Tales of Majipoor

by Robert Silverberg

  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, ill 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 Dink-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 tomb-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 was 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 Simmigord 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 s
labs. At best he had a vague sense that 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, hours 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.”

  It was as close as they had ever come to a real quarrel. But gradually the discussion grew less heated. They both saw that arguing with each other about the authenticity of the texts or the scholarly credentials of Prasinet Sungavon was pointless. They had come to Kesmakuran to conduct independent research and reach their own conclusions. Each of them had already let Prasilet Sungavon see that they had their doubts about the things he had shown them – they had, in fact, not been able to do a very good job of concealing their disdain for his methods and his results – and it was clear that the Hjort was annoyed by that. In his own eyes he was the leading authority on the tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn and they were merely a pair of snotty wet-behind-the-ears University boys, and indeed there was some truth to that. In the future they would have to take a less condescending approach to him, for Prasilet Sungavon held the keys to the tomb and without his cooperation they would accomplish nothing.

  They tried to do just that in their next meeting with the Hjort, letting him know how excited they were by all that they had seen so far, and how eager they were to build on the splendid work he had done. He seemed mollified by that. Simmilgord asked to be allowed to take the slabs back to their house for study, and, although Prasilet Sungavon refused, he did let them make copies to work with. He also was willing to give them access to his own extensive library of paleographic texts. Lutiel said that he wanted to have lighting installed in the tomb – at the expense of the University, naturally – and the Hjort unhesitatingly agreed. Nor did he seem to be troubled by Lutiel’s suggestion of extending the existing excavation deeper into the mountainside, which somehow no one had thought of doing since the cavern first had become known to the people of Kesmakuran.

  The first surprise came when they began poring over the inscriptions on the tablets and comparing the characters with the examples of early Majipoori script in Prasilet Sungavon’s books. In twelve thousand years one would expect any sort of alphabet to undergo some metamorphosis, but careful inspection of the tablets under adequate lighting quickly revealed that they were decipherable after all, once one made allowances for the erosion of the surface that time and careless cleaning had inflicted, and, after they had learned to make those allowances, they could see that the Hjort’s readings were not very far from the mark. “See – here?” Lutiel said. “By the Divine, it does say ‘Dvorn’ – I’m certain of it!”

  Simmilgord felt the shiver of discovery again. “Yes. And this – isn’t it ‘Barhold’?”

  “With the pontifical sign next to both names!”

  “E-tern-al re-pose –”

  “I think so.”

  “Where’s the part about ‘the hundredth year of his reign?”’

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Neither do I. But of course Dvorn didn’t reign a hundred years. That’s culture-hero stuff – myth, fable. Just because it’s in Furvain doesn’t mean it’s true. Nobody lives that long. The Hjort must have interpolated it to make the Kesmakurans happy. They want to believe that their great man was Pontifex for a century, just as it says in the Book of Changes, and so he found it on this slab for them.”

  “It’s probably this line here,” Lutiel said, pointing with his pencil. “You can make out about one letter out of every six, at best, in this section. Prasinet Sungavon would have been able to trans
late it any way he liked.”

  “But the rest of it—”

  “Yes. It does all match up, more or less. We have to be nicer to him, Simmilgord. We really do have the tomb of Dvorn here, I think. You know how skeptical I was at first. But it gets harder and harder to argue this stuff away.”

  The installation of the lighting system began the next day. While that was going on, and Lutiel was purchasing the tools he would need for the dig, Simmilgord busied himself in the municipal archives, digging back through astonishingly ancient records. With the mayoral blessing of Kyvole Gannivad all doors were thrown open to him, and he roamed freely in a labyrinth of dusty shelves. The archive here was nothing like what he imagined was held in the Castle Mount library, or in the storage vaults of the Labyrinth, but it was impressive enough, particularly for so minor a town as Kesmakuran. And it appeared as though no one had looked at these things in decades, even centuries. For two days he wandered through an unfruitful host of relatively recent property deeds and tax records and city-council minutes, but then he found a staircase leading downward to a storeroom of far older documents, documents of almost unbelievable antiquity. Some of them went back six, seven, eight thousand years, to the days of Calintane and Guadeloom and the mighty Stiamot who reigned before them, and some were older than Stiamot even, bearing the seals of Coronals and Pontifexes whose names were mere shadows and whispers; and beneath these were what seemed to be transcriptions, themselves several thousand years old, of what appeared to be documents from the very earliest years of human settlement on Majipoor.

  It was a wondrous thing to read these old texts. Simply to handle them was a thrill. Here – Simmilgord, still caught in the struggle between his skepticism and his eagerness to believe, could not help wondering whether it was a latter-day forgery – was a document that purported to be a copy of a decree issued by Dvorn when he was nothing more than the head of the provincial council of Kesmakuran. Here – how startling, if authentic! – was the text of Dvorn’s fiery message to his fellow leaders in west-central Alhanroel, calling on them to unite and form a stable national government. Here – there seemed to be a considerable gap in time – was an edict of Dvorn’s having to do with water rights along the Sefaranon River. So his regime had already extended its reach that far to the west! Whatever clerk had been responsible for making this copy of the primordial original document had drawn a replica of something very much like the Pontifical seal on it. Then there was a decree that bore not only Dvorn’s name but that of Lord Barhold, the first Coronal, which indicated that Dvorn had by then devised the system of dual rule, a senior monarch who shaped policy and a junior one who saw to its execution; and after that came one that indicated that Barhold had succeeded to the title of Pontifex and had appointed a Coronal of his own.