The Mountains of Majipoor

2

It had never been part of Harpirias’s plan to go venturing into the dismal snowy wastes of the Khyntor Marches. As a member of one of the great pontifical families, a Prestimion of Muldemar, he had quite reasonably expected that he would pass his days comfortably on Castle Mount in the service of the Coronal Lord Ambinole, perhaps rising in time to the rank of counselor to the Coronal, or possibly some high ministry, or even the dukedom of one of the Fifty Cities.

But his upward path had been abruptly interrupted, and for the most cruel and trivial of reasons.

With a band of six companions he had ridden out from the Castle, on his twenty-fifth birthday, a fateful day for him, and down into the forested estate country close by the city of Halanx . His friend Tembidat’s family long had maintained a hunting preserve there. The outing was Tembidat’s idea, Tembidat’s gift to him.

Hunting was one of Harpirias’s greatest pleasures. He was a man of short stature, like most of the men of the Prestimion line, but agile and broad-shouldered and strong, a genial, outgoing, athletic young man. He loved the chase in its every part: the stalking, the sighting of the prey, the sweet air whistling past his cheeks as he gave pursuit, the moment of pausing to take aim. And then, of course, the kill. What finer way to celebrate one’s birthday than by slaughtering a few bilantoons or fierce-tusked tuamiroks in an elegant and skillful manner, and bringing the meat back for a joyous feast, and taking a trophy or two to hang on the wall?

All that day had Harpirias and his friends hunted, and with the greatest of success, bagging not only a score of bilantoons and a brace of tuamiroks but a fat succulent vandar as well, and a dainty high-prancing onathil, and, as the afternoon was waning, the most wondrous catch of all, a majestic sinileese that had a splendid glistening white hide and glorious many-branched scarlet antlers. Harpirias himself was the one to bring it down, with a single well-placed shot at an astonishing range, a clean shot that filled him with pride at his own marksmanship.

"I had no idea your family kept such rare creatures as this in its park," Harpirias said to Tembidat, when they had recovered the body of the sinileese and he was preparing it for transport back to the Castle.

"In fact I had no idea of it myself," said Tembidat in an oddly somber and uneasy tone, which might have served Harpirias as a hint of what was to come. But Harpirias was too swollen with delight at his achievement to notice. "I confess I felt just a bit of surprise when I saw it standing there," Tembidat continued. "Rare indeed, a white sinileese — I’ve never seen a white sinileese before, have you?—"

"Perhaps I should have let it be," Harpirias said. "It may be some special prize of your father’s — some particular favorite of his—"

"Of which he’s never spoken? No, Harpirias!" Tembidat shook his head, a little too vigorously, perhaps, as though trying to convince himself of something. "He must not have known of it, or cared, or it wouldn’t have been roaming loose. This is our family estate, and all animals here are fair game. And so the sinileese is my birthday present to you. My father would feel only joy, knowing that you were the one who had slain it, and that this is your birthday hunt."

"Who are those men, Tembidat?" asked one of the others in the hunting party suddenly. "Your father’s gamekeepers, are they?"

Harpirias looked up. Three burly grim-faced strangers in crimson-and-purple livery had stepped from the forest into the clearing where the hunters were at work.

"No," said Tembidat, and that curious tautness had returned to his voice, "not my father’s keepers, but those of our neighbor Prince Lubovine."

"Your— neighbor—" said Harpirias, with apprehension growing in him as he considered the ample distance at which he had killed the sinileese.

He began to wonder, now, just whose beast the sinileese had been.

The biggest and most grim-looking of the crimson-and-purple strangers offered a careless salute and said, "Have any of you gentlemen happened to see— Ah, yes, apparently you have—"

His voice trailed off into a growl.

"A white sinileese with scarlet antlers," another of the newcomers finished tersely for him.

There was an ugly moment of hostile silence. The three were peering in a dark-visaged fashion at the animal over which Harpirias was crouching. Harpirias, putting down his skinning knife, stared at his bloodied hands. He felt a rushing roar in his ears, as of a seething torrent passing through his skull.

Tembidat said finally, with an unsteady touch of defiance in his tone, "You surely must know that this is the hunting preserve of the family of Duke Kestir of Halanx, whose son I am. If your animal strayed across the boundary onto our land, we regret its death, but we were completely within our rights to regard it as legitimate prey. As you well know."

"If it had strayed across," said the first of Prince Lubovine’s gamekeepers. "If. But the sinileese, which we have been pursuing all afternoon since it broke from its cage, was on our prince’s domain when you shot it."

"Your— prince’s— domain—" Tembidat said, faltering.

"Indeed. Can you see the boundary marker over there, blazed on that pingla tree? The blood of the sinileese stains the ground well behind it. We have followed that bloody trail to here. You can carry the animal over the line to Duke Kestir’s land, if you wish, but that does not change the fact that it was standing in Prince Lubovine’s domain when you shot it."

"Is this true?" Harpirias said to Tembidat, with an edge of horror sharpening his words. "Is that the boundary of your father’s land?"

"Apparently so," Tembidat muttered hollowly.

"And the animal was the only one of its kind, the grandest treasure of Prince Lubovine’s collection," the gamekeeper said. "We claim its meat and its hide; but your foolish poaching will cost you much more than that, mark my words, my young princes."

The three wardens hoisted the sinileese to their shoulders, and stalked off into the forest with it.

