'Yes,' Kattikawn said, 'how could we give up the homes that had been ours and our forebears' for so long, eh?'
Eremoil ignored the heavy irony. 'We took this planet from an unwilling people. For thousands of years we attempted to live in peace with them, until we admitted that coexistence was impossible. Now we are imposing our will by force, which is not beautiful, but the alternatives are even worse.'
'What will Lord Stiamot do with the Shapeshifters he has in his internment camps? Plough them under as fertilizer for the fields he's burned?'
'They'll be given a vast reservation in Zimroel,' said Eremoil. 'Half a continent to themselves — that's hardly cruelty. Alhanroel will be ours, and an ocean between us. Already the resettlement is under way. Only your area remains unpacified. Lord Stiamot has taken upon himself the terrible burden of responsibility for a harsh but necessary act, and the future will hail him for it.'
'I hail him now,' said Kattikawn. 'O wise and just Coronal! Who in his infinite wisdom destroys this land so that his world need not have the bother of troublesome aborigines lurking about. It would have been better for me, Eremoil, if he had been less noble of spirit, this hero-king of yours. Or more noble, perhaps. He'd seem much more wondrous to me if he'd chosen some slower method of conquering these last holdouts. Thirty years of war — what's another two or three?'
'This is the way he has chosen. The fires are approaching this place as we speak.'
'Let them come. I'll be here, defending my house against them.'
'You haven't seen the fire zone,' Eremoil said. 'Your defense won't last ten seconds. The fire eats everything in its way.'
'Quite likely. I'll take my chances.'
'I beg you—'
'You beg? Are you a beggar, then? What if I were to beg? I beg you, captain, spare my estate!'
'It can't be done. I beg you indeed: retreat, and spare your life and the lives of your people.'
'What would you have me do, go crawling along that highway to the coast, and live in some squalid little cabin in Alaisor or Bailemoona? Wait on table at an inn, or sweep the streets, or curry mounts in a stable? This is my place. I would rather die here in ten seconds tomorrow than live a thousand years in cowardly exile.' Kattikawn walked to the window. 'It grows dark, captain. Will you be my guest for dinner?'
'I am unable to stay, I regret to tell you.'
'Does this dispute bore you? We can talk of other things. I would prefer that.'
Eremoil reached for the other man's great paw of a hand. 'I have obligations at my headquarters. It would have been an unforgettable pleasure to accept your hospitality. I wish it were possible. Will you forgive me for declining?'
'It pains me to see you leave unfed. Do you hurry off to Lord Stiamot?'
Eremoil was silent.
'I would ask you to gam me an audience with him,' said Kattikawn.
'It can't be done, and it would do no good. Please: leave this place tonight. Let us dine together, and then abandon your domain.'
'This is my place, and here I remain,' Kattikawn said. 'I wish you well, captain, a long and harmonious life. And I thank you for this conversation.' He closed his eyes a moment and inclined his head: a tiny bow, a delicate dismissal. Eremoil moved toward the door of the great hall. Kattikawn said, 'The other officer thought he would pull me out of here by force. You had more sense, and I compliment you. Farewell, Captain Eremoil.'
Eremoil searched for appropriate words, found none, and settled for a gesture of salute.
Kattikawn's guards led him back to the mouth of his canyon, where Eremoil's driver and the messenger waited, playing some game with dice by the side of the floater. They snapped to attention when they saw Eremoil, but he signaled them to relax. He looked off to the east, at the great mountains that rose on the far side of the valley. In these northerly latitudes, on this summer night, the sky was still light, even to the east, and the heavy bulk of Zygnor Peak lay across the horizon like a black wall against the pale gray of the sky. South of it was its twin, Mount Haimon, where the Coronal had made his headquarters. Eremoil stood for a time studying the two mighty peaks, and the foothills below them, and the pillar of fire and smoke that ascended on the other side, and the moons just coming into the sky; then he shook his head and turned and looked back toward Aibil Kattikawn's manor, disappearing now in the shadows of the late dusk. In his rise through the army ranks Eremoil had come to know dukes and princes and many other high ones that a mere civil engineer does not often meet in private life, and he had spent more than a little time with the Coronal himself and the intimate circle of advisers around him, and yet he thought he had never encountered anyone quite like this Kattikawn, who was either the most noble or the most misguided man on the planet, and perhaps both.
'Let's go,' he said to the driver. 'Take the Haimon road.'
'The Haimon, sir?'
'To the Coronal, yes. Can you get us there by midnight?'
The road to the southern peak was much like the Zygnor road, but steeper and not as well paved. In darkness its twists and turns would probably be dangerous at the speed Eremoil's driver, a woman of Stoien, was risking; but the red glow of the fire zone lit up the valley and the foothills and much reduced the risks. Eremoil said nothing during the long journey. There was nothing to say: how could the driver or the messenger-lad possibly understand the nature of Aibil Kattikawn? Eremoil himself, on first hearing that one of the local farmers refused to leave his land, had misunderstood that nature, imagining some crazy old fool, some stubborn fanatic blind to the realities of his peril. Kattikawn was stubborn, surely, and possibly he could be called a fanatic, but he was none of the other things, not even crazy, however crazy his philosophy might seem to those, like Eremoil, who lived by different codes.
He wondered what he was going to tell Lord Stiamot.
