The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  Kyvole Gannivad was the mayor’s name. He was a stubby, rotund man, bald except for two reddish fringes above his ears, stocky with the sort of solid stockiness that made you think that no matter how hard you pushed him you could not knock him over. He had trouble remembering their names, calling Simmilgord “Lutilel” a couple of times and once transforming Lutiel’s surname into “Simmifrons,” which seemed odd for a politician, but otherwise he was ingratiating and solicitous to the point of absurdity, telling them again and again what an honor it was for the town of Kesmakuran to be graced by renowned scholars of their high intellect and widely acclaimed accomplishments. “We are counting on you,” he said several times, “to put our city on the map. And we know that you will.”

  “What does he mean by that?” Lutiel asked, when they were finally alone. “Are we supposed to do real research here, or does he think we’re going to act as a couple of paid publicists for them?”

  Simmilgord shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing that mayors like to say, that’s all. He can’t help being a home-town booster. He thinks that if we set up a nice little four-room museum next door to the site of the tomb and find a few interesting old inscriptions to put in it, visitors will come from thousands of miles around to gawk.”

  “And suppose that doesn’t happen.”

  “Not our problem,” said Simmilgord. “You know what you and I came here to do. Pulling the tourists in is his job, not ours.”

  “What if he tries to push us in directions that compromise the integrity of our work?”

  “I don’t think he will. But if he tries, we can handle him. He’s nothing but a small-town mayor, remember, and not a particularly bright specimen of his species.—Come on, Lutiel. Let’s unpack and have a look at the famous tomb.”

  But that turned out not to be so simple. They needed to go with the official custodian of the tomb, and it took more than an hour to locate him. Then came the trek to the tomb itself, which was at the southern edge of town, far across from their lodgings, at the foot of the range of mountains out of which the city’s building-blocks had been carved. It was late afternoon before they reached it. An ugly quarry scar formed a diagonal slash across the face of the mountain; below and to both sides of it grew a dense covering of blue-black underbrush, descending to ground level and extending almost to the outermost street of the city, and here, nearly hidden by the thick tangle of brush, was the entrance to Dvorn’s tomb, or at least what was said to be Dvorn’s tomb: a black hole stretching downward into the earth.

  “I will go first,” said their guide, Prasilet Sungavon, the local antiquarian who was the custodian of the tomb. “It’s very dark down there. Even with our torches, we won’t have an easy time.”

  “Lead on,” Simmilgord said impatiently, gesturing with his hand.

  Prasilet Sungavon had annoyed them both from the very start. He was a stubby little Hjort, squat and puffy-faced and bulgy-eyed, a member of a race that apparently could not help seeming officious and self-important. About a third of the population of Kesmakuran were Hjorts, evidently. By profession Prasilet Sungavon was a dealer in pharmaceutical herbs, who long ago had taken up amateur archaeology as a weekend hobby. “I’ve been digging down here, man and boy, for forty years,” he told them proudly. “And I’ve found some real treasures, all right. Just about anything that anybody knows about Dvorn, they know because of the things I’ve found.” Which would irritate Lutiel Vengifrons considerably, because, as a professionally trained archaeologist, he surely would dislike the thought that this pill-peddler had spent decades rummaging around at random with his spade and his pick in this unique and easily damaged site. Simmilgord was bothered by him too, since it was unlikely that Prasilet Sungavon had the knowledge or the wit to derive any sort of solid historical conclusions from whatever he had managed to scrape loose in the depths of the tomb.

  But, whether they liked it or not, the Hjort was the official municipal custodian of the tomb, the man with the keys to the gate, and they could do nothing without his cooperation. So they lit their torches and followed him down a stretch of uneven flagstone steps to a place where a metal grillwork barred their entry, and waited while Prasilet Sungavon elaborately unlocked a series of padlocks and swung the gate aside.

