Tales of Majipoor

by Robert Silverberg

  Kasinibon seemed to take notice of Furvain’s long silence, his air of deepening concentration. “What we see here is the pure stuff of poetry, is it not?” Kasinibon said proudly, making a sweeping gesture that encompassed both shore and sky and the distant dark hulk of his own fortress, looming at the top of the cliff that lay at their backs. They had come to a halt half a league up the valley. It looked much the same here as at the place where they had begun their ride: red everywhere, before and behind, an unchanging scarlet world. “I draw constant inspiration from it, and surely you will as well. You will write your masterpiece here. That much I know.”

  The sincerity in his voice was unmistakable. He wants that poem very much, Furvain realized. But he resented the little man’s jarring invasion of his thoughts and he winced at that reference to a “masterpiece.” Furvain had no wish to hear anything further about masterpieces, not after last night’s painful quasidream, in which his own mind seemed to have been mocking him for the deficiencies of his ambitions, pretending to lead him toward some noble work that was not within his soul to create.

  Curtly he said, “Poetry seems to have deserted me for the moment, I’m afraid.”

  “It will return. From what you’ve told me, I know that making poems is something that’s innate to your nature. Have you ever gone very long without producing something? As much as a week, say?”

  “Probably not. I couldn’t really say. The poems happen when they happen, according to some rhythm of their own. It’s not something I’ve paid much conscious attention to.”

  “A week, ten days, two weeks – the words will come,” said Kasinibon. “I know they will.” He seemed strangely excited. “Aithin Furvain’s great poem, written while he is the guest of Master Kasinibon of Barbirike! I might even dare to hope for a dedication, perhaps. Or is that too bold of me?”

  This was becoming intolerable. Would it never end, the world’s insistence that he must pull some major enterprise from his unwilling mind?

  Furvain said, “Shall I correct you yet again? I am your prisoner, Kasinibon, not your guest.”

  “At least you say that, I think, without rancor.”

  “What good is rancor, eh? But when one is being held for ransom—”

  “Ransom is such an ugly word, Furvain. All that I require is that your family pay the fee I charge for crossing my territory, since you appear to be unable to pay it yourself. Call it ransom, if you like. But the term does offend me.”

  “Then I withdraw it,” said Furvain, still concealing his irritation as well as he could beneath a forced lightness of tone. “I am a man of breeding, Kasinibon. Far be it from me to offend my host.”

  In the evening they dined together, just the two of them, in a great echoing candlelit hall where a platoon of silent Hjorts in gaudy livery did the serving, stalking in and out with the absurd grandeur that the people of that unattractive race liked to affect. The banquet was a rich one, first a compote of fruits of some kind unknown to Furvain, then a poached fish of the most delicate flavor, nestling in a dark sauce that must have been based in honey, and then several sorts of grilled meats on a bed of stewed vegetables. The wines for each course were impeccably chosen. Occasionally Furvain caught sight of some of the other outlaws moving about in the corridor at the lower end of the hall, shadowy figures far away, but none entered the room.

  Flushed with drink, Kasinibon spoke freely of himself. He seemed very eager, almost pathetically so, to win his captive’s friendship. He was, he said, a younger son himself, third son of the Count of Kekkinork. Kekkinork was not a place known to Furvain. “It lies two hours’ march from the shores of the Great Sea,” Kasinibon explained. “My ancestors came there to mine, the handsome blue stone known as seaspar, which the Coronal Lord Pinitor of ancient times used in decorating the walls of the city of Bombifale. When the work was done some of the miners chose not to return to Castle Mount. And there at Kekkinork they have lived ever since, in a village at the edge of the Great Sea, a free people, beyond the ken of Pontifex and Coronal. My father, the Count, was the sixteenth holder of that title in the direct line of succession.”

  “A title conferred by Lord Pinitor?”

  “A title conferred by the first Count upon himself,” said Kasinibon. “We are the descendants of humble miners and stonemasons, Furvain. But, of course, if one only goes back far enough, which of the lords of Castle Mount would be seen to be free of the blood of commoners?”

