“Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!” Septach Melayn cried, hands outstretched to make the starburst sign. “Long life to Lord Dekkeret!” And then, in a quieter tone: “I am the first to utter those words, I think.”
They were both staring, Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, frozen, astounded. Then Septach Melayn saw them exchange stunned glances. Huskily Dekkeret said, “What is this, Septach Melayn? What are you doing?”
“Offering the proper salutation, my lord. News has come from the Labyrinth, it seems. Prestimion has become Pontifex, and we have a new Coronal to hail. Or will, as soon as the Council can meet. But the thing is as good as done, my lord. You are our king now; and so I salute you.—You seem displeased, my lord. What could I have said to offend you?”
II
The Book of Lords
1
The moist, humid lands beyond the Kinslain Gap were Hjort territory. It was the sort of land where few other people cared to live, but the Hjorts were native to a steamy world of spongy soil and constant torrid fog, and they found conditions here ideal. Besides, they knew that they were not well liked by the other races that inhabited Majipoor, who found their appearance unattractive and their manner abrasive and irritating, and thus they preferred to have a province of their own, where they could live their lives as they pleased.
Their chief center was the small, densely packed city of Santhiskion. It contained two million of them, or perhaps even more. Santhiskion was a breeding-ground for minor bureaucrats, for there was something in the temperament of urban, well-educated Hjorts that inclined them favorably toward becoming customs collectors and census-takers and building-inspectors and the like. Hjorts of a different sort lived in the valley of the Kulit that lay to the west of the city—people who were simpler folk in the main, villagers, farmers, who kept to themselves and patiently went about the business of raising such crops as grayven and ciderberries and garryn that they shipped to the populous cities of western Alhanroel.
Just as the Hjorts of Santhiskion city were given by nature to painstaking list-making and record-keeping and report-writing, the rural Hjorts of the valley were lovers of ritual and ceremony. Their lives revolved around their farms and their produce; everywhere about them lurked invisible gods and demons and witches, who might be threats to the ripening fields; it was necessary constantly to propitiate the benevolent beings and to ward off the depredations of unfriendly ones by acting out the rites appropriate to the day of the year. In each village there was a certain official who kept the calendar of rites, and every morning announced the proper propitiations for the week ahead. Knowing how to keep the calendar was no easy matter; lengthy training was involved, and the calendar-keeper was revered for his skills the way a priest would be, or a surgeon.
In the village of Abon Airair the calendar-keeper was named Erb Skonarij, a man so old that his pebbly-textured skin, once ashen-colored, had faded to a pale blue, and whose eyes, once splendidly huge and gleaming, now were dull and sunken into his forehead. But his mind was as alert as ever and he performed his immensely involuted cal-endrical tasks with undiminished accuracy.
“This is the tenth day of Mapadik and the fourth day of Iyap and the ninth of Tjatur,” Erb Skonarij announced, when the elders of the village came to him in the morning to hear the day’s computations. “The demon Rangda Geyak is loose among us. Thus it is incumbent on us to perform the play of the contending geyaks this evening.” And the storyteller whose responsibility it was to narrate the play of the contending geyaks began at once to make ready for the show, for among the Hjorts of the Kulit Valley no distinction was made between ritual and drama.
They had brought with them from their home world a complex calendar, or series of calendars, that bore no relation to the journey of Majipoor around its sun or to the movements of any other heavenly body: their year was 240 days long, divided into eight months of thirty days by the reckoning of one calendar, but also into twelve months of twenty days by a different reckoning, and likewise six months of forty days, twenty-four months of ten days, and 120 months of two days.
Thus any given day of the year had five different dates in the five different calendars; and on certain special conjunctions of days, especially involving the months named Tjatur in the twelve-month calendar, Iyap in the eight-month calendar, and Mapadik in the twenty-four-month calendar, particularly important holy rites had to be celebrated. And this night the conjunction of dates was such that the rite of Ktut, the war between the demons, must be enacted.
The people of Abon Airar began to gather by the storytellers’ mound at dusk, and by the time the sun had dropped behind Prezmyr Mountain the entire village was assembled, the musicians and actors were in place, the storyteller was perched atop his high seat. A great bonfire blazed in the fire pit. All eyes were on Erb Skonarij; and precisely at the moment when the hour known as Pasang Gjond arrived, he gave the signal to begin.
“For many months now,” the storyteller sang, “the two factions of the geyaks have been at war…”
The old, old story. Everyone knew it by heart.
The musicians lifted their kempinongs and heftii and tjimpins and sounded the familiar melodies, and choristers with greatly distended throat-sacs brought forth the familiar repetitive bass drone that would continue unbroken throughout the performance, and the dancers, elaborately costumed, came forth to act out the dramatic events of the tale.
“Great has been the sorrow of the village as the demons make war against each other,” sang the storyteller. “We have seen green flames darting by night among the gerribong trees. Blue flames have danced atop gravestones in the cemetery. White flames move along our roof-beams. The harm to us has been great. Many of us have fallen ill, and children have died. The garryn we have gathered has been ruined. The fields of grayven are devastated. Harvest time is almost upon us and there will be no grayven to harvest. And all of this has befallen us because there is sin in the village, and the sinners have not given themselves over to be purified. The demon Rangda Geyak moves among us—”
Rangda Geyak moved among them even as the storyteller spoke: a huge hideous figure costumed to look like an ancient female of the human kind, with a coarse mop of white hair and long, dangling breasts and great yellow crooked teeth that jutted like fangs. Red flames darted from her hair; yellow flames sprang from her fingertips. Back and forth she strode along the edge of the mound, menacing those who sat in the front rows.
“But now, the sorcerer Tjal Goring Geyak comes, and does battle with her—”
A second demon, this one a giant equipped with the four arms of a Skandar, pranced forward out of the shadows and confronted the first. Together now they danced in a circle, face to face, taunting each other and jeering, while the storyteller recited the details of their combat, telling how they hurled fiery trees at each other, and caused immense pits to open in the village square, and made the waters of the placid River Kulit surge above their banks and flood the town.
The essence of the tale was that the contest of the geyaks brought great grief and woe to the village as it raged, for the demons were unconcerned by the incidental damage they were inflicting as they struggled up and down the town and the surrounding fields. Only when the sinners who had brought this calamity upon the townsfolk came forth to confess their crimes would the demons cease their warfare and turn against the evildoers, taking up flails and wielding them as weapons to drive them out of the village.
The three dancers who were to play the guilty sinners sat to one side, watching the spectacle with everyone else. Their time to take the stage was still hours away; the storyteller must first relate in full detail the arrival of other demons, the one-winged bird and the one-legged dragon and the creature that eats its own entrails, and many more. He must speak of demonic orgies, and the drinking of blood. He must tell of transformations, the beasts that interchanged shapes. He must tell of the beautiful young women who wordlessly make obscene overtures to young men on lonely roads late at night. He must—