“My chastity is no concern of his.”
“Ah, but it is, it is, prince! Just as you heard yesterday from those men in the ice-cave: he is expecting you to sire a royal heir for him. He is furious because you sent his daughter away, and the talks are not going to make any progress whatever until you embrace her and plant the son of a Coronal in her womb.”
“The son of a Coronal!” Harpirias cried. “Is that what he thinks he’ll get out of me?”
The Shapeshifter’s impenetrable eyes might have been showing a certain sly pleasure. He said nothing.
“For the love of the Divine, Korinaam, do you see what you’ve done? I told you and told you and told you again that I didn’t care for the idea of letting him think that I was Lord Ambinole. I ordered you on at least three different occasions to make the truth known to him. But you refused, and refused, and refused once more, and now—do you see? He wants a Coronal’s child for a grandson, and how can I give him that? I am not the Coronal, Korinaam! Not! Not!”
“You are of royal blood, prince.”
“A thousand years removed.”
“Nevertheless. Your ancestor was a great king. Even if you are not Coronal yourself, we can explain that you are royal. Make the child, and Toikella will be satisfied.”
“Make the child?” Harpirias sputtered. “What are you saying?”
“Is it such a dreadful chore? The girl seemed fair enough to me.”
Harpirias drew a deep breath. “As if you could tell. But what the girl looks like is completely beside the point. I’m simply not going to—No,” he said grimly. “We go back in there and you let him know the truth about who I am, and that’s that.”
“He will kill us, prince.” There was no mockery in the Shapeshifter’s tone now.
“Do you mean that?”
“He thinks you are his lordship. It is too late to tell him anything else. He has too much pride invested in having the Coronal of Majipoor as a suppliant in his village. If we tell him at this late hour that we’ve allowed him to deceive himself about who you really are up till now, he’ll kill us both out of hand. Believe me, prince.”
“But that would be an act of war! His lordship’s government would send an army in here and carry him away into prison for the rest of his life.”
“He has no idea of the strength of his lordship’s government,” Korinaam said. “As you know, he believes that his lordship is a tribal chieftain who is no more important or powerful than he is himself, and that no invader could possibly mount a successful assault on this village. Of course, he would find out eventually that he is wrong. But you and I would still be dead.”
Hopeless. Hopeless. Harpirias saw that he was totally boxed in by Korinaam’s steadfast refusal to speak the truth to the king and the king’s own ill-informed assumptions.
He retreated to his room in the guest house to ponder the situation.
It was wild folly to have let Korinaam sustain this witless misunderstanding this long. And what a tangle it had become now! To be forced to go on and on with this nonsensical hum-buggery, on pain of death, pretending that he was indeed the anointed master of Castle Mount—and to be asked, of all things, to provide the king with an heir in whose veins the royal blood of Majipoor would be combined with that of the Othinor chieftain—
But certainly it was a high crime against the realm to pose as a Coronal. Regardless of the explanations he could give for having undertaken such an imposture, he knew that it was unthinkable to attempt it. And yet—and yet—
Lord Harpirias, Coronal of Majipoor!
He could pretend to it if there was a good reason for doing so, could he not? For the sake of the mission? Conduct himself as though he were king? Stalk around this icy realm of misery as though he were indeed the master of Castle Mount, as though it was he who held the royal seat upon the glorious Confalume Throne, he who wore the starburst crown? How would Toikella ever know it was not so?
No. This was vacuous nonsense.
He could no more imagine himself to be Coronal than he could imagine himself old. He was Harpirias of Muldemar, a young man of the Prestimion line, a minor prince of the Castle Mount aristocracy. He wanted to go on being Harpirias of Muldemar. He was satisfied with that. He had no ambitions beyond that. To masquerade, even here, even for a moment, even out of supposed diplomatic necessity, as the lord of the world would be a grotesque blasphemy.
He knew he must correct the foolishness into which Korinaam had thrust him before it proceeded any further.
But how?
No answer presented itself. Harpirias was still puzzling over it, alone in his room, far into the evening.
Then, very late, came a voice at his door, a woman’s voice, speaking softly to him in words he was unable to understand.
“Who is it?” he called. But he had a good idea.
She spoke again. There seemed to be a plaintive, imploring note in her voice.
Harpirias went to the door, pulled the leather flap aside. Yes, it was she: the one who had come to him before, the king’s young dark-haired daughter. Tonight she was more formally dressed, a fine robe of white fur, leather buskins, a bright scarlet ribbon elaborately woven through the glossy bowl of her hair. A spindle-shaped sliver of carved bone had been thrust into her upper lip from side to side: some sort of tribal jewelry, no doubt.
She looked terrified. Her eyes were wide and rigidly fixed on him, and she was trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the chill of the air. A muscle was jerking rhythmically in her cheek. Harpirias stood there a long while, staring at her, not knowing what to do.
“No,” he said to her after a time, trying to keep his voice gentle. “I’m really sorry. But I can’t do this. I simply can’t.” He smiled sadly, shook his head, pointed outward through the door. “Can you understand what I’m saying? You have to go. What you want from me is something I can’t give you.”
