Read Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy Online

Authors: Robert Silverberg

Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy (33 page)

BOOK: Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
11.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“I’ll be glad to oblige you,” said Rack.
“But then you’ll have to explain how I came to be dead. If you manage to kill the bear with one shot, that is. Sometimes these bears can take a half-dozen balls into their bodies and still swipe a man’s head clean off and then go fishing for the afternoon. Lots of fat, lots of muscle. And how’s your aim, anyway?”
So it was that next morning, the scale still weighed opposite to Rack’s intent, and so it went day after day until the harvest was over. Every day the bear and his servant ate their corn mush and corn bread and drank their corn likker and lay around in the shade, with onlookers gathering and lingering to see the marvel. The result was that witnesses were around all day and not far off at night. And it went on just the same when the buyers started showing up to haul away the corn.
Stories about the bear who had tamed a man brought more than just onlookers, too. More farmers than usual came to Rack Miller to sell their corn, so they could see the sight; and more buyers went out of their way to come to buy, so there was maybe half again as much business as usual. At the end of the whole harvest season, there was Rack Miller with a ledger book showing a huge loss. He wouldn’t be paid enough by the buyers to come close to making good on what he owed the farmers. He was ruined.
He went through a few jugs of corn likker and took some long walks, but by late October he’d given up all hope. One time his despair led him to point a pistol at his head and fire, but the powder for some reason wouldn’t ignite, and when Rack tried to hang himself he couldn’t tie a knot that didn’t slip. Since he couldn’t even succeed at killing himself, he finally gave up even that project and took off in the dead of night, abandoning mill and ledger and all. Well, he didn’t mean to abandon it—he meant to burn it. But the fires he started kept blowing out, so that was yet another project he failed at. In the end, he left with the clothes on his back and two geese tucked under his arms, and they honked so much he turned them loose before he was out of town.
 
 
W
hen it was clear Rack wasn’t just off on a holiday, the town’s citizens and some of the more prominent farmers from round about met in Rack Miller’s abandoned house and went over his ledger. What they learned there told them clear enough that Rack Miller was unlikely to return. They divided up the losses evenly among the farmers, and it turned out that nobody lost a thing. Oh, the farmers got paid less than Rack Miller’s ledger showed, but they’d get a good deal more than they had in previous years, so it was still a good year for them. And when they got to inspecting the property, they found the ratchet mechanism in the scale and then the picture was crystal clear.
All in all, they decided, they were well rid of Rack Miller, and a few folks had suspicions that it was that Alvin Smith and his half-Black boy who’d turned the tables on this cheating miller. They even tried to find out where he might be, to offer him the mill in gratitude. Someone had heard tell he came from Vigor Church up in Wobbish, and a letter there did bring results—a letter in reply, from Alvin’s father. “My boy thought you might make such an offer, and he asked me to give you a better suggestion. He says that since a man done such a bad job as miller, maybe you’d be better off with a bear, especially if the bear has him a manservant who can keep the books.”
At first they laughed off the suggestion, but after a while they began to like it, and when they proposed it to Davy and the bear, they cottoned to it, too. The bear got him all the corn he wanted without ever lifting a finger, except to perform a little for folks at harvest time, and in the winter he could sleep in a warm dry place. The years he mated, the place was a little crowded with bearflesh, but the cubs were no trouble and the mama bears, though a little suspicious, were mostly tolerant, especially because Davy was still a match for any of
them,
and could grin them into docility when the need arose.
As for Davy, he kept true books, and fixed the scale so it didn’t ratchet anymore, giving honest weight every time. As time went on, he was so well liked that folks talked about running him for mayor of Westville. He refused, of course, since he wasn’t his own man. But he allowed as how, if they elected the bear, he’d be glad to serve as the bear’s secretary and interpreter, and that’s what they did. After a year or two of having a bear as mayor, they up and changed the name to Bearsville, and the town prospered. Years later, when Kenituck joined the United States of America, it’s not hard to guess who got elected
to Congress from that part of the state, which is how it happened that for seven terms of Congress a bear put its hand on the Bible right along with the other congressmen, and then proceeded to sleep through every session it attended, while its clerk, one Davy Crockett, cast all its votes for it and gave all its speeches, every one of which ended with the sentence “Or at least that’s how it looks to one old grizzly bear.”
ROBERT SILVERBERG
LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE (1980)
MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES (1981)
VALENTINE PONTIFEX (1983)
THE MOUNTAINS OF MAJIPOOR (1995)
SORCERERS OF MAJIPOOR (1997)
LORD PRESTIMION (1999)
 
