The Mountains of Majipoor

11

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 grass and scraps 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 glassy-looking white stone chipped to razor sharpness. He handed the huge weapon to Mankhelm, who formally raised it aloft with both hands and passed 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 gods 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 grass. 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 masses 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 apron 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 trespassers 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?

"What do you say, Korinaam? Are those some of your people? What would Piurivars be doing living in these mountains?"

But Korinaam only shrugged and shook his head, and made no other answer. The identity of the creatures on the ridge was apparently a matter of complete indifference to him just now. He looked exhausted by the climb. His eyes were glazed, his narrow shoulders were slumped, his breath came in short rasping bursts.

In the succeeding hours there were no additional sightings of the mysterious creatures of the heights. They had appeared, they had done their mocking dance, they had vanished. But the strange episode cast a long shadow over the royal hunt all the rest of that day. Toikella stalked ahead in frosty silence, striding up one ridge and down the next, lost in a private realm of angry brooding. Nor did any of the other Othinor speak a word. Accompanied by Korinaam and the Skandars, Harpirias trailed along behind them, understanding nothing of what had taken place.

Animals could be seen in the flatlands between the crests — black shaggy things, seemingly of great size, ambling slowly over the rocky plains and nibbling at the sparse patches of stubby gray-green grass. Hajbaraks, were they? Korinaam was unsure and the Othinor still remained grimly uncommunicative. In any case the beasts were well beyond range, and drifted even farther away as Toikella approached them.

The air grew cooler as the day went along: there was a real bite in it now. The bleak upland terrain was gray and cheerless. Harpirias felt his spirits sagging ever deeper from hour to hour. This was nothing like the hunts he had known on Castle Mount. Those had been joyous sport, this was a dismal dreary trek.

It began to appear likely that the sacred hunt would last several days, or perhaps even more. That was a gloomy prospect indeed.

Toward evening, though, some unwary animal unexpectedly came rushing out from between two vertical slabs of pink rock, right into the midst of the hunting party. It was a scruffy-looking gray beast of only moderate size, big-headed and lean, with unpleasant curving claws and a long slavering mouth: a scavenger of some sort, from the looks of it. One of the king’s manservants began to swing at it with the staff he was carrying, as if to swat it aside like vermin; but Toikella let out a great raging cry and quickly stepped forward. Catching the staff in mid-course and twisting it from the man’s hand, the king roughly shoved the servant down and out of his way. Then he drew the short sword that he wore on a thong around his waist and thrust it into the befuddled animal’s belly.

The wounded beast reared back, rising up on its back legs and striking ineffectually at Toikella with its curved claws. The king brushed the animal’s forearm aside in the most casual way and thrust again, and a third time; and the creature uttered a soft bubbling sigh and fell down on its side. Streams of greenish-red blood came in spurting gushes from its wounds.

The king said a few curt words to Mankhelm. Immediately the priest drew a flask of black leather from his box of holy regalia and held it to the gouts of spouting blood until it was full. He handed it then to the king; and then, kneeling, Mankhelm began to flay the dying animal even as it slowly threshed about.

"What’s happening?" Harpirias asked Korinaam in a low voice.

"I’m not certain. But it’s a ritual butchering of some sort, that much is clear."

"Isn’t the king supposed to be hunting hajbaraks on this expedition?"

"Perhaps he’s decided that this animal will do."

And indeed that seemed to be the case. The priest had now laid the animal’s flesh bare — it was dead, finally — and with the efficiency of one who has long been accustomed to preparing sacrificial offerings he was cutting the thing into sections, laying the meat of the haunches over here, the heart nearby, certain other of the internal organs in a different place. Harpirias had to admire Mankhelm’s skill at stripping and quartering the creature. When the job was done the priest rose and draped the animal’s raw moist skin over Toikella’s broad shoulders, fastening it in place with a beaded leather cord that he tied about the king’s neck. The head of the beast, still attached to the hide, dangled down along the royal back, dead eyes glassily staring outward.

What followed was shocking even to someone as experienced in the bloodshed of the hunt as Harpirias. Toikella held the black leather flask of blood aloft, solemnly offering it to the four quarters of the heavens; and then he drank it down in four or five gulps. Next he knelt and devoured the red and steaming heart. Something that was probably the liver he handed to Mankhelm, who consumed part of it and set the remainder atop a flat rock that had evidently been chosen to serve as an altar. The rest of the meat the king divided, giving torn bloody segments to each of his men, and then turning toward Harpirias with one for him.

Harpirias stared blankly.

"Take it," Konnaam whispered. "Eat it."

"But it’s raw."

The Shapeshifter glared at him. "You’re being asked to participate in one of the holiest rituals these people have. Perhaps the holiest. The king is paying you a high compliment. Take it. Eat it."

Harpirias gave him a morose nod.

Tembidat, he thought, you will owe me much for ail this!

The meat was hard and stringy, and its flavor was that of dead things. Somehow Harpirias choked it down, though he came close to vomiting. Toikella watched in evident satisfaction as Harpirias swallowed it, and clapped him lustily between the shoulderblades when he was done.

The others in Harpirias’s party were spared the honor of partaking of the holy meat. None of them appeared to be unhappy about that.

There was chanting now, and a ceremonial burning of the uneaten parts of the animal’s body. The rest of the carcass was simply tossed down the closest ravine. Then the king spoke briefly to his men, who began at once to pack and stow the hunting gear.

"Is that it?" Harpirias asked. "The hunt is over?"

"So the king has decreed," said the Shapeshifter. "He’s not going to bother going after a hajbarak. This animal has been designated the official midsummer sacrifice and this year’s hunt is at its end."

"He’s upset about the people he saw dancing on the ridge, isn’t he? That’s why he’s cutting things short."

"Very likely."

"Who were they, Korinaam? What were they?"

"I have no idea," the Metamorph said tightly. He looked away. The question seemed to pain him. "Ah: we’re just about ready to leave, it would appear. We’re going to go back down to the village now."

"Now? But it’s starting to get dark!"

"Nevertheless, we seem to be leaving."

There could be no doubt about that. Already the towering figure of King Toikella, still clad in the bloody animal skin, was a good distance along the way, heading back toward the place where the trail down to the village began. Harpirias had no choice but to fall in with the marchers, though the dusk was deepening rapidly now into night and it struck him as perilous in the extreme to attempt the icy, rock-strewn path at this late hour. Would they even reach the trail at all before full darkness came? Or would they have to go blundering through the broken and difficult terrain of this plateau without being able to see where they were going?

He hurried to catch up with the swiftly striding Othinor.

No one said so much as a word during the downward march. The king’s mood was so black that his men gave him a wide berth. Beyond any question the hunt had been something far short of a success, even if Toikella had chosen to decree that it was.

The descent, illuminated only by the light of one crescent moon, was a slow and harrowing one. The trail was all but invisible; it could only have been by instinct alone that Toikella chose the right path out of the myriad dimly seen choices that presented themselves. Somewhere in the middle of the night a cold harsh wind slicing downward from the summit began to blow against their backs. Harpirias wondered if the wild gusts would sweep them from the trail and fling them down the side of the mountain, their bodies tumbling into the plaza of the village like those of the murdered hajbaraks. He shivered and huddled into himself and placed his feet with exaggerated care at every step.

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.