News of the Coronal’s imminent arrival reached Stiamot two days later. He gathered a troop of peacekeepers and rode out to meet him east of town and escort his party into the city.
Strelkimar, wrapped in that dark cloud that seemed to go with him everywhere, greeted Stiamot in a perfunctory way, acknowledging him curtly with a quick, minimal movement of his hand. The Coronal was a commanding figure of a man, tall and powerfully built, but today he looked tired. That unfathomable darkness that lay at the core of his soul showed through plainly to the surface. Everything about Lord Strelkimar was dark: his eyes, his beard, the black doublet and leggings that he almost always wore, and, thought Stiamot, his soul itself. Stiamot suspected that the strange chain of events that had brought Strelkimar to the summit of power, the abrupt abdication and disappearance of his predecessor and all the whispered gossip that had surrounded the change of rule, had left some indelible mark on him. But all of that had happened before Stiamot’s own time at court; he had heard the stories, of course, but had no hard knowledge of what had really taken place.
“Has your journey been a good one, my lord?” Stiamot asked.
The question was mere routine courtesy, the obligatory sort of thing that a courtier would ask his arriving master. But it seemed to anger the Coronal: Lord Strelkimar’s obsidian eyes flared for a moment, and he scowled as though Stiamot had said something offensive. Then he softened. Stiamot was one of his favorites, after all, though it had appeared to take a moment or two for him to remember that. “These towns are all alike,” he said gruffly. “I’ll be glad to move along through here to Alaisor.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Stiamot. “The sea air will do you good, my lord. But I have a fine lodging waiting for you, and there will be an audience of notables tonight, and a state banquet tomorrow evening.”
“An audience, yes. A banquet. Very good.” The Coronal seemed ten thousand miles away. Stiamot conducted him into town – the whole population had turned out, lining the one main street on both sides – and took him to the Residency, where Kalban Vond greeted him with embarrassing obsequiousness. The Coronal asked to be left alone in his chambers for an hour or two. Stiamot obliged. He was glad to be free of the Coronal’s oppressive presence for a little while. When he returned in late afternoon, Strelkimar seemed refreshed – he had had a bath and changed his clothes, a different black doublet, different black leggings, and he had even donned his crown, that slender shining circlet that was his badge of office and which most of the time he disdained to wear. But his lips were clamped, as ever, in that brooding scowl that he seemed never to shed.
“Well, Stiamot, have you been keeping yourself amused here?”
“This is hardly an amusing place, sir.”
“I suppose not. Seen any Shapeshifters, have you?”
Was that some sort of mocking jab? There was a strange glint in the Coronal’s dark eyes. Stiamot had been a member of the Coronal’s council the past seven years, and was as close to him, quite likely, as anyone. But he never could tell, even after so much time, quite where he stood with Lord Strelkimar. He came from a good family though not one of the great ones, and had risen very swiftly at court through diligence, loyalty, intelligence, and – to some degree – luck, a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Still, the Coronal was a mystery to him. Much of the time he still found Strelkimar an enigma, baffling, opaque, impenetrable. He said warily, “As a matter of fact, I have, my lord. One. Right in the center of town, crossing a street. We stopped and stared at each other for a moment or two. He did a quick little shapeshifting trick, or so I thought. And then he went walking away.”
“Right out in the open,” the Coronal said. “So there are some actually living in this town?”
“I don’t think so. But they’re in the forests all around, and I guess one of them comes drifting through, occasionally.”
“And why is that?” said the Coronal, toying with the starburst decoration on the breast of his doublet.
“I have no idea, sir. But I can try to find out. I’ve met a man here who knows a great deal about them – has lived with them, even, in the forests – and he’s been telling me something about them. I hope to learn more from him.”
“Yes. Yes.” The Coronal peered at his knuckles as though he had never seen his hands before. “The Shapeshifters,” he murmured, after a time. “What an enigma they are, Stiamot. What a puzzle. I will never understand them.”
Stiamot said nothing. An enigma contemplating an enigma was too much for him to deal with.
Brusquely, in an entirely different tone of voice, the Coronal said, “And what time is this audience I’m holding supposed to happen?”