 
 
 
 
The giant world of Majipoor, with a diameter at least ten times as great as our own planet’s, was settled in the distant past by colonists from Earth, who made a place for themselves amid the Piurivars, the intelligent native beings, whom the intruders from Earth called Shapeshifters or Metamorphs because of their ability to alter their bodily forms. Majipoor is an extraordinarily beautiful planet, with a largely benign climate, and is a place of astonishing zoological, botanical, and geographical wonders. Everything on Majipoor is large-scale—fantastic, marvelous.
Over the course of thousands of years, friction between the human colonists and the Piurivars eventually led to a lengthy war and the defeat of the natives, who were penned up in huge reservations in remote regions of the planet. During those years, also, species from various other worlds came to settle on Majipoor—the tiny gnomish Vroons, the great shaggy four-armed Skandars, the two-headed Su-Suheris race, and several more. Some of these—notably the Vroons and the Su-Suheris—were gifted with extrasensory mental powers that permitted them to practice various forms of wizardry. But throughout the thousands of years of Majipoor history the humans remained the dominant species. They flourished and expanded and eventually the human population of Majipoor came to number in the billions, mainly occupying huge and distinctive cities of ten to twenty million people.
The governmental system that evolved over those years was a kind of nonhereditary dual monarchy. The senior ruler, known as the Pontifex, selects his own junior ruler, the Coronal, when he comes to power. Technically the Coronal is regarded as the adoptive son of the Pontifex, and upon the death of the Pontifex takes his place on the senior throne, naming a new Coronal as his own successor. Both of these rulers make their homes on Alhanroel, the largest and most populous of Majipoor’s three continents. The imperial residence of the Pontifex is in the lowest level of a vast subterranean city called the Labyrinth, from which he emerges only at rare intervals. The Coronal, by contrast, lives in an enormous castle at the summit of Castle Mount, a thirty-mile-high peak whose atmosphere is maintained in an eternal springtime by elaborate machinery. From time to time the Coronal descends from the opulence of the Castle to travel across the face of the world in a Grand Processional, an event designed to remind Majipoor of the might and power of its rulers. Such a journey, which in Majipoor’s vast distances could take several years, invariably brings the Coronal to Zimroel, the second continent, a place of gigantic cities interspersed among tremendous rivers and great unspoiled forests. More rarely he goes to the torrid third continent in the south, Suvrael, largely a wasteland of Sahara-like deserts.
Two other functionaries became part of the Majipoor governmental system later on. The development of a method of worldwide telepathic communication made possible nightly sendings of oracular advice and occasional therapeutic counsel, which became the responsibility of the mother of the incumbent Coronal, under the title of Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Her headquarters are situated on an island of continental size midway between Alhanroel and Zimroel. Later, a second telepathic authority, the King of Dreams, was set in place. He employs more powerful telepathic equipment in order to monitor and chastise criminals and other citizens whose behavior deviates from accepted Majipoor norms. This office is the hereditary property of the Barjazid family of Suvrael.
The first of the Majipoor novels,
Lord Valentine’s Castle,
tells of a conspiracy that succeeds in overthrowing the legitimate Coronal, Lord Valentine, and replacing him with an impostor. Valentine, stripped of all his memories, is set loose in Zimroel to live the life of a wandering juggler, but gradually regains an awareness of his true role and
launches a successful campaign to reclaim his throne. In the sequel,
Valentine Pontifex,
the now mature Valentine, a pacifist at heart, must deal with an uprising among the Metamorphs, who are determined to drive the hated human conquerors from their world at last. Valentine defeats them and restores peace with the help of the giant maritime beasts known as sea-dragons, whose intelligent powers were not previously suspected on Majipoor.
The story collection
Majipoor Chronicles
depicts scenes from many eras and social levels of Majipoor life, providing detailed insight into a number of aspects of the giant world not described in the novels. The short novel
The Mountains of Majipoor,
set five hundred years after Valentine’s reign, carries the saga into the icy northlands, where a separate barbaric civilization has long endured. And the most recent of the Majipoor books,
Sorcerers of Majipoor,
begins a new trilogy set a thousand years prior to Valentine’s time, in which the powers of sorcery and magic have become rife on Majipoor. The Coronal Lord Prestimion, after being displaced from his throne by the usurping son of the former Coronal with the assistance of mages and warlocks, leads his faction to victory in a civil war in which he too makes use of necromantic powers. The sequel,
Lord Prestimion,
shows him struggling to deal with the day-by-day problems of kingship in a world that has been immensely altered by the wizardry employed at the climax of the war.
The story presented here offers an episode from a period late in Valentine’s reign as Pontifex, when the war against the Metamorphs has been over for some years but the process of reconciliation is still incomplete.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
 
