Now the sun was faintly tinged with late-day bronze, and the city lay close before them. A stunning sight presented itself in this part of the road: on both shoulders of it had been planted noble trees, twenty times the height of a man, with slim tapering trunks of dark bluish bark and mighty crowns of glistening greenish-black leaves sharp as daggers. Out of those crowns burst astounding clusters of bloom, red tipped with yellow, that blazed like beacons as far as Valentine could see.

"What are those trees?" he asked.

"Fireshower palms," Shanamir said. "Pidruid is famous for them. They grow only near the coast and flower just one week a year. In the winter they drop sour berries, that make a strong liquor. You’ll drink it tomorrow."

"The Coronal has picked a good moment to come here, then."

"Not by chance, I imagine."

On and on the twin column of brilliant trees stretched, and they followed along, until open fields yielded to the first country villas, and then suburban tracts thick with more modest homes, and then a dusty zone of small factories, and finally the ancient wall of Pidruid itself, half as high as a fireshower tree, pierced by a pointed arch set with archaic-looking battlements. "Falkynkip Gate," Shanamir announced. "The eastern entrance to Pidruid. Now we enter the capital. Eleven million souls here, Valentine, and all the races of Majipoor to be found, not just humans, no, everything here, all mixed together, Skandars and Hjorts and Liimen and all the rest. Even, so they say, a little group of Shapeshifters."

"Shapeshifters?"

"The old race. The first natives."

"We call them something else," Valentine said vaguely. "Metamorphs, is it?"

"The same. Yes. I’ve heard they’re called that in the east. You have a strange accent, do you know that?"

"No stranger than yours, friend."

Shanamir laughed. "To me your accent’s strange. And I have no accent at all. I speak normal speech. You shape your words with fancy sounds. ‘We call them Metamorphs,’" he said, mimicking. "That’s how you sound to me. Is that Ni-moyan talk?"

Valentine replied only with a shrug.

Shanamir said, "They frighten me, Shapeshifters. Metamorphs. This would be a happier planet without them. Sneaking around, imitating others, working mischief. I wish they would keep to their own territory."

"Mostly they do, is that not so?"

"Mostly. But they say a few live in each city. Plotting who knows what kind of trouble for the rest of us." Shanamir leaned across toward Valentine, caught his arm, peered solemnly into his face. "One might meet one anywhere. Sitting on a ridge looking out toward Pidruid on a hot afternoon, for example."

"So you think I’m a Metamorph in masquerade?"

The boy cackled. "Prove that you aren’t!"

Valentine groped for some way to demonstrate his authenticity, found none, and made a terrifying face instead, stretching his cheeks as though they were rubber, twisting his lips in opposite directions, rolling his eyeballs high. "My true visage," he said. "You have discovered me." And they laughed, and passed on through Falkynkip Gate into the city of Pidruid.

Within the gate everything seemed much older, the houses built in a curious angular style, humpbacked walls swelling outward and upward to tiled roofs, and the tiles themselves often chipped and broken, and interspersed with heavy clumps of low fleshy-leaved roof-weeds that had gained footholds in cracks and earthy pockets. A heavy layer of fog hovered over the city, and it was dark and cool beneath it, with lights glowing in almost every window. The main highway split, and split again, until now Shanamir was leading his animals down a much narrower street, though still a fairly straight one, with secondary streets coiling off from it in every direction. The streets were thick with folk. Such crowds made Valentine obscurely uncomfortable; he could not recall having had so many others so close about him at once, almost at his elbow, smack up against his mount, pushing, darting about, a jostling mob of porters, merchants, mariners, vendors, people from the hill country like Shanamir bringing animals or produce to the market, tourists in fine robes of glowing brocades, and little boys and girls underfoot everywhere. Festival time in Pidruid! Gaudy banners of scarlet cloth were strung across the street from the upper stories of buildings, two and three on every block, emblazoned with the starburst crest, hailing in bright green lettering Lord Valentine the Coronal, bidding him be welcome to this his westernmost metropolis.

"Is it far to your inn?" Valentine asked.

"Halfway across town. Are you hungry?"

"A little. More than a little."

Shanamir signaled to his beasts, and they marched obediently into a cobbled cul-de-sac between two arcades, where he left them. Then, dismounting, he pointed out a tiny grimy booth across the street. Skewered sausages hung grilling over a charcoal flame. The counterman was a Liiman, squat and hammer-headed, with pocked gray-black skin and three eyes that glowed like coals in a crater. The boy pantomimed, and the Liiman passed two skewers of sausages to them and poured tumblers of pale amber beer. Valentine produced a coin and laid it on the counter. It was a fine thick coin, bright and gleaming, with a milled edge, and the Liiman looked at it as though Valentine had offered him a scorpion. Hastily Shanamir scooped up the piece and put down one of his own, a squarish coppery coin with a triangular hole punched in the center. The other he returned to Valentine. They retreated to the cul-de-sac with their dinner.

"What did I do wrong?" Valentine asked.

"With that coin you could buy the Liiman and all his sausages, and a month of beer! Where did you get it?"

"Why, from my purse."

"Are there more like that in there?"

"It could be," said Valentine. He studied the coin, which bore on one face the image of an old man, gaunt and withered, and on the other the visage of a young and vigorous one. The denomination was fifty royals. "Will this be too valuable to use anywhere?" he asked. "What will it buy, in truth?"

"Five of my mounts," Shanamir said. "A year’s lodgings in princely style. Transportation to Alhanroel and back. Any of those. Perhaps even more. To most of us it would be many months’ wages. You have no idea of the value of things?"

Valentine looked abashed. "It would seem that way."

"These sausages cost ten weights. A hundred weights make a crown, ten crowns make a royal, and this is fifty of those. Now do you follow? I’ll change it for you at the market. Meanwhile keep it to yourself. This is an honest city and a safe one, more or less, but with a purse full of those you tempt fate. Why didn’t you tell me you were carrying a fortune?" Shanamir gestured broadly. "Because you didn’t know, I suppose. There’s such a strange innocence about you, Valentine. You make me feel like a man, and I’m only a boy. You seem so much like a child. Do you know anything? Do you even know how old you are? Finish your beer and let’s move along."

Valentine nodded. One hundred weights to a crown, he thought, ten crowns to a royal, and he wondered what he would have said had Shanamir pressed him on the matter of his age. Twenty-eight? Thirty-two? He had no idea. What if he were asked in earnest? Thirty-two, he decided. That had a good sound to it. Yes, I am thirty-two years old, and ten crowns make a royal, and the shining piece that shows the old man and the young one is worth fifty of those.