She shivered in an almost convulsive way. Held out her hands to him. They were shaking.
“No,” she said, and to his amazement she was speaking his language. “No—please—please—”
“You know Majipoori?”
Not very much of it, apparently. He had the impression that the girl was speaking by rote. “Please—please—I—come—in?—”
Korinaam has taught her this, Harpirias thought suddenly. That would be very much like him.
He shook his head again.
“You can’t. You mustn’t. I’m simply not going to—”
“Please!” There was a terrible urgency in her tone. She seemed about to fall at his feet.
In the face of that, how could he turn her away? Harpirias sighed and beckoned her in. Just for a little while, he told himself. A little while, and that would be all.
The girl stumbled into the icy room. It was impossible for her to stop shivering. Harpirias wanted to put his arms around her and offer comfort. But he could not allow himself to do that. It was important to keep his distance.
Evidently she had exhausted her few comprehensible words now. She was gesturing to him in some sort of pantomime, raising her arms high over her head and bringing them down to her sides in a broad sweeping gesture, then doing it again, again, again. Harpirias struggled to make sense out of her miming. Something big. A mountain, was that what she was portraying? Did this have anything to do with the two dead animals that had been thrown down into the village from the top of the canyon wall?
She swept one hand downward in front of herself in a swelling curve from her forehead to her knees. Indicating her belly? A representation of the pregnancy that she desired from him? Maybe not. She made the mountain gesture again, and then the belly. He watched her uncomprehendingly. She opened her mouth, pointed to her teeth. The mountain again. The belly. Once more the teeth.
Harpirias shook his head.
She paused in thought for an instant or two. Then she thrust her arms out toward the floor at an angle, a gesture that seemed to indicate size, and began to march stiff-leggedly a
round the room in a comical hulking way.
He was altogether lost. “An animal? A big animal? A hajbarak?”
“No. No.” She looked annoyed at his denseness. Once more the mountain, the belly, the teeth. The hulking stiff-legged strut. And this time he got it.
A mountain that walked—a big belly—and the teeth—a big potbellied man with unusual teeth—
“Toikella!” he cried.
The girl nodded happily. Comprehension at last.
He waited. She appeared to be thinking again. Then, as she had done the last time she had come to him, she pointed toward the pile of sleeping-furs, tapped her chest, extended her hand to Harpirias. Harpirias began to explain to her once again that he wasn’t willing to go to bed with her. But before he could say anything she acted out the Toikella pantomime again; and then she let her face puff up and her eyes turn demented in what was clearly a representation of royal anger, and went jumping around the room furiously wielding an imaginary sword or lance. After which, shrinking down from her Toikella size to her own, she clutched at her body with both her arms and made her eyes glaze over. Wounded. Dying.
“Toikella will kill you if I don’t sleep with you?” Harpirias asked. “Is that it?”
She gave him a helpless uncomprehending look. He tried again, speaking louder and more slowly. “King—will—kill—you?”
The girl shrugged and went through the whole pantomimed rigmarole again.
“Kill both of us?” Harpirias asked. “Kill only me?”
But words were useless. Evidently she had already uttered every word of his language that she understood, all four or five of them. He knew only two or three words of hers, and none that would help him now.
She was imploring him with her eyes. Looking desperately at him, then looking toward the pile of furs. Offering herself to him once more.
Harpirias realized that he had probably caught the gist of her anguished charade correctly. Her father the king had ordered her to bear a royal heir. He would settle for nothing less. If Harpirias sent her away as he had before, Toikella’s ire would be aroused to a murderous heat.
Whether it was the girl that he would kill, or Harpirias, or the two of them, was not something that he had been able to get from her. But it made no difference. The implications were clear that some sort of violence would come from this, unless he yielded to the king’s blind insistence.
And, trapped between the cynical lies that Korinaam had told and the dynastic expectations of King Toikella, Harpirias saw that he had no choice.
“All right,” he said to her. “Come on. I’ll make a little prince for you, if that’s what your father wants so badly.”
He didn’t expect her to understand anything of that, nor did she. But when he caught her lightly by the wrist and drew her toward the bed of furs her eyes brightened in immediate comprehension. A kind of glow came into her face that made her seem almost attractive.
Not that she was particularly repugnant, Harpirias thought. Stockier and more muscular than he really preferred a woman to be, and somewhat deficient in bodily cleanliness, perhaps, and the dark spaces in her smile where front teeth were missing disturbed him. But—even so—
He had never been an outstanding model of moral fastidiousness himself. In his time Harpirias had embraced more than a few young women whose deportment and appearance would have raised eyebrows at the Coronal’s court. That laughing red-haired dancing girl long ago in Bombifale, the one with the fiery eyes and the hoarse shrill voice of a fish-peddler—and that slim-legged juggler lass in the holiday town of High Morpin, who could swear like a sailor—and especially that swaggering broad-hipped huntress he had met while wandering alone in the forests back of Normork, who had showed him a trick or two when he was eighteen that would never have crossed his mind—
There had been others. More than a few, more than a few. If he was forced now to add a swarthy smudge-faced barbarian girl to the list, well, so be it. Diplomats have to perform all sorts of unusual things in the course of their duties, Harpirias told himself once again. His mission would very likely fail if he persisted in his prissy refusal to honor Toikella’s wishes in this matter. Therefore it could be construed as his professional duty to oblige the king. And if he was not in fact the Coronal, for all that Toikella had chosen to believe he was, it was certainly true that the blood of Coronals past ran in his veins. The king would have to be satisfied with that.
