The Mountains of Majipoor

'You should dance.'

'No doubt I should. Yes. Yes, of course I’ll dance.'

Harpirias hesitated just a moment, studying the steps with closer care, soaking up the strange clashing rhythms. Then he moved out into the center of the floor.

The women slipped back into the shadows. He was alone with the king, who loomed over him like a titan.

Sweat rolled in streams down Toikella’s bare glistening body. He grinned in high amusement — Harpirias noticed for the first time that there were bright gems, an emerald and a ruby and a third one of a darker hue, set into his front teeth — and struck his hands together three times. It was a signal, apparently, to the musicians, who halted their frenzied wailing and honking and pounding and screeching and set about playing a different tune entirely, one that was slow and sinuous, a dark, quiet, serpentine melody, haunting and strange.

The king, his shoulders hunched high and his hands held facing each other with fingers writhing mysteriously, began now to move with implausible grace in a wide circle around Harpirias, treading lightly, almost floating. It could have been the dance of a hunter stalking his prey.

Harpirias, having no idea of what step he was meant to undertake, remained still for a moment, watching Toikella in the baffled fashion of one who is beginning to slip into a trance. But then he too started to move, almost without conscious volition: flexing his fingers first, then slowly raising and lowering his shoulders, and finally mimicking the king’s fastidious tiptoe delicacy as he set out to follow his own circular path, going in the direction opposite to Toikella’s.

For long moments they stalked each other, winding round and round, the immense fleshy man and the shorter, more compact one, while the music gradually grew and grew in tempo and volume. Soon it began to approach the wild intensity of the women’s dance. Harpirias picked up his pace as the music rose. Toikella, still grinning, moved faster as well. Harpirias laughed. It was impossible now to maintain his earlier delicacy of step. He leaped; he bounded; he stamped his feet and clapped his hands.

'Eyya!' cried the king. 'Halga!'

'Eyya!' Harpirias echoed. 'Halga!'

'Shifta skepta gartha blin!'

'Shifta skepta!'

'Gartha blin!'

'Shifta skepta gartha blin!'

Harpirias threw his head back, flung his hands high, pulled one knee almost to his chest and then the other. He howled and roared. He stamped and clapped. And he saw now that others were coming out onto the floor, some of the women first, and then the elaborately robed man with the painted face who had spoken with Korinaam at the entrance to the valley, and other men after him, flamboyantly painted also — high warriors of the tribe, perhaps. Even a few of the Skandars joined the dance, finally, although none of the Ghayrogs did, nor did Korinaam venture forth. For what seemed like hours they all circled round the room like a band of moonstruck madmen, until abruptly the music died away in mid-note, as if all the musicians had perished in the same instant, and the only sounds in the room were those of laughter and harsh breathing.

The king, who was standing beside Harpirias as the music ended, turned toward him. There was a look of total delight in the big man’s eyes. He reached out one outsized paw for him and gathered Harpirias in, drawing him into a crushing embrace. For a seemingly endless moment the king held him there. The royal effluvium was overwhelming: a reeking mixture of sweat, animal grease, thickly applied pigments, awful perfumes.

Then Toikella released him, grinned once more, and clapped his forehead in what had the look of a salute. Harpirias, grinning also, returned the gesture. The dance had left him exhilarated. He felt almost like himself again, after all these long gloomy months of exile. To his surprise, he found himself oddly charmed, too, by Toikella, who seemed to be an amiable, high-spirited old tyrant. It appeared that Toikella was taken by him as well.

Yes, Harpirias thought, we will be the best of friends, he and I. We will sit up late together and drink whatever it is that they like to drink in this place, and we will tell each other the stories of our lives. Friends, yes. Bosom companions.

It was time for the feasting, finally.

The king served Harpirias with his own hands: a high honor, evidently, but something of a doubtful one, since diplomatic courtesy now obliged Harpirias to eat everything that Toikella had chosen for him. Left to his own discretion, he might have preferred a less generous assortment, for nearly everything on the serving tables looked and smelled inedible.

Most of it was meat, roasts and stews and skewered strips, buried under thick, pungent sauces. There were several soups — Harpirias hoped that those fluids were soups, and nothing more sinister — and mounds of roasted nuts, and vegetable mushes of various kinds, and what might have been gnarled roots, baked until charred. The beverage of choice evidently was some kind of bitter, brackish beer, grayish-black in color, that bubbled unpleasantly of its own accord in the bowl.

Harpirias ate what he could, nibbling here, staunchly cramming there, washing it all down with desperate gulps of the beer. These people seemed to like their meat half-cooked and fatty, and most of it had a gaminess which even an experienced huntsman like Harpirias found hard to tolerate. All the sauces were much too spicy for him, and many of the vegetable dishes had a spoiled or fermented undertaste. But he did his best. He understood what a sacrifice it must be for the Othinor to provide such abundance as this, living as they did in a land that was covered by snow most of the year, where farming was unknown, where every scrap of food must be pried from nature’s unwilling grasp.

