Robert Silverberg: Tales of Majipoor (collection)

“Stiamot,” he said uncomfortably. “Of Stee.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. The Coronal’s advance man. Everybody in town knows who you are.”

“And what I’ve been doing, also, I guess. You saw me talking to the—Piurivar, you called it?”

“That’s what they call themselves. I like to use the term too. Metamorph, Shapeshifter, Piurivar, whatever you like. No, I didn’t see you with him. What would I be doing awake at that hour? But he told me about it. He said you looked at him as though he were a creature from some other world. What do you like to drink, eh, Stiamot? First one’s on me.”

Stiamot shot a quick glance at the two aides with whom he had entered the inn, wordlessly telling them to fade away, and said to Mundiveen, “Let’s start with gray wine, shall we? And then, when I’m paying, we can go on to the blue.”

It was strange how quickly Stiamot began to feel at ease with this quirky little man. They would never be friends, Stiamot saw at once: the doctor was all sharp edges, prickly as a zelzifor, and Stiamot doubted that “friendship” was a word in his working vocabulary. The harsh, hopeless laugh with which he punctuated his sentences betrayed a profound mistrust of humanity. But Mundiveen seemed to be willing enough to accept a little companionship from Stiamot, at least. They crossed the room together—he did have a distinct limp, Stiamot saw—and settled at a corner table, and a zone of privacy appeared to take form around them, an invisible wall that set the two of them off from the crowd of noisy, boisterous planters who filled the room.

Mundiveen let him know right away that he was just about the only man in town who understood anything about the Shapeshifters. “Spent a lot of time with them, you know. Right there in their own forest. Helped one mend a badly broken arm—they do have bones, by the way, nothing like yours or mine but bones all the same, and they can break—and he took a kind of liking to me, and that was the beginning. One outcast to another, you might say.”

“That’s how you see yourself, an outcast?”

“That’s what I am,” said Mundiveen, laughing his hopeless little laugh, and bent low over his wine-bowl to forestall farther inquiry.

“The District Resident said you’d lived among them for a dozen years.”

“I still do live among them. If I can be said to live among anybody, that is.”

“You live in the forest?”

“I have a place in town, and one in the forest. I move from one to the other as the spirit takes me. We need another flask of wine. You pay, this time.”

“Of course.” Stiamot signalled to the barmaid. “Where were you from, originally?”

“Stee, same as you.”

“Stee? Really?”

“You seem surprised. No reason to be. Stee’s a big city; nobody can know everybody. It was a long time ago, anyway. You were probably just a boy when I left there. Your Coronal, Lord Strelkimar. How is he?”

That was an odd phrase, Stiamot thought: your Coronal. He was everybody’s Coronal. “His health, you mean?”

“His health, his state of well-being, his inner equilibrium, whatever you want to call it.”

Stiamot hesitated. His eyes met the little man’s—they were very pale eyes, not gray, as Stiamot had first thought, but a sort of washed-out yellowish-green, and one seemed imperfectly aligned with the other—and they revealed nothing, absolutely nothing. It would be improper, of course, for him to discuss the Coronal’s state of well-being, of inner equilibrium, with any stranger he happened to meet in a tavern, even if the Coronal were in a perfect state of well-being, but especially because he was not. He paused just long enough and said, “He’s fine, of course.”

“I knew him,” said Mundiveen. “In my days at court. Before he became Coronal. And for a short while after.”

“You were at court?”

“Of course,” Mundiveen said, and took refuge once more in his wine-bowl.

The conversation, when it resumed, centered on the Shapeshifters. Mundiveen seemed to know—how? From the Resident, no doubt—that Stiamot had some special interest in them, and asked him what that was about. Stiamot attempted to explain, as he had to Kalban Vond, that it was primarily a matter of intellectual curiosity, a private hobby: he was, he said, fascinated by their folkways, their religious beliefs, their art, their language. But the fact that he was a member of the Coronal’s staff, and not just that but an actual member of his Council, obviously made all that ring false to Mundiveen, who listened with as much patience as he seemed able to muster and finally said, “I’m sure you find them very interesting. So do I. Well, is some sort of policy shift in the making?”

“Policy of what sort?”

“You know what I’m saying. Policy toward the Piurivars.”

Stiamot smiled. “Even if there were, I’d hardly be likely to want to discuss it, would I?”

“Even if there were, I suppose you wouldn’t,” said Mundiveen.

Beyond any doubt Mundiveen was the man to cultivate here. He was unlikely to learn anything valuable about the Metamorphs from the planters, all of whom appeared to regard them with contempt or loathing, if not complete indifference, mere impediments to their intended expansion of their plantations. But Stiamot knew he had to go slowly with this sardonic, bitter little cripple. There was something dark and angry in Mundiveen that had to be approached with caution: one could not be too open with him until one had some idea of the forces that drove that anger and that bitterness, and it was too soon to start probing for that now.

Besides, he had plenty of other things to do. Couriers brought him daily bulletins on the progress of the Coronal and his traveling companions: he was in Byelk, he was in Bizfern, he was in Milimorn, he was in Singaserin, he was moving steadily westward. He would stay the night in Kattikawn and in three days he would arrive in Domgrave. Stiamot spent the three days going over the final invitation list for the state banquet they would hold here, working out the formal program of speeches, conferring with the purveyors of meats and wines. And there were security issues to address. The Metamorphs came and went as they chose in the dark, sinister forests that surrounded these valley towns, and, as Stiamot could testify from personal experience, they seemed able to materialize and disappear like phantoms. If they had it in mind to assassinate a Coronal, madness though that would be, they would never have a better opportunity than this. Strelkimar was coming with his own guard, of course, but Stiamot thought it wise to enlist local peacekeepers in his service as well, and did.

On the second of those three busy days he went to the tavern again in the afternoon and found Mundiveen there once more, and had the same sort of uneasy arm’s-length conversation with him over a couple of expensive flasks of wine, centering mostly on Mundiveen’s years in the forest with the Shapeshifters. He wasn’t actually a doctor, Mundiveen admitted: in the days of the former Coronal Lord Thrykeld he had been a mining engineer, whose special responsibility in the government was supervision of the sparse mineral resources that the giant but metal-poor world of Majipoor had to offer. Once his days at court had ended—and he offered no information about that—he had lived in retirement in Deepenhow Vale, farther down the Mount from Stee, where somehow he had picked up a few medical skills, and then he had found it best to leave the Mount entirely and wander off toward the west, coming eventually to the forests of this northwestern region. There, as he put it, he “made himself useful as a physician to the Piurivars.”

Carefully, during the course of the evening, Stiamot nudged Mundiveen into telling him some tales of life in the Shapeshifter encampments in the forests surrounding Domgrave. He learned something about their tribal arrangements—they had a single monarch, he said, the Danipiur, who in some fashion ruled over all the scattered bands of Piurivars everywhere in the world—and a little, though it was not very articulately expounded, about their religious beliefs. In a muddled, sketchy way Mundiveen related also a Piurivar myth, the legend of some dreadful ancient sin they had committed at the old Shapeshifter capital of Velalisier long before the first human settlers had arrived, a sin so grievous that it had brought a curse down on them and led directly to the downfall of the race.