  “Indeed,” Furvain said. That part was unimportant. What he was struggling to assimilate was the knowledge that this small bearded man sitting elbow to elbow with him had beheld the Great Sea with his own eyes, had grown to manhood in a remote part of Majipoor that was widely looked upon as the next thing to mythical. The notion of the existence of an actual town of some sort out there, a town unknown to geographers and census-keepers, situated in an obscure location at Alhanroel’s easternmost point many thousands of miles from Castle Mount, strained credibility. And that this place had a separate aristocracy of its own creation, counts and marquises and ladies and all the rest, which had endured for sixteen generations there – that, too, was hard to believe.

  Kasinibon refilled their wine-bowls. Furvain had been drinking as sparingly as he could all evening, but Kasinibon was merciless in his generosity, and Furvain felt flushed, now, and a little dizzy. Kasinibon had taken on the glossy-eyed look of full drunkenness.

  He had begun to speak, in a rambling, circuitous way that Furvain found difficult to follow, of some bitter family quarrel, a dispute with one of his older brothers over a woman, the great love of his life, perhaps, and an appeal laid before their father in which the father had taken the brother’s side. It sounded familiar enough to Furvain: the grasping brother, the distant and indifferent noble father, the younger son treated with offhand disdain. But Furvain, perhaps because he had never been a man of much ambition or drive, had not allowed the disappointments of his early life ever to stir much umbrage in his mind. He had always felt that he was more or less invisible to his dynamic father and his rapacious, aggressive brothers. He expected indifference from them, at best, and was not surprised when that was what he got, and had gone on to construct a reasonably satisfactory life for himself even so, founded on the belief that the less one expected out of life, the less one was likely to feel dissatisfied with what came one’s way.

  Kasinibon, though, was of another kind, hot-blooded and determined, and his dispute with his brother had mounted to something of shattering acrimony, leading finally to an actual violent assault by Kasinibon on – whom? – his brother? – his father? – Furvain was not entirely sure which. It finally came to pass that Kasinibon had found it advisable to flee from Kekkinork, or perhaps had been exiled from it – again, Furvain did not know which – and had gone roaming for many years from one sector of the east-country to another until, here at Barbirike, he had found a place where he could fortify himself against anyone who might attempt to offer a challenge to his truculent independence. “And here I am to this day,” he concluded. “I have no dealings with my family, nor any with Pontifex or Coronal, either. I am my own master, and the master of my little kingdom. And those who wander across my territory must pay the price. More wine, Furvain?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  He poured, as though he had not heard. Furvain began to brush his hand aside, then halted and let Kasinibon fill the bowl.

  “I like you, you know, Furvain. I hardly know you, but I’m as good a judge of men as you’ll ever find, and I see the depth of you, the greatness in you.”

  And I see the drunkenness in you, Furvain thought, but he said nothing.

  “If they pay the fee, I’ll have to let you go, I suppose. I’m an honorable man. But I’d regret it. I’ve had very little intelligent company here. Very little company of any sort, as a matter of fact. It’s the life I chose, of course. But still—”

  “You must be very lonely.”

  It occurred to Furvain that he had not seen any wom
en at the fortress, nor even any sign of a female presence: only the Hjort servants, and the occasional glimpse of some of Kasinibon’s followers, all of them men. Was Kasinibon that rarity, the one-woman man? And had that woman of Kekkinork, the one his brother had taken from him, been that woman? It must be a grim existence for him, then, in this desolate keep. No wonder he sought the consolations of poetry; no wonder he was still capable, at this advanced age, of finding so much to admire in the nonsensical puerile effusions of Dammiunde or Tuminok Laskil.

  “Lonely, yes. I can’t deny that. Lonely – lonely—” Kasinibon turned a bloodshot gaze on Furvain. His eyes had taken on a glint as red as the waters of the Barbirike Sea. “But one learns to live with loneliness. One makes one’s choices in life, does one not, and although they are never perfect choices, they are, after all, one’s own, eh? Ultimately, we choose what we choose because – we choose – because – because—”

  Kasinibon’s voice grew less distinct and trailed off into incoherence. Furvain thought he might have fallen asleep; but no, no, Kasinibon’s eyes were open, his lips were slowly moving, he was searching still for the precise phrase to explain whatever it was he was trying to explain. Furvain waited until it became clear that the bandit chieftain was never going to find that phrase. Then he touched Kasinibon lightly on the arm. “You must forgive me,” he said. “The hour is very late.” Kasinibon nodded vaguely. A Hjort in livery showed Furvain to his rooms.