“In two hours, my lord.”
“Can you manage to make it any sooner? I’d like to get it over with.”
“That would be difficult, sir. Some of the planters live a considerable distance from town. I don’t see any way we could—”
“All right. All right, Stiamot.” There was another long pause. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly: “Tomorrow morning, bring me this forest-dweller of yours, this Shapeshifter expert. Maybe he can teach me a thing or two about them.”
Getting Mundiveen to come to a private morning interview with the Coronal was not so easy to accomplish. The little man had already made it clear to Stiamot that he was anything but an early riser; and simply to locate him was a problem. But with the District Resident’s help he tracked Mundiveen to his lair, a little ramshackle cottage in a dreary corner of town, and sent one of his aides in to ascertain whether he was awake. He was, though not happy about it. Fortunately, the Coronal was no early riser either, and his idea of “morning” was more like early afternoon.
Mundiveen seemed taken aback by this summons to the Coronal’s chambers. “Why does he want to see me?”
“I told him you knew a great deal about the Piurivars. He’s interested in them, all of a sudden. At court he hasn’t wanted to talk about them or, maybe, even to think about them, but now, for some reason – please, Mundiveen. You have to come.”
“Do I?”
“He is the Coronal.”
“And he can call me to his side just like that, with a snap of his fingers?”
“Please, Mundiveen. Don’t be difficult.”
“Difficult is what I am, my friend.”
“For me. A favor. Let him ask you a few questions. This is more important than you can possibly know. The future of Majipoor may depend on it.”
“I doubt that. But for me my not seeing him is more important than you can possibly know. Let me be, Stiamot.”
“A few questions, only. I’ve promised him I’ll bring you. Come. Come, Mundiveen.”
“Well—”
Stiamot saw him weakening. Some powerful inner struggle was going on; but as the moments passed Mundiveen’s resistance appeared to be diminishing. Refusing a royal command was evidently something that even the crusty, acerbic Mundiveen was unwilling to do. Or perhaps it was merely the fierce lofty indifference that seemed to underlie everything he said or did, that cosmic shrug with which he faced the world, that led him ultimately to yield.
“Give me half an hour to get myself ready,” Mundiveen said. But the meeting was a brief and unhappy one. Mundiveen was strangely tense and withdrawn during the journey to the Residency, saying almost nothing. He came limping into the Coronal’s chamber with Stiamot beside him, and when he saw Strelkimar he shot a look of such coruscating hatred at him as Stiamot had never seen in human eyes. Strelkimar, who was poring over a sheaf of newly arrived dispatches, took no notice. He barely looked up, greeting Mundiveen with no more than a grunt and a casual glance, and signalled that he wanted to continue reading for a moment. One had to grant a Coronal such whims, but Stiamot knew that Mundiveen was no man to honor even a Coronal’s whim, and half expected him to turn indignantly and leave. Surprisingly, though, he simply stood and waited, a tightly controlled figure, practically motionless, his breath coming in a harsh rasp, an
d at last the Coronal looked up again. This time, when his eyes met Mundiveen’s, some violent unreadable emotion – shock, anger, despair? – swirled for an instant across Lord Strelkimar’s face. Then it vanished, and was replaced by a steely fixed stare. He stared at Mundiveen with a terrible piercing force that reminded Stiamot of the look that that Metamorph had given him in the street. But despite the grim power of that stare Strelkimar seemed somehow unnerved by Mundiveen’s presence, confounded, dazed.
“You are the expert on Shapeshifters?” the Coronal asked finally, in a low, husky voice.
“If that is what your man tells you, my lord, I will not deny it.”
“Ah. Ah.” A long silence. He was still staring. Another string of unfathomable emotions played across his features, a twitching of his lip, a clenching of his jaw. He was holding some inward debate with himself. Then the Coronal shook his head, slowly, the way a man at the last extremity of exhaustion might shake it. He was barely audible as he said, not to Mundiveen but to Stiamot, “It was a mistake to call him here. This is not a good moment for a meeting. I find myself very weary, this morning.”
“If you say so, my lord.”
“Very weary indeed. The man can go. Perhaps another time, then.”
