Robert Silverberg - The Mountains of Majipoor

All was dark within. There was a long business of lighting torches; and then Harpirias saw that they were in a low-roofed cavern, deep and narrow, that ran back far into the core of the rocky wall. Seepage from some mountain spring had coated its sides everywhere with an icy skin, which glinted with a beautiful bluish sheen by the torches’ smoky glow.

Shadowy figures came lurching out of the cavern’s depths, blinking and murmuring as they approached the light.

In a formal tone Harpirias said, "I am the ambassador of His Highness Lord Ambinole, come to win your freedom for you. Harpirias is my name. Prince Harpirias of Muldemar."

"Divine be praised! What year is this?"

"What — year?" Harpirias was taken aback. "Why, the thirteenth of the Pontificate of Taghin Gawad. Does it seem that you’ve been here so long?"

"Forever. Forever."

Harpirias stared. The man with whom he spoke was tall and terribly thin, pale as bleached parchment, with a crest of wiry graying hair fanning far out in every direction from his balding scalp and a thick, unkempt black beard covering nearly all of his face. Two burning half-crazed eyes peered from that thicket of hairy growth. He was dressed in loose fraying rags, pitifully inadequate to the cold.

"You’ve been here only a year," Harpirias told him. "Or perhaps just a little more. It’s the middle of the summer in the Marches . The summer of the year Thirteen."

"Only a year," the man repeated in wonder. "It feels like a lifetime. — I am Salvinor Hesz," he announced, after a moment. Harpirias knew the name. The leader of the ill-starred paleontological expedition, yes.

Others much like him in their raggedness and gauntness stood gathered behind. Harpirias counted quickly: six, seven, eight, nine. Nine. Was one missing?

"Is this the entire group of you?" he asked.

"All of us, yes."

"There was some question about how many of you had made the journey. Eight, ten — the records were unclear."

"Nine," said Salvinor Hesz. "Changes of personnel were made at the last minute. Two dropped out — what luck for them! — and one replacement was found."

"Myself," a man of remarkable height and thinness said, in a black sepulchral voice that seemed to rise from the bottom of the Great Sea . "It was my good fortune to be allowed to join the expedition just as it was leaving Ni-moya. What an opportunity for furthering my career!" He put out a trembling hand. "My name is Vinin Salal. How much longer are we to be kept here?"

"I’ve only just arrived," said Harpirias. "There’s a formal treaty to negotiate with the king before you can be freed. But I hope to have you out of here before the summer ends. I will have you out of here by then." He looked from one to another of them, marveling at the fleshlessness of them all. Skin and bones was all they were. "By the Lady, they’ve been starving you, haven’t they? They’ll pay for this! Tell me: what kind of treatment have you had?"

"They feed us twice a day," Salvinor Hesz said, without rancor. He gestured to the sacks of provisions which the Othinor had thrown down against the side of the cave, and which the men of the cavern appeared to be in no hurry to fall upon. "Dried meat, nuts, roots — pretty much the same things they eat themselves. It isn’t a diet one can love. But they do feed us." "Every morning, every afternoon, very punctually. A party of them always comes climbing up here with these sacks of food for us," one of the others said. "Sometimes we can hear terrible storms raging outside, but they never miss a meal, they come up here all the same. You don’t get plump on Othinor fare, you know. Still, we can hardly say that we’re being starved."

"No," someone else agreed. "Not starved, no."

"No."

"Not at all."

"Treated quite well, in fact."

"Decent people. Very backward but not unkind, all things considered."

Harpirias was puzzled by the mildness of their words, the almost benign tone in which they spoke of their savage captors. These men looked like walking skeletons. They had lived a year and something more in this dark glacial hole, far from their homes and loved ones and careers, slowly wasting away on the odds and ends of repellent food that was all the Othinor could provide. Where was their fury? Why were they not raining down curses on their jailers? Had this imprisonment so broken their souls that they were grateful even for the miserable bits and pieces that those who had condemned them to lie here were giving them to eat?

He had heard that prisoners, after many a month and year, sometimes came to love their keepers. But that was a hard thing for him to understand.

"You have no grievances against the Othinor at all?" Harpirias asked. "Other than having been forced to remain here against your will, I mean?"

They met his question with silence. It seemed to be difficult for these men to think clearly. Their minds as well as their bodies must have been weakened by their privations, Harpirias thought. The hunger, the cold, the separation from the world.

Then Salvinor Hesz said, "Well, they’ve taken our specimens away. The fossils. That was very distressing. You must try to get them back for us."

"The fossils," said Harpirias. "So you did actually find the bones of these land-dragons?"

"Oh, yes, yes. Quite a spectacular find. A clear link to the maritime species of dragons — an unquestionable evolutionary connection."

"Is it, now?"

"We succeeded in excavating teeth of astonishing size, ribs, vertebrae, fragments of a huge spinal column—" Salvinor Hesz’s lean face became radiant with excitement. He glowed through the bushy shroud of his beard. "The largest land creatures that ever existed on this world, by far. And beyond any real doubt the ancestors of our sea-dragons — perhaps a transitional evolutionary form, one that will need a great deal of further study. The bones of their ears indicate clearly that they were designed to hear both on land and under water, for example. We’ve uncovered an entire new chapter in our knowledge of the development of life on Majipoor. And there’s more, much more, waiting to be discovered on that hillside. We had only just finished our scaffolding and begun to dig when the Othinor found us and took us prisoner."

"And confiscated everything we had uncovered," said another. "Reburied it, so we were given to understand."

"That’s the most maddening part of all," came a voice from farther back in the cavern. "Having made a major discovery like that, and not being able to bring our findings back to civilization. We can’t leave here without those things. You will insist on the return of the fossils, won’t you?"

"I’ll see what I can do, yes."

"And also to get their permission to continue the work. You need to make them see that our excavating these fossils is mere scientific research, that the bones are of no value to them. And that the tribal gods, if they have any, won’t be displeased in any way by digging them up. Which I suppose is why they stopped us. Or don’t you agree?"

"Well—" Harpirias said.

"Surely the problem was some religious objection, wouldn’t you say? We were breaking some kind of taboo?"

"I don’t know anything about that. I remind you, I’ve only just arrived and real negotiations haven’t started. What they’ve asked for, though, is a treaty guaranteeing them that we will refrain forever from any sort of interference in their lives. There’s a chance I can at least get back the bones you’ve already dug up, but I’m not sure that they’re going to be willing to allow any additional excavations in the vicinity of their territory."

There was a chorus of immediate objections to that.

"Hold on!" Harpirias said, raising his hands for silence. "Listen to me. I’ll do what I can for you. But my main purpose here is simply to get you out of this place, and even that isn’t going to be easy. Anything else I happen to achieve in the way of safeguarding past or future scientific research will be strictly a bonus." He glared at them. "Is that understood?"