Collected Short Fiction, page 1073
A few days afterward he was collecting firewood and soon became aware that he was being studied. At once he said to the Metamorph. “I’ve caught a bilantoon. and I’m about to roast it. There’s more meat than I need. Will you share my dinner?” The Metamorph smiled—he took that enigmatic flicker for a smile, though it could have been anything—and as if by way of replying underwent a sudden astonishing shift, turning itself into a mirror image of Nismile. stocky and muscular, with dark, penetrating eyes and shoulder-length black hair. Nismile blinked wildly and trembled: then, recovering, he smiled, taking the mimicry as some form of communication, and said, “Marvelous! I can’t begin to see how you people do it!” He beckoned. “Come. It’ll take an hour and a half to cook the bilantoon, and we can talk until then. You understand our language, don’t you?” It was bizarre beyond measure, this speaking to a duplicate of himself. “Say something, eh? Tell me; is there a Metamorph village somewhere nearby? Piurivar,” he corrected, remembering the Metamorphs’ name for themselves. “Eh? A lot of Piurivars hereabouts, in the jungle?” Nismile gestured again. “Walk with me to my cabin and we’ll get the fire going. You don’t have any wine, do you? That’s the only thing I miss, I think, some good strong wine, the heavy stuff they make in Muldemar. Won’t taste that ever again, I guess, but there’s wine in Zimroel, isn’t there? Eh? Will you say something?” But the Metamorph responded only with a grimace, perhaps intended as a grin, that twisted the Nismile face into something harsh and strange; then it resumed its own form in an instant and with calm, floating strides started walking away.
Nismile hoped for a time that it would return with a flask of wine, but he did not see it again. Curious creatures, he thought. Were they angry that he was camped in their territory? Were they keeping him under surveillance out of fear that he was the vanguard of a wave of human settlers? Oddly, he felt himself in no danger. Metamorphs were generally considered to be malevolent; certainly they were disquieting beings, alien and unfathomable. Plenty of tales were told of Metamorph raids on outlying human settlements, and no doubt these Shapeshifter folk harbored bitter hatred for those who had come to their world and dispossessed them, driving them into the jungles. Nismile knew himself to be a man of goodwill, who had never done harm to others and wanted only to be left to live his life, and he fancied that some subtle sense would lead the Metamorphs to realize that he was not their enemy. He wished he could become their friend. He was growing hungry for conversation after his time of solitude and thought it might be challenging and rewarding to exchange ideas with these strange folk. He might even paint one. He had been thinking of returning to his art. of experiencing that moment of creative ecstasy as his soul leaped the gap to the psychosensitive canvas and inscribed on it those images that he alone could fashion. Surely he was different now from the increasingly unhappy man he had been on Castle Mount, and that difference must show itself in his work. During the next few days he rehearsed speeches designed to win the confidence of the Metamorphs, to overcome that strange shyness of theirs, that delicacy of bearing that blocked any sort of contact. In time, he thought, they would grow used, to him; they would begin to speak, to accept his invitation to eat with him, and then perhaps they would pose—
But in the days that followed he saw no more Metamorphs. He roamed the forest, peering hopefully into thickets and down mist-swept lanes of trees, and found no one. He decided that he had been too forward and had frightened them away—so much for the malevolence of the monstrous Metamorphs!—and after a while he ceased to expect further contact. It was disturbing. He had not missed companionship when none seemed likely, but the knowledge that there were intelligent beings somewhere in the area kindled an awareness of loneliness in him that was not easy to bear.
One damp and warm day several weeks after his last Metamorph encounter, Nismile was swimming in the cool, deep pond formed by a natural dam of boulders half a mile below his cabin. He saw a pale, slim figure moving quickly through a dense bower of blue-leaved bushes near the shore. He scrambled out of the water, barking his knees on the rocks. “Wait!” he shouted. “Please—don’t be afraid—don’t go—” The figure disappeared, but Nismile, thrashing frantically through the underbrush, caught sight of it again in a few minutes, leaning casually now against an enormous tree with vivid red bark.
