Tales of Majipoor

by Robert Silverberg

  So Lutiel remained in Kesmakuran; and Hawid Zakayil went through the pretense, at least, of sharing responsibility for the project with the two of them. He informed Simmilgord that he was arranging financing so that every document found so far could be copied for the benefit of the archives at the Castle and the Labyrinth, a task that would keep Simmilgord busy for a good many weeks to come. And even though the site remained closed, with no further excavation until further notice, Lutiel himself would be admitted for several hours a day to sort through his discoveries in the outer tunnels and to supervise the work of the technicians who would be dealing with the task of preserving the murals against further decay.

  Simmilgord wondered just what the Skandar would be doing during this time. Hawid Zakayil seemed to have allocated no specific aspect of the enterprise to himself, but he was too big and rambunctious and restless a presence to be content for long to sit about quietly in a sleepy place like Kesmakuran while such lesser men as Simmilgord and Lutiel went about their work.

  The answer came soon enough. One morning Simmilgord and Lutiel received word that they were summoned to a meeting, and a couple of municipal officials escorted them to a place southeast of town, halfway around the base of the mountains from the site of the tomb. Over here the pinkish-gold stone of the main mountain range was sundered by a huge and formidable mass of black basalt, virtually a mountain unto itself, that must have been thrust up into it by some volcanic eruption long ago. Hawid Zakayil was waiting there for them with Mayor Kyvole Gannivad and Prasilet Sungavon when they arrived. The Skandar pointed at once to the face of the basalt mass. “Here is where we will put the monument. What do you think, gentlemen? Is this not a properly dramatic site for it?”

  “The monument?” Simmilgord said blankly, feeling as though he had come in very late on something that he really should have known about before this.

  “The monument to Dvorn!” the mayor cried. “What else do you think we’re talking about? Haven’t you seen the sketches?”

  “Well, to be completely truthful—”

  “We’ll dig the entrance to the cavern here,” Kyvole Gannivad swept his stubby arms about with a vigorous sweep to indicate a zone perhaps thirty feet high and forty feet wide – “and there’ll be a vestibule that will continue onward and downward for – oh, what did we say, Hawid Zakayil, a hundred feet? Two hundred?”

  “Something like that,” the Skandar said indifferently. Simmilgord did not understand. A monument? What monument? He had seen no sketches. This was the first he had heard of any of this. “You mean, a kind of historical site, to bring visitors to town? Aside from the tomb itself, I mean.”

  “The tomb itself is too fragile to be a proper place of pilgrimage,” Prasilet Sungavon said. The Hjort spoke the way he might if he were explaining something to a six-year-old. “That’s why the Superintendent closed it so quickly, once the murals were discovered. But we need to build something here as a focus of attention on the greatness of the Pontifex Dvorn and on Kesmakuran’s importance in his career. As you say, a kind of historical site that will bring visitors here.”

  “Exhibits commemorating the life and achievements of Dvorn,” said Hawid Zakayil. “Plaques that tell his story – no mythmaking, everything placed in accurate historical context.” The Skandar favored Simmilgord with a gaze of such force that he feared he might be burned to a crisp in its glare. “You will be in charge of this part of it, Simmilgord. We will count on you to provide us with all the data, essentially a biography of the Pontifex that can be recreated in graphic form, and to design the exhibits: all the wonder and magic that was the life of Dvorn, set out here in its full glory. I am well aware that this is your special field of expertise. You are precisely the person for the task.” Simmilgord nodded. What could he say? He was overwhelmed by the power of the Skandar’s formidable nature. And what Hawid Zakayil was proposing was so astonishing that in a moment everything was transformed for him. Dvorn had been Simmilgord’s special obsession since his undergraduate days. There was no way he could refuse this assignment. Already he saw the monument taking shape in his imagination, to expand, to flower and grow – the murals, the statuary, the displays of documents and artifacts – the Museum of Dvorn! The shrine of Dvorn! You will be in charge, Simmilgord. Hawid Zakayil was handing him the project of his dreams. Once more he heard that magical soaring music that he had heard atop those little hills in the Vale of Gloyn and again in the archives of Kesmakura, the grand swelling sounds of the symphony of Majipoor. To build a commemorative shrine in honor of the first Pontifex – not just a shrine, though, nor even just a museum, but a research center, a place of study, over which he himself would preside—

  “Of course, sir,” he said hoarsely. “What a superb idea!”

