He and Akbalik had sailed from Alaisor, the usual port of embarkation for travelers bound to the western continent from central Alhanroel. After an uneventful but interminable-seeming sea journey they made their landfall at Piliplok on Zimroel’s eastern coast.
Which proved to be a city that lived up in every way to Dekkeret’s expectations of it: he had heard that Piliplok was an ugly place, and ugly it was, brutal and rigid of design. People often said of his own native city of Normork that it was dreadfully dark and somber, a city that only someone born there could love. Dekkeret, who found Normork’s appearance quite pleasing, had never understood that criticism before. But he understood it now: for who could possibly love Piliplok except someone native to the place, to whom Piliplok’s brutal and rigid look was the norm of beauty?
One thing that it wasn’t, though, was a muddy backwater. A backwater, maybe, but not at all muddy; Piliplok was paved, every last inch of it, a hideous metropolis of stone and concrete with barely a tree or a shrub to be seen. It was laid out with mathematical and indeed almost maniacal precision in eleven perfectly straight spokes radiating outward from its superb natural harbor on the Inner Sea, with curving bands of streets crossing the axis of the spokes in disagreeably exact rows. Each district—the mercantile quarter close to the waterfront, the industrial zone just beyond it, the various residential and recreational areas—was uniform throughout itself in architectural style, as though fixed by law, and the buildings themselves, clumsy and heavy, were not much to Dekkeret’s taste. Normork was an airy paradise by comparison.
But their stay there was blessedly brief. Piliplok was not just the main harbor for the ships that sailed between Alhanroel and Zimroel, and for the fleet of sea-dragon hunters that plied the waters of the Inner Sea in quest of the gigantic marine mammals that were so widely prized for their meat. It was also the place where the River Zimr, the greatest of all Majipoor’s rivers, reached the sea after its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel; and so, by virtue of its position at the huge river’s mouth, Piliplok was the gateway to the whole interior of the continent.
Akbalik bought passage for them aboard one of the big riverboats that plied the Zimr between Piliplok and the river’s source at the Dulorn Rift in northwestern Zimroel. The riverboat was enormous, far larger than the ship that had carried them across the Inner Sea; and whereas the oceangoing vessel had been simple and sturdy of design, intended as it was to bear up under the stresses involved in crossing thousands of miles of open sea, the riverboat was an ungainly and complicated affair, more like a floating village than a ship.
What it was, actually, was a broad, squat, practically rectangular platform with cargo holds, steerage quarters, and dining halls belowdecks, a square central courtyard bordered by pavilions and shops and gaming pavilions at deck level, and, at the stern, an elaborate many-leveled superstructure where the passengers were housed. It was decorated in an ornate and fanciful way, a jagged scarlet arch over the bridge, grotesque green figureheads with painted yellow horns jutting out like battering-rams at the bow, and a bewildering abundance of eccentric ornamental woodwork, a whimsical host of interlacing joists and scrolls and struts sprouting on every surface.
Dekkeret stared in wonder at his fellow passengers. The largest single group of them were humans, of course, but also there were great numbers of Hjorts and Skandars and Vroons, and a handful of Su-Suheris in diaphanous robes, and some scaly-skinned Ghayrogs, who were reptilian in general appearance although in fact they were mammals. He wondered if he would see Metamorphs too, and asked Akbalik about that; but no, Akbalik said, the Shapeshifter folk rarely left their inland reservation, even though the ancient prohibition against their traveling freely through the world had long since ceased to be firmly observed. And if there were any on board, he added, they would probably be wearing some form other than their own, to avoid the hostility that Metamorphs aroused whenever they mingled with other folk.
The Zimr, at Piliplok, was dark with the silt it had scoured from its bed in the course of its long journey east, and where it met the sea the river was some seventy miles across, so that it hardly looked like a river at all, but rather like a gigantic lake beneath which a vast stretch of the coast lay drowned. Piliplok itself occupied a high promontory on the river’s southern bank; as they set out on their journey Dekkeret could just barely make out the uninhabited northern bank, plainly visible even across that great distance because it was a massive white cliff of pure chalk, a mile high and many miles long, brilliant in the morning light. But soon, as the riverboat left Piliplok behind and began to make its way upriver, the Zimr narrowed somewhat and took on more a riverlike appearance, though it never became truly narrow.
For Dekkeret this was like a journey to another world. He spent all his time on deck, staring out at the round-topped tawny hills and busy towns that flanked the river, places whose names he had never heard before—Port Saikforge, Stenwamp, Campilthorn, Vem. The density of population along this stretch of the river astonished him. The riverboat rarely traveled more than two or three hours before pulling into some new port to discharge passengers, pick up new ones, unload cargo crates, take new cargo on. For a time he jotted the names of them in a little notebook he carried—Dambemuir, Orgeliuse, Impemond, Haunfort Major, Salvamot, Obliorn Vale—until he realized that if he kept on writing down all these towns, there would be no room left in the book for anything else long before he reached Ni-moya. So he was content simply to stand by the rail and stare, drinking in the constantly changing sights. After a time they all blurred pleasantly together, the unfamiliar landscape started to look very familiar indeed, and he no longer felt such a sense of overwhelming strangeness. When dreams came to him in the night, though, they very often were dreams in which he was flying through the endless midnight of space, moving in utter ease from star to star.
There were two disturbing events during the voyage, both of them occurring within a few days after the departure from Piliplok, one comic, the other tragic.
The first involved a red-haired man just a few years older than Dekkeret, who seemed to spend much of his time wandering the decks muttering to himself, or chuckling unaccountably, or pointing at some spot in the empty air as if it held mysterious significance. A harmless lunatic, Dekkeret thought; and, remembering that other madman, not at all harmless, who had killed his beloved cousin Sithelle in the course of a crazed attempt to assassinate the Coronal, he made a point of keeping his distance from the man. But then, on the third day, as Dekkeret stood near the starboard rail looking out at the passing towns, he suddenly heard maniacal laughter coming from his left—or perhaps they were frantic shrieks; there was no way of telling—and looked about to see the red-haired man run wildly across the riverboat’s central concourse, arms flailing, and mount the steps that led to the upper decks, and stand for a moment at the edge of the observation portico up there, and then, uttering a cascade of grotesque giggles and cackles, hurl himself over the side and into the river, where he began to thrash about in a frantic, frenzied way.