 
 
 
 
One last steep ridge of the rough, boulder-strewn road lay between the royal party and the descent into Velalisier Plain. Valentine, who was leading the way, rode up over it and came to a halt, looking down with amazement into the valley. The land that lay before him seemed to have undergone a bewildering transformation since his last visit. “Look there,” the Pontifex said, bemused. “This place is always full of surprises, and here is ours.”
The broad shallow bowl of the arid plain spread out below them. From this vantage point, a little way east of the entrance to the archaeological site, they should easily have been able to see a huge field of sand-swept ruins. There had been a mighty city here once, that notorious Shapeshifter city where, in ancient times, so much dark history had been enacted, such monstrous sacrilege and blasphemy. But—surely it was just an illusion?—the sprawling zone of fallen buildings at the center of the plain was almost completely hidden now by a wondrous rippling body of water, pale pink along its rim and pearly gray at its middle: a great lake where no lake ever had been.
Evidently the other members of the royal party saw it too. But did they understand that it was simply a trick? Some fleeting combination of sunlight and dusty haze and the stifling midday heat must have created a momentary mirage above dead Velalisier, so that it seemed as
if a sizable lagoon, of all improbable things, had sprung up in the midst of this harsh desert to engulf the dead city.
It began just a short distance beyond their vantage point and extended as far as the distant gray-blue wall of great stone monoliths that marked the city’s western boundary. Nothing of Velalisier could be seen. None of the shattered and timeworn temples and palaces and basilicas, or the red basalt blocks of the arena, the great expanses of blue stone that had been the sacrificial platforms, the tents of the archaeologists who had been at work here at Valentine’s behest since late last year. Only the six steep and narrow pyramids that were the tallest surviving structures of the prehistoric Metamorph capital were visible—their tips, at least, jutting out of the gray heart of the ostensible lake like a line of daggers fixed point-upward in its depths.
“Magic,” murmured Tunigorn, the oldest of Valentine’s boyhood friends, who held the post now of Minister of External Affairs at the Pontifical court. He drew a holy symbol in the air. Tunigorn had grown very superstitious, here in his later years.
“I think not,” said Valentine, smiling. “Just an oddity of the light, I’d say.”
And, just as though the Pontifex had conjured it up with some countermagic of his own, a lusty gust of wind came up from the north and swiftly peeled the haze away. The lake went with it, vanishing like the phantom it had been. Valentine and his companions found themselves now beneath a bare and merciless iron-blue sky, gazing down at the true Velalisier—that immense dreary field of stony rubble, that barren and incoherent tumble of dun-colored fragments and drab threadbare shards lying in gritty beds of wind-strewn sand, which was all that remained of the abandoned Metamorph metropolis of long ago.
“Well, now,” said Tunigorn, “perhaps you were right, majesty. Magic or no, though, I liked it better the other way. It was a pretty lake, and these are ugly stones.”
“There’s nothing here to like at all, one way or another,” said Duke Nascimonte of Ebersinul. He had come all the way from his great estate on the far side of the Labyrinth to take part in this expedition. “This is a sorry place and always has been. If I were Pontifex in your stead, your majesty, I’d throw a dam across the River Glayge and send a raging torrent this way, that would bury this accursed city and its
whole history of abominations under two miles of water for all time to come.”
Some part of Valentine could almost see the merit of that. It was easy enough to believe that the somber spells of antiquity still hovered here, that this was a territory where ominous enchantments held sway.
But of course Valentine could hardly take Nascimonte’s suggestion seriously. “Drown the Metamorphs’ sacred city, yes! By all means, let’s do that,” he said lightly. “Very fine diplomacy, Nascimonte. What a splendid way of furthering harmony between the races that would be!”
Nascimonte, a lean and hard-bitten man of eighty years, with keen sapphire eyes that blazed like fiery gems in his broad furrowed forehead, said pleasantly, “Your words tell us what we already know, majesty: that it’s just as well for the world that you are Pontifex, not 1. I lack your benign and merciful nature—especially, I must say, when it comes to the filthy Shapeshifters. I know you love them and would bring them up out of their degradation. But to me, Valentine, they are vermin and nothing but vermin. Dangerous vermin at that.”
“Hush,” said Valentine. He was still smiling, but he let a little annoyance show as well. “The Rebellion’s long over. It’s high time we put these old hatreds to rest forever.”
Nascimonte’s only response was a shrug.
Valentine turned away, looking again toward the ruins. Greater mysteries than that mirage awaited them down there. An event as grim and terrible as anything out of Velalisier’s doleful past had lately occurred in this city of long-dead stones: a murder, no less.
Violent death at another’s hands was no common thing on Majipoor. It was to investigate that murder that Valentine and his friends had journeyed to ancient Velalisier this day.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s be on our way.”
He spurred his mount forward, and the others followed him down the stony road into the haunted city.
 
