Tales of Majipoor (30 page)

“Thank you, no, father,” I said hoarsely. “I’m not ready, I think, for such sights.” And I could not tell, just then, whether I was refusing the demonstration to avoid embarrassing the good man when his nonsense failed to produce results, or out of fear that his spells and gestures just might present me with a vision of Minim or Ruhid or Theddim right there in the room before my scornful unbelieving eyes.

That Macola Endrago might be responsible for the deaths of Melithorn and Flurivole in some disagreement over wages now seemed inconceivable to me. Whatever disputes between the three men Melithorn’s journal alluded to could much better be accounted for by the fact that Endrago actually believed in the tenets of the Temple of Eternal Comfort, whatever those might be, while his two employers had regarded the chapel merely as a money-making enterprise. Endrago’s mere presence there each day would have been a constant silent reproach to them, and they might well at last have let him know in some blunt and mocking way that they had nothing but contempt for his unworldly faith in the creed that they had pasted together out of bits and scraps of other religions. But could that have led him to murder them? No, never. If a murderous impulse lurked anywhere in Macola Endrago’s soul, then I am no judge of men.

Which left me nothing to fall back on, then, but the conjecture offered to me by the sexton Graimon Sten that a disgruntled worshipper had killed them, and not even the sexton seemed to take that idea very seriously. Of course there was also the death-at-the-hands-of-angry-demons hypothesis, but of course that was not an idea I was capable of embracing. Endrago apparently was the only witness to that event, and even he had come upon the scene after the demons had done their work. I doubted that he had fashioned the tale out of whole cloth. But a man who can believe in invisible demons in the first place is likely to believe in other theories as well that men of my sort are unable to accept.

My longing to quit this place and return to Thuwayne was all but overwhelming by now. But I knew I could not give up at this point, for I felt a strange certainty that I would have the answer I sought before much longer. So each day I continued to go, toward the middle of the afternoon, to the Temple of Eternal Comfort. There was always a handful of worshippers there, kneeling on the bare floor, eyes closed, deep in meditation. I imitated them. From time to time a deacon in a white robe trimmed with scarlet would appear and ring a little bell, and the congregation would rise and sing a hymn, and participate in a sort of contrapuntal ritual chant, and incense would be burned and mysterious lights would glow in the corners of the long room, and sometimes misty, shimmering apparitions would briefly make themselves visible. At the climax of the ceremony Macola Endrago would emerge from a back room and deliver a brief, sweet sermon, counselling us to let the troubles of the world slide from our shoulders like water, and calling upon this spirit or that one to aid us in that task, and one by one we would approach the altar beside him and drink from a common vessel containing a thick, almost viscous wine.

It all was a bit of a strain on my patience; but I did come every day, I knelt and rose and pretended to chant the chants, and listened to Endrago’s sermon and I drank from the cup of communion, and I must say that I would leave the chapel feeling released from the ordinary tensions of the moment. And each day I waited for Jaakon Gameel – that was the name of the man who, so rumor had it, had been responsible for the disappearance of the two founders – to make an appearance at the chapel. Graimon Sten had promised to point him out to me. But four days passed, and five, and six, and I told myself that a murderer never does return to the scene of the crime, whatever the popular belief may be.

Then in the second week of my vigil someone I had not seen before was present in the chapel when I arrived, and Graimon Sten, passing close beside me, murmured, “That’s the one.”

A great sadness came over me at that. For I am, I do maintain, a capable judge of men; and, I thought, if the plump, placid dumpling of a man who was Jaakon Gameel could have been responsible for the deaths of Melifont Ambithorn and Nikkon Flurivole, then I will be the next Coronal of Majipoor.

I studied him carefully. The people of Sippulgar are generally lean and bony, but this one was round-faced, fat-cheeked, a stubby cabbagy blob of a man with a mild, innocent face. Plainly he was a true believer in the teachings of his faith. When he knelt in prayer he passionately pressed his forehead hard against the floor. Sometimes I heard him sobbing. When the time came to chant, he chanted with a sort of desperate fervor. When Endrago delivered his sermon he responded to each familiar point with a short, sharp nod, like one who has been struck by unarguable revelation. When we went up to the altar for the cup of communion, he held it with both hands and drank deeply. After the ceremony he sat for a long while, as though stunned, and eventually left without a word to anybody.

Day after day I waited and left the chapel when he left; and on the fifth day I hailed him in the street, and told him I was a stranger in town, a lonely visitor who felt the need for company, and in one way and another I was able to persuade him to come with me to that nearby tavern. There I brought forth for him the sad though altogether fictional tale of the tragic events that had befallen my family in Sisivondal and propelled me into this journey southward to Sippulgar. He listened with care and such obvious sympathy for a fellow sufferer that I felt a bit ashamed of my own crafty mendacity.

But he did not respond at once with the story of his own bereavement, as I had expected. He fell silent, as though some dam within him was holding him back. I waited, urging him with my eyes to confide in me, and before long I could see the dam beginning to break.

Quickly, then, his tale came pouring out of him. A young and beautiful wife, apple of his eye, his treasure, his only joy, a paragon among women, a wife far beyond his true deserts, the envy of all his friends – struck down in the second year of their marriage, carried off in a trice by the sting of some venomous tropical insect. Inconsolable, half dead with sorrow, he had gone from one creed’s chapel to another, he said, seeking the one that might have the power to restore her to him; but of course there was none that did. Someone had told him of the Temple of Eternal Comfort, and he had made his last attempt there. He had spoken most earnestly with the two founders, and with the high priest Endrago, begging them to work the miracle for him. Each of them had said it could not be done: in our world death is final and there is no coming back from it. Yet he had persisted. He was a man of some means; one day he came to Melifont and Flurivole and offered them half his wealth if they would intercede with the spirit world on his behalf for the return of his wife from the dead.

“And they attempted it, did they?”

He was silent a long moment, looking downward. Then he raised his face to mine and a look of terrible regret bordering on agony came into his eyes. He seemed to be staring past me into the darkest of abysses.

“Yes,” he said, barely audibly. “Finally they agreed. They asked the spirits, yes. And – and—”

He faltered. He fell silent.

I prodded him. “Nothing happened, of course.”

“Oh, yes, something happened,” he said, in that same soft, quavering voice. “But not the return of my wife.” And he looked away again, shivering as though in the grip of irremediable guilt and shame, and began to weep.

*

Macola Endrago said to me, when I told him that I was about to take my leave of Sippulgar, “It is for the best, I think. Seek your solace at home. We can give you no help here, for you are a man without belief.”

“You see that, do you?”

“I saw it from the first. When I told you how your wife’s brother met his death, you looked at me as though I were telling you children’s fables. When you pray in the chapel, you hold yourself like a man who wishes he were almost anywhere else. When you come up to take the cup you have no presence of the god about you. None of this is hard to see.” His voice came to me as though from far away, gentle, kindly, infinitely sad. “Return to your wife, my friend. You came here to solve a mystery, and I provided you with the information you needed, and you are unable to accept it. So you may as well go.”

“I’d be pleased to believe that the men were torn apart by those demons – Remmer, Proiarchis, are those the names? – if only I could. But I can’t. I
can’t.
There are no such beings.”

“No?”

“No,” I said. “Everything in my soul tells me that.”

He smiled his gentle, loving smile. “I offered to summon Theddim or Minim for you. You refused. Shall I give you another chance? I could bring up Remmer or Proiarchis, even. There would be risks, but I could do it, and then you would know the truth. Shall I? I would do that for you, my friend. I would embrace the risk, so that your eyes might be opened.” For a moment I wavered in the face of the inexorable force of his belief.

Again he smiled – that mild, sweet, saintly smile of his. And in his eyes, which were not mild or sweet or saintly at all, I saw the implacable will, the utter conviction, the invincible strength, that sustained his faith.

“Let me show you what you are so unwilling to see.”

I gasped and struggled for breath. Melifont may have been a fraud, but not this Endrago. I was burning in the awful fire of his sincerity. In that moment I felt sure that this man really had walked with demons. And now he will take me by the hand and lead me to them. I shuddered under the inexorable force of his belief. It fell upon me like a hammer. I wanted to run from him, but I was frozen where I stood.

“No,” I said once more, even as I stared bewilderedly into the darkness of the chapel.

That shape – that shadowy form with blazing eyes—

At that instant it seemed to me that the dread figure of Proiarchis was rearing up before me to tell me why Melifont Ambithorn and his partner had had to be slain.

I began to tremble. A door was opening. Fiercely I slammed it shut. I slammed it and held it with all my strength. As Macola Endrago reached out toward me I backed away. “Please. No.” And I said, though it was a lie and he surely was aware of that, “I know nothing about demons, and I want to know nothing about them. If such things as demons do exist.”

The saintly smile yet again. My heart shriveled under the heat of that smile. “If, indeed.”

“But let me say that if they do –
if
they do – I would never presume to ask you to take so great a risk on my behalf. If anything went wrong, I could never forgive myself.”

He showed no anger, no disappointment, no surprise.

“Very well,” he said, and our meeting was over.

The next day I left Sippulgar, hiring an express courier to get me back to Sisivondal as quickly as possible. And when at last I was with my wife Thuwayne again I told her that no one in Sippulgar had any real idea of what had happened to her brother, but that he had vanished and after the appropriate legal period had elapsed he had been declared officially dead, and the most probable explanation was that he had failed in business one last time, failed so completely that he had taken his own life to escape his creditors. More than that, I said, we will never know. And I think that that last part, at least, is the truth.

O
ne 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 time-worn temples and palaces and basilicas, nor 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.