He could not know, naturally, whether he had indeed sired a little princeling for Toikella on her that night. But if the effort had been a failure, he told himself, well, then, he would be quite willing to make another try at it.

The king, the next day, was in a far more congenial mood than he had been yesterday. He greeted Harpirias at the entrance to the throne chamber with hugs and bellows of hearty affection, and then with lascivious grins and winks and sn.i.g.g.e.rs and nudges that made Harpirias wince with barely concealed embarra.s.sment. Plainly Toikella had had a full report from the girl and had been very much pleased by what he heard.' * But he still refused to let Harpirias draw him into any specific negotiations. He was in truth, as Korinaam had said, a man who disliked being hurried.

Harpirias had the Shapeshifter deliver a tactfully worded request for a discussion of the welfare of the hostages. Toikella's reply was cool and brief, and even Harpirias could tell that it was a refusal.

He looked toward Korinaam. "He says no, does he?" "The king wishes to a.s.sure you that all will be well in regard to everything you wish, but he a.s.serts that this is not the time to talk about it. He is going to set out on a hunting trip three days hence and it would be unlucky for him to engage in matters of any substance until he returns."

"Which will be how long? A week? A month?"

"Two days. One to ascend, one to return. Perhaps a third day if the animals make themselves scarce."

"By the Lady! If this keeps up we're never going to - "

"You are invited to accompany him," Korinaam continued smoothly. "I advise that you accept. The midsummer royal hunt is a great sacred festival of these people, and he is honoring you greatly by asking you to come."

"Well, then," Harpirias said, somewhat mollified. But all this delay was irksome to him none the less.

The rest of that morning's meeting was devoted to plans for the trip. Afterward, as he and Korinaam were returning to their lodging house, Harpirias said, "You taught that girl how to say words like 'please' and 'I come in,' didn't you?"

"I felt that the situation was dangerous. She needed my help."

"Dangerous to whom?"

"The king was very resentful of her failure to seduce you that first night. He saw it as something close to treason on her part. It is always dangerous to attract the resentment of a barbarian king."

"And you think he would have had her killed if I hadn't allowed her to - "

"There was that possibility. It seemed wisest to me not to risk it. The king was determined to have his way. He would only have sent another woman to you if this one hadn't succeeded."

"No doubt you're right," said Harpirias. Then, when they had walked on a few steps, something else crossed his mind and he asked the Metamorph, "Do you happen to know the meaning of the Othinor word 'shabilikat'?"

"What?"

" 'Shabilikat,' " Harpirias repeated. "Or something approximately like that. It's a word that she spoke just as she and I were-were about to - "

"Say it again."

Harpirias p.r.o.nounced it once more, clearly, carefully. Korinaam was slow to respond. Then he began to laugh, not a familiar thing coming from him. The laughter began as a quiet inward sound but quickly grew to a guffaw.

"So it's funny, is it?"

"Obscene, actually. So-terribly-filthy-" Korinaam appeared positively electrified by the -word. "Of course you're misp.r.o.nouncing it hideously. It's more like -" And he delivered himself of something that had the same number of syllables, but was studded with an impossible array of jaw-cracking consonants heaped together like boulders. "Is that more like what she actually said?"

"I suppose. What does it mean?"

Korinaam hesitated. He was snickering in a way that made Harpirias want to smack him across his face. "I can't say it out loud. It's too awful."

"Come on. You're not a child, Korinaam. Don't be coy with me!"

"I ask you, prince - "

"And I order you."

"Knowledge of this word is not essential to your diplomatic work."

"How can you be sure of that? I want you to tell me what it means."

Korinaam's forehead was chartreuse with embarra.s.sment. He smothered an attack of the t.i.tters and said, forcing the words out with no little difficulty, "It means-roughly-'The gateway of my body is open to you.' Feminine mode of address to masculine listener. Men and women use different verb forms here."

Harpirias understood now why the girl had been so amused when he had repeated the word to her. It was a simple grammatical error, a man using the feminine form of speech. But where was the filth that Korinaam saw in the word? The gateway of her body was open. She was simply describing the situation as it existed at that moment. If he had unknowingly used the wrong verb form when he had repeated what she had said, well, no one could have expected him to understand the subtleties of Othinor grammar.

He gave the Shapeshifter a perplexed look. Korinaam had his head turned away from him and was staring abashedly at the ground.

"I don't find anything obscene in that phrase," he said. "Erotic, maybe, yes, but not obscene."