Nismile stopped short, amazed, for the other was no Metamorph, but a human woman.
She was slender and young and naked, with thick, auburn hair, narrow shoulders, small, high breasts, and bright, playful eyes. She seemed altogether unafraid of him, a forest sprite who had obviously enjoyed leading him on this little chase. As he stood gaping at her, she looked him over unhurriedly and with an outburst of clear, tinkling laughter said, “You’re all scratched and torn! Can’t you run in the forest any better than that?”
“I didn’t want you to get away.”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to go far. You know, I was watching you for a long time before you noticed me. You’re the man from the cabin, right?”
“Yes. And you—where do you live?”
“Here and there,” she said airily.
He stared at her in wonder. Her beauty delighted him. and her shamelessness astounded him, She might almost be a hallucination, he thought. Where had she come from? What was a human being, naked and alone, doing in this primordial jungle?
Human?
Of course not, Nismile realized, with the sudden, sharp grief of a child who has been given some coveted treasure in a dream, only to wake aglow and perceive the sad reality, Remembering how effortlessly the. Metamorph had mimicked him, Nismile comprehended the dismal probability: This was some prank, some masquerade. He studied her intently, seeking a sign of Metamorph identity, a flickering of the projection, a trace of knife-sharp cheekbones and sloping eyes behind the cheerfully impudent face. She was convincingly human in every degree. And yet—how implausible to meet one of his own kind here, how much more likely that she was a Shapeshifter, a deceiver—
He did not want to believe that. He resolved to meet the possibility of deception with a conscious act of faith, in the hope that that would make her be what she seemed to be.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sarise. And yours?”
“Nismile. Where do you live?”
“In the forest.”
“Then there’s a human settlement not far from here?”
She shrugged. “I live by myself.” She came toward him. He felt his muscles growing taut as she moved closer, and his skin seemed to be blazing. She touched her fingers lightly to the cuts the vines had made on his arms and chest. “Don’t those scratches bother you?”
“They’re beginning to. I should wash them.”
“Yes. Let’s go back to the pool. I know a better way than the one you took. Follow me.”
She parted the fronds of a thick clump of ferns and revealed a narrow, well-worn trail. Gracefully she sprinted off, and he ran behind her, delighted by the ease of her movements, the play of muscles in her back and buttocks. He plunged into the pool a moment after she did. The chilly water soothed the stinging of the cuts. When they climbed out, he yearned to draw her to him and enclose her in his arms, but he did not dare. They sprawled on the mossy bank. There was mischief in her eyes.
He said, “My cabin isn’t far.”
“I know.”
“Would you like to go there?”
“Some other time. Nismile.”
“All right. Some other time.”
“Where do you come from?” she asked.
“I was born on Castle Mount. Do you know where that is? I was a soul painter at the Coronal’s court. Do you know what soul painting is? It’s done with the mind and a sensitive canvas, and—I could show you, I could paint you, Sarise. I take a close look at something, I seize its essence with my deepest consciousness, and then I go into a kind of trance, almost a waking dream, and I transform what I’ve seen into something of my own and hurl it on the canvas. I capture the truth of it in one quick blaze of transference—” He paused. “I could show you by making a painting of you.”
She scarcely seemed to have heard him.
“Would you like to touch me. Nismile?”
“Yes. Very much.”
The thick turquoise moss was like a carpet. She rolled toward him, and his hand hovered above her body. He hesitated, for he was still certain that she was a Metamorph playing some perverse Shapeshifter game with him, and a heritage of thousands of years of dread and loathing surfaced in him. He was terrified of touching her and discovering that her skin had the clammy, repugnant texture that he imagined Metamorph skin to have, or that she would shift and turn into a creature of alien form the moment she was in his arms.
Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted, her tongue flickered between them like a serpent’s; she was waiting. In terror he forced his hand down to her breast. But her flesh was warm and yielding, and it felt very much the way the flesh of a young human woman should feel. With a soft, little cry she pressed herself into his embrace. For a dismaying instant the grotesque image of a Metamorph rose in his mind, angular and long-limbed and noseless, but he shoved the thought away fiercely and gave himself up entirely to her lithe and vigorous body.
