Robert Silverberg - The Mountains of Majipoor

It was dawn before they reached the bottom of the canyon wall. Exhausted by the night’s exertions, Harpirias went straight to his room and buried himself beneath the entire pile of furs.

As he settled in he wondered once more what those creatures were who had jeered and mocked the king of the Othinor on that high ridge. Surely they were the same who had slain the royal beasts and hurled their bodies to the canyon floor. Something very strange was happening here: but what? What?

He had no answers. Whatever mystery was unfolding among these people, he was without any way of penetrating it.

Even under the furs Harpirias could not stop shivering. The morning sounds of the awakening village came dimly to him through the ice walls of the guest lodge. But neither the cold nor the noise mattered to him for long. He was governed now by fatigue. He drew his knees to his chest and shut his eyes tightly and within moments he went toppling into the deepest of sleep.

Immediately upon his return from the high country Harpirias applied himself to the task of learning to speak the language of the Othinor. There was too much going on in this place that was opaque to him; and the only interpreter that he had had shown himself to be untrustworthy. He needed to master the language himself, if he could. He had never given much thought before to the problem of learning to speak another language. Except in these mountains, Majipoori was universally understood all over the world, and there was no need for a prince of the Mount to trouble himself to become familiar with the tongues that the Vroons, or the Skandars, or the Liimen, or any of the other alien minority races of the planet, might speak among themselves.

Ivla Yevikenik did her best to help him. It was like a game for her, one more amusing thing that they could do together between bouts of lovemaking. There was an air of childish glee about her during their sessions of linguistic studies. She might have a woman’s body, Harpirias realized, but in truth she was only a girl, and a simple-hearted one at that. Probably she regarded him as some interesting kind of life-sized doll that her father had chosen to bestow on her. And teaching Harpirias to speak Othinor was just another way of playing with her new toy.

Progress was slow at first. She was able quickly enough to teach Harpirias a few rudimentary things, "hand" and "eye" and "mouth" and other such obvious point-and-ask nouns. But it was not an easy thing for him to go beyond that degree of complexity with her. After a time, though, things began to fit together in his mind in a logical and orderly way; and then, to his surprise and pleasure, Harpirias found himself quickly learning the main elements of the language.

Even now, the grammar remained an enigma to him, and his pronunciation of most words was so far off the mark that it sent her into merry convulsions. But he pieced together enough of a vocabulary so that in short order he was able to communicate with her, after a. fashion, through a mixture of half-garbled words, strenuous gestures, and elaborate pantomiming.

Once more he spoke to her of Majipoor, its glories and splendors. Ivla Yevikenik seemed to comprehend much more this time. She scarcely appeared to breathe as he described the world beyond the ice-barrier for her. Her eyes widened in wonder — and, perhaps, disbelief — when he told her of Castle Mount and its Fifty Cities, High Morpin with its mirror-slides and juggernauts, Halanx and its grand estates, Normork of the great stone wall and the mighty Dekkeret Gate, and high above everything else the ancient Castle of Lord Ambinole in all its unreckonable thousands of rooms, spreading like some huge many-tentacled creature over the summit of the Mount. He told her too of the vastness of the River Zimr, a river the size of an ocean, and of its innumerable towns, Belka and Clarischanz and Gourkaine, Semirod and Impemond and Haunfort Major and all the rest, and also of the place where the Zimr merged with its sister river, the Steiche, to form the enormous inland sea along whose immeasurable shores the city of Ni-moya of the white towers had been built. .

Harpirias felt a pang of homesickness as he spoke the names of these places and sights — even the names of cities that he himself had never beheld, even the name of Ni-moya, which he had loathed. For they were all Majipoor, whether he had been to them or not; and he felt hopelessly cut off from the Majipoor he had known in this stark and forlorn land of ice, try as he might to convince himself that this was Majipoor too.

When he had talked with her of Majipoor long enough so that they were starting to grow easier of speech with one another, he asked her about the figures that they had seen on the high ridge, and of her father’s angry reaction to their derisive posturing and dancing.

"Who are they?" Harpirias asked. "Do you know?"

"Devils, they are. Wild people. They live beside the Frozen Sea ."

In the northernmost reaches of the Khyntor Marches, was what she meant — almost at the planetary pole. The extreme limit of the world, the very brink of nowhere. A place where, according to myth and the ancient conjecture of geographers, the ocean itself had turned to a sheet of perpetual ice and human life was impossible to sustain.

"What kind of people, Ivla Yevikenik? Do they look like us?"

"No."

"What, then?"

She groped for words, could not find useful ones, and instead began to move around the room in an odd sideways manner, holding her shoulders hunched together and her arms dangling as if they had no strength. Harpirias was puzzled at first; but gradually it struck him that what she was doing was imitating Korinaam: his flimsy physique, his way of walking.

Harpirias pointed toward the room that was next to his in the lodge — Korinaam’s room. "They are Shapeshifters, you mean?" And he too mimicked Korinaam’s manner.

"Yes. Yes. Shapeshifters." Ivla Yevikenik grinned at him and clapped her hands in pleasure at her own success in answering his question.

Shapeshifters! So it was true! Just as he had suspected.

Or had he put the word in her mouth himself? Was she simply telling him what she thought he wanted to hear?

Possibly so. But Harpirias had a hunch that the information she was giving him was accurate. The creatures on the heights, after all, had had the semblance of men while they were dancing; but when they had gone racing off afterward, they had run on all fours in a way that no human being could have managed. The only rational explanation he could find was that they had altered their bodily form to achieve that.

And Korinaam — who had been so evasive when Harpirias twice tried to draw an opinion about them from him — he must have recognized at once that the people of the heights were a band of his own distant kinsmen, some sort of wild Metamorphs of the northland. Which for reasons of his own he had not wanted to confirm.

What would a tribe of wild Shapeshifters be doing by the shores of the Frozen Sea ?

Harpirias knew that in the old days before the arrival of the first human settlers, thousands of years ago, the Piurivars had lived wherever they pleased on the giant planet. Their capital city had been at Velalisier in south-central Alhanroel, and its stupendous stone ruins were still there for all to see. There had been other Metamorph settlements, now vanished without a trace, on the other side of the Inner Sea in the forests of Zimroel, and even in the desert wastes of the isolated southern continent of Suvrael. But why would they have gone into the frigid northlands? So far as anyone was aware, Metamorphs were people who preferred warm climates.

Harpirias thought once more of the creation fable that Kormaam had told him during their journey up from Ni-moya — the one about the great beast that had wandered the northern mountains in solitude, the only inhabitant of the world, and had brought the first Piunvars into being by carving them from the ice with her tongue. From that tale Harpirias had learned that the Piurivars believed this chilly northland to be their earliest home, from which they had eventually launched the migrations that would send them radiating outward over all of Majipoor.