T
he ruins appeared much less dismal at close range than they had on either of Valentine’s previous two visits. This winter’s rains must have been heavier than usual, for wildflowers were blooming everywhere amidst the dark, dingy waste of ashen dunes and overturned building blocks. They dappled the gray gloominess with startling little bursts of yellow and red and blue and white that were almost musical in their emphatic effect. A host of fragile bright-winged kelebekkos flitted about among the blossoms, sipping at their nectar, and multitudes of tiny gnatlike ferushas moved about in thick swarms, forming broad misty patches in the air that glistened like silvery dust.
But more was happening here than the unfolding of flowers and the dancing of insects. As he made his descent into Velalisier, Valentine’s imagination began to teem suddenly with strangenesses, fantasies, marvels. It seemed to him that inexplicable flickers of sorcery and wonder were arising just beyond the periphery of his vision. Sprites and visitations, singing wordlessly to him of Majipoor’s infinite past, drifted upward from the broken edge-tilted slabs and capered temptingly about him, leaping to and fro over the porous, limy soil of the site’s surface with frantic energy. A subtle shimmer of delicate jade-green iridescence that had not been apparent at a distance rose above everything, tinting the air: some effect of the hot noontime light striking a luminescent mineral in the rocks, he supposed. It was a wondrous sight all the same, whatever its cause.
These unexpected touches of beauty lifted the Pontifex’s mood. Which, ever since the news had reached him the week before of the savage and perplexing death of the distinguished Metamorph archaeologist Huukaminaan amidst these very ruins, had been uncharacteristically bleak. Valentine had had such high hopes for the work that was being done here to uncover and restore the old Shapeshifter capital; and this murder had stained everything.
The tents of his archaeologists came into view now, lofty ones gaily woven from broad strips of green, maroon, and scarlet cloth, billowing atop a low sandy plateau in the distance. Some of the excavators themselves, he saw, were riding toward him down the long rock-ribbed avenues on fat plodding mounts: about half a dozen of them, with chief archaeologist Magadone Sambisa at the head of the group.
“Majesty,” she said, dismounting, making the elaborate sign of respect that one would make before a Pontifex. “Welcome to Velalisier.”
Valentine hardly recognized her. It was only about a year since Magadone Sambisa had come before him in his chambers at the Labyrinth. He remembered a dynamic, confident, bright-eyed woman, sturdy and strapping, with rounded cheeks florid with life and vigor and glossy cascades of curling red hair tumbling down her back. She seemed oddly diminished now, haggard with fatigue, her shoulders slumped, her eyes
dull and sunken, her face sallow and newly lined and no longer full. That great mass of hair had lost its sheen and bounce. He let his amazement show, only for an instant, but long enough for her to see it. She pulled herself upright immediately, trying, it seemed, to project some of her former vigor.
Valentine had intended to introduce her to Duke Nascimonte and Prince Mirigant and the rest of the visiting group. But before he could do it, Tunigorn came officially forward to handle the task.
There had been a time when citizens of Majipoor could not have any sort of direct conversation with the Pontifex. They were required then to channel all intercourse through the court official known as the High Spokesman. Valentine had quickly abolished that custom, and many another stifling bit of imperial etiquette. But Tunigorn, by nature conservative, had never been comfortable with those changes. He did whatever he could to preserve the traditional aura of sanctity in which Pontifices once had been swathed. Valentine found that amusing and charming and only occasionally irritating.
