rubbed them. Though Mizguun Troyzt’s cold unblinking eyes remained expressionless, his serpentine hair writhed in emphatic annoyance. He backed away an inch or two, but the Othinor reached out further.
“I do not want to be touched like this,” the Ghayrog said to Harpirias, between clenched jaws.
“Nor I,” said Eskenazo Marabaud, the captain of the Skandars. An Othinor, standing on tiptoes, had reached up to tug the dense reddish hair that covered the Skandar’s great slab of a chest, and now was pulling at the lower of Eskenazo Marabaud’s two pairs of arms as though to find out whether they were really attached to his body.
Harpirias fought back laughter. But all the Othinor now were poking and prodding energetically at the Skandars and Ghayrogs; and he saw that in another moment there was likely to be an incident. “You’d better put a stop to this,” he said to Korinaam.
“There is no help for it,” the Shapeshifter said. “It is a natural curiosity on their part. Your men will have to get used to it.”
“And how long am I supposed to stand with my arms out like this?”
“You can put them down now. We are officially admitted to the village. The priest here tells me that King Toikella is looking forward with much pleasure to making your acquaintance. So come, now, prince: to the royal palace.”
6
The palace of the Othinor monarch was, predictably, the grandest of the buildings of the village, a three-storied structure at the extreme eastern end, its flat white facade covered from top to bottom with a scrollwork of fantastic interlaced ice-carvings of the most intricate kind. Within, though, it turned out to be a single cavernous room, enormously high and broad, with no supporting columns. Such construction, thought Harpirias, must surely strain the tensile strength of the ice-blocks out of which the place had been built to its absolute limits.
The great hall was dark and smoky and dank. Its air was stiflingly close, unexpectedly warm, with a foul fishy aroma. Heavy weavings hung from the walls and the floor was strewn with dried rushes that crunched nastily under foot. The only illumination came from a large leather-walled tank, set in a deep pit in the very center of the room, which held a pool of dark oil of some unfamiliar sort that was burning slowly with a bluish flickering glow. Behind it sat King Toikella high atop an astounding platformlike throne made of scores of colossal bones, a whole charnel house of them, tightly and elegantly wedged and woven together—thighbones, ribs, immense curving tusks, shoulderblades, jawbones, an awesome royal seat constructed entirely from the bodies of the formidable beasts that roamed this icy land.
The king himself was well worthy of such a throne: a gigantic potbellied man, entirely bald, strikingly ugly, naked except for a strip of leather around his waist and an array of bone beads and long yellow teeth dangling from a string on his chest. His face and back and shoulders were striped with bright streaks of paint. In his left hand he held a great gross gobbet of bloody, greasy meat, charred on one side but otherwise practically raw, which he had been gnawing on as Harpirias and Korinaam entered. A bevy of half-naked women, most of them as fat and ugly as he was—wives? concubines? royal princesses?—lolled at the foot of the throne.
The Shapeshifter stepped forward, struck what was evidently a ceremonial pose of submission—arms out high, palms turned forward—and greeted the king with a long, slow speech, altogether unintelligible to Harpirias. The king was silent for a time when Korinaam had finished. He tore off a chunk of meat and chewed it reflectively. He looked Harpirias over with care. Then—slowly, solemnly—he rose to his full majestic height, the meat still in his mouth, and spoke for a long while in the deepest voice Harpirias had ever heard come from a human throat. It was a low rumbling growl more like a Skandar’s voice than a man’s.
When he had finished he pulled another whopping piece of meat from the haunch in his hand and tossed it in an offhand way down to Harpirias, who caught it in some surprise.
??
?The king bids you welcome,” Korinaam murmured.
“Tell him that I thank him for his kindness.”
“Not yet. Eat what he’s given you, first.”
“Are you serious?”
“Extremely. Eat it, prince.”
Harpirias stared unhappily at the meat. A sharp, acrid, uninviting aroma rose from it. Only one corner appeared to be cooked at all. The rest of it was bright red, except for the thick vein of fat and gristle that ran through its middle. He turned the hefty chunk over, surreptitiously scanning it for maggots.
“Eat it,” the Metamorph said again. “Meat from the king’s own portion must not be refused.”