  In the night Furvain dreamed a dream of such power and lucidity that he thought, even as he was experiencing it, that it must be a sending of the Lady of the Isle, who visits millions of the sleepers of Majipoor each night to bring them guidance and comfort. If indeed it were a sending, it would be his first: the Lady did not often visit the minds of the princes of the Castle, and in any case she would not have been likely to visit that of Furvain, for it was the ancient custom for the mother of the current Coronal to be chosen as Lady of the Isle, and thus, for most of Furvain’s life, the reigning Lady had been his own grandmother. She would not enter the mind of a member of her own family except at some moment of high urgency. Now, of course, with Lord Sangamor having moved on to become Sangamor Pontifex, there was a new Coronal at the Castle and a new Lady at the helm of the Isle of Sleep. But even so – a sending? For him? Here? Why?

  As he was drifting back into sleep once the dream had left him, he decided that it had not been a sending at all, but merely the workings of his own agitated mind, stirred to frantic excitation by his evening with Master Kasinibon. It had been too personal, too intimate a vision to have been the work of the stranger who now was Lady of the Isle. Yet Furvain knew it to have been no ordinary dream, but rather one of those strange dreams by which one’s whole future life is determined.

  For in it his sleeping mind had been lifted up out of Kasinibon’s stark sanctuary and carried from it over the night-shrouded plains of the east-country, off to the other side of the blue cliffs of Kekkinork where the Great Sea began, stretching forth into the immeasurable and incomprehensible distances that separated Alhanroel from the continent of Zimroel half a world away. Here, far to the east of any place he had ever known, he could see the light of the dawning day gleaming on the breast of the ocean, which was a gentle pink in color at the sandy shore, then pale green, and a deeper green farther out, and then deepening by steady gradation to the azure gray of the unfathomable depths.

  The Spirit of the Divine lingered high above that mighty ocean, Furvain perceived: impersonal, unknowable, infinite, all-seeing. Though the Spirit was without form or feature, Furvain recognized it for what it was, and the Spirit recognized him, touching his mind, gathering it in, linking it, for one stunning moment, to the vastness that was itself. And in that infinitely long moment the greatest of all poems was dictated to him, poured into him in one tremendous cascade, a poem that only a god could create, the poem that encompassed the meaning of life and of death, of the destiny of all worlds and all the creatures that dwelled upon them. Or so Furvain thought, later, when he had awakened and lay shivering, feverish with bewilderment, contemplating the vision that had been thrust upon him.

  No shard of that vision remained, not a single detail by which he could try to reconstruct it. It had shattered like a soap-bubble and vanished into the darkness. Once again he had been brought to the presence of a sublime poem of the greatest beauty and profundity and then it had been snatched away again.

  Tonight’s dream, though, was different in its deepest essence from the one of the night before. That other dream had been a sad cruel joke, a bit of mere harsh mockery. It had flaunted a poem before him but had given him no access to it, only the humiliating awareness that a major poem of some sort lurked somewhere within him but would be kept forever beyond his reach. This time he had had the poem itself. He had lived it, line by line, stanza by stanza, canto by canto, through all its grand immensity. Although he had lost it upon waking, perhaps it could be found again. The first dream had told him, Your gift is an empty one and you are capable of nothing but the making of trivialities. The second dream had told him, You contain godlike greatness within you and you must now strive to find a way to draw it forth.

  Though the content of that great vision was gone, Furvain realized in the morning that one aspect of it still remained, as though burned into his mind: its framework, the container for the mighty poem itself: the metric pattern, the rhyme-scheme, the method of building verses into stanzas and the grouping of stanzas into cantos. A mere empty vessel, yes. But if the container, at least, was left to him, there might be hope of rediscovering the awesome thing that it had contained.