  A dark, muddy, musty-smelling passage, low and narrow, with a cold breeze rising up out of it, lay before them. Through swerves and curves it led onward for some unknown distance into the heart of the mountain on a gradual sloping descent. Because of his height, Simmilgord had to crouch from the start. The floor of the passage was a thick, spongy layer of muddy soil; the sides and roof of it had been carved, none too expertly, from the rock of the mountain above them. The entranceway, the Hjort told them, had now and then been blocked by the backwash from heavy storms, and had had to be cleared at least five times in the last two thousand years, most recently a century ago. When they had gone about fifteen feet in, Prasilet Sungavon indicated a crude niche cut into the tunnel wall. “I found remarkable things in there,” he said, without explanation. “And there, and there,” pointing at two more niches further along. “You’ll see.”

  The air in the tunnel was cold and dank. From somewhere deeper in came the sound of steadily dripping water, and occasionally the quick clatter of wings as some cave-dwelling creature, invisible in the dimness, passed swiftly by overhead. Other than that, and the hoarse, ragged breathing of the Hjort, all was silent in here. After about ten minutes the passage expanded abruptly into a high-roofed circular chamber, lined all about by a coarse and irregular wall of badly matched blocks of gray stone, that could very readily be regarded as a place of interment. And against the left side of it sat a rectangular lidless pink-marble box, three or four feet high and about seven feet long, that was plausibly a sarcophagus.

  “This is it,” said the Hjort grandly. “The tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn!”

  “May I?” Lutiel Vengifrons said, and, without waiting for a reply, stepped forward and peered into the box. After a moment Simmilgord, more diffidently, went up alongside him.

  The sarcophagus, if that indeed was what it was, was empty. That was no surprise. They had not expected to find Dvorn lying here with his hands crossed on his chest and a benign smile on his Pontifical features. The stone box was roughly carved, with clearly visible chisel-marks all along its bare sides. There did not seem to be any inscriptions on it or any sort of ornamentation.

  “A tomb, yes, very possibly,” said Lutiel Vengifrons after a while. He made the concession sound like a grudging one. “But just how, I wonder, were you able to identify this place specifically as the tomb of Dvorn?”

  His tone was cool, skeptical, challenging. Unflustered, the Hjort replied, “We know that he was born in Kesmakuran, and that after his glorious century-long reign as Pontifex he died here. There is no doubt of that. It has always been understood locally that this is his tomb. That is the tradition. No one questions it. No other city in the world makes any such claim. Plainly this is an archaic site, going back to the earliest days of the settlement of Majipoor. The effort that must have been involved at that early time in digging such a long passageway indicates that this could only be the tomb of someone important. I ask you: Who else would that be, if not the first Pontifex?”

  The logic did not seem entirely impeccable. Simmilgord, who had his own ideas about the unquestioning acceptance of local tradition as historical certainty, began to say something to that effect, but Lutiel nudged him ungently in the ribs before he could get out more than half a syllable. For the moment it was Lutiel who was conducting the interrogation. Prasilet Sungavon continued, still unperturbed, “Of course the body had disintegrated in the course of so long a span of time. But certain relics remained. I will show them to you when we come out of here.”

  “What about the lid?” Lutiel Vengifrons said. “Surely nobody would bury such an important personage in a sarcophagus that had no lid.”

  “There,” said the Hjort, aiming his torch into a dark corner of the to
mb-chamber. Against the far wall lay what must once have been a long stone slab, now cracked into three pieces and some bits of rubble.

  “Tomb-robbers?” Simmilgord asked, unable to keep silent any longer.

  “I think not,” the Hjort said sharply. “We are not that sort of folk, here in Kesmakuran. Doubtless some visitors long ago lifted the lid to make certain that Dvorn’s body really did lie here, and as they carried it to one side they dropped it and it broke.”

  “No doubt that is so,” said Simmilgord, working hard to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  He could feel himself slipping into a profound bleakness of spirit. This dark, muddy hole in the ground—this miserable crude stone coffin with its shattered lid—these unprovable conjectures of Prasilet Sungavon—how did any of this constitute any sort of substantive information about the life of the Pontifex Dvorn? He wondered how he and Lutiel could possibly fulfill even the slightest part of the scientific mission that had taken them halfway across the continent from Sisivondal. It all seemed hopeless. There was so little to work with, and what little there was undoubtedly contaminated by the passionate desire of the Kesmakuran folk to inflate its significance into something of major historical importance. Right here at the beginning of everything Simmilgord saw only disaster encroaching on him from all sides.