"The image-the body perceived as having a gateway-" Korinaam was unable to go on.

"But it does. The female body, anyway. Explain to me why anybody-particularly a savage like her, uncomplicated, uncorrupted by civilization's absurdities-would see obscenity in a straightforwardly anatomical descriptive metaphor?"

"She probably doesn't," said Korinaam. Harpirias had never seen him look so uncomfortable. "I do. -If we may, prince, may we speak of something else?"

Once more Harpirias was reminded of how very alien his traveling companion actually was. They might have political equality everywhere on Majipoor, yes; their queen was officially regarded as a Power of the Realm, and all that; but nevertheless they were different, different in unknowable ways, a race whose strange pliant bodies functioned along principles unique to themselves and whose minds-whose minds, Harpirias thought, were capable of regarding the simple notion that the female body has an entrance as a vile obscenity.

How did Metamorphs make love? he wondered.

Harpirias realized that he didn't know. And didn't want to find out.

He parted from Korinaam outside the lodging house and stood for a while in the plaza, looking up at the sky. It had turned a dark metallic gray, like a sheet of cold iron. A few whirling snowflakes floated overhead.

A storm was coming on; it was starting to snow; and yet this was the eve of the midsummer hunting festival! As he watched, the force of the snowfall increased appreciably. Already a thin white dusting had begun to cover the old and darkened ice of the plaza floor. Midsummer! Midsummer! Harpirias felt the hard little flakes striking his upturned cheeks. How strange this all is, he thought. Wherever he turned he found himself amidst strangenesses. He would have quite a story to tell, if ever he returned from this place.

The girl came to him again that night. The snow had stopped by then, after a considerable fall. Boys with brooms of straw were out in the plaza, clearing the places where high drifts were blocking access to doorways.

Harpirias had found out from Korinaam at dinnertime how to say "What is your name?" in the Othinor language, and he asked it of her when she arrived.

"Ivla Yevikenik," she told him.

He pointed to her and repeated it. She nodded and tapped her breast. "Ivla Yevikenik," she said again.

"Harpirias," he said, pointing to himself.

"Harpirias."

So they had that much established, at least.

She seemed to think that because he could speak one sentence in her language, he now was completely fluent in it. A torrent of baffling chatter came from her; and he ended it only by laughing and hitting the side of his head with his fingertips, as though to say that there was nothing but emptiness inside. She appeared to understand that. But she wanted to talk, even so. For a long while they struggled to communicate, each laboriously explaining words to the other, without accomplishing anything; and then at last they gave up and headed toward the pile of furs.

She murmured the word that he heard as "Shabilikat" again, just as Harpirias was about to enter her. He did not repeat it this time.

Afterward, when they lay naked and panting together waiting for his strength to rea.s.sert itself, she began to speak again to him, softly, almost tenderly. Phrases of endearment, he supposed. Or, perhaps, grat.i.tude for his willingness to surrender to Toikella's requirements. That made Harpirias a little uneasy. Her grat.i.tude was not what he wanted.

The girl is actually quite attractive, he told himself. I am not doing this as a favor to anybody but myself.

Was that true? Not really, he knew. But he wished very much to feel that it was.

In the middle of the night she insisted on going out into the plaza with him. Which seemed crazy to him, but there was no doubt of her meaning, for she arose and dressed herself, and held his clothing out to him with a clear indication that he should put it on, and then took him by the hand and led him from the building.

All was silent outside. The night was clear and cold, with three small moons in the sky and a brilliant sprinkling of stars. She began to tell him something in pantomime, the same set of gestures over and over, pointing to the canyon wall and then going up on tiptoes as if pointing over it, and gradually Harpirias divined that she wanted him to describe the world beyond that great stone wall for her.

One of the brooms with which the boys had been sweeping the plaza lay discarded nearby. He picked it up and used the end of its handle to inscribe a map of Majipoor in the newly fallen snow, the two main continents side by side with the Isle of the Lady between them and the sun-cursed desert continent of Suvrael below.

Did she understand what he had drawn? How could he tell?

"This is where we are," he said, pointing with the broom handle to the northeastern tip of Zimroel and speaking with exaggerated precision, as though that would help her understand. "The Khyntor Marches, we call this region." He glanced at her to see if the name had registered; but her face showed only intense curiosity, no comprehension. He pushed up a ridge of snow to indicate the mountain range that cut the Marches off from the rest of the western continent.

"Down here," he said, "this is the city of Ni-moya. Big, big, big city. Many, many millions of people." He felt like an idiot, speaking to her this way. He sketched in the River Zimr, running from west to east across the upper third of the continent, and poked the handle into the snow at the river's mouth to mark the city of Piliplok. "Seaport," he said. "Very big. Lots of Skandars live here." Harpirias tried to demonstrate the concept of having four arms. "Shan-dan. And this river here, running up from the south-that's the Steiche. Metamorphs live here, in the jungles. You can't imagine what a jungle is, can you? Very hot. Rain all the time. Huge trees. That's where the Metamorphs come from. People like Korinaam. Metamorphs. Korinaam."

Useless. Preposterous.

But she encouraged him with nods and eager grins to go on. He drew in more of the major cities of Zimroel for her, as well as he could remember them from his school days, Pidruid and Tilomon and Narabal over on the western coast, and Dulorn more or less where it belonged inland, and a few more. Then he moved over to the other great circle he had drawn, the one representing the continent of Alhanroel, and knelt in the snow, reaching his arms out to swoop up a heap of it that would stand for Castle Mount.

"This is where I live," he said. "Big, big mountain, this high, tremendous mountain reaching to the stars, cities all around its sides. Castle on top. Cos-tie. The castle of the Coronal. Coro-nal. King of the world. Lord Ambinole, the Coronal of Majipoor."

He was beginning to freeze, now, on this fine summer night. His ears and the tip of his nose were burning. But he was determined not to abandon this geography lesson so long as she was paying attention, and Ivla Yevikenik was definitely paying attention, staring at him in a rapt, captivated way. Harpirias poked with the broom for her again and again, drawing the River Glayge with the Labyrinth of the Pontifex at its southern end, the cities of Alaisor and Treynone and Stoien, and the ancient stone ruins that had once been the Metamorph capital, Velalisier. And would have gone on until morning, naming all that there was to name, every one of the Fifty Cities and much else besides, except that after a few minutes more she came up beside him and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. She had had enough geography for now.

"Shabilikat," she said, and led him inside.

The trail to the sacred hunting grounds began right behind the royal palace and rose in five sharp switchbacks to a deep lateral crevice in the mountain wall that was invisible from below; and from there it wound gradually back and forth, up and up, until the canyon rim came into view. The path was much like the one to the cave where the hostages were being kept, rough and rocky and narrow, but not quite as steep. Harpirias found it far less of a challenge, although the snow of a few days before, still mostly unmelted, made the going trickier than it might otherwise have been.

The hunting party had twelve members. Toikella led the way, with the high priest Mankhelm beside him, followed by six husky villagers carrying hunting gear and some sort of holy regalia in a painted wooden box. Harpirias had Korinaam with him to serve as interpreter, and had been permitted also to bring two of the Skandars, presumably as porters, though there was nothing for them to carry.

This part of the canyon rim was higher and more irregular than the one Harpirias had visited earlier. Instead of terminating in a flat broad summit, it appeared to lead to a series of even higher ridges beyond, stretching on and on to the north - a jagged sloping plateau of sorts, no doubt the grazing grounds for the beasts that the king had come here to hunt.

They halted a long while at the transitional point of the canyon wall proper, where it ceased to rise in a straight vertical line but leveled off before beginning its next uneven swoop northward. The village could still be seen from here-just barely, far below -but it would be hidden from view beyond this point.

Here the king stripped off his robes and stood naked, evidently untroubled by the cold, silently looking on while Mankhelm performed a long series of rituals. The priest solemnly arranged twigs and bits of dried gra.s.s and sc.r.a.ps of colored leather in patterns on the ground and set fire to them; he built three little cairns of pebbles and muttered words into them; he opened a jug of beer or perhaps some stronger liquor and offered splashes of it to the four quarters of the horizon.

The climax of the rite came when one of the bearers undid a fur blanket that was tied with a thick leather cord, and drew from it a spear of astonishing length and heft that was tipped with a great triangular point of some gla.s.sy-looking white stone chipped to razor sharpness. He handed the huge weapon to Mankhelm, who formally raised it aloft with both hands and pa.s.sed it over to Toikella. As Harpirias looked on in amazement the naked king brandished the mighty spear high over his head, shook it fiercely three times as if he meant to intimidate the G.o.ds with it, and delivered himself of a long rumbling war-whoop which reverberated through the mountains with such force that Harpirias expected boulders and whole crags to come crashing down around them.