  The structural pattern was such a distinctive one that he knew he was unlikely to forget it, but even so he would not take the risk. He reached hastily for his pen and a blank sheet of paper and scribbled it down. Rather than attempting at this point to recapture even a fragment of what would be no small task to retrieve, Furvain used mere nonsense syllables to provide a shape for the vessel, meaningless dum-de-dum sounds that provided the basic rhythmic outline of one extended passage. When he was done he stared in wonder at it, murmuring it to himself over and over again, analyzing consciously now what he had set down as a sort of automatic transcription of his dream-memory. It was a remarkable structure, yes, but almost comically extreme. As he counted out its numbers he asked himself whether anything so intricate had ever been devised by poet’s mind before, and whether any poet in the long history of the universe would ever have been able to carry off a long work using prosody of such an extravagant kind.

  It was a marvel of complexity. It made no use of the traditional stress-patterned metrics he knew so well, the iambs and trochees and dactyls, the spondees and anapests, out of which Furvain had always built his poems with such swiftness and ease. Those traditional patterns were so deeply engrained in him that it seemed to others that he wrote without thinking, that he simply exhaled his poems rather than creating them by conscious act. But this pattern – he chanted it over and over to himself, struggling to crack its secret – was alien to all that he understood of the craft of poetry.

  At first he could see no sort of regularity to the rhythms whatever, and was at a loss to explain the strangely compelling power of them. But then he realized that the metric of his dream-poem must be a quantitative one, based not on where the accents fell but on the length of syllables, a system that struck Furvain at first as disconcertingly arbitrary and irregular but which, he saw after a while, could yield a wondrously versatile line in the hands of anyone gifted enough to manipulate its intricacies properly. It would have the force almost of an incantation; those caught up in its sonorous spell would be held as if by sorcery. The rhyme-scheme too was a formidable one, with stanzas of seventeen lines that allowed of only three different rhymes, arranged in a pattern of five internal couplets split by a triolet and balanced by four seemingly unrhymed lines that actually were reaching into adjacent stanzas.

  Could a poem actually be written according to such a st
ructure? Of course, Furvain thought. But what poet could possibly have the patience to stay with it long enough to produce a work of any real scope? The Divine could, of course. By definition the Divine could do anything: what difficulties would a mere arrangement of syllables and rhymes offer to the omnipotent force that had brought into being the stars and worlds? But it was not just blasphemous for a mere mortal to set himself up in competition with the Divine, he thought, it was contemptible folly. Furvain knew he could write three or four stanzas in this kind of scheme, if he turned himself properly to the task, or perhaps seven, that made some kind of poetic sense. But a whole canto? And a series of cantos that would constitute a coherent work of epic magnitude? No, he thought. No. No. That would drive him out of his mind. No doubt of it, to undertake a task of such grandeur would be to invite madness.

  Still, it had been an extraordinary dream. The other one had left him with nothing but the taste of ashes in his mouth. This one showed him that he – not the Divine, but he, for Furvain was not a very religious man and felt sure that it was his own dreaming mind that had invented it, without supernatural assistance – was able to conceive a stanzaic system of almost impossible difficulty. It must have been in him all along, he thought, gestating quietly, finally erupting from him as he slept. The tensions and pressures of his captivity, he decided, must have aided in the birth. No longer was he as amused as he once had been about spending his days in Kasinibon’s custody. It was becoming harder to take a comic view of the affair. The rising anger he felt at being held prisoner here, the frustrations, his growing restlessness: all that must be altering the chemistry of his brain, forcing his thoughts into new channels, his inner torment bringing out new aspects of his poetic skill.

  Not that he had the slightest idea of trying to make actual use of such a system as the night just past had brought him; but it was pleasing enough to know that he was capable of devising such a thing. Perhaps that portended a return of his ability to write light verse, at least. Furvain knew that he was never going to give the world the deathless masterpiece that Kasinibon was so eager to have from him, but it would be good at least to regain the pleasant minor skill that had been his until a few days before.