Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

It was an uninteresting but necessary place, and its appearance was in keeping with its function. Located as it was in a district of Alhanroel where little rain fell except for a couple of months in the winter, Sisivondal did without the grand and lavish ornamental gardens that were a distinctive mark of nearly all the cities of Majipoor. The monotony of its broad bare streets, dry and dusty under the constant golden-green eye of the sun, was relieved here and there only by plantings of rugged undemanding shrubs and trees, usually arrayed in long regular rows along the curbsides: squat thick-trunked camaganda palms with drooping grayish-purple fronds, somber lumma-lumma bushes that looked like boulders with leaves and grew so slowly they might just as well have been carved from stone, and spiky garavedas that flowered only once every hundred years, each one sending up a single ominous black spike three times the height of a man.

No, not a pretty city. But here the cult of the Beholders had taken root, and the Beholders, when they held the Procession of their Mysteries, did indeed bring for a brief time an unfamiliar beauty to the drab streets of Sisivondal.

They came forth now, dancing and singing and chanting as they marched past the long stolid rows of identical warehouses that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue. At the head of the procession ran scores of young women in immaculate white garments who strewed the ground with the bright crimson-and-gold petals of halatinga blossoms that had been brought in at monumental expense from Castle Mount. Young men with sparkling mirrors sewn to their jerkins danced after them, sprinkling the streets with balsams and unguents. Next came the massed ranks of sturdy chanters, accompanied by the shrill cries of pipes and flutes as they bellowed over and over, “Make way for the holy things! Make way! Make way!”

Now, marching by herself, there advanced the terrifying figure of a giantess in red boots with soles a foot thick, carrying an enormous two-headed wooden staff that she gripped with both her hands and raised again and again above her head. To her huge shoulders a pair of powerful dark wings was strapped, which fluttered slowly in time to the pounding rhythms of two masked drummers who followed her at a respectful distance. Behind this group came initiates of the cult, walking six abreast, their faces hidden by loose black veils. Their heads had been shaven closely and waxed, those of men and women both, so that the tops of their skulls rose above the swirling veils like domes of polished marble.

Those in the forefront of this group bore the seven artifacts that the Beholders held to be among their most sacred possessions, things which they displayed only at occasions of the highest gravity. One held aloft an elaborately carved stone lamp of curious design, from which a fearsome, roaring yellow-tipped flame spurted far into the sky; the next, a palm branch interwoven with strands of gold in the form of a coiling serpent with gaping jaws; the one beyond that, the giant image of a disembodied human hand with the middle finger bent backward in an impossible and menacing way; then a fourth with a silver urn in the shape of a woman’s breast, from which he poured an inexhaustible stream of steaming, fragrant golden milk into the streets; and a fifth with a huge fan made of wood, which he swept from side to side in a manner that caused onlookers at the edge of the throng to leap back in fright. A sixth bore the effigy of a plump little pink-fleshed deity whose face had no features, and a seventh came staggering along under the weight of a monstrous male genital organ carved from a long curving slab of purple wood.

“Behold and worship!” the marchers cried.

And from the onlookers came an answering cry: “We behold! We behold!”

More dancers followed—frenzied ones now, in a delirious, ecstatic furor, leaping crazily from one side of the street to another as though tongues of flame were bursting from the pavement all about them, and uttering brief wordless cries like the yippings of demented beasts. They moved on, giving way to a pair of grim towering Skandars who carried slung between them on a stout wooden pole the Ark of the Mysteries, said to contain the most potent and holy objects of the cult, though these would not be revealed to anyone until the final hours of the world.

And then, at last, borne on a resplendent gleaming cart of ebony inlaid with silver, came the terrifying figure of the high priest, the masked Messenger of the Mysteries. He was a slim naked man of phenomenal height whose rippling body was painted black down one side and gold down the other; he wore over his head the carved visage of a furious-looking yellow-eyed hound with fierce elongated muzzle and long narrow ears standing stiffly erect; and he held in one hand a narrow staff around which golden serpents with swollen necks and red staring eyes were entwined, and in the other a leather whip.

Screams of joy went up from those who lined the path of the procession as he went by, nodding his blessings to the multitudes at every step and occasionally flicking his whip at them. And they fell in behind him, hundreds of them, thousands, the ordinary citizens of Sisivondal, sober, hardworking citizens, now ecstatic, sobbing, laughing eerily, prancing wildly, flinging high their arms, throwing back their heads as they begged the empty vault of the sky for some sign that mercy would be forthcoming. Spittle flicked their faces. Their eyes rolled in their heads, and on some only the whites could be seen. “Spare us!” they cried. “Spare us!” But what it was from which they wanted to be spared, or from whom they expected their salvation to come, very few in that jostling throng that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue would have been able to say, or perhaps none at all.

On that same day, in the windswept hilltop city of Sefarad on the western coast of Alhanroel, a little group of mages clad in saffron-colored chasubles, surplices of bright purple silk, and yellow shoes led the way to the sharp ridge known as Lord Zalimox’s Chair, overlooking the roughly tossing waters of the Inner Sea. They were five men and three women of the human kind, stately and tall, with a look of nobility and grandeur about them. Their faces were dabbed with spots of blue powder and their eye-sockets were painted a brilliant scarlet, and they carried long white staffs fashioned from sea-dragon ribs carved along every inch of their length with mysterious runic figures in what was said to be the script of the Elder Gods.

A long, winding procession of the citizens of Sefarad followed after them, murmuring prayers to those unknown ancient deities. As they moved steadily forward to the sea, they made the sign of the sea-dragon over and over again with their hands, fingers simulating the beating of the voluminous leathery wings, wrists curving to imitate the swooping of the mighty necks.

Many of those who followed the mages to Lord Zalimox’s Chair were Liimen, the humblest folk of the town, slender rough-skinned people with dark flat faces much wider than they were high, out of which three circular eyes stared like glowing coals. These simple fishermen and farmers and street-sweepers and sausage-vendors had for many centuries looked toward the huge winged dragons of Majipoor’s seas as semidivine beings. For them the dragons occupied a station midway between the mortal people of Majipoor and the gods who once had ruled this giant planet and had unaccountably departed long ago; and they felt that those gods would one day return to take possession of what was rightfully theirs. Now, in clustering groups of fifty or a hundred, the Liimen of Sefarad hastened to the edge of the sea to beg their vanished gods to hasten their return.

But they were far from alone today. Word had gone about that a herd of sea-dragons would be coming close to shore here this day. That was startling in itself, for the dragons in their long maritime migrations were never a common sight along this coast of Alhanroel; and the notion that this visitation might be a miraculous one, that the immense beasts might somehow have the ability to establish contact with those mysterious ancient gods of which the Liiumen had long babbled, had spread like fire in dry brush through every race of the city. Humans, Hjorts, Ghayrogs, and even a handful of Vroons and Su-Suheris, were also to be found in the band of pilgrims that came scrambling up the rocky road to the beach.