  He might as well have been talking to himself. Simmilgord realized that the Skandar had already moved on, turning his attention to Lutiel: “And we will want a replica of the tomb chamber, everything in one-to-one correlation, though somewhat restored, of course, for the benefit of the laymen who will want to see it as it was in Dvorn’s time. Those wonderful murals, reproduced exactly, with the colors enhanced and the missing portions carefully reconstructed – who better to supervise the work than you, Lutiel? Who, indeed?”

  Hawid Zakayil paused, plainly waiting for Lutiel to reply. But no reply was forthcoming, and after a long moment of silence the Skandar simply looked away, his frenetic spirit already moving along to the next consideration, the hotel facilities that the town would need to provide here, and some highway expansion, and similar matters of municipal concern.

  The glory and wonder of it all remained with Simmilgord after they had returned to their lodgings. Already he could see the long lines of visitors shuffling reverently past the great replica of the mural of the smiling Dvorn enthroned, pausing to study the historical plaques on the walls, the murmured discussions amongst them of the visionary brilliance of the first Pontifex, even the multitudes of eager readers for the book on Dvorn that he intended to write.

  Then he noticed the furious, glowering expression on Lutiel’s face.

  Lutiel was fuming. He was pacing angrily about. And finally his anger broke into words.

  “How absolutely awful! A phony ruin – replicas of the murals, very nicely prettied up for the tourists – !”

  It was like being hit with a bucket of cold water.

  With some difficulty Simmilgord brought himself down from the lofty fantasies that had engaged his mind. “What’s so terrible about that, Lutiel? You can’t expect to let them have access to the originals!”

  Lutiel turned on him. “Why do they have to see them at all? What do we need this silly cave for? This shiny fraudulent showplace, this phony historical site? And why should we be involved? I told you right at the start, before we even came here, I wasn’t going to hire on as a paid publicist for the town of Kesmakuran.”

  “But—”

  “You know yourself that most people have no serious interest in what that Skandar wants to put in his museum. They might come and look for five minutes, and move onward, and buy a souvenir or two, maybe a little statuette of Dvorn to put on the mantel, and then start wondering about where to have lunch—” Simmilgord began to feel his own anger rising. It was true, no denying it, that from the very beginning, from the time the head of the department back at the University had broached the Kesmakuran journey, Lutiel had opposed their getting involved. A “career detour,” he had called it then, something irrelevant to the work of two serious young scholars. Yes, Simmilgord had argued him out of that, and had managed to overcome Lutiel’s later doubts about the legitimacy of the project on a dozen occasions, and eventually Lutiel had made the discovery of a lifetime, that gallery of murals that any archaeologist would give his right arm to have found, or maybe both arms, and even so he went on grumbling and fretting about the issues of integrity that seemed to trouble him so much. Evidently he had never reconciled himself to the project in the first place. And never would.<
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  As calmly as he could Simmilgord said, “You’re being absurd, Lutiel. Are you telling me that we do all our work purely for ourselves, that we’re like priests of some arcane cult who go through rites and rituals that have no relevance whatever to the real world and the lives of real people in it?”

  Lutiel laughed harshly. “And you, Simmilgord? What are you telling me? Not a shred of integrity in you, is that it? Ready to sell yourself to the first bidder who comes along?”

  Simmilgord gasped. Perhaps, he thought, Lutiel was some sort of monk at heart, too pure for this world. But this was going too far.