  Prasilet Sungavon, though, stood before them smiling an immense Hjortish smile, a foot wide from ear to ear. Obviously he was very pleased with himself and the cavern over which he presided.

  With a brisk professionalism that belied his gloom Simmilgord said, “Well, now, is there anything else we should see?”

  “Not here. At my house. Let us go.”

  One room of Prasilet Sungavon’s house had been turned into a kind of Dvorn museum. Three cases contained artifacts that had been taken from the tomb, most of them by the Hjort himself, some by the anonymous predecessors of his who had poked around in the tomb in the course of the previous thousand years. “These,” he said resonantly, indicating several small yellowish objects, “are some of the Pontifex’s teeth. And this is a lock of his hair.”

  “Still retaining some color after twelve thousand years,” said Lutiel. “Remarkable!”

  “Yes. Verging on the miraculous, I would say.—These, I am told with good authority, are his knucklebones. Nothing else of the body remains. But how fortunate we are to have these few relics.”

  “Which you say can be identified as those of the Pontifex Dvorn,” Simmilgord said. “May I ask, by what evidence?”

  “The inscriptions from the tomb,” said the Hjort. “I will show you those tomorrow.”

  “Why not now?”

  “The hour grows late, my friend. Tomorrow.”

  There was no mistaking the inflexibility in his tone. Tomorrow it would have to be. The Hjort had the upper hand, and it seemed that he meant to keep it that way.

  * * *

  It was a depressing evening. Neither man had much to say, and little of that was optimistic. What had been put forth to them as the tomb of Dvorn was nothing much more than a muddy unadorned underground chamber that could have been built for almost any purpose at any time in the past twelve thousand years, the putative teeth and hair and bones that Prasilet Sungavon had shown them were absurdities, and the Hjort’s proprietary attitude toward the site was certainly going to make any sort of real probing very difficult. There hadn’t even been any Hjorts on Majipoor in the early centuries of the Pontificate—it was Lord Melikand who had brought all the non-human races here, thousands of years later, an amply chronicled fact—and yet here was this one behaving as though he owned the place. That was likely to be an ongoing problem.

  The inscriptions from the tomb, at least, provided one mildly hopeful sign when Prasilet Sungavon let them see them the next day. From a locked cabinet the Hjort drew five small plaques of yellow stone. He had found them, he said, hidden away in the niches leading up to the tomb-chamber. Their surfaces appeared to have been damaged by unskillful cleaning, but nevertheless it was possible to see that they bore lettering, worn and indistinct, in some kind of barely familiar angular script that at even such brief inspection as this Simmilgord believed could be accepted—with a stretch—as an early version of the writing still in use in modern times.

  A shiver of excitement ran down his spine. If these things were genuine, they could be the world’s oldest surviving written artifacts. What an amazing notion that was! That romantic element in his soul that had blazed in him since his boyhood atop the hillocks of the Vale of Gloyn still lived in him: to hold these chipped and battered little slabs of stone aroused in him a feeling of being in contact with the whole vast sweep of the world’s history from the beginning. And for the first time since their arrival in Kesmakuran he began to think that their long journey across the continent might yet result in something useful. But he was no paleographer. He had never handled any documents remotely as old as these would have to be, if indeed they dated from the era of the early Pontificate, and what he saw here was altogether mysterious to him. No actual intelligible words leaped out to him from the worn surfaces of the slabs. At best he had a vague sense that the faint marks that they bore were words, that they said something meaningful in a language that was akin, in an ancestral way, to the one that the people of Majipoor still spoke. He looked across to Lutiel Vengifrons. “What do you think?”