The welcoming party included none of the Metamorph archaeologists connected with the expedition. Magadone Sambisa had brought just five human archaeologists and a Ghayrog with her. That seemed odd, to have left the Metamorphs elsewhere. Tunigorn formally repeated the archaeologists’ names to Valentine, getting nearly every one garbled in the process. Then, and only then, did he step back and allow the Pontifex to have a word with her.
“The excavations,” he said. “Tell me, have they been going well?”
“Quite well, majesty. Splendidly, in fact, until—
until
—” She made a despairing gesture: grief, shock, incomprehension, helplessness, all in a single poignant movement of her head and hands.
The murder must have been like a death in the family for her, for all of them here. A sudden and horrifying loss.
“
Until
, yes. I understand.”
Valentine questioned her gently but firmly. Had there, he asked, been any important new developments in the investigation? Any clues discovered? Claims of responsibility for the killing? Were there any suspects at all? Had the archaeological party received any threats of further attacks?
But there was nothing new at all. Huukaminaan’s murder had been an isolated event, a sudden, jarring, and unfathomable intrusion into
the serene progress of work at the site. The slain Metamorph’s body had been turned over to his own people for interment, she told him, and a shudder that she made an ineffectual effort to hide ran through the entire upper half of her body as she said it. The excavators were attempting now to put aside their distress over the killing and get on with their tasks.
The whole subject was plainly an uncomfortable one for her. She escaped from it as quickly as she could. “You must be tired from your journey, your majesty. Shall I show you to your quarters?”
Three new tents had been erected to house the Pontifex and his entourage. They had to pass through the excavation zone itself to reach them. Valentine was pleased to see how much progress had been made in clearing away the clusters of pernicious little ropy-stemmed weeds and tangles of woody vines that for so many centuries had been patiently at work pulling the blocks of stone one from another.
Along the way Magadone Sambisa poured forth voluminous streams of information about the city’s most conspicuous features as though Valentine were a tourist and she his guide. Over here, the broken but still awesome aqueduct. There, the substantial jagged-sided oval bowl of the arena. And there, the grand ceremonial boulevard, paved with sleek greenish flagstones.
Shapeshifter glyphs were visible on those flagstones even after the lapse of twenty thousand years, mysterious swirling symbols, carved deep into the stone. Not even the Shapeshifters themselves were able to decipher them now.
The rush of archaeological and mythological minutia came gushing from her with scarcely a pause for breath. There was a certain frantic, even desperate, quality about it all, a sign of the uneasiness she must feel in the presence of the Pontifex of Majipoor. Valentine was accustomed enough to that sort of thing. But this was not his first visit to Velalisier and he was already familiar with much of what she was telling him. And she looked so weary, so depleted, that it troubled him to see her expending her energy in such needless outpourings.
BOOK: Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
11.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

One More Thing by B. J. Novak
A Buss from Lafayette by Dorothea Jensen
Whirlwind Revolution by Flynn Eire
Life Is Short But Wide by Cooper, J. California
Flames Of Deceit by Hutchens, Carol
Highland Sinner by Hannah Howell
Undead and Unfinished by Davidson, MaryJanice


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024