He made a gesture of dismissal.
Stiamot was dumfounded. To ask that Mundiveen be brought, and then to react like this, and send him away so hastily—!
But Mundiveen did not seem troubled by the discourtesy. If anything, he appeared to be relieved to take his leave of the Coronal. Stiamot saluted and they went from the room, and, outside, Mundiveen said, “I wondered how he’d react when he saw me. Took him a moment to recognize me, I suppose. How awful he looked. By the Divine, what a haunted look there is in that man’s eyes! And for good reason, let me tell you.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that—” Stiamot paused. “He recognized you, you say? He’s seen you before?” Acidly Mundiveen said, “I told you I was at court, in the time before he was Coronal. And for a little while afterward. You don’t remember my saying that?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I must have forgotten it.”
“I wish I could. We go a long way back, your Coronal and I.” Stiamot passed his hand across his forehead as though to clear it from cobwebs. “You need to tell me what this is all about.”
“I do? I need to? The same way I needed to go and see Lord Strelkimar?”
“For the love of the Divine, Mundiveen—”
Mundiveen let his eyes slip closed for an instant. “All right. Let’s go have a bowl or two of wine, then, and I’ll tell you.”
“Wine? This early in the day?”
“Wine, Prince Stiamot. Or no story.”
“All right,” Stiamot said. “Wine.”
Mundiveen said, “I wasn’t always twisted up like this, you know. In the days when Lord Thrykeld was Coronal I was quite an athlete, as a matter of fact. And when I was on a surveying trip I could walk miles and miles without the slightest fatigue.”
“Back when you were a mining engineer.”
“When I was a mining engineer, yes. At least you remembered that much. I was going to find the world’s biggest iron mine, I thought. Not that Lord Thrykeld cared very much about that. All he cared about, really, was poetry and singing and his Ghayrog favorite. Do you know about that, the Ghayrog? Before your time, I suppose. But no matter. Thrykeld was the Coronal Lord, and I served him as loyally as you seem to serve Strelkimar, and I was going to present him with more iron than had ever been discovered before.”
Mundiveen helped himself liberally to the wine. He seemed calm, icily controlled, betraying no sign of the ferocious rage that had come over him in his first moment in the Coronal’s presence. Stiamot waited, saying nothing.
“The former Coronal, Lord Thrykeld,” Mundiveen said at last. “I suppose history will call him a great fool. You probably know very little about him.”
“Not much, really,” said Stiamot. “Only the standard information.”
“Then you must think he was a great fool. Most people do. Well, probably he was. But he was a gentle, sweet man, with a considerable gift for poetry and music. The people loved him. Everyone loved him. You must have loved him yourself, when you were a boy. But in the third or fourth year of his reign something began to change in him. There was this Ghayrog at court, a certain Valdakko, some sort of conjurer, I think. The Coronal spent more and more time with him, and then he brought him into the Council. Well, that was a little unusual, a Ghayrog in the Council. There never had been one before. They have equality under the law, of course, but they are reptilian, you know. Their metabolisms aren’t like ours and neither are their minds. Thrykeld’s cousin Strelkimar was High Counsellor then, and I can tell you, he wasn’t pleased when the Coronal began to jump this Valdakko up like that. He took it as well as anyone could, though. But when Thrykeld decided that he wanted the Ghayrog to be High Counsellor in Strelkimar’s place, things got, shall we say, a little tense.”
“I heard about that,” Stiamot said. “The Ghayrog as High Counsellor.”
Mundiveen had finished his first bowl of wine, though Stiamot had had only a few sips of his. He went to work on a second one, savoring the wine, pondering it, seemingly lost in recollection of a far-off time. At length he began to speak again. “Strelkimar was very diplomatic about it all, at least outwardly. He behaved as though his cousin was just going through a phase. He loved Thrykeld, you know – as I said, we all loved him; a kind, good man – but gradually it became clear that the Coronal had become unstable, was slipping over, in fact, into a kind of megalomania.” Mundiveen went on to describe how, urged on by his Ghayrog counsellor, Lord Thrykeld had promulgated a law giving him the power to annul any previous statute without consent of the Council. This was absolutism; it was something entirely new in the history of the world. Strelkimar and a few of the other counsellors then made their objections known, objected very strongly, Mundiveen said, and Thrykeld – a Thrykeld none of them had ever known before – retaliated immediately, dismissing the entire Council except for the Ghayrog. He intended to rule, he announced, by personal decree.
“Strelkimar confronted him on that, of course,” Mundiveen said. “Thrykeld flew into a rage. No one had ever seen him even mildly angry before. He ordered Strelkimar banished to Suvrael and all his possessions confiscated.”
Astounded, Stiamot said, “I never heard a thing about that. It was never made public, was it?”
“Of course not. No one beyond the Council ever knew anything about it. Except me.”
“You weren’t a Council member.”
“No. But I was very close to the Coronal. To his cousin, too. And I was stupid enough to try to intervene in the crisis. I got between them: I told Lord Thrykeld that it was very dangerous to try to strip a great prince like Strelkimar of his estates, and I went to Strelkimar and begged him to be patient, to wait his cousin’s madness out, even to go into exile for a time until things calmed down. I was the very soul of moderation and conciliation. So of course they both turned on me.”
Stiamot signalled for another flask of wine. The little man seemed to have an infinite capacity.
“It was impossible to reason with the Coronal,” Mundiveen said, when he was sated for the moment. “He was far gone in his lunacy and the only person he would listen to was the Ghayrog. He drove me from his side. Strelkimar now let it be known that he felt the Coronal would have to be set aside, for the good of the whole commonwealth. I opposed him on that. I felt I had no choice about it. I went to him and said that Thrykeld was undoubtedly behaving very strangely, but no Coronal had ever been removed from office in all the history of the world; that to depose one would be an offense against the Divine; that all of this would surely blow over in a little while. No, said Strelkimar, his cousin was hopelessly mad. He intended to push him aside. I made the error of getting very excited. I swore great purple oaths that I would stand beside the anointed Coronal no matter what Strelkimar di
d. I threatened to go to the people with word that Strelkimar was planning to overthrow their monarch. I vowed to fight him every step of the way. My behavior was extremely rash. I forbade him to depose Thrykeld. Imagine that! Saying a thing like that to a man like Strelkimar. I became as crazy as Thrykeld himself was, I suppose.”
He fell silent. The silence stretched for a minute or more. When it began to seem as though he did not intend to resume at all, Stiamot prodded him:
“And—?”
“And that evening three hired thugs wearing masks came for me and took me from Stee to someplace far downslope, Furible or Stipool or one of those cities, and there they beat me until both they and I were sure that I was at the edge of death, and then they left me. But I didn’t die. They badly damaged me, but I lived. All they did was cripple me, as you see. Or did you think I was born with my backbone all askew like this?”
“Strelkimar’s men, were they?”
“They didn’t go to the trouble of telling me that. Make your own guesses.”
“And the next thing to do was killing Lord Thrykeld, I suppose,” said Stiamot, wondering whether he had fallen into some dream.
“Oh, no, nothing like that. They killed the Ghayrog, yes, but the Coronal was persuaded to sign a document of abdication. I can just imagine how he was persuaded, too. In his statement he declared that his health had unfortunately become too poor to permit him to continue to meet his royal responsibilities, and so he was withdrawing from the throne and going off to live in Suvrael. He sent a separate message to the Pontifex Gherivale, urging him most strongly to appoint Strelkimar as the new Coronal. So it was done; and Thrykeld left the palace; and then we heard the regrettable news that Thrykeld’s ship had been sunk by a sea-dragon en route to Suvrael, as you probably remember, and that was that. As for me, I suspected that it would not be a smart idea to return to the capital. In fact I discovered, when I had begun to recover from what your Coronal’s men had done to me, that I had lost all interest in the company of my own species, and I was years in recovering even a little of it. So I floated off quietly into the forests and took up my new career as a doctor to the Piurivars.” He paused again a moment and stared thoughtfully into his wine bowl. Then, looking up, he gave Stiamot a sharp sidelong glance. “Is there anything else you’d like to know, now?”