“Ah,” Harpirias said. “Yes. Yes, certainly.”
It was all starting to seem unreal. Civilized, tranquil Majipoor felt very far away. This could well be some strange new universe he had wandered into, or a particularly vivid hallucination. Or perhaps he was asleep, and it was simply a dark sending of the King of Dreams. But if this was a dream he saw no way of waking from it.
Harpirias reminded himself that there were worse things in the world than eating half-raw meat; and also that a diplomat often must make himself conform to the customs of his hosts. He took a bite. The meat wasn’t half as bad as it looked. He had tasted less agreeable fare while out hunting in the forests of Castle Mount. The second bite was less pleasing: he had struck the fat, and he had to struggle to keep from gagging. But he recovered and bit into the meat again. King Toikella was watching with interest.
“Now thank him for me,” Harpirias told the Shapeshifter.
“You haven’t finished eating it.”
“Neither has he. We can eat while we parley.”
“Prince, I think—”
“Give him my thanks,” said Harpirias. “This instant.”
Korinaam nodded curtly. Turning toward the throne, he launched into a loud, florid-sounding oration. The king listened with apparent pleasure, nodding emphatically after a time and offering a lengthy response of his own, in which, now and again, Harpirias heard the words Coronal and Lord Ambinole in the midst of the torrent of guttural mountaineer speech. Then Harpirias realized that the king was looking directly at him whenever he pronounced those words.
An ugly suspicion grew in him.
“Wait a minute,” he said angrily to Korinaam, when Toikella appeared to have reached the end of his reply. “What have you done? You haven’t told him that I’m the Coronal, have you? You know I ordered you not to do that.”
The Shapeshifter made an apologetic gesture. “Indeed. Nor have I done so. But I’m afraid that he himself has jumped to that conclusion, prince.”
“Well, unconclude him, then. Now. I’m not going to operate under false pretenses.”
Korinaam looked troubled. His form flowed and rippled a little around the edges for a moment, always a sign of acute Shapeshifter distress. “This is not a good time for telling him such a thing. That would only confuse and perhaps anger him, just when everything has begun so smoothly. We’ll have plenty of opportunities later to get the matter cleared up.”
“Now, I said. Not later. He’s got to realize that there’s been an error, that I’m only the Coronal’s emissary, not actually the Coronal. It’s an order, Korinaam. I want you to make it absolutely clear to him that—”
But King Toikella had begun speaking again. The Metamorph gestured urgently to Harpirias to be quiet, and Harpirias subsided. In his annoyance he took another bite of his chunk of meat without even noticing.
Harpirias realized glumly that he was completely in the Shapeshifter’s power: unable to communicate verbally with King Toikella himself, he was forced to rely on his Metamorph interpreter for every transaction. Korinaam was free to tell the king anything he felt like and Harpirias would never know the truth of what had been said. That could become a problem. Already had, in fact.
Toikella was silent again, waiting.
The Shapeshifter glanced toward Harpirias. “The king declares that he is well pleased you have come,” he said.
“Fine. I’d like you to ask him if the hostages are in good health.”
“Once again, prince, I must beg your indulgence. The time for asking that is also not just yet.”
Another hot jolt of fury shot through Harpirias. “Am I the ambassador, or are you, Korinaam?”
With a sweeping gesture of subservience the Shapeshifter said, “There can be no doubt on that score, prince.”
“But nevertheless it seems that you make yourself the final arbiter of what I am allowed to say. In this case I have to insist. Knowing the condition of the hostages is of prime—”
“We must assume that the hostages are in excellent condition, prince,” said Korinaam smoothly. “But to ask questions about them at this point would be inappropriate and premature. Worse: it would be impolite.”
“Impolite? That naked barbarian sits up there on a throne made out of bones, eating a haunch of practically raw meat and forcing me to do the same, and you tell me that we have to worry about being polite to him?”
“Politeness is always useful in these affairs,” Korinaam said, giving Harpirias an unctuous smile. “Patience, also. I beg you, prince, to take my advice seriously. I know what these people are like. You do not.”
True enough, Harpirias thought.
Nor was it possible in any case to continue the conversation with the king just now, for Toikella had descended from his throne and was bellowing orders to various members of his court in an amazing thunderous voice.