Harpirias stood stunned. Prince Lubovine’s park of rare beasts was legendary for the marvels it contained. And Prince Lubovine was not only a man of great power and immeasurable wealth and high ancestry — he traced his lineage back to the Coronal Lord Voriax, elder brother of the famous Valentine, who had been Coronal and then Pontifex during the Time of Troubles five centuries before — but also he was known as a man of petty and vindictive nature, who brooked no affront lightly.

How could Tembidat have been so stupid as to let the hunting parry wander right up to the border of Lubovine’s estate? Why had Tembidat not said that the boundary was unfenced, why had he not warned him how risky it might be to aim at that far-off sinileese?

Tembidat, plainly aware of Harpirias’s dismay, said gently, "We will make full amends, my friend, have no doubt of that. My father will speak to Lubovine — we will make it clear that it was simply a mistake, that you had not the slightest intent of poaching — we will buy him three new sinileeses, five new sinileeses—"

But of course it wasn’t as simply dealt with as that.

There were profound apologies. There was the payment of an indemnity. There was an attempt — fruitless — to find another white sinileese for the outraged Prince Lubovine. Highly placed kinsmen of Harpirias’s, Prestimions and Dekkerets and Kinnikens, spoke on his behalf, urging leniency for what had been, after all, an innocent youthful error.

And then, just when he thought the whole affair had blown over, Harpirias found himself transferred to an obscure diplomatic post in the giant city of Ni-moya , on Majipoor’s subsidiary continent of Zimroel, far across the sea, thousands and thousands of miles from Castle Mount.

The decree crashed down upon him like the falling of an axe. In effect, his career was over. Once he had gone to Zimroel he would be forgotten at the Castle. He might be gone for years, even decades; he might never win reassignment to the governmental center. And his duties in Ni-moya would be meaningless; he would spend his days shuffling papers, filing trifling reports, and stamping his seal on pointless documents, year after year; and meanwhile all the other young lordlings of his generation would vault past him to the high posts of the Coronal’s court that should have been his by right of birth and ability.

"This is Lubovine’s doing, isn’t it?" Harpirias asked Tembidat when it was clear that the transfer was irrevocable. "This is how he’s taking his revenge for that damned sinileese of his. But it isn’t fair — to ruin a man’s entire life simply because a stupid animal got killed by accident—"

"Your life won’t be ruined, Harpirias."

"Won’t it?"

"You’ll spend six months in Ni-moya, a year at most. My father is certain of it. Lubovine is very powerful and he insists on extracting one final squeeze of retribution from you for what you did, so you’ll have to serve a kind of penitential exile out there for a little while, and then you’ll be back. The Coronal has assured him of that."

"And you believe it’ll really happen that way?"

"Absolutely," said Tembidat.

But that was, however, not the way things worked out.

Off went Harpirias to Ni-moya with the darkest forebodings. It was, at any rate, a grand and beautiful city, the greatest one in Zimroel, a place of more than thirty million inhabitants, hundreds of miles of wonderful white towers rising above the swift waters of the mighty River Zimr. But it was a city of Zimroel , all the same. No one who has been raised amid the splendors of Castle Mount can adapt lightly to the lesser glories of the other continent.

And there in Ni-moya Harpirias remained for one dreary month after another, performing negligible and insulting bureaucratic functions in something called the Office of Provincial Liaison, which seemed to fall neither into the sphere of the Coronal nor that of the Pontifex but into a kind of governmental limbo somewhere between.

He waited eagerly for the message summoning him back to Castle Mount. And waited.

And waited.

Several times he filed formal application for a transfer to duty at the Mount. He received no answers. He wrote to Tembidat, reminding him of the Coronal’s alleged promise to let him come home after a while. Tembidat replied that he was completely convinced that the Coronal intended to make good on his word.

The anniversary of Harpirias’s arrival came and went, and he began a second year of exile.

By now Harpirias was getting only the sketchiest of news from his friends and kinsmen at the Castle: an occasional brief letter, stray bits of gossip, greater and greater spaces between each communication. It was as if they were becoming embarrassed to write to him. So everything was happening just as he had feared. He was forgotten. His career was at an end; he would finish his days as a minor bureaucrat in this obscure administrative department in this prodigiously big but distinctly provincial city of Majipoor’s secondary continent, forever cut off from the sources of power and privilege to which he had had access all the years of his life.

His soul itself began to change. He who had been so rollicking and outgoing turned crabbed and harsh and inward, a sullen man, embittered perhaps beyond all soothing by the wrong that had been done to him.

Then one day when Harpirias was going through the newly arrived diplomatic pouch from Alhanroel, picking spiritlessly over the latest miscellany of empty documents with which he would be expected to deal, he was startled to come upon one that was addressed personally to him — an envelope that bore the insignia of Prince Salteir, High Counselor to the Coronal Lord Ambinole.

Harpirias had never expected to receive anything from so notable a figure as Salteir again. With trembling fingers he broke the seal. And began to read in wonder and delight.

A transfer! Lubovine had relented! They were lifting him out of Ni-moya at last!

But, as he continued to read, his brief flare of exultation turned swiftly to ashes. Instead of being called back to the center of government, he was being sent even farther away. Hadn’t burying him in Ni-moya been sufficient vengeance for Lubovine? Apparently not. For now, to his deep chagrin and utter dismay, Harpirias discovered that his newest assignment would send him beyond the boundaries of civilization itself: into the forlorn, ice-bound mountainous territories of Zimroel’s far northeastern region, the Khyntor Marches.