The king plied him with second portions, and thirds, and fourths. Harpirias laughed and protested, and confined his eating to nibbles, and let the royal servants clear his unfinished plates away whenever Toikella was looking the other way.

The evening wore on. And on and on.

Three clowns entered the room and carried out a long unfathomable routine of jokes and haphazard juggling that brought tears of mirth to the king’s face. The women danced again, and then a group of the men. Harpirias grew drowsy, but gamely compelled himself to pay attention. He drank more of the bubbling bitter beer: it was almost possible to like it, after a while. Gradually he became aware that the feasters were beginning to slip away, in groups of two and three. The big room had grown very quiet. The king had gathered two armloads of his women to his side and had slumped down with them onto the rugs.

Softly Korinaam said, 'Come, prince. The evening is at its end.'

'Shall I bid the king good night?'

'He won’t notice, I suspect.' Indeed, Toikella appeared preoccupied. Soft moist slobbering sounds could be heard. 'We should just go,' the Shapeshifter said.

Together they crossed the icy plaza to the guest house at the far end. It was late enough so that darkness had fallen. The air on this midsummer night was clear and crisp, and had what Harpirias regarded as a wintry edge to it. The stars hardly seemed to shimmer: they were discrete points of light, keenly bright.

'You did well tonight,' said Korinaam, as they entered the building of ice. 'A good start to the mission.'

Harpirias nodded. He felt woozy. Too much stimulation, too much strange beer, too much bad food, too much close smoky air. He pushed the leather door-flap aside and went into his room. It was even warmer inside than the throne room had been, and the lamps, which had been lit during his absence, had filled the air with thick oily smoke, so that Harpirias choked and gagged at the first breath of it.

There was someone in the room. A woman.

'Yes?' he said. 'What do you want?'

She rose and came toward him, displaying a gap-toothed smile. Harpirias recognized her as one of those who had clustered earlier at the foot of King Toikella’s throne — the youngest-looking and least unattractive of them, in fact, a reasonably slender girl with straight, glossy dark hair cut in a bowl shape just about to the level of her ears. She was wearing only the moccasins and loincloth of black fur that had been the costume of the dancers, and now, quite casually, she pulled the loincloth down and kicked it aside. With a cheerful gesture she pointed toward the pile of sleeping-furs, tapped her chest, extended her hand to him.

'No,' Harpirias said. 'Not tonight, thanks. I’m very, very tired. I’d just like to go to sleep.'

She bobbed her head up and down and giggled. She pointed again to the furs.

Harpirias stayed where he was. 'You didn’t understand a word of what I said, did you? No. No, how could you?'

For an instant he was almost tempted. He had been living chastely for so long now that chastity was starting to feel almost like a normal way of life to him, which was a situation that surely needed to be remedied. But not here, not now, not with her. She was far from hideous — pleasing features, alert mischievous eyes, a decent figure, appealing breasts — but she was, after all, barbaric in her manner and dirty and unfragrant in her person. And he was extremely tired and not at all interested.

It was flattering that she had taken a fancy to him, he supposed. But what would the king say when he discovered that the ambassador from the civilized world had allowed himself a night’s sport with a member of the royal harem?

'I’m sorry,' he said gently. 'Perhaps another time.' He picked up her discarded loincloth and pressed it into her hand. Then, putting the tips of his fingers lightly and he hoped unprovocatively against her back, he steered her toward the door, not exactly pushing her but making it as clear as he could that he was asking her to go.

She turned and looked back at him for a long charged moment. Sadly? Angrily? Mockingly? He couldn’t tell.

Then she was gone.

Shaking his head, Harpirias did what he could to cleanse himself and get ready for sleep. He was on the verge of climbing between two of the furs on the floor when the Shape-shifter’s quiet voice from the hallway said, 'May I speak with you, prince?'

Harpirias yawned. This was getting very annoying. He said, without rising to pull back the sheet of leather that functioned as the door, 'What is it, Korinaam?'

'The girl you refused has come to me.'

'My warmest congratulations. I wish you much joy of her.'

'You misunderstand me, prince. She came to me to ask what she has done wrong with you, why she has displeased you. She has gone away bewildered and insulted.'

'She has? Well, that’s too bad, I suppose. It wasn’t my intention to hurt her feelings. But I didn’t particularly want company tonight, not hers, not anybody’s. And as a general rule it doesn’t seem smart to me to be sleeping with the king’s wives.'

'Not one of his wives, prince. It is King Toikella’s youngest daughter whom you have rejected. And when he learns of it, there’s bound to be no small amount of trouble.'

'His daughter? He wants me to go to bed with his daughter?'