So be it. So be it.
Harpirias unfastened the robe of white fur and held it open as the girl slipped out of it.
She was naked beneath it. Her body was lean and taut-fleshed, with small hard breasts and nicely flaring hips. Apparently she had oiled herself from head to foot with something—could it be hajbarak grease, he wondered?—that gave her a smooth and agreeably slippery feel, and masked to some extent the scent of her unwashed skin.
They dropped down together to the pile of hides. Harpirias quickly wriggled into the middle of the heap, for it was much too cold in the ice-walled room for him to want to expose his unclothed body very long to the air. Though apparently the girl would have preferred to remain on top of the pile rather than within it, she seemed to understand his need, and after a bit she followed him underneath. Once they were safely covered, side by side and snug beneath the mound of furs, she laughed and pressed her hand against his chest, rolling over and pushing him down so that she could climb into the upper position.
“That’s how you like it, is it? Fine. Whatever you want.”
She grinned down at him. There was a playful sparkle in her eyes, as though this were some sort of game for her. Harpirias wondered how old she was. Twenty? Younger, maybe. Fifteen? There was no telling.
He tried to kiss her, but she averted her mouth. Not their custom, apparently. So be it, Harpirias thought. That little sliver of carved bone stuck through her upper lip would have caused difficulties anyway.
She said something to him in her language. “I don’t understand,” he told her. She laughed and said it again. Othinor words of tender passion? Somehow he doubted that. Maybe she was just telling him her name.
“Harpirias,” he said. “My name is Harpirias. What’s yours?”
She giggled. Said something again, a single word, which a moment later she said a second time. Perhaps it was of some significance; but of course, he hadn’t a clue to its meaning.
“Shabilikat?” he ventured.
His attempt at mimicking her sent the girl into a gale of wild laughter.
“Shabilikat,” he said again. “Shabilikat.”
It seemed to amuse her inordinately to hear him repeating the word. But when he tried it one more time she put her hand over his mouth; and then, an instant later, she wrapped her powerful thighs around his waist, straddling him in a manner that left him without much of an urge to make further attempts at conversation.
It was a long night, and an active one, and rather more pleasant than Harpirias had anticipated, although the style of it was very strange to a man accustomed to the more polished women of the Majipoor aristocracy. Yet he accommodated readily enough to the lusty vigor of her lovemaking, the eager clawing hands, the fierce rocking thrusts, the robust uproarious outbursts of hilarity at what struck him as oddly inopportune moments. She seemed insatiable. Harpirias, though, after long months of unbroken continence, was far from troubled by that.
Somewhere along the way the furs with which he had covered them went flying to one side, but he hardly noticed the cold. Eventually—he had no idea how many hours later it was—he tumbled suddenly into the deepest and darkest of sleeps, the way one might tumble into a well; and when he woke, much later, he discovered that she had covered him once again while he slept and had slipped out of his room without awakening him.
He could not know, naturally, whether he had indeed sired a little princeling for Toikella on her that night. But if the effort had been a failure, he told himself, well, then, he would be quite willing to make another try at it.
&nbs
p; 10
The king, the next day, was in a far more congenial mood than he had been yesterday. He greeted Harpirias at the entrance to the throne chamber with hugs and bellows of hearty affection, and then with lascivious grins and winks and sniggers and nudges that made Harpirias wince with barely concealed embarrassment. Plainly Toikella had had a full report from the girl and had been very much pleased by what he heard.
But he still refused to let Harpirias draw him into any specific negotiations. He was in truth, as Korinaam had said, a man who disliked being hurried.
Harpirias had the Shapeshifter deliver a tactfully worded request for a discussion of the welfare of the hostages. Toikella’s reply was cool and brief, and even Harpirias could tell that it was a refusal.
He looked toward Korinaam. “He says no, does he?”
“The king wishes to assure you that all will be well in regard to everything you wish, but he asserts that this is not the time to talk about it. He is going to set out on a hunting trip three days hence and it would be unlucky for him to engage in matters of any substance until he returns.”
“Which will be how long? A week? A month?”
“Two days. One to ascend, one to return. Perhaps a third day if the animals make themselves scarce.”
“By the Lady! If this keeps up we’re never going to—”
“You are invited to accompany him,” Korinaam continued smoothly. “I advise that you accept. The midsummer royal hunt is a great sacred festival of these people, and he is honoring you greatly by asking you to come.”
“Well, then,” Harpirias said, somewhat mollified. But all this delay was irksome to him none the less.
The rest of that morning’s meeting was devoted to plans for the trip. Afterward, as he and Korinaam were returning to their lodging house, Harpirias said, “You taught that girl how to say words like ‘please’ and ‘I come in,’ didn’t you?”
“I felt that the situation was dangerous. She needed my help.”
“Dangerous to whom?”