There they waited, in silence, each hoping that this day would bring the coming of the dragons.

* * *

The southeastern coast of Zimroel—the huge province known as Gihorna—is one of Majipoor's most obscure regions: a land without cities, a forgotten place of thin gray sandy soil and moist blustery breezes, subject at unpredictable intervals to colossal, vastly destructive sandstorms. There is no natural harbor for hundreds of miles along that unhappy coast, only an endless ridge of low shabby hills sloping down to a sodden strand against which the surf of the Inner Sea crashes with a sad dull sound. In the early years of the settlement of Majipoor, explorers who ventured into that forlorn quarter of the western continent reported that there was nothing there worth a second look, and on a planet otherwise so full of miracles and wonders that was the most damning dismissal imaginable.

So Gihorna was bypassed as the development of the new continent got under way. Settlement after settlement was established—Piliplok first, midway up the eastern coast at the mouth of the broad River Zimr, and then Pidruid in the distant northwest, and Ni-moya on the great bend of the Zimr far inland, and Til-omon, and Narabal, and Velathys, and the shining Ghayrog city of Dulorn, and many more. Outposts turned into towns, and towns into cities, and cities into great cities that sent forth tendrils of expansion creeping outward across the astonishing immensities of Zimroel; but still there was no reason to go into Gihorna, and no one did. Not even the Shapeshifters, when Lord Stiamot had finally subjugated them and dumped them down in a forest reservation just across the River Steiche from the western reaches of Gihorna, had cared to cross the river into the dismal lands beyond.

Much later—thousands of years later, when most of Zimroel had begun to seem as tame as Alhanroel—a few settlers at last did filter into Gihorna. Nearly all were Liimen, simple and undemanding people who had never woven themselves deeply into the fabric of Majipoori life. By choice, it seemed they held themselves apart, earning a few weights here and there as sellers of grilled sausages, as fishermen, as itinerant laborers. It was easy for these drifting folk, whose lives seemed bleak and colorless to the other races of Majipoor, to drift on into bleak and colorless Gihorna. There they settled in tiny villages, and strung nets just beyond the surf to catch the swarming silvery-gray fishes, and dug pits in which to trap the big glossy octagonal-shelled black crabs that scuttled along the beaches in packs numbering many hundreds, and for a feast went out to hunt the sluggish tender-fleshed dhumkars that lived half-buried in the dunes.

Most of the year the Liimen had Gihorna to themselves. But not in summer, for summer was dragon time.

In early summer, the tents of curiosity-seekers began to sprout like yellow calimbots after a warm rain, all along the coast of Zimroel from a point just south of Piliplok to the edge of the impassable Zimr Marsh.