  “When did I ever say—”

  “I saw the way you lit up when the Skandar told you you were just the man for the job of putting together the historical side of the new monument.”

  “Of course I did. Why shouldn’t I? It’s a tremendous opportunity to put the story of Dvorn across to thousands, even millions of people. And you – when he told you essentially the same thing as he put you in charge of supervising the reconstruction of the murals, the creation of replica that look better than the originals – what did you feel?”

  “What I felt was disgust,” Lutiel said. “Indignation. I kept my mouth shut, because I couldn’t bring myself to stand up to Hawid Zakayil to his face, any more than anyone else can. I told you I’m no publicist, Simmilgord, and certainly I’m not a showman either. Or some sort of theatrical impresario. What I am is a scientist. And so are you, whether you want to believe it or not. You’re an historian. History is a science, or should be, anyway. And scientists have no business getting involved in anything as sordid as this.”

  Sordid?

  Simmilgord’s head was beginning to ache. He wanted to slide away from this discussion somehow. He was ashamed to face Lutiel.

  That stinging charge of hypocrisy – of whoring, even – hurt him deeply. Lutiel was his closest friend. For Lutiel to see him as a hypocrite and a whore was painful. But there was a certain truth in it. A flamboyant character like Hawid Zakayil, who was both a scientist and a manufacturer of public entertainments, and probably somewhat more of the one than of the other, would dismiss such an accusation without a thought. Simmilgord, though, was shaken by it. One part of him thought Lutiel might just be right, that they had no business getting involved in something as far from genuine scholarship as this “monument” promised to be. But another part – the part that remembered the boy who had climbed those mountains and tried to cast his gaze from sea to sea – was wholly caught up in its spell.

  They managed after a while to disengage themselves from the quarrel yet again. Simmilgord slept badly that night, profoundly disturbed by all that had been said. In the morning he went early to the archives, with Lutiel still asleep, and spent the day digging feverishly through a section of old municipal documents he had never examined before. There proved to be nothing of the slightest interest in them, but the work itself was soothing, the mechanical selecting of documents and setting them up in the reader and scanning. Dull work, even pointless work, but it was comforting to be focusing his full attention on it.

  The ugly words kept coming back nonetheless. Hypocrite. Whore.

  But on the way back from the archives building to his house Simmilgord’s thoughts turned back to yesterday’s meeting with Hawid Zakayil, toward the monument that he proposed to build in that cavern in the mountain of black basalt. Almost against his will, ideas for its design kept bursting into his mind, until he was dizzy and trembling with excitement. It all came together in the most wondrous way. He could see the layout of the vestibule, the arrangement of the inner rooms, the route that led to the replica of the tomb-chamber, which would be the climax of the experience for the visitor—

  He had to smile. Maybe Lutiel was right: maybe he had failed to understand his true vocation all along, that he was not really a scholar at all, that he had actually been destined, even as a small boy atop those rocky hillocks, to be a kind of showman, someone who converts history into the stuff of romance. Perhaps, he told himself, it was quite permissible for him to rise up out of the dusty archives of the world and devote his life to bringing the story of the founding of the Pontificate to a world yearning to know more about it. And he had a bleak vision of Lutiel’s future, seeing him endlessly digging and sifting through sandy wastelands, getting nowhere, the great achievement of his life already behind him and the primary credit for it taken from him by someone else. Simmilgord did not want any such fate as that for himself, a lifetime of puttering with ancient documents in cloistered halls and writing papers that no one but his few colleagues would ever read. He could see a new role, a better role, for himself: the man who rediscovered Dvorn, who turned his name into a household word.

  When he reached the house he shared with Lutiel he found a note pinned to his pillow:

  Have handed in my resignation. Setting out for Sisivondal this afternoon. When he publishes my excavation, make sure that my name is on the paper somewhere.

  Best of luck, old friend. You’ll need it.

  L.

  Hawid Zakayil said, “And are you going to resign also?”

