It was centuries now since the Piurivars — the Shapeshifters, the Metamorphs, a people with as many names as they had faces — had won full political equality on Majipoor; but, like many young aristocrats of the Mount, Harpinas still harbored some residual prejudices against them. He believed, not entirely incorrectly, that the Shapeshifters were tricky and devious, a race of schemers, slippery and unpredictable, who had never completely reconciled themselves to the occupation of their planet by the billions of humans and other species that had colonized Majipoor nearly fifteen thousand years before. An attempt by the Piurivars hundreds of years ago in the time of Valentine Pontifex to drive all the intruders from their world had failed, as inevitably it had had to, and a detente between the outnumbered Shapeshifters and the dominant humans of Majipoor had been negotiated to everybody’s presumable satisfaction. But still — still -
You could never trust them, Harpirias believed. No matter how sincere and helpful they might sound, it was never a good idea to take anything they said at face value, because there was almost always some hidden double meaning, some sly and treacherous subtext to their words. And of
The caravan moved onward, past the place of the haiguses, heading out onto the widening plateau. The afternoon now had become bright and clear, and they advanced under a cloudless sky rich with light. Scarcely any vestige remained of the screeching snowstorm through which they had been riding only a few hours before. The air was calm, the sun was high and strong. Scattered dark patches of dampness, speedily vanishing, were the only visible signs of the snowy fury that had whirled down upon them then.
A single huge triangular mountain, like a giant’s tooth thrusting upward from the valley, rose directly before them at a great distance, deep purple against the blue of the sky. Stony sharp-contoured hills, covered only by thin and widely spaced stands of graceless scrubby trees and some faint shadowy splashes of bluish grass, bordered their path on both sides as they rode toward it. Now and then Korinaam pointed out animals: the imposing white-furred bulk of a steetmoy standing at the tip of an inaccessible crag; a herd of graceful mazigotivel leaping from one strip of grass to another to graze; a keen-eyed mountain hawk making slow, purposeful circles high overhead.
To Harpirias these Marches seemed to be a place that dwelled perpetually at the edge of some mighty drama. The silence, the immensity of the vistas, the clearness and brightness of the air, the strangeness of the tortured landscape and its few inhabitants — everything intensified the potent impact of the place and kindled high wonder in him. For all his anger at the chain of events that had brought him to these mountains, he could not now regret being here, nor did he doubt he would ever forget the splendor of these sights.
At this time of year the sun remained aloft in these latitudes far into what Harpirias regarded as the normal hours of the night. Since the day did not seem to end, he wondered whether Konnaam would keep them riding onward until midnight or later; but just as hunger was beginning to announce itself to him, the Shapeshifter told him to give the order for a leftward turn into a side canyon opening just before them.
'There’s an encampment of March-men in there,' Korinaam explained. 'They spend their summers in this place. You see the black smoke of the campfire rising, do you? They’ll sell us meat for our dinner.'
The mountaineers came out to greet them well before the caravan had reached their camp. Evidently they knew Korinaam, and had dealt with him many times before, because they greeted him cordially enough, and there was a long exchange of effusive compliments in a rough, barking kind of mountaineer lingo of which Harpirias could understand only occasional words.
It was Harpirias’s first encounter with the nomads of the Marches . He had expected them to be more or less like wild beasts in human form, and indeed they were dressed in roughly sewn hides and not very clean-smelling ones at that, nor did any of them appear to have washed in recent days. At a glance, no one would mistake them for citizens of Ni-moya.
But a close look revealed them to be much less savage than he had imagined. In truth they were robust, vigorous, articulate people with ready smiles and bright alert eyes, who had, actually, very little about them that was primitive or alien. Give them a haircut and a bath and an outfit of clean city clothes and they would pass easily in a crowd. The Skandars, immense hulking four-armed figures covered all over with coarse shaggy fur, were far wilder-looking creatures.
The mountain folk gathered around the travelers in good-natured excitement, offering little trinkets of bone and crude leather sandals for sale. Harpirias bought a few things as mementos of the trip. Some, who spoke more intelligibly than the rest, bombarded him with questions about Ni-moya and other places in Zimroel; and when he told them that in fact he came from Castle Mount, and had lived only a short while in Ni-moya, they grew even more animated, and asked him if it was true that the Coronal’s castle had forty thousand rooms, and wanted to know what sort of man Lord Ambinole was, and whether Harpirias himself lived in a grand palace with many servants. Then too they wanted tales of the senior ruler, the Pontifex Taghin Gawad, who was even more mysterious to them, since he never left his imperial seat in the Labyrinth of Alhanroel. Did he really exist, or was he only a figure of myth? If he existed, why had he not picked his own son to be Coronal, instead of the unrelated Ambinole? For what reason were there two monarchs in the world at all, an elder and a younger?
A simple folk, yes. Accustomed to a harsh life, but not unfamiliar with the luxuries of the cities. Most of them had been down into the more civilized parts of Zimroel more than once; a few, apparently, had lived for extended periods in one city or another. They had rejected them, that was all: this was where they preferred to live. But they had not cut themselves off entirely from the great world whose northernmost extremity they happened to inhabit. Simple and unsophisticated they might be, yes, but they were far from savage.
'You’ll see real savages soon enough,' Korinaam said. 'Wait until we reach the country of the Othinor.'
5
Harpirias feasted that evening on skewers of grilled meat of a kind unknown to him, and drank mug after mug of a thin, acrid green beer that seemed less intoxicating than it turned out to be. The sun hovered above the rim of the nearby mountains far into the night, and even when it finally dropped from view the sky remained strangely light. He slept in his floater, a fitful and troublesome night’s sleep, punctuated by fragmentary dreams and long spells of wakefulness, and awakened with a sour taste in his mouth and an all too predictable throbbing in his head.
In the morning the caravan rolled onward, continuing northward across the plateau. The day was clear and crisp, no sign at all of any new snowstorm. But the terrain grew progressively more bleak hour by hour. With every mile they covered the elevation of the plateau increased moderately but perceptibly, so that Harpirias, looking back, was able to see the road they had traversed, lying far below them.
In this high country the air was chilly even at midday, and there were no more trees here, nor was there much vegetation of any kind, only a few small, practically leafless bushes and isolated scraps of grass. Mainly the landscape consisted of bare rocky hills covered with old gray crusts of ice, over which lay the light dusting of yesterday’s storm, barely melted here at all. In the distance, now and then, the fires of other March-men encampments made dark trails of smoke against the sky, but they had no other meetings with any of the mountain folk.
They came at last to the triangular mountain that had stood before them since the last pass: Elminan, it was, the Steadfast Sister. Its true size now became apparent, for at close range it was like an unanswerable wall filling the entire sky with the gigantic question that it posed.
'There is no way over it,' said Korinaam. 'It can be climbed on this side, but on the other there is no descending. All we can do is go around it.'
Which they did: a journey of some days, through rough and ragged country made intractable by long miles of icy ridges hard as iron.
This was a land of wild and hungry beasts that roved with impunity. One morning a pack of ten or twelve shambling great-haunched creatures bigger than Skandars approached the floaters and began energetically to rock them, as if hoping to tip them over and crack them open from below. Harpirias heard one pounding with the force of a giant hammer against the roof of his vehicle. 'Khulpoins,' Korinaam said. 'Very disagreeable.'
Harpirias took his energy-thrower from its rack. 'I’ll try a warning shot, perhaps, to scare them off.'
'Useless. Nothing scares them. Give me the weapon.'
Reluctantly Harpirias let the Shapeshifter take it from him. Korinaam opened the hatch of the floater a little way and poked the energy-thrower’s tube through. Harpirias had a glimpse of wild fiery eyes, slavering jaws, a row of teeth like yellow scythes. Korinaam sighted calmly along the barrel and fired. There was a chilling howl of pain and the khulpoin sprang away from the floater, streams of blood spurting in startling violet gouts from a gaping hole in its shoulder.
'You only wounded it,' Harpirias said, with some contempt.
'Exactly. Maximum blood flow, that’s the trick. Watch what happens.'
The khulpoin, roaring, had begun to run in a lopsided staggering way across the icy ridges, biting frantically at the wound in its shoulder as it went. A trail of purple blood sprang up behind it. Instantly its companions left off their attack on the caravan and gave pursuit. They caught up with it a hundred yards away, surrounding it, clawing at it, leaping upon it as it fell. Even at this distance their growls of satisfaction reverberated through the floater with appalling force.
'Now we leave them to their meal,' said Korinaam, sending the floater into high acceleration. Harpirias looked back only once, wincing at what he saw.
A day and a night and a day and a night more, and all the while purple Elminan stood above them like a scornful sentinel; and then at last they reached the mountain’s western edge and began to pass around to the far side of it. That transition took another day and a half, until Harpirias found himself looking up at Elminan’s north face, a horrifying vertical slab, a sheer straight drop that terminated in a pile of tremendous boulders at ground level. Small wonder there could be no traveling over this mountain, but only around it.
The country beyond was desert-dry and altogether stark. From time to time, as they crossed it, lightning would break without warning or apparent cause out of a cloudless sky, striking the ground with the vehemence of an angry god’s wrath and sending up a quick puff of flame. Even Korinaam seemed distressed by this place, and they put it behind them as quickly as they could.
The last of the nine great mountains of the Marches could be seen on the horizon now: two of them lay to the east, Thail and Samaril, the Wise Sister and the Cruel Sister, and to the west, so far away that it was no more than a dark nubbin against the sky, was triple-peaked Kantavinorka, the Eldest Sister. But the route that Korinaam was following took them straight onward, ever northward, past the last campfire of the March-men, past the northernmost zone of known exploration, deep into an empty ice-locked wilderness of perpetual winter, as silent as though it stood under some solemn enchantment. It seemed to Harpirias that they were heading for the roof of the world.
Had anyone ever ventured here before, in all the history of Majipoor? Yes, yes, it must be so: it was clear that Korinaam was familiar with these roads and knew where he was going.
None the less this place seemed to Harpirias like a virgin world, untouched, unknowable. The familiar cities of Majipoor, lying somewhere far behind him in the warm happy haze of summer, had ceased to be real for him: they were dream-cities now, myth-cities, places that had sprouted in the fertile compost of his imagination
