Robert Silverberg - The End of the Line

“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.

Stiamot supposed that someone who had as little liking for mankind as Mundiveen apparently did would have made a compensating shift in the other direction, taking refuge among the Metamorphs as he had because he saw them as the only beings on the planet worth living among, pure and true and noble, altogether undeserving of having lost their planet to the human oppressors who had settled among them six thousand years before. But it was not like that at all. Mundiveen never spoke of the Metamorphs with the sort of scorn that the District Resident had expressed—“sneaky, nasty savages”—but he seemed to have no more fondness for then than he did for humanity, letting slip between the lines, as he told Stiamot one story and another that night, that he found them a difficult, quarrelsome, even treacherous race—“a slippery crew” was the phrase he used—and that much of his medical work consisted of repairing damage that one Metamorph had done to another.

The legend of that ancient sin and the curse evidently had something to do with his attitude toward the Piurivars—the unspeakably evil thing that they had done twenty thousand years ago that had crushed them under the vengeance of their own gods. Whatever that had been, and Mundiveen could not or would not say what it was, the tale seemed to have revealed something about their basic nature to him and mark them in Mundiveen’s eyes as a dark, troublesome lot. But perhaps, Stiamot thought, Mundiveen was inherently incapable of liking anyone at all, and chose to live among the Shapeshifters only because he preferred them, for all their faults, to his own species. Despite his manifold shortcomings, though, Mundiveen had had more first-hand experience of Shapeshifter life than anyone else Stiamot had ever encountered, and in the remainder of his time in Domgrave he intended to learn all that he could about them from the sharp-edged little man.