The girl hesitated. He could see her searching for words.
“Nothing troubles him tonight,” she said finally.
“He is not like himself.”
“He is tired. He is—yes, that is it. He is tired.”
She made hardly any effort at all to sound convincing.
“No,” Harpirias said. He stared angrily at his fingertips and cursed the limitations of his Othinor vocabulary. Then, looking intensely into her eyes, he said, “Tell me the truth, Ivla Yevikenik. Something is bad here. What is it?”
“He is—afraid.”
“Afraid? Him? Of what?”
A long pause. Then: “You. Your people. Your weapons.”
“He shouldn’t be. There’s a treaty now. We guarantee the safety and freedom of the Othinor.”
“You guarantee it, yes,” the girl said. And the bitter inflection of her tone explained everything to Harpirias.
Indeed the king was frightened. And angry and humiliated; and these were all new emotions for him. Toikella had learned at last what sort of antagonist he was really up against, and the knowledge had thrown him into an anguish beyond all bearing.
Perhaps Ivla Yevikenik had passed along to her father some of Harpirias’s descriptions of the greatness and splendor of Majipoor, his tales of the richness of its superabundant crops and the wealth of its swift rivers, the myriads of its people, the two mighty continents studded with innumerable huge cities, and above all else the serene grandeur of Castle Mount and the immensity of the royal dwelling-place at its summit. Whatever she had understood of his stories—magnified, very likely, by the distortions and enhancements of her own free-ranging imagination, so that the genuinely magnificent was transformed into the inconceivably awesome—was probably what Ivla Yevikenik had poured into Toikella’s reeling mind.
And then the sight of the energy-throwers in action—those rugged stone crags disintegrating under the force of the purple light that came from the metal tubes in the hands of Harpirias’s little army—the hated Eililylal fleeing like vermin as the rocks came tumbling down—
Small wonder that the king’s mood was dark. For the first time in his life he found himself up against a force that could never be made to yield to his booming and his blustering. He was coming to understand the truth about the world: that his little kingdom would have no hope of being able to stand against the power of the vast unknown realm that lay somewhere beyond his snowy borders. He had begun the process of discovering that the mighty King Toikella was nothing more than a flea on the backside of Majipoor; and that process hurt. Oh, how it must hurt!
Harpirias realized that he felt genuinely sorry for the fierce old monster—that in fact he had actually come to like Toikella, and had had no wish to be the cause of his undoing.
He looked around for Korinaam, and called him to his side. What he needed to say was too delicate to attempt in his own clumsy and erratic Othinor.
“I want you to let him know,” he told the Shapeshifter, “that we of Majipoor will regard the treaty that we have just signed as a sacred obligation: that its terms will safeguard the independence of the Othinor forever.”
“He knows these things already,” said Korinaam.
“Never mind what he may or may not know already. Tell him. Tell him to have faith in the treaty, and in me. Tell him that his people will never come to harm at our hands.”
“As you wish, prince.”
Korinaam turned to the king and spoke at length; and so far as Harpirias could tell the Shapeshifter was accurately rendering the things he had been told to say. But that only appeared to make matters worse. Toikella’s frown deepened; the king chewed at his lower lip and balled his fists and rammed his great knobby knuckles together until they popped; his nostrils flared, his cheeks went taut with mounting displeasure.
When he made his reply, Toikella looked not at Korinaam but at Harpirias, and his response was brief and sardonic in tone, edged with unmistakable ferocity:
“I give you my thanks. I am grateful for your mercy.”
Harpirias had no difficulty in understanding the king’s words, or the meaning that they carried beneath their surface. Toikella fully recognized that his power would continue only by sufferance of the lords of Majipoor; and that was not an easy thing for him to accept.
Still Harpirias felt the need to offer some expression of sympathy and reassurance.
“Your majesty—my good royal friend—”
Toikella replied with a growl. “Go, now. Go, leave this room, leave this land. And may none of you ever return to this place—you, or any of your kind.”
Korinaam volunteered a translation. But Harpirias waved him to silence. He had no doubt of the meaning of what the king had said.
Harpirias held out his hand to him. Toikella peered at it as though it were a soiled thing. An icy aura of offended royal dignity, as chilly as the darkest day of the Othinor winter, emanated from him.
“We are not afraid,” Toikella said loftily. “Let the empire do its worst—we will be ready. Even if you send an army of two hundred men against us! Three hundred!”