  “Extraordinary,” Lutiel said. “They could actually be quite old, you know.” The way he said it left no doubt that he too was greatly moved, even shaken, by the sight of the slabs. Simmilgord took note of that: Lutiel, steady and sober-minded and conservative, was not a man given to overstatement or bursts of wild enthusiasm. But then his innate sobriety of mind reasserted itself. “—If they’re authentic, that is.”

  “How old, Lutiel?”

  A shrug. “Lord Damiano’s time? Stiamot’s? No, older than that—

  Melikand, maybe.”

  “Not as old as the era of Dvorn, then?”

  “I can’t say, one way or the other, not just by one fast look. They’re hard to read. I’m not very much of an expert on the most archaic scripts. And the lighting in here isn’t good enough for this kind of work. I’d need to examine them under instruments—a close study of their surfaces—”

  Prasilet Sungavon gathered up the slabs and said, “Let me tell you what they say. This one—” It was the largest of them. He pursed his immense lips and slowly traced a line across the surface of the slab with a thick ashen-gray forefinger. “ ‘I, Esurimand of Kesmakuran, acting at the behest of Barhold, anointed successor to the beloved Pontifex Dvorn—’ ” Looking up, he said, “That’s all can be read of this one. But on the next it says, ‘The blessings of the Divine upon our great leader, who in the hundredth year of his reign—’ Again, it’s not possible to make out anything after that. But the next one says, ‘For which we vow eternal gratitude—’ and this one, ‘May he enjoy eternal repose.’ The fifth tablet is completely unintelligible.”

  Simmilgord and Lutiel Vengifrons exchanged glances. The look of skepticism in Lutiel’s eyes was unmistakable. Simmilgord silently indicated his agreement. It was all he could do to keep himself from laughing.

  But he tried to preserve some semblance of scholarly detachment. They could not afford to seem to be mocking Prasilet Sungavon to his face. “Quite fascinating,” he said crisply. “Quite. And would you care to tell us how you were able to arrive at these translations?”

  But he must not have been able to conceal the scorn in his voice very well, for the Hjort fixed his huge bulging eyes on him with a look that must surely be one of anger.

  “Years of study,” said Prasilet Sungavon. “Unremitting toil. Comparing old texts with older ones, and even older ones yet, until I had mastered the writings of the ancients. And then—long nights of candlelight— straining my eyes, struggling to comprehend these faint little scratchings in the stone—”

  * * *

  “He’s making it all up, of course,” Lutiel said, ho
urs later, when they had returned to their own quarters. “The slabs might be real, and the inscriptions, but he invented those texts himself.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” said Simmilgord. He had been through a long and troubling conversation with himself since they had left the Hjort’s place. “I doubted his translations as much as you did at first, when he started reeling off all that glib stuff about the beloved Pontifex Dvorn, and so forth. But you saw his library. He’s done some genuine work on those inscriptions. We ought to allow for the possibility that they do say something like what he claims they say.”

  “But still—how pat it is, how neat, the reference to Barhold, the line about eternal repose—”

  “Pat and neat if he’s building support for a hoax, yes. But if that truly is Dvorn’s tomb—”

  Lutiel gave him an odd look. “You really want to believe that it is, don’t you?”

  “Yes. No question that I do. Don’t you?”

  “We are supposed to begin with the evidence, and work toward the hypothesis, Simmilgord. Not the other way around.”

  “You would say something like that, wouldn’t you? You know that I’d never try to deny that a proper scholar ought to work from evidence to hypothesis. But there’s nothing wrong with starting from a hypothesis and testing it against the evidence.”

  “The evidence of myth and tradition and, quite possibly, of fabricated artifacts?”

  “We don’t know that they’re fabricated. I don’t like that Hjort any more than you do, but his findings may be legitimate all the same.—Look, Lutiel, I’m not saying that that is Dvorn’s tomb. I simply answered your question. Do I want to believe it’s Dvorn’s tomb? Yes. Yes, I do. I think it would be wonderful if we could prove that it’s the real thing. Whether it is or not is what we’re here to find out.”