And this is Majipoor, Harpirias thought, in the thirteenth year of the Pontificate of Taghin Gawad!

The echo of Toikella's cry died away. The king resumed his robe; the bearers picked up the ceremonial spear and returned it to its fur wrap; the high priest Mankhelm kicked his pebble cairns apart and ground his foot into the charred bits of twigs and gra.s.s. Whatever rite had been observed here was done. They were ready, it seemed, to proceed now with the royal hunt itself.

"Look there," Eskenazo Marabaud said. The Skandar was pointing toward a distant high ridge. Harpirias shaded his eyes against the glare of the sky, but his eyes were not as keen as Eskenazo Marabaud's and he could make out nothing unusual up there.

King Toikella, though, who also had followed the Skandar's pointing arm, evidently could. He had taken up a peculiar fixed stance, legs far apart, head thrown back, and was studying the ridge in rigid concentration. After a moment a long thick strangled sound of rage came from his throat.

"What do you see?" Harpirias asked Eskenazo Marabaud.

"Figures. Moving about, right at the top."

"I don't see them."

"Look harder, then, prince. There. There, coming down that ridge."

Harpirias stared. All he saw was tumbled ma.s.ses of rock. He glanced sideways at Korinaam. The Shapeshifter was looking toward the high ridge in the same intent way as the king, and he was trembling. His hands were knotted together tensely behind his back and his arms from shoulder to wrist were writhing and rippling like a couple of agitated serpents.

Then at last Harpirias made out what the others were seeing: a dark line of diminutive figures, perhaps eight or ten of them, emerging like evil gnomes from sheltered crannies in the fissured rock of the ridge and clambering up toward a kind of natural amphitheater just below the highest point. It "was easier to see them there. They -were long-limbed, slender, almost spidery of build-very different in appearance from the thick-set Othinor.

Toikella shook both his clenched fists at them and grunted something.

"What is he saying?" Harpirias asked Korinaam.

"He says, 'Enemies-enemies -' "

"The ones who threw the dead hajbaraks into the village, do you think?"

"It could be," the Shapeshifter said. "How should I know?" His voice was faint and remote, and he spoke without taking his eyes from the figures on the heights. His hands still were locked together behind his back and he had not stopped trembling.

Now the enraged king broke from his stasis. Gesturing to the other Othinor to follow him, he launched into a wild upward scramble. There was no longer any kind of path here, only a wide sloping ap.r.o.n covered with rocks and pebbles and the occasional boulder. Toikella, lurching and clawing and scrabbling, slithering up through shallow openings in the rock and often tumbling back down again, moved like a man possessed by dark spirits. It was as though he meant to seize the trespa.s.sers with his bare hands and hurl them from the mountain. Mankhelm and the Othinor bearers struggled upward after him, not far behind.

Harpirias had no choice but to climb with them. It would be distinctly unwise to let himself become separated from the royal parry in these mountains.

When he had ascended a hundred paces or so, he looked back and saw that Korinaam had not accompanied him. The Metamorph still stood motionless below, like one who was lost in dreams, peering up at the figures on the far-off ridge.

Angrily Harpirias called to him. "Korinaam? Korinaam! Stay close to me!"

"Yes -I'm coming-coming - "

Harpirias waited for him to catch up. The Skandars had already gone ahead.

He had a better view of the creatures on the upper ridge from here. They were arrayed in a straight line right along the top now, and had gone into a madcap dance, tipping their heads from side to side, waggling their long slender arms, kicking their knees high: a frantic devil-dance of obvious derision and scorn. They were defying Toikella to come and get them.

But Toikella had no hope of getting to them. When he had climbed a little farther Harpirias saw that a steep hidden declivity separated this ridge from the higher one. Toikella and his men had reached it and gone down into it, but from the looks of that sudden slope they would need all day to descend one side of it and come up the other. Their quarry was unlikely to wait for them.

And in fact the Othinor were coming back already. Somber-faced, weary-looking, they moved slowly into view, their heads and then their shoulders and their bodies becoming visible as they rose up out of the chasm.

Harpirias looked up again toward the dancers on the heights. They were gone, or so it seemed to him at first; but then he caught a glimpse of them off toward the left, clearly outlined against the bright sky as they went scampering away over the sharp spine of the ridge.

What was this, though? He felt certain that they were running on all four legs, as wolves would do. And yet just a moment before they had looked unmistakably human in form. A band of Shapeshifters? Here?