There was nothing Harpirias could say in return. Best to leave things as they were, he thought. Toikella’s pride, at least, was still intact. And perhaps the wounds of this visit would heal after a while, and in his old age he would boast of how he had forced the Coronal of Majipoor to come crawling to him once upon a time to gain the release of his explorers, and how he had extracted from the Coronal a child of royal blood in payment for the hostages he had taken.
So be it, Harpirias thought. Korinaam had been right after all: nothing would have been gained by forcing the truth down Toikella’s throat, and much would have been lost.
He bade the king a formal farewell, which Toikella received stonily, with great hauteur; and then he turned to Ivla Yevikenik for one last fond and weepy moment with his Othinor princess. But what could he say to her? What, indeed, could he say? For all his Castle Mount eloquence, nothing came to him now. She stared solemnly at him; he smiled; she managed a smile of sorts as well; her tears glistened; she blotted them with the back of her hand. He could not kiss her goodbye. Kissing was not the custom here. In the end Harpirias took her hand and held it a time, and let it go. She took his, and put it lightly to her belly, and kept it captive there for a moment, resting on her, as though to let him feel the new life that was quickening there. Then she released him and turned away.
Harpirias gathered his troops and beckoned to the freed hostages to follow him, and went out of the feasting-hall.
18
From the look of the star-speckled darkness overhead, dawn was still some hours off. But it took the rest of the night to load the waiting floaters and make them ready for the homeward journey. The sky was already streaked with pink before all the final tasks were finished.
Harpirias stood for a moment just outside the high wall of stone that surrounded the hidden kingdom of the Othinor.
Home, now! Home to the waiting warmth of civilized Majipoor—and, perhaps, the resurrection of his own interrupted career on Castle Mount. He had actually accomplished the task he had been sent here to do; more than that, he had had his great adventure and he had gained a lifetime’s worth of stories to tell, stories that the Coronal would listen to eagerly, and everyone else as well. And now home to tell those stories; home to a decent bath, and a dinner of real food, oysters and spiced fish and breast of sekkimaund or haunch of bilantoon, and the thick strong wine of Muldemar or the bright crimson wine of Bannikanniklole or the golden wine of Piliplok or the fine silvery-gray wine of Amblemorn, maybe all four in quick succession—with some clear-eyed beauty with high cheekbones and delicate brows as his companion for the night, yes, or—why not?—two or three—
But Harpirias knew that the land of the Othinor had imprinted itself upon his soul forever. Beyond any doubt he would dream time and again of the land of the Othinor, when finally he was home once more. Images of the ice-world would steal into his mind,
and of King Toikella’s smoky banquet-hall, and of the jeering, capering Eililylal of the heights: that he knew. And the glossy-haired girl with a sliver of carved bone through her upper lip who had slipped into his room to keep him warm on so many frosty nights: she too would come to him in his sleep.
Yes. Yes. All that and much more: Harpirias was certain of that. He would never forget this place.
“Everything is stowed, prince,” Eskenazo Marabaud called to him. “Sun’s about to come up. Shall we get going?”
“In a moment,” Harpirias said.
He stepped back through the narrow wedge-shaped crack in the mountain wall that afforded the only access to King Toikella’s land. The ice-village gleamed faintly in the pearly light of dawn. Harpirias let his eyes rove the shining fanciful facades, the glittering icy filigrees.
A small figure was standing in front of the lodge where his quarters had been. At this distance, it was hard for him to see her clearly, but Harpirias could envision her well enough in the eye of his mind, a ragged smudgy figure in carelessly arrayed furs, a girl who perhaps was bearing his Othinor child. Waving to him, hesitantly at first, then more eagerly, a gesture of obvious love and longing.
He stared at her for a time. Then he waved back at her, and turned and walked away, passing through the crevice in the mountain wall and heading for his floater to begin his long journey home.
ROBERT SILVERBERG’s many novels include the bestselling Lord Valentine trilogy the Nebula-winning A Time of Changes, the critically acclaimed Hot Sky at Midnight, Kingdoms of the Wall and The Face of the Waters. He is also the co-author, with Isaac Asimov, of The Positronic Man, as well as the co-editor of the new Universe series of original short-fiction anthologies. He has won numerous awards for his fiction, including five Nebulas, four Hugo Awards, a Jupiter Award, and the Prix Apollo. He lives near San Francisco with his wife, Karen Haber.
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