  The Superintendent of Antiquities spoke in what was for him a surprisingly mild, non-confrontational tone. He sounded merely curious, not in any way angry or menacing.

  “No,” Simmilgord replied at once, before anything to the contrary could escape his lips. “Of course not. This is strictly Lutiel’s decision. I don’t happen to share his philosophical outlook.”

  “His philosophical outlook on what?” asked the Skandar, in not quite so mild a way.

  Evasively Simmilgord said, “Ends. Means. Ultimate purposes. Lutiel takes everything very seriously, you know. Sometimes too seriously.” And then he went on, quickly, to keep Hawid Zakayil from continuing this line of inquiry, “Sir, I’ve had some interesting thoughts since yesterday about how we might handle certain features of the monument. If I might share them with you—”

  “Go ahead,” said the Skandar gruffly.

  “Those wheel-like structures shown in the murals, with a line of what look like celebrants approaching them: they must surely have had some sort of ritual purpose in the days when Dvorn’s tomb was an active center of worship. Perhaps we could recreate that ritual in the monument – every hour, let’s say, stage a kind of reenactment of what we think it might have been like—”

  “Good! Very good!”

  “Or even hire people to keep the wheels in constant motion – revolving steadily, powered by some sort of primitive arrangement of pedals – to symbolize the eternal cycle of history, the ongoing continuity of the world through all its millions of years—”

  Hawid Zakayil smiled a shrewd Skandar smile.

  “I like it, Simmilgord. I like it very much.”

  And so it came to pass that Simmilgord of Gloyn became the first administrator of the Tomb of Dvorn, as the monument in the black basalt mountain came to be called after a while, and looked after it in the blossoming of its first growth until it became known as the most sacred site of western Alhanroel, where every Coronal would make a point of stopping to pay homage when he made one of his long processional journeys across the world.

  4

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Gannin Thidrich was nearing the age of thirty and had come to Triggoin to study the art of sorcery, a profession for which he thought he had some aptitude, after failing at several for which he had none. He was a native of the Free City of Stee, that splendid metropolis on the slopes of Castle Mount, and at the suggestion of his father, a wealthy merchant of that great city, he had gone first into meat-jobbing, and then, through the good offices of an uncle from Dundilmir, he had become a dealer in used leather. In neither of these occupations had he distinguished himself, nor in the desultory projects he had undertaken afterward. But from childhood on he had pursued sorcery in an amateur way, first as a boyish hobby, and then as a young man’s consolation for shortcomings in most of the other aspects of his life – helping out f
riends even unluckier than he with an uplifting spell or two, conjuring at parties, earning a little by reading palms in the marketplace – and at last, eager to attain more arcane skills, he had taken himself to Triggoin, the capital city of sorcerers, hoping to apprentice himself to some master in that craft.

  Triggoin came as a jolt, after Stee. That great city, spreading out magnificently along both banks of the river of the same name, was distinguished for its huge parks and game preserves, its palatial homes, its towering riverfront buildings of reflective gray-pink marble. But Triggoin, far up in the north beyond the grim Valmambra Desert, was a closed, claustrophobic place, dark and unwelcoming, where Gannin Thidrich found himself confronted with a bewildering tangle of winding medieval streets lined by ancient mustard-colored buildings with blank facades and gabled roofs. It was winter here. The trees were leafless and the air was cold. That was a new thing for him, winter: Stee was seasonless, favored all the year round by the eternal springtime of Castle Mount. The sharp-edged air was harsh with the odors of stale cooking-oil and unfamiliar spices; the faces of the few people he encountered in the streets just within the gate were guarded and unfriendly.

  He spent his first night there in a public dormitory for wayfarers, where in a smoky, dimly lit room he slept, very poorly, on a tick-infested straw mat among fifty other footstore travelers. In the morning, waiting on a long line for the chance to rinse his face in icy water, he passed the time by scanning the announcements on a bulletin board in the corridor and saw this: