Later in the day, with Nascimonte and Tunigorn and the rest now joining him, Magadone Sambisa showed Valentine the site of the expedition’s other significant discovery: the bizarre cemetery, previously unsuspected, where the ancient inhabitants of Velalisier had buried their dead.
Or, more precisely, had buried certain fragments of their dead. “There doesn’t appear to be a complete body anywhere in the whole graveyard. In every interment we’ve opened, what we’ve found is mere tiny bits—a finger here, an ear there, a lip, a toe. Or some internal organ, even. Each item carefully embalmed, and placed in a beautiful stone casket and buried beneath one of these gravestones. The part for the whole: a kind of metaphorical burial.”
Valentine stared in wonder and astonishment.
The twenty-thousand-year-old Metamorph cemetery was one of the strangest sights he had seen in all his years of exploring the myriad wondrous strangenesses that Majipoor had to offer.
It covered an area hardly more than a hundred feet long and sixty feet wide, off in a lonely zone of dunes and weeds a short way beyond the end of one of the north-south flagstone boulevards. In that small plot of land there might have been ten thousand graves, all jammed together. A small stela of brown sandstone, a hand’s-width broad and about fifteen inches high, jutted upward from each of the grave plots. And each of them crowded in upon the ones adjacent to it in a higgledy-piggledy fashion so that the cemetery was a dense agglomeration of slender close-set gravestones, tilting this way and that in a manner that utterly befuddled the eye.
At one time every stone must have lovingly been set in a vertical position above the casket containing the bit of the departed that had been chosen for interment here. But the Metamorphs of Velalisier had evidently gone on jamming more and more burials into this little funereal zone over the course of centuries, until each grave overlapped the next in the most chaotic manner. Dozens of them were packed into every square yard of terrain.
As the headstones continued to be crammed one against another without heed for the damage that each new burial was doing to the tombs already in place, the older ones were pushed out of perpendicular by their new neighbors. The slender stones all leaned precariously one way and another, looking the way a forest might after some monstrous storm had passed through, or after the ground beneath it had been bent and buckled by the force of some terrible earthquake. They all stood at crazy angles now, no two slanting in the same direction.
On each of these narrow headstones a single elegant glyph was carved precisely one-third of the way from the top, an intricately patterned whorl of the sort found in other zones of the city. No symbol seemed like any other one. Did they represent the names of the deceased? Prayers to some long-forgotten god?
“We hadn’t any idea that this was here,” Magadone Sambisa said. “This is the first burial site that’s ever been discovered in Velalisier.”
“I’ll testify to that,” Nascimonte said, with a great jovial wink. “I did a little digging here myself, you know, long ago. Tomb-hunting, looking for buried treasure that I might be able to sell somewhere, during the time I was forced from my land in the reign of the false Lord Valentine and living like a bandit in this desert. But not a single grave did any of us come upon then. Not one.”
“Nor did we detect any, though we tried,” said Magadone Sambisa. “When we found this place it was only by sheer luck. It was hidden deep under the dunes, ten, twelve, twenty feet below the surface of the sand. No one suspected it was here. But one day last winter a terrific whirlwind swept across the valley and hovered right up over this part of the city for half an hour, and by the time it was done whirling the whole dune had been picked up and tossed elsewhere and this amazing collection of gravestones lay exposed. Here. Look.”
She knelt and brushed a thin coating of sand away from the base of a gravestone just in front of her. In moments the upper lid of a small box made of polished gray stone came into view. She pried it free and set it to one side.
Tunigorn made a sound of disgust. Valentine, peering down, saw a thing like a curling scrap of dark leather lying within the box.
“They’re all like this,” said Magadone Sambisa. “Symbolic burial, taking up a minimum of space. An efficient system, considering what a huge population Velalisier must have had in its prime. One tiny bit of the dead person’s body buried here, preserved so artfully that it’s still in pretty good condition even after all these thousands of years. The rest of it exposed on the hills outside town, for all we know, to be consumed by natural processes of decay. A Piurivar corpse would decay very swiftly. We’d find no traces, after all this time.”
“How does that compare with present-day Shapeshifter burial practices?” Mirigant asked.
Magadone Sambisa looked at him oddly. “We know next to nothing about present-day Piurivar burial practices. They’re a pretty secretive race, you know. They’ve never chosen to tell us anything about such things and evidently we’ve been too polite to ask, because there’s hardly a thing on record about it. Hardly a thing.”
“You have Shapeshifter scientists on your own staff,” Tunigorn said. “Surely it wouldn’t be impolite to consult your own associates about something like that. What’s the point of training Shapeshifters to be archaeologists if you’re going to be too sensitive of their feelings to make any use of their knowledge of their own people’s ways?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Magadone Sambisa, “I did discuss this find with Dr. Huukaminaan not long after it was uncovered. The layout of the place, the density of the burials, seemed pretty startling to him. But he didn’t seem at all surprised by the concept of burial of body parts instead of entire bodies. He gave me to understand what had been done here wasn’t all that different in some aspects from things the Piurivars still do today. There wasn’t time just then for him to go into further details, though, and we both let the subject slip. And now—now—”
Once more she displayed that look of stunned helplessness, of futility and confusion in the face of violent death, that came over her whenever the topic of the murder of Huukaminaan arose.
Not all that different in some aspects from things the Piurivars still do today, Valentine repeated silently.
He considered the way Huukaminaan’s body had been cut apart, the sundered pieces left in various places atop the sacrificial platform, the head carried down into the tunnel beneath the Seventh Pyramid and carefully laid to rest in one of the alcoves of the underground shrine.
There was something implacably alien about that grisly act of dismemberment that brought Valentine once again to the conclusion, mystifying and distasteful but seemingly inescapable, that had been facing him since his arrival here. The murderer of the Metamorph archaeologiist must have been a Metamorph himself As Nascimonte had suggested earlier, there seemed to be a ritual aspect to the butchery that had all the hallmarks of Metamorph work.
But still it made no sense. Valentine had difficulty believing that the old man could have been killed by one of his own people.
“What was Huukaminaan like?” he asked Magadone Sambisa. “I never met him, you know. Was he contentious? Cantankerous?”
“Not in the slightest. A sweet, gentle person. A brilliant scholar. There was no one, Piurivar or human, who didn’t love and admire him.”
“There must have been one person, at least,” said Nascimonte wryly.
Perhaps Nascimonte’s theory was worth exploring. Valentine said, “Could there have been some sort of bitter professional disagreement? A dispute over the credit for a discovery, a battle over some piece of theory?”