No use rehearsing: words would come, or they would not. He slipped after a time into a kind of waking sleep, his mind lucid but frozen, contemplating nothing, calculating nothing. The floater, moving lightly and swiftly up the dizzying road, climbed out of the valley and into the jagged country beyond. At midnight it was still in the lower reaches of Mount Haimon, but no matter: the Coronal was known to keep late hours, often not to sleep at all. Eremoil did not doubt he would be available.
Somewhere on the upper slopes of Haimon he dropped without any awareness of it into real sleep, and he was surprised and confused when the messenger shook him gently awake, saying, 'This is Lord Stiamot's camp, sir.' Blinking, disoriented, Eremoil found himself still sitting erect, his legs cramped, his back stiff. The moons were far across the sky and the night now was black except for the amazing fiery gash that tore across it to the west. Awkwardly Eremoil scrambled from the floater. Even now, in the middle of the night, the Coronal's camp was a busy place, messengers running to and fro, lights burning in many of the buildings. An adjutant appeared, recognized Eremoil, gave him an exceedingly formal salute. 'This visit comes as a surprise, Captain Eremoil!'
'To me also, I'd say. Is Lord Stiamot in the camp?'
'The Coronal is holding a staff meeting. Does he expect you, captain?'
'No,' said Eremoil. 'But I need to speak with him.' The adjutant was undisturbed by that. Staff meetings in the middle of the night, regional commanders turning up unannounced for conferences — well, why not? This was war, and protocols were improvised from day to day. Eremoil followed the man through the camp to an octagonal tent that bore the starburst insignia of the Coronal. A ring of guards surrounded the place, as grim and dedicated-looking as those who had held the mouth of Kattikawn's canyon. There had been four attempts on Lord Stiamot's life in the past eighteen months — all Metamorphs, all thwarted. No Coronal in Majipoor's history had ever died violently, but none had ever waged war, either, before this one.
The adjutant spoke with the commander of the guard; suddenly Eremoil found himself at the center of a knot of armed men, with lights shining maddeningly in his eyes and fingers digging painfully into his arms. For an instant the onslaught astonished him. But then he regained his poise and said, 'What is this? I am Group Captain Eremoil.'
'Unless you're a Shapeshifter,' one of the men said.
'And you think you'd find that out by squeezing me and blinding me with your glare?'
'There are ways,' said another.
Eremoil laughed. 'None that ever proved reliable. But go on: test me. and do it fast. I must speak with Lord Stiamot.'
They did indeed have tests. Someone gave him a strip of green paper and told him to touch his tongue to it. He did, and the paper turned orange. Someone else asked for a snip of his hair, and set fire to it. Eremoil looked on in amazement. It was a month since he had last been to the Coronal's camp, and none of these practices had been employed then; there must have been another assassination attempt, he decided, or else some quack scientist had come among them with these techniques. So far as Eremoil knew, there was no true way to distinguish a Metamorph from an authentic human when the Metamorph had taken on human form, except throush dissection, and he did not propose to submit to that.
'You pass,' they said at last. 'You can go in.'
But they accompanied him. Eremoil's eyes, dazzled already, adjusted with difficulty to the dimness of the Coronal's tent, but after a moment he saw half a dozen figures at the far end, and Lord Stiamot among them. They seemed to be praying. He heard murmured invocations and responses, bits of the old scripture. Was this the sort of staff meetings the Coronal held now? Eremoil went forward and stood a few yards from the group. He knew only one of the Coronal's attendants. Damlang of Bibiroon, who was generally considered second or third in line for the throne; the others did not seem even to be soldiers, for they were older men, in civilian dress, with a soft citified look about them, poets, dream-speakers perhaps, certainly not warriors. But the war was almost over.
The Coronal looked in Eremoil's direction without seeming to notice him.
Eremoil was startled by Lord Stiamot's harried, ragged look. The Coronal had been growing visibly older all through the past three years of the war, but the process seemed to have accelerated now: he appeared shrunken, colorless, frail, his skin parched, his eyes dull. He might have been a hundred years old, and yet he was no older than Eremoil himself, a man in middle life. Eremoil could remember the day Stiamot had come to the throne, and how Stiamot had vowed that day to end the madness of this constant undeclared warfare with the Metamorphs, to collect the planet's ancient natives and remove them from the territories settled by mankind. Only thirty years, and the Coronal looked the better part of a century older; but he had spent his reign in the field, as no Coronal before him had done and probably none after him ever would do, campaigning in the Glayge Valley, in the hotlands of the south, in the dense forests of the northeast, in the rich plains along the Gulf of Stoien, year after year encircling the Shapeshifters with his twenty armies and penning them in camps. And now he was nearly finished with the job, just the guerrillas of the northwest remaining at liberty — a constant struggle, a long fierce life of war, with scarcely time to return to the tender springtime of Castle Mount for the pleasures of the throne. Eremoil had occasionally wondered, as the war went on and on, how Lord Stiamot would respond if the Pontifex should die, and he be called upward to the other kingship and be forced to take up residence in the Labyrinth: would he decline, and retain the Coronal's crown so that he might remain in the field? But the Pontifex was in fine health, so it was said, and here was Lord Stiamot now a tired little old man, looking to be at the edge of the grave himself. Eremoil understood abruptly what Aibil Kattikawn had failed to comprehend, why it was that Lord Stiamot was so eager to bring the final phase of the war to its conclusion regardless of cost.
