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He gulped and gulped again, and a third gulp gave him the last of the brandy. It hit with a frightful impact. His shoulders quivered violentlyv almost convulsively. His head throbbed and whirled. For a moment he swayed and thought he would fall; but then he steadied himself and planted his feet firmly on the floor.
By the Lady, would the king fill those bowls again?
No, he would not. The Divine be thanked, Toikella was content with a single draught of the stuff!
"Treaty," the king said gruffly. He still looked grim. "Now we sign."
"Yes," said Harpirias. He fought back another shiver, another wobble. "Now we sign."
The two parchment scrolls were produced and arrayed side by side on the table before the throne. A chair made of bone was brought for the king, and another for Harpirias, and they too sat side by side, looking out at the assembled grandees of the Othinor. Korinaam stood just behind Harpirias in his role as interpreter and adviser, and Mankhelm took up the same position in back of the king.
Toikella, seizing one scroll in his immense paws and holding it high, scrutinized it line by line as though he could actually read it; then, with a grunt, he put it down, picked up the other copy, and began to give it the same survey. Harpirias noted with some satisfaction that the king was reading this one upside down.
"Everything good?" Harpirias asked him.
"Everything good, yes. We sign."
Korinaam handed Harpirias a stylus that had already been inked. The Shapeshifter leaned forward and said, in a low cutting voice, "You see the place where you must sign, do you not, your lordship?"
"I have no intention of signing the name of—"
"Sign, lordship. Quickly. You must. There is no alternative."
In quick angry strokes Harpirias wrote in at the bottom of the scroll the name that was required of him there: Ambinole Coronal Lord. It seemed monstrous to him, almost blasphemous. He stared at the fraudulent signature for an instant; and then, before Korinaam could object, he added underneath, Harpirias of Muldemar, on Lord Ambinole’s behalf. Let King Toikella make of that whatever he would — or could.
He gave the signed scroll to the king, and received the other in return. Toikella had painstakingly inscribed a bold, jagged, illiterate scribble in the lower left corner. Opposite it Harpirias once more wrote the Coronal’s name, and once more added his own beneath.
It was done. The treaty was signed.
"Goszmar," Harpirias said. "The hostages, now."
"Goszmar," Toikella grunted, nodding brusquely. And signaled; and the feasting-hall door was thrown open, and the nine prisoners of the ice-cave came marching uncertainly in, the wild-eyed figure of Salvinor Hesz leading the group.
He rushed to Harpirias and fell to his knees. "Are we really free?"
Harpirias indicated the two scrolls before him on the table. "Everything’s signed and sealed. We’ll leave here first thing in the morning."
"Free! Free at last! And the fossils — I saw them sitting outside the hall, prince, the whole collection! Will they be returned also?"
"The Othinor wall provide porters to carry them to the floaters that we have parked outside the village," Harpirias said.
"Free! Free! Can it really be?" In a desperate frenzy the paleontologists embraced one another. Some seemed almost manic with glee; some seemed to be having trouble believing that their captivity was ending.
Harpirias said, "Give these men meat and drink. This is their celebration too!"
Toikella acceded with a surly wave of his hand. More beer was poured; more platters of meat were brought. But Harpirias saw that the king had drawn aside and stood sulkily watching, taking no part in the festivity.
Was Toikella pla
Harpirias said quietly to Ivla Yevikenik, "Your father — what troubles him tonight?"
The girl hesitated. He could see her searching for words.
"Nothing troubles him tonight," she said finally.
"He is not like himself."
"He is tired. He is — yes, that is it. He is tired."
She made hardly any effort at all to sound convincing.
"No," Harpirias said. He stared angrily at his fingertips and cursed the limitations of his Othinor vocabulary. Then, looking intensely into her eyes, he said, "Tell me the truth, Ivla Yevikenik. Something is bad here. What is it?"
"He is — afraid."
"Afraid? Him? Of what?"
A long pause. Then: "You. Your people. Your weapons."
"He shouldn’t be. There’s a treaty now. We guarantee the safety and freedom of the Othinor."
"You guarantee it, yes," the girl said. And the bitter inflection of her tone explained everything to Harpirias.
Indeed the king was frightened. And angry and humiliated; and these were all new emotions for him. Toikella had learned at last what sort of antagonist he was really up against, and the knowledge had thrown him into an anguish beyond all bearing.
Perhaps Ivla Yevikenik had passed along to her father some of Harpirias’s descriptions of the greatness and splendor of Majipoor, his tales of the richness of its superabundant crops and the wealth of its swift rivers, the myriads of its people, the two mighty continents studded with i
And then the sight of the energy-throwers in action — those rugged stone crags disintegrating under the force of the purple light that came from the metal tubes in the hands of Harpirias’s little army — the hated Eililylal fleeing like vermin as the rocks came tumbling down -
Small wonder that the king’s mood was dark. For the first time in his life he found himself up against a force that could never be made to yield to his booming and his blustering. He was coming to understand the truth about the world: that his little kingdom would have no hope of being able to stand against the power of the vast unknown realm that lay somewhere beyond his snowy borders. He had begun the process of discovering that the mighty King Toikella was nothing more than a flea on the backside of Majipoor; and that process hurt. Oh, how it must hurt!
Harpirias realized that he felt genuinely sorry for the fierce old monster — that in fact he had actually come to like Toikella, and had had no wish to be the cause of his undoing.
He looked around for Korinaam, and called him to his side. What he needed to say was too delicate to attempt in his own clumsy and erratic Othinor.
"I want you to let him know," he told the Shapeshifter, "that we of Majipoor will regard the treaty that we have just signed as a sacred obligation: that its terms will safeguard the independence of the Othinor forever."
"He knows these things already," said Korinaam.
"Never mind what he may or may not know already. Tell him. Tell him to have faith in the treaty, and in me. Tell him that his people will never come to harm at our hands."
"As you wish, prince."
Korinaam turned to the king and spoke at length; and so far as Harpirias could tell the Shapeshifter was accurately rendering the things he had been told to say. But that only appeared to make matters worse. Toikella’s frown deepened; the king chewed at his lower lip and balled his fists and rammed his great knobby knuckles together until they popped; his nostrils flared, his cheeks went taut with mounting displeasure.