For a long time afterward they lay still, side by side, hands clasped, saying nothing. Even when a light rainshower came, they did not move but simply allowed the quick, sharp sprinkle to wash the sweat from their skins. He opened his eyes eventually and found her watching him with keen curiosity.
“I want to paint you,” he said.
“No.”
“Not now. Tomorrow. You’ll come to my cabin, and then I can—”
“No.”
“I haven’t tried to paint in years. It’s important to me to begin again. And I want very much to paint you.”
“I want very much not to be painted.” she said.
“Please.”
“No,” she said gently. She rolled away and stood up. “Paint the jungle. Paint the pool. Don’t paint me. all right. Nismile? All right?”
He made an unhappy gesture of acceptance.
She said, “I have to leave now.”
“Will you tell me where you live?”
“I already have. Here and there. In the forest. Why do you ask these questions?”
“I want to be able to find you again. If you disappear, how will I know where to look?”
“I know where to find you.” she said. “That’s enough.”
“Will you come to me tomorrow? To my cabin?”
“I think I will.”
He took her hand and drew her toward him. But now she was hesitant, remote. The mystery surrounding her throbbed in his mind. She had told him nothing but her name. He found it too difficult to believe that she, like him, was a solitary of the jungle, wandering as the whim came, but he doubted that he could have failed to detect, in all these weeks, the existence of a human village nearby. The most likely explanation was that she was a Shapeshifter, embarked on an adventure with a human. Much as he resisted that idea, he was too rational to reject it completely. But she looked human, she felt human, she acted human. How adept were these Metamorphs at their transformations? He was tempted to ask her outright whether his suspicions were correct, but that was foolishness; she had answered nothing else, and surely she would not answer that. He kept his questions to himself. She gently pulled her hand free of his grasp and stepped toward the fern-bordered trail and was gone.
Nismile waited at his cabin all the next day. She did not come. It scarcely surprised him. Their meeting had been a dream, a fantasy, an interlude beyond time and space. He did not expect to see her again. Toward evening he drew a canvas from the pack he had brought with him and set it up, thinking he might paint the view from his cabin as twilight purpled the forest air. He studied the landscape a long while, testing the verticals of the slender trees against the heavy horizontal of a thick, sprawling, yellow-berried bush, and eventually shook his head and put his canvas away. Nothing about this landscape needed to be captured by art. In the morning, he thought, he would hike upstream past the meadow to a place where fleshy, red succulents sprouted like rubbery spikes from a deep cleft in a great rock: a more promising scene, perhaps.
But in the morning he found excuses for delaying his departure, and by noon it seemed too late to go. He worked in his little garden plot instead—he had begun transplanting some of the shrubs whose fruits or greens he ate—and that occupied him for hours. In late afternoon a milky fog settled over the forest. He went inside, and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door.
“I had given up hope,” he told her.
Sarise’s forehead and brows were beaded with moisture. The fog, he thought, or maybe she had been dancing along the path. “I promised I’d come.” she said softly.
“Yesterday.”
“This is yesterday.” she said, laughing, and drew a flask from her robe. “You like wine? I found some of this. I had to go a long distance to get it. Yesterday.”
It was a young gray wine, the kind that tickles the tongue with its sparkle. The flask had no label, but he supposed it to be some Zimroel wine, unknown on Castle Mount. They drank it all, he more than she—she filled his cup again and again—and when it was gone, they went outside to make love on the cool, damp ground beside the stream and fell into a doze afterward. She woke him in some small hour of the night and led him to his bed. They spent the rest of the night pressed close to each other, and the next morning she showed no desire to leave. They went to the pool to begin the day with a swim; they embraced again on the turquoise moss. She guided him to the gigantic red-barked tree where he had first seen her and pointed out to him a colossal yellow fruit, three or four yards across, that had fallen from one of its enormous branches. Nismile looked at it doubtfully. It had split open, and its interior was a scarlet, custardy stuff, studded with huge, gleaming black seeds. “Dwikka.” she said. “It will make us drunk.” She stripped off her robe and used it to wrap great chunks of the dwikka fruit, which they carried back to his cabin and spent all morning eating. They sang and laughed most of the afternoon. For dinner they grilled some fish from Nismile’s weir, and later, as they lay arm in arm watching the night descend, she asked him a thousand questions about his past life, his painting, his boyhood, his travels, about Castle Mount, the Fifty Cities, the Six Rivers, the royal court of Lord Thraym, the royal Castle of uncountable rooms. The questions came from her in a torrent, the newest one rushing forth almost before he had dealt with the last. Her curiosity was inexhaustible. It served, also, to stifle his; although there was much he yearned to know about her everything—he had no chance to ask it, and just as well, for he doubted she would give him answers.
“What will we do tomorrow?” she asked finally.
So they became lovers. For the first few days they did little but eat and swim and embrace and devour the intoxicating fruit of the dwikka tree. He ceased to fear, as he had at the beginning, that she would disappear as suddenly as she had come to him. Her flood of questions subsided, after a time, but even so he chose not to take his turn, preferring to leave her mysteries unpierced.
He could not shake his obsession with the idea that she was a Metamorph. The thought chilled him—that her beauty was a lie. that behind it she was alien and grotesque—especially when he ran his hands over the cool, sweet smoothness of her thighs or breasts. He constantly had to fight away his suspicions. But they would not leave him. There were no human outposts in this part of Zimroel. and it was too implausible that this girl—for that was all she was a girl—had elected to take up a hermit’s life here. Far more likely. Nismile thought, that she was native to this place, one of the unknown numbers of Shapeshifters who slipped like phantoms through these humid groves. When she slept, he sometimes watched her by faint starlight to see whether she began to lose human form. Always she remained as she was, and even so, he suspected her.
And yet. and yet, and yet it was not in the nature of Metamorphs to seek human company or to show warmth toward them. Humans had stolen this vast world of Majipoor from them—coming here thousands of years ago, finding the Shapeshifters already in decline, their mighty stone cities in ruins, and finishing the job by appropriating their most fertile lands, sequestering them in ever smaller regions, defeating their last uprising in Lord Stiamot’s time and forcing them, ultimately, into the Zimroel forests, out of sight, out of mind. To most people of Majipoor the Metamorphs were ghosts of a former era, revenants, unreal, legendary. Why would one seek him out in his seclusion, offer itself to him in so convincing a counterfeit of love, strive with such zeal to brighten his days and enliven his nights? In a moment of paranoia he imagined Sarise reverting in the darkness to her true shape and rising above him as he slept to plunge a gleaming dirk into his throat: revenge for the crimes of his ancestors. But what folly such fantasies were! If the Metamorphs here wanted to murder him. they had no need of such elaborate charades.
It was almost as absurd to believe that she was a Metamorph as to believe that she was not.
To put these matters from his mind, he resolved to take up his art again. On an unusually clear and sunny day he set out with Sarise for the rock of the red succulents, carrying a raw canvas. She watched, fascinated, as he prepared everything.
“You do the painting entirely with your mind?” she asked.
“Entirely. I fix the scene in my soul, I transform and rearrange and heighten, and then—you’ll see.”
“Is it all right if I watch? I won’t spoil it?”
“Of course not.”
“But if someone else’s mind gets into the painting—”
“It can’t happen. The canvases are tuned to me.” He squinted, made frames with his fingers, moved a few feet this way and that. His throat was dry and his hands were quivering. So many years since he had last done this: Would he still have the gift? And the technique? He aligned the canvas and touched it in a preliminary way with his mind. The scene was a good one, vivid, bizarre, the color contrasts powerful ones, the compositional aspects challenging, that massive rock, those weird, meaty red plants, the tiny, yellow floral bracts at their tips, the forest-dappled sunlight. Yes, yes, it would work, it would amply serve as the vehicle through which he could convey the texture of this dense, tangled jungle, this place of shapeshifting—