“What’s he saying?” Harpirias asked the Metamorph.
“That we are to be shown to our quarters, so that we can have a few hours of rest after our long and arduous journey. There’ll be a grand feast tonight in our honor. Othinor hospitality at its finest.”
“I can just imagine,” said Harpirias unhappily.
By way of guest accommodations the Othinor king provided them with a dozen or so chambers in a low, sprawling icehouse at the opposite end of the village from the royal palace. Harpirias’s Skandars had to bunk three or four to a room, cramped though that would be for the bulky creatures; his four Ghayrogs, who liked to keep to themselves, took a pair of rooms; Harpirias and Korinaam each were permitted the luxury of private quarters.
The room they had given Harpirias was a square, boxy windowless cell, lit only by small dim lamps made of carved bone that burned the same thick dark odoriferous oil which had illuminated Toikella’s throne chamber. Its air was so still and stagnant, despite the burning lamps, that the enclosure seemed almost to be without air at all; and it was cold—cold. Living in it would be like living in a storage refrigerator. Even indoors, his breath rose in steamy clouds before his face. Everything was ice, the entire structure fashioned of heavy blocks of it—floor and walls and ceiling and all. There was no furniture, only a pile of furry rugs on the floor to serve as a bed.
“Will this be satisfactory, prince?” Korinaam asked him, as he stood frowning in the doorway.
“And if I say no?”
“You will cause the king much embarrassment.”
“Certainly I wouldn’t want to do that,” said Harpirias. “And this is better than sleeping outdoors, I suppose.” Though not by very much, he added silently.
“Indeed,” replied the Shapeshifter in a solemn tone, and left him to such brief repose as he was able to find in the midst of the stack of thick, itchy furs.
The feast that evening was held in the great high-ceilinged hall that was the royal palace. They had spread heavy rugs, made of white steetmoy hides sewn end to end, over much of the floor—luxurious immaculate rugs that undoubtedly were brought out only on very special occasions. Massive tables of broad rough-hewn planks, resting on substantial trestles fashioned from the same huge bones out of which the royal throne had been constructed, were covered with all manner of plates and tureens and bowls and porringers brimming with foodstuffs. A dozen slender flambeaus projected from sconces of bone set into the walls at the end of arm-shaped hand
les, providing a smoky, fitful light.
Before the meal there was dancing. The king, seated far above everyone else on the platform that was his throne, rose and clapped his hands, and a dozen musicians playing crude unfamiliar instruments, drums and pipes and gongs and odd-looking stringed devices, set up a discordant screeching polyrhythmic caterwauling at such unthinkable volume that Harpirias feared that the walls of the palace would come crashing down.
The members of the royal harem were the first to dance, a gaggle of tubby bare-breasted women in loincloths and moccasins of black fur, who formed a line and pranced wildly about, kicking up their legs and hurling their arms outward with a berserk manic clumsiness that was both comic and endearing. It was an effort for Harpirias to keep a straight face. But then he realized that the dance was supposed to be funny: the dancers themselves were chortling as they cavorted and collided, and whoops of pleasure from the onlookers filled the room, with the king’s own mighty roars resounding over all the rest.
Then Toikella himself stepped down from the throne and thrust himself into the line of dancers. He was a formidable figure, half again as tall as any of the women, his shining shaven head rising above them like a mountain dome. His monumental chest was bare, as it had been earlier, but tonight he had donned a cape of black haigus fur that was fastened at his throat to dangle down his back. The haiguses had been stitched together horns and all: angry red eyes gleamed from the pelts, and a triple row of the sharp needles jutted threateningly along the king’s heavy-muscled shoulders.
“Eyya!” he boomed. “Halga! Shifta skepta gartha blin!”
He moved among the women, stamping his feet, flinging high his arms, bellowing and howling. They swirled around him, no longer comic now but weirdly compelling as they matched his primeval stampings and flingings with fierce, savage steps of their own. It was an awesome sight, ludicrous but frightening at the same time. Harpirias had never seen anything like it.
And now the king seemed to be beckoning to him, bending forward at the waist, staring straight at him, crooking and wriggling his fingers.