The members of the royal harem were the first to dance, a gaggle of tubby bare-breasted women in loincloths and moccasins of black fur, who formed a line and pranced wildly about, kicking up their legs and hurling their arms outward with a berserk manic clumsiness that was both comic and endearing. It was an effort for Harpirias to keep a straight face. But then he realized that the dance was supposed to be funny: the dancers themselves were chortling as they cavorted and collided, and whoops of pleasure from the onlookers filled the room, with the king’s own mighty roars resounding over all the rest.

Then Toikella himself stepped down from the throne and thrust himself into the line of dancers. He was a formidable figure, half again as tall as any of the women, his shining shaven head rising above them like a mountain dome. His monumental chest was bare, as it had been earlier, but tonight he had donned a cape of black haigus fur that was fastened at his throat to dangle down his back. The haiguses had been stitched together horns and all: angry red eyes gleamed from the pelts, and a triple row of the sharp needles jutted threateningly along the king’s heavy-muscled shoulders.

"Eyya!" he boomed. "Halga! Shifta skepta gartha blin!"

He moved among the women, stamping his feet, flinging high his arms, bellowing and howling. They swirled around him, no longer comic now but weirdly compelling as they matched his primeval stampings and flingings with fierce, savage steps of their own. It was an awesome sight, ludicrous but frightening at the same time. Harpirias had never seen anything like it.

And now the king seemed to be beckoning to him, bending forward at the waist, staring straight at him, crooking and wriggling his fingers.

Could it be? Were those gestures a summons?

Yes, they were. Harpirias glanced inquiringly toward Korinaam, who nodded. "He’s inviting you to dance with him," the Metamorph said. "It’s a tremendous honor. It means he regards you almost as an equal."

"Almost an equal. Right."

"You should dance."

"No doubt I should. Yes. Yes, of course I’ll dance."

Harpirias hesitated just a moment, studying the steps with closer care, soaking up the strange clashing rhythms. Then he moved out into the center of the floor.

The women slipped back into the shadows. He was alone with the king, who loomed over him like a titan.

Sweat rolled in streams down Toikella’s bare glistening body. He grinned in high amusement — Harpirias noticed for the first time that there were bright gems, an emerald and a ruby and a third one of a darker hue, set into his front teeth — and struck his hands together three times. It was a signal, apparently, to the musicians, who halted their frenzied wailing and honking and pounding and screeching and set about playing a different tune entirely, one that was slow and sinuous, a dark, quiet, serpentine melody, haunting and strange.

The king, his shoulders hunched high and his hands held facing each other with fingers writhing mysteriously, began now to move with implausible grace in a wide circle around Harpirias, treading lightly, almost floating. It could have been the dance of a hunter stalking his prey.

Harpirias, having no idea of what step he was meant to undertake, remained still for a moment, watching Toikella in the baffled fashion of one who is beginning to slip into a trance. But then he too started to move, almost without conscious volition: flexing his fingers first, then slowly raising and lowering his shoulders, and finally mimicking the king’s fastidious tiptoe delicacy as he set out to follow his own circular path, going in the direction opposite to Toikella’s.

For long moments they stalked each other, winding round and round, the immense fleshy man and the shorter, more compact one, while the music gradually grew and grew in tempo and volume. Soon it began to approach the wild intensity of the women’s dance. Harpirias picked up his pace as the music rose. Toikella, still grinning, moved faster as well. Harpirias laughed. It was impossible now to maintain his earlier delicacy of step. He leaped; he bounded; he stamped his feet and clapped his hands.

"Eyya!" cried the king. "Halga!"

"Eyya!" Harpirias echoed. "Halga!"

"Shifta skepta gartha blin!"

"Shifta skepta!"

"Gartha blin!"

"Shifta skepta gartha blin!"

Harpirias threw his head back, flung his hands high, pulled one knee almost to his chest and then the other. He howled and roared. He stamped and clapped. And he saw now that others were coming out onto the floor, some of the women first, and then the elaborately robed man with the painted face who had spoken with Korinaam at the entrance to the valley, and other men after him, flamboyantly painted also — high warriors of the tribe, perhaps. Even a few of the Skandars joined the dance, finally, although none of the Ghayrogs did, nor did Korinaam venture forth. For what seemed like hours they all circled round the room like a band of moonstruck madmen, until abruptly the music died away in mid-note, as if all the musicians had perished in the same instant, and the only sounds in the room were those of laughter and harsh breathing.

The king, who was standing beside Harpirias as the music ended, turned toward him. There was a look of total delight in the big man’s eyes. He reached out one outsized paw for him and gathered Harpirias in, drawing him into a crushing embrace. For a seemingly endless moment the king held him there. The royal effluvium was overwhelming: a reeking mixture of sweat, animal grease, thickly applied pigments, awful perfumes.

Then Toikella released him, grinned once more, and clapped his forehead in what had the look of a salute. Harpirias, grinning also, returned the gesture. The dance had left him exhilarated. He felt almost like himself again, after all these long gloomy months of exile. To his surprise, he found himself oddly charmed, too, by Toikella, who seemed to be an amiable, high-spirited old tyrant. It appeared that Toikella was taken by him as well.

Yes, Harpirias thought, we will be the best of friends, he and I. We will sit up late together and drink whatever it is that they like to drink in this place, and we will tell each other the stories of our lives. Friends, yes. Bosom companions.

It was time for the feasting, finally.

The king served Harpirias with his own hands: a high honor, evidently, but something of a doubtful one, since diplomatic courtesy now obliged Harpirias to eat everything that Toikella had chosen for him. Left to his own discretion, he might have preferred a less generous assortment, for nearly everything on the serving tables looked and smelled inedible.

Most of it was meat, roasts and stews and skewered strips, buried under thick, pungent sauces. There were several soups — Harpirias hoped that those fluids were soups, and nothing more sinister — and mounds of roasted nuts, and vegetable mushes of various kinds, and what might have been gnarled roots, baked until charred. The beverage of choice evidently was some kind of bitter, brackish beer, grayish-black in color, that bubbled unpleasantly of its own accord in the bowl.

Harpirias ate what he could, nibbling here, staunchly cramming there, washing it all down with desperate gulps of the beer. These people seemed to like their meat half-cooked and fatty, and most of it had a gaminess which even an experienced huntsman like Harpirias found hard to tolerate. All the sauces were much too spicy for him, and many of the vegetable dishes had a spoiled or fermented undertaste. But he did his best. He understood what a sacrifice it must be for the Othinor to provide such abundance as this, living as they did in a land that was covered by snow most of the year, where farming was unknown, where every scrap of food must be